Occupy and Quebec: Welcoming back the debate on making higher education MORE affordable

  

    It is not that I disagreed with what they were saying. More that, if this is the best resistance to neoliberal plans to basically erode all of their social safety nets, break down their common solidarity, sell each other out for the benefit of the banks and crooked politicians, privatize everything mentality, if this was Europe’s best line of defense, from where I was sitting, that generation and the whole continent seemed, again in Robert Reich’s terms, not mine, their future’s hopelessly f*&ked. “They have already lost.” ...

         Though the Occupy Movement definitely had its moments, mostly I was nonplussed. It seemed to reawaken a dead or dormant “political left” but it really lacked the number or the interests of enough people to do little more than shift some of the political debate away from pro-austerity, on time, all the time. In that it was significant, but short of even what little the Tea Party accomplished. As I said in the post here Democracy DOA, I saw hope in the organization of the Tea Party for democracy. It eventually turned out to be elite driven, far from the chaotic “People’s Assemblies” of the latter Occupy Movement, but they did not have a previous example of what to avoid as the Occupy Movement did with the Tea Party.

         Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, Conservative or a Liberal, Anarchist, Communist, Socialist, or Libertarian, almost universally the mood in early 2009 was disgust at what to many or most seemed to be the banks and Wall St financial corporations holding a gun to the head of Congress, and saying give us trillions of dollars interest free or we will blow up the economy.  And the response not only was to give them whatever they asked for, the greatest and most successfully robbery probably in the history of the world, but to then unilaterally disarm the ability to ever say no to anything they may ask ever again. The Tea Party, in its infancy was a reaction to that. But then as it matured it was easily turned 180 degrees by the most wealthy not only to not be a threat to them anymore, but into an army of zombots protesting for even greater deregulation of the banking and stock industries.  And again and again they have gotten such watering down legislation passed.

         The Occupy Movement by and large was successful at resisting that being co-opted by its leadership into something else, but in doing so, it did not present a coherent message or unified front as far as to what they hoped to accomplish. There was no coherent “end” to work towards or, like the “War on Terror,” any way to know when it is over or would be won.

         Yes, I know movements have to expand and tend to evolve, and to do that they often become more vague and less coherent, but they have to have an end game plan or they are not really going to do much good in the long run. Maybe that is not the point or is not a bad thing, and that sometimes just trying to be heard or by people becoming more politically active, you are accomplishing something.

         Many writers I read, long desperate for any sign of resistance to the drone of austerity, austerity, austerity, have seized upon the Occupy Movement in the United States as a catalyst or a “sea change.”  Mostly I saw that as hype. The Spanish Indignados, the Italian protests, and the Greek protests of the last year have been more significant in size but that I saw mainly as a domestic reaction to draconian cuts which were being felt so severely I was more amazed that more were NOT protesting. ...

        As far back as 2004, I put Papandreou on the front page of PolSci.com because of something he wrote about politics needing to be done differently. Since then he has obviously gotten more attention for the austerity programs he put into place as soon as he retook office. While the Greek crisis is complicated (as mentioned in my previous post), it seemingly matters not who you vote for, and voting for the left, as with Papandreou or Blair or Obama, means the austerity measures (cuts in government spending, services, privatization) will go forward with less push back than if you voted for a right or center-right candidate. Austerity is being sold as inevitable, and for those who are put it power, it is the path of least resistance because, as one American Senator put it, “the Banks own the place” (meaning Congress and the Senate). And the public push back has been pathetic at best and hilariously ineffective at worst.

        “It ought to be free.” Those five little words said again and again in the protests in Montreal about the tuition increase proposals are what you never hear any mainstream “Leftist” politician say about higher education. In America as elsewhere, the question is always about “how much higher” fees will be, about how much services which are free or low cost should be privatized. Never will a politician of a mainstream center-left political party try to move the ball opposite in the direction. As I mentioned to a fellow student in Sweden while walking back to the dorm, it is almost as if every country has one major “business friendly” party which will bleed the poor or middle-class faster and less apologetically and a major “alternative party” which proposes all the same bloodletting crippling programs, but “feels your pain” and will do it more slowly. ...

