Why No Strikes in the United States?

Political campaigns do not unify us and our interests; a strike does.

You might wonder why a general strike hasn’t occurred.  And as my last post’s author describes, there are several reasons.

One way of thinking about the politics of the decision not to strike, to continue protest in several states and to work looking forward to the next elections is that the union protesters, their non-union allies and their political leaders have made a rather strange decision regarding a general strike.  They have chosen not to make a choice.  They haven’t said, “We will not strike.”  They have said, “Let’s wait and see.” They have rather passively decided, in the midst of a lot of action, to not act.  We must ask, Why?

I suppose there are several methods we can use to solve the problems caused by the Republican-led attack on public workers across the United States.  Listing all the methods and the reasons for supporting the most useful is not necessarily helpful. Such a task is always secondary to a much more subtle process that disrupts the collective, concentrated, useful power in our organized labor.  In other words, before we can decide to strike, something else is already happening.  My argument is that this something that is happening is political and aimed at directing the power in our unions, the public unions in this case, into an effort to support a political party that cannot (because of its role in society) protect our unions’ interests.

Never mind that much of American labor functions under the notion that it does not have the freedoms its employers have to make contracts, set standards and function in the market.  Employees seem to feel obligated to cooperate under almost every condition for the benefit of Employers’ self-interest. Let’s apply this sense of cooperation to unions. The unions seem to have a similar problem with their political parties.  The unions feel obligated to support/cooperate under almost ever condition for the benefit of Politicians’ self-interest. It’s rare that unions get much from their politicians other than press.

We have tied our ability to organize labor to the success or failure of politicians and their political campaigns, much in the same way that most American employees tie their self-interest to the success or failure of Employers and Employer interest. One thing we know for sure.  The Employers and Employees do not have the same self-interest.

A general strike would put everybody’s interests at stake. A political campaign does not.  And that’s the power in a strike.  Where is this concern, right now?  All tied up in politics.  In ideology.  And ideology is imaginary representation.  And a strike is very, very real.

John Boehner, Resentment, White Power

Young people and Unions are destroying America with their Xboxes and Facebooks and 40-hour work weeks and a living wage. It’s the typical old guy rant, right? Wrong. This is repressed resentment bubbling to the surface from a guy who believes he’s in a safe position of power from which to speak about his real beliefs.

Can any of you tell me what a typical white conservative man’s rant about youth culture and privilege has to do with our President?  Because John Boehner’s rant to Matt Taibbi begins about those lazy good for nothing kids and ends with a shot at our President.

John Boehner would be funny if he wasn’t such a typical representation of smug white power.  Reading the selections Matt Taibbi has released ahead of his upcoming story, you’re likely to feel Leader Boehner feels pretty secure in his job and his status in his community.  That is, until you read what he says about President Obama: “Don’t get me started on health care- doctors study their entire lives and they barely make enough to live and yet Obama, who had his entire life handed to him on a silver plate wants to cut their pay.”  You might well wonder what about Obama’s life Boehner is talking about?

Boehner is a once-poor white guy who is not ever going to be secure in his wealth and status.  He has, like many successful white conservatives, tied his success to his whiteness, what many of these guys refer to as “the way I was raised,” and guys like Obama, who are more successful and more progressive than he is, and importantly, not white like he is, have had life handed to them because they cannot possibly have worked as hard as his folks did and he has to find success in life.

And I’m going to be frank here. Boehner is from Cincinnati, Ohio, and was born in Reading. He is from blue collar roots in southwestern Ohio. I can tell you from experience, that part of the country is rife with white resentment of progressive culture and with  black Americans in particular. It’s a very racist place to this day. For some reason, even liberal whites from that region have a weird desire to stand up for the white culture there, often claiming they’re misunderstood. (See, Mississippi and South Carolina.)

I’m not calling Boehner a racist—just that his rant is typical white-people-talk in that part of the country.

In addition, we should be wary of Boehner’s poor personal opinion of places like Community Colleges.  As we all know, community colleges are where many non-traditional higher ed. students find access to mainstream success.  Community colleges have helped more than I can express in a blog post.  For Boehner to choose the community colleges to slight shows just how invested he is in the white power line.  He sees them as places that basically reward lazy poor people and illiterates with degrees so they can make more money than they deserve, so they can work above their station.
It’s vile stuff this white resentment. It serves nobody to ignore it.

Writing to our leaders works.  If what Boehner says pisses you off, you should let him and other politicians know about it.  Send him a note.  Send your Rep a note.  Encourage them to speak out on behalf of students and unions.

Michelle Rhee's Celeb Status in Jeopardy. FINALLY

I wrote about how the corporate education reform movement is actually part of a wider tax reform movement the other day.

I thought I should share some links about Michelle Rhee and her growing scandal:

When standardized test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real? (USA Today)
Michelle Rhee is a liar … (The Reality Based Community)
Michelle Rhee's Cheating Scandal (The Daily Beast)
Shame on Michelle Rhee (By Diane Ravitch @ The Daily Beast)

Read and share.

dagSeoul's Tumblr feed

I've added my Tumblr feed to my blog. If you look above, you'll see a link to it. If you're on Tumblr, please follow me.

URL:  http://dagseoul.tumblr.com/post//fact-finding-missions-...

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How Education Reform is Really Tax Reform

I've claimed it for years: because the wealthy elite (well educated, by the way,) and business owners/investors are unwilling to pay (more) taxes, we have had to find reasons to cut public funding from well-established government programs. You justify the cuts in education by promoting a need for education reform. In other words, reforming public education is actually a complicated, well-funded and articulate cover for radical tax reform. In this article, the culprits are big business, big media and the Obama Administration. All three are only too happy to help spread the message of reform to a citizenry that doesn't really understand the issues.

This article, from Truthdig, can help us illustrate the ridiculous binary that education reformers use to alienate and abuse teachers. It's teachers vs students, where the teachers are greedy profiteers and the students stand-ins for abused consumers and/or rugged individuals who only need a fair shake to succeed.

Also discussed: value-added teacher evaluation, privatization of public schools, tax breaks for businesses, increased class size. Very concise and detailed analysis. Please share.

Rangers Fan Organizations Support Sectarianism

Love how Rangers fan organizations draw a false equivalency between rebel songs (Celtic fans sing) and sectarian songs (Rangers fans sing). The comparison shows how inconsiderate and disrespectful they are about people's right to sing songs about their history as opposed to permitting white, protestant fans to sing songs about hating non-whites, non-Protestants, non-citizens of the UK.

This article does a good job of illustrating why it is not sectarian to sing about the IRA. Even so, it's too legalistic for my tastes. The fact is that there are truly few pro-IRA "rebel" songs that are in spirit and fact sectarian. Very few. I think I can count them on my hand. And there's only one that Celtic fans ever sing. It's been banned and most fans honor it. The fact is that Rangers fans singing sectarian songs is *the* problem.

I had to post this note on my blog because some Rangers fans have complained to Facebook that it contains offensive material. See, for Rangers fans, having to face reality and clean up their act, which means ejecting the hateful bigots from their fan base is considered offensive. They are hypocrites. They support sectarianism.

Until the fan groups stand up to the bigots, eject them, publicly denounce them, and stop blaming Celtic fans and players for the problem, there is no responsible choice but to continue calling the Rangers organizations out for who they are.

Also see: Celtic Quick News

The Korean Quotidian: Office Routines

I'm sharing an office with one of those OCD guys every Korean office seems to have. He's very nice and constantly cleans. When he's not cleaning, he's teaching; when he's neither teaching nor cleaning, he's hiking. He's mopped our office floor five times in three days. I think he needs some help.

