The despicable state of California (and US) public education

The state of public education in the state of California is despicable, and getting worse!

In three to five more years of No Child Left Behind and the lack of state funding our public school system may fail completely. No Child Left Behind is taking away money from the schools that do not do well on the standardized tests - so schools that are failing will have LESS resources!

It is said that 80% of California public schools will face federal take over in 5 years due to NCLB.

Our public schools rank 47 out of 50 states for funding. There is plenty of money in this state - look at the housing prices and cars. People here have money. But not everyone. Which is the problem with a failing public school system. The wealthy can send their kids to private schools or supplement the public schools (many are asking for $3000 per family) in their area with huge fund raisers. But for neighborhoods where income is low the schools are in a world of hurt. and getting worse.

With further cuts we have school districts talking about increasing class sizes more, cutting whatever extra programs are left (extra are the things like art, music, PE - the things private schools like mine realize are as important as the core subjects and for which parents pay $33,000 a year) and they are talking about maybe only having school 4 days a week so they can pay public school teachers even less!

Also with higher public education being slashed California is now poised to take back its pledge to offer a spot in college for all California residents who qualify. And of course with costs going up many can simply not afford to go to college even if there is a spot.

They say Americans, Californians especially, are becoming less educated on average than we were 20 years ago. Our work force is going to have millions more people who have low levels of education looking for work in an environment where automation and outsourcing is going to decrease the number of jobs available to those with low levels of education.

Meanwhile we are the only state that does not tax oil companies for the oil they take out of our ground! They do pay in other ways but as they are setting records for corporate profits and oil is destroying the world anyway, we should be taxing the hell out of it!

Prisons! The United States of America has more prisoners than any country in the world. China is second but as a larger country has 18% our rate of incarceration. California leads the way with hundreds of thousands of prisoners. The "three strikes your out" law doubled our prison population. They are over crowded and increasingly costly. Arnold's solution - outsource them to Mexico, he said it would cost half as much to build prisons and house prisoners in Mexico. This of course is for prisoners from other countries. For US prisoners he wants to have private prisons - prisons for profit. This makes sense! How can it be cheaper to run something for profit? Unless you cut corners. And even if it is, it has been proven that private prisons just put pressure on the system to create prisoners so the corporations have lots of business - not long ago (2 years maybe) in this country a judge was busted for taking pay offs from a private prison for sending innocent youth to prison!

How about investing in education! Perhaps if we educated people they will be able to get jobs instead of going to jail. Perhaps they will be inspired to do good things. Clearly having an educated population would benefit our economy in more ways than one.

California, you get what you pay for. Are you going to invest in your future?

We must change the rule that a 2/3rds majority is needed to pass a budget, then we need to raise taxes so we can pay for these vital programs, public education being only one of them.

And as for Obama's race to the top - I give him an "F" How can it make sense to give more money to the schools that are doing the best???? The schools that are doing the worst are the ones that need the most help.

We need to repeal NCLB for it is penalizing the same schools that need more help. It should be called "poor kids left behind". And of course it is ruining the quality of education by making schools teach their students to take standardized tests rather than teaching them to be creative and informed thinkers, which in turn will prepare them to be positive contributors to our society.

Alright, no time to continue this rant, I must take my private school students on a field trip. One of our fathers helped organize a trip to the Stanford Neurology Lab. We are going to be taught about the brain by Stanford Neurologists, we will handle real brains, learn clinical exams from interns, and see state of the art virtual imaging for brain and skull research. You see my students are being educated very differently than my own children who go to public school, simply because we cannot afford the better education, the kind of education all kids should get!

another fine Republican

GOP Hopeful: People on Public Assistance "Like Stray Animals"

Saturday 23 January 2010

by: Nathaniel Cary | McClatchy Newspapers

Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer jogging with Mike Huckabee. (Photo: ltgovbauer)

Greenville - Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."

Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said.

The worst supreme court decision EVER!!- the end of our democracy?

Well I just heard that the supreme court has decided corporations have the right to free speech and that congress cannot limit how much money they contribute to political campaigns.

This seriously is the worst news possible for our democracy.

I will write more about this soon but for now my first reaction.

The supreme court has decided that money is equal to free speech and that a corporation has the same rights as a human citizen. So this says the corporations can give unlimited money to influence politics. This means they can buy politicians.

They already have too much ability to influence politics as is obvious in all that Washington is doing today.

But this is TERRIBLE. Everyone should read what the four Supreme Court Justices that voted against this decision wrote. They lay it out. They say this is reckless! They say that corporations can be foreign owned so now China can influence our politics. They point out that the framers of this country believed corporations should be kept under control by the government, not the other way around!

They also point out that unlimited corporate control of politics will destroy our democracy and prevent politicians from doing things that are in the public interest but that would upset the corporations.

Theses 5 justices who made this decision are Republican appointed activist judges who have gone against the ideas of democracy and turned this country into a truly Fascist state!

Fascism in the combining of corporations and government, which we now have, corporate control of our political system.

We needed to reduce the power of corporations in the political arena and now the supreme court has done the opposite!!!

Ouch, deathblow to democracy

Ok, this is crazy!

We have around 200,000 private contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan. By law the companies must provide each employee a from of workman's comp insurance. very few insurance companies offer such insurance for war zones.

AIG provides 85% of these policies and they charge a rate of 1 to 1 based on the employees salary so someone making $100,000 in a year (an average salary for the work) would cost $100,000 to insure. This cost is paid for by the American Taxpayer through the Pentagon which is who pays for these contracts.

Now the craziest part is that there is another law that requires the American government to reimburse an insurance company 100% of medical costs incurred by someone in a combat zone. So we pay AIG $100,000 a year per person for insurance and then reimburse AIG for all their medical costs!!!!!

