Plutocrats in NYC Wielding Power, Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again
Public schools are among the primary institutions that serve the families in the 99 Percent. As primarily middle class institutions, they are coming under attack from the One Percent, the plutocrats—both Republican and Democrats—who control the levers of power.
In a piece earlier this week the NY Times profiled 158 families across the country who have provided nearly half of all the early money that has been underwriting the campaigns of the candidates currently vying for the 2016 Presidential nominations. The reporters quote the political analyst and demographic expert Ruy Teixeira: “The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want.”
Last week, the NY Times op-ed page printed a commentary by Thomas Edsall on the same subject. Edsall describes the conclusions of political scientist Martin Gilens on the impact of our increasingly plutocratic system: “The majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose… Gilens notes that policies popular with the middle class but not with the affluent rarely win enactment: The majority are redistributive policies including raising the minimum wage or indexing it to inflation, increasing income taxes on high earners or corporations, or cutting payroll taxes on lower income Americans. Conversely, policies opposed by the middle-class but backed by the affluent include ‘tax cuts for upper income individuals, spending cuts in Medicare, and roll-backs of federal retirement programs’—policies that have been adopted.”
So what does all this mean for education? One need only look at television in New York City Plutocrats in NYC Wielding Power, Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again | janresseger: