Congress is about to pass an additional $32 billion to pay for the war In Afghanistan. It will have overwhelming bipartisan support, with legislators eager to display their fealty to the troops in an election year.
At the same time, the Congress is struggling with a $23 billion bill to forestall the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers next year, championed by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller. This faces a Republican filibuster and the opposition of many blue Dog Democrats, who argue that it shouldn't be considered emergency spending. (Harkin has now given up on passing it in the Senate directly. The only hope is that the House will pass it as part of the military supplemental and perhaps then the Senators will swallow it.)
What kind of country are we? In the worst economic recession in 70 years, competitive industrial nations must choose their priorities -- what gets saved, what must be sacrificed. No sensible leadership would choose to make children -- particularly the children of working and poor families -- pay the cost of the downturn.
The damage is already being done. Hawaii has gone to a four-day school week; districts in Kansas are headed there. Detroit is closing more than 40 schools. Kansas City wants to shutter more than 50% of its school buildings.
Indiana and Arizona have eliminated free all-day kindergarten. One third of districts are considering eliminating summer school this year. Nearly two-thirds anticipate increasing class size next year. Classes may reach 35 students in Chicago elementary schools.
This surely is how great nations decline. Like Rome and Britain before us, Washington now chooses to police the world, even as it cuts back the education of the nation's most vulnerable children. We fight two wars on the other side of the world, spend more defending South Korea from North Korea than the South Koreans do, increase military spending already nearly as great as the rest of the world combined while saying we can't afford vital investments at home.
Last month, an iconic article in the New York Times recorded the costs of this folly. The Times reported from Beijing that the Chinese were preparing a bid to build the bullet train from San Francisco to LA. The director of high speed rail in China, Zheng Jian, noted that "We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the U.S."
High speed rail requires financing, very sophisticated technology and advanced engineering -- and China is ready to supply the cash, the technology and the high end engineers and skilled technicians. They would hire Americans to assemble the parts and lay the track.
Why is China so far ahead? It is estimated that the U.S. will spend $13 billion over the next five years on high speed rail routes (and that only because the president insisted it be part of the recovery act). China will spend $300 billion in the next three years. It is opening 1200 miles of high speed rail track this year alone.
This of course is a stunning contrast to 150 years ago when the U.S. imported Chinese laborers to help build the transcontinental railroad. Then we were laying more rail line than the rest of the world combined, part of our rise to the world's industrial leader. Then we were satisfied with uniting the continental United States. Now we stand alone as the world's globocop. But our schools no longer lead the world. We've moved from a high-wage manufacturing economy to a low-wage service economy. Our trade deficit -- $2 billion a day before the collapse, is back up to over $1 billion and growing. We run a high tech trade deficit with China. We've come a long way. We can only hope that the Chinese treat our workers better than we treated the Chinese immigrants those many years ago.
P.S. Please don't give me lectures on our debt and the need to "pay for it." Conservatives in both parties don't demand we pay for the increased so-called "emergency" spending for Afghanistan. And they oppose many ways to "pay for it" that would be immensely popular with their voters, but not their donors: tax the big banks, slow speculation with a financial speculation tax, end the "carried interest" scam that has billionaire private equity managers paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
Nor is talk about waste in public education germane. If eliminating waste were the answer, the entire war in Afghanistan could be funded with the cost of weapons the Pentagon has purchased but cannot locate. Nor is this about reforming schools. It is hard to imagine a reform agenda that would begin by firing 300,000 teachers from the nation's weakest schools... without replacing them. This is about priorities and values. And does not auger well for this nation.
Follow Robert L. Borosage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/borosage
Respectfully, the Democratic Party will never revert to form of the early 1970s when its leaders finally ended the insanity of Vietnam and legislated a moderately progressive domestic policy agenda. The soulless opportunistic hawkish neo-liberals who took over the Dems thereafter are beyond extirpation.
American leftists and liberals need a new approach for achieving political power and advancing our agenda. The British LibDems now jointly govern Britain precisely because they organized and persevered for a century as an established political party.
In stark contrast America’s labor union members, progressives, environmentalists, activists, idealists, and other truth and justice seekers have divided themselves (the better to be conquered) into a vast multitude of interest groups each devoted to a slice of the overall enlightenment cause. One problem: this is essentially the George HW Bush paradigm: “a thousand points of light”. Doh!
The American public badly needs a new party that is a “choice not an echo” to do things like: restore government “of, by and for” all the people (those below as well as above middle class stations in life); staff government with scrupulously honest, earnest and talented personnel; reverse all prevailing anti-social, anti-ecological, anti-egalitarian, anti-justice public policies (at home); and return to traditional American neo-isolationism (in lieu of today’s abhorrent insane indiscriminate use of the U.S. military as a world police force) abroad.
Enter the U.S. LibDems stage left. http://www.libdems.us/
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
Culver City, California
The threat that is terrorism and the (arguable) need to fight that terrorism over in Afghanistan and in Iraq (where the unrelated deposing of a dictator has created a fruitful garden for terrorism) is seen as an immediate threat to the U.S. and therefore creates a genetically conditioned urge within the politicians to respond. The response here is both intellectual and emotional (but possibly primarily emotional).
