Union Talk: Oklahoma Walkout Edition by Aaron Michael Baker

Originally posted at: https://spoonvision.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/union-talk-oklahoma-walkout-edition/

(See below for definitions.)

Teachers and State Employees in Oklahoma are getting jiggie (1) with a statewide job action (2). For ten years Oklahoma teachers have been told, “Bob’s your uncle” (3).During this time, teachers in Oklahoma gained a reputation for being Worms (4). Now, many teachers are belly up (5), and some have dragin fever (6). But public education in Oklahoma is still filled with Shop Rockets (7). Meanwhile, the Oklahoma legislature is mostly Blisters (8) and Hub Caps (9) with glass stomachs (10). The most work that gets done at the capitol is polishing turds (11). Oklahoma, of course, is “right-to-work,” (12)and the schools are open shop (13). But this spring break, Liberal Scumbags (14) and Ratchet Jaws (15) are stepping up to be Teletubbies (16) and general Pitas (17) of the Legislature. Legacies (18) are demanding, “SIWAC” (19). The teachers are so united that Scabs (20) are virtually nonexistent. The Top Commie’s (21) demands are the cat’s ass (22). For now, the collective action (23) is mostly informational picketing (24), but may soon escalate to a Wobble (25). On April 2, there may be a major outbreak of teacher anal glaucoma (26). The battle is raging now, but the war may be won in November when many Bird Dog (27) legislators will take the walk of shame (28). Teachers are encouraged to bring a dookie (29) with them to the Capitol because roach coaches (30)and blue lagoons (31) may or may not be available. Solidarity (32) forever!

1. “Get jiggie with it” – to get some ass into what you are doing

2. Job Action: A concerted activity by employees designed to put pressure on the employer without resorting to a strike. Examples include: wearing T-shirts, buttons, or hats with union slogans, holding parking lot meetings, collective refusal of voluntary overtime, reporting to work in a group, petition signing, jamming phone lines, etc.

3. “Bob’s Your Uncle” – everything will be okay

4. “Worm” – someone who doesn’t stand up for themselves

5. “Belly Up” – broke, busted, no money until next paycheck

6. “Dragin Fever” – wanting to quit a job

7. “Shop Rocket” – a person who busts their ass for the shop and gets jobs done quickly (a hero more or less)

8. “Blister” – someone that shows up when all the hard work is done

9. “Hub Cap” – someone that is always talking to the big bosses

10. “Glass Stomach” – so you can see when you have your head up your ass

11. “Polish a turd” – make shitty work look good

12. “Right-to-Work” States: States which have passed laws prohibiting unions from negotiating union shop clauses in their contracts with employers covered by the NLRA. Unions often refer to these as “right to work for less” states.

13. Open Shop: Where employees do not have to belong to the union or pay dues to secure or retain employment in a company, even though there may be a collective bargaining agreement. The Union is obligated by law to represent members and non-members equally regardless of whether it is an open shop or a union shop.

14. “Liberal Scumbag” – union organizer

15. “Ratchet Jaw” – someone who won’t shut up

16. “Teletubby” – telecommunications/data worker

17. “Pita” – pain in the ass

18. “Legacy” – second plus generation union member

19. “SIWAC” – “say it with a check!”

20, “Scab” – union worker who crosses a picket line

21. “Top Commie” – union president

22. “Cat’s Ass” – something extremely good

23. Collective Action – Action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their status and achieve a common objective.

24. Informational Picketing: Picketing done with the express intent not to cause a work stoppage, but to publicize either the existence of a labor dispute or information concerning the dispute.

25. “Wobble” – to cause enough of the workforce to quit the job bringing the project to a standstill

26. “Anal Glacoma” – when you just can’t see your ass getting to work

27. “Bird Dog” – a foreman (or higher up) who stands around or tries to hide and watches you work

28. “Walk of Shame” – when company fires a manager and escorts him to the parking lot

29. “Dookie” – lunch bucket

30. “Roach Coach” – food truck

31. “Blue Lagoon” – porta-potty, honey bucket, shitter

32. Solidarity – unity that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards

The Alt Right Has a Friend in Common Core by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/22/the-alt-right-has-a-friend-in-common-core/

Let’s say you’re a modern-day hipster Nazi.

You’re bummed out.

No one wants to hang out with you because of your bald head and your red suspenders and your commitment to the ideals of a defeated and disgraced totalitarian regime.

What are you to do?

REBRAND, son!

It’s simple.

No more National Socialist German Workers Party! That sounds too pinko!

Now you’re simply a member of the Alt Right!

It’s not racist! You’re just committed to traditional attitudes and values — if those traditional attitudes and values come from 1945 Berlin!

Heck, you don’t even have to call yourself Alt Right.

You can call yourself a White Identitarian.

You aren’t over-concerned with any one side of the political spectrum or other. You just strongly identify with whiteness — and by extension increasing the political power of white people at the expense of all others.

That’s all.

It should be obvious that this isn’t merely rebranding. It’s propaganda.

In today’s fast paced information age – where every fact is merely a Google away – that can be hard to get away with – UNLESS…

Unless you already have a readymade tool to protect propaganda from the kind of informed critical thought that can pop it like a bubble. Something to insolate the ignorance and keep out the enlightened analysis.

