Those People

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All right, there are 47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

“SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters,” David Corn

This is one of those public statements that are so rich with multiple layers of irony that you’d think it was faked by a writing teacher. It’s a rare peek behind the mansion doors. Romney, like all financiers and big business people, has made his living using every government subsidy available, starting with his income tax rate. (Here’s a piece,“Romney’s ‘Crony Capitalism’: Bain’s Big Government Subsidies,” outlining the history of his public dependencies. Never mind the billion dollar government bailout of Romney’s Olympics.)

The irony gets a little nastier when you consider that the economic crash, and so the ongoing need of so many for help ranging from food stamps to unemployment insurance, has its roots in the unwavering Republican passion for deregulation and austerity, despite all evidence that these things hinder economic growth, among other things. It’s also a very deceptive statement; we all pay all sorts of other taxes, from social security to property to sales taxes. The poorer we get the fewer people pay income tax because it’s a progressive tax.

Romney assumes that corporate welfare is beyond reproach and everyone else’s public support suspect. The last irony is that this reveals more about Romney’s class biases and politics than just about anything else in the campaign, with the sole exception of his wife’s comment that, “We’ve given all you people need to know.” This isn’t a politician speaking to citizens, it’s an aristocrat’s habitual complaint about the impossibility of finding a honest servant who will work hard for almost nothing and won’t steal the silverware.

Posted in: Writing

Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Follow the Money

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Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system–i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.

“Public Schools: Make Them Private” Milton Friedman

Emanuel in fact has built a strong base of donors outside the labor movement, including corporate and cultural icons and even some prominent Republicans. He received a $50,000 donation from real estate magnate Donald Trump, who flirted with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a disclosure to the elections board showed.

“Wealthy base helps Emanuel take on Chicago teachers union,” Nick Carey

“The new vision, championed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who used to run Chicago’s schools, calls for a laser focus on standardized tests meant to gauge student skills in reading, writing and math. Teachers who fail to raise student scores may be fired. Schools that fail to boost scores may be shut down.

And the monopoly that the public sector once held on public schools will be broken with a proliferation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run— and typically non-union.”

“Chicago Teachers Striking Out on Education” Jayne Matthews-Hopson

I’ve been reading pieces by Doug Henwood, Corey Rubin, and then Jane Van Galen on why, despite the Chicago Teacher’s Unions’ strong progressive record and detailed, reasonable agenda for the Chicago public schools, so many liberals seem to echo the traditional conservative hatred for both teachers and for teachers’ unions. This liberal mistrust seems to have deep roots in class bias as much as in economic and political opportunism.

Mayor Emanuel, and Jayne Matthews-Hopson, one of his many allies at the Democrats for Education Reform, seems to sit right at the crossroads of several important currents in U.S. culture. Van Galen and Rubin both suggest that many upper middle class or wealthy Americans have long felt a powerful disdain towards teachers, people who have in their view “opted out” of the race for wealth and so are either failures or simply mediocre.

Friedman offers intellectual cover for these attitudes and hints in a not so subtle fashion that an enormous amount of money could be made if the economic potential of the public education system were “unlocked.” Buried down there somewhere is that freakish worship of markets and private enterprise, a religious fanaticism that, after the collapse of so many countries and businesses, ought to be transparently grotesque but somehow isn’t yet.

The teachers, and the teachers unions, are scapegoats, stand ins for the larger issues of the concentration of wealth and the rise in poverty. This is the story, as Corey Rubin reminded me, of Diane Ravitch’s description of the strange love some have for the reactionary documentary, “Waiting for ‘Superman'”. Mayor Emanuel, and the DER, want us to forget that we can’t fix education unless we are willing to try to ameliorate poverty.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Rahm Emanuel to Teachers Everywhere: Drop Dead!

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The Chicago teachers strike is, arguably, the most important labor action to occur in a decade if not longer. At bottom, the issue is simple. Who will pay for the gross mismanagement represented by 30 years of pro-business economics?  The Democrats are certainly the lesser of the two evils, but as the major’s intransigence shows, too many conservative Democratic are too willing to try to force teachers to pay for the sins of the fathers, in this case, ironically, that means, among other things, the Chicago school of economics. This is a test of raw political power against sheer ideological pigheadedness.

The theories advocated by Milton Friedman and his gang, with its freakish worship of so-called free markets and its irrational theory of rational choice,  brought us to the verge of a second great depression. Thanks to Friedman’s policy grandchildren, now in power in the House, efforts to remedy the economic downturn through stimulus have been stymied. School districts, dependent on property taxes (and other federal, state, and local funding) have been doubly hit, first with the collapse of housing prices and then again with budget balancing economic policies cutting jobs and services.

Emanuel is using contact negotiations to quash union power and push reforms that would link teacher salaries to student evaluation scores. This “value-added” approach has been denounced in a public letter signed by 18 Chicago education researchers. (In such a system, teachers are rewarded for the “value” they add to student learning, whatever that might mean.)  The researchers suggest  that such a system is “in its infancy” at best, hardly ready for large-scale implementation.  The union has a very different set of priorities, all focused on problems and not ideological dreams of privatization.

The teachers’ demands all center around making a start towards correcting the damage created by conservative economic policies and austerity-based budgeting, both in the schools themselves and in the neighborhoods around the schools. “We’ve seen public housing shut down,” union President Karen Lewis says, “public health clinics, public libraries and now public schools.  There is an attack on public institutions, many of which serve low-income and working-class families.”  I hope that President Obama is reelected but I also hope that the union wins and that, come spring, more unions begin to fight and win these sorts of battles.

 

Posted in: Writing