"Agitprop" and Black Lives Matter

The police are not judge, jury and executioner. Peaceful protest is a Constitutionally-protected right. When Black Lives Matter protests the extrajudicial killing of black people, they are protesting the murder of someone who either did not commit a crime at all, or at most committed a misdemeanor certainly not punishable by death, which of course takes us back to the first part of the statement; the job of the police is to apprehend someone whom they “suspect” of committing a crime, and then if necessary it is up to a judge and or jury to decide if this is the case.

This is part of my response when someone asks for my opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Part of the Black Lives Matter “mission” is: “Rooted in the experiences of black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, Black Lives Matter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by police and vigilantes” (blacklivesmatter.com). This sounds to me like a reasonable response to the violence committed against innocent black people in this country, and to the institutionalized racism that is at the root of the problem. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Black Lives Matter is portrayed in the media. Just this week a police chief in Wisconsin stated that Black Lives Matter was going to join with ISIS to take down America (Suen, 2015). Also recently, a Fox News Host compared Black Lives Matter to the Nazis (Suen, 2015).

These types of statements align with what Jacques Ellul called “Propaganda of Agitation” (Ellul, 1965), or what is now known as “agitprop.” Ellul pinpoints hate as the epicenter of agitprop; “Hate is generally its most profitable resource; hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one’s misfortunes  and sins to ‘another’; propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided they are not too powerful”(Ellul, 1965). It’s hard to imagine a less powerful group in society than one that represents just 13% of the population, have just 1/12^th the wealth of the majority white population (Luhby, 2015), and are descendants of slaves. In this seemingly endless election cycle we have seen Donald Trump engage in agitprop to successfully rally his “troops” by targeting Mexican, Latin American and Muslim immigrants as the source of so much White-American misery; again all comparatively powerless groups.

I have yet to see a positive portrayal of Black Lives Matter in the mainstream media. A comparison of response to Black Lives Matter peaceful protest to that of a riot at a nearly all-white college after a pumpkin festival (Lennard, 2014) tells us an awful lot about race relations, the treatment of black people in this country, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

References

Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The formation of men's attitudes. New York: Knopf.

Lennard, N. (2014, October 20). The great pumpkin riot is a white riot worth taking seriously. Retrieved from https://news.vice.com/article/the-great-pumpkin-riot-is-a-white-riot-worth-taking-seriously

Luhby, T. (2015, February 18). Whites have 12 times the wealth of blacks, 10 times that of Hispanics. Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/18/news/economy/wealth-blacks-whites-hispanics/

Beauty and Ugliness

No matter how hard I have tried, for years I could never find myself in complete accord with the feeling of disgust Jean-Paul Sartre creates for his character Antoine Roquentin in his 1938 novel, Nausea. Simply reading the text left me underwhelmed; then some close-reading of portions of the work still didn’t resonant in the manner one would hope for. It was only after transcribing the entire book that I started to get a whiff of Roquentin’s condition; lamentations on his relationship with “Anny,” a long-lost love, were rife with remonstration, regret and finally, mutual rejection, and were potentially, for the susceptible at least, cause for the uncritical mind to view the attempts at reconciliation as repulsive. Not for me, however. And Roquentin’s final encounter with ‘the self-taught man,’ an uneasy acquaintance throughout, wherein the autodidact is caught making untoward advances at teenaged boys and is subsequently banished from his beloved library, had me riding along with the protagonist in a maelstrom of pity, compassion and revulsion. But I didn’t feel the need to reach for the Pepto-Bismol. I chalked it all up to the notion that I needed to experience the queasy existential moments ‘in-situation,’ as Sartre might put it.

Pretty much every day since Republicans were handed control of the entirety of congress has for me been like adding pieces to a Jenga stack of socio-political atrocities, each one worse than the last, and each one with the potential to bring the whole thing crashing down. Racist policing, climate change denial, obstruction of reproductive choice for woman; all of it and much more a toxic soup of incomprehensible dimension.  If the thought of imminent human extinction due to anthropogenic climate disruption isn’t disconcerting enough, reading about Fox News and their concoction of non-Muslim ‘no-go zones’ in Paris and Birmingham would surely send some of us over the edge. I pondered Sartre and Roquentin and their nausea.

