Obama's "Way-to-Go, Brownie!" Moment?

by Greg Palast
for the Huffington Post

Has Barack Obama forgotten, "Way-to-go, Brownie"? Michael Brown was that guy from the Arabian Horse Association appointed by George Bush to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownie, not knowing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain from the south end of a horse, let New Orleans drown. Bush's response was to give his buddy Brownie a "way to go!" thumbs up.

We thought Obama would go a very different way. You'd think the studious Senator from Illinois would avoid repeating the Bush regime's horror show of unqualified appointments, of picking politicos over professionals.
But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.
Say it ain't so, President O.
Let's begin with Joel Klein. Klein is a top notch anti-trust lawyer. What he isn't is an educator.
Klein is as qualified to run the Department of Education as Dick Cheney is to dance in Swan Lake. While I've never seen Cheney in a tutu, I have seen Klein fumble about the stage as Chancellor of the New York City school system.
Klein, who lacks even six minutes experience in the field, was handed management of New York's schools by that political Jack-in-the-Box, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire mayor is one of those businessmen-turned-politicians who think lawyers and speculators can make school districts operate like businesses.
Klein has indeed run city schools like a business - if the business is General Motors. Klein has flopped. Half the city's kids don't graduate.
Klein is out of control. Not knowing a damn thing about education, rather than rely on those who actually work in the field (only two of his two dozen deputies have degrees in education), Klein relies on high-priced consultants to tell him what to do. He's blown a third of a billion dollars on consultant "accountability" projects plus $80 million for an IBM computer data storage system that doesn't work.
What the heck was the $80 million junk computer software for? Testing. Klein is test crazy. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker George Bush's idea that testing students can replace teaching them. The madly expensive testing program and consultant-fee spree are paid for by yanking teachers from the classroom.
Ironically, though not surprisingly, test scores under Klein have flat-lined. They don't dip only because Klein has "moved the cut line" that is, lowered the level required to pass, notes author Jane Hirshmann. In other words, Klein is cheating on the tests.
But media poobahs have fallen in love with Klein, especially the Republican pundits. The New York Times' David Brooks is championing Klein, hoping that media hype for Klein will push Obama to keep Bush schools policies in place, trumping the electorate's choice for change.
Brooks and other Republicans (hey, didn't those guys lose?) are pushing Klein as a way for Obama to prove he can reach across the aisle to Republicans like Bloomberg. (Oh yes, Bloomberg's no longer in the GOP, having jumped from the party this year when the brand name went sour.)
Choosing Klein, says Brooks, would display Obama's independence from the teacher's union. But after years of Bush kicking teachers in the teeth, appointing a Bush acolyte like Klein would not indicate independence from teachers but their betrayal.
Hoops versus Hope
The anti-union establishment has a second stringer on the bench waiting in case Klein is nixed: Arne Duncan. Duncan, another lawyer playing at education, was appointed by Chicago's Boss Daley to head that city's train-wreck of a school system. Think of Duncan as "Klein Lite."
What's Duncan's connection to the President-elect? Duncan was once captain of Harvard's basketball team and still plays backyard round-ball with his Hyde Park neighbor Obama.
But Michelle has put a limit on their friendship: Obama was one of the only state senators from Chicago to refuse to send his children into Duncan's public schools. My information is that the Obamas sent their daughters to the elite Laboratory School where Klein-Duncan teach-to-the-test pedagogy is dismissed as damaging and nutty.
Mr. Obama, if you can't trust your kids to Arne Duncan, why hand him ours?
Lawyer Duncan is proud to have raised test scores by firing every teacher in low-scoring schools. Which schools? There's Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto with children from homeless shelters and drug-poisoned 'hoods. Surprisingly, they don't test so well. So Chicago fired all the teachers. They brought in new ones - then fired all of them too: the teachers' reward for volunteering to work in a poor neighborhood.
It's no coincidence that the nation's worst school systems are run by non-experts like Klein and Duncan.
Obama certainly knows this. I know he knows because he's chosen, as head of his Education Department transition team, one of the most highly respected educators in the United States: Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University.
So here we have the ludicrous scene of the President-elect asking this recognized authority, Dr. Darling-Hammond, to vet the qualifications of amateurs Klein and Duncan. It's as if Obama were to ask Michael Jordan, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know anyone who can play basketball, would you?"
Classroom Class War
It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials which scare me: it's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such pre-packaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and - voila! - millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.
We hope for better from the daddy of Sasha and Malia.
Educationally, the world is swamping us. The economic and social levees are bursting. We cannot afford another Way-to-go Brownie in charge of rescuing our children.
****************
Greg Palast is the father of school-aged twins and the author of, "No Child's Behind Left," included in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Palast is a Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting.
Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays for a tax-deductible contribution to the Palast Investigative Fund at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org
Subscribe to Palast's reports at www.GregPalast.com
Please re-post this.

Why is Obama sliding?

