just to make you smile

Voting On The Future Of Education

"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead." -- Aristotle

With the General Election looming over our heads, Californians are faced with more than their choice for president, we have to deal with those darn propositions. Propositions in and of themselves are a tricky matter, as Robert J. Elisberg argues, the proposition system “is based on the premise of full-participation democracy of an informed citizenry...” The problem with leaving the task of voting on propositions to the public is that many citizens vote based off a thirty second commercial they saw on TV, most citizens do not take the time to fully research what their yes or no vote will mean. 

The upcoming vote has two propositions geared towards the education budget, lets focus on Proposition 30; as the Official Voter Information Guide explains, this is a temporary tax to fund education. What does that mean? Income tax will be increased by 1-3% for anyone earning more than $250,000 for seven years and the sales tax (which is currently 8.75% in Los Angeles) will be increased by 1/4 cent for the next four years. The funds generated from the increased taxes will then be used to fund schools, public safety realignment, and other programs the current state budget cannot fund. 

Governor Jerry Brown has been arguing that a yes vote on this proposition would be in the best interest of California and the education system, in his opinion it is “a sound way to balance the state’s budget, stave off devastating cuts to public schools and community colleges and restore billions slashed from public education.” Yes on Prop 30 claims the money generated by this proposition will be put in an “account the legislature can’t touch” and at the end of each year an audit will be available to the public to insure “the funds are being spent properly.”

Those against the passing of Proposition 30 argue that the $50 billion raised by higher income and sales tax are not guaranteed to aid schools, the government will still be able to spend the money how they se fit. No on Prop 30 argues there is no guarantee the revenue will be available for schools, rather than reforming our current system the government is increases taxes that “destroys small business and kills jobs.” 

If proposition 30 does not pass, the Cal State system will face a budget cut of $250 million, having already raised tuition in the past year, Cal States will have to increase tuition by another 5% for California residents and 7% for non-resident students to make up for the loss in budget. In the event that Prop 30 passes, this hike in tuition will not go into effect and the 9% hike that took place in January will be repealed. Meaning every student that paid tuition would receive a refund for the 9% increase they paid. 

Cal State students not only face possible increases in tuition if Prop 30 does not pass, many prospective students are losing out on the opportunity to attend college, it is projected that the schools face “20,000 qualified students turned away, 5,500 class sections slashed, and 1,500 faculty and staff reductions.” 

While a yes vote will increase sales tax in California and income tax for the wealthiest 1% of Californians, the California Budget Project argues “Proposition 30 presents voters with the opportunity to begin reversing a decade of disinvestment in California.” Education funding has been on the back burner in terms of funding for many years now, despite increases in taxes, it might be time to start reinvesting in our future and the future of the youth. 

The Cost of Free Speech

Unbiased news is hard to come by these days, but with the help of the internet via blogs, photos, and videos, it is becoming easier to clue into the events happening world wide that are not covered by the mainstream media. We rely on these independent news sources to go out into the world and capture what is actually happening. As of recent, during the coverage of protests, particularly the Occupy Wall Street protests, the police have been targeting journalists and photographers. Josh Stearns has created a running tally of journalists arrested while participating in protests.

“Between September 2011and September 2012 more than 90 journalists have been arrested in 12 cities around the United States while covering Occupy protests and civil unrest. This number includes an array of people who were documenting and reporting on Occupy events including professional press, freelancers, photographers, independent filmmakers, and citizen journalists.”

The Occupy movement thrived from its use of the internet, with the ability to grow far beyond the reaches of New York City, the internet was used as a catalyst for expansion and awareness. With journalists and photographers being targeted, people far removed from the scene have less access to what is actually happening, a fact the NYPD and police across the country are quite conscious of. Not only are these journalists being arrested, many have faced physical violence and the destruction of their equipment without reason. Journalists photographing or taking video of violent police interaction with protesters often faced violence themselves. Jack Mirkinson with The Huffington Post, wrote about the violence that ensued in November 2011, the height of the protests in New York,

“ Lucy Kafanov, a reporter for the RT Television network, said she was hit with a police baton while trying to film the protests.” 

The First Amendment gives the press specific rights and grants the people the right to peaceably assemble. So how are these arrests being justified? 

Glen Greenwald commented after the UC Davis pepper spray incident;

“Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time.” "

The problem is, as more stories come out about the violence journalists are facing, the less likely people are to go out and participate in social movements, as journalists or activists. If we never challenge this treatment things will never change, we could potentially lose even more of our so called "freedoms. 

