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Past Issues December 2005 Subscripts
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…This month’s Andersen Award for Creative Accounting goes to the crew
up in ‘Research and Evaluation’ at the Board of Education. In early
November, the R&E people produced a “study” showing that the kids
who wound up at the “New Williams” and the “New Dodge” were doing
better than the kids who had gone to the old Williams and Dodge.
Officially, these “gains” are all thanks to “Renaissance 2010”, which
informally began in 2002 with Mayor Daley’s teachers bashing attacks on
Dodge and Williams (along with Terrell). The new “study” was as necessary to Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley — who are expanding “Renaissance 2010” relentlessly behind a smokescreen of cooked books and creative anecdotals — as those Arthur Andersen “audits” used to be to Enron’s Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Lay and Skilling, for those new to the world of high finance, were once the President and CEO of Houston’s Enron corporation before 2002. Other Andersen ‘audits’, by the way, were necessary back in those days to CPS (which also utilized Andersen’s services for everything from printing to approving every cockeyed Paul Vallas scheme in the late 1990s until Andersen demise after the Enron debacle). Both the early 2000 Enron stuff and the 2005 Renaissance ‘studies’ come from the same school of creative analysis. Andersen had to move out of its old World Headquarters at Monroe and Dearborn in Chicago after Enron and other corporate scandals. Those debacles cost shareholders who relied on Andersen’s audits billions of dollars. A joke among Daley’s insiders is that they can always get a ‘study’ to prove the mayor’s right. Even with Andersen gone, its mendacious spirit lives on... …Subscripts will pay for photographs from inside the Board of Education’s new Scott McClellan Smile Room™. We’ve heard that the Board of Education has secretly purchased a copy of the special room, originally designed by the American Enterprise Institute and vetted by the Heritage Foundation. The Smile Room is where right wing propagandists are trained. It’s also where they go for R&R when reality intrudes and some “journalist” breaks ranks with corporate policy and asks real questions. That’s been happening even in Washington, D.C. and Chicago this year, much to the chagrin of corporate and government propagandists. The Smile Room, with special music from Montovani and Famous Artists School variations on the Smiley Face, has been used in order to keep those smiles coming while the propaganda departments’ lies are flowing. (We heard there is a TOP SECRET John Denver song by that name — “Keep the smiles going while the lies are flowing…” — but haven’t confirmed it.). The Smile Room is back there somewhere on the 6th floor of 125 S. Clark St. Another is up the street on the 5th Floor at 121 N. LaSalle. And perhaps there is also truth to the rumor that the Board of Education of the City of Chicago is going to be able to enter the Bush administration’s annual “Goebbie Award” competition for best PR work. The Goebbie (named after that sadly maligned hero of public relations Josef Goebbels and in honor of his family, which met a tragic end in April 1945) has been awarded to the best in the PR business since Arie Fleischer was handling those WMD questions for Bush back in late 2002 and early 2003, before the invasion of Iraq... …”A flawed policy wrapped in illusion…” is the phrase U.S. Rep. John Murtha used on November 17 to describe the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. The same words could be used to describe the Daley administration’s policy in the public schools. Almost as soon as Rep. Murtha (a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam) spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney went on the attack. Murtha’s response was to note that Cheney — along with most of the hawks on Iraq, including President Bush — are “chicken hawks” — warriors who bellow chauvinistically as long as others have to do the fighting for them. Cheney dodged the Vietnam draft with deferments available the wealthy and powerful. Bush dodged his service with a rich kid’s tour in the National Guard — one which didn’t even require him to be present for all of his duty (a thing called AWOL if the sons of working families did it, but which drew a wink because Bush was the son of a millionaire). Like Bush, Richie Daley fought his Vietnam War in the National Guard. He was there with guys like Paul G. Vallas and other Chicago area chicken hawks. Today’s connection? Daley is pursuing privatization militarization with the same ideological and racist blinders that Bush and Cheney are wearing for Vietnam and Iraq. Daley’s “school reform” nonsense is as bad for public education as Bush’s imperialist war is for democracy around the world… …One of the most interesting things about the current version of the struggles against militarism at Senn High School is how each month some large guy tries to pick a fight with the smallest woman leafleting “Anchors Away” (the Save Senn monthly newsletter). In October, it was a Rickover heavyweight nicknamed Admiral Patterson (he’s actually an Army Captain, according to our sources) bellowing some in-your-face stuff of the kind he usually reserves for his students (er, “recruits”). November, it was a Board of Education security guy (whose