Teenagers vs. Billionaires: Education is a Basic Right, Not a Consumer Good

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Student Movement Marks Radical Shift in Chilean Politics

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2012. 12. 24.

"Generation Without Fear" Demands Free Education in Chile ... University of Chile: The student movement ...

July 02, 2013

Education is a Basic Right, Not a Consumer Good

Teenagers vs. Billionaires

by JONATHAN FRANKLIN

Santiago, Chile.

“What day is it, Wednesday? Thursday?” asked Moises Paredes as his eyes drooped nearly shut.  Paredes, 18-years old, the national spokesman for a collective of Chilean high school students, is exhausted. On Wednesday Paredes helped organize a march of 100,000 Chilean students. Then he addressed a press conference to explain why the students had seized dozens of public high schools as part of their campaign for free university education.  The following morning Paredes and his classmates were roused and ousted at dawn as Chilean national police raided their school, which they had occupied.

“It is typical of this government, and especially Chadwick [Minister of the Interior] who think they can end this conflict with violence and instead are just adding more fuel to the fire,” said Paredes, “They are making the student movement more radical, leading to students seizing more schools and more universities.”

When the police arrived, Paredes hurriedly stuffed his change of clothes and a toothbrush into a white plastic shopping bag, which he now carries as he moves from one student organizing committee meeting to another. Along the way he continued to joust via Twitter with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera.

Paredes described Pinera – who is ranked by Forbes as the world’s 589^th richest person with a net worth of $2.5 billion — as an “intransigent businessman” who has sold Chile to the economic interests of a tiny elite. “It is abysmal that someone like him can have so much, so much money and others do not have a roof or even basic needs like public education,” said Paredes. “The state has forgotten their duties and let the market intervene across the board, privileging profits and you see this in healthcare, natural resources, education.”

Asked about his personal net worth, Paredes whips out his wallet, opens it to show no bills, no coins only a student bus pass. “If I don’t have enough for the bus fare I can ask the driver to let me ride for free.” For his phone calls, Paredes depends on fellow students to chip in. “One friend really helped me, he put a lot of money on my [cell] phone all at once,” said Paredes who described a gift of 5,000 Chilean pesos – a little over 6 GBP.

“I have not slept in 36 hours,” says Paredes, his face weary even for an 18-year-old. “And yes, I’m hungry,” he says, devouring a hamburger and fries while taking a flurry of phone calls from fellow student leaders, journalists and his mom.

“She tells me to be careful. At first she didn’t want me to be involved in the protests, she thought it would be too dangerous. You know she is from the other generation of the [Pinochet] dictatorship and they still have the fear that people who become politically involved will then be found [dead] under a bridge or disappeared,” said Paredes who expressed no fear of deadly reprisal from Chilean authorities.

As student leader for both his high school and the national coordinating committee known as Cones, Paredes is part of a new generation of Chilean political leadership. These are young men and woman who are still not old enough to order a beer or obtain a driver’s license, yet they are steering Chilean politics in a new direction. “I was never involved in politics until two years ago. No one from my family is politically active, these protests have been my training,” said Paredes referring to the Chilean student uprising that began in 2011 and which has ignited a profound nationwide debate over the role of public education in a democracy.

The students have consistently argued that education is a basic right, while the government led by President Pinera has defined education as “a consumer good” and the gulf between those two positions has changed little during the course of the now two year old protest movement.

While the student’s primary demand — free university education for all – has yet to be achieved, education reform has been catapulted to the top of the Chilean political agenda. Several university directors have been jailed for running illegal, for-profit institutions and Universidad del Mar, a private university that had more than 15,000 students was stripped of government accreditation and essentially shut down by government regulators.

As Chile goes to the polls on Sunday for presidential primary elections, public education is now a key issue that is addressed at every debate and at length by candidates across the political spectrum. Leading Presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet recently outlined a multi-year transition plan that would faze-in a system of higher taxes to pay for universal, free university education.

