Peter Mclaren

Weekend Edition
March 24 / 25, 2007

Four Years Later in Iraq

Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Pick almost any date on the calendar and it’ll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It’s like driving across the American West. “Historic marker, 1 mile”, the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. “On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry ”

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, Sunday March 18, one day short of the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa in 1916;of the day the U.S. Senate rejected (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of the active phase of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10 pm broadcast March 19, 2003, by President G.W. Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq had commenced.

This was the attack on Dora Farms outside Baghdad where some Iraqi whispered into his phone that Saddam Hussein was visiting his children. Down hurtled four 2000-pound bunker-busters and 40 cruise missiles. There were high fives in the White House situation room at news of a mangled Saddam being hauled from the rubble. It all turned out to be nonsense, like most military bulletins out of Iraq. The bunker busters all missed the compound. Saddam Hussein wasn’t there. Uday and Qusay weren’t there. Fifteen civilians died, including nine women and a child.

Here I was, a couple of days shy of four years later, in a used paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina Turner’s side of the story on life with Ike. My cell phone rang. It was my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil, in northern Iraq. He gave me a brisk précis of the piece he’d file the next day. Every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught. He’d talked that day to Kassim Naji Salaman, a truck driver replacing his murdered brother at the wheel of an oil tanker. Salaman was now the sole bread earner for 18 women and children because so many of his male relatives had been killed “I can’t even visit the village where they live,” he told Patrick. “Soldiers or militia or just men in masks might kill me. I don’t even know how to send them money”.

I’ve had many such phone calls from Patrick since March 2003, as he returned time after time to Iraq, either to Baghdad or to the north. Unlike the embedded reporters he’s never felt moved to announce a “turning point”, as when they blew away Uday and Qusay on July 22,2003. CNN’s studio generals said on the news that night it was a big blow to the Iraqi resistance. Then Saddam was hauled out of a hole on December 15, 2003, just in time for Christmas. Maybe the death knell of the resistance, the studio generals exulted. Then came one “new dawn” for Iraq after another: the handback of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004, the two elections and the new constitution in 2005. Now we have the “surge” into Baghdad, designed to whip the Shi’a back into line.

Baghdad had 20 hours of power a day. Now it’s down to 2. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and Jordan. It’s the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Dawn after dawn rises over Iraq to reveal tortured corpses in the river beds, on the rubbish dumps, by the side of the road: bodies riddled with bullets, punctured by drills, whipped with wire cable, blown apart.

The U.N. says that in the two months before this last Christmas 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. The months since have probably been as bad. Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it from ruin to the graveyard, plundering the corpse as it did so.

There’s plenty of blame to go round. You’d think these days that the cheerleaders for war were limited to a platoon of neocons, as potent in historical influence as were supposedly the Knights Templar. But it was not so. The coalition of the enablers spread far beyond Cheney’s team and the extended family of Norman Podhoretz. Atop mainstream corporate journalism perch the New York Times and the New Yorker, two prime disseminators of pro-invasion propaganda, written at the NYT by Judith Miller, Michael Gordon and, on the op ed page, by Thomas Friedman. The New Yorker put forth the voluminous lies of Jeffrey Goldberg and has remained impenitent till this day.

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar “hard left”. Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube played this game eagerly. Berube lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of “left internationalism”. Others, like Ian Williams, played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did. “The ball will be very much in Saddam Hussein’s court,” Williams wrote in November, 2002. “The question is whether he will cooperate and disarm, or dissimulate and bring about his own downfall at the hands of the U.S. military.” (In fact Saddam had already “disarmed”, as disclosed in Hussein Kamel’s debriefings by the UNSCOM inspectors, the CIA and MI6 in the summer of 1995 when Kamel told them all, with corroboration from aides who had also defected, that on Saddam Hussein’s orders his son-in-law had destroyed all of Iraq’s WMDs years earlier, right after the Gulf War. This was not a secret. In February 2003 John Barry reported it in Newsweek.Anyone privy to the UNSCOM, CIA and MI6 debriefs knew it from 1995 on.)

As Iraq began to plunge ever more rapidly into the abyss not long after the March, 2003 attack, this crowd stubbornly mostly stayed the course with Bush. “Thumpingly blind to the war’s virtues” was the head on a Paul Berman op ed piece in February, 2004.Christopher Hitchens lurched regularly onto Hardball to hurl abuse at critics of the war.

But today, amid Iraq’s dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, — Friedman, Hitchens, Berman — like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.

Post coldwar Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the “civilizing mission” of the great powers.

A Memory of Tanya Reinhart

Amid the shock of Tanya Reinhart’s sudden death from a stroke in New York, CounterPuncher Vanessa Jones reminded us of a little description she’d done of Reinhart, giving a talk at ANU in Canberra, late last year. It’s a nice vignette of a woman who gave her all for the struggle for justice for Palestinians.

She was: calm, thoughtful, down to earth, unpretentious, clear speaking, practical, not bitter, accessible, no need to smile, comfortable with her own seriousness. All the books sold out the hour before, lecture hall three quarters full, audience sympathized and laughed, but mainly listened. Over half the audience was grey or white haired- a third youngish- i.e. around 30 or 40 years old. It was easier to listen to her than read her- the content of her political writing I find depressing, with any writer. Coming from her, I found it simple and easy to digest- when you can see the sincere humanness of where she is coming from. She had the only map published in Israel before the Oslo deal- the one before the Camp David meeting. It was projected up onto the large screen. She was given a lecturer’s pointing stick to point up at the slide projected map, after her pen seemed inadequate, and Tanya laughed at the huge size of it, which seemed double her height, and hid it, until it was useful for pointing out areas.

Didn’t stay for her to sign my book. She looked like she’d be looked after for the evening. She wore short, suede-type lace up black boots, long tailored khaki skirt, with rear low slit, and black long sleeved stretch shirt, with a leather satchel on her back. When she walked down the stairs to the lecture area, she walked past, next to where I was seated, and I noticed she had a spring to her step. She had a certain vitality to her, and had that Israeli type of dress sense- slightly European and slightly hippy- or maybe I’ve only met hippyish Israelis. Sad that her view is a minority view amongst Israelis and Jews worldwide. Can’t see why her views are a minority- they seem perfect sense to me. Reminded me of an Israeli woman I met long ago- same outlook, and openness. So, I will try and read her book, but I would much rather sit and hear her read out a chapter each 2 hours. That would be easier, as it makes the situation seem as I see it- simply human, and not academic. But it’s not everyday that we can sit and hear people talk about things they would normally write about, so writing is a way to link the ideas with other minds. Communicate. I like seeing the writer/ thinker in the flesh- always comes across as normal and human, compared to the print, which at times can seem academic. Tanya Reinhart was quietly spoken and modest in her approach, with people asking for the volume up. Lots of questions at the end- they had to be limited.

