These are recent Tweets from Bernie Sanders @ http://twitter.com/#!/senatorsanders @SenatorSanders. Senator Bernie Sanders is the longest serving independent in congressional history. Tweets are from the senator's staff. http://sanders.senate.gov
October 2, 2011
In 2009 Exxon Mobile made $19 billion in profits, paid no federal income taxes and took a $156 million rebate from the IRS.
Ford's federal income tax rate was just 2.3 percent in 2009 even though it made $3 billion in profits.
GE took a $1.1 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made over $10 billion in profits in 2009.
The US has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country in the industrialized world.
October 1, 2011
Bernie's audit of the Fed showed that $16 trillion was loaned to American & foreign banks & businesses. http://ow.ly/6Kv4M
In their heydays, 40% of total profits in America went to the financial sector. Today, the top 6 financial institutions in the US have assets equal to more than 60% of our GDP.
From '98 to '08 the financial sector spent over $5 billion in campaign contributions & lobbying to deregulate
After adjusting for inflation, middle class families earned more income in 1998 than they do today.
September 30, 2011
Hedge fund managers who made a billion dollars last year now pay a lower effective tax rate than many teachers.
Between 1980 and 2005, 80% of all new income created in this country went to the top 1%.
The percentage of income going to the top 1 percent has nearly tripled since the 1970s.
During the Bush years, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion and are now worth over $1.3 trillion.
September 29, 2011
Today, the richest 400 American families own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
3 out of the 4 largest financial institutions are bigger today than before the financial crisis began.
Today, 1 in 4 credit card holders are paying interest rates of more than 20%. That is usury.
This year alone the financial sector spent over $170 million on lobbying & campaign contributions to gut Dodd-Frank.
From 1998 to 2008 the financial sector spent more than $5 billion on campaign contributions & lobbying.
Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.
September 28, 2011
Since 2000, nearly 12 million more Americans have slipped into poverty.
The official unemployment rate has been 8.6% or higher for 30 consecutive months, the longest on record.
Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits.
Corporate tax revenue in 2010 was 27% smaller than 2000, even though corporate profits are up 60% over the last decade.
A record-breaking 50 million Americans have no health insurance & 45,000 die every year because they don't have access to health care.
You get the idea. Make no mistake, the American public is absolutely fed up.
“The danger when a liberal class breaks down is that there becomes no mechanism anymore by which mounting rage and anger can be expressed within the system.” (Video below @ 28:53)
For decades the liberal class was a defense against the worst excesses of power. But the pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, labor movement, culture, Democratic Party, and liberal religious institutions—have collapsed as effective counterweights to the corporate state. In its absence the needs of the poor, the working class and even the middle class, no longer have a champion. The death of the liberal class has permitted the rise of a new and terrifying political configuration.
Back cover:
Liberals conceded too much to the power elite. The tragedy of the liberal class and the institutions it controls is that it has succumbed to opportunism and finally to fear. It abrogated its moral role. It did not defy corporate abuse when it had the chance. It exiled those within its ranks who did. And the defanging of the liberal class not only removed all barriers to neofeudalism and corporate abuse but also ensured that the liberal class will, in its turn, be swept aside.
Excerpts from pp. 9-13:
The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.
The liberal class refuses to recognize the obvious because it does not want to lose its comfortable and often well-paid perch...
The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions—the pillars of the liberal class—have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power...
The death of the liberal class means a new and terrifying political configuration. It permits the corporate state to demolish, without impediment, the last vestiges of protection put into place by the liberal class. Employees in public-sector unions—one of the last havens from the onslaught of the corporate state—are denounced for holding “Cadillac health plans” and generous retirement benefits. Teachers’ unions in California and New Jersey are attacked by corporate pundits and politicians who portray teachers as parasites thriving at taxpayer expense. The establishment of charter schools will help hasten the extinction of these unions. The increasing restrictions imposed on public-sector employees, despite their ostensible union protection, are draconian and illustrate the corporate state’s final attack on unionized workers. In turn, labor organizations (for the diminishing number of workers who still have unions) facilitate the disempowerment and impoverishment of workers...
