Monday, April 13

The Crisis in Higher education


The education system in the US is in crisis. In New York there have been three campus occupations since the new year. Most recently, on April 10th, New School students occupied a building and were gassed and beaten by police in a brutal raid.

The occupations were indeed crushed however the courage the students had in coming together and standing up against injustices in American colleges has created a buzz. College education has become increasingly unaffordable, public schools are underfunded due to the two prolonged wars the US is fighting, and more and more students each year are looking to attend university and each year student take heavy loans just to be able to afford these expensive institutions. Others are sucked into the military just so they can afford their education.
The issue is that education is NOT a tool for recruitment, it is NOT a exclusive club where students do not know where their money is going and board members pocket large profits, education is NOT the stifled conformed atmosphere that its essential commidification has turned it into. Education is a right and should be not bought and sold.
conservatives have attacked professors who think freely in the mainstream media and published books encouraging the witchhunt of radical professors. The atmosphere of a prison has been created in place of what is supposed to be the most important time of one's life. Until education is completely free and universal, students will continue to organize and resist no matter how severe the police repression or adminstrative consequences

Sunday, April 12

Boom, Bust, Broken... Time for Revolution not just change

I'm kinda a History buff. Last year I got the highest possible score on the Advanced Placement Global History test earning college credits and this year I plan on accomplishing the same in the Ap American History exam. American History, as conformed, distorted, and packed with outright lies, as it is in the American public school system, still reveals lots about the nature of the capitalist system when you are learned in revolutionary marxist thought.
My teacher is having complete review sheets for the entire American history experience and as I have lost my textbook, I am forced to google terms that have slipped my mind. googling the panic of 1819, America's first homegrown recession, I typed
"panic of" and then sat their enjoying the utter stupidity of our system. Every few years since 1819, at least once per decade, our economy does what it is doing now. It has panic where millions lose their homes, lives, jobs, personal fortunes, and are forced to start up from scratch after the fuckheads in charge figure out how to put a big enough band-aid on the shotgun wound that is capitalist economics.
I am convinced capitalism is broken. Only a crackhead could think otherwise as the boom and bust cycle that has existed since the days of scalped natives and whipped slaves all the way up til today, the age of ponzi scheme crooks and greedy bankers. It is not logical, it is inefficient, leads to hunger, leads to homelessness, unemployment, and the destruction of our enviroment.
It is time for nationalization, it is time for economic planning. Not economic planning for bankers and bosses, but within our own communities and for hard working people so we can keep our homes, jobs, and lives. Humans and lives are not chips and coins to be gambled with at a casino we are intelligent so why the fuck do we stick with this system?
The bailouts, which AIG has shown, do not work as an economic band-aid could be used to provide public works projects & jobs, fund a healthcare system, or build a universal university system so youth like me have a future. Perhaps the bailouts, as inefficient and draining of the American people as they are, will save the economy this time, as they have before. But I can promise you if they do, I'll be writing this same post soon after when we again are all crying about the next economic meltdown.