Alexander Cockburn’s new book, End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, is now available.

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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

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Published on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 by Daily Herald (Provo, Utah)
Cheney Speech at BYU Causes Outcry
by Nathan Johnson
At BYU — in the heart of what has been called the reddest county in the nation — the mere possibility of Vice President Dick Cheney coming to campus is getting some blue blood boiling.

Cheney is scheduled to be Brigham Young University’s keynote speaker at this year’s graduation ceremonies. While it is a day of celebration for many, some BYU administrators and faculty, alongside parents and students, are expressing displeasure with the VP’s visit.

Despite the opposition, BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said that there are currently no plans to eliminate Cheney as a part of the graduation ceremonies.

BYU Marriott School professor Warner Woodworth said that he has received e-mails from all over the world expressing dismay over Cheney’s visit.

Woodworth said that some of those e-mails came from parents and LDS stake presidents, particularly in Latin America, expressing anger that Cheney — whom they called a “warmonger” — will be representing their children and their church.

Woodworth said that administrators, faculty and even some students and parents are refusing to attend graduation ceremonies if Cheney is speaking. Pickets and other forms of protest are also being planned, he said.

Nephi Henry, a BYU student who will be graduating next month, is working with other students in organizing opposition to Cheney’s visit.

Henry said his group felt that it was not appropriate for someone of such an “inflammatory” nature to be at BYU. Henry criticized the move to have Cheney because the vice president does not meet the university’s policy on speakers having “a good public reputation and a moral private life.” Additionally, he said the invitation violated BYU’s policy of political neutrality.

“It certainly looks like the church is endorsing someone of a highly patrician political nature,” he said.

Woodworth also expressed concern over Cheney’s fitness to speak to graduates at commencement ceremonies. He said that Cheney’s moral values were not in line with what BYU represents.

“Cheney’s coming here is a contradiction of what we’re trying to do,” he said. “We represent an institution of peace, he represents an institution of war … an institution of deception and outright lies.” he said.

Despite the harsh criticism that Cheney’s invitation has generated, some students and faculty members don’t feel that sit-outs and pickets are appropriate.

BYU law school alumna turned Ph.D. student Betsy Fowler took a more cautious approach to the debate.

“A university is a forum for ideas. While members of the university community have the right to make a statement by not attending, personally I think it is too bad that professors would elect not to support their students whose work and dedication this commencement is intended to celebrate,” she said.

BYU professor of Spanish and Portuguese Ted Lyon is among those who are very displeased at the scheduling of the vice president. While Lyon is not planning to sit out, he does believe that if a political message is going to be issued, then it is necessary to issue a political message on the other side. “I’m suggesting that we invite Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama,” he said.

Lyon said that he has been included in e-mails involving more than 200 students about the vice president’s visit. Lyon said the messages had a tone and tenor of “we want our graduation to have a spiritual tone, not a political tone.”

Henry said that he is leaning toward a boycott of his own graduation if Cheney speaks.

Copyright © 2007 Daily Herald and Lee Enterprises

See Perry Anderson’s scathing take on Kofi Annan: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/anderson

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please see:

http://www.radicalmath.org/conference/main.htm

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Daily Kos
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 1
by Mandevilla

Wed Mar 14, 2007 at 10:21:06 AM PDT

Much was said about George W. Bush’s fundraising prowess in 2000 and 2004, when he created labels like “Bush Pioneers” to identify those who shook down donors and bundled the lucre for his campaigns. But hard on the heels of his inauguration, he might’ve just as appropriately created a new label, “Bush Profiteers,” to identify those who first turned his decayed ideologies into law – inventing new spigots through which Bush’s businessmen-backers could suck federal funds – and who then vacated public service to collect their own lucre as lobbyists for those businessmen and their companies.

If you needed a perfect example of this model of lawmaking-turned-moneymaking, you might consider Bush’s vaunted No Child Left Behind. And if you needed a perfect example of the Bush Profiteer, you might consider the first “senior education advisor” he imported from Texas, the architect of NCLB himself.

Mandevilla’s diary :: ::
I offer a simple thesis: Several large corporations and their lobbyists have profited from Bush’s NCLB by tapping billions of dollars in standardized testing and in “supplemental education services” funds since its passage in 2001. They’re lining up now to expand their profit margins for the next six years as NCLB is being re-authorized. And the one man who stands to personally profit the most this year isn’t Bush himself, but advisor-turned-lobbyist Sandy Kress, the architect of Bush’s old high-stakes testing model in Texas and the overhaul of ESEA in 2001.

As Bush himself might put it, “Heck of a job, Sandy.” (Ahem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/…

KATHY EMERY KNOWS something about educating kids. Her resume, found here http://www.educationanddemocracy.org… documents a 30-year career as a history teacher-turned-education researcher. Credentials impeccable. She’s published and presented and given workshops and been interviewed on testing and assessment and good education practices, so she’s got skills. And she writes, “When Ted Kennedy and George Bush agree on something, one needs to worry about who the man behind the curtain is. After doing research for my dissertation (which is now a book) it became clear to me that the men behind the curtain are the members of the Business Roundtable.”

In a speech given in January 2005 to the San Francisco State University faculty retreat in Asilomar, California, she detailed the convergence of two heretofore unconjoined worlds: the world of big business, and the world of educating kids. The convergence was given birth in the passage of NCLB, she says, but the pregnancy was more than a decade long. Its unsuspecting mother was the Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), first adopted under Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1965 in partial fulfillment of John Kennedy’s domestic agenda. Its father? “…a bipartisan bandwagon of standards based advocates – a bandwagon built in the summer of 1989 by the top 300 CEOs in our country.”

At this meeting, the Business Roundtable CEOs agreed that each state legislature needed to adopt legislation that would impose “outcome-based education,” “high expectations for all children,” “rewards and penalties for individual schools,” “greater school-based decision making” and align staff development with these action items. By 1995, the Business Roundtable had refined their agenda to “nine essential components,” the first four being state standards, state tests, sanctions and the transformation of teacher education programs. By 2000, our leading CEOs had managed to create an interlocking network of business associations, corporate foundations, governor’s associations, non-profits and educational institutions that had successfully persuaded 16 state legislatures to adopt the first three components of their high stakes testing agenda. This network includes the Education Trust, Annenberg Center, Harvard Graduate School, Public Agenda, Achieve, Inc., Education Commission of the States, the Broad Foundation, Institute for Educational Leadership, federally funded regionally laboratories and most newspaper editorial boards.