Here's Hedges speaking about his book at The Sanctuary for Independent Media on October 17, 2010. If you have limited time, start at 20:45 where Hedges says, “And so we end up with a Democratic Party that speaks in a voice of such flagrant hypocrisy that it has killed its own credibility.”
And @ 32:50: “...what’s happened as we are propelled down this road towards an oligarchic or neofeudal society is that we are creating a permanent underclass, a permanently enraged underclass.”
Explore Hedges’s message and see if your gut picks up on the truth of it. Mine did, and I can see that the United States of America is marching toward a terrifying future.
And as Hedges states, all resistance will be need to be local.
1. Schwarzenegger leads the way with selling off California’s assets and removes those who question him from his path. This is neoliberalism in its true form: the transfer of wealth belonging to the masses (the State) into the hands of a small number of private individuals. Read this article carefully to absorb what is happening here. A local version of this would be if OUSD (Oakland Unified School District) sold its properties off, then turned around to rent back its schools from those new landlords in perpetuity.
2. Schwarzenegger professes his love and admiration for Milton Friedman: economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Free-Market, and the neoliberal creator of all this mess. The movement to privatize public education started during the Reagan years.
3. In “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” Naomi Klein explains all. It’s happening fast and furious now. And never forget that it was the same extreme free-market faction that originally caused our current economic decline, enabling some of their players to make astronomical profits. The book is meaty, and I bet the forces are keeping their fingers crossed that not enough Americans have the stamina to read it.
The Schwarzenegger administration has removed appointees from two oversight bodies that must sign off on its plan to sell California state office buildings, replacing potential critics of the move with people who support it.
The appointees—to building authorities in San Francisco and Los Angeles—were replaced quietly in recent weeks as the state began taking bids on the properties, and their removal likely quashes any dissent or independent financial studies that might have emerged as the property sales move forward.
In both cases, the replaced board members had questioned whether the administration's plan is in the best long-term interests of California taxpayers.
Last month, the administration removed two longtime appointees on the San Francisco State Building Authority, just days before the panel was scheduled to review the sale of the San Francisco Civic Center.
It is one of about a dozen properties the state has put up for sale in an attempt to raise money to help close the state's budget deficit. The sell-off was championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and approved by the Legislature as part of last year's budget package.
Two more appointees revealed this week that they had been removed from the Los Angeles State Building Authority for asking questions about Schwarzenegger's plan. Marina del Ray developer Jerry B. Epstein told The Associated Press that he had asked the state for a cost-benefit analysis of the plan.
Specifically, he wanted to compare the projected proceeds from the sell-off to the long-term cost of having to rent the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles. The building is scheduled to be paid off next year.
Instead, Epstein and retired real estate investment manager Rusty Doms received a two-sentence letter from the Schwarzenegger appointee who runs the state Department of General Services saying they were being replaced.
"It's the first time in over 60 years that I've ever been fired," said Epstein, 86, who has served as president of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners and as chairman of the California Transportation Commission.
He announced the move earlier in the week in an op-ed column he wrote for the Los Angeles Times.
Schwarzenegger's office referred inquiries on the issue to the Department of General Services. Department spokesman Jeffrey Young said the agency simply felt it was time to change appointments to bring in fresh ideas that were "more in tune with DGS's efforts and philosophies and strategies."
"We didn't fire them," he said.
Other cash-strapped states, including Arizona and Connecticut, also are attempting to sell state assets, but California's offering is by far the largest.
The budget bill that gave Schwarzenegger the authority to pursue the sale of state office buildings passed the Legislature last July. The legislation allowed Schwarzenegger to put 11 state properties containing more than a dozen buildings up for sale as a way to raise cash to shrink the budget deficit.
In addition to the Reagan building in Los Angeles and the Civic Center in San Francisco, the properties include the California Public Utilities Commission building in San Francisco and buildings in Sacramento that house the attorney general's office and state Franchise Tax Board.
Real estate firm CB Richard Ellis won the contract to manage the sale and in February began taking offers on the so-called "Golden State Portfolio."