Then I went to the movies…

My wife and I had wanted to see ‘Birdman’ mostly to witness the resurrection of Michael Keaton. Because we see very few ‘mainstream’ American films, we are largely unaccustomed to being subjected to gorge-crippling movie trailers. All three film previews paraded in front of us before the feature, including the empire propaganda tool ‘American Sniper,’ were likely the wet dream of many a gun-toting, blood-lusting, cadmium-blooded patriot; but to my eyes it was pure filth and a not at all subtle reminder of this nation’s precipitous decline. However, it was ‘Birdman’ itself that provided the cultural body-blow. In one of the most important scenes in the film, three of the main characters, for approximately 3 minutes of screen time, discuss what took place in a scene from the play they are rehearsing covered in fake blood from a gun shot blast to the head.

We discussed the picture on our walk home; mostly marveled at some of the performances, a few musings about potential Oscar nominations. Then we skirted around the ‘meaning’ of the film, until I finally blurted out, ‘I feel the director was holding a mirror up to our sick society with characters walking around covered in blood!’ The rest of the walk home I felt a profound uneasiness and, indeed, a bit of nausea.

Then I went on a car ride…

I don’t spend much time in cars; my wife and I don’t own one, so this was a bit of an event for us, occasioned primarily because we had left our hometown and were visiting family in a place where it is difficult to get around efficiently without a vehicle – the suburbs of Seattle. As we were chauffeured around I was reminded of a George Carlin quote: ‘Have you looked around at this country lately? It’s one big shopping mall!’ Amidst all this incredible natural beauty, and in and around Seattle there is a lot of it, our culture had managed to make it all ugly, with our cathedrals of material abundance. I was witnessing a terminal ugliness, I felt; there was no escape from it, and no end to it. Enormous signs and enormous putrid-looking buildings advertising our gluttony. We have traded beauty for ugliness, I thought. I felt even more sick than I had after the movie violence – and now I think I know why.

“…I understand absolutely why America is so violent. It’s because your wallpaper is so ugly.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“In a doubtful case, a nation decides, not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its sentimental needs.” ~George Santayana

If we can agree that Santayana did not mean to trivialize the immortal quest for beauty as ‘sentimental needs,’ what sacrifices are we willing to make to reclaim the beauty that feeds our souls? To answer this query with requisite heft, perhaps we should examine the forces that put this ugliness in place. Some of my like-minded leftist friends continually decry the material abundance and consumptive practices that have poisoned our society. A few of them also are intrigued by or even promote the use of force to protect theirs and others’ property. Yet force protects the very ugliness they condemn! Our tax dollars fund the use of force to protect this way of life, this ugliness. One of the best recent examples of this is given in Jerry Mander’s 2012 book, The Capitalism Papers. Around that time the Chinese had proposed shrinking the exportation of rare earth minerals, a resource of which they possess approximately 90% of the world’s share. As Mander puts it, “The American government’s response was not to send the commerce secretary for diplomatic negotiations; it was instead to threaten military action, by way of the Defense secretary and the Sixth Fleet.” It was further revealed that this action was at the behest of corporations such as Apple Computer, which has a vested interest in the continuing cheap availability of rare earth minerals – and the cheap labor that happens to be located in the same country. Millions of Americans struggling to survive are subsidizing, through their tax dollars, the protection of the corporations’ ability to continue to exploit human and natural resources all over the world. Of course, many of those same Americans are complicit in this ongoing ecocide, by purchasing products at those ugly shopping malls and strip malls. Meanwhile, it is no coincidence that violence is increasing in our suburbs (McWhirter & Fields, 2012). I thought about my first trip to Paris; and the experience of seeing those majestic old apartment houses when I emerged from the Gare du Nord. Compared to that, how could anyone find any beauty in the American urban/suburban landscape?