By 2000, many states legislatures, however, were balking at the sheer size and scope of what corporate America was demanding. The Business Roundtable took note of this resistance when publishing, in the spring of 2001, a booklet entitled Assessing and Addressing the “Testing Backlash”: Practical Advice and Current Public Opinion Research for Business Coalitions and Standards Advocates. My guess is that the timing of this renewed effort to “turn up the heat” involved getting federal government into the act by aligning the federal educational policy with the Business Roundtable’s state-by-state strategy.

Emery quotes Gene Hickock, the under-secretary of education assigned to implement NCLB, speaking to CEOs at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in 2003: “One of the virtues of NCLB is leverage, leverage at the state. . . at the local level . . . We don’t mind being the bad guys… I am very concerned that we will . . . underestimate the potential that we have to redefine everything.”

And Emery pays special attention to Hickock’s desire to “redefine everything.” She sketches briefly the intent of the “corporate business class” to control public education systems beginning the 1890s and continuing through “modern comprehensive schools, an important part of which was the introduction of standardized, norm-reference tests.”

Why the interest of the “corporate business class” in standardized tests? Emery tells us: “Since the 1890s, these tests, along with the factory like conditions of public high schools, have been central to fulfilling one of the major purposes of our public schools. In an industrial economy, working class students need to be tracked into vocational education and middle class students into college prep courses. This is one reason why we find standardized tests to be more strongly correlated to socio-economic status than to any other variable.”

Emery suggests that the corporate climate in the 1980s – pressure from the emergence of Japan, for example – lit a fire beneath America’s corporate interests to accelerate the education process, she surmises; hence, the Business Roundtable’s meeting in 1989 and its development of a “high-stakes testing” model for schools.

It’s clear to me that the fact that its system fails millions of American kids doesn’t deter the leaders of the Business Roundtable: Its goal of marrying the world of big business with the world of educating children has yielded its primary objective, the profit margin. How so?

Education itself isn’t a profit-making venture; no teacher, lunch lady, janitor, principal or bus driver is getting “rich” from “the system.” Any dividends on public investment aren’t realized until a child graduates, matures, and becomes a contributing member of society. But a small cottage industry of education support programs has always existed in the private sector, and it included everything from single-subject tutors to after-school or summertime programs for remedial readers. NCLB, the shotgun marriage of Lyndon Johnson’s ESEA with the Business Roundtable’s “high stakes testing” agenda, created a brand-new spigot through which that cottage industry in the private sector could siphon federal education funds. The result: Instant profit – and instant profiteers. What once was just a cottage industry has become a corporate giant.

Says Emery:

Not only do working class and poor students, especially those of color, not learn to read and write, they don’t learn the kinds of skills that would allow them to challenge the direction the Business Roundtable CEO’s are taking this country. Throughout American educational history, there have been educators and activists who have argued against education as merely legitimizing the sorting of students into job categories. Some have created schools based on the joy of learning, or the need for students to be life-long learners. Others have created schools that taught students how to be active agents of social change, or to be skilled citizens in a democratic society. One effect of high stakes testing, one that I am sure the CEO’s are pleased with, is that the historic public debate over what the goals of education should be, a debate going back 2500 years, has been eliminated. Instead, raising tests scores has become an end in itself…

PRESIDING OVER THE SHOTGUN wedding that Emery describes – the forced marriage of ESEA to the Business Roundtable’s agenda – was none other than Sandy Kress. “Pressure” from not-yet-Secretary Margaret Spellings – then still known as Margaret La Montagne – and Kress, “former head of the Dallas school board, seems to be paying off. Already, the Business Roundtable has pledged to air TV ads promoting testing,” wrote Richard Dunham in the March 19, 2001, edition of Business Week magazine here http://www.businessweek.com/…

Dunham’s puff-piece on La Montagne/Spellings said the duo was “counting on business leaders such as Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, AT&T CEO C. Michael Armstrong, and Texas Instruments CEO Thomas J. Engibous to lobby Congress on behalf of Bush’s cherished annual performance tests…”

Mere weeks later, columnist Robert Novak credited Kress as half of Bush’s Texan education brain trust, and Bush’s emissary to Congress at a time when the legislative branch was still evaluating its untested executive. “…Who convinced the president to build this bridge for the enemy? Republican House members finger two White House aides brought from Texas: Margaret LaMontagne and Sandy Kress.”

“Kress, who was a Democratic activist in Dallas backing Michael Dukakis for president when I first met him, told me Tuesday the White House did not support even Kennedy’s version of Straight A’s because ‘to have a bloodbath on the House floor is not worth it’,” wrote Novak on May 23, 2001, here http://www.texaseagle.org/…

But by July, Kress had left La Montagne/Spellings behind and earned a high-profile spread of his own in New Yorker magazine, thanks to writer Nicholas Lemann. In addition to sketching Kress’s history, Lemann cast Kress as Bush’s brain on education. Inscribed in “a flimsy little drugstore notebook, green, maybe four by six inches” was a text by Kress dated 1999 and called ‘A Draft Position for George W. Bush on K-12 Education’.” It was this draft, apparently, that led to Kress’s “temporary assignment as the White House’s chief lobbyist on education.”

Here’s a sample of the guru’s amazing composition: “Unhappily, after spending billions and billions of dollars on education, the federal government has made virtually no meaningful difference in helping educate our children. As a result of this cynical, shameful, and wasteful behavior, other politicians have decided that there should be no federal role in education at all. Our citizenry, which regularly says that education is the nation’s most important cause, needs to understand the sharp contrast between Governor Bush’s vigor and the utter sloppiness of the keepers of the status quo.”

If anyone could lead Bush’s crusade into education, it would be Kress, who, in addition to being “former president of the Dallas School Board and one of the architects of the Texas education reforms, is a Democrat, but he and Bush had been working together successfully for years.”

“Sandy Kress’s notebook lays out the essentials of the Texas education reform,” Lemann writes. It’s not rocket science: State-adopted standards feed into state-adopted tests, with scores “used to rate the performance of schools.” The magic, Lemann understates, was in the marketing: “the promise to ‘leave no child behind’ and to eschew ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’.” And Kress was the perfect marketer for the purpose, as Lemann describes here:

In the early stages of the Presidential campaign, I watched Gore, in Dallas, make a speech on education to a group of African-American mayors, in which he tried, without much evident conviction, to cast Bush’s record on education in a bad light. Sandy Kress was there to run an after-the-speech spin room for the Bush campaign, which entailed publicly opposing the Presidential candidate of his own party. The intense loyalty of Bush’s close aides can be startling — is there something there that they see and we don’t, or do we see Bush more clearly from a distance than they do up close? In one of my conversations with Kress, when he was talking about an early Bush maneuver on behalf of the bill — nothing terribly unusual, just chatting up some members of Congress — a wave of emotion came over him and, with a murmured apology, he started to cry.