The Pentagon has actually suggested cutting AIG out of the equation which would save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions but as of yet there is noone in Congress who wants to try and get rid of this crazy law that lines the pockets of the insurance industry who intern keeps the politicians on their payrole via campaign contributions and lobbying jobs (which pay millions). Piss off the corporations and you piss off your future employer and cash cow .once you are out of office.

This info was from T. Christian Miller who wrote the book : "Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq" and who's new book focuses on the lives of those contractors who take the jobs supporting our military and what happens to them once they are injured by war. It is called somthing like "our throw away army".

Check out his Defense Act Compensation Blog

How obama is making us less safe

OK Things are looking worse, I feel like this is de ja vu from the Bush years.

So we had an attempted terrorist attack. Airport security failed to stop it but passengers did stop it.

So what to do? Obama talks about this huge failure. What about all the people who smuggle drugs into this country every day. The war on drugs is a failure just as the war on terror is and forever will be.

So let's stop fighting it!!!

Improve security when possible. But it will always be possible to blow up a plane. Militants have already put bombs inside their bodies that were remotely activated. We should not waste too much money and energy freaking out about airport security. What we need to do is stop doing the things that make the world hate us.

And Obama is doing the opposite. Escalation in Afghanistan, drone attacks in Pakistan, now talk of military action in Yemen where this latest terrorist may have trained.

We cannot kill all the terrorists! For every militant our drones kill in Pakistan we kill 10 civilians. The Taliban show up after a drone attack and recruit the brothers,etc of the civilians killed - increasing their numbers far beyond the one militant we may have killed.

We give military aide to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, they intern buy weapons we make here in the US (our only last export) and then we go around killing people over there, supporting Israel as they kill people, and all this makes the world more dangerous and makes the Christmas day attempt more and more likely.

If we want to be safe, airport scanners (that may give us cancer) are not the answer!!! Ending US led violence abroad and the militarization of the world for profit are what we need to focus on.

Obama said change doesn't come from Washington it comes to Washington. Well he is Washington %100 and he is going for the same old "smoke em out and kill 'em all" strategy that will not work. The anti war movement better stop celebrating their victory over McCain/Palin and start bringing some of that change TO Washington.

Stop the War on Terror. War IS Terror!

post script

Now I must ad a little post script. As disapointed I am in the Democratic Leadership running our country I must point out that the Republicans are still worse so no matter how much the Dems suck we must keep the Republicans from regaining control

This terrorist incident has illustrated that fact once again. While we have this breach in airline security, Obama's nominee to run the department in charge of Airline security is being held up right now by the Republicans because they fear he will unionize airport security workers. Their fight against unions (the working class) is so deep rooted it trumps their concern for national security. Of course they use twisted logic to say unions will make us less safe but that is a shallow argument.

Thank you Joe Lieberman (will Obama learn his lesson)

So after campaigning on universal health care, Lieberman (the second largest recipient in the senate of money from the insurance and medical industries), Lieberman insisted the public option be taken out of the Senate Bill. The Dems went along with him.

In its place they put in a provision that would lower the eligible age for Medicare to 55, something Joe was also in favor of. Now he has killed that provision as well.

Thank you Joe Lieberman for showing the voters of America your true colors (obstructionist lying Republican). Now that the Health Care Bill is completely gutted of anything that will lower costs for consumers the Republicans in the Senate are STILL united against it! Once again, thanks, this also allows the voters of America to see where the Republican party stands - against the American public.

So if Joe Lieberman or any Republicans still have their jobs after they come up for re-election, well then the voters are to blame, for it can not be more clear that they are not interested in helping the American people. This also applies to the "blue dog" democrats that have been working on behalf of the insurance industry throughout this process.

I agree with Howard Dean that this bill should now be killed. It, in fact, requires people to buy private insurance (with tax payer subsidies for the poor) while refusing to offer any option. This, in fact, will drive up costs and actually benefits the insurance companies that were the problem in the first place!!!

Now for Obama. He of course is proving to be quite a corporatist (unlike the socialist the Right tries to make him out to be) so maybe he is happy with this bill. But with that being said he needs to learn his lesson from Joe Lieberman! Joe campaigned against Obama in support of McCain. Then when there was talk of stripping Joe of his committee chairmanship Obama stepped in and said, we need to work together and not hold grudges. Obama has gone out of his way to get Republican support for this Health Bill and other legislation. Even though the Republicans went on record as saying they want this issue to fail in order to take out Obama.

So when will Obama learn the lesson that these Republicans (Joe included) are not to be worked with, much less catered to. Obama and the Democrats need to push for strong legislation, allow the Republicans to filibuster it if that is what they choose, and then make the point to the voters that the Republicans are obstructing progress and they need to go.

I want to see a strong, principled Obama, not a weak compromising Obama. I do realize that the latter is probably his true political self but it is proving ineffective against the united Republican front against the American People.

two good developments in health care reform!

OK, I am feeling a bit optimistic about the progress of the health care reform in congress. Two items of news made me happy:

first the senate voted down the anti abortion ammendment and that was just a horrible attack on poor women. It is still in the House Bill and must be defeated. It says women cannot buy insurance that covers abortion. This means only women who can pay out of their own pocket can afford abortions. This would be most hurtful to those who have complications late in a wanted pregnancy and must pay for an EXPENSIVE emergancy abortion that is already something they do not really want to do. BAD. And for the poor it will return folks to back alley abortions.

second the senate says they may scrap the public option and hire a private insurance company to run the "public option". I just love this irony!!!! BUT there are two good things that I like about this plan.

First the public option was going to be so shitty that it would discredit the who idea of a public option. This way in the future there will