If Welcome to the Dollhouse is the ultimate treatise on how many humiliating things you can do to one adolescent, Towelhead might just be close behind. The main difference is this: Dawn Weiner was supposed to be unattractive, awkward and pretty much the opposite of sexy. Towelhead's Jasira, on the other hand, is gorgeous, and although only 13, realizing to both her delight and horror that she is a man magnet.
Amid all of the debate on the $700 Billion bailout, the House of Representatives passed the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights by a wide (312-112) margin. The bill represents one of the first times in many years that Congress has taken action on credit card debt and abusive practices within the industry, and passed despite strong opposition from both the White House and credit card companies. The Senate is not currently expected to take up the bill before the end of the legislative session, but Campus Progress will be joining consumer groups in calling on the Senate to find time to consider this important proposal.
The bill would, among other things, protect consumers from underhanded games that make it more likely that credit card payments would be considered late, require that credit card companies inform their customers at least 45 days before any interest rate increase takes effect, limit the ability of companies to increase interest rates retroactively, and prohibit certain kinds of predatory and “subprime” credit cards.
Campus Progress has worked with partner organizations to advocate for strong protections for credit card borrowers, especially young people. We have testified before the House Financial Services Committee, issued action alerts to encourage young people to contact their representative, and signed onto letters to Congress with partner organizations.
We look forward to continue working with students, Congress, and partner organizations on this issue, and congratulate the House of Representatives for taking action on this issue.
Here's a great example of students taking matters into their own hands, and bypassing "authorized" methods of student participation (student government/council).
Scotland School for Veterans Children has made several changes for the new school year, the result of a student protest held at the end of last school year.
In late May several teenage students gathered by a clock on the lawn around the student cottages to petition for changes to certain school rules, policies, curriculum, campus conditions and dress code concerns. [...] The dress code was also an important issue for students, who wanted more variety in their school uniforms. The new red polo shirt was a popular addition to student wardrobes, he said, and the boys got longer shorts to reflect a more modern style.
The administration was quick to emphasize to students the importance of the student council, Cramsey said, as the protest last school year could have been avoided if students had realized they could approach their peer representatives.
It indeed would have been avoided, but it appears the students are under no illusions that the school would have acted. I'm sure some advisory committee or commission would "look into" the student demands and make recommendations after a year or two, by which point much of the rebellious energy would have been exhausted.
Students seized the moment, and for it they have won concessions. Hopefully this will inspire future instances of direct action, both in high school and at college. Power to the students!
Great news – we have heard from a very good source that the House of Representatives will be voting on the Credit Card Holders’ Bill of Rights sometime early next week! The credit card industry has been lobbying hard to kill this legislation behind the scenes, and so the support of strong consumer protections for borrowers by Campus Progress readers and activists have shown to Congress so far has been crucial.
We can’t stop now – we need to keep up the pressure until the minute that Congress votes. Check out the action alert below for more information, and to take action:
With the rising costs of college, gasoline, food, health care, and other expenses, credit cards are becoming the “safety net” for an entire generation. Unfortunately, credit card companies are using unfair and even predatory practices to increase their profits at the expense of the financially vulnerable or inexperienced. Luckily, the House Financial Services Committee has recently passed the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights, which will create several important protections for borrowers, and the bill will be voted on by the full House of Representatives next week, so take action now!
Last week, Barack Obama confirmed what many had hoped was a misstatement made in the primaries. Washington Post:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took the occasion to chide Columbia for its lack of on-campus ROTC. "I don't think that's right," Mr. McCain said. "Shouldn't the students here be exposed to the attractiveness of serving in the military, particularly as an officer?" Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) readily agreed, calling Columbia's anti-ROTC stance a "mistake."
From last night's Democratic debate, as reported by The Hill:
Obama and Edwards both said that they supported withholding funding from higher education institutions that do not provide ROTC programs to students. Clinton initially said she would enforce laws to stop funding but later said of prominent schools that do not have ROTC programs that "there are ways they can work out fulfilling that obligation."
What they were talking about is the Solomon Amendment — a law passed in 1996 (and upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court) that allows the Secretary of Defense to strip a college or university of all Federal funding if the school bans/prohibits ROTC or any other military recruitment on campus.
If you recall, the LGBT and anti-war communities flipped out at this, and rightfully so.