Kress won his victory, sure enough. Without ever convening a hearing on the bill, the House passed it 384 to 45. “The last thing the White House wanted was a long, slow period of national debate in which the many interest groups involved in education could marshal lobbying campaigns,” Lemann explains. In the Senate, progress was slower, getting snagged on the consequences to schools whose scores didn’t measure up. Kress’s solution reflected Kress’s power in Bush’s world: “One Saturday afternoon, word spread instantaneously within this group (while the world slumbered on): Sandy Kress had just rewritten the A.Y.P. formula,” Lemann says.

Just like that.

WHEN JOHN DiIULIO DITCHED the White House’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, Time magazine’s James Carney wrote that Washington watchers wondered why Kress hadn’t done the same already. But Kress was a different animal altogether, Carney observed here http://www.time.com/… “Not only is Sandy Kress a Democrat, but he’s also the lead negotiator and chief policymaker for Bush’s education-reform plan. Together with his faith-based initiative, education reform undergirded Bush’s claim to be a compassionate conservative. Like DiIulio, Kress was chosen because Bush hoped his Democratic credentials would attract bipartisan support. In Kress’s case, it worked. But after the education-reform bill clears Congress, expected next month, Kress will pack his bags. Kress will at least be able to claim victory when he leaves.”

And it came to pass, as reporter Diana Jean Schemo wrote here http://listserv.arizona.edu/… on December 18: “The Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill today that would dramatically extend the federal role in public education, mandating annual testing of children in Grades 3 to 8, providing tutoring for children in persistently failing schools and setting a 12-year timetable for closing chronic gaps in student achievement. The 87-to-10 vote capped a tumultuous year for the bill that began with President Bush’s postinaugural unveiling of his education plan, [and] continued through a springtime of wrangling over issues like how student progress would be measured…”

Kress himself, Schemo writes, “watched the vote from the Senate gallery, as did Education Secretary Rod Paige.”

(Stay tuned for Part 2.)

Tags: NCLB, ESEA, Sandy Kress (all tags)

by Jim Crowther

THE POPULAR EDUCATION NEWS
Connecting popular and community-based educators and activists to resources for improving educational work in social movements against oppression and for democracy, sustainability, social justice, and peace.

No. 46 March 2007

A free monthly newsletter about popular education/community organizing resources for facilitators and practitioners: Many of the materials reviewed or listed in the newsletter are part of the collection in the Penny Lernoux Memorial Library at the Resource Center of the Americas, 3019 Minnehaha Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55406. You can contribute to future issues by sending suggestions, notices of materials and short reviews or subscribe by sending your email address to lolds@popednews.org.

Check out www.popednews.org for an archive of back issues and an annotated bibliography of the popular education and community organizing collection.

Theme: A FEW WEB-BASED MATERIALS

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. Please join us at PTO!! A SPECIAL EFFORT CONTINUES
2. FROM THE EDITOR: A FEW WEB-BASED MATERIALS
3. LINKS TO POPULAR EDUCATION BLOGS
4. UPDATES ON FUTURE SOCIAL FORUMS (MWSF update)
5. WHERE POPULAR EDUCATORS WILL GATHER
6. LINKS TO POPULAR EDUCATION WEB SITES AND ONLINE BOOKSTORES
7. QUOTE OF THE MONTH

*********************************************************************************************************
1. THE SPECIAL EFFORT TO GATHER POPULAR EDUCATORS AT THE PTO CONFERENCE IN MINNEAPOLIS MAY 31 – JUNE 3, 2007CONTINUES

Please join us at PTO!! The special effort to encourage popular educators to gather at next years annual Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed Conference to be held in Minneapolis May 31 – June 3, 2007. Come together, share what you do, learn from others, and join us in celebration.
Plans are for two half-day pre-conferences on Thursday, May 31, a morning introductory session on Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an afternoon session, A Popular Educator Practitioner Workshop. (There are several pre- and post-conference Theater of the Oppressed options featuring Augusto Boal and/or Julian Boal, and others.)
We are also working with the planners to increase the opportunities for participant dialogue, and to help move the conference beyond the familiar “talking heads” formats, to make it more of a “gathering” than a conference.
For information and the call for proposals see http://www.ptoweb.org/

*********************************************************************************************************
2. FROM THE EDITOR: A FEW WEB-BASED MATERIALS

Some of the most interesting popular education materials I have come across lately are from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. In some of the articles on their successful campaign to get Taco Bell to buy tomatoes only from suppliers that pay and treat workers decently I had noted that the Coalition used a popular education method of community organizing. For some time I have been trying to find out what that meant. Recently, one of the Twin Cities organizers who worked in Florida on the earlier campaigns, and is now helping to organize the current campaign focusing on McDonalds, shared some copies of materials – in particular a series of “codes” used to animate discussions in organizing the workers, a “Theater Skit,” and a draft of a good article on both the history and methods of the Immokalee Workers, an article that also describes some of the popular education practices used in the organizing campaigns. The article will soon be published and I am working on a way to share the other materials. Watch the future issues of this newsletter for information.

Exciting News! Since I have not identifies any new materials to review in this issue, I have delayed getting started putting the issue together. This morning’s email brought another good reason for the delay. I just received a note from Michael Newman in Australia, my favorite adult education author, that he has made three of his books available online for free downloads. They are: Maeler’s Regard: Images of Adult Learning; Defining the Enemy: Adult Education in Social Action; and The Third Contract: Theory and Practice in Trade Union Training. His most recent book, Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators, published last year by Jossey-Bass, was mentioned in the June-July 2006 issue of The Popular Education News. (I am still hoping to find someone to write a short review for the newsletter.) Several of these books about adult education and social and political action have won awards.

This website ( http://www.michaelnewman.info/) has been set up to provide free access to 4the three books.

Inspired by Michael Newman’s generosity in sharing his work, I have decided to post some sections of my memoir on the http://www.popednews.org web site. As a result of a writing residency at The Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks several years ago, I completed a draft of a memoir with the working title A Memoir of My Journey in Adult Education: The Making of a Popular Educator. Over the last couple years I have circulated a few copies among friends but lately work on it has been languishing. My first post is a section called “Popular Education in the College Classroom.” I have asked that those who download a copy “pay” by sending me a paragraph or more of comments about it.

As long as I was learning how to make resources available on the web site as .pdf files I added two more files. They are the most often requested items when I share my slide show, Another Kind of Movement Education Is Possible: Popular Education in workshops and other sessions. The two are “The Tree of Knowledge” and “Planning Educational Activities with Eight Overlapping and Interlock Popular Education Principles.”