I am, of course, talking about Common Core.

What!?

How does Common Core have anything to do with white nationalism?

Common Core is just a set of academic standards for what should be taught in public schools adopted by 42 of 50 states.

Academic standards aren’t political. Are they?

Actually, they are. Quite political.

Just take a look at how the standards came to be adopted in the first place.

The Obama administration bribed and coerced the states to adopt these standards before many of them were even done being written.

Hold your horses. The Obama administration!? That doesn’t sound exactly like a friend of the Third Reich.

And it wasn’t.

It was a friend to big business.

When first created, these standards weren’t the result of a real educational need, nor were they written by classroom educators and psychologists. They were written by the standardized testing industry as a ploy to get federal, state and local governments to recommit to standardized testing through buying new tests, new text books, new software and new remediation materials.

It was a bipartisan effort supported by the likes of Obama, the Clintons and Bill Gates on the left and Jeb Bush, Betsy DeVos and Bobby Jindal on the right.

After Obama’s success pushing them down our collective throats, many Republicans vocally decried the standards – often while quietly supporting them.

That’s why after all this time very few state legislatures have repealed them despite being controlled predominantly by Republicans.

Okay, so what does this have to do with the Alt Right?

People like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are engaged in redefining the conservative movement. Instead of circulating ideas with a merely racist and classist undertone, they want to make those subtleties more explicit.

Most aren’t about to hop out of the closet and declare themselves open Nazis or members of the Hitler fan club, but they want to make it clear exactly how wunderbarthe Fuhrer’s ideals are with a wink and a smirk.

For instance, Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.

When exactly was America great? When white people had unchallenged political and social power and minorities and people of color knew their place. That’s when.

This is obvious to some of us, but we face a real obstacle making it obvious to others.

And that obstacle is Common Core.

A generation of Americans have been brought up with these shoddy academic standards that don’t develop critical thinking but actively suppress it.

For instance, take the absurd ravings of the Core’s chief writer – and current head of the College Board – David Coleman.

Going counter to the thinking of nearly every expert on literacy, he emphasized cold or close reading over reading text in context.

In particular, he said:

“Do you know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today?…It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with these two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel or think… It is a rare working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.”

Later, he added:

“The most popular 3rd grade standard in American today…is what is the difference between a fable, a myth, a tale, and a legend? The only problem with that question is that no one knows what the difference is and no one probably cares what the difference is either.”

And finally:

“This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students.”

However, Coleman was dead wrong on all counts.

What you think and feel IS important. The requirements of the corporate world ARE NOT the only reasons to teach something. Being able to distinguish between similar but different concepts IS important. And context is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to understanding!

For instance, today’s spin doctor Nazis soon realized that you can’t go goose stepping down main street blindly espousing how much better it is to be white — better than, say, being black or Jewish.

But you can hang up posters in college campuses that say the same sort of thing in a cutesy, passive aggressive way. For instance: “It’s okay to be white.”

If we look just at the text, as Coleman advises, we see a rather innocuous statement.

There’s nothing racist here. It’s just a simple statement that being white is also acceptable.

However, if we add back the context, we find an indirect racial undertone.

These posters weren’t put up willy nilly. They were hung on college campuses where white nationalists wearing MAGA hats were recruiting. They were pasted over Black Lives Matter posters, accompanying drawings of Donald Trump.

In context, then, this statement doesn’t just mean “It’s okay to be white.” It means “It’s okay to be pro-white supremacist, to be pro-white power.”

And that brings up two other examples.

MAGA – Make America Great Again.

Take it out of context and it’s innocuous. It just means to increase the abstract greatness of the country to what it was at some unspecified time in the past.

However, if we put that statement in the context of the Trump campaign and its xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, etc. — then it’s meaning becomes clear. As noted above, it’s an ode to white power and nostalgia for greater white privilege.

And “Black Lives Matter”? Why do many of these same Identitarians take exception to that slogan and the movement behind it?

The Alt Right says BLM is reverse racist. They claim the name BLM means “ONLYblack lives matter.”

Context tells us differently.

The BLM group was formed in response to the indiscriminate murder of people of color and those who committed these crimes not behind held accountable. Officer Darren Wilson not indicted for killing Michael Brown. Officer Daniel Pantaleo not indicted for killing Eric Garner. Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback not indicted for killing Tamir Rice. And on and on.

Yet the Alt Right is allowed to mischaracterize a simple call for peace as if it identified a terrorist organization.

Why? Because context has been banished from the building.

I’m not saying that Common Core has caused these problems, but it has allowed them.

I doubt this is what Coleman, who is Jewish, intended.

But whenever you water down critical thinking – even if it’s for purely practical ends – you end up hurting everyone.

The best societies praise intellect and tolerance.

For all their faults, our founders knew this. That’s why they emphasized the importance of public education.

If we had ensured everyone in the country had access to the best possible education, this modern Nazi subculture wouldn’t be able to make as much headway as it has.

This is yet another way that our obsession with unrestrained capitalism, neoliberalism and plutocracy has put us on a road that may end in fascism.

