(NOTE: This is pretty long; the shorthand version is toward the bottom...)
In the US, public education is just about extinct, unless you happen to want to learn the best way to sneak a .38 through a metal detector. There is no money for anything necessary or worthwhile like furniture, books, teaching materials or extracurricular stuff like music and art and creative writing. None for maintenance and repair, either, so many of our schools look as shitty as they function.
All that stuff I took for granted as a kid has been stolen from today's kids, and those unlucky enough to enter the system over the last 30 years or so. And why would that be? Because everything done under GOP leadership must serve the single, overriding, fundamental GOP governing principle: always... ALWAYS ... measure every action, policy, law or regulation for its ability to facilitate and accelerate the continuous transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. No matter what else it accomplishes, a governmental initiative is counter-productive to the GOP if it doesn't meet that all-important standard.
So instead of hot food and cold milk, the money that used to be ticketed to subsidize public education now goes into the tax-free offshore accounts of the war machine, the fossil fuels industry, Wall Street, the insurance industry and the safety deposit boxes of the top one or two percent of elites who own and operate this country.
So what are the results of all this re-prioritizing and money shuffling away from kids and toward the further enrichment of the ruling class? Let's take a brief and necessarily incomplete inventory:
We're living in the world champion of runaway capitalism, where the only thing that's valued in business anymore is the ability to extract more work from fewer people for less pay, all the while cutting or eliminating benefits, busting unions and generally creating a climate where the labor force is too scared and insecure to make much noise.
Where roughly three out of 10 people around you at any given time are religiously insane and think the earth is about 6,000 years old.
Where the economy runs as a rigged zero-sum game, and where even rare and highly prized skill sets don't guarantee a job with decent pay.
Where debt slavery has replaced formal indentured servitude as the preeminent mechanism of social control, and despite this the national religion remains consumerism and the preferred method of payment remains the credit card.
Where environmentalism is seen as subversive, and where intellect is viewed with suspicion.
Where health care is a privilege and not a right, and is rationed by bank account.
Where Constitutional guarantees are now optional, where celebrity worship trumps political awareness, and where the apex of mass culture is the Super Bowl halftime show.
Where paper pushers make fortunes and caregivers make minimum wage, and where systemic racism and xenophobia create murderous monsters -- who call themselves patriots -- out of otherwise decent people.
Where the second amendment -- one of only three elements of the Bill of Rights that the feds haven't yet eliminated (although you can bet it's at the top of the action item list when BushCo ratchets up its war on Americans -- has created a national free-fire zone, while protests are restricted to "free speech zones."
Where tens of millions of swaggering, posturing, rugged individualist machismo-poisoned wannabes live closeted, fear-saturated lives of doom and desperation because Cheney has scared the hell out of them and they expect to be murdered in their beds by some iconic Islamofascist terrorist.
Where the distribution of wealth is so heavily concentrated in the greedy little fists of the upper five or so percent that they own about 60 - 70 percent of everything and even that's not enough for these parasites.
Where the trappings of success go to the most devious or outright criminal, while the decent people get the dregs and keep falling farther behind.
Where a significant percentage of the country's physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, overpasses and underpasses is structurally compromised and in immediate need of reinforcement, but there's only federal money available if you're in the mass slaughter and genocide business.
This is the current perversion of the American dream, made possible in large part because a piss poor public educational system failed in its most basic tasks, managed to make discovery and learning tedious and boring, and didn't give a shit when advertising and PR won while critical thinking lost.
And damned if many millions of people don't just lap this lunacy right up.
Today's patriots, too busy to actually enlist in the service and fight the global menace of international terrorism, show their commitment to US foreign and domestic policy through endless repetition of tribal mating chants like USA! USA! USA!
They also see the wisdom of protecting themselves from the evildoers using little iconic flag lapel pins as totems. If they really wanted to show their respect and veneration for the true national icon, the pins would resemble dollar signs, but that would be just a little too crass, I suppose.
They remain committed to voting republican because their daddies told them that the GOP is tough on America's enemies. Plus, it's always been the party of fiscal responsibility and creates millions of good jobs whenever a GOP president occupies the white house. As an example, just look at the amazing job Bush has done in just seven years. Amazing.
Most important of all, the GOP believes in unrestrained, laissez-faire, free-market capitalism and they back up their words with policies. Like the holy of holies: deregulation. Or as the spin machine would put it, freeing our noble and altruistic business leaders from the tedium of federal regulatory compliance to they can bring to bear the nation's enormous wealth of intellectual capital and inventive genius for the sole purpose of improving lives, spreading joy, shining the light of knowledge into the world's darkest corners and asking nothing in return but a fair and reasonable profit to fund another round of R&D.
So in homage to the cause of economic freedom and the good old American can-do spirit, the GOP has spent untold effort and political capital -- and twisted at least half a million arms -- over the past 30 or so years to deregulate entire industries, along with public utilities that now operate as pure monopolies without any oversight.
Incredibly, each of those industries -- from telecoms and cable access providers to privatized water systems and natural gas wholesalers -- has increased its bottom line and shareholder value every year since they were deregulated. The employees tend not to fare too well, of course, and customers get a royal screwing, but somebody's got to take the hit to ensure profitability and it's sure as hell not going to be anyone on executive row.
Naturally, the GOP's benevolent stewards of our national economic heritage aren't in it for the money. That would be beneath their dignity. Nope, they're only concerned about deregulation because -- as a different group of spinmeisters might say -- it unleashes our MBA visionaries to direct the full power of their entrepreneurial brilliance toward creating fantastic new products and services at rock bottom prices to improve our already overly joyous lives.
Per omnia secula seculorum....AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMENNNNNNNN
If you skipped to here looking for the shorthand version, it's this:
It's impossible to sustain a functional democracy without an informed, aware, critical, literate and WELL-EDUCATED population. Without the ability to sort out the steaming mounds of rotting bullshit from the occasional nugget of truth, you get millions of voters who can only handle debates featuring irrelevance and idiocy -- like questions about Kucinich's UFO experience, or the cost of Edwards' haircuts and size of his McMansion, or whether Obama wears boxers or briefs.
All very important issues, I'm sure, but they somehow pale compared with impeachment, defunding Iraq, preventing WW III by putting Iran off limits for a US attack, universal health care, massive and growing debt and trade imbalances, repos and foreclosures, the morality or lack thereof in the pentagon budget, war profiteering, infrastructure collapse, environment meltdown, ending our oil addiction, domestic repression, creeping totalitarianism, indictable cronyism, corruption from top to bottom of this administration... All that and how about some talk about funding for public education, too? And that doesn't mean No Child Left Behind; AKA the Build-Your-Own-Hitler-Youth-Dimwit-Conformist program.
Honestly, without some immediate and systemic improvements to public education -- including recognizing its value by funding it as zealously as we fund the department of war -- I don't think this country can survive the next telegenic right wing demagogue.
We may get a four-year reprieve this time around thanks to the sheer sustained awfulness of the Bush/Cheney regime, but it's unlikely that -- after reaching for the brass ring for maybe 100 - 150 years -- the far right is going to just quietly pack up and go home. And without an informed citizenry to separate the onslaught of lies repeated throughout the wingnut echo chamber from actual objective facts, these fools would cheerfully elect Pol Pot, as long as he wasn't labeled a liberal.
wp
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