The mopping at my school involves the coldest water and a mop. Nothing becomes clean: doesn't look clean, doesn't smell clean, isn't clean.

Constant dirty pooled
Water and wet smell,
Dust and mop cotton.


Keywords: musky, dusky, dank, dirty.

Wet concrete, kept wet, only slightly visibly erodes leaving a fine and consistent gray dust on its surface. It's a sneaky erosion. It makes my obsessive and anxious office mate believe the floor is never quite clean enough to leave alone. He's expediting its erosion. A wonderful signifier for his state of mind.

His look betrays the kind of anxiety that quietly unsettles the daily order, gives the appearance of cohesion and adherence to a routine that is always unraveling. Where am I going to find enough time to clean this office before I have to teach. It suggests when he returns from the classroom, fifty minutes later, he'll have forgotten he worked so hard to get it right the first time. He'll clean again.

Tea Party Ethos: Eugenics, WASPs & You

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/03/tea-party-nation-whites-ar...

Good Mother Jones note about what's up in The Tea Party Nation. I’d like to direct everyone to a chapter in Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, “Two Men and a Bargain”.



It’s bad enough that white people fall for this hateful ideology and its social processes. That we have citizens who respect people who talk about the extinction of the white race is sad. But eugenics has a more nefarious purpose: to encourage racial anxiety within poor white communities. In Smith’s book a bargain is struck between “Mr Rich White” and “Mr Poor White”. See a very good description of the book and its arguments here: http://tinyurl.com/4vlm2hr .

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Friedrich Hayek, Zombie (Krugman)

URL:  http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/friedrich-h...

I used to teach Hayek in my Business Ethics course. Hayek was wrong about so much, but it's his reasons for his predictions and economic beliefs that libertarians and conservatives love so much. Many of my conservative students ended up enjoying slogging through Hayekian theory about the liberal social order of our capitalist market. Truly zombie economics, undead ideas. The stuff will not go away, and it needs to.



And isn't this the problem with what Conservativism has become? It's a system based on ideals without any grasp of reality.



Anyway, Brad DeLong had written about this and Paul Krugman has now had a go. Good reading.

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Recent Stanley Fish in the NYTimes

URL:  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/crucifi...

I'm a sucker for good writing. Fish's recent essays, especially on supporting teacher's unions and his latest on religion, have been wonderful. And I'm often not a fan of his rhetoric. Highly recommended.

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American Thought Police (Krugman)

URL:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.htm...

Paul Krugman's piece in the times is a good one.



David Brooks was on Real Time with Bill Maher last weekend defending Conservativism from the right wing antics of the Republican Party. I often hear from my Conservative friends that I shouldn't confuse Conservatives with Republicans. It's a bit self-righteous and precious, and hides a more complex truth. The claim is an implicit refusal to do anything at all to change the popular Conservative movement and its tactics, which are managed by the Republican Party and a growing, strong far-right-wing movement. So while conservative intellectuals, like Brooks, explicitly denounce the members of the Conservative movement who behave improperly and hurt civic discourse, they nevertheless politely refuse, hesitate is to kind, to act against it.



I think the damage to discourse has been done. The Conservative movement has been working since the 80s to control educational and market institutions via legislation and local activism. Academics and researchers are already forced to be quiet for fear that local conservative groups, at the service of the national movement, will smear them and their work. Even I experienced conservative plants in my classrooms at Metropolitan State College of Denver, of all places, during the Academic Rights nonsense pushed by David Horowitz in the early 2000s.



We've been forced by centrist culture to accept conservative binarism into intellectual discourse, to acknowledge paradox-denying common sense into our pragmatism, to permit ridiculous religious dogma into our educational discourse, et al. And while we all seem to agree that the minority who insists we continue moving to the right is, in fact, bad for our culture, our nation, we continue to do nothing about it.



I don't know if there's much we can do about it except by putting our careers at stake and telling the truth in spite of the potential smear campaigns. I promise to continue to do so.

