It will be like watching water boil. Milk spoil. Bananas rot. I am not referring to the return of Jay Leno to the late-night Siberia that is network TV but rather Barack Obama's health care summit, notable for who will not be there: the public option, aka, universal health care. What our allies in Europe embrace as socialized medicine.
Socialized medicine is such a failure that even the British right, the Conservative Party, fight to keep it. France, of course. The Canadians, too. Yes, Sweden. Our longtime enemies, the USSR had it, and our persistent enemy, Cuba, maintains it while it also sends doctors to poor countries to administer health care.
But the US under the yoke of a corporatocracy, is bent onf distinguishing itself from the civilized pack.
Just as many of our corporations are showing their irrelevance, racing to mediocrity with our manager class, the USA is becoming as prominent a dot on the map as Long Beach, CA., must appear to the man in the moon. The USA has raced another step down with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean recently joining forces to create a trade bloc ... without us.
So, enter Obama, who has prefaced this six-hour TV telethon for private health care with expressions of his utter belief in capitalism. This is pretty redudant stuff: it must be for the tea-baggers, birthers (yes, they persist in claiming Obama is a foreigner), and the descendants of US Chief Justice Roger Taney; because anyone who would be so heavily funded by and, in turn, bail out, Goldman Sachs, must believe fundamentally in nothing else but capitalism.
Rather than watch this Blair House corporate telethon, I will watch the water boil in my tea pot: at least I will get a cup of tea out of it and not more bullsh*t.
Without the likes of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, or any of the Progressive Congressional Caucus, whatever comes out of this exclusive, maudlin farce will hopefully fall as flat as Obama's progressive promises.
Meanwhile, the 2010 purge I predicted is happening. Poor us!
04 February 2010
California schools go back to basics
Long Beach Unified School District [LBUSD], like most California public school districts, is launching the mother of all back-to-basics campaigns. Forget No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top or any other neo-liberal fad du jour in sheep's clothing.
LBUSD is coming close to dismantling its schools giving a rather Victorian meaning to the back-to-basics mantra.
Soon there will be no pretense that our school are just day care for poor children until they are old enough to turn to crime, work at Wal Mart, or Be All a Militarist society wants them to Be.
Grade school teachers, high school instructors, counselors, programs are to be axed.
Thanks to the taxpayers' revolts of the 1970's, the new centrality of Reaganomics, the perpetual invisibleness of our children, and our mediocre president's Race to the Top it is not an understatement to say that California is throwing generations of young into the toilet and flushing it.
When I was a child growing up here, us kids had heard that California was destined to fall off into the ocean after the Big One. Only now this catastrophe is not caused by a great tremor as we thought, but rather by our own hands, or our own complicity, or our own silence ... which is all the same thing.
Obama has horded federal funds and is throwing them like rations into the circus ring for the strongest beast to devour. The weak be damned.
The other day I listened to a "discussion" on national corporate radio, as the guests framed the education debate as a competition between arts and sports funding. This takes real discipline, especially as the station stridently begs for money from its listeners.
What might the public say if the competition were pit between school funding and war funding? Educating our kids' minds, free- and reduced-lunch programs, arts and sports programs against foreign war funding which kills and maims our young and theirs?
I know the answer.
As I have said, it is a disturbing irony that for every one of these 750 school teachers to be fired by LBUSD, how many jobs are being met with the war economy? War is soldiers. War is the police state. War is the excessive security apparatus at our borders and within our airports: functionaries largely, who are forced to rationalize their positions by creating much more mischief than that school bully who will now be under served because his teacher is overburdened and the school psychologists are being dismissed.
The otherwise shallow radio discussion proposed an interesting idea as tax season is upon us: just as we can opt to fund federal campaign coffers on our 1040, the radio guests we opt for funding schools' programs.
I would take this direct democracy much further: fund the war machine or not? Please check the box.
See also: LA Unified plans to fire more non-tenured teachers
LBUSD is coming close to dismantling its schools giving a rather Victorian meaning to the back-to-basics mantra.
Soon there will be no pretense that our school are just day care for poor children until they are old enough to turn to crime, work at Wal Mart, or Be All a Militarist society wants them to Be.
Grade school teachers, high school instructors, counselors, programs are to be axed.
Thanks to the taxpayers' revolts of the 1970's, the new centrality of Reaganomics, the perpetual invisibleness of our children, and our mediocre president's Race to the Top it is not an understatement to say that California is throwing generations of young into the toilet and flushing it.
When I was a child growing up here, us kids had heard that California was destined to fall off into the ocean after the Big One. Only now this catastrophe is not caused by a great tremor as we thought, but rather by our own hands, or our own complicity, or our own silence ... which is all the same thing.
Obama has horded federal funds and is throwing them like rations into the circus ring for the strongest beast to devour. The weak be damned.
The other day I listened to a "discussion" on national corporate radio, as the guests framed the education debate as a competition between arts and sports funding. This takes real discipline, especially as the station stridently begs for money from its listeners.
What might the public say if the competition were pit between school funding and war funding? Educating our kids' minds, free- and reduced-lunch programs, arts and sports programs against foreign war funding which kills and maims our young and theirs?
I know the answer.
As I have said, it is a disturbing irony that for every one of these 750 school teachers to be fired by LBUSD, how many jobs are being met with the war economy? War is soldiers. War is the police state. War is the excessive security apparatus at our borders and within our airports: functionaries largely, who are forced to rationalize their positions by creating much more mischief than that school bully who will now be under served because his teacher is overburdened and the school psychologists are being dismissed.
The otherwise shallow radio discussion proposed an interesting idea as tax season is upon us: just as we can opt to fund federal campaign coffers on our 1040, the radio guests we opt for funding schools' programs.
I would take this direct democracy much further: fund the war machine or not? Please check the box.
See also: LA Unified plans to fire more non-tenured teachers
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