“If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.” – African Proverb.

This mini-documentary film looks at the initial causes and wider context surrounding the recent England riots. Politicians refuse to acknowledge their role in creating a deeply unfair and failing society, a perfect storm of police brutality, city poverty and austerity measures, that will only get worse unless the root problem is addressed.

Did you know for the rioters to be on par with the looting by the financial bailouts, corporate tax avoiders and Libyan invasion, they would have to repeat the same level of damage……4,320 times?

Documentary by WideShut.co.uk

by Shamus Cooke

Global Research, September 28, 2010

In less than a week two billionaires have joined the anti-teacher “Billionaires Club”: a group of ultra-wealthy individuals hell-bent on destroying public education and teachers’ unions. The newest members of the club are Oprah Winfrey and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg.

Winfrey has used her show — twice in one week — as a platform against public education. She first hosted billionaire Bill Gates to discuss his “philanthropy” in education, as he promoted the new anti-public education propaganda film Waiting for Superman.

Waiting for Superman is a “documentary” focused on the types of anti-teacher school “reforms” desired by the Billionaires Club, who have used their tremendous wealth to blackmail school districts and states to institute their policies.

For example, the Facebook founder’s donation of $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey school district will almost certainly require — according to The New York Times — that the school institute these reforms, much like Bill Gates’ donation of $100 million to the Tampa Hillsborough County School District — and the $90 million to the Memphis school district — had the same types of strings attached.

What are the conditions for receiving this “charity” of billionaires? It’s the same demands for receiving money from the federal government under Obama’s badly-named Race to the Top program: creating more privately administered — or for profit — Charter schools; connecting teacher’s pay with student test scores (merit pay); undermining the seniority of teachers; and other tricks to dis-empower teachers and public education.

Diane Ravitch, a former corporate-school reformer, has now dedicated her time to exposing the motives of the super-rich and their new-found interest in “reforming” public education.  In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ravitch entitles a chapter “The Billionaires Boys Club.”  On the radio show Democracy Now! Ravitch summarized the chapter:

“The Billionaires Boys Club is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the [billionaire] foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations — the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations — Gates, Broad and Walton — are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the U.S. Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.”

There are some key motives for billionaires to jump in a coalition with this singular focus, none of them well meaning.

1) There are unknown billions in profits to be made in privatizing public education, either in the private administration of schools, curriculum companies, or wholly for-profit schools.  There has been much talk in the investor world of this new “market.”  In addition, the New York Daily News reported: “Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.” (May 5, 2010).

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/05/07/2010-05

2) The super-rich hate taxes. They would rather not pay taxes towards public education when they could instead invest their money in private schools and reap profits.

3) Billionaires hate unions (they didn’t become billionaires by paying union wages): The biggest obstacle towards privatizing public education is the powerful teachers’ unions. Teacher unions are also the strongest segment of the labor movement, and thus the most powerful grouping in the U.S. working class, able to fight back most effectively against corporate school reform— the billionaires’ natural enemies.

The super-rich attacked first in this battle between teachers and billionaires. The teachers must defend themselves. Shamefully, certain segments of the teachers’ unions are having troubles labeling their attackers as enemies.

For example, the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randy Weingarten, sent a friendly invitation to Bill Gates to address the AFT convention, where Gates was allowed to deceive the teachers about the intentions of his multi-billion dollar “investment” in “reforming” education.

Gates’ ideas about education — blaming teachers for everything — ignores what most teachers already know: the main predictor for a student’s success is social-economic background. Rich students outperform poor students for many different reasons: less stress, more resources, parental help, etc. Ignoring this obvious fact exposes the billionaires’ profit motive behind their fake charity.

Teachers must fight back. They cannot allow the media to frame the debate with the ideas of the corporate think tanks and foundations. Teachers cannot concede on the issues that help keep their unions powerful, such as seniority; merit pay must be defeated for the same reasons.

