Dear Commons Community,

The case of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African-American student, who was shot last month as he walked home one night has stirred national outrage and protests.  All the facts of the case are not known but it appears that once again loose gun control, racial profiling, and so-called Stand Your Ground laws (SYG) set the stage for this tragedy.  The New York Times has an editorial that reviews the issues of SYG:

“The local police in Sanford, Fla., ruled the shooting justifiable under a (SYG) law that was created to give the benefit of the doubt to people who shoot their guns in public areas and then claim self-defense. This statute goes well beyond the traditional principles of self-defense in homes. In 2005, Florida became the first in the nation to adopt this type of measure, with overwhelming bipartisan approval and the signature of Gov. Jeb Bush.

Since the enactment of the law, claims of justifiable homicide tripled in Florida, according to state data. “It’s almost insane what we are having to deal with,” Willie Meggs, the state attorney in Tallahassee, declared this week. Self-defense is being invoked in everything from gang shootings to backyard disputes between neighbors, with prosecutors left to disprove the shooters’ claims. “

The editorial conclusion:

“Stand Your Ground laws are abominations that should be repealed. One obvious flaw among many is that slain victims can never tell their side of the story.”

Trayvon Martin surely will not be able to.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that in a speech on Wednesday in Singapore, where he received a prize for urban sustainability, Mayor Bloomberg spoke about the difficulties of leading a city into the future amid a political culture that is often focused on the short term.

The mayor noted that technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.

“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”

Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Media, a group that studies how technology is changing politics, said he admired the mayor’s engagement with social media. But he said he could also empathize with Mr. Bloomberg’s concerns.

“He is expressing the difficulties and the challenges of using social media in an effective way in governing,” Mr. Rasiej said in an interview. “But I also want to encourage him to say the technology also offers an opportunity to build a better and more robust democracy.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the Professional Staff Congress  filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court, New York County, challenging the adoption of the controversial Pathways resolution by the CUNY Board of Trustees.

Below is an email fro PSC President, Barbara Bowen, providing the details.

Tony

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Dear Members and Colleagues,

Yesterday afternoon the PSC filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court, New York County, challenging the adoption of the Pathways resolution by the CUNY Board of Trustees. I am joined as plaintiff on the suit by Sandi Cooper and Terrence Martell, leaders of the University Faculty Senate. This is the first of two lawsuits against Pathways that the PSC plans to support.   We will also support a lawsuit to be brought by students at a later date, focused on the harm Pathways will do to their education at CUNY. Our press release on the growing opposition to Pathways was issued early this morning.

The lawsuit filed yesterday concentrates on the violation of the settlement agreement reached in 1997 between CUNY, on the one hand, and the PSC and University Faculty Senate on the other. That settlement agreement reaffirmed that the CUNY faculty, through the University Faculty Senate and the college faculty senates and councils, are responsible for the formulation of policy relating to curriculum, the awarding of college credit, the granting of degrees and other academic matters.

The PSC has invested considerable resources in filing the suit, and we will pursue it vigorously. But the most important actions are those you take on campus.

I attended the University Faculty Senate meeting last night, and not a single person spoke in favor of Pathways, yet many felt they had no choice but to vote for its approval. We do have a choice. Faculty and faculty bodies across the University are standing up and registering their opposition to Pathways. Those of us who hold elected faculty governance positions have the freedom—and the responsibility—to vote in ways that we believe are academically and pedagogically sound.

You can stand up for what you believe even if you are not on an elected governance committee. Sign the union petition on Pathways online by noon on Friday, March 23, and your name will appear along with thousands of others in the next Clarion. (Duplicate and ineligible signatures will be eliminated.)

Faculty and staff on every campus are struggling to do what’s right for our students, yet feeling forced to make decisions by the absurd and coercive timeframe for Pathways implementation. There is no justification for rushing a curriculum revision of this magnitude. It’s time for 80th Street to slow down, start again, and respect the role of our elected faculty bodies.

In solidarity,
Barbara Bowen
President, PSC

Dear Commons Community,

Today is a travel day and I will be returning from my Middle States visit to Clarion University outside of Pittsburgh.

Two quick news comments.

First, Mitt Romney won the Illinois primary handily yesterday.   Romney led Santorum 46.7 percent to 35 percent, with 99 percent of the vote counted. One unnamed Romney advisor declared that it will now take an “act of God” for Rick Santorum to win the Republican presidential nomination.

Second, Maureen Dowd has a fine column in today’s New York Times entitled, Heart of Darkness, that examines our involvement in Afghanistan.  Her position:

“The impossible has happened in the past few weeks. A war that long ago reached its breaking point has gone mad, with violent episodes that seemed emblematic of the searing, mind-bending frustration on both sides after 10 years of fighting in a place where battle has been an occupation, and preoccupation, for centuries.”

And her conclusion:

The epitaph of our Sisyphean decade of two agonizing wars was written last year by then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates: “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to send a big American land army into Asia, or into the Middle East or Africa, should have his head examined.”

We need to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.  Osama bin Laden is dead and it is clear that nation building is not our (American) forte.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post is reporting that in a new book to be released tomorrow, President Obama reveals his opinions of Fox News.  The book, “Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party,” was authored by journalist David Corn, and is based on interviews with the President.  Here is an excerpt:

“ after the midterm elections, Obama told labor leaders in December 2010 that he held Fox partly responsible for him “losing white males.…Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in…The Republicans have been at this for 40 years. They have new resources, but the strategy is old,”.

