Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Our Post-Democratic World

This article in The New Yorker about Jeb Bush and his connections to commercializing education is frightening.  It is possible we will be unable to keep the .01% from stealing our schools and I suspect they will get away with it because too many people assume that they will never be affected and would enjoy watching their "enemies" suffer the consequences of their inferiority.

Women who had to beg in the streets for money to feed their babies will keep their legs closed, we hear. Women are lazy and if they are not helped they will be forced to marry or get a job.  Shiftless men will be forced to work. Moral values will return. Communities will be strengthened.

For-profit schools will operate for profit. We know that every single business has a duty to its owners/shareholders to make as much profit as possible. The logical conclusion is the elimination of actual schools for virtual ones. The parents alone will be responsible for the education of their children, as all rugged individualists should.

ADDED: Batocchio quotes MLK in an article at Hullabaloo.

 If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.
 
When your self-image is based on your position in your authoritarian hierarchy, you guard that position with your life and take every opportunity to strengthen it.

And you always follow the money. Eliminating public schools heavily undercuts the Democratic party, women, minorities and makes it easier for the .01% to get their unimpeded  way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eliminating public schools heavily undercuts the Democratic party

And yet our Democratic president has appointed as Secretary of (Privatizing) Education one Arne Duncan, a man who feels about America's schoolchildren the same way that James Watt felt about America's national forests.

willf

Susan of Texas said...

It's been bipartisan all the way. They are *all* drooling over the potential for profit.

As always minorities will suffer the most but I would really like to see the look on Ms. White Alabama Tea Party's face when she realizes that she has to work in the chicken plant and watch and educate her kids and grandkids at the same time.