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labor

Uber and Lyft Want to Replace Public Buses

Joshua Brustein Chicago Tribune
In Uber's early days, it said it wanted to be "everyone's private driver." Now the company and its main U.S. competitor, Lyft, are playing around with the idea of becoming the bus driver, too.

labor

State Terrorism and Education, the New Speculative Sector in the Stock Market

Renata Bessi and Santiago Navarro F. El Enemigo Común
(Orginally published in Spanish on SubVersiones, see links at the end.) If the national teachers movement in Mexico manages to bring down the educational reform, there will be a path to bringing down all the structural reforms that are occurring in the country’s strategic sectors, such as the energy sector. This is the assessment that teachers are making. This is precisely the fear of the federal government.

tv

Why Are The Guards On Strike On 'Orange Is The New Black'? Privatization Got To Them

Mariella Mosthof Romper
One of Orange Is the New Black's greatest accomplishments in Season 3 was exploring the Litchfield guards' inner lives just as deeply, richly, and with just as much complexity as it has the inmates' lives. Rather than set up a false dichotomy where the prisoners are the "good guys" who just got themselves into a bad situation and the guards are the monsters, Season 3 shows us that the guards have it tough, too. So tough, in fact, that they decide to unionize.

School Solutions and Turnarounds

Bobbi Murray & Bill Raden Capital and Main
California has become ground zero for the national battle over charter school expansion. Some of America’s richest individuals and largest foundations are pouring resources into what critics view as the privatization of public education. Based on six months of reporting and interviews with experts, elected officials, educators and advocates on both sides of the debate, “Failing the Test” is a comprehensive portrait of how charter schools are changing public education.

The Ouarzazate Solar Plant in Morocco: Triumphal 'Green' Capitalism and the Privatization of Nature

Hamza Hamouchene Jadaliyya
Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco, well worth visiting. It is an important holiday destination and has been nicknamed the "door of the desert." That is not all what Ouarzazate has to offer as its name has recently been associated with a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a "green path."

Professor: Why I Am `Incredibly Pessimistic' About the Future of Public Education

Mark Naison The Washington Post - The Answer Sheet
Public schools in recent years have sustained assaults from believers in the privatization of the public education system. The powers that be plan a data-based reinvention of teacher education that will require the closing, or reinvention of colleges of teacher education. If these plans go through, a majority of the nation's teachers and teacher educators could lose their jobs in the next 10 years, replaced by people who will largely be temp workers-making minimum wages

books

Lester K. Spence's 'Knocking The Hustle'

Brandon Soderberg The City Paper
The idea that "everything and everybody everywhere should operate as if they were a business" has emerged a working definition of contemporary neoliberalism. Another way of putting it is that "everything and everybody everywhere" should actually be a business. Lester K. Spence shows how this philosophy pains most of us while focusing on neoliberalism's effects on black politics. Brandon Soderberg offers an introduction to Spence's argument.
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