The Most Wild Public Intellectual

"We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom." -- Slavoj Zizek

Is the role of the public intellectual all that important in a technologically fueled world with information available at the press of a button? There are many debates considering the future of the public intellectual, Stephen Mack highlights this issue in Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past? Where many are looking at the future of the public intellectual, the so called endangerment of intellectual work, and what society needs to do in order to nurture and sustain the intellectual. But Mack brings our attention to a commonly overlooked aspect, the work of the intellectual:

     “...our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public  

     intellectual is--and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title.   

     Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, 

     irrespective of who happens to be doing it.”

If we forget about who the public intellectual actually is we can turn our focus towards the information they are attempting to educate the public with, the weight of their words become ever more important and the quality of work will be held to higher expectations. The fact is that public intellectuals do not have to be liked, their duty to society is to provide criticisms and to shine light on sensitive topics. 

Slavoj Zizek might be better understood if less attention is paid to who he is as he can be quite difficult to understand, and at times to like. Zizek has been termed “the most dangerous philosopher in the West” by Adam Kirsch of The New Republic. His body of work is not easily understood, as he subscribes to the beliefs of Lacan, continually updating his theories as his beliefs and knowledge evolve. Critics tend to chalk this up to flip-flopping and a not being able to take a side. Zizek aims to question ideologies, rather than answer questions in a traditional philosophical role, he attempts to engage readers in his critiques, in an effort to allow the reader to articulate their own ideology rather than be told what the “Truth” actually is. He explains that if his work was not evolving and changing as he became aware of new facts and lived through more experiences, his work would essentially mean nothing. 

Zizek gained international recognition after the English publication of his work The Sublime Object of Ideology. In this work he questions the “human agency in a postmodern world,” blending psychoanalytic and philosophical concepts into social and cultural issues. Combining the ideas of Hegel, Lacan and Marx, Zizek studies political issues, such as capitalism, and the role they take in society. Working in Cartesian fashion, Zizek employs the idea of “je pense donc je suis,” or for those unfamiliar with French, I think, therefore I am. Rene Descartes brought this idea to the forefront when he began questioning the contemplation of existence, and whether this was proof of something existing, in order to do the actual thinking. Zizek takes this philosophy and brings it into his political theories by looking at the functions of power and attempting to understand political subjects. 

Zizek also studies the terminology and teachings of Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst, and his theory that rejected the idea of capturing reality within language, a subject Roland Barthes also writes on, which will be discussed later. Zizek often compares the teachings of Lacan and Marx in an attempt to criticize Marx’s theory of ideology. Zizek argues that Marx had it wrong when he put forth the idea of false consciousness within capitalist societies, in todays world Zizek finds this idea irrelevant. Instead, looking at ideology from Lacan’s point of view, our deep unconscious motivations show that ideology is not irrelevant but reveals a deeper truth, “the Real is not equivalent to the reality experienced.” 

Zizek is most well known for his public arguments against democracy, capitalism, the war on Iraq and the economic meltdown in the United States. His arguments against democracy stem from the inability to control global capitalism, according to Zizek democracy may work on local levels, but when it comes to working globally, democracy often results in an authoritarian rule. While being an atheist, or Christian Materialist as he sometimes describes it, Zizek proposes secular democracy should be the reigning power, having a government that does not infringe on individual beliefs while also not using just one set of beliefs in creating its authoritative power. In a piece written for the New York Times, Zizek stakes a case for atheism and its preservation throughout the world. Zizek has found that the existence of God allows everything to be permitted because we in turn live for the afterlife and earning salvation. When we only do good deeds to fulfill God’s commands we lose the ability to do things simple because they are the right thing to do, atheists, he argues, are able to act in this way. Zizek cites an example of atheist allies for the construction of a Muslim mosque proposed in his home country of Slovenia, in his view, atheists care the most about protecting religious freedom because they are looking at all religions in the form of critical analysis. As long as the government is not built upon the ideals of one religion, which segregates or impedes on the beliefs of other religions, all religions can function within the state equally.

The work of Zizek’s that I am most interested in studying is a speech he gave in October, 2011 at Occupy Wall Street. I first heard the speech in an Art Theory class in which we were discussing a piece written by Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author. As mentioned earlier, Barthes discussed the idea of being able to understand reality within language. Barthes discusses the idea of the authors identity, he found that readers no longer looked at the words of the author, instead they were judging who this person was, much like the Mack’s debate on public intellectuals. Rather than focusing on an authors work, we focus on their personality or biography to explain the text, we are not actually reading their words we are reading their actions. As readers we need to distance ourselves from the author and understand that the words we are reading are not coming from a particular being, they are coming from language. The meaning of words are deep within language and it is impossible for us to become aware of a writers intention because we cannot peg down who is actually speaking, we have lost authority and instead gained a “multi-dimensional space” where meaning cannot be interpreted. Essentially this idea can be related to appropriation, we are never saying anything original we are working within a system in which everything has been said, the words we say are just arbitrarily assigned meaning in which we cannot trace back to their origins. While this is completely confusing, and a bit ironic since Barthes is in fact writing this, what we can get out of this is the idea that reality cannot be completely understood in terms of language. Language in a sense limits our abilities, which Zizek brings up in his speech. 