For Paredes, the education protests has completely changed his outlook on life. Before the student uprising, Paredes spent his free time taking singing classes, honing his tenor voice in school chorus and at public concerts. “Now with all the protests I have to dedicate my time to interviews,” said Paredes. “Now my voice is used to communicate other things.”

Jonathan Franklin writes for the Guardian, where this article originally appeared.

Why Have Student Loans At All? Let's Get the Burdens of Debt off College Students' Backs -- And Make Wall St. Pick Up the Tab

Higher education used to be free for millions of Americans. A transaction tax on the financial houses would make it free again.

July 2, 2013  |  

 

 

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Anyone with a heartbeat knows that Wall Street took down the economy, killed millions of jobs and hasn't had to pay a penny for the damage it caused. In fact we are paying them for crashing the economy in the form of trillions in bailouts and low interest loans.

Well, maybe it's time for Wall Street to contribute, rather than siphoning off our wealth. How about a sales tax on all transfers of stocks, bonds, and derivatives in order to fund tuition-free higher education?  

Why are high schools free but colleges aren't?

Access to higher education is vital to our economy and to our democracy. Today a college degree or post-high school professional training are the equivalent to what a high school diploma provided and signified a generation ago. For over 150 years, our nation has recognized that tuition-free primary and secondary schools were absolutely vital to the growth and functioning of our commonwealth.  

By the middle of the 19th century, New York City also provided free higher education through what would become the City College of New York. Hunter and Brooklyn colleges also were tuition-free, as was California's rapidly growing post-WWII state college and university system. The GI Bill of Rights after WWII provided significant resources to over three million returning veterans to go to school tuition-free, which in no small part, helped to build American prosperity for the next generation. (Tuition was even provided if GIs attended private colleges and universities.) A further impetus to free higher education came as America fell behind the USSR during the Sputnik-era space race.  

But the spread of free higher education stalled and then retreated precisely as Wall Street began to grab more and more of the nation's wealth. As financialization transformed the economy starting in the late 1970s, average wages flattened while Wall Street incomes shot through the roof. At the same time taxes on the super-rich collapsed placing more and more of the burden on working people. Lo and behold, free higher education rapidly became "unaffordable." Wall Street then swooped in with loans as students and their families loaded up on debt in order to gain access to higher education. This is the very definition of financialization.

As Student Loans Rise, the Rich get Richer  

As student loan debt climbed ever higher, the super-rich continued to rake in more and more income, especially in comparison to the rest of us.

Many financial elites rose to riches by packaging and selling every kind of toxic asset imaginable. They made fabulous amounts as they pumped up the housing bubble, and then made even more as it imploded. It turns out that wealth was based on hot air, as well as plain old cheating. (See How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour for a detailed account.) So far, neither Wall Street nor its super-rich patrons have been forced to pay for the damage they caused.

 

How to Make Wall Street Pay

It's not easy to tax the super-rich when they have their hooks so deeply into both political parties. However, the student debt crisis opens the door to force a provocative public debate:   

• Are we resigned to be vassals to Wall Street elites or can we redirect resources to invest in our young people?  

• Are we going to saddle our kids with decades of debt or are we going to make the Wall Street gamblers pay the damage they caused?  

The financial transaction tax (aka Robin Hood Tax or Speculation Tax) hits hard at Wall Street gambling. A small sales tax on all financial transactions will come almost entirely from those who are gaming the system by rapidly moving money in and out of markets. Eleven European nations are about to institute such a tax and have found excellent ways to enforce it. (If you or affiliates don't pay by using shell companies and other tricks, you don't do business in our country.) England has had one on stocks for the past 300 years and it works just fine. Clearly, a sales tax would successfully collect from the superrich.

Of course, you'll hear Wall Street apologist moan and grown about how such a tax will kill jobs, steal from your pension funds, and rob your kids' piggy-banks. All lies.

Unless you play with your 401k like a high frequency trader—which means you'll be fleeced by them anyway—you won't feel this tax. Neither will your pension funds, which are not supposed to churn your investments anyway.

As for jobs, when was that last time Wall Street produced real jobs on Main Street? They would just as soon finance a job smashing merger or the movement of jobs out of the country. The only jobs that would be hurt are a few at high frequency hedge funds that milk markets by making millions of automated trades per second. For the sake of financial stability and fairness, they should be put out of business anyway.