If the teachers’ unions combined with other public sector unions, parent associations, and the community at large to demand FULLY FUNDED PUBLIC EDUCATION by TAXING THE RICH, the billionaires would find themselves without allies.  Their money might then be put towards something useful.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).  He can be reached atshamuscook@gmail.com

An edgy, fast-paced documentary on the financial meltdown

By Mike Whitney

November 24, 2009 “Information Clearing House” — Andrew and Leslie Cockburn have produced the best movie of the year. American Casino tells the story of the financial crisis, which started with the meltdown in subprime lending and ended up triggering the deepest slump since the Great Depression. The Cockburn’s skillfully uncover the truth behind the headlines, shining a light on the negligent regulators, the colluding Fed, the unscrupulous ratings agencies, the mercenary banks, the venal mortgage lenders, and the long daisy-chain of opportunists and fraudsters who gorged themselves on the spoils from the biggest swindle in history. This is this generation’s big story and it is deftly conveyed by master narrators, Mr. and Mrs. Cockburn.

The movie begins in downtown Manhattan, the camera shifting quickly from one looming skyscraper to the next. This is Wall Street, the epicenter of the financial universe. With the edgy wail of bebop in the background, Cockburn fixes his lens on Senator Phil Gramm and Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, the two policymakers most responsible for the market blowup. In testimony before a congressional committee,”Maestro” Greenspan reluctantly admits that he discovered a “flaw” in his theory of how markets work. Director Cockburn contrasts Greenspan’s feeble defense with sweeping visuals of the endless rows of boarded up homes in downtown Baltimore where the foreclosure epidemic has turned large parts of the city into a ghost-town. This is the Greenspan/Gramm legacy, the triumph of deregulation.

American Casino explains the most complex aspects of the financial collapse in terms that everyone can understand. The movie is an informal tutorial on Wall Street’s “innovations”, including a brief rundown on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and credit default swaps (CDSs). These are the notorious debt-instruments which clogged the credit markets and sent stocks into a nosedive. The Cockburn’s also interview a number of people who played a part in the market crash. We get a glimpse of the ratings agency executive who caved in to the investment banks and gave them the triple A ratings they wanted, but didn’t deserve. There’s a brief segment with a mortgage lender who routinely filed false income statements which allowed unqualified loan applicants to be approved. There’s also a clip of a financial technician who packed B-rated junk into CDOs that were offloaded to gullible Korean investors. What’s most disturbing about American Casino, is that it shows how normal people eagerly participated in a profit-skimming operation that was based on repackaging and peddling dodgy loans to credulous investors. These people knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway.

American Casino transitions seamlessly from Wall Street to intercity Baltimore, and then onto the abandoned housing developments in California’s Central Valley. Here, we see the true cost of deregulation measured in terms of the lives it has ruined. The Cockburn’s allow a few articulate African Americans, who were trapped in predatory lending scams, to relay the story of an entire Baltimore community. Not surprisingly, these mortgage ripoffs were engineered by some of the most highly-respected banks in the country. Wells Fargo is one name that pops up repeatedly. African Americans were four times more likely to be given subprime loans even though the vast majority of applicants met the standards for conventional prime mortgages. To their credit, the Cockburn’s stand alone in showing the role that racial discrimination played in the housing crisis. This is clearly the civil rights issue of our time.

American Casino is not your typical dispassionate documentary. The Cockburn’s sympathies are never in doubt as they stitch together a number of gut-wrenching stories which help to illustrate how the trading of financial exotica in an “anything goes” market, ended up destroying the lives of millions of ordinary working people. This is what separates the movie from the desensitized version of events we read in the mainstream press. It’s not enough to know who was responsible or what crimes they may have committed. We need to see the faces of the victims and hear their stories first-hand. These are the people whose lives will be forever marred by the reckless, high-stakes gambling of Wall Street speculators.

The following Dutch documentary from 2005 poses a mindblowing “worst case” scenario where speculation on the currency exchange market and a substantial sell-off of dollars from a hedge fund causes a chain reaction in the markets around the world, leading to a complete collapse of the banking system, and effectively resulting in a political escalation of blame around the globe. Features Peter Schiff, Stephen Roach amongst others.