ON ITCAPSKI(BGC/RSD)

Over the last week, boing boing featured two stories that really resonated with me:

• Tibetan Exile Group Seeks Your Used Audio Recording Gear. This is dope, a group in India looking for gear for a community radio station.
• Adopt a classroom, help kids, and get a tax write-off. This stood out for obvious reasons. I know people who benefit from this and I too got my share of private assistance as a teacher. It’s good to see the program get more exposure and with what is going on in the LA Unified School District (textbook issues anyone?) it is extremely crucial right now. Plus, with my new job starting soon and it being based in servicing LAUSD students, school resource shortfalls are very much back on my radar.

Now a quote from Mary Kane, via Spencer Ackerman:

The most troubling and overlooked aspect of the foreclosure crisis has been the discriminatory and most likely illegal behavior of many lenders in targeting minorities for high-cost loans. The damage done will be felt for decades.

Steering minorities into abusive loans isn’t fodder for entertainment. It probably won’t be dissected and excerpted all over the Internet. It’s just exactly what it seems — a tragedy. And maybe someday it will get the attention it deserves.

The blame surely has been spread around to the point that it has worn thin (greedy mortgage companies! dems for pushing banks to give loans to minorities! stupid borrowers!) but at this point, aside from understanding the reasons to better regulate the industry, we really ought to be looking at the long term community consequences of what this means to start heading it off. Predatory lending affected communities that were already facing challenges (hence their need to get the risky loans) and this just compounds it all and in a way that, as Kane points out, will leave long term damages. So when people rail against mortgage relief and greedy borrowers, think about the unsaid message of it and who the wealthy class thinks is deserving (if they aren’t profiting from it).

• Mickey Kaus just called Robert Reich a “huckster” on Bloggingheads. What a buffoon (right into obligatory card check freak-out).
• Stimulus package: needs more rails. $30 billion for freeways is NOT what is clever. ~$12 billion for rails should be tripled.
• Speaking of Kaus and card check, I’m amazed (not sure why) by the semantic acrobatics surrounding it.  Hamsher points out the straight-up wrongness of an oft used anti-card check arguments.
• Bloggingheads update: Wright’s talkin bout high speed rail! (interestingggg: high speed rail tech is largely foreign based and therefore kind of excludes it from a stimulus package intended to help the US economy exclusively…therefore, we need to reconsider stimulus alone.)
• Education: I aint forget.

via, Matthew Yglesias, The Limits of Service:

A friend Twitters:

Service is great! But MLK’s life and work wasn’t about volunteering: it was about altering the distribution of power.

Quite so. I mean, it was about volunteering. But it was about volunteering for the cause of social justice—for a new, fairer, and more equal distribution of political and economic power. It wasn’t about doing charity work. More on this later.

If you weren’t aware, today is the “Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service.”

Yglesias and “friend” bring up excellent points and ones that begin for me the discussion re: the distinctions between “service” and “charity” and “volunteerism” et al. The charity argument is well worn: both David Wagner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It and Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism address the other side of private and corporate “giving.”

I guess in my mind the terms need all to be defined in popular parlance more, or just used more specifically. In any case, my main belief is that service can be a two way street. You serve because you recognize some kind of disparity that urges you to help, which could be the first step toward a consciousness that demands social justice. Or maybe you serve cause your church or school told you to…well in that case you are exposed to injustices that you may not have been aware of. 
The key then is how you make meaning of those service experiences. It’s a pretty iffy prospect. Service experiences can go either way. Not that teach for america is the best example, but i know not a few TFA alum that became pretty hardened in their “man THEY are just lazy!” 

All I’m sayin is: a blanket call for service is dangerous, it has to be in the larger framework, as Yglesias and friend point out, of working to end systemic inequality. (If that is the sort of thing is what you want)

Living in Santa Clarita, home of EXTREME NEIGHBORHOOD MAKEOVER (aka make your neighborhood look like ours or we’ll figure out a way to kick you out), this Yglesias post is rather comical and timely, as giant office buildings are still being built here…as commercial vacancies skyrocket.  Linking to a Times piece articulating the surprise facing developers, dude easily points out how patently idiotic and without basic logic this all seems.  WHO WERE THESE MORONS!?

Also: I am fully stoked for the potential for the improvement in early education.

And the $10 billion Mr. Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965. Now, Head Start is a $7 billion federal program serving about 900,000 preschoolers.

When basically EVERY study EVER articulates the importance of a child’s earliest years (peep HCZ’s Baby College, as profiled on This American Life #366*) this is all good news. ANYBODY who has taught past 2nd or 3rd grade can see where students were lacking in early ed. For my kids, there were just really obvious gaps either in socialization or just generalized cognitive problem solving. 

Let’s see what happens, but expanded awareness has got to be a great thing. Also: it won’t simply be a matter of starting up a nationwide system…much profound reorganization is in order (yuck yuck yuck). I mean, california has 22 funding sources for childcare and preschool? Yikes.

*yes, no stats yet exist for children going through the whole HCZ program, it just seems so dope.