State officials hope the properties will sell for about $2 billion total, but the net amount that will go to the state's general fund will be far less. After paying off the various construction bonds, the state expects to be left with $660 million, which would cover only about 3 percent of California's $20 billion deficit.
"It's like getting a pail of water to help the Titanic not sink," Epstein said.
Epstein and former San Francisco State Building Authority member Don Casper questioned whether the sell-off is in the best interest of taxpayers, especially since many of the buildings would be paid off in less than 10 years, meaning the state would own them free and clear.
The little-known building authorities oversee the state-owned properties in Los Angeles and San Francisco and must sign off on the plan before they can be sold. The Los Angeles authority is scheduled to meet April 15 to elect new authority members.
They were established three decades ago after the state decided that owning its government buildings was a smarter, long-term financial decision than being subject to annual rent increases. Then-Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, signed off on the plan as a way to save money and consolidate state offices.
Schwarzenegger's plan marks a return to the days when California taxpayers were beholden to landlords.
"It's a reverse mortgage, because at the end of the day, the state will no longer own the buildings. That means the state will be paying rent forever," Casper said in an interview.
Under the administration's plan, California would sell the buildings and enter 20-year leases with the new owners, who could impose rent increases every five years.
Experts in commercial real estate earlier told the AP that trying to sell such properties in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression was folly, ensuring that the state would not get full value.
The first attempt seems to support that logic. Last month, the Schwarzenegger administration rejected all seven bids for the state-owned Orange County Fairgrounds because they came in too low. State officials initially projected they could get between $96 million and $180 million for the Costa Mesa property, but the highest bid came was $56 million.
The recent moves by the Schwarzenegger administration had the effect of silencing dissenting voices.
Mike DeNunzio, a Republican from San Francisco, said he replaced Stan Moy as president of the San Francisco State Building Authority after being vetted by the governor's office. Moy did not return a telephone message seeking comment.
DeNunzio said it was right for the governor to remove Casper, who told the San Francisco Weekly that he had concerns about turning the California Supreme Court into tenants of a commercial enterprise. The court is housed at the Civic Center, one of the properties to be sold.
"With all due respect, Don is the one who made the fuss," said DeNunzio, who said he assured administration officials that he supported their plan. "He concluded whatever the reason, his concern or financial judgment, he would oppose this—and that was not his role. It was beyond his purview."
Casper and Epstein disagree, saying they were acting in the best interest of the public in raising questions about the sell-off.
"It just doesn't make economic sense," Epstein said.
“Maria and I were so sad to hear about Milton Friedman’s death. Milton and his wife Rose, I have said many times, were not only my dear friends. They have been heroes to me for much of my life.
“Milton was one of the great thinkers and economists of the 20th Century, and when I was first exposed to his powerful writings about money, free markets and individual freedom, it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt.
“I wound up giving copies of his books and ‘Free to Choose’ videos to hundreds of my friends and acquaintances, and later I was lucky enough to meet the Friedmans and we became fast friends.
“A much-beloved Nobel Prize winner and advisor to three presidents and leaders around the world, Milton was kind enough to serve on my Council of Economic Advisors. He was a constant source of inspiration and insight.
“The world has lost a true giant, a tireless advocate for freedom, and I have lost a great friend. Our thoughts and prayers go to Rose and the rest of the Friedman family.”
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
3. “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” by Naomi Klein. Klein might well argue that the situations which arise and compel the government to unload their assets are in fact manufactured by the pro-privatization forces themselves.
"The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today."
- In the 1950’s and 60’s, the CEO’s of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker.
- In the mid-1950s, 36% of the United States labor force was unionized.
- By 1980, the big company CEO took home roughly 40 times the worker’s wage.
- By 1989, the unionized United States labor force had dropped to about 16%.
- By 1990, the big company CEO took home roughly 100 times the worker’s wage.
- By 2000, only 13% of our labor force was unionized.
-By 2007, executives at the largest American companies received about 350 times the pay of the average employee.
-The United States is now one of the most economically stratified societies in the western world. A 2008 study found that the top .01% — or 14,000 American families — hold 22.2% of wealth. The bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, control just 4% of the nation’s wealth.