Zizek participated in a question and answer after giving a speech during the height of the Occupy movement in Liberty Square. In his speech, Zizek positioned himself with the “protestors” of the Occupy movement:

  

     “They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can 

     go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening 

     from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.”

Zizek’s speech gave me the same feeling Barthes did. He speaks of not being able to imagine the end of capitalism, which is exactly what ruling power wants of us. “We have all the freedom we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom.” If we are existing in this language in which we cannot understand reality or articulate our goals, where do we go from here? The only model we know is capitalism, how can we think beyond capitalism when it has taken over every aspect of our lives, it becomes difficult to imagine change when it cannot even be put into words. The way in which we perceive the world is dictated by media and government, he uses examples of Chinese government and what information we have access to through the news. Our sense of reality is in effect even more altered because now we are only perceiving it through an filtered language. 

The problem many have with Zizek are their misconceptions, he speaks of Communism and Socialism, which are taboo words in American society. People automatically term him a Communist, but he is not speaking of Communism as a viable option, he speaks of it as the most ruthless Capitalist system which is what we should be striving against. He explains the thing we can take from a Communist system is its interest in the commons, which is interest in the people, in nature, intellectual property, an ideal not exclusive to Communism. His ideas are grand and question everything we know today which scares people from the questions he raises, what philosopher has not scared the crap out of society? The Occupy movement is continually disregarded because it does not have a proposal for a better system, as Zizek explains we have not yet realized what our system could or should be. In order to find that system maybe we need to go outside of language, disregard the author and the public intellectual. 

Many expected Zizek to give answers or concrete steps that need to be taken to push forward in the fight against capitalism and the two-party system, but he stayed true to his form, instead he raised questions and challenged ideas. We look to public intellectuals for all the answers, but maybe their role should be to inform and critic and analyze in order to fuel an entire public of intellectuals. Maybe we should not be looking to an elite few for the answers on how to structure society, government, economics, etc., maybe we should be taking their ideas and fostering them to educate and work as a larger body of intellectuals. 

Which begs the question(s).... Is the author dead? Are public intellectuals a thing of the past? 

Maybe so. 

How Romney Made His Millions

“People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.”  -- Plato

After watching the Republican and Democratic conventions I was wondering how much I really knew about the candidates. Other than ones political ideologies, what is it about each candidate that makes us want to vote for them? Myself, not a Republican,  do not understand the attraction to Mitt Romney. From everything I know about him or have recently learned, he is one of the last people I would choose to run the country. Trying to understand what it is people see in him, I have spent the last week reading as many articles about him as I could but instead of learning what it was people admired him for, I learned that he is a walking contradiction that wants to criticize Obama and the government for acts he has performed throughout his own career. 

Many of us have no idea how Romney has actually made his fortune over the years, as the media tends to focus instead on how much he is worth. I know Romney is not the only person to work for a private equity firm, but when he could potentially be the next president I think it is important to understand what it is he did exactly. Matt Taibbi  explains in his latest piece in Rolling Stone Magazine, that the policies and debt Romney is ridiculing now, played a large part in his own success. A man that explicitly says it is “entirely legal and fair” to exploit tax code is not the type of man I am looking for to run the country in which I live. 

Maybe I am too naive, but I am quite alarmed to think that people have completely bought into the bs that is spewing out of his mouth. Do I trust every politician? Of course not, but running for president sets you on a stage in which you should be held to a higher standard. I do not understand how people go nuts for a man that uses American debt to strike fear in his followers, when he has created some of the largest amounts of debt of all time. Imaging debt as a fire that is going to burn our children alive....a bit excessive if you ask me. Okay, so maybe he has produced some jobs in his time at Bain Capital, but most likely, he negated this by destroying thousands of jobs when he burdened small businesses with millions of dollars in debt which then forced them to fire their hard working employees or file bankruptcy. On the brink of his own firms bankruptcy, he cashed in on government bailout that he publicly opposed when it come to helping out the auto industry;an industry that has provided millions of jobs for Americans.  How can he now claim that it is his moral duty to insure the government does not spend more than it has? Apparently his campaign will not be concerned with contradictions either.