name we’ll wait on), again bellowing and threatening. The security guy was followed the same morning up by a civilian “neighbor” (who gave his name as “Jeff”) who knew that Senn High School was “a piece of shit” until Rickover arrived to clean the stables nine weeks earlier. No details. Just loud certitude. Why are these guys afraid of someone half their size standing outside on a nice fall day telling the truth? We think these guys are getting Insensitivity Training somewhere in the bowels of the Board or from City Hall, but we haven’t found the training manual yet. Bullying comes to mind as another word to describe the tactic. That’s especially interesting since the person on the receiving end of the bellowing is small and female and the people on the bully end are large and male. Wonder if that’s part of the “character and leadership” training Mayor Daley and Arne Duncan tout when you get in a “military academy” or JROTC? We can’t wait to see if next month that First Amendment spot on the sidewalk is occupied by Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (who’s been invited), a year ago a supporter of Rickover, and what she’s going to say when she’s bellowed at by people who were put into place by policies she supported. It’s time all those elected officials who are promoting militarism in Chicago stood in our shoes without all those protections and courtiers and felt what it was like under the Daley Dictatorship... …Would one of the most liberal (and decent) senators in the USA suggest aborting black babies to reduce crime? Of course not. Then we’d like to know why U.S. Senator Dick Durbin routinely quotes another racist comment by William Bennett as part of the mythologizing of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s version of history. Is it OK as long as it’s praising Mayor Daley? Maybe Durbin didn’t know it, but he was quoting William Bennett, the now disgraced virtue king, in his November 7 speech at Senn High School. “It wasn’t long ago,” Durbin told the audience at the dedication of the Rickover Naval Academy, “that critics branded Chicago the worst public school system in America.” Actually, it was one critic — and a coporate media giant. Durbin and others who quote Bennett on “Chicago’s schools — America’s Worst” are spewing the same kind of racist nonsense that Bennett recently got in big trouble for with his suggestion about how to reduce the crime rate. Those “critics” Durbin quoted on November 7 were William Bennett and the editors of the Chicago Tribune. That was back in the days of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Bennett’s lies about Chicago were one of the opening salvos in the attack on public education that Durbin is helping today by supporting Daley’s version of history. Those quotes attacking Chicago are now uttered by guys like Durbin without attribution — as if “everyone knows” they were once true. Fact is, they are part of a corporate attack on public education. By 1988, when Bennett uttered his “America’s worst” slander, Chicago had terrible problems, including a level of racial segregation and poverty concentrated in about 200 of its 600 public schools unseen outside of the Third World. To make things worse, a bankers’ attack on the public schools during the 1979 “financial crisis” had created enormous additional financial problems in the city’s public schools. Ignoring these facts, Bennett, Reagan, Bush and the corporate media blamed public education — in the case of Chicago, public education run by African Americans. Today, after nearly 20 years of repetition, that Bennett’s Big Lie (not by ubiquitous “critics”) has been repeated so often that even those who should know better simply roll it off their tongues, boiler plate, in speeches like Durbin’s. We doubt some wonk in Durbin’s office will set the record straight, however. The lie’s been told too often, and it’s now part of the Daley “miracle” myth that no politician can afford to debunk. But Durbin’s speechwriters need to be careful using the author of “The Book of Virtues.” If they’re not careful, in his next speech Durbin will be quoting Bennett on the desirability of abortions to reduce the crime rate. Truth is the opposite of Durbin’s Daleyesque version. When Bennett libeled Chicago’s public schools nearly 20 years ago, the schools had been under financial attack for ten years by those who ruled Chicago and faced unconscionable segregation, much of it the work of two generations of the Daley family. Thanks to the heroic work of teachers (the majority of whom were black), some political leaders (led by Harold Washington), a tough union (led by Jacqueline Vaughn) and hundreds of thousands of parents and students, Chicago’s schools had survived the most vicious problems since the Great Depression. At the time of Bennett’s libel, Chicago had a black mayor, a black school superintendent, and a black president of the Chicago Teachers Union, leading a school system that had been abandoned, then libeled, by those at the heights of power in corporate America. Remember The Wall Street Journal editorials referring to Washington’s Chicago as “Beirut on the Lake”? Quoting Bennett on our schools in the 1980s is spiritually kin to quoting Bennett on aborting black babies. White supremacist versions of history inevitably lead to white supremcist atrocities against people who aren’t white. Durbin should stop the Bennett quotes... |
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