“Beauty can be important in a person’s life. And people beguiled by the beautiful are less dangerous to others than those obsessed by the thought of supremacy.” ~Wallace Shawn

The cello is the dream. The gun and the person wielding it are the destroyers of the dream. Those who would deny us beauty, whether politicians, business leaders, or even religious leaders, are protected both by wielding force and their ability to convince people that there are no alternatives to this way of life. This ‘disimagination machine,’ as Henry Giroux aptly describes it, can be seen in every segment of society: the commodification and vocationalization of education; the destruction of labor unions; and the inculcated belief that consumption is one’s only civic duty; the glorification of sports and the sanctification of business gurus; all these have conspired to render entire generations completely lacking in imagination and critical thinking skills. Yet, those who can only chase money are fearful of those who are beguiled by beauty, because of our ability to tickle the minds of others. And, as any good leftist knows, there are alternatives; and there are signs that some of the most vulnerable in our society, and some who are not as vulnerable but are careening headlong into new socio-economic realities, are beginning to see through the ugliness and are searching in the darkness trying to reclaim beauty. The electrician who has had his hours at work drastically reduced finds that he has time to pursue one of his true passions: woodworking. The career computer engineer who can find only occasional contract work decides to make the sacrifices necessary to start a spiritual healing practice. When one considers that most of the jobs created in this so-called economic ‘recovery’ are low-wage with no benefits (Lowrey, 2014), more and more Americans are coming to the realization that under-employment and long-term unemployment is the new normal. Psychologists may find themselves with an increased workload because of this; but perhaps the creative communities should be filling that void as well. Still, millions of Americans must work two or three jobs just to survive, leaving them with no time or the wherewithal to pursue the beautiful. And of course that means if they are surrounded by the ugliness, they truly cannot escape it! What can give their lives meaning? Economic alternatives such as a universal living wage would be an excellent place to start. Another more radical alternative is what could be called ‘Reclaiming the Office Parks.’ When I was doing temporary work in the suburbs of Portland I noticed that the office park parking lots adjacent to my place of employment were ½ to 2/3 empty, no matter the time of day; that’s a lot of unused office space; something one would think would be a sign of capitalism’s collapse. Regardless, what better use of this land than to have thousands of Americans reclaim it as farmland; even one quarter of an acre would allow someone to truly pull themselves up by the bootstraps; and it just might return some of the beauty our souls cry out for.

In Greek myth, the titan Prometheus climbed Olympus to steal fire and bestow it upon man, because he loved humanity. During the Enlightenment, the English poet and playwright Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ Shelley equated the ‘divine fire’ with knowledge, and that in the Enlightenment humanity chose to caste off the shackles of the church and seize the fire of knowledge, of learning, indeed of beauty. The elites in today’s world do not want us to have any sense of knowledge or beauty; this should be obvious in seeing the attacks on a well-rounded education and the onslaught of anti-science propaganda, as well as attempts at privatizing cultural entities, and of course convincing people that there only civic duty is consumption, specifically of what the elites have to peddle, which by and large has nothing to do with beauty. It is very easy to convince people to eschew beauty when you advertise plastic trinkets and baubles and addict people to them through the medium of television; beauty becomes even less attractive when it is commodified and made unaffordable. How else to explain that it is cheaper to purchase a chemical-laden McDonald’s hamburger than a single Washington apple? Ugliness is sold by the ugly, those who cannot create, or at least not well enough to make a killing at it. Beauty is the great equalizer; if you can experience it enough you will, literally or figuratively, lay down your arms to embrace it.

Sartre was primarily preoccupied with the absurdity of existence, the banal and the beautiful, particularly as it relates to how he perceived others and their navigation of the world around them; so perhaps he wouldn’t be doing the Technicolor yawn non-stop if he were around today. Santayana, on the other hand, inspires us to keep striving to beguile our fellow man with beauty, even if it’s just convincing them to have a wholesome stack of pancakes from a mom & pop diner instead of the non-food from the corporate chains. More cellos, fewer guns means less Pepto-Bismol for everyone!

References

Lowrey, A. (2014, April 14). Recovery Has Created Far More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html?_r=0

McWhirter, C., & Fields, G. (2012, December 30). Crime Migrates to the Suburbs - WSJ. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323300404578206873179427496

Behavior influencing attitudes

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume posited that all perceptions of the human mind are of two distinct kinds: impressions and ideas. He asserted that impressions precede, or are the causes of, our ideas. He offered the example of our impressions of colors, both different colors and shades of the same color, producing independent ideas (or in the present context, attitudes) toward them (Hume, 1740; 1961). The only exception to this order, according to Hume, is the individual who is, after many years and exposure to all different types of colors, confronted with a previously un-experienced shade of blue; Hume believes that the individual’s imagination makes the leap to “fill in the blank” where the missing shade belongs amongst the various hues of gradating blue; thus, our idea of blue has no need for a preceding impression. Of course, the logical extension of this dimension of the theory is that we may subsequently form distinct ideas on this shade of blue through succeeding impressions. Can we apply Hume’s theory to our ideas or attitudes to our fellow human beings? I believe we can.