        But on a scale few in Europe could imagine, public education across the board in America is not only under fire, it is being euthanized with smaller budgets, school closures, and a corporate media using these ever lessening qualities of education to blame the teachers for the deterioration. And all as an excuse to push for breaking unions and rewarding private-for-profit corporations the only few taxpayer dollars the banks have not figured out how to steal yet. Besides privatizing Social Security that is. Obama’s second term may have success where Bush’s second term hit the rocks. Obama will deliver the Democratic votes in the Grand Compromise to achieve what right could not be delivered in Bush’s second term. And when the public complains, and they will, they will vote in an even more pro-privatization pro-austerity candidate (in 2016, if not 2012) as a reaction. And the fake-left and then go further right tandem moves ever rightward ever onward.

        If there was even a vague political “Left” left in America, they would have long ago used the fiscally caused “education crisis” (about a real as the Postal Service Crisis and Social Security Crisis, all accounting inventions) to push for BUILDING thousands of public schools, not CLOSING thousands of public schools. The dialogue would be how can we make education MORE affordable for MORE people instead how fast or slow can we increase the rates and decrease the number of people who can afford it.

        It is not rocket science. Any big D democrat (or Liberal or Social Democrat) long ago would have been talking about hiring teachers instead of bragging how he or she cut more government jobs than their Republican (or Conservative party) predecessors did. In America, you would think there would have long ago been plans to convert existing closed 11th & 12th grade high schools into free 2 year public Associate Degree colleges and some existing 2 year colleges into 2 year finishing schools for Bachelor degrees. And retraining teachers to teach at the higher levels, our own Marshall Plan for education. Instead of selling out on the idea that health care is a right, now completely debunked in America by the Democrats, the “center-left” parties of the West would have been trying to expand that to saying, as a thousands of picketing students in Canada have, that higher-education too ought to be a right, cheap if not free, and not increasingly just a privilege for fewer every year. ...

        But as we have grown lazy and are ceding our lesser social protections to nothing every year, so too are European countries learning to want and accept less because they are conned into looking at how they are still higher than the rest while the bottom is falling everywhere instead of rising. Ever rising again is not even a goal. It is simply to get less poorer less quicker than the others.

        When I was young both parties in America had both plans for full employment and for national health insurance. When I was in Europe a half dozen years ago, still there the discussion was on how to create full employment, and their social insurances were considered safe and as untouchable as Social Security was before Obama. That is now considered verboten in Europe as well. And creating many new government WPA-type work program jobs, there now is as taboo a topic as it has been off the table for decades in America (unless you count hundreds of thousands of jobs building and staffing new prisons, spying on people, a long pined for domestic “security” program the equivalent of the KGB, and our other new departments other countries never would have imagined creating). Austerity lite (France, Hollande) or austerity extreme (Germany, Merkel) are all that are on the menu, no mixed salad, just a melting pot of race to the bottom for “competitiveness” because they, like American unions, never lobbied to make their gains solid by making them universal, and expecting all others to have them too. Well isn’t that (NOT) special!

Which Direction: Tea Party, Idignados, Occupy, Bill 78; "They've already lost"

Truthrevival.org, May 29, 2012

         One of the strangest things for me to notice was that in countries in which higher education was free or near free, many people, a very large percentage, just never cared to go to college. So many that their governments needed to encourage them to do so. From my perspective, though I did drop out of high school before getting a GED so I could go to college, it seemed nearly incomprehensible. In America, not only is going to college supposed to be difficult, it is meant to be, almost by design, something out of reach for most people without well-off parents who can contribute to their “college funds” or by going heavily into debt with loans sometimes higher than most mortgages, and certainly not with as long being given to pay them back.