PS: Prop 16 is more of the same. PG&E (private company) concocted the ballot initiative to undercut competition from municipal (state-owned) power agencies. The proposition will require that any attempt to have electric service supplied by a public entity must be voted on by the public, and will require a Two Thirds majority to pass. Basically the proposition outlaws future public power (or community controlled power) in California. PG&E is almost the sole financial support for the proposition.
But, I suppose none of this is any matter. Everyone can now go back to watch “Dancing with the Stars"...
The extreme amount of hatred and venom being hurled at public school teachers these days has got to be some sort of misdirected expression of the deluded people who still think that all things are possible for all people in this country. Or, is it the result of manipulation by those who are fully aware of what is going on and decided to toss in a red herring?
This country’s social mobility has pretty much hit the wall and we are entering uncharted territory. The empire is in decline. The citizenry knows that things aren’t right, but still haven't completely computed it. They don’t know what else to do other than to join in the fun of blaming a whole class of workers.
Mind you, I am not a teacher and I don't belong to a union. I am a longtime urban public school parent observer who is monitoring events and sensing that something evil is afoot.
Did you see Newsweek last week? What a stunning and uninformed attack on teachers and teachers' unions. The cover of the magazine told the story: The Key to Saving American Education, by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert. It was printed on a classroom blackboard. In the background, on the same blackboard, was the handwritten phrase, repeated again and again, "We must fire bad teachers."
The story itself is a parody of a right-wing rant. It seems that the nation's classrooms are overrun with "bad teachers," pedophiles, "weak" teachers, ineffective teachers, dumb teachers, and others who remain in the classroom only because they have "lifetime tenure." Evil teachers' unions protect these people who are harming our nation's children. Researchers now know, the writers say, that if we could fire all these malingerers, the notorious achievement gap between the races would soon close and America would once again lead the world in education.
I submit to you that teachers have been targeted because their work symbolizes our nation’s uncertain future. It is easy to attack the nurturers and caregivers of our children because they are fairly ineffective with defending themselves and with retaliating against the attacks. Stressed public school teachers are too busy working on the daily tasks of trying to make 25-35 kids focus on class work and behave right, and at the end of the school day, their energy is drained. Add to that the fact that, these days, the teachers are increasingly demoralized. I believe this demoralization is one of the primary goals because it produces emotional breakdown and powerlessness.
It would be much harder for people to go after the higher status entities that function with an aggressive, masculine nature, like the business, legal, or warrior classes. What else explains why the nation’s response to what Goldman Sachs did (and is still doing) to us has been so muted?
So why go after the teachers? Because they’re easy targets and bullying is an adrenaline rush. It's also easier to bully and blame than to deal with the deeper, societal issues that eat away at this country.
The nasty scapegoating mentality is best revealed by the “no excuses” rhetoric. But the fact is that we will never be a society where everyone gets a college degree, where people at higher positions on the social ladder willingly sacrifice their spot to someone else, and where the poor and the less fortunate don’t exist.
As for the scene in urban areas, Michelle Alexander (author of “The New Jim Crow”) is telling the difficult-to-hear-truth: America now has a permanent under-caste. She writes:
Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
*There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
Think any of this might impact the academic achievement of the children born into this caste? Of course, you will never hear anything significant about this theme acknowledged or uttered by the people now setting education policy and pushing for "reform." That such a stark admission is missing is either by intentional neglect, or because their heads are buried in the sand.
Either way, this country's approach is very dangerous stuff. It's a bit difficult to bring this up out loud, but is anyone else getting that slight sense that fascism and/or thoughts of genocide are lurking in the wings?
...Blacks and Hispanics, and especially those who are young and those who are poor, are disproportionately singled-out for this peculiar form of police harassment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly and other top leaders in this town would never tolerate this kind of systematic abuse of middle-class or wealthy, white New Yorkers.
The overwhelming majority of the stops yield no law-enforcement benefit whatsoever. An analysis of the stops in the first three quarters of 2009 showed that contraband, which usually means drugs, was found on just 1.6 percent of the blacks who were stopped, 1.5 percent of the Hispanics, and 2.2 percent of the whites (who are stopped far less often than the other groups).