A Tree of Knowledge

Finally, I have just received a note from Dave Bleakney of the Canadian Postal Workers Union about a training opportunity taking place near Berlin this spring that is worthy of a special mention. It is a series of 4 workshops called Undoing Capitalism - Skills for Change (Methods and tools of popular education for the anticapitalist movement. A ten day workshop and training experience.) Here is some of what the workshop planners say about the workshops: It’s not the analysis of neoliberal globalization which is missing, but rather practices of transmitting and exchanging knowledge. Also missing are ways of inspiring people to engage in political action.

Political education from below, in the sense of Popular Education, is underdeveloped within the movement of globalization critics. It’s not only way more fun than reading texts but also reaches and inspires more people.

In these four workshops you can experience and learn about
*capitalism and anti-capitalism using methods of popular education
*tools and approaches for training social activists
*how to use these skills within non-hierarchical organizing procesess http://www.rosalux.de/cms/index.php?id=12502&type=0

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3. LINKS TO POPULAR EDUCATION BLOGS

chris cavanagh www.comeuppance.blogspot.com.

(Please send others that you know.)

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4. UPDATES ON FUTURE SOCIAL FORUMS

MIDWEST SOCIAL FORUM (MWSF)

This year, instead of holding our own regional Forum, the MWSF Organizing Committee is pursuing two key goals:
• Use the momentum we have built in the Midwest in support of the first United States Social Forum (USSF), scheduled for June 27-July 1 in Atlanta. By ensuring a strong Midwest contingent, we will help build personal relationships and organizational connections between the MWSF and the broader national and international Forum movement.

• Organize a series of more focused follow-up activities aimed at building on the energy generated by the USSF by further developing relationships and movement infrastructure in the Midwest. These activities will include a Caucusing / Organizer Training event in fall 2007, in preparation for the MWSF in the summer of 2008. The fall event also offers an opportunity for those who are unable to go to Atlanta. In addition, the MWSF Organizing Committee has instituted some important changes in its organizing structure, aimed at meeting the increasingly complex demands of the Forum and its related activities, while at the same time providing new opportunities for participation in the planning and development of those activities. The Organizing Committee encourages all Midwest-based community activists, students, educators, and others that share the overall vision of the Forum to take advantage of these opportunities and help build the MWSF.

The MWSF offers many exciting ways to take part in the growing Social Forum movement. For more details on how you can get involved, please visit the links below. Stay tuned for regular updates further below.
• Mobilization for the USSF

• Fall 2007 Caucusing / Organizer Training event

• Midwest Social Forum 2008

• Midwest Social Forum Organizing Structure
UNITED STATES SOCIAL FORUM (USSF)

US Social Forum Writing Team: Scholars and writers are invited to join a network of scholar-writer-activists working to support the United States Social Forum. This document outlines the ways we hope each writing team member will participate, as well as the support offered through the USSF National Planning Committee network.

Scholars and writers have an important role to play in helping bridge the divides within U.S. society that separate communities according to race, class, interest, and other differences. The USSF writing team consists of individual scholars and writers who commit to do the following actions in support of the USSF:
• Write [at least one per month] essays, op-eds, news analyses, or other pieces in general audience news sources that serves to educate the wider U.S. public about the USSF, the people it involves, and the issues it addresses;

• Write at least [three] analyses, poems, opinion pieces, announcements, etc. in specialized publications targeting particular audiences of activists, special interest groups, professionals, or other publics who should know about the USSF and/or who can contribute to the work of the USSF;

• Following the USSF, we will do “report back” work – that is, write and speak to help inform the U.S. public about the USSF’s discussions and about how to carry forward the goals of enhancing social movement cooperation and promoting progressive social change in this country;

• Encourage friends and colleagues to make financial contributions to support the USSF. The costs of this meeting are high, and organizers also seek to raise money to increase participation from low-income activists. Costs will be met through registration fees, donations, and corporate or foundation grants.

• Speak with local journalists and/or activists in your community about the USSF and aid preparations for local participation in and/or media coverage of the forum; Additional suggestions for improving our work, or requests to join this network, can be sent to Jackie Smith (jsmith40@nd.edu).

The USSF will be held in Atlanta June 17 -22, 2007. For Information and contact numbers see http://www.ussf2007.org/ or contact alovelace@ussocialforum.org

OTHER SOCIAL FORUMS AROUND THE WORLD For info: http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/ *********************************************************************************************************
7. WHERE POPULAR EDUCATORS WILL GATHER

March 1-4, 2007, Their Wars Left Behind: Education for Action, The Rouge Forum hosts at Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan. For info http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/rouge_forum/TheirWarsLeft%20Behind.htm

Spring 2007 (dates not yet set) Cross-border Dialogue on Popular Education and Global Economic Power Just Associates is collaborating with the Toronto Labour Education Centre and a range of economic justice and workers’ organizations in Mexico, the USA and Canada http://www.justassociates.org/

March 9-10, 2007 4th Annual (Net)Working Conference on Women & Literacy: Threads of Experience - Creative Spaces for Women’s Learning Northeastern University, Boston A Call for Presenters is out with a deadline Dec 1. for info http://www.litwomen.org/conference.html

March 9 -11, 2007 Interpreting for Social Justice, Highlander Center, New Market, TN http://www.highlandercenter.org/

April 20-22, 2007 Fourth International Conference of the Popular Education Network, Maynooth Campus of the National University of Ireland For info jim.crowther@ed.ac.uk

April 27 - May 6 Undoing Capitalism - Skills for Change (4 workshops), (Methods and tools of popular education for the anticapitalist movement. A ten day workshop and training experience.) Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in cooperation with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Training for Change , Muncheberg OT Trebnitz (nr Belin) http://www.rosalux.de/cms/index.php?id=12502&type=0

May 24-25, 2007 Critical Connections: Education for Social Change International Conference, Queen Margaret University College in collaboration with the Institute for International Health & Development and the School of Social Science, Media & Communications, A call for proposals by theme: Arts for Social Justice (contact sknight@qmuc.ac.uk), Popular Education (contact escandrett@qmuc.ac.uk), Resilience, Rights and Recovery (contact sfustukian@qmuc.ac.uk) For info www.community-arts.org.uk

May 31 Pre-Conference Workshops: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (AM) and Popular Education Practitioner’s Workshop (PM) before the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed Conference, Minneapolis (See 1. above).