         And this is supposedly, the way it is supposed to be, according to the greater bulk of society, or at least the opinions put out into the media on what people think, or are supposed to think. If you have a degree, unfortunately for those who do not, it is made more valuable by the fewer numbers of people who have them. If everyone had one, it would be worth far less, certainly not the huge debt loads many have to carry when graduating now.

         I never thought in those terms about going to college, nor do I like to now. I did not do it for a career reason or to earn more money. I just wanted to study things that interested me, and that I was able to get pretty far, though I often had to leave for financial reasons, I felt simply reflected my ability to do the work. There is no meritocracy in the United States, no matter what the politicians like to sell. College educations often are not a measure of intelligence, and the idea that all people should be able to go to college if they are bright enough and willing was a recently new phenomena. And not one that had much staying power, according to recent comments by powerful politicians in the US, that greater access was always a threat to its being considered the “privilege” that a college education used to be.  As one politician said recently, people should get only the educations they can afford. That was the view before I was born, and it is rapidly becoming the view again. I was fortunate to grow up in the gap period when a person’s ability was supposed to be the main thing, not the size of their, or their parents, bank accounts.

         But with the major “left” parties basically giving up on the poor, even not mentioning them anymore, it makes sense that affordable or free education would be the first to go. Nothing gets a bug up the a** of some people more than having to share their educations, or even their classrooms, with those who clearly should not be there or do not belong there, socio-economic-wise. It used to be women, then blacks, Jews, gays, what have you, but now, just like everybody can still gang up on Gypsies to score cheap points in Western Europe politcally when you need a group to be the “other,” in most places now it is the poor. What, do these people really expect to be fed or housed or schooled, and especially, to see a doctor, even if they have no way to pay for it? The nerve of these people!!

         I could hope it to be a fad, but it has been self-reinforcing for generations now, or at least one and a half generations. With all this talk about “red lines” these days, it was nice to see, briefly, students in the America’s stand up and say, with at least some voice, higher education should be free. The Quebec student movement, about many things like other recent social movements were, seemed to voice a heretofore recently unthinkable argument or goal, that higher education should be getting MORE affordable, not less every year, and eventually be completely free.

         Liberals obviously did not like to hear it implied that they were not doing their jobs, or that it could really be any other way. Their job was to fight the conservatives, not just in Canada I am speaking of but generally, in that they would control or limit the increases to more advantageous lower levels than if the conservatives were in power. Not to roll back the increases in tuition, restore civil rights, habeas corpus, repeal indefinite detentions without trials, increase minimum wages, but to simply hold the line better against things getting even worse than the more "conservative" alternatives might do.

         In America, they have long gotten use to that dynamic and anything else has long been considered too much to ask for. The job of the “left” is to give austerity, neo-liberalism, with a heart, and when that proves unpopular, the “right” takes power and increases it markedly. This has gone on as well in country after country in Europe for years now also.

         When the Labour Party lost power recently in Britain, the supposedly "left" major party, no truer statement I heard was that in how they planned to react to the loss, they said they certainly would never move to the left. When a “left” party does well, run by a Clinton or Blair, a “third-way” leader, any successes were deemed because they were willing to move “to the center” (never phrased as moving to the right mind you), and then when privatization, job exporting, and increasing corporatization of the government proves unpopular, they simply blame it on not yet having moved “enough” to the right, ahem, I mean to the “center.”

         The rightist parties feel no such pressure, at least not in North America. When they lose power, they simply double down on their “base” and sometimes on the “crazy.” They know with the weathiest's money behind them, they can simply wait it out, stick to their platforms which lost, and then when they retake power, it is said to be because there now is a “mandate” for those same programs. The only mandates the “left” have left is that their equivocations and selling out those who elected them have suddenly been redeemed if they win twice as the new way forward, pretty much to the disenfranchisment of the poor and lower classes, who no longer even warrant mention in polite society. And if not, they must again move more away from them, as if they could be any more distant anyway.

         I don’t mean to say that I think that this is a “bad” thing, only that it is getting pretty noticeable. The poor and lower classes have been so long being made poorer, there is no money left to get from them to get any politicians to notice them or to care anymore.