My parents, though raised in primarily white, middle-class Southern California neighborhoods, were both exposed at an early age to peoples of different race and ethnicity in largely positive fashion. Their embrace of diversity was further cemented when campaigning for Robert Kennedy during his ill-fated run for the presidency in 1968; this was a leader who made many strong, positive impressions upon them, not least being a love and acceptance of all creeds and colors.

When I was a child, our family regularly watched the television program “All in the Family.” My parents continuously showed a dislike for the character Archie Bunker, particularly when he discussed people of color in a negative way, which anyone familiar with the character knows occurred frequently. Because I had already formed a strong attachment bond with my parents, their impressions toward Archie manifested themselves in their behavior which formed my ideas about both Archie and people of color. This was reinforced and distinctions were made whenever the African-American neighbor Lionel appeared on screen; my parents displayed a visible affection for this character, and so did I. Thus, Lionel took his place among the “shades of blue” as a “good guy” first and foremost.  It was around this time that my family formed a bond with our doctor’s family that now spans 38 years. This family had adopted an African-American boy and Vietnamese girl. My exposure to their Vietnamese daughter was new, a shade of blue I had never encountered, but my idea about her had essentially already been formed, and for me she took her place in our lovely human rainbow.

I am grateful for this behaviorally influenced attitude, and shudder to think what my life could be if I had grown up in the next house over.

Reference

Hume, D. (1740; 1961). A treatise of human nature. Garden city, ny: Dolphin books.

Should student loan debt be reduced or forgiven?

“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.” ~John  Adams

There was a time when the greater purpose of higher education in the United States was creating informed citizens who could find a place and engage in a participatory democracy.  Americans have always prided themselves on being a beacon of democracy to the rest of the world; an example to counter dictatorial, totalitarian, or fascist regimes. We as a nation have promoted democracy as the way forward for countries who wanted to throw off the political and economic shackles of repression.

One of the instruments of promoting democracy took the form of access to higher education. Higher learning was seen as a bastion of everything from enlightenment thought to industrialization. We built cathedrals to higher education; Harvard University, for example, was founded 140 years before the American Revolution. The development of creative thinkers with a well-rounded education that included the Arts and Humanities was held in high regard as a moral, cultural and economic imperative.

After the Second World War, the GI Bill allowed millions of veterans to pursue higher education; for the first time in the nation’s history, higher learning was accessible to virtually all classes of people. This was truly a transformational moment in American history; most of the men and women who benefited from the GI Bill were the first in their family to go to college. These events coincided with a temporary spike in civic engagement that lasted well into the 1960s; voter participation was particularly strong at this time (Pintor, Gratschew & Sullivan, 2003).

It is clear from John Adams’ quote that the Founders intended a role for the Federal Government in the education of our nation. However, if Adams’ were transported from his time to the present, he would not recognize anything in our current education policy that demonstrated this priority. In fact, for the last thirty years or so, public education, including higher education, has either been under attack for supposed inefficiencies while continuously finding its funding subject to cuts; or has been commodified by corporate interests to be little more than vocational education factories to supply their too often temporary, low-paying, benefits-poor labor force. But perhaps the most telling aspect of the shift in the curriculum emphasis in higher education is the sharp rise in tuition, with the concomitant need for ever larger student loans. Student loan debt has exploded in recent years, with solutions to the problem ranging from forgiving most or all of the debt to abolishing the program altogether (Raum, 2012). The question is: should student loan debt be reduced or forgiven? As someone who believes that we cannot call ourselves a fully functioning democracy if every citizen does not have equality of opportunity, I argue that not only should student loan debt be reduced or forgiven, but also that tuition costs should be reduced and that all of this can be paid for if our national priorities are in order. In this paper I will show how our priorities have been skewed away from a democratic notion of education to one that largely benefits corporations and university administrators.