Comments like this are meant to be scary, scary, scary!
OR -- Is it that those types of comments are being launched by the corporatocracy to serve as a distraction, or a manipulation of public sentiment? The facts don't seem to jibe, and the arguments don’t make sense.
To expand your critical thinking, read the article by Beryl Lieff Benderly in the 2/22/2010 issue of Scientific American, Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?: American science education lags behind that of many other nations, right? So why does it produce so many talented young researchers who cannot find a job in their chosen field of study? Here are some excerpts, the bolding is mine:
For years, Americans have heard blue-ribbon commissions and major industrialists bemoan a shortage of scientists caused by an inadequate education system. A lack of high-tech talent, these critics warn, so threatens the nation’s continued competitiveness that the U.S. must drastically upgrade its K-12 science and math education and import large numbers of technically trained foreigners by promptly raising the current limit on the number of skilled foreigners allowed to enter the country to work in private industry. “We face a critical shortfall of skilled scientists and engineers who can develop new breakthrough technologies,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates testified to Congress in March 2008.
But many less publicized Americans, including prominent labor economists, disagree. “There is no scientist shortage,” says Harvard University economist Richard Freeman, a leading expert on the academic labor force. The great lack in the American scientific labor market, he and other observers argue, is not top-flight technical talent but attractive career opportunities for the approximately 30,000 scientists and engineers—about 18,000 of them American citizens—who earn PhDs in the U.S. each year.
~~~~~~~
At the same time, however, the U.S. annually admits large numbers of foreign graduate students and postdocs and finds itself increasingly dependent on an inherently unreliable stream of young foreign scientists, mostly in the country on short-term, non-resident visas, to do much of the routine labor that powers American research. [more of the cheap labor we adore]The American research enterprise—the indispensable engine of national prosperity and the world’s leading innovation establishment—has therefore become vulnerable, observers say, to conditions beyond its borders and its control. At the same time, experts note that recruiting sufficient amounts of the talent needed for vital defense-oriented scientific and engineering work that requires security clearances has become increasingly difficult.
~~~~~~~
One thing that’s not in short supply are scientifically talented American students, whose academic achievements have been increasing rather than declining in recent years.“Students emerging from the oft-criticized K-12 system appear to be studying science and math subjects more and performing better in them, over time,” said Teitelbaum in Congressional testimony in November 2007. “Nor are [they] lagging far behind comparable students in economically competitive countries, as is oft asserted.” The number of Americans earning PhDs in science and technical fields has risen by 18 percent since 1985, according to the authoritative Scientific and Engineering Indicators 2008, published by the National Science Board.
~~~~~~~
Arguments for the shortage based on the inadequacy of American education generally begin with the results of standardized tests used in international comparisons. Average scores for K-12 students in the U.S. never top those lists in either science or math (although they do in both reading and civics). On one widely cited assessment, Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), which tested American third and eighth graders between 1995 and 2003 and American 12th graders in 1995 and 1999, U.S. students ranked between fifth and 12th in math and science—results bemoaned by many as dangerously deficient.
But a detailed study of students’ performance on TIMSS as well as on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), another widely reported international comparison test, by B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration and Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., suggests otherwise. “Their point is that the average performance of U.S. students on these comparative international tests is not a meaningful number,” Teitelbaum says. Far from trailing the developed world in science education, as some claim, “on PISA, the U.S. has more high-scoring kids in science than any other country” and nearly as many in the top math category as top-scoring Japan and Korea, Salzman says.
But crucially from a statistical standpoint, U.S. students are by far the most diverse of any industrialized country, ranging from some of the world’s best-prepared to some of the worst among the developed countries. On tests comparing the U.S., Japan and five Western European countries, for example, white Americans on average substantially outscored the Europeans in math and science and came second to the Japanese. American whites came first in reading by a wide margin. American black and Hispanic students, however, trailed significantly behind all other groups on average.