June 1-3, 2007 13th Annual PTO Conference: “What Does it Mean to be a Citizen” University of Minnesota, Minneapolis http://www.ptoweb.org/

June14-17, 2007 Class Matters: Working-Class Culture and Counter-Culture Annual Conference of the Working-Class Studies Association, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota. For info rachleff@macalester.edu

June 14-16 2007 ESREA Active Democratic Citizenship and Adult Learning Network Seminar: Changing Relationships between the State, Civil Society and the Citizen: Implications for adult education and adult learning The Unit for Adult Education (UfAE), University of Minho, Braga, Portugal http://www.uea.uminho.pt

June 21-24, 2007 The Conference - Free Minds, Free People, The Chicago Freedom School Project, the Education for Liberation Network, The Brotherhood/Sister Sol, and the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban School Improvement. (The conference will bring together teachers, youth, parents, researchers and community-based educators from across the country to begin building a movement to develop and promote Education for Liberation.) freeminds@Brotherhood-Sistersol.org

June 22, 2007 Symposium on Popular Education, the first day of the Allied Media Conference, Detroit, Michigan http://www.alliedmediaconference.org/

June 22-24 Allied Media Conference: Breaking Silence, Building Movements, Detroit, Michigan http://www.alliedmediaconference.org/

Aug. 31-Sept. 2, 2007 Highlander’s 75th anniversary Celebration, Highlander Center, New Market, TN. http://www.highlandercenter.org/

Sept 20-23, 2007 5th ESREA European Research Conference: Adult Learning and the Challenges of Social and Cultural
Diversity: Diverse Lives, Cultures, Learnings and Literacies , University of Seville and Institute of Paulo Freire of Spain, Seville, Spain http://www.congreso.us.es/cesrea

Dec 2–5, 2007 International Researching Work and Learning Conference RWL5 , Cape Town, South Africa http://rwl5.uwc.ac.za

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8. LINKS TO POPULAR EDUCATION WEB SITES AND ONLINE BOOKSTORES
(*those with online bookstores)

*Catalyst Centre ( www.catalystcentre.ca/index.htm )
*Highlander Center (www.highlandercenter.org )
*Resource Center of the Americas (www.americas.org )
*Growing Communities for Peace ( www.humanrightsandpeacestore.org )
*IPEA (www.peopleseducation.org/ )
Project South (www.projectsouth.org )
Center for Popular Education and Participatory Research ( www.cpepr.info )
Pop Ed Links Directory http://poped.org
WE LEARN: Women Expanding-Literacy Education Action Resource Network (http :// www.litwomen.org/news.html)
Centre for Popular Education ( http://www.cpe.uts.edu.au/)
The Change Agency ( www.thechangeagency.org/index.htm)
Training for Change www.TrainingforChange.org

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9. PROVERB OF THE MONTH

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If you go through the high grass where the elephant has already gone through, you don’t get soaked with the dew. - Ghanaian Proverb

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Jim Crowther

Published on Friday, March 2, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
Bush Picks Executive as Consumer Watchdog
by James Gerstenzang

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Thursday that he would nominate a senior executive of the largest organization representing the nation’s manufacturers to head the government agency assigned to protect consumers from dangerous products.

I think it’s shocking. It’s the fox in the chicken coop.

Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen
Bush’s choice of Michael E. Baroody, executive vice president of the National Assn. of Manufacturers, to be chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission drew an angry response from consumer advocates and predictions of a tough battle for Senate confirmation from the Democratic majority.

Critics, noting Baroody’s work for an organization that aims to ease restrictions on a long list of companies making consumer goods, said the nomination would reflect an administration effort to restrict government regulations by executive order and action, rather than by congressional approval.

“I think it’s shocking,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader. “It’s the fox in the chicken coop.”

Claybrook, who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Carter, said, “They wanted a hard-liner in the agency to push it into the deregulation mode.”

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, established in 1974, issues safety standards for a wide range of products, including lawn mowers, toasters, toys, clothing and furniture — nearly all consumer products except motor vehicles and guns.

It investigates reports of dangerous products, issues recalls and shapes regulations. It also has the option of taking no action on complaints or investigations.

The panel has not had a chairman since July; only two of its five seats are filled. Under its regulations, the commission is unable to take formal action after more than six months without a quorum. It hit the mark in January.

Baroody, 60, was an assistant secretary of Labor and director of public affairs under President Reagan. He also was a speechwriter for Bob Dole when the Kansas senator was chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Both in government and out, Baroody has tangled with advocates of greater government regulation to protect public health and safety:

• In 1988, as assistant secretary of Labor, he defended the Reagan administration’s record in protecting workers despite delays in issuing safety rules and efforts to weaken regulations.

• In 2000, he fought an ergonomics rule — put into place by the Clinton administration — that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said was intended to prevent 300,000 workplace accidents and injuries.

• In 2001, speaking for the National Assn. of Manufacturers, he criticized a Supreme Court ruling rejecting arguments that the Environmental Protection Agency had acted unconstitutionally when it issued standards for limiting smog and soot.

Baroody’s nomination must be considered by the Senate Commerce Committee before being voted on by the Senate.

“I intend to give his nomination thorough scrutiny,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a Commerce Committee member, said in a statement.

“Here was a golden opportunity to put a true champion of consumers onto a very important commission, and instead President Bush selected someone who represents the special interests,” she said. “This administration seems incapable of doing anything in the public interest.”

Republican lawmakers did not return calls seeking comment.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has received no increases in funding, according to Democratic staff members on the Senate Commerce Committee, forcing it to reduce staff and workload because its budget mandates cost-of-living increases for employees.

One staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Democratic senators were concerned that the commission’s staff had been deprived of its expertise by what amounted to budget cuts imposed by the Bush administration.

Baroody also was president of the now-defunct National Policy Forum, a Republican-oriented policy research group. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

james.gerstenzang @latimes.com

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

First, by the brilliant film reviewer and Unrepentant Marxist, Louis Proyect:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/amazing-grace/

More from Louis Proyect:
I just discovered that the production company behind the film, Bristol Bay Productions, has launched something called the “Amazing Change Campaign” (http://www.amazinggracemovie.com/amazing_change.php) that intends to fund and promote Christian missionary work in troubled areas in Africa (Uganda, etc.) in the spirit of William Wilberforce.

When I discovered the Christian connection, I did a little more investigation and learned that Bristol Bay is a wholly owned subsidiary of Walden Media, the production company responsible for the Christian film “The Chronicles of Narnia”.

Walden’s CEO is one Philip Anschutz, an evangelical Christian billionaire who has funded organizations that oppose abortion and gay rights. Last year Anschutz got into a bit of a scandal trying to launch a gambling casino [perfect--just perfect] in London’s Millennium Dome, which inspired this report in the July 7, 2006 Independent:

The Christian tycoon who wants to ban gay marriage; Deputy PM Under Fire

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

John Prescott’s genial host in Colorado is a billionaire conservative who has used his vast wealth and influence to promote his Christian viewpoint, to rally against gay marriage and fund an organisation that questions the theory of evolution. He has also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates.