No, when it comes to hitting Wall Street elites, a financial transaction tax is just about perfect.

Let's encourage Elizabeth Warren to take the next step

Senator Elizabeth Warren opened the door to this debate as she attempted to stop student loan interest rates doubling to 6.8 percent in July. On July 1, they doubled. She wants the Federal Reserve to loan money to students at the same rate it charges too-big-to-fail banks, which is next to nothing at 0.75 percent.

Of course, most politicians and pundits think she's off her rocker. How dare she try to interfere with "market forces"? But as Ellen Brown of the Public Banking Institute shows in her excellent rejoinder ("Elizabeth Warren's QE for Students: Populist Demagoguery or Economic Breakthrough?"), it makes economic as well as ethical sense to invest in our young people. In fact, it makes a whole lot more sense than propping up too-big-to fail banks that have grown even fatter since the crash.

But why have any student loans at all?

Why accept the perverse idea that students should saddle themselves with decades of loan repayments in order to gain access to higher education? Even with interest rates at 0%, we're still asking students and their families to load themselves up with tons of debts in order to get access to the advanced skills and knowledge our economy and our democracy desperately need.

Isn't it in the national interest to invest in our young people, rather than loading them up with debt?  

Can we really beat the Street?

Maybe. It starts with having the nerve to ask for what we really want, rather than compromising before we start. Do we think Wall should pay reparations for what it has done to the economy? Do we think it fair to use that money to fund free higher education in order to rid our young people of crushing debt? If the answers are yes, we can start organizing.

The next step is to convince those working on the Robin Hood Tax to tie it to free higher education. That would allow financial transaction tax advocates to reach out to an enormous constituency—students and their families.   

And yes, we also we need some organizational magic, not unlike what sparked Occupy Wall Street. Perhaps, websites like AlterNet.org can link up with like-minded media outlets and progressive groups to form a vast coalition of the pissed-off! Millions might be ready for that.

The anger toward Wall Street is there. The outrage over ever-rising student debt is there. Now is the time to connect the two and provide some extra organizational juice.

No one has a magic bullet and no one can guarantee success. But unless we try, we will guarantee that Wall Street and its Washington minions will continue to rip us off.

Surely we have enough creative energy to build another path.

Les Leopold's latest book is How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds are Siphoning away America's Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013).

http://www.alternet.org/education/reparations-college-debt?paging=off

The Chilean Student

Movement and the Crisis of Neoliberal Democracy

September 23, 2012 5 Comments

Katy Fox-Hodess, Department of Sociology University of California at Berkeley

Francisco Nuñez Capriles, Department of History, Universidad de Santiago de Chile

Last month, following winter break, Chilean high school and university students across the country have once again occupied their schools, the latest upsurge in a powerful student movement that began in May of 2011. Though the student movement appears once again to be gathering strength, the government has shifted from its traditionally permissive stance on school occupations to a strong-arm position of dislodging students with police force soon after schools are initially occupied and, in some cases, having the police occupy schools for up to a week to prevent further student action. This shift has placed the student protesters in a more tenuous position than the position they found themselves in last year and the situation is in a state of flux.

It is clear, however, that the movement is not yet over, and Chilean students remain highly critical of the marketized educational system inherited from the dictatorship. Despite a seven-month long militant mass mobilization of students and their supporters in 2011, the protests have yet to result in significant substantive changes to Chile’s educational policies. The failure of the government to meet the students’ demands has resulted in a growing critique of the flaws of the democratic system negotiated at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. In this sense, the current movement can be seen as a second wave of pro-democracy protests, calling attention to the problems of marketization and the need to reduce Chile’s high levels of inequality and make government more responsive to the public.

