Alternative Visions

Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, 40-year experienced teacher, Gretchen Lipow, discuss last week’s ‘Vergara’ legal decision in California—the latest example of a long series of efforts by politicians and corporate elites to blame teachers for the decline in the quality of K-12 public education in America. Dr. Rasmus explains how David Welch, Silicon Valley tech billionaire, has been behind funding the movement and the legal suit that led to last week’s Vergara decision identifying teacher tenure as the cause of inner city schools’ student underachievement. Lipow explains how Teacher Tenure is just a diversionary tactic by opponents of teachers and public education, and why eliminating it will not change urban schools students’ underperformance, which is the consequence of many cultural-socio-economic factors. Lipow also points out the many procedures that already exist to eliminate poor performing teachers and how ‘tenure’ does not mean a guaranteed lifetime job but just the right to due process. Rasmus explains the bigger context of the Vergara decision: How Vergara is just the latest element in an intensifying decade long attack on teachers and public schools. Vergara is the latest element in a long term Corporate strategy to remake the public education system into a major new profit center for tech companies: No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Core Curriculum, Charter Schools are all examples, Rasmus explains, of the long term plan to standardize K-12 ‘product’ into pre-packaged software and hardware, that will de-professionalize the teacher profession in the process, eventually turn teachers into ‘technology monitors’ in the classroom, and cut education costs by eliminating teachers and lowering wages. Rasmus notes that lower costs from teacher de-professionalization means more spending on K-12 technology and more profits for the David Welch’s, the Bill Gates’, and other tech billionaires who are driving this long term strategy for K-12 education. However, first teacher job security, unions, and bargaining rights must be gutted, Rasmus argues. The Vergara decision therefore represents the latest offensive in this longer term corporate initiative to recast public education into a new multi-billion dollar corporate profit center. (For more on Dr. Rasmus’s view on this theme, see posted on the PRN website his chapter, ‘The Privatization of Public Education’, from his forthcoming book, ‘America’s Ten Crises’).   Gretchen Lipow has been a public school teacher for 40 years in New York City and Alameda, California. She has been an officer in her teachers union in Alameda and a member of the California Teachers Association (CTA) State Council, which determines union policy for 300,000 California teachers, and is currently President of the Retired Teachers Association in Alameda and Contra Costa County, California. She is also active in various Alameda Community initiatives and political activities.”

Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, Steve Breyman, discuss this past week’s just released Obama/EPA proposals to reduce CO2 emissions from existing industrial plants in the US by 30% by 2030.  Are conservative environmental groups justified in their praise of the EPA proposals? Are the proposals too little, too late, and cleverly left to the last two years of the Obama administration to ensure nothing will actually happen during the remaining years of Obama’s second term?  Jack offers a criticism of the Obama/EPA strategy, noting if Obama were really serious he would have issued an Executive Order to immediately implement the EPA rules. In the present form, Rasmus notes, there will be no implementation of any rules until after the 2016 elections, if even then. Breyman and Rasmus discuss whether the EPA’s 30% ‘target’ for emissions reduction is really only 14%? Whether the EPA rules are proposed in order to provide political ‘cover’ for the administration’s now fast track promotion of natural gas fracking. And whether the EPA proposals  ‘sometime later’ are a trade-off to enable Obama to ‘immediately’ approve and sign the XL pipeline after this November 2014 midterm congressional elections? Breyman discusses the likelihood the EPA proposals will reduce CO2 from industrial plants, but stimulate even more C02 and methane carbon emissions from natural gas fracking now destroying water tables and air quality in the Dakotas, Texas and Pennsylvania?  Rasmus asks if the rules represent a ‘passing the buck’ by Obama to the states to encourage the latter to develop more state-level ‘cap and trade’ carbon credits trading programs that have elsewhere had little impact on reducing carbon emissions?  Can EPA proposals be trusted that, according to multi-state coal-fired plant corporations, like American Electric Power, “allow us to keep coal units running for an extended period” (John McManus, VP of American Electric Power). Listeners are encouraged to check out analyses of the EPA proposals by ‘Rainforest Network’ and ‘FoodWater Watch’ environmental groups, not just the big Washington environmental lobbies, and not to get taken in by the ‘spin machine’ in Washington.   Steve Breyman is a former New York State environmental bureaucrat and current the ‘shadow’ EPA Administrator for the Green Shadow Cabinet. He formerly also worked for the US State Department. He currently teaches peace, environmental and media studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, Deb Silverstein, discuss how the ACA (Obamacare) program is now increasingly undermining union negotiated employer health insurance plans. Union contract negotiations now in progress, with expiration dates in 2018, face the imposition of a 40% tax beginning 2018 per the ACA. Employers are already responding by insisting union workers pay for the tax hike in their new contracts by reducing benefits, deleting coverage for spouses, converting full time workers to part time (who will have no coverage), and introducing other means of ‘cost shifting’ from employers to workers.  Union multiemployer health plans are being hit with an additional, second tax now as well.  Meanwhile, pleas by unions (Laborers International and others) to Obama that he allow their low paid members, to begin to receive government health insurance subsidies under the ACA are rejected by the administration.  Jack and Deb discuss why national union leaders allowed themselves to be maneuvered into this strategic dead end with the passage of the ACA in 2010 in the first place. Jack predicts the now emerging crisis for union negotiated health plans as a result of the ACA (which he predicted last year in a prior Alternative Visions show) will result in more strikes, more union contracts being unsigned, new contracts with less coverage for spouses and dependents, and more workers shifted from full time to part time status by employers in order to ‘cut and shift the costs’ to accommodate the coming 40% tax increase required by the ACA. Jack suggests local union leaders should convene a national convention of local union leaders to begin discussing solutions to the now intensifying attack on union health benefits, and to relaunch a national movement to replace ACA with  ‘Medicare for All’.   Deb Silverstein has taught in public schools in Ohio for 30 years, and is the Ohio state director for SPAN, ‘Single Payer Action Network’, for the state of Ohio.”

