November 3, 2011 in Education
There is a great Website out there and a book based on the Website was just been released October 27. Like the site, it’s titled “You Are Not So Smart. Here is a movie trailer for the book. It’s all about thinking about thinking.
September 25, 2011 in Education
September 10, 2011 in Education
Bloomberg Business Week reports that Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville announced Friday that Republican lawmakers will move to eliminate the state law requiring school employees to belong to unions, the latest GOP-led effort to weaken the power of organized labor in one of its longtime strongholds.
At the same time in the true spirit of GOP newspeak, Richardville said Friday he doesn’t support making Michigan a right-to-work state because it won’t help the struggling economy. [We are just going to remove this right for school teachers--not you big burly guys who work in the few factories we have left.]
Richardville also accused the Michigan Education Association of standing in the way of education improvements and said on public television’s “Off the Record” program that the only way to change that is to eliminate laws requiring school employees to join unions, potentially crippling unions finances. [SOURCE]
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IfLizWereQueen
That’s how they operate: inch at a time. The first step is to remove the power of organized labor from the teachers. Then that will pave the way for the GOP’s ”free market” privatization school voucher schemes. No surprise here considering that Michigan is home to Betsy DeVos, married to Amway multilevel marketing CEO who lives in a $10 million, 22,000 Sq foot mansion on Lake Michigan, complete with a 6,200 square foot guest house.
The rest of us might remember what George Carlin had to say about the wealthy and public education:
There is a reason why education sucks and there is a reason it will never ever be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better. Don’t look for it because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners–the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians.
The politicians are put there to give you the belief that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. The owners own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They have long since bought and paid for the Congress, the Senate, the state houses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information that you get.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They are not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That is against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they are getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they do want? They want obedient workers. They want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And dumb enough to passively accept the increasingly shitter jobs with the lower pay, longer hours, loss of benefits, the end of overtime pay, the vanishing pension that goes away the minute you are ready to collect it. That will never ever be fixed. And now they are coming for your Social Security money. They want to give it to their friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They will get it. They will get it all from you. Sooner or later they will get it because they own this place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
September 8, 2011 in Education
Here in the USA we have extreme right-wing groups funded by the Koch Brothers, the Mellon Scaife Foundation, and the Milton and Ruth Friedman foundation for Educational Choice led by billionaire zealots such as Betsy DeVos (married to CEO of Amway) who are trying to dismantle public education.
In addition we have groups in practically every state in the Union who are trying to (and succeeding in some cases) to get textbooks re-written according to their ideology and religious beliefs.
In Germany it looks like they have the same struggle. Whereas in the USA the name “Democrat” at least was once associated with the left, in Germany it is associated with right-wing neo-Nazis.
Der Spiegel reports that in February when the village of Bartow in the northeast of the state almost permitted a father of seven to take over a kindergarten which had been on the verge of closing due to a lack of funds. The man had agreed to run it free of charge. When the mayor checked out his credentials, he found out that he was a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD),which glorifies the Third Reich. He politely declined the offer.
Anti-racism activists say there has been a growing incidence of far-right members either training to be kindergarten carers or attempting to influence nurseries — for example parents bringing in racist books or demanding that photos of immigrant children be removed from the walls.
Concern is also growing that in some thinly populated regions there may be enough neo-Nazi parents to secure a majority on parent boards.
“Within the far-right scene there appears to be a more or less clear strategy to encourage young women to train for teaching and social work jobs because that offers an opportunity to spread nationalist ideology,” Heike Radvan, an educational scientist at the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an anti-racism group, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
July 1, 2011 in Class War, Education
Finger pointing and agitation is quick on the heels of disappointment following a collapse in negotiations between Pennsylvania House and Senate leaders over a school voucher bill despite Republicans controlling both chambers and the governor’s office.