Why have popular demands coalesced around the issue of education? Simply put, the possibility of social mobility through education has become a central ideological tenet of Chilean neoliberalism. Chile, which once had among the most powerful union movements and highest rates of unionization in Latin America now has a weak union movement and low union density. The result is very few good jobs for working-class people. At the same time, the state has promoted entrepreneurialism and higher education as the keys to social mobility, making state-guaranteed credit (albeit at high interest rates) widely available. Consequently, the number of students enrolled in the tertiary education system has grown exponentially in recent years.
The problem is that, unsurprisingly, the cost of education in an unregulated market has grown as well, making the cost of higher education in Chile among the highest in the world. Additionally, unequal funding at the K-12 level, caused in part by the diversion of funds from public schools to for-profit charter schools, means that poor students in the public system are not provided with adequate preparation to take Chile’s rigorous college entrance exam, the PSU. The result is a highly unequal educational system in which wealthy students have access to some of the best schools and universities in Latin America, while poor students studying at municipal schools receive subpar K-12 education and are locked out of the higher education system. Those students in the middle who decide to continue on to higher education have no choice but to take on significant debt at high interest rates in a tight labor market with no guarantee of good employment at the end.

The students’ demands reflect a very different vision of public education than the one put forward by the state. For example, the federation of state university students, CONFECH, has demanded free public education at all levels; a constitutional amendment guaranteeing education as a right of citizenship; the renationalization of the educational system (which was denationalized during the dictatorship); the end of state funding for for-profit schools and increased oversight; free public transportation for students; a change in the university entrance requirements favoring poorer students; increased investment in technical education; and funds to ensure educational quality and autonomy for indigenous communities.

The mobilization around these demands has been impressive. Dozens of high schools and university buildings across the country were occupied in 2011 by students, and a significant number of the occupations lasted for several months. Additionally, students at hundreds of schools participated in a lengthy student strike, lasting up to seven months in the longest cases. Students at many schools who had participated in the strike ultimately decided to repeat the school year rather than compromise with the government. In the town of Buin, outside of Santiago, high school students engaged in a hunger strike, while in Santiago, university students and youth set up barricades as they confronted the police. The whole country was riveted by the nearly year-long drama.

In addition to the occupations and strikes, students and their allies in civil society participated in mass marches in Santiago and across the country. Marches in Santiago incorporated hundreds of thousands of participants – by far the largest protests since the end of the dictatorship – and involved often violent confrontations with the police. Even many residents of Santiago’s wealthier and more conservative neighborhoods have supported the students. For example, in response to the police violence, evening protests known as cacerolazos (banging of pots and pans) were held, a popular protest tactic used during the Pinochet dictatorship. Finally, unionized workers engaged in solidarity actions, including work stoppages and a dramatic general strike called by the Central Unica de Trabajadores. Polls found that nearly four out of five Chileans supported the students, while right-wing President Sebastian Piñera’s approval rating dropped to the lowest level seen since the return to democracy in 1990.

Yet, despite the scale and militancy of the mobilizations, several rounds of negotiations with the government resulted in quite minor reforms relative to the students’ demands. The interest rate on government-backed student loans from private banks was decreased from 6% to 2%, and the government will now guarantee free tuition for students from the poorest 40% of families. However, the basic structure of Chile’s educational system – the unregulated educational market that lies at the heart of the students’ critique – remains unchanged.

Consequently, given government intransigence in the face of a massive and enduring protest movement with high levels of public support, students and their allies over time have moved beyond simply a critique of educational inequality to a broader critique of the neoliberal model and post-Pinochet democracy in Chile. Yet, given the increasing propensity of the government to use strong-arm tactics to immediately dislodge non-violent school occupations, as well as the near total failure of last year’s negotiations, it may be time for the students to further diversify their tactics.

Building stronger ties with other groups in civil society who have suffered under the dictates of market fundamentalism – particularly working-class youth who are locked out of both higher education and decent work – is essential. In fact, the students would be well-served by articulating their struggles with the struggles of workers more generally. After all, the students themselves will soon enter the workforce and their debt is simply a way of forcing them to pay an ever-greater share of the cost of reproducing their labor in a society with endemic high rates of unemployment and widespread labor precarity.