Jack Rasmus explains how Europe’s ‘stop-go’ recovery and its version of an ‘Epic recession’ (i.e. short, shallow recoveries followed by economic relapses and double dip recessions) is proving worse than the USA’s experience with ‘stop-go’ recovery since 2009.  While the USA’s economy has slowed to zero or less on three different occasions since 2009 (in 2011, 2012, and now 2014), Europe’s economy experienced an even worse bona fide double dip recession, even weaker recoveries between, and now appears headed to another slowdown after only a year of a paltry 0.2% GDP growth.  As Depression conditions continue in Southern Europe and the Euro periphery economies, Northern Europe economies (France, Netherlands, Finland, etc.)  are also beginning to experience declining real investment, falling exports, and slowing household consumption as well. Meanwhile, governments continue ‘austerity’ policies, struggle with a continuing fragile banking system and government debt, and continue to ‘talk down’ the crisis.  Jack explains the role of European Central Bank monetary policies in Europe behind Europe’s current drift toward deflation and economic stagnation, which are the ultimate source of its continuing fiscal austerity policies. The role of emerging markets’ capital flows to Europe, western global investors and shadow banks chasing risky corporate junk bond ‘yield’ and Eurozone periphery government bonds as key elements to today’s emerging ‘3rd phase’ of the crisis. Jack also explains the effects of changing China and Japan policies on Europe, the Ukraine crisis effect on Europe, and why the drift toward deflation Eurozone-wide will continue.  Dr. Rasmus concludes with an explanation of why the United Kingdom’s is experience an artificial recovery based on an induced property bubble in London and south England, with Cameron policies echoing George Bush-Alan Greenspan USA policies of 2002-03, in what represents a desperate attempt to engineer a short term, unstable recovery before an upcoming national election, that will inevitably collapse afterward with serious economic consequences.’ (For the bigger global economic picture, listen to earlier Alternative Vision radio shows since February 19 on the Emerging Markets, China, Japan, and USA economies, archived on this station).

Dr. Jack Rasmus welcomes guest, Jill Stein, Presidential candidate of the Green Party USA, to discuss President Obama’s just released, ‘US National Climate Assessment Report’, this past week. While the Obama report provides overwhelming evidence of accelerating climate crisis in the USA in all regions of the country, both Jill and Jack explain it falls way short of proposals to address the growing environmental crisis—from thawing permafrost in Alaska, to drought and destruction of forests in the west, to disappearing maple trees in new England, to the melting of the Antarctic ice shelf that threatens to raise sea levels by up to 10 ft. in coming decades that will devastate coastal US cities. Jill provides a critique of the President’s report and offers an alternative set of proposals. Stein and Rasmus together then take note of the growing convergence between the environmental movement and other grass roots USA protest movements today, in the recent ‘Earth Day to May Day’ actions, the upcoming ‘Alternative Climate Summit’ this coming September, and growing discussions at the grass roots how to form joint community-labor organizations locally to fight for change. Ms. Stein calls for ‘unifying solutions’, a ‘Green New Deal’ to resolve environment and decent jobs creation, and the need for various movements to come together in a national organizing conference of some kind—a US version perhaps of the Latin American ‘Justice Movement’ in recent years that has proved successful. For more on the grass roots convergence, listeners are encouraged to go to www.globalclimateconvergence.org for more information how to do something about the intensifying joint economic-environmental problems in the USA instead of just complaining about it.