Having ROTC and military recruiters on campus violates many university non-discrimination regulations. To create sympathy for their argument, the Post casts it in classist terms of elite universities being the only ones without recruiters. But the long shadow of the Pentagon does reach these institutions, in the form of "defense" research into everything from smart bombs to spy satellites to bioweapons.
And the Post wraps it up with a bit of flag waving:
"Don't ask, don't tell" is a misguided policy. For the time being, though, it is the law of the land, and we see no sign that the Ivies' protest is having any impact on it. Meanwhile, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines defend all Americans, gay or straight.
But it is having an impact, as all boycotts do (to a greater or lesser extent). They're also serving as an example to others. As more and more universities refuse to bow down and subsidize Empire, we'll see reduced capacity for another set of Middle East (or South American) adventures, which is, scarily, still a possibility nomatter who wins in November.
Pressure is building to bring the Credit Card Holder’s Bill of Rights to the House floor. The bill would stop some of the worst abuses of the credit card industry (see below for more info). Consumer groups are working hard to make sure this legislation is considered, despite the opposition of the industry. They need your help, however, so take action:
With the rising costs of college, gasoline, food, health care, and other expenses, credit cards are becoming the "safety net" for an entire generation. Unfortunately, credit card companies are using unfair and even predatory practices to increase their profits at the expense of the financially vulnerable or inexperienced. Luckily, the House Financial Services Committee has recently passed the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights, which will create several important protections for borrowers. We need your help to make sure that this issue is considered on the House floor before the end of this legislative cycle.
An interesting rundown of some of the fascinating on-the-ground changes happening in Venezuela at the moment.
The creation of communal councils, legally recognised in April 2006, served to bring together these different sectoral organisations around discussing and acting upon a local development plan.
The idea behind the councils is that it be the communities themselves that diagnose the local problems, democratically decide on the tasks to be solved and, with funding from the national, regional and municipal budgets, begin to tackle these basic problems.
According to Farias, there are currently 36,000 communal councils.
I'd love to see a documentary about these budding institutions. While Obama merely talks about "from the bottom up," average Venezuelans are actually living it.
EDIT: Wikipedia actually has a great systematic look at the structure/function of communal councils. Sweet! Participatory democracy = awesome.
10 more progressive magazines and newspapers from across the country have joined the over 50 student publications that receive funding, journalism training, content support, and other forms of assistance from Campus Progress.
Campus Progress is proud to support the work of young journalists trying to get their voices heard and bring attention to issues that the mainstream press ignores.
This year, there are several new and exciting publications joining our network including:
*The Fine Print, a brand new publication at the University of Florida looking to break stories and talk about issues in-depth where the campus daily just doesn't cut it.
*The Bottom Line, a bi-weekly newspaper at UC Santa Barbara that serves as a critical voice for students from covering LGBT rallies to talking about race issues at the school.
*One World, a magazine focusing on human rights in the U.S. and around the world at Saint Louis University.
*Women Unite, a publication focusing on women's issues at Trinity College in Connecticut.
*The Collegiate Progressive, examining science policy questions in an accessible format at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.
Check out all the publications in our network here. It's also not too late to apply to join the network. Check out the online application here.
Trouble in the twin cities - police have arrested, detained, and harassed many independent journalists covering the protest on the RNC, including Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!You can read more about what happened here and here.
Free Press has just put out an action alert urging people to take action:
Stop the Arrests of Journalists. Sign the Letter. Police in St. Paul arrested several journalists during protests of the Republican National Convention, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and an AP photographer as they were covering the demonstrations. Police also raided a meeting of the video journalists' group I-Witness with firearms drawn to arrest independent media, bloggers and videomakers. Arresting and detaining journalists for doing their jobs is a gross violation of free speech and freedom of the press. Journalists must be free to do their jobs without intimidation. Please click here to demand that press intimidation in the twin cities ceases immediately, and that charges against the arrested journalists are dropped.
While on vacation out East, I got the chance to pick up and read Walter Benn Michaels' 2006 book The Trouble With Diversity. Might as well spoil the suspense and start by saying Benn Michaels didn't convince me when he argues (like Michaels Lind and Tomasky) that left-wing "identity politics" around race and gender stand in the way of a serious left-wing class politics. The book reminded me at various points of Catherine MacKinnon's argument (in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State) that feminists and Marxists view each other with suspicion because each party could undo one kind of oppression while leaving the other oppression intact. It's often not clear to whom Benn Michaels, an English professor, is addressing his argument. He offers criticisms (often clever, always articulate) of some academic arguments about identity, but he doesn't engage with many pivotal ones - like the literature on intersectional (rather than additive) approaches to identity, considering how identities mediate each other - how being identified as a poor Black woman has different social and economics meanings than just being poor plus being Black plus being a woman. He calls Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States "certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race," but cites only two sentences from it.
If the argument is directed at political practitioners, we're left wondering how he actually pictures the left gaining power and effectiveness by throwing race and gender overboard. In a telling line criticizing the focus on sexism at Wal-Mart as a distraction from exploitation there, Benn Michaels asserts that "Laws against discrimination by gender are what you go for when you've given up on - or turned against - the idea of a strong labor movement." Tell that to all the folks in the labor movement and labor-allied groups who've worked to support the Dukes lawsuit and the fight against Wal-Mart's sexism as part of a broad-based critique of a company that helpfully illustrates the connections between conservatism's threat to gender equality, economic justice, environmental sustainability, and other values progressives and most Americans hold dear. Benn Michaels' approach, which denies that rich people can be victims of oppression or that poor people can be oppressed by more than only poverty, would render the left unable to fully understand, let alone seriously engage, with what Betty Dukes and millions of women like her are facing (see also Whitewashing Race). As badly as Benn Michaels may wish for a revived labor movement, in advocating a disregard for identity politics he's echoing the disconnection from progressive social movements which contributed the labor movement's decline in the first place. Those blinders regarding oppressions besides class mirror the blindness to class of too many in, for example, the pro-choice movement - blindness of which Benn Michaels would be rightly critical.
That said, we needn't accept Benn Michael's arguments about the irrelevance of race- and sex-based politics to appreciate the book's critical insight: that the plutocrats triumph when poverty is understood as an identity to be respected rather than as a problem to be eliminated. Read More »
Students that work with Campus Progress in both Texas and Montana have started the year with a bang by getting stories in their campus papers.
In Texas, former Campus Progress Student Advisory Board member Hooman Hedayati wrote a powerful op-ed about what we learned from the de facto seven month moratorium on the death penalty caused by a supreme court challenge to the legality of lethal injection. Here is a snippet:
During the recent moratorium on executions, several notable things happened. Three states - California, North Carolina and Tennessee - launched studies of their death penalty systems. Two states, Maryland and Nebraska, debated abolishing the death penalty in their state legislatures. A third state, New Jersey, did away with capital punishment altogether. For the first time in Texas, Rick Reed, a candidate for the Travis County district attorney's office, ran on a platform opposing capital punishment.
Hillary Clinton got some deserved criticism for her lecture about how "it took a President" to pass the Civil Rights Act (didn't Obama prove he values the role of the President when he started running to be the next one?). But Robert Caro's op-ed today reminds us she could have said something worse:
"Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans," I have written, "but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life."
This isn't poetic - it's just offensive. Did LBJ tie African-Americans' shoes before they left the house to vote? It should go without saying that African-Americans have been a "true part of American political life" since before the birth of the United States. Among other things, they led a movement which seized the franchise by shifting public opinion and transforming the political landscape. That movement made the difference between the days when LBJ was strategizing against Civil Rights legislation to the days when Jesse Helms must claim to support it.
Caro seems smug towards Civil Rights activists who didn't trust Johnson's support until they got it. No doubt which bills Johnson supported, and when he came around to support them, is indeed, as Caro says, some combination of "ambition and compassion." It's short-sighted for historians to lionize Johnson's choices while disparaging the people whose vision, tactics, and courage made it possible for him to wed the two. Of course it makes a huge difference who the President is. But the Great Man Theory that tells us Lincoln freed the slaves and then Johnson gave their descendants the vote is a theory that should be in the dustbin of history by now.
Let's remember that as we consider the progress Barack Obama's nomination represents as well as the struggles ahead should there be an Obama presidency.
Want strengthen the progressive movement on your campus, bring engaging speakers and films to jumpstart dialogue, and engage in activism on local and national issues?
Then join the Campus Progress Student Network for 2008-2009! We’re currently still accepting applications to join the team of Student Representatives from the across the country who work with the staff of Campus Progress to advance progressive causes at the local level and make their voices heard on the issues they care most about.