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White Power 101: Apologetics

URL:  http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/chris-matth...

Two things about this clip from the Chris Matthews show.



The first thing I'm quite accustomed to; we all are, in fact. The privileged white man who has a checkered past is given another chance to lead, to succeed, to be all that he can be; he's given a pass for all past indiscretions. He is mindlessly afforded this pass because he is privileged. In the US, this kind of privileged is tied to race and bolstered by wealth.



The second thing is much more mundane, but more troubling. It enables the white power structure that privileged white racists Haley Barbour rely on to remain powerful, healthy and wealthy. To not be able to see beyond the white power structure itself; to refuse to recognize privilege; to destabilize critical thinking in the face of racism. In fact, Chris Matthew's panel permits Haley Barbour "to do it". What can he do? He can run, as Barbour has said, as "The Anti-Obama." Not one person on the panel said, "You know, we can permit him to run, but we shouldn't. He's a bigot. He's bad for our nation, our kids, our culture, our credibility."



And I'll add a bonus thing. The third thing is that, once again, the media presents Obama's problem as his intelligence and success. Apparently, it's still suspicious to be black and smart in the United States. Fortunately, we have stupid racist hicks who have enough money to run for President to counter black intelligence. (See Real Time with Bill Maher's hilarious video about The Anti-Obama, Amabo.)

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Labor History: Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/03/mind-set-that-surv...

March 25, 1911. Good post about it, the mindset that caused it. You know, the mindset that persists. It's called "libertarianism," and it's dangerous to your health and our national well-being.

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Lists: Sociology of Space

Working through a reading list



Hovering above it all: Hegel



Lefebvre's Production of Space. that Imagination is involved in producing space, effects the rhythm of space, marked by time, etc has gotten me off course with what appears to be Lefebvre's most well-read book.  Must return to it.



Where does Simmel fit here?  Thinking of his discussion about time and counting, how it changes the basic structure of our minds--imagination, thinking, thus space...



Martina Low--ordering of things in space--discourse.



This all effects Poetics, certainly, our ability to describe something within a line, in so far as versifying is a turning of language we can assume that the ordering of things (concrete and abstract) in space determines, more or less (to what extent?), what we can put down and how it will be read by others?  as opposed to the more common, and trite, notion that what we write shapes the present shape of things to come...



Maximus, then. Williams' Spring and All and Paterson.  Creeley decrying young poets in letters to Olson, complaining they do not understand form.  Makes more sense.  I agree and believe it's an institutional, foundational, linguistic problem.  How can we approach form when, say, our poetry is everyday further removed from everyday life. Must keep it formally anchored.  Innovations may release writers from stale formal constraints but also permits a resistance to understand what permits innovation in the form itself.



See: poets complaining about the lack of a marketplace for their ideas. This is a lack of readers.  More importantly, it's a lack of space.  We've mistaken publication, being published, for being read, reading together, doing the work of poetry.



Can't be disobedient when you're unaware of the space you inhabit. Its contours. As if the page were a replacement for a place.  Imagine a space--it's already shaped by your perceptions of similar spaces.  This isn't a discourse thing, it's a concrete limitation, a prohibition that has everything to do with the market as it does with knowing how to compose a line of prose or verse.



Look at Alice James.  Invalid.  Space.



Trying to find more about Marx's concept of a concrete abstraction.

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Hegelian Triads

URL:  http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/triads/inde...

Re-reading Hegel and digging around online for articles and such. Found this. Remember when hypertext was going to be the next big thing. Still, it's kind of helpful. And the Marxists.org Library is a great resource.

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HOW TO: A New Routine for Taxes in Korea

UPDATE:  Do you really need to use the NTS site I outline below?  It depends.  My school insisted I needed to, but I've just learned it's not necessarily so.  In my case, I use my bank card for almost everything.  So, it behooves me to use the site because I'll get some sort of deduction.