Additionally, the need to build alternate political organizations that incorporate cadre from diverse backgrounds – the student movement, the housing rights movement, the environmental movement, the Mapuche movement, the LGBT movement and the women’s movement, to name a few — has become abundantly clear as the traditional parties of the left are viewed with great skepticism by young people critical of their perceived attempts to co-opt or dilute the movement. A number of small, independent left parties have emerged in recent years. Whether one of these parties — or a new organization built from the ground up — could provide a vehicle for articulating a cross-sectoral vision of a society in which human needs would take precedence over markets remains to be seen, but the mobilizations of the past year and a half have shown that the time is ripe to move beyond the two-coalition political system of left-wing and right-wing neoliberalism. While a few months ago pundits were predicting the supposed death of the student movement, it may instead be the case that a broader movement for social and political change has just begun.

Katy Fox-Hodess is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies working-class consciousness and organization in Chile, as well as labor internationalism.

Francisco Nuñez Capriles is a graduate student in History at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile and a film-maker. He studies contemporary student and youth protests in the urban periphery of Santiago and 19th century Chilean social history.

http://www.isa-sociology.org/universities-in-crisis/?p=914

Only 40% of Chile’s Students Get Free Education, and They’re Fighting Back

• by s.e. smith
• April 22, 2013
• 2:31 pm

Remember how Chile’s student movement effectively ground the nation to a halt in 2011? Led by a handful of fiery and determined leaders, students took to the streets in major cities like Santiago to demand access to fair and free education and a reversal of the policies put in place during the notorious Pinochet dictatorship. Chile’s students captivated the international media for a few months, but they’ve faded from coverage since then, so you might be surprised to learn that their movement has been continuing all this time, and it’s ramping up yet again. 

The aspects of the Chilean student movement are complex, but in a nutshell, Chile has one of the most extreme income disparities in the world. University education costs about half the average annual salary of Chileans, and notably, only 40% of high school students are able to access free education. Consequently, students are forced from a very young age to make an extremely tough choice: do they want to go to school and expand the possibilities for their future and career, even though it will send them into significant debt that may be difficult or impossible to pay off?

Students are asking for free public education, stating that it’s a universal human right and something that never should have been dismantled during the Pinochet era. Now that Pinochet is long-gone, they point out, it’s time to move past the harmful policies of neoliberalism that damaged Chile and many other South American nations. Free public education could help address the drastic social inequalities in Chile as well as developing a more educated populace that could play a growing role on the global stage.

They’re also worried about the privatization of education and the larger implications not just for education but for society. Many nations have been grappling with similar issues as they confront for-profit education and ask if it is in the best interests of students as well as nations as a whole; in the United States, for example, for-profit colleges have come under close scrutiny in the last several years. Chile’s students want to spark an international debate, and they’re willing to give up their academic years to do it, if they have to.

It’s not just students taking to the streets. They’re being joined by educators and other education professionals as well as advocates and supporters who believe in their cause. Many are recognizing that education is part of a larger structural issue faced in Chile, where imbalances cannot be corrected by conventional means because people don’t have enough clout. In 2011, protesters were able to force the resignation of two key officials and bring about some policy changes, illustrating that their movement was working.

There are particularly important implications to the current resurgence of the movement, because Chile is about to face an election, and the current President, who has reached his term limits, cannot run again. As Michelle Bachelet advances her candidacy, many students are asking why she didn’t make education reforms during her previous stint as President (which was also marked by education protests), and they’re wondering if perhaps another candidate to support may emerge.

As a block, the students could have a significant effect on the vote, because at the height of their power in 2011, they enjoyed huge national support. Throwing their weight behind a specific candidate might determine the outcome of Chile’s election, and many eyes are turning to Chile as a result.

Related articles:

Chilean Students Burn Buses, Demand Education

Free Kids From Global Poverty Through Education

7 Ways Romney’s Education Plan Would Destroy America

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/only-40-of-chiles-students-get-free-education-and-theyre-fighting-back.html#ixzz2XwVYBjcf

Neoliberal Education and Student Movements in Chile: Inequalities ...

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Introduction Thousands of Chilean secondary and university students filled the ..... In the first stages of this movement, the demands were free transportation ...