The threat that is the ignorance of the next generation(s) of U.S. citizens is not an immediate threat to the livelihood, lives, or lifestyles of politicians. It does not trigger the same level of urgency because the politicians are not as genetically hard-wired to respond to long-term threats. The response here must be an intellectual one and an intellectual one alone.
When considering optiions, we can intellectually assess them and see that one is probably more critical than the other. Nevertheless, emotional factors will intrude and bias our reasoned response towards the short-term threat.
Bit of a turnaround from the days when it was the Chinese who were laying the tracks in America.
The eternal war desired by the military industrial complex (MIC) requires throngs of soldiers. There is no need for these soldiers to be educated in history, science, etc. - the only education they need is that which is sufficient for them to perform their job. Excess education could lead to the soldiers questioning the very concept of eternal war which would be against the interests of the MIC. The MIC can allow the rich (the Alphas and Betas so to speak) to educate their youth but the MIC seek to ensure that the poor (the Gammas of our Brave New World) come to the military with their minds clean and ready for indoctrination.
Remember: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
I now end my somewhat tongue in cheek dystopic rant with the hope that it is so far off base as to be inane.
Especially when there is no declaration of war, when there is no legitimate reason to have our military overseas at all, when there are no publicly shared objectives for our occupation of foreign lands, when there is absolutely no threat of attack or invasion, "service" to a totally arbitrary civilian leadership is just another job. The MIC exploits that desire for service -- and our ignorance, anxiety and the constant threat of war -- to assure its growth, to feed itself on helpful volunteers, to grow indispensable.
Volunteers sign up for what they expect, they get educational and medical benefits and they enjoy the potential for some testosteronic adventure. They serve their time and take the consequences just like any other federal employees.
We "support the troops" like we support all federal employees who are supposed to represent us honorably. We dutifully pay our taxes to pay for awesome toys, medical care, some number of predictable funerals and engaging video of violent acts and victimization and a periodic message from Big Brother.
Sounds like a Brave New
War is good for business. It is also fun in a way that education and rebuilding bridges is not. The time of the transcontinental railroad, which you refer to, was one of conquest and technology. That was fun for our leaders then, so that's where the money went. Now it's fun to hand out fat contracts for war-related goods and services, so that's what they do these days.
With the exception of electing these people into office, the voters simply do not exist on their radar. Once in power our elected officials only want to do fun, exciting, greedy things, the things boys do when they know they can get away with it.
Every year we have a surplus of lawyers and a shortage of MD's exiting graduate programs. This isn't going too well, is it?
Still, if I were to be optimistic, I guess this means the US will be too poor to start a fight with Iran?
It's kind of lame, sure. But at least there is an idea-of-it there.
So instead of being slaves to Corporate America, now we will be slaves to China?
WE should be funding and building these mag rails, not China..if nothing else, for National Security.
China and India plan 25 years in advance, thanks to our corrupt politicians worrying about re-election, we can't even pass legislation for our educators. This is why we are the Mc Donald's workers of the world.
No offense to the hard working mickey d's employees.
We are in an emergency now...
Just because we bailed the banks out and now they are sitting pretty and bonus-ing again doesn't mean they are off of the hook as far as the devastation that they caused...Just because the banks are stable doesn't mean that we as a nation are done...
We had to suck it up and give millions to the greedy, gluttonous banks..Best be sure that not one single banker or any of their families were cold, hungry, or homeless during the bailout...
We as a country gave millions to the banks to bail them out. The bailout isn't over yet. Part of the cleanup is putting Americans back to work and Corporate America should have to pay for it...
Additionally, Mandarin is supposed to be easier to learn as it only has 4 tones. The Cantonese cannot even agree on how many tones the language has, with estimates ranging from 6 to 10. With tonal languages, how you say a word changes its meaning. Words that sound the same to those untrained in tones will have quite different meanings when heard/said by native speakers.
Of course, that's probably more information than your question desired.
if you can read this, thank a teacher. if you are reading it in english, thank a veteran, wussie!
where is andrew jackson when you need him.
how many cubans were saved when che and castro decided to do away with private property?
how many russians were saved when lenin took over?
how about mao?
how many people did bill ayers, bernadine dorn, and jeff jones, estimate they would need to "eliminate" to institute their communist revolution? (25 million)
how many jews will iran kill when they finally achieve their goal?
education only works if you are willing to fight for your right to learn.
• The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. John Adams
We have troops in Korea for 60 years, Germany for 65 years, if we cannot figure things out in that amount of time we never will. Bring all our troops home now, scale back this monstrosity and then we can start to manage our spending and deficits.
I am tired of people finding religion when it's convenient, who lowers taxes when you go to war, now they want to pay for this and still don't want to raise taxes.
As Smedley Butler said "War is a Racket". Let's outlaw profiteering on all munitions.
BRING THEM HOME NOW!!!!!!!!