How to Oppose White Supremacists Without Becoming a Monster, Yourself by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/how-to-oppose-white-supremacists-without-becoming-a-monster-yourself/

There is a danger in opposing white supremacists.

In confronting such an odious set of beliefs, you can justify suspending your own strongest held moral convictions as a necessary end to defeating their prejudices.

It’s easy to see how this might happen.

When hearing an ignorant troll like Richard Spencer arrogantly spouting warmed over Nazi propaganda, it is quite natural to wish to issue a rebuttal in the form of your fist.

You can follow the logic all the way from your heart to your knuckles.

Your thought process might go something like this:

This fool is so enamored with violence, let him suffer the consequences of it.

But that is conceding the point.

That is giving the white supremacist his due. It’s entering his world and playing by his rules.

Oh, I’m sure it’s satisfying, but it’s the wrong way to respond.

However, on the other hand one can’t simply smile and nod during Spencer’s tirade and then expect to reciprocate with an academic treatise.

No cogent, logical, professorial come back is going to counter the purely emotional arguments made by white supremacists.

They are stoking fear and hatred. Logic is useless here.

So what are anti-racist anti-facists like ourselves supposed to do when confronted with people like this?

We have to walk a razor’s edge between two poles.

On the one hand, we can’t tolerate intolerance.

I know that’s paradoxical. But it’s true.

As Vienna-born philosopher Karl Popper put it in The Open Society and Its Enemies, unlimited tolerance leads to the destruction of tolerance.

If we tolerate the intolerant, if we give them equal time to offer their point of view and don’t aggressively counter their views, they will inevitably resort to violence and wipe our side out.

This doesn’t mean immediately punching them in the face or violently attacking them. For Popper, we should let rationality run its course, let them have their say and usually their ideas will be rejected and ignored.

However, if this doesn’t happen and these ideas start to take root as they did in Nazi Germany (or perhaps even today in Trump’s America), then Popper says we must stop them by “fists or pistols.”

In short, Popper writes:

“We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

Popper believed in the free expression of ideas, but when one of those ideas leads to violence, it is no longer to be tolerated. Then it is outside the law and must be destroyed.

What then do we do with our commitment to nonviolence?

Do we reluctantly agree to push this constraint to the side if push comes to shove?

No. This is the other pole we must navigate between.

On the second to last day of his life, April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech stating his unequivocal commitment to the principal of nonviolence:

“It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”

The next day he was shot to death. These are among the last words he spoke in public.

That King was to be martyred in the cause of justice would not have surprised him.

He had already received several death threats and attempts on his life.

He knew that his continued efforts to fight for human dignity would probably result in the premature ending of his life someday. He knew all that yet he still prescribed nonviolence.

There was simply no other way for him to exist.

Mahatma Gandhi, who influenced Dr. King and our American fight for civil rights with his own nonviolent revolution in India, went even further.

At the start of WWII, he wrote that the British should lay down their arms and let the Nazis invade the United Kingdom without offering any violent resistance. They should even let themselves be slaughtered if it came to it. He made similar remarks to Jews facing the Holocaust.

That’s pretty extreme.

But can you imagine its effect?

No one followed Gandhi’s advice. We fought the Germans in WWII and won. We crushed their pathetic thousand year Reich and threw their prejudiced ideals on the trash heap of history.

And yet here we are today. In Charlottesville. In Portland. In Washington, DC.

The scared and ignorant have rooted through the trash and recycled those same odious ideals.

The war ended, but the battle goes on.

Would that have happened had we met violence with nonviolence?

I don’t know the answer. No one does.

But it respects an important point – we can’t ultimately fight our way to peace. Not without killing everyone else. And then why would the solitary survivor wish to live?

There is an inherent flaw in humanity that continually incites us to kill each other.

We can never have true peace unless we find a way to stamp out that flaw.

Nonviolence is the closest we’ve ever come to finding a solution.

So there you have it, the Scylla and Charybdis of our current dilemma.

We must try to navigate between them.

We must not tolerate the intolerance of the white supremacists. But we must also not allow our opposition of them to change us into that which we hate.

I know it sounds impossible. And I certainly don’t have all the answers about how we do it.

To start with, when white supremacists advocate violence of any kind, we must seek legal action. We must use every tool of the law, the courts, and law enforcement to counter them.

This requires political power. We must organize and keep them politically marginalized and weak.

We must take every opportunity to speak out against white supremacy. We must continue to make their ideal socially and culturally repugnant. At the same time, we must also reach out to them in the spirit of healing and love. We can’t give up on them, because they, too, are our brothers and sisters.

Yet if they resort to violence, we can feel justified in protecting ourselves and those they wish to victimize.

But the keyword here is “protect.”

We should go no further. We should not attack.

I know that is a hard line to walk.

Maybe it’s not even possible. Still, we must try.

It might feel satisfying to punch a Nazi. Heck! I’m sure it would. But we cannot allow ourselves to become like them.

Because the real enemy is not them.

It is their fear and ignorance.

And if we’re honest, we hold the same disease deep inside our own hearts.

We cannot defeat racism and prejudice unless we overcome our own flawed humanity.