If we are to comprehend what the Founders intended for educating the American populace, and how education can feed the soul of democracy, it is instructive to understand the forces behind the psychology and measures employed to undermine democracy (while disguised as pro-democracy), bifurcate our education system along class lines, and blur the distinction between the economic (capitalism) and the political (democracy) in order to maintain the balance of power in the direction of big business and away from the average citizen and their voting voice.

In the 1920s, government, PR and advertising firms, and business leaders, spurred by the success of President Woodrow Wilson’s World War I propaganda service, banded together to form public opinion and habits around “creating artificial wants, imagined needs, a device recognized to be an effective technique of control” (Chomsky, 2004). Edward Bernays, a member of Wilson’s propaganda service and one of the founders of the PR industry, claimed that “the general public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders whose role in a democracy is to be spectators, not participants” (Chomsky, 2004). These business and government leaders sought to create a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life” (Chomsky, 2004) through the focus on meaningless and superficial consumption. They knew that, just as in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, a passive, disinterested public is one that is also easy to control and manipulate; one that will turn command of their lives over to presumably better educated, business-savvy men of property. Though the New Deal cultural programs and introduction of the GI Bill served to ameliorate some of the darker aspects of this form of brainwashing, the process of cultivating a passive American public has continued mostly unabated ever since.

Another aspect of this anti-Democratic agenda was to champion the notion of two sets of standards for education as it related to democratic participation. Journalist Walter Lippman, in concert with the aforementioned parties, reported on his version of “democracy” in the 1920s, stating “…representative democracy entailed creating two modes of education – one mode would be for the elite, who would rule the country and be the true participants in the democratic process, and the other branch of education would be designed for the masses, whose education would train them to be obedient workers and passive spectators rather than participants in shaping democratic public life” (Giroux, 2004).  On the other hand, in the tradition of John Adams and the Founders, Henry Giroux makes the case that “Progressives like W.E.B. Dubois, John Dewey and Jane Addams rejected such a divergence of educational opportunity outright. They believed that education for a democratic citizenry was an essential condition of equality and social justice and had to be provided through public and higher education” (Giroux, 2004).

In 1964, Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, recognized what was happening to higher education and to students hoping to benefit from it. Before his now-famous comments on “the operation of the machine,” he told his audience that University of California at Berkeley President Kerr compared the Board of Regents to shareholders in a corporation and himself to the manager of said corporation, which for Savio meant that the students are raw materials, to be sold in the market place; Savio strenuously objected to this characterization, stating, “we are not employees, we are human beings!” (Savio, 1964).

The commodification (we as individuals are a commodity, and our entrance to a higher social class will cost us) and vocationalization (shift from humanities to a business-oriented or corporate training model) of higher education has resulted in ever-rising tuition costs. University presidents are hired from the ranks of the corporate world and are paid accordingly (as long as they are generating the appropriate amount of revenue). Universities and corporations are teaming up to build entire degree programs around entrance directly into that corporation’s work force, going as far as including the corporate name in the title of the programs and courses; surely these firms are looking for a financial payoff. The direct influence of corporations on college and university curriculum and administration is a recent phenomenon, but it is no coincidence that its appearance on the scene coincides with the steep rise in tuition. In the 1980-81 school year, the average tuition fees, for both public and private four-year colleges and universities, were $8,672; in the 2009-10 school year, they were $20,986 (What are the…2011). During that same span, median family income was virtually stagnant, ranging from approximately $37,000 in 1980 to approximately $46,000 in 2008 (Median household income, 2009). Clearly, for the vast majority of Americans, college tuition is not affordable.

Perhaps one is not convinced that there is a connection between corporate influence at universities and higher tuition fees. I would like to introduce an additional tack, then. In France, there are no university tuition fees; in Germany, students or their families pay only $1,000 per year to attend university (Sheng, 2010). One argument that occasionally surfaces when arguing for reduced fees or free college education is, “Not one French university appears in the top forty of world universities; you get what you pay for” (Sheng, 2010). According to this line of reasoning, there is a correlation between higher tuition fees and a better education. Then why are American companies going out of their way to hire foreign workers (Bort, 2011), often paying them less than they would have to pay an American worker?; and these workers are supposed to be arriving here after attending inferior schools, whether from Asia or Europe, because higher tuition fees signal a better education! So we pay higher tuitions to ostensibly have the best university education, yet there are no jobs for us when we have completed that education/training and people who have studied in other countries, presumably with lesser standards and rigor because they pay little or nothing for it compared to us, are being paid less to do the jobs we have trained for at supposedly better colleges and universities.