The state will likely have to wait until after lawmakers return from their two-month summer recess following a last-minute failure to cobble together legislation both chambers could agree. Sen. Jeffrey E. Piccola (R), chairman of the Senate Education Committee and co-sponsor of the controversial proposed voucher legislation SB1 accused the House of being “unable or unwilling to engage in any meaningful discussions to finalize” a compromise.
That remark did not sit well with Republican Rep. Curt Schroder, who authored two bill proposals that would establish a school voucher program in the state. “All I know is that for six months [the Senate] was telling us they would send a school choice bill and they didn’t do that,” said Schroder in an interview with TAI. “Failure to do that can’t be pinned on the House. So it is beyond me as to why they’d be using that reasoning or excuse to hide behind in this instance.” MORE
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Iflizwerequeen comments
WAKE UP PENNSYLVANIA BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! DON’T SELL YOUR PUBLIC EDUCATION
Be sure and ask how much the proposed vouchers are to be and then price tuition of private schools in your area. The average cost per student in public schools in the USA is between $5,000, and $7,000 per student and the rich are yelping about that.
However if you will price the tuitions for private schools, you will find few, if any, that are under $9,000 a year per student for tuition. This means that you can count on a minimum of paying between $2,000 and $4,000 per child for their school tuition to close the gap between what the voucher pays and what the private school charges. Thus if you have three children, you can expect, at a minimum to be forking over $6,000 to $12,000 a year for tuition for your children if the rich get their way with the school vouchers.
AS FOR THE REAL COST OF PRIVATE SCHOOL TUITIONS? HERE IS A PICTURE FOR YOU:
As the old expression goes, the devil is always in the detail. This goes double in regard to the plutocrats’ scheme to dismantle public education and replace it with school vouchers.
May 7, 2011 in Education
Stop the DC Voucher Program in the Senate!
As you may have heard, the House of Representatives has already passedtheir version of the DC voucher bill, HR 471, that would send taxpayer money to private and religious schools in the District of Columbia. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has sponsored the Senate version of the bill, S 206, which would restart and expand the failed DC school voucher experiment. …
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QUEEN’S COMMENTS
Public education is the foundation of a democratic society. Millionaires and billionaires, with the assistance of their pet political monkeys like John Boehner and Joe Lieberman, are making inroads in the destruction of public education with their school voucher schemes.
Here is the part that they don’t tell you about their school voucher program: It is nothing but more government welfare for the rich.
If you think that a school voucher would ever pay enough to cover a child’s tuition in a private school, you are dreaming. For example, the Sidwell Friends School, attended by the Obama children and the Biden grandchildren, charges $28,000 tuition per year per child. Two children would cost $56,000 a year–an amount that exceeds the total income for most single parent families in the USA.
George Carlin was right when he said: ” I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-eduated people capable of critical thinking. They are not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they are getting shafted by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago. They don’t want that.”
Who are the billionaires who are funding this effort to dismantle public education?
BETSY DEVOS
Betsy DeVos, former head of the Republican Party in Michigan, married into the billionaire family of multi-level marketing founders of Amway and sister to Prince who founded BlackWater–the ultimate in a government welfare corporation devoted to war profiteering. She is the driving force behind school voucher legislation in Florida and Pennsylvania. Other billionaires like David and Charles Koch and members of the Mellon-Scaife family also help to fund this movement to dismantle one of the most basic cornerstones to any democracy–a free public education.
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ADDENDUM: THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT’S CONTRIBUTION TO THESE EFFORTS TO DISMANTLE PUBLIC EDUCATION According to a recent piece published by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Religious right in America is lavishly funded and politically well-connected. The top 12 most powerful Christian Right Groups have a total in annual budgets that exceed $1billion. These figures were obtained from public tax documents from 2009 and 2010.
To provide an example of what they offer:
David Barton, a Texan who makes his living promoting bogus “Christian nation” history to fundamentalist groups helped rewrite Texas social studies standards which downplay church-state separation and elevate the “Christian nation” view. Barton does not have a degree in history but that does not stop him from posing as a historian. His degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University–the same “university” that Michele Bachmann earned her law degree from.