Jack Rasmus welcomes back labor historian, Staughton Lynd, to discuss specific ideas how American unions might evolve their current organizational structure to better confront the growing crisis of American workers and their unions in the 21st century.  Jack and Staughton agree it’s time for solutions, not just talking about dimensions of today’s crisis in union strategy—whether political, industrial, bargaining, organizing—i.e. strategies that that are now failing across the board for American workers today.  Both agree that some new form of local union organization is needed that strengthens local unions to confront the massive legal web that has grown over decades favoring employers, government, and national union leaders.  Stronger local unions must somehow be developed, both argue, that organizationally integrate the community. Jack and Lynd discuss what a new kind of local union might look like organizationally, how it might include local community groups as equal members, how it might develop regionally, as well as evolve at a national level in the form of a ‘National Workers Legislative Congress’. Jack explains how organizational restructuring is not new to the history of labor, but has occurred repeatedly in the past as Corporate power and Capital has evolve rendering the old union strategies and organizations ineffective.  Jack argues a new structure, based on ‘local mobilization-solidarity committees’, can also complement and expand Union Labor’s current structure, not necessarily replace it. Both agree some kind of new organizational evolution of labor, starting at the local union level, is necessary to deal with the current crisis of American labor today. (See Jack’s article ‘Reorganizing the AFL-CIO: An Initial Proposal’ on the PRN website, and his own website: www.kyklosproductions.com).

Dr. Jack Rasmus will focus on today’s continuing crisis in the U.S. and global economies.

Dr. Jack Rasmus welcomes grass roots immigrants’ rights leaders, Nativo Lopez and David Bacon, to discuss the new resurgence in the immigrants rights movement in the U.S.  With deportations under the Obama administration now exceeding 2.5 million since 2008—including half a million of legal US citizens (youth children or deported parents)—Jack and guests discuss the key demands of the immigrants rights groups today and the resurging activity at the grass roots. Jack asks guests why the Obama administration has not introduced executive orders to defend immigrants, while continuing to hide behind the failure to pass any legislation by Congress. David Bacon explains that while millions are being deported, the administration has increased the numbers of ‘guest workers’ coming into the US to work in agriculture and elsewhere under sub-wage and sub-working conditions and bringing hundreds of thousands of skilled tech workers to the US while deporting record level millions back to Mexico, central America and elsewhere. Jack’s guests explain how free trade agreements, like NAFTA and CAFTA (and soon the TPP) play a key role in driving emigration to the US. Nativo Lopez discusses the key demands of the movement today, and in conclusion raises the question why 22,000 US agents are needed on the border today, developing new procedures for mass roundup and mass incarceration and detention in camps and rapidly expanding the use of drones and other technology. Is the border control strategy in development today perhaps a ‘dress rehearsal’ for something yet to come throughout the US down the road?’ David Bacon is a California writer and photojournalist, documenting the impact of the global economy, migration, and human rights..He was a founder of the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network, and board chair of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and a union organizer for two decades with the UFW and the ILGWU.His books include Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008), The Children of NAFTA (University of California Press, 2004) and Communities Without Borders (Cornell University Press, 2006). His new book is The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013), and is about the social movements seeking alternatives to displacing communities and criminalizing the migrants produced by displacement. Nativo Lopez is a leader of the immigrants rights organization, Hermandad Mexicana, and has been active in Mexican and Latin American undocumented workers’ rights groups and movements in the southern California area for decades.