Dave Lindorff has an article over at Counterpunch (here) that pretty much hits the nail on the head:

But how can I or any progressive vote for a presidential candidate who goes
from opposing a war to saying he not only supports the idea of keeping troops in
Iraq for another five years—the length of the entire WWII!—but who further says
he won’t rule out attacking Iran, even if that country poses no imminent threat
to the US, simply because it develops nuclear weapons—the same weapons that our
putative friends, Pakistan and India, have? How can I vote for a candidate who
wants to expand the military (by 65,000 troops) instead of shrinking this huge,
bloodsucking parasite of an organization which is costing as much as the rest of
the world spends on its armies?

How can I or any progressive vote for a presidential candidate who
cannot state categorically that he will defend the Constitution by reversing all
of President Bush’s abuses of power and who will not promise to prosecute the
president and members of his administration for any crimes committed while in
office?

Obama vs. the Neo-right

On one side we have Barack Obama's speech from yesterday. If you haven't seen it yet you must. I am cynical about politicians but this speech truly does give me hope, and not the kind that fits in a sound bite:

For the wrong side of the debate I give you Mitt Romney's concession speech, or at least blogger and journalist Chris Floyd's translation of it:

If you would like to see just how sick the American elite really is – how morally depraved, how intellectually diseased, how addicted to the taste of human flesh, the scent of human blood, and the sight of human suffering – then you need go no further than the speech given by Mitt Romney to the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 7, 2008.

Now you might say that Mitt Romney is old news. After all, this was the very speech where he declared he was quitting the presidential race. He's toast, he's over, the fork has been stuck into his well-roasted hide; who cares what he says? This is of course the witless "horse-race" view that dominates political discourse in America: who's up, who's down, who's getting the column inches, who's on TV? But in reality, the American elite – or the Establishment, or the power structure, call it what you will (as long as you don't call it what it really is: the ruling class) – is like an iceberg: most of its vast bulk exists unseen, it plows on beneath the surface, unperturbed by the media storms that rage around the small bit of exposed material at the summit.

You can read the rest here and you really should. This guy is one of my favorite writers and his analysis of the subtext of Romney's speech is devastating. It really highlights the subtle bigotry of the neo-right as we have come to know them in the last 14 or so years.

The producers of the last post have been sacked . . .

Once again Obama gives me (and Phillip Weiss) hope:

Hot Damn! Obama's Secretly a Leftist

Great minds . . .

OK, so I couldn't resist

I was on Obama's campaign website and they have a place where you can submit an "idea". Here is what I submitted. It was off the cuff but I think it turned out OK:

You say you will end the war in Iraq and yet you will leave a sizeable military force either in Iraq or the region to respond to "al-qaeda" bases. Unfortunately the presence of our military in Saudi Arabia was one of the main reasons that al-qaeda attacked us in the first place. By maintaining a military presence in the middle east you will perpetuate military conflict in the region whether you intend to or not.

My idea is a complete withdrawl of American forces from the middle east and around the world. Then we wouldn't need to add 80,000+ new troops as you intend.

Another suggestion is to withdraw military aid around the world particularly from Israel and from dictatorial regimes such as Egypt. This would remove the other main problem that terrorists have with the United States. Perhaps without our unqualified support the hard core elements in Israel might be more inclined to deal equitably with the Palestinians.

Sincerely,

Behind the Next Throne 2

Well, when we last left our hero he was feeling slightly uplifted that the people in the Obama camp were not crazy neocons. Of course our hero forgot who Zbigniew Breszinski really was and the kind of American foreign policy he advocates. To wit, the subtitle of his book "The Grand Chessboard" is

American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives

American primacy? That sounds awfully familiar (pun intended). I submit that if we want to understand where a future President Obama would take us we need to read this book.

Also Democracy Now interviewed Samantha Power, Obama's senior foreign policy advisor yesterday. The interview can be reached from a link here.

Behind the next throne . . .

If there is one thing that we can learn from the Bush administration it is that often times the people behind the throne are just as important as the one on it. Think Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and on and on . . .

Well Professor Stephen Zunes has been kind enough to break down the foreign policy people in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns:

Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors tend to be veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration, most notably former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Her most influential advisor – and her likely choice for Secretary of State – is Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke served in a number of key roles in her husband’s administration, including U.S. ambassador to the UN and member of the cabinet, special emissary to the Balkans, assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, and U.S. ambassador to Germany. He also served as President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia in propping up Marcos in the Philippines, supporting Suharto’s repression in East Timor, and backing the generals behind the Kwangju massacre in South Korea.

Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, who on average tend to be younger than those of the former first lady, include mainstream strategic analysts who have worked with previous Democratic administrations, such as former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig. They have also included some of the more enlightened and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. His team also includes the noted human rights scholar and international law advocate Samantha Power – author of a recent New Yorker article on U.S. manipulation of the UN in post-invasion Iraq – and other liberal academics. Some of his advisors, however, have particularly poor records on human rights and international law, such as retired General Merrill McPeak, a backer of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Dennis Ross, a supporter of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

I have predicted in the past (nostrajohnus) that Barack Obama would be the next President. I have been somewhat disappointed in his muted opposition to the war in Iraq while a Senator. That being said I have clung to the shred of hope that Obama is actually a bit more progressive than he lets on, and that he is just coming off hawkish in an attempt to mollify the powerful political and economic interests that might oppose him otherwise. The analysis of his foreign policy team gives me a bit more reason to hope.

You can read the rest of the article over at GlobalResearch.ca