The Deputy Prime Minister claims he spent only two-and-half hours with Philip Anschutz over the entire July weekend he spent at his 35,000-acre ranch, Eagle’s Nest, an hour from Denver. Mr Prescott said he went to satisfy an ambition to see a working cattle ranch - stirred by watching Westerns as a boy - and to talk with sugar-beet farmers about the state of their industry.

But if the MP for Hull East had time to dig a little he might have asked Mr Anschutz about Amendment 2, an ultimately failed ballot initiative he funded to overturn state laws that protected gay rights. The measure was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1996.

He might also have asked Mr Anschutz about the Discovery Institute, a “think-tank” he funds in Seattle that criticises Darwin’s theory of evolution and argues for the involvement of a “supernatural” actor in the development of living things.

Critics accuse it of offering little more than a new spin on creationism and the institute was recently caught up in a notorious lawsuit about the teaching of creationism in schools. And over dinner at the ranch, complete with its own golf-course and formerly owned by the beer magnate Peter Coors, Mr Prescott could have raised the topic of the Media Research Council, a Washington-based group that attacks the liberal media and which, in 2003, was responsible for half of the complaints received by the Federal Communications Commission about alleged indecency on television.

The wealth of Mr Anschutz, 67, is huge and his interests are vast. Born in Kansas, he inherited his father’s land and oil businesses before expanding them.

His empire includes sports teams - he owns the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team’ a cinema chain’ a film production company that has produced such films as Ray and The Chronicles ofNarnia’ oil’ railroads’ telecommunications and newspapers.

Forbes lists him as the 28th richest person in the US with a net worth of $7.2bn (pounds 4bn) but, in 2002, Fortune called him the “greediest executive”.

A review in the Guardian Newspaper:

First among equals

The abolition of slavery was the work of many. To canonise Wilberforce is an injustice to history

Nigel Willmott
Saturday February 24, 2007
The Guardian

William Wilberforce probably had more influence than anyone else in this place on the course of human history, Melvyn Bragg intoned reverentially from Westminster Abbey in a special radio broadcast this week marking 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade. It’s a dubious claim, given that the mortal remains of Newton and Darwin are slowly evolving into dust nearby, but it may have some literal truth. Those who might challenge Wilberforce’s claim to be The Man Who Abolished Slavery are not, and could not, be buried in the abbey, given that a large number were nonconformists, particularly Quakers. Of course Wilberforce, as the spokesman of the anti-slavery movement in parliament and promoter of several bills to outlaw it, played a key role, but to indulge in this canonisation of one man is a travesty of history.

It not only ignores the role of black people themselves in the colonies, who made slavery increasingly untenable through resistance and rebellions - and, in the case of Haiti, outright revolution under Toussaint L’Ouverture - but also those black leaders such as Olaudah Equiano, who campaigned in Britain for abolition. And why Wilberforce, a member of the Anglican-Tory establishment then enriching itself on slavery, rather than those who created the movement a generation before he even entered politics? Men such as Granville Sharp, who fought legal battles to ensure the freedom of runaway slaves, or the Rev Thomas Clarkson, the founder in 1787 of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. They were supported by a nationwide movement, including great figures of the industrial revolution: men such as Wedgwood - who raised funds with medallions declaring “Am I not a man and a brother?” - Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and other members of the Lunar Society, committed abolitionists all. And if you want Anglican and establishment figures, what about Lord Mansfield, who as chief justice handed down the judgment - interpreted as “Britons never shall be slaves” - that the runaway slave James Somerset could not be returned to his “owner” on British soil. Of course it was much more equivocal than that, but that didn’t stop this case becoming a rallying call for freedom. (Is it coincidence that Mansfield had a much-loved adopted black daughter, Dido, immortalised in a painting by Zoffany?)

But perhaps the biggest victim of this hagiography is the anti-slavery movement itself: one of the greatest popular political movements in British history, and in many ways the prototype of every reform movement since - from the campaigns over suffrage and factory hours, to anti-apartheid and the fight for racial equality and gay rights - with its combination of legal challenges, parliamentary lobbying and popular agitation. It is understandable why the Victorians would want to enthrone Wilberforce, to claim the moral high ground, as they sought to justify Britain’s growing imperialism. But why are we repeating this nursery-book history in 2007?

Slavery itself was abolished in Britain in 1833. The half-century of struggle is in reality a complex history full of ambiguity (Mansfield later ruled on a point of law in favour of a ship’s captain who threw slaves overboard); altruism mixed with self-interest (yes, slavery was an inferior competitor to the new factories, as abolitionist Adam Smith realised); and defeats and false dawns, elating and exhausting campaigners by turn.

All this is being increasingly documented in books such as Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains and Michael Jordan’s The Great Abolition Sham, as well as in others with a wider remit - Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings usefully shows that it’s not only the British establishment that likes to rewrite history; the flight of tens of thousands of slaves to enrol in the British forces to fight slave owners such as Washington and Jefferson is a rarely told story of the American revolution.

So let’s give Wilberforce his due. Perhaps, as Bragg has argued in his Twelve Books That Changed the World, Wilberforce’s 1789 arguments in parliament should be seen as a key historical text. But remember that the 1807 act was passed not because Wilberforce finally, after 25 years of trying, convinced the Anglican-Tory establishment that the trade was wrong, but because a brief non-Tory government provided the parliamentary arithmetic. The successful abolition bill was promoted by Sir Samuel Romilly - not Wilberforce.

The Tories returned for the next 25 years and only with their defeat in 1830 did the abolition of slavery itself come about, following the Great Reform Act of 1832. Both acts were the result of huge popular movements and political engagement, not of individual Great Men. Let’s celebrate the many, not the few.

nigel.willmott@guardian.co.uk

More on the Movie, Amazing Grace:

http://www.counterpunch.org/linebaugh02282007.html

Another Opinion about Amazing Grace:

Whitewashing the Slave Trade

An Amazing Disgrace

By PETER LINEBAUGH

W.E.B. DuBois taught us that the slave trade and the struggle against it were magnificent dramas superior even to the Greek tragedies. This year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade by the English Parliament, and the bicentennial is celebrated in the movie, Amazing Grace. Far from being a majestic human drama involving millions of human beings on three continents in the protracted and mighty struggle of greed and cruelty against liberation and dignity, Amazing Grace presents an English story of pretty people either having tedious tea-parties at various country estates or compromising with one another in boring rhetoric in that exclusive British men’s club, the House of Commons.