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I am surprised that "Acceptance of Homosexuality" and "Liberal Activist Judges" aren't on there.
I like how not -all- the boxes are checked, implying that this is a warning to be heeded and it's not too late. If there's a deadly gamma ray burst, I'll be sure to get in touch with this dude...Oh wait, he didn't leave a return address.
..And in other shocking news, the sky is blue! The Pope is Catholic! Economists are myopic!
The Washington Post has a great article today about how many national political figures who live in DC, and are "representing" DC at the DNC next week, are clueless about DC itself:
Harold Ickes is the prototypical insider, a career political operative who knows as much about how Washington works as anyone. Just don't ask the former Clinton White House official and Democratic superdelegate what ward he lives in.
"Oh boy," Ickes said recently by phone. "It's either 2 or 7. I live in Georgetown."
Or who represents him on the D.C. Council.
"Don't know."
Or the name of the public schools chancellor.
"I don't know the name, an Asian woman."
If Ickes isn't plugged into the local political scene -- correct answers: Ward 2, Jack Evans and Michelle A. Rhee -- that's because there have long been two separate and distinct Washingtons. One is federal, the other local, and rarely do those in these two worlds think of one another.
Though that last sentence isn't really correct. I know the writer was going for a semblance of "balance," but the fact is that local-DC politicians are acutely aware of what's happening on Capitol Hill. Congress has veto power over DC, and not vice-versa.
Perhaps it's best described by stealing a line from Stephen Colbert's epic win of a Correspondents Dinner performance: "DC is a chocolate city too, with a marshmallow center."
In case you missed Campus Progress and The Nation's National Youth Journalism Conference this past July, fear not. One of the morning plenary panels on media and politics was featured in a recent episode of RadioNation with Laura Flanders. You can check out the podcast here featuring Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, Chris Hayes, Betsy Reed, and Amy Alexander of The Nation, and moderated by Daniella Leger of the Center for American Progress.
Kantipur is reporting that manufacturing workers of three of the largest tea estates in Nepal have taken over the factories and have started to run them again without management.
DHANKUTA, Aug 3 - Workers of three big tea estates, which remained closed for the last three weeks due to disputes between the management and workers, have forcefully took control of the processing factories and resumed operations.
The factories of Gurash Tea Estate, Kuwabashi Tea Plantation and Joon Tea Garden were taken into control by the workers on Friday and started tea production from Saturday.
Gopal Tamang, president of All Nepal Trade Unions Federation, a trade union closely affiliated with the Maoists, said the workers have resumed tea production and also started collecting tea leaves from the garden. He said the workers were forced to ‘capture’ the factories after the managements refused to initiate dialogues to end the deadlock and added that the takeover will continue until the managements agree to talk.
The tea estates were closed three weeks back after tea workers started protest programs demanding wage hikes, permanent appointments, and medical insurance, among others. The managements of the tea estates have been refusing to sit for negotiations citing insecurity.
This scenario is hardly a new one on the world stage. Less then a decade ago workers across Argentina did the same, taking possession of factories that their owners refused to run. This will be the first real test of the newly-elected Maoist government in Nepal - how will they respond? Read More »
South by Southwest (known as SXSW) is an annual interactive festival of film, music, art, and culture held in Austin, TX. For the third year in a row, they are giving the public a chance to weigh in on what panels they would like to see at the festival.
Campus Progress submitted a panel idea entitled "A New Wave? Iraq and Dissent in Cinema," which talks about the impact of Iraq War documentaries (event based on this panel held at NYU). While the online voting only counts for about 40% of the final decision, your vote could help bring us to the huge audiences at Austin next March! Read More »
Alex Cornell du Houx, a friend of Campus Progress, an Iraq War veteran, a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, and an outspoken leader for progressive causes, has just been featured in Newsweek Magazine.
He has spoken at the last two Iraq Action Camps sponsored by Campus Progress, and the students in attendance loved his passion and frankness when speaking about his experiences serving as a Marine in Iraq.
Read his story and watch a video here. We're thrilled that he's continuing his activism and getting recognized for it.
Get involved in our Iraq Campaign to bring a safe end to this war by clicking here.
A new video from the Enough project with Ryan Gosling and John Prendergast discussing genocide in Darfur and what you can do to help stop this crime against humanity.
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Flash back several months (courtesy 
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