Surviving Incumbency
In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein discerns an irresolvable conflict of diametrically opposed interests. She characterizes capitalism as a driving force that fuels global warming with its inherent economic imperative for “…continuous growth and continuous depletion of resources, including finite resources“. And she notes the zeitgeist of a striking future where “…it’s just a more brutally cleaved world between haves and have-nots than the one we have now.” She notes “… [i]t’s actually not controversial to say this is where we are headed [e.g. "Snowpiercer, Elysium or The Hunger Games"]. The question is, can we imagine another way of responding to crisis other than one of deepening inequality, brutal disaster capitalism and mangled techno-fixes…”?
This is the spot-on same conflict that underlies the Education ®eform Movement [sic, with a tip-of-the-hat to PTSA representative Scott Folsom who writes 4lakids.blogspot.com]. It is personified here in LA by our own Eli Broad-indemnified superintendent Deasy, and played out through his man’s never-bally-hooed, de facto “tenure“. This school district and its administration – meaning superintendent and school board in concert — has championed one systematic, serial descent into “deeping inequality, brutal disaster capitalism and mangled techno-fixes”.
Let’s start with the middle one, “brutal disaster capitalism”. The situation of teachers and the effort to strip them of labor rights and professional dignity is unconscionable. As collateral damage of Ed®eform, the underlying theme of union busting floats all along the surface of this LATimes editorial. Revealed is an essential confusion between “protection” and “advocacy”. The distinction is wholly explained by which side of the labour table you occupy. The LATimes is in the Surviving Incumbency – redqueeninla:
