free advice is adjusted to market price

The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.
The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping—and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.

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—	Guernica / Frances Fox Piven: How the 99% Could Stop the War Against the Poor

A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the over-consumption and waste of that top 1 percent.

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—	Guernica / Frances Fox Piven: How the 99% Could Stop the War Against the Poor

Arizona's Prohibition on "Hateful" Ethnic Studies »

absurdlakefront:

Now, I’d have no problem with taking the teaching of this stuff out of the “ethnic studies” ghetto where it’s kept and building it into the universal curriculum. Surely, every kid in Boston public schools learns about the Irish Potato Famine, right? Say it with me: Irish-Americans are white and English-speaking. That doesn’t mean their history is more part of the special canon of universal American stories than, say, the mid-20th-century Bracero Program. And it definitely doesn’t mean that an all-white class in Boston automatically becomes a breeding ground for racism when it studies the 1840s.

But teaching everyone about the conquest of the Southwest and the ensuing century-and-a-half of exploitation of Chicano workers is obviously not what this law has in mind. The idea, instead, is to teach nobody about it. And if nobody’s teaching it, then kids in Arizona are, of course, going to grow up unaware. The implicit message to Chicanos is that they have no history, that the struggles of their ancestors are not relevant or important. And the lesson for white kids is much the same — that their Latino classmates’ experience of their own historical and ethnic identity is invalid. If it did matter, wouldn’t it be in the history books?

Denying the brutal and exploitative past of the Southwest is, ultimately, a way of trying to keep it going in the present. There’s been, for centuries, a continuous labor market extending from California down through Arizona and Texas and into Mexico. It was once all part of the same country. The current border was drawn across the middle of it, by American soldiers. But the U.S. thought nothing of shipping people back and forth over this forcibly-claimed new frontier like cattle, to work when needed and be gone when not. In other words, we got the land and the workers, but didn’t have to bother with the representation and respect. If students don’t know this, they’ll slip into thinking that it’s just the natural state of being for the U.S. to exploit Mexican labor without according laborers dignity and rights.

I’m not making some faux-postmodern argument here about how all narratives are equally valid. This isn’t America-bashing. There is simply a true story of the Southwest, and the state of Arizona has apparently just decided that it not be taught, and especially not to the students for whom it is a community inheritance.