Despite his lack of legitimate academic credentials, Barton’s prominence has increased because of a number of appearances that he made on Glenn Beck’s program.
Mike Huckabee, the man who would be president-elect in 2012 had this to say about Barton: Addressing a Religious Right gathering earlier this year he said that all Americans should be forced “at gunpoint. . .to listen to every David Barton message.”
And that is the Religious Right’s idea of “education”–to force religious ideology on Americans at gun point. Well I guess I understand better now their aversion to gun laws.
April 24, 2011 in Education
Rachel Tabachnick reports that the DeVos family crusade to eradicate public education has targeted Pennsylvania and a voucher bill may come to a vote in the PA Senate as early as Tuesday. Who is the DeVos family? They are members of the billionaire class of America who are trying to make serfs of the rest of us. Betsy DeVos is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party; daughter of the late Edgar Prince and Elsa Prince-Broekhuizen; sister of Blackwater-founder Erik Prince; and wife of Dick DeVos (son of Richard and Helen DeVos). The Devos side of the family fortune comes from Amway/Alticor, the controversial, multi-tiered home products business. A Center for Public Integrity Report showed that the DeVos family and business interests were the fifth largest contributors in the 2003 -2004 election cycle, with 100% of the donations going to Republicans.
A wave of school voucher bills is sweeping the nation which would allow public education funds to be used in private or parochial schools. As with past waves of voucher initiatives, these new bills are largely promoted and funded by the billionaire DeVos family and a core group of wealthy pro-privatization supporters. Betsy DeVos is at the helm of organizations that have set the stage for these upcoming bills in Pennsylvania as well as the “Vouchers-for-All” bill approved by the Flordia Senate Education Committee on April 14. It is highly likely that a Betty DeVos campaign is already at work in your state or will soon be there. The DeVos family is recognized as one of the top national contributors to the Republican Party, free market policy institutes, and Religious Right organizations.
Make no mistake about it. These billionaires are about ending public education. Behind the curtain of this effort is an interconnected network of right wing think tanks and billionaire donors, funded by foundations including those of the DeVos and Koch families and the Scaife, Allegheny, and Carthage Foundations of Pennsylvania’s own Richard Mellon Scaife. The leaders of many of these DeVos/Koch/Scaife-funded institutes openly voice their ideological objections to all forms of public education. Some even proudly display their support for a proclamation posted at the Alliance for Separation of School and State, which reads,
“I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.”
READ Rachel Tabachnick’s complete article. You owe it to yourself and to all American children (the majority) whose parents could not afford to send their children to private schools. Voucher Advocate Betsy DeVos, Right-Wing Think Tanks Behind Koch-Style Attack on PA Public Schools
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QUEEN’S COMMENTS
I am reminded of a paraphrase I include in the beginning of my upcoming book on propaganda in the USA. It is from one of the truth-tellers to whom I’ve dedicated the book: George Carlin.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well –educated people capable of critical thinking. They are not interested in that. That does not help them. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they are getting f*&ked by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they do want? They want obedient workers. They want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And dumb enough to passively accept the increasingly sh*^^er jobs with lower pay, longer hours, loss of benefits, the end of overtime pay, the vanishing pension that goes away the minute you are ready to collect it.
They beat us over the head every day with their media—telling us what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hardworking people—white collar, blue collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. These are the people of modest means who continue to elect these rich c(*ksuckers who don’t give a damn about them. They don’t care about you AT ALL.
Again as I continue to admonish all Americans: STOP VOTING FOR MILLIONAIRES! We have 261 of them, almost half, in our Congress in Washington DC. Run for office yourself or support a neighbor. You can do it. Don’t believe them about money. That’s a lie they tell us. You can run for offices for levels up through U.S. Congressional Representatives and win on next to nothing for a budget—if you speak the truth. You can even run for Senate in the smaller states and win. I’ve written a book on it available from LULU publications: It is available for digital down load as well as in paperback.
Nothing will get better in the USA until we remove the millionaires from office.