February is tax time in Korea. The important thing to remember is tax is assessed as a payroll deduction. Some employers forget to remind English-speaking employees about this deduction.  Moreover, many Americans seem to believe we get an automatic tax-free, first two years here.  They forget to fill out appropriate paperwork before arriving in Korea to receive the 2-year tax holiday they get via a US-Korea agreement.  If you never applied to receive the tax holiday or this is your third February in Korea, you will pay taxes with the rest of us next month.  If you don't make much money, you might miss the 200-400,000Won you'll be assessed.

You need to use your credit/debit card for more than 25% of your annual income to get a tax deduction. The NTS site I describe below will tell you how much you spent using your bank card. So, it's worth checking to determine whether or not you need to file for deductions.

Your employer should automatically calculate anything having to do with National Health Insurance. I don't know anyone who doesn't work here without carrying the national insurance.  In addition, your employer will calculate your pension information, if applicable.

If you spent more than 3% of your annual income on medical expenses, then you should qualify for some sort of deduction.

If you made large donations, pay mucho mortgage, or are receiving some sort of government benefit, you'll need to use the site.

As I learn more, I'll post more. It's very difficult to glean this information from the Internet; each year I learn a little more. The amount I learn is pretty much in line with the amount my ability to speak the language improves. As always, I like to remind my readers to stay off the ESL Forums. They're full of angry misinformers and lurkers who like to spread useless misinformation.  Talk to your colleagues here.  I know Chris in Korea will likely post about taxes soon.  He's reliable, and like me, he'll attempt to answer your questions.  Don't listen to foreign teacher gossip.  Well, do listen and then ignore it.  If you're with SMOE/EPIK/GEPIK, you can talk to your school's administrators directly.
_______________________________

Some of you may have heard about this already, but if you have not:

If you have to pay taxes in Korea, and whether you have to or not is always confusing, there's a new requirement. You must/may need to present your schools with personal financial information that's available via Korea's NTS website. Even though the website is only presented in Hangukmal, the process to obtain your financial data is relatively easy.  It takes a matter of minutes.

However, to access your information in the NTS system, you'll need a security key, a bit of script that is saved onto a USB drive, your handphone or your computer. The security key is available via your bank. If you've set up Internet banking through your Korean bank account, you no doubt already possess this key and use it each time you log into your bank account, possibly when you shop online. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll need to visit your bank and ask for help acquiring the key.

This process will likely cause thousands of foreigners serious frustration because of the language barrier. We all know how communication quickly disintegrates at work and in public when our Korean colleagues must talk with us about technical details about our obligations as employees or at places like a bank. My suggestion is that you acquire your security keys, access the NTS site, print out your info, and take it to your employers without being asked. Do it. They'll really appreciate it. And you'll avoid the nasty headache that comes with doing things at the last second as is custom around here.

Moreover, if you cannot speak and read Hangukmal: get a Korean friend or co-teacher to help.  If you can't get help, you'll have to insist that your employer does the work for you.  I know my high school admin colleagues were willing to help me with everything and were super-elated this morning when we dropped off the info unannounced.  I don't think they believed we would do it on our own. (My wife helped me obtain my security key at Woori Bank.)

At any rate, obtaining the security key from your bank is going to be the most difficult part of this task because you may find it difficult without somebody to translate for you.

Sungkyunkwan University provided their English profs a very helpful, step-by-step presentation on how to use the NTS website.  I'm going to post it below with a few notes; their admin staff deserves kudos for the work, not me.  Your bank will, I'll say should, walk you through obtaining a security key.  Remember:  insist or you'll never get help.  It sounds rude to English-speaking ears, but you may have to get in somebody's face and demand help before you'll get it.  That's just Korean-style customer service.  And it doesn't sound as bad in Hangukmal as it does in English.  Trust me.  You must, must, must obtain the key.  You cannot access your financial info without it.  And you cannot properly complete your taxes without out visiting the NTS site.