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, the chief executive of Intel, Craig Barrett, discussed the integration of India, China, and Russia into the new global economy this way: “I don’t think this has been fully understood in the United States. If you look at India, China, and Russia, they all have strong educational heritages…The big change today from what’s happened over the last 30 years is that it’s no longer just low-cost labor that you are looking at. It’s well educated labor that can effectively do any job that can be done in the United States (Herbert, 2004). What about American educational heritage? Long before the student loan debt problem reared its ugly head, Americans had been led to believe that we have the best educational system in the world; now we’re supposed to believe that it’s a good thing to have corporate logos plastered all over campuses, professors and administrators more concerned about the bottom line than educating future citizens, and college sports programs (sponsored by corporations) raking in hundreds of millions while tuitions skyrocket; and all of this to see good-paying jobs either shipped out of the country, or filled with foreign workers from “strong educational heritages?”

            Then there is the matter of our colleges and universities becoming increasingly more vocational. This is not working out very well for Americans, either. The few manufacturing jobs left in this country are now often filled by workers who went to college, where in the past most of these positions were filled by less educated workers. Does a college education make them more productive? It appears not. Productivity levels in most of Europe are higher than the U.S. (including France); number of hours worked in manufacturing in Europe has trended higher for several years; and workers are better paid in these countries (International comparisons of…2011). If vocationalizing higher education was supposed to improve the corporate bottom line, it appears it might not be working so well for anyone (unless the company moved the jobs overseas); especially workers, some who are paying those high tuitions. We are paying higher tuitions to work longer hours at lower paying jobs. And we often can’t afford to pay back the student loans.

“Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell” (Moyers, 2003).

Perhaps the mindset that Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle demonstrates in this statement is at the root of many of our society’s ills; it also brings us back to Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman and the indoctrination of the American public to a condition of apathy. What kind of a society do we want? Do we believe in democracy, or just pay lip service to the ideology? Do we want to educate our people to compete in a global economy? If our priority is to educate Americans toward full participation in democracy and compete globally, nothing less than a complete shift in how we organize our society is in order. I am sure the people in Europe and all around the world, whose way of life comes “straight from the pit of hell” yet who are better educated and more productive than us, would agree that a good place to start would be to reduce or forgive student loan debt, lower college tuition substantially, and place more emphasis on a humanities-driven, well-rounded higher education. No less than the future of the country is at stake.

References

Bort, J. (2011, December 06). Despite high unemployment, u.s. companies are hiring from overseas at record pace. Business insider, Retrieved from http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-06/news/30481039_1_h-1b-h1b-visa-petitions-visa-program

Chomsky, N. (2004). On nature and language. (pp. 182-183). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Giroux, H., & Searls Giroux, S. (2004). Take back higher education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Herbert, B. (2004, January 26). Education is no protection. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/opinion/education-is-no-protection.html

Median household income. (2009). Unpublished raw data, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median Household Income.pdf

Moyers, B. (2003, May 14). [Video Tape Recording]. Now with bill moyers. , Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript220_full.html

Pintor, R., Gratschew, M., & Sullivan, K. (2003, January). Voter turnout rates from a comparative perspective. Retrieved from http://www.idea.int/publications/vt/upload/Voter turnout.pdf

Raum, T. (2012, April 03). Explosion in student loan debt reaching crisis proportions, but largely flying under radar. Coast reporter. Retrieved from http://www.coastreporter.net/article/GB/20120403/CP01/304039992/-1/sechelt/explosion-in-student-loan-debt-reaching-crisis-proportions-but&template=cpArt

Savio, M. (Performer) (1964). Mario savio on the operation of the machine [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0

Sheng, J. (2010). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://jimsheng.hubpages.com/hub/Comparison-of-cost-of-higher-education-around-the-world

U.S. department of education, National center for education statistics. (2011). What are the trends in the cost of college education? (NCES 2011-015). Retrieved from Institute of education sciences website: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

U.S. department of labor, Division of international labor comparisons. (2011). International comparisons of manufacturing productivity and unit labor cost trends. Retrieved from Bureau of labor statistics website: http://www.bls.gov/web/prod4.supp.toc.htm