But scientists are not generally recruited from the average students, Salzman notes, but from those with the top scores, of whom America has large numbers. Compared with the products of Asian secondary schools, American students “are free thinkers,” says Vivek Wadhwa of Duke and Harvard Universities. “They didn’t spend the last 12 years of their lives memorizing books…. They’ve spent the last 12 years dealing with real problems and solving them. [In America], you can walk up to your teacher and tell her that she’s wrong or he’s wrong.” In Asia, he continues, “you wouldn’t dare do that.”
Raising America’s average scores on international comparisons is, therefore, not a matter of repairing a broken educational system that performs poorly overall, as many critiques suggest, but rather of improving the performance of the children at the bottom, overwhelmingly from low-income families and racial and ethnic minorities. This discrepancy, of course, is a vital national need and responsibility, but it does not reflect an overall insufficient supply of able science students.
~~~~~~~
Spot shortages may exist in certain limited fields, especially those that are new or that require citizenship for security clearance. But in general, writes Harvard’s Freeman, “the job market for young scientists and engineers has worsened…relative to… many other high level occupations, which discourages US students…[but] the rewards are sufficient to attract large immigrant flows, particularly from less developed countries,” in a study published by National Bureau of Economic Research.
~~~~~~~
Recruiting abroad "benefits the country by tapping a large and relatively inexpensive pool of talent at the cost of reduced incentives for native-born individuals to go into science and engineering,” he writes. His Harvard economics colleague, George Borjas, for example, has demonstrated that inflows of foreign students and scientists do, indeed, depress opportunities and incomes for both Americans and foreigners.
It is widely believed and lamented that U.S. students perform poorly on international comparisons of academic achievement. For example, Edward Silver reports that U.S. seventh- and eighth-grade students performed poorly on the mathematics section of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 1995) and that this indicates "a pervasive and intolerable mediocrity in mathematics teaching." Likewise, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education attributed the reportedly poor performance of U.S. middle- grade students on the TIMSS 1995 mathematics assessment to the ineffectiveness of mathematics education. Such perceptions have led to grave concerns about the future economic competitiveness of the U.S. For example, Rita Colwell, the former director of the National Science Foundation, has stated that if the U.S. is to maintain its position in the world economy, it is critical for the nation's students to achieve at high levels in mathematics and science. The results of international assessments of student achievement are far more nuanced than the headlines lead citizens to believe. Having examined six comparisons of performance--in various subjects and at various levels--by students in the U.S. and other industrialized nations, Mr. Boe and Ms. Shin conclude that the dire pronouncements about America's standing are greatly exaggerated. Their examinations are described in this article.
Why can't these legitimate points get adequate national attention and traction? Why would the extremely smart Bill Gates and others want to spread misinformation?
Perhaps the CEO oligarch-types, now in charge of U.S. public education, might actually want to see a glut of highly educated American scientists produced, so they can eventually pay them even less. This would reduce their dependence on the cheap foreign workers they prefer to currently employ.
And remember, the CEO oligarchs are a big piece behind the starvation and privatization of U.S. public education. The "create-a-crisis" approach is a well-documented neoliberal tactic used to create panic and fear, so drastic changes never thought possible before, can be slipped by the citizens who have been emotionally-destabilized. It happens all the time; just read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.
In this instance, global lies about public education inadequacies are being used to build suspicion and mass anti-public education public opinion -- it costs too much money, all the teachers are lazy, the schools are failures and need to be abolished, and everything is the unions' fault. In such a milieu, the structure can be more easily destroyed. To learn more, read the work of Gerald Bracey who passed away in October 2009, some of which is here:
Watch this Bill Moyers' interview with Thomas Frank, the author of The Wrecking Crew. Frank explains how government-haters obtain positions of power within the government and then starve it from the inside. Their type of governing is one which actually wants as many inferior people working in the government as possible, as well as doing everything it can to incapacitate the workers' ability to produce a stellar product. The goal is to maximize government's incompetencies and failures. This keeps them well-supplied with more and more ammunition with which they can continue the kill.
Here’s an excerpt from the program:
THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you've described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay.
All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we're forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.
