At first glance, I thought that it was just another article about disappointing test scores. I almost didn’t click through to read it, in part because I spend so much time in my teacher education courses trying to contextualize the rhetoric about “the achievement gap” and testing and my students’ role as teachers in closing […]
Politics and Class
Economists can’t be rapists? Hotel maids are lunatics?
In rushing to the defense of accused rapist and head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn, well-known conservative commentator Ben Stein has stooped to blatant classist stereotypes. His headline on the American Spectator website, “Presumed Innocent, Anyone?,” implies that he’s just asking for a fair trial before judgment – a reasonable point. But look […]
Middle Class Traitors: Who Are They?
I recently came up with a phrase that other than one fleeting reference was not to be found in Google. It seemed to me to really describe a recent phenomenon that I found quite disturbing: the demographics of the electorate who voted for right wing conservatives in the November 2010 elections both on the federal […]
Who represents the working class in Massachusetts?
The vote to take away public employee health care bargaining rights took place thirty minutes before midnight, on April 26th, while most of the state slept, oblivious to the event. The scene would have brought a big smile to the face of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker. But this wasn’t Madison. This was Boston, and […]
Joe Bageant: 1946-2011
It is with great sorrow that we learned of the recent death of Joe Bageant. Joe and Class Action’s late co-founder, Felice Yeskel, were two of our greatest voices on class in the U.S. What a loss for us all. Felice loved Joe’s blog posts –and frequently sent me links to his latest dispatch with […]
Connecticut Public Employee Activists Fight For Pension Justice
Out of the limelight, public employee activists have achieved a near victory in their quest for a fair pension plan. However, fulfillment of a national precedent setting grievance award to allow Connecticut state employees to transfer from a defined contribution 401(k) type retirement plan into the state’s traditional defined benefit pension system has been delayed. […]
Class, Race & the Attacks on Public Employees
The Wisconsin uprising has become as loud a wake-up call as there has ever been that working America is under attack. Attempts by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority to steal away the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers – as a false premise for the state’s budgetary hardships – has triggered a […]
Modern-day Pirates: the Republicans vs. the Public Sector
So, let’s be clear: it’s not about the budget. As the facts have emerged in the 2011 Wisconsin crisis with Governor Scott Walker’s move against public service unions, it is not about Wisconsin lacking funds. There is no credible way that Walker and his clique can argue that eliminating a worker’s right to collective bargaining […]
‘Tis the Season When the Poor are Freezin’
Lack of enough opportunity, social inequality, and exploitation are the main factors in capitalist America that cause poverty, but an often overlooked contributor are the “ghetto taxes” and abusive social policies that go hand in glove with lack of incomes that keeps people poor. Ghetto taxes are the extra fees, rates, and miscellaneous surcharges that […]
Restorative Circles: Justice without Classism
We know the justice system is biased by inequality. The best justice money can buy. And the locations where this justice system is carried out – courtrooms, classrooms, living rooms, workplaces – are filled with people labeled with roles of unequal status: the judge and the accused, the cop and the criminal, the parent and […]
Chickens in Every Pot? Or Bentleys in a Few Garages?
Lawmakers are really in a bind over whether to let the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire at the end of this year. After all, they owe those millionaires a lot after all those campaign contributions this fall. But extending tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 would cost an estimated $700 billion […]
It’s Not Butter: The Other Tax Spread
Congress and the White House are wrangling over the future of the Bush tax cuts, which expire this year. Much has been written about how the 2001 and 2003 cuts widened the gap between the very wealthiest 2% of Americans and the middle and working classes. But far too little notice has been paid to […]
Red Carpets and Platinum: Travel and Privilege
The hardest place to pretend that the U.S. is a classless society is when traveling. After all, it’s the travel industries who put “Class” into “First Class.” Instead of the avoiding the language of class, the travel industry seems to flaunt it.
Beware of Cabinet Officers Bearing “Gifts”
“We already have the privatization of the military…; we’ve seen the privatization of the prison system. Well, the next step is the privatization of public schools.” That prediction by Jonathan Kozol four years ago has come closer to reality with the enactment of President Obama’s Race to the Top educational goals. Besides continuing the previous […]