         So the recent election in Quebec, after the student demonstrations, I found interesting. I asked a few French-Quebec students here about what they thought of the then-upcoming election and the Liberal party. They were quite happy with the Liberal Party, and said that they were much more progressive than any groups in the United States. Though not a representative sample to be sure, I was simply curious if they thought the Liberals might win again, even though the “Liberal” party, like all Liberal parties, was supportive of the tuition and rate increases, whereas many of the students were not. It is just simple economics to them. More money was needed therefore tuitions must go up. As in most places the choices given were vote us in, or risk having the conservatives come back, and then you would be in a worse bargaining position.

         But in Quebec, unlike the United States, other dynamics and parties could come into play. Though the party with the most votes did not get an absolute majority, the Parti Quebecois, or independence party got more votes than any other. The main target of the protests, perhaps unfairly, the premier, had been forced to retire. And the new government promised to try to kill the tuition increases and repeal the dreaded Bill 78 which made protesting almost illegal, considering the draconian fines and restrictions imposed to try to force an end to the student strikes and protests.

         Many people have been bothered by a separatist party winning but I had previously studied the history of that movement and do not think that it really is anything most ought to be concerned about. Support for an independent Quebec is nowhere near 50% and far off from its highs around the last time a referendum was held, (1995) and Canadian unity was reaffirmed.

         I try to be neutral in my own countries politics, though I do vote, and also I do not have any real opinion about Quebec and independence. I studied minority relationships, power sharing, and multilingual based issues, so I find their politics intriguing from a political and social point of view.

         However, I would bet that unless factors change heavily, Quebec will not be changing its status to the rest of Canada anytime soon. But at least a third party upset the ever-rightward progression not only of the rightist parties and Canada, but of the Left ever towards the mythical center. In America, Ronald Reagan was now, whether any on the right or left like to admit it, not only further to the left than practically all of where the Republicans are, but getting pretty near half of the Democrats as well. The steady march rightward seems under no threat of changing, just as tuitions are under no threat to ever need to be pushed downward. And minimum wages are under no pressure to move upwards, despite ever-declining purchasing power and rampant impoverishment and growing hunger.

         But at least for awhile this year, large numbers people put the idea of mainstreaming college educations to anyone, whether they can afford it or not, and thought they ought to educate anyone capable of it, providing that they were willing to try, and could do the work. 

         In the United States, the affordability of “public” universities varies from state to state, and sometimes from institution and institution among public colleges within a state. But the trend has always been the same, ever declining affordability, ever increasing student debts among those fewer and fewer able to even attempt it for economic reasons, and greater profits and political contributions from the banks to reward the politicians for the trend.

         The question is, can we really afford, in a different sense of the word, to increasingly have our public to become that much less educated, year after year, generation after generation. Whether the direction is up or down, a downward spiral or upward spiral, it becomes self-reinforcing and harder to slow down. And the trend goes where the money goes, and where the highest profits go. Now it is toward an ever increasingly “valuable” college degree, not because of how much you necessarily have learned, but simply because of how many fewer others will ever get the chance to get one to compete against you, (or your children if you can provide them with the means to obtain them one,) once obtained, year after year after year.

          Because something is made rarer, it may make it more valuable to some, but improving the quality of it instead, that used to be the "increasing value" which counted the most. But that would be harder. We don't want to make things that much more difficult for our next generations, or do we? 

         By failing to make each have to compete against the very best, no matter what their economic backgrounds are, means our "best" will always be ever lessened because they were not required to be that, the best, because their real and most important competitions were crippled before ever even getting out the of gate. 

         But other countries may not be as corrupted or as lazy in how they provide their educational opportunities, and we will continue to slide in comparison against them. And ever more relying on the brain drain from those countries that do have greater competition in their societies for reaching those top spots, that is not an educational policy worth banking on. And neither is that increasingly the "value" of our country's college and university degrees.