Those things have all sort of been dwarfed by the economic disaster and the wreckage on Wall Street. But I would say to you that all of these things that we're describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance. Okay?
BILL MOYERS: That government is a perversion.
THOMAS FRANK: Government is-- yeah, government is a perversion. And to believe that the federal government can be operated, you know, with all of its programs, can be operated well and do things that are good for the people, is, as you say, is a perversion.
And they look at someone like Barack Obama and it makes them seethe. Because that's, you know, that's what he's trying to do. What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they're in power deliver government failure.
BILL MOYERS: Not merely from incompetence, you say, but from ideology, from philosophy, from a view of the world.
THOMAS FRANK: And sometimes from design.
BILL MOYERS: From design? What do you mean?
THOMAS FRANK: Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don't believe in the mission.
And the result is that it doesn't-- they don't enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I'm smiling, because it's kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank.
They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, "Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?" "No." Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn't believe in regulating Wall Street.
BILL MOYERS: So, they made the Securities and Exchange Commission a laughing stock, if you will. They really did.
THOMAS FRANK: Right. Well, there's these horrible stories that came out. Once Bush was out, there was a study done of the SEC, as well. These people didn't even have like their own functioning photocopiers, okay? So, we're talking about the lawyers that are supposed to be protecting us from Wall Street. And they have to go stand in line at Kinko's to do their own photocopying. And they're going up against the best paid, you know, best educated lawyers on planet Earth, who represent the investment banks. And they're supposed to be defending us.
BILL MOYERS: The curious thing about this is that you and I and my audience knows that our ancestors believed that capitalism needed to be supervised. But when the conservatives came to power, they begin to muzzle the watchdog.
THOMAS FRANK: Yeah. Well, or you know, do away with it altogether, de-fund it. Look, the beginning in the 1980s, President Reagan came to office and came to power, and you remember the kind of rhetoric that he used to use in denouncing the Federal workforce. He hated the Federal workforce. And this is an article of faith among conservatives.
There's something called the pay gap that they used to talk about a lot in Washington, D.C. Which is, back in the '50s, '60s, and up into the 1970s, Federal workers were paid a comparable amount to what people in the private sector earned. Okay? So, if you're a lawyer working for the government, you got about as much as a lawyer working in the private sector.
Not as much, because government benefits are considered to be much better. Okay. Under Reagan, you had this huge gap open up between Federal workers and the private sector. I asked around. And I found out a government attorney makes $140,000 a year on retirement. After he's been there all his life. In the private sector law firm in Washington, you'd be making $160,000 starting salary. That's first year. Right out of law school.
BILL MOYERS: So what's the consequence of this pay gap you described? Or, do we get inferior government because of it?
THOMAS FRANK: Absolutely. It keeps the best and the brightest out of government service, unless you're really dedicated to a cause.
But let me go one step further with this, Bill. When I say this is done by design, I'm not exaggerating. And this is one of the more surprising things that I found when I was doing the research for "The Wrecking Crew," is that there's a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate.
I found an interview with the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1928, where he said-- this quote, it's mind-boggling to me. But he really said this. "The best public servant is the worst one." Okay? You want bad people in government. You want to deliberately staff government with second-rate people. Because if you have good people in government, government will work. And then the public will learn to trust government. And then they'll hand over more power to it.
And you don't want that, of course. Your Chamber of Commerce. And I thought, when I first read this, "That's a crazy idea. I can't believe that sentiment." And then I found it repeated again and again and again. Throughout the long history of the conservative movement. This is something they believe very deeply.
BILL MOYERS: It comes out of a definitive way of seeing things, right?
THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And we can summarize that very briefly. That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way.
Doesn’t this sound exactly like what's been happening to public education over the years?
And once you become aware of the fact that the entire whole public ed deform movement started way back during the Reagan years, and once you catch on to the players who have been pushing it, everything falls into place. Read A History Lesson About the Sandia Report to learn how an important report was suppressed back in the early 1990s to prevent its results from interfering with the master plan.
Of course, when their mansions fall down the hill or their big business venture is about to fail, these people suddenly fall in love with the government. It's totally sick.
