Clay Burell's Library tagged propaganda →  View Popular

Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.

Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.

I'm asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated altogether. And they're like, "Well, what's wrong with making money? Why can't I open a shoe store?"

And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high school, they don't really understand what any of it means.

The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall.

But because there's been this big push in the past 20 or 30 years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up.

a patriotic thing to do. So if you believe in democracy, democracy can't be being able to vote every two or four years. It has to be every part of every day of your life.

We've changed relationships and institutions around quite considerably because we've decided democracy is a better way to do it. Two hundred years ago, you had to ask a woman's father for permission to marry her, and then once the marriage happened, the man was calling all the shots. And legally, women couldn't own property and things like that.

Thanks to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s, this idea was introduced to that relationship -- that both people are equal and both people should have a say. And I think we're better off as a result of introducing democracy into an institution like marriage.

But we spend eight to 10 to 12 hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say.

I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now -- if we make it that far -- they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent 10 hours of every day in a totalitarian situation, and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."

Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.

“They appear like smiling liberals, but they are all a bunch of condescending bigots,” Sharpton said while speaking on an education panel regarding the release of McKinsey & Co.'s report, “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

Good thing U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan left the event immediately after giving his remarks preceding the panel.

He compared those in charge to then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace and the “door blockers” of the 1960s, saying, “It may be a different day, but the people in the doorway now are those we thought were our friends.”

He added anyone who does not try to fix the education problem “are co-conspirators” to Wallace’s attempt to stop desegregation.

“Newt Gingrich and I agree on the idea of there being no sacred cows in this,” he said. “[We] teased about doing a poster together that says ‘no sacred cows.’”

"If only to keep and improve on the slim c
ompetitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system."

This theory became very popular a few years later when the nation slipped into recession. "Lousy schools are producing a lousy workforce and that is killing us in the global marketplace" went the refrain. Larry Cremin, in Popular Education and Its
Discontents, debunked the theory, but no one was listening: "American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and
Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely
as school reform, is not merely utopian and millenialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. I
t is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education."

Gigot: So they were so looking for the technical infractions that they missed the bigger picture. All right, thanks, James.

Still ahead, Obama's choice for education secretary. Arne Duncan, is being touted as a reformer, but will he take on the teachers unions? Our panel examines his Chicago record when we come back.

* * *

Obama: When it comes to school reform, Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners. For Arne, school reform isn't just a theory and a book. It's the cause of his life.

Gigot: That was President-elect Barack Obama nominating Chicago school chief Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education. But does he have what it takes to fight the nation's teachers unions?

Here with a look at Duncan's reform credentials, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley and senior editorial page writer Collin Levy.

Jason, he's described Duncan as a compromise choice. What does that mean in policy terms?

Riley: Well, it means that he's not a product owned--wholly owned product of the teachers unions.

Gigot: Partially owned? Not wholly owned?

Riley: Perhaps. He supports reforms that many want, such as merit pay for teachers and charter schools and these sorts of things. So that's why he's described as someone who can please both sides of this debate.

Gigot: But merit pay is more pay for better teachers.

Riley: Yeah, pay for performance.

Gigot: But is he willing to take on the flip side of that, which is teacher tenure, which would allow you to get rid of bad teachers?

Riley: That's the big question. We don't know.

Gigot: Do we know?

Riley: We don't know. But we know that he's willing to close bad schools. He's done that. He has a history of doing that in Chicago, and that's a step in the right direction.

Gigot: All right, Collin, let's talk about his Chicago record. You've looked at it. Give us some of the pros and cons of what he's done there.

Levy: Yeah, I think the record in Chicago is certainly a mixed bag. I think the main thing that people point to is that graduation rates during his tenure improved. And that is something good in Chicago. But the flip side of it was that high school test scores didn't really go up. And in particular, Chicago's ranking among other major urban school districts also didn't improve during the tenure, so it's about status quo.

Gigot: But the graduation rates improved how much--nominally, or in a significant way?

Levy: Nominally. They're about 55% now. They were about 47%, I think, when he took over. So--

Gigot: That's not bad. That's pretty good improvement.

Levy: Yeah, that is good improvement.

Gigot: And how extensive were his--he's a big supporter of charter schools. How extensively did he spread them in Chicago? Are there a lot more now than there used to be?

Levy: There are a lot more now. And one of the things that he did that was very good was that Chicago has a cap on the number of charter schools that it can actually create. And what he did was he worked within that cap and said, OK, we're allowed to have 15 charter schools technically, so let's let each of those charters operate four or five campuses. So that was a way of expanding charters without actually breaking the rules.

Gigot: I see, so he wouldn't try to bust the cap politically, which is what Joel Klein--

Levy: Exactly.

Gigot: Joel Klein, for example, the New York City public school superintendent, really fought and succeeded breaking that cap, which in this state was 100.

Which is why they -- we -- hired an Academy Award-winning director, James Mangold, and a brilliant, Academy Award-nominated cinematographer, Wally Pfister.

(And then we put Kid Rock in it. As my friend Larry Doyle once said, "It's like buying a Ming vase and filling it with dog shit.")