End Prey for Profit - Education "Reform" as an Example

Prey for Profit:
The exploitation, bullying, marginalization, and/or abuse of people, animals, the environment, economies, and/or countries for profit and/or power.

Example:
Education "reform" for the purpose of the privatization of public education and increase of corporate profits and power. Who is exploited and/or abused? Students and teachers.

The Story:

Some corporations, CEO's and millionaires/billionaires are using their power and money to abuse children, marginalize teachers, destroy unions, take away people's rights, and exploit democracy (Citizens United, etc.) for power and profit. First, they purposefully compare test results between the entire and extremely heterogeneous and higher rate of poverty, huge COUNTRY of the US with the more lower rate of poverty and homogeneous CITY of Shanghai and small country of Finland and in order to be able to say Education in America has Failed. Then, they use EVERY opportunity to scapegoat and demonize teachers and say they, especially the more experienced teachers, are the problem. I especially love their central propaganda piece, "Waiting for Superman," in which they come in to "rescue" our country from our horrendously incompetent teachers and school systems. Next, they lobby and create laws, policies and regulations, while they put their corporate reform minions in place as School District Superintendents, School Board Trustees and Federal and State Legislators to help usher in their reforms, budget cuts, vouchers, co-locations, merit pay, common core standards, increased testing, union and collective bargaining busting, as they erode public education and teacher's rights. Finally, they get their desired results: increased corporate profits for charter and private schools...testing and remediation companies...textbook publishers, etc.; dis-empowered or broken unions; low-salaried, at-will employed teachers who have no due-process rights and for whom they no longer have to pay much in benefits. Notice that there is not one mention of students in this scenario? Of course there isn't. Children were never really their concern. They threw teachers under the school bus while they used public-school children and education reform as the cover for their battle for power, control and profits. Shame on the corporate "reform" people for using our nation's children as human shields. End the Use of Children as Prey For Profit. 

Get Involved! Do SOMEthing!!!

Like the leaves on my tree, the American people are falling fast. Get involved! If you're apathetic, you are the weakest link. The weakest link ALLOWS OTHERS to determine the course of our nation. If you think sitting back and letting others run the show for you has been working, take a really good look around you. One in four American children now live in poverty, on your watch. Unions, the last bastion of worker's rights and middle class salaries are being busted to make way for the repeal of minimum wage and child labor laws, on your watch. Yes, this is true - these new laws are already submitted to multiple state houses. Keep on doing nothing, and this will all continue to worsen. WE NEED YOU! NOW!!!

...and if the powers that be really did care about it all, they wouldn't have created the seriously regressive tax structure and economic environment that have created our enormous income inequality and the resulting high child poverty rate. This is all purposeful. Deregulation and policy and law changes have to be created. These things don't just "happen."

As for "reform," education reform, just as has been the case in tort reform and health care reform, is not about the actual reform of education. It's simply a well-tested focus group piece of propaganda the far right is using to pull the wool over people's eyes so they don't look at the real purpose behind these "reforms." The doublespeak à la George Orwell's 1984 is alive and well.

The reformers never bring up the number one reason for the academic success of students: parental involvement. Nor do they mention the importance of relationships behind a successful academic career or recognize the plethora of broken families in America. They don't want to address child poverty (and along with it, lack of adequate health care and nutrition), which does have a huge adverse impact on education. They don't acknowledge any of this because the real reform they're foisting on Americans is really all about union-busting, privatization, repeal of minimum wage and child labor laws, and the creation of an uneducated workforce that won't be capable of questioning them. Then, they'll no longer have to reduce their profits to export low-paying serf-style jobs and can look like heroes bringing those jobs back into the USA. Aren't they so patriotic? So, they ridicule, scapegoat and demonize teachers as the cause of all the ills of society. Deflection is so convenient for them, isn't it? 

Ridicule, scapegoating, demonization, then dehumanization are also the steps to violence against others. The Ministry of "Love" is our Department of "Homeland Security" that now "works with" our local police forces who show up to peaceful demonstrations in riot gear and, on one occasion, with a tank. They use military grade weapons such as pepper spray, tear gas, stun grenades, while they also wield batons to inflict harm. They send peaceful, law-abiding American citizens who are simply exercising their Constitutional rights to free speech and assembly to the hospital...some in critical condition. The peaceful people they've harmed and/or arrested includes veterans, a former police chief, a 94-year-old woman, an entire group of seated and unarmed UC Davis students, and an expectant mother. So much for the sanctity of life. 

Our Fourth Estate no longer exists, as predominantly all media outlets are now owned by 3-5 major corporations, all spouting the same corporate propaganda. Our Fourth Estate is now our Ministry of "Truth." The police have detained, arrested, and destroyed and/or erased data off of the cameras of many of the few remaining unbiased journalists in order to destroy evidence and suppress the true facts, so that the Ministry of Truth can disseminate lies. The brain-washing arm of the Ministry of Truth is a powerful core group of Hollywood elite with major corporate money behind their green-lighted propaganda movie projects and star-filled personal appearances.

If you think these are the actions of a democratic government, think again. We are currently in a non-violent struggle (on our side) for the return to democracy. We want the power and money of multi-national corporations (can you say non-American, then?) out of our government. It's about the American people, our freedom, our national security, and the survival of our way of life. We're down to brass tacks and need everybody on this. We need YOU!

In Memory of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: 11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn a long time ago, in high school. The world has lost a great man and writer who so compellingly documented life under tyranny.

Memorable Quotes:

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

The whole raison d'etre of serfdom and the Archipelago is one and the same: these are the social structures for the ruthless enforced utilisation of the free-of-cost work of millions of slaves.


Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.