First, visit the NTS home page and select "log in"/"로그인", which is a button on the left hand side of the button bar on the top of the home page, under the logo.

After you log in, follow these steps:  (click on the images to show full size^^)

The above step is where you choose how to access your security key. If you look, you have five options where from to select the key. You'll want to choose the first one, if you're using a key on your USB drive, or the fourth one, if you're using a key on your computer. Some of you may have one installed on your smart phone; you can select that option as well.  You may notice there are smart card options as well, but I don't know foreigners who possess these. Once you select the method of acquisition, you'll need to select the key itself. Then you can proceed.

___________________________________________
Just remember, most of you will have nothing to declare. So, all you're really doing in the NTS system is accessing the info and printing it. Make a copy for your own records. I found it impossible to save using Adobe Reader on a PC (maybe FoxIt Reader would work???) but using Preview with a Mac permits you to save the info. Bring a copy to your boss at Hagwon or to your Kyojangsil/Principal's Office at your public school. Even if they haven't asked you for it yet, they will need it.

Hope this helps. If you have questions, leave them in the comments.

Wandering Korea and Europe until March.

traveling. back in March. daily writing regimen. i've even got Praise keeping a dream journal. much more interesting than my work.

it's the time of year that high school teachers get a break. no teaching until March. i'm ecstatic. full of anxiety. never fails that when i'm free of most worries, free to wander, free to write that my neuroses peak.

much in store for dagseoul, dagscreen, and dagsound come March. stay tuned.

Larry Wilmore on Huck Finn Censorship (The Daily Show)

The Daily Show (1/11/11): Wilmore's commentary on the censorship of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is wonderful.  Check it out:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mark Twain Controversy
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

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Things Foreigners Do in Korea That They Aren't Aware They Do

Use KOREA and KOREAN as pejoratives.

It's a patronizing, paternalistic and lazy way to criticize and complain. Don't do it. You have a problem as a teacher? Don't address the issue vis a vis Korea. Why not take a stab at doing the critical work necessary to actually attempt to solve the problem?

Korea's full of haters; 50% of them are foreign teachers.

Working On

1. I'm reading Volume One of Karl Marx's Capital again. This is the second time I'm reading it cover to cover; it will be the third time re-reading many of the more famous sections. I found a copy of David Harvey's lectures about Volume One and am reading it as if I were taking his popular seminar. It reminds me of the class I took at University of Denver (DU) with Robert Urquhart. I miss that man's company. A lot of fun reading Marx and watching John Wayne films. Well, his love for John Ford and Wayne always made me groan, but his screenings were a kick.

2. I'm trying hard to get reinstated as a student at DU while finishing my dissertation. It's difficult trying to do this from Korea. Handling registration and, as a result, student loan issues from overseas is a real headache. What would have taken a day or two of walking papers with signatures between departments on campus is a year-long odyssey of unanswered e-mails and phone calls. I blame nobody on this one, but it does illustrate how educational and financial institutions have failed to usefully implement technology in order to make the students', teachers', consumers' and employees' jobs a little easier.

3. Reading Slavoj Zizek has become a hobby of mine. I follow his lectures as well. I really like the guy, especially his ability to piss off establishment academics and right wing ideologues. His recent work has become much more readable, I think. Whether we agree with everything he argues, his take is creative, aggressive, and concerned. I like the fact that he insists we revisit Hegel. Hegel is one of the most abused western philosophers. He's often misquoted and misunderstood because researchers and theorists use two or three of his most famous works without fully understanding his conception of logic and his entire project. The abuse could be prevented with a little more reading and decision to cease using other authors using other authors using other authors. And of course, literary theorists are always misusing him. Anyway, my engagement with Zizek has me revisiting Kant, Marx, Hegel, Butler. Makes me happy.

4. Wrapping up another semester at Samsung High School in Seoul.