‘Dr. Rasmus interviews Staughton Lynd, long time oral histories labor historian, as part of the Alternative Vision show’s continuing focus on the subject: ‘Are US Unions At a Strategic Impasse’? Lynd recounts his oral history interviews with union activists and local leaders in the 1930s-40s and their warnings on the limits of Labor’s then developing strategies that have since become the norm for the past 75 years—i.e. industrial, bargaining, organizing, and political strategies that now appear in recent years to have exhausted their potential for advancing workers’ wages, benefits, and standard of living in the 21st century. Both Jack and Lynd discuss the  broad ‘legal web’ that has developed the past half century that today have effectively neutralized and defeated past union strategic approaches, as well as prevent internal union renewal ‘from below’. Current promising movements by low wage workers, immigrant workers, and union reform movements in recent years (i.e. Chicago teachers, Boeing workers, etc.) are considered for their great potential for union renewal. But both Jack and Lynd agree these spontaneous movements will likely atrophy, as in the recent past, unless some form of new union-community permanent organization at the grass roots emerges to break through the ‘legal web’ and internal union organizational roadblocks that prevent union renewal from below today. The ‘Great Task’ is to develop some kind of permanent labor-community organizational network that, according to Lynd,  “doesn’t give away workers freedom of action in order to become a permanent organizational structure that prevents that freedom of action”--as is the case today.  Lynd agrees to return to the May 3 Alternative Visions show to discuss this view further in his forthcoming new book, ‘Solidarity Unionism’, and Rasmus agrees to update his similar views on the necessity of new ‘labor-community alliance’ organizational forms for the 21st century.”

Dr. Jack Rasmus offers his latest view of the US economy as it enters the 2nd quarter 2014. What’s happening with US GDP, business investment, consumer spending, housing, and jobs in the US today, as the rest of the world’s economies currently drift toward slower growth, deflation, and economic and political volatility?  Dr. Rasmus discusses the 2014 US economic picture as the addendum to previous Alternative Visions shows in recent weeks that reviewed China’s slowing economy and growing financial instability, the Eurozone’s drift toward deflation and stagnation, the UK’s artificial construction bubble-driven recovery, Japan’s now stalling ‘Abenomics’ recovery, and growing currency volatility, capital flight, and economic slowing in Emerging Markets like Brazil, India, So. Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, etc. Having previously identified the US and global economy in early 2014 as the initial stage of a ‘3rd Phase of the Global Economic Crisis’, Rasmus explains where the US economy presently fits in the broader global economic trends and picture today.”

Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest discuss the buildup toward a coup being prepared by US and its business-right wing friends in Venezuela today.  Jack’s guest is longtime union activist, Alan Benjamin, who works in the International Labor Office in Geneva, Switzerland, and has access to information globally on the Venezuela situation. Benjamin provides an eye-witness view of contemporary events in Venezuela based on his frequent direct contact with unionists on the ground in Venezuela in recent months.  Jack and Alan discuss the current relationship of political forces today in Venezuela, including the various alignments of classes there, political parties, union organizations, students, US sponsored and funded NGOs, small business v. large businesses, small farmers and peasants, and splits within the military. Benjamin explains the history of US coup attempts in Venezuela and Latin America in recent decades and parallels with recent events in the Ukraine coup. Who is behind the recent killings in the streets, splits within the anti(Maduro) government right wing forces and within the government itself, and USA’s current various current plans (‘A, B, and C’) to destabilize Venezuela along multiple fronts are addressed—in this ‘fact-based’ exploration of what’s happening in Venezuela. Alan Benjamin is a long time member of the Office Professional Employees Union in the U.S. and its delegate for a number of years to the San Francisco Central Labor Council, AFLCIO. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the ‘Labor Fightback Network’ in the USA, and has been involved in numerous undocumented US workers’ grass roots organizations defending US immigrant workers rights, as well as active in organizations defending US students from government education spending cutbacks.

Dr Jack Rasmus welcomes as his guest, Tom Moore, a nationally known expert on health care costs with 30 years experience in medical cost analysis in government and as a consultant, to discuss rising health insurance premiums and costs today in the US.  Jack and Tom discuss why health care premiums and deductibles are again on the rise, and projected to escalate at double digit annual rates further in 2015 under Obamacare.  Dr. Rasmus notes the sharp contradiction between national consumer polls and surveys that show health care insurance premiums and deductibles rising again at double digit levels vs. government and Obama administration reports that claim total healthcare spending in the US is slowing. So what is it? Are personal out of pocket costs rising and about to escalate even more—or are the government reports of total healthcare spending slowing correct? Are health insurance companies, that have become big finance companies expanding worldwide, about to rip off the US public again with double digit further premium and deductible hikes once Obamacare is implemented?  What can you expect in coming months. Jack and Tom discuss the details and the real data.’ Guest Tom Moore, Jr. is the co-founder of Community Campaigns for Quality Care and serves as its Board Chair and Chief Financial Officer.  He brings over 30 years’ experience in health policy and program management, having held major federal and state government positions including the Director of California Department of Social Welfare, Director of the Office of Legislation for the U.S. Public Health Service, and Deputy Director of the California Department of Health Services for the Prepaid Health Plan program in Medi-Cal.  Tom was also a Senior Health Policy and Program Consultant to the California Health Care Coalition, where he represented CHCC members on the board of the California Hospital Assessment and Reporting Task Force (CHART), recognized as a national model for health care quality measurement and reporting.  He has consulted with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the California State Council of the Service Employees International Union on health benefits, including serving as SEIU’s liaison to CalPERS. Working with his CCQC partner, Sally Covington, he has participated in development of projects to identify and improve questionable variations in utilization of clinical services in Montana, Oregon, and California and currently supports delivery system improvement projects with IBEW L1245 (Northern California).  

