No Public Education, No Democracy!
I teach English at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, California. I love my school, my amazing colleagues, and the kids who enter my classroom each year. But I hate what is happening to public education.
From the national to the local level, our public schools are under attack, and that means our students are under attack. This attack takes more than one form. The cuts to vital education services are horrifying enough, but they’re only half the picture. The other half is the violation of our public trust by private interests.
It’s not a pretty sight, but we must look squarely at the vultures of privatization that prey on the damage to our schools, from New York to New Orleans to Wisconsin to California. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, refers to the three big education funders, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton Family, as the Billionaire Boys Club in her excellent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch has come a long way since her days of working under Bush, Sr. I’ve even heard people
Misanthropy in Healthcare
Both left-wing activists and right-wing conservatives have a tendency to defer to near-mythical idealogical principles that the formed the core of the United States. But the “founding fathers” and “American ideals” that these continual references point to are such broad and scattered concepts that their employment serves only the most shallow rhetorical purpose. The idea that at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, the general population was in such noble accord with the spoon-fed magnanimity of the original planners is ignorant at best and idiotic at worst.
Take, for example, the entitlement of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as inalienable to all human beings or rather, all American citizens or rather, to all white Americans or rather, to all white American males, or rather to all white American male landowners. The left sloganizes the phrase to emphasize the goal of collective prosperity and classlessness and the right sloganizes the phrase to emphasize (often ostensibly) the manner in
Huey Long: An Original Voice of the 99%
Every individual is a blend of struggling motivations, except perhaps for the garden variety sociopaths that seem to occupy many places of power these days. Most of us, however, endeavor to exhibit the noble of our character as we try to calm the howls of ego that so often derail the best of intentions.
Perhaps no historical figure exemplifies this strange dichotomy better than Louisiana’s Huey Long. Progressive internet sites have revisited the man and his words in recent weeks. His evaluation of wealth disparity echoes from the halls in which he delivered his thunderous speeches during the roaring 20s and the Great Depression. You can even view some of his more rousing talks with a simple search — the films exist. Long served as