President Obama also took a swipe at Fox earlier this year:

“[Obama] told Rolling Stone, “The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

I am wholeheartedly with the President on this.  Fox News is destructive.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times started a debate/opinion page regarding so-called trigger laws which let parents who are dissatisfied with the way a public school is being run, turn it into a charter, replace the staff, or even shut it down, if 51 percent of the school’s families agree. The laws — which have been passed in various forms in California, Connecticut, Mississippi and Texas — have generated controversy.  Proponents of these laws see them as a way of empowering parents to take more control of their children’s education.   Opponents see them as one more battle in the war being waged against public education.

Diane Ravitch, education historian, comments:

“A parent trigger — a phrase that is inherently menacing — enables 51percent of parents in any school to close the school or hand it over to private management. This is inherently a terrible idea. Why should 51 percent of people using a public service have the power to privatize it? Should 51 percent of the people in Central Park on any given day have the power to transfer it to private management? Should 51 percent of those riding a public bus have the power to privatize it?”

Ben Austin,  executive director of Parent Revolution, former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and a former member of the California State Board of Education,  sees triggers as useful in the school reform movement:

“Those seeking to understand parent triggers need look no farther than the parents at Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto, Calif., who are actually using the law in real time. Parents there have spent nine months organizing 70 percent of the parents at their systematically failing school. With their historic new power they have sought collaboration with their district and teachers union, not confrontation, attempting to use the leverage of the parent trigger law to negotiate. The parents’ efforts are not a manifestation of the other side’s for-profit or “privatization” conspiracy theory – their initial proposal was for modest in-district reform rooted in minor modifications to their school’s union contract.”

Austin’s example is not a problem but surely there must be concern that trigger laws open up additional opportunities for charter schools, most of which increasingly are being run by for-profit corporations.

Dear Commons Community,

Dozens  of Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on Saturday night as police officers swept Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and closed it.

The demonstrators sat down and locked arms as officers moved in about 11:30 p.m. The protesters chanted “we are not afraid” as the police began pulling people from the crowd, one by one, and leading them out of the park in handcuffs.

The operation occurred after hundreds of people had gathered in the financial district to observe the founding of Occupy Wall Street six months ago. Earlier, protesters had embarked upon a winding march, after which police officers made initial arrests of about a dozen people near the park.

Occupy Wall Street will be major news this summer and fall especially as the presidential elections heats up.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I will be traveling this week to Pittsburgh, PA, as a member of a Middle States Accreditation Team Visit to Clarion University.  Established in 1867, Clarion enrolls  approximately 7,000 students and offers associate, baccalaureate and masters degrees.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The photograph above was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows hundreds of thousands of glittering stars shining in a globular cluster at the center of our galaxy.  The cluster is called Messier 9, and contains hordes of stars swarming in a spherical cloud about 25,000 light-years from Earth. The object is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, and when it was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764, the scientist could only resolve it as a faint smudge that he classified as a nebula (“cloud” in Latin).

Now, though, the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to make out more than 250,000 individual stars in Messier 9, in a new picture released on March 16. The bluer points indicate hotter stars, while the redder stars are cooler.

Below is a video from www.spacetelescope.org on Messier-9.

Tony

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsfQRpOR6mk[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

In his New York Times column, Joe Nocera comments on the firestorm created by Greg Smith’s op-ed piece wherein he described Goldman Sachs as a toxic and destructive environment. He reminds us that corporate America has its good guys and bad guys:

The Good:

“On Wednesday, Howard Schultz, the chairman and chief executive of Starbucks, will take the podium at his company’s annual meeting and talk about the importance of morality in business.

Yes, morality. I don’t know that he’ll use that exact word. But there can be little doubt that in recent years, especially, Schultz has been practicing a kind of moral capitalism. Profitability is important, he believes, but so is treating customers, employees and coffee growers fairly. Recently, Schultz has defined Starbucks’s mission even more broadly, creating programs that have nothing at all to do with selling coffee but are aimed at helping the country recover from the Great Recession.

In the speech, Schultz plans to make a direct link between Starbucks’s record profits and this larger societal role the company has embraced. He will make the case that companies that earn the country’s trust will ultimately be rewarded with a higher stock price. “The value of your company is driven by your company’s values,” he plans to say.”

The Bad:

“I bring up Schultz and Starbucks because this week we saw a different kind of American capitalism on display — the “rip your eyeballs out” capitalism of Goldman Sachs. In the corporate equivalent of the shot heard round the world, Greg Smith, a former Goldman executive, wrote an Op-Ed article in The Times as he was walking out the door in which he described a corporate culture that values only one thing: making as much money as possible, by whatever means necessary. According to Smith, Goldman views clients as pigeons to be plucked rather than customers to be valued. Goldman traders vie to see how much profit they can make at the expense of their clients, even if it means selling them products that are sure to “blow up” eventually. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” Smith wrote.

In the wake of Smith’s article, plenty of people raced to Goldman’s defense. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s billionaire mayor, whose company sells Goldman expensive computer terminals, went to Goldman Sachs’s headquarters in a show of support. The editors of his eponymous firm published an editorial that mercilessly mocked Smith. They and others pointed out that Goldman clients are big boys who can take care of themselves. Even some clients agreed. “You better not turn your back on them,” one Goldman customer told The Financial Times. Yet, he added, “They are also highly competent.”

The Conclusion:

“But there’s a reason Smith’s article has struck such a chord. It is the same reason that Goldman Sachs, despite having come through the financial crisis largely unscathed, has become the target of such astonishing venom, described as a vampire squid and the like. The reason is that the kind of amoral, eat-what-you-kill capitalism that Goldman represents is one that most Americans instinctively find repugnant. It confirms the suspicions many people have that Wall Street has become a place where sleazy practices are the norm, and where generating profits in ways that are detrimental to society is the ticket to a successful career and a multimillion-dollar bonus.”

Unfortunately YES!

Tony