[Michigan] State education officials have ordered Robert Bobb to immediately implement a financial restructuring plan [for Detroit schools] that balances the district’s books by closing half of its schools, swelling high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidating operations.
Stories like this make me question the honesty of people that claim they really do care about the children. Eliminating illiteracy and providing universal health care were goals of the Cuban Revolution and were provided. Can our country be honestly said to value either of them?
Among the many ironies of the Tea Party rally in Madison was the playing of “Sweet Home Alabama”. Among many of the sadly funny sayings going around is that Governor Walker wants to make Wisconsin into Wississippi with worse climate. Given that only one of the speakers was from Wisconsin and the event was bought and paid for with out of state money, perhaps they could be forgiven for the oversight.
Speaking of the Tea Party, I was a tad incredulous listening to the radio and hearing all the whining about the poor Tea Partiers being intimidated by the union thugs (teachers, nurses, you know the type). I thought these were the people constantly whining about wanting conceal carry so that they could save the innocent from the evil gang of thugs. Instead I hear complaints about union members making it difficult to cross the street by their marching. Thankfully these folks are back in their gated communities tonight and back into their worlds where the plebians show their due deference lest they be fired. By the way, with all this intimidation, there were 0.0 arrests in a rally with a combined 70,000 people. Top end estimates of Tea Partiers were 7,500. Admittedly, it was probably a bit much for them to be in a space where more than a handful of people dared to openly disagree with them.
Coincident with this is the obnoxious tendency of people to use the phrase “they work for me.” The origin of the possessive with respect to labor is the servant and slave classes. Whereas one could always say that’s my gardener or that’s my cook, one would never say in the same sense that’s my lawyer, that’s my doctor, or that’s my accountant. In the faux outrage of doctors writing notes on behalf of protesters were people claiming outrage because the doctors were employed by the UW Health system and they were paying the doctors’ salaries. One would think it would be obvious that the doctors provide far, far more to the state than the state provides to the doctors. Regardless, this will all be a moot point since Governor Walker is proposing to privatize UW-Madison.
Finally, I had never taken seriously the defense associated with Pravda and other State-controlled media. The defense was that US media is just as controlled. The only difference was that with Pravda the control was explicit and open. As the Wisconsin debate has unfolded, I have been absolutely devastated at how vacuous our media has been. Governor Walker has been asked several times and in various ways if he understood how people could understand his actions to be union busting. He has obfuscated and been non-responsive. Rather than get an honest answer out of him, they just move on. They reprint his dissembling uncritically. This has been true in the New York Times. Locally, WTMJ radio’s news department has been particularly embarrassing in this regard. I’m tempted to insert “Dear Leader says” when I see and hear these reports because of how uncritically they’re offered. Of course the news media doesn’t want to upset Dear Leader for fear of losing their access to Dear Leader. I think it was the CBS Evening News on Friday night – they all probably did it – that had nice little graphs about how much premiums were going to go up for employees. Of course it was known to anyone paying attention by that point that monetary issues weren’t behind the protests. By that point, the unions had already implicitly conceded benefit issues, and that was made explicit Friday night and again Saturday morning. But the chance to use flashy graphics and offer a narrative wasn’t going to be denied, because televisions news departments long ago dropped any pretense that they were anything other than entertainment.
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