Greek drama depended on the protagonist challenging the cosmic laws of the gods. His pride teased a fate beyond his control. The masses were represented by the chorus which witnessed and recorded what transpired. This movie omits drama because it avoids the historical conflicts: the primary conflict was between the slave in the plantations and the master, the secondary conflict was between the worker in the factory and the boss. You wouldn’t know that from this whitewash.

The two historical faults with the movie are first it does not show us that the English abolitionist movement owed its beginning, its thrust, and its ending to the activity of the slaves themselves. The second fault is that it does not consider the historical proposition that the abolition of the slave trade could only succeed at the moment in economic development when other sources of exploitation became available to English capital, namely, the working class in England. Now, those are themes of tragedy.

The steel workers of Sheffield opposed the slave trade in the 1790s; the United Irishmen did likewise. These were the allies of the Jamaicans, the vast number of Afro-Americans, and above all the Haitian slaves. These men and women waged near constant struggle in rebellion (1760s), in the War of Independence (1776), and in the Haitian revolution against slavery (1791-1803). The drama of the time arose from the possibility of revolutionary combinations of proletarians - Irish, African, English even against the lords of humankind. But not a word, not a whisper, about them in Amazing Grace.

This was the decade when English humanitarianism became warped by racialism beyond recognition. Wilberforce was a leader of both a political and a cultural counter-revolution. As the head of Society for the Suppression of Vice he opposed stage dancers, ballad singers, gingerbread fairs, nude swimming, and favored imprisonment for adultery. In 1802 alone the Society clocked 623 prosecutions for Sabbath-breaking. Wilberforce had a direct hand in the suppression also of the Constitutional Society of Sheffield where the graffiti writing on the walls were Liberty, Equality, and No King. A

government spy noted “thousands of Pittmen, Keelmen, Waggonmen and other labouring men, hardy fellows strongly impressed with the new doctrine of equality”.

Wilberforce was their magistrate in Yorkshire as well as Member of Parliament. He approved of the burning in effigy of Tom Paine, and to suppress democratic urges he proposed a national day of fasting and humiliation. He helped to draft the Sedition Act in 1795 making it treason to write or speak against the King or government. In 1799 William Pitt brought in a bill against the millwrights of London, the machine designers and makers, which Wilberforce promptly extended to all working people. This was the Combination Act which forbade the workers of England from combining to reduce the hours of toil or to increase the remuneration of labor. He wrote on the management of the poor suggesting that they console themselves for the inconveniences of poverty with the thought that life is “very short.”

What passes for ‘the civilization of the west’, to use the traditional but absurd phrase, is the direct result of the unpaid labors of millions of African proletarians, a fact so fundamental that it is the beginning of all modern history as Franz Fanon taught us long ago, and hence of our understanding of the world. The movie reduces this fact to the sugar cube. However, this historical premise of modernity applied to all European wealth and treasure because wealth in one form quickly turned to other forms by the alchemy of trade and money. Thus that sugar and rum, that tobacco and coffee, the staple products of the slave’s labor on plantations, was transmuted into the infrastructure - the bricks and mortar, the bridges and roads, the ports and factories of the industrial revolution, and these in turn were represented by stocks and bonds, by paper and debentures, and the chits of the gambling table.

The movie shows us the young William Wilberforce gambling against the Duke of Clarence, a royal pipsqueak, who runs out of cash and must play by the rules of the club which say that, even if at a loss for money, he may wager any other possession he might have with him. “Bring me my nigger,” he commands. The illusion of the entire social system shatters at this point as the Afro-British coachman enters to be traded at the gaming table of White’s (one of the exclusive clubs of Pall Mall). Wilberforce in shocked naiveté concedes his hand and withdraws in a huff. Where did he think money came from? The trees?

William Wilberforce is the protagonist whose dogged determination and persistence in Parliament is attributed to either his saintliness or to the sweet support of his wife. As a hero he is handsome, romantic, with a sonorous singing voice, and rides a white horse whenever possible. He suffers from colitis and sometimes we see him jonesing from an opium habit which began as medicine. In the first scene we see him stopping his coach in the rain in order to relieve the suffering of a wounded horse being beaten by two teamsters. The film depicts sympathy towards animals and antagonism towards workers, unless they are beggars, in which case he offers them a seat at his bountiful table. (But where is that bounty from?)

His friend is William Pitt, the young prime minister of England, himself every bit as pretty and reactionary as Tony Blair. We see these guys gallivanting about the English countryside, a place of fenced-in beauty, spiritual spider webs, and golf courses but not of labor or production, because its greenery depended upon that enclosure movement which sent the commoners into the cities and factories. And where are they in this movie? Nowhere, apart from nearly formless gray and brown tones in the background.

One of the powerful scenes in the movie is the unrolling on the floor of the House of Commons a petition of hundreds of thousands of signatures for the abolition of the inhuman trade. Another historic scene was the insertion into the bill to abolish the trade of the word “gradually.” The same prevarication was employed by the white power structure against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ‘Gradually, gradually,’ murmured the authorities, meanwhile doing nothing, or letting loose their tools of violence the lash in the 19th century or the water cannon in the 20th.

This movie is part of the self-congratulation of the English ruling class excusing itself for the most odious and reprehensible crimes in history. This self-congratulation is accomplished with all the charm that money can buy, with cute production values of costume, scenery, English character acting, and camera work. If you want to see how that self-congratulation works, go to the movie and watch the gentry and the politicians, row upon row of them, wearing their powdered, white wigs clapping their fair, uncalloused hands: you’ll hear the sound of humanitarian hypocrisy. The name of William Wilberforce became a by-word for liberation in the Caribbean islands thousands of miles away, but at home in industrial Yorkshire his name was a synonym for prudery and political repression. Say his name with a West Indian intonation - William Wilberfarce.

Meanwhile the intelligent movie-goer will go read about Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian war of independence, or will read the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano which belongs on the shelf next to Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, or the classic discussions of abolition by C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, or W.E.B. DuBois. Adam Hochschild Bury the Chains is the best current study of the British abolitionists. In it you can learn about some of the movie’s secondary characters - Hannah More, Thomas Clarkson, Charles James Fox, Olaudah Equiano, and John Newton, the slave dealer who composed the lyrics but not the music to the song “Amazing Grace.” The movie, far from expressing the truth about the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, is a whitewash and a disgrace, fit only for an anglo-american ruling class still robbing us blind and than offering to help us see!

Peter Linebaugh will be speaking on “The Political Alchemy of the Red
Atlantic” at noon, Saturday, 3 March 2007, at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, at a conference called “The Black and the Green Atlantic.”

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch’s favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com

And, finally, aA Defense of Amazing Grace
http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/grac-m02.shtml