...hat, but really an all-out war over public education,” he explains. In the past several years, there have been numerous flare-ups of protest activity centered on equal access to quality public schools, from Chile to Québec to Chicago. Jones believes that recent shifts in the political landscape, along with enhanced potential for collaboration between organizations, signal that activists are on the verge of a transformational movement for public e...
...himself and his elite friends first. Rahm sends his children to The Lab School, where the director opposes standardized testing (which Rahm wants more of for working-class students), where the school has three libraries (160 Chicago public schools have no library), and where the director actually supports teacher’s unions (which Rahm and the Democrats want to gut). [For those who still believe in neoliberal school reform, see top-education-offic...
...law,” has required state governments to abide by many of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment, however, has never been incorporated against the states. Now, a pair of cases, National Rifle Association v. Chicago and McDonald v. Chicago, seems poised to accomplish just that. A host of legal experts, including Spitzer, concur that the Court will incorporate the Second Amendment against the states after McDonald v. Chicago’s or...
...le critiques we must make of OWS, and longer analyses are necessary, but the fact remains, OWS rocked the political terrain. And already we’re seeing the strands of struggle stretch forward. Most importantly right now, 26,000 Chicago teachers went on strike this week to demand better pay, smaller class sizes, freaking air conditioning, and no more damn “school reform.” In an election year, the mainstream discussion narrows, and we are told that t...
...d to the closure of the NATO equipment pipeline. Pakistan considers the drone attacks gross violations of its sovereignty. The diplomatic rift that these issues have caused widens by the day. Last month, at the NATO summit in Chicago, Obama cold-shouldered Pakistani President Asi Ali Zardari and only last week the director of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, Zahir ul-Islam, cancelled his planned visit to CIA headquarters. And, of course,...
...itocracy, which operated and was conceived in direct opposition to the socially immobile British aristocracy, was developed behind the notion that all men were created equal. But Luigi Zingales, professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, notes that “unlike the French Revolution, which emphasized the principle of equality, [the American Revolution] championed the freedom to pursue happiness. In other words, America was founde...
...ntations” pose a problem for Obama in this respect, especially given the possibility of protests at the highly visible upcoming party conventions or the G8 summit, which has recently been moved to Camp David from the original Chicago. Warren and Gitlin disagreed, however, about the nature and origin of the current Occupy Wall Street movement. Gitlin drew a comparison to the liberal energy felt during the 2008 Obama campaign, whereas Warren said t...
...en an unprecedented degree of political dissidence against the mainstream policies of austerity that have prevailed in education over the past several decades. Many are familiar with last September’s massive teacher strike in Chicago, or the standardized test boycott in Seattle this past January, both of which represented bold challenges to the neoliberal status quo. Philadelphia has had its share of protest as well, as grassroots parent organiza...
...a case-by-case basis to fund NFIP has not only been penny wise and pound foolish, but also has only been a drop in the bucket to the problem. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” as former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said. When hurricane relief funding comes up on the national agenda once again, most likely through another large-scale hurricane, these problems need to be considered in order to have a better...
...or how the rest of this race will unfold, and it will be a showdown between Santorum and Romney. Santorum has found much success in Midwestern and Rust Belt states, but Romney will get support from the more moderate voters in Chicago and its suburbs. Even ignoring Santorum’s failure to file for a full slate of delegates in the state, if he wins Illinois, then Romney failing to reach the magic number becomes a very real possibility. But if Romney...
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