Dr. Jack Rasmus provides an update of the economic crisis in the Ukraine, predicting the future IMF deal next week, and surveying the positive and economic impacts on the Russia and European economies as sanctions and IMF details emerge.  Why the USA has ‘most to gain’ and least to lose from an ongoing crisis in the Ukraine?  And why the Ukrainian people stand to lose the most, as the economic crisis deepens. (read Dr. Rasmus’s Counterpunch blog article on ‘Who Benefits, Who Loses’? posted on the PRN website and on is own blog, jackrasmus.com, for details).  Dr. Rasmus then turns to an analysis of the Japan economy today and explains why Japan’s ‘Abenomics’ policies (named after Japan’s prime minister, Abe) of the past year are an echo of US policies since 2008 that have failed to produce a sustained economic recovery except for investors, bankers, corporations, and the wealthiest 1%.  As in the US, Europe and elsewhere, the preferred policy of global capitalism is monetary—QE, zero rates, and bank bailouts—while fiscal policy is token in content, and form and then quickly withdrawn with little positive economic effect, or is ‘austere’ (austerity) to make the populace pay for the crisis and bank bailouts. Rasmus concludes with the notion that Capitalism’s major crisis in the 21st century is the inability to sustain real investment that creates jobs, incomes, middle class consumption and thus recovery.  The ‘new normal’ long term is what we see emerging everywhere—slowing investment and global growth.

“Dr. Jack Rasmus and guest, Steve Lendman, revisit the latest in the Ukrainian crisis, discussing its political and economic dimensions. In the first half hour, Dr. Rasmus raises ’10 Unanswered Questions’ about the political coup of February 22: Who were the snipers, why is no investigation underway, what is the composition of the neo-fascist parties on the street (Svoboda, Right Sector, UPA, etc.), what official positions have they assumed in the new interim Ukrainian government, why did US undersecretary of State, Virginia Nuland, admit to $5 billion spent by the US on Ukrainian politics, what are Nuland’s ‘Neocon’ credentials, and is there a ‘deep government’ in the US driving US foreign policy? Dr. Rasmus also raises the question of what are the ‘crony capitalist’ connections in the Ukraine with US business sectors? Rasmus identifies the key neo-fascist and crony capitalists and their current roles.  Steve Lendman then gives his view of the Crimea referendum and perspective on the Ukrainian crisis, which he calls the worst and most dangerous since the 1962 Berlin crisis. In the second half of the show, Dr. Rasmus discusses economic issues, focusing on “who benefits” and “who pays” from the current economic crisis, including western Europe, the USA, Russia and the Ukraine itself. (Listeners more interested in the latter topic should go directly to the ‘station break’ at the 30 minute point of the show, and listen to the second half of the h our that discusses economic crises in the Ukraine and other regions affected by it. Rasmus warns the Ukrainian crisis may be the critical development that sends the European economy into its third ‘dip’ recession in 2014-15.

“Dr. Rasmus takes a deep look into China’s economy, asking if it is heading for a ‘hard landing’? Will its growing financial bubbles soon burst? Rasmus discusses reasons why China’s economy is slowing, and its potential impacts on emerging markets, Europe, and the rest of the global economy. China’s growing financial instability is also explored, including the role of global shadow banks and the 200,000 richest ‘Ultra High Net Worth Individuals’ (aka biggest global finance capitalists and their primary financial institutions) stoking the financial bubbles and instability in China. How are they together driving China’s currency and real estate bubbles? What’s China trying to do to slow speculation in its currency, local housing, and local investment markets? Why is China total debt is now well above crisis levels? Are they driving China toward a ‘Lehman Moment’ financial crisis? Rasmus concludes with discussion of China’s recent shift to lower the value of its Yuan to ‘reign in’ the shadow banks and global speculators, and what that could mean if it loses control not only for China’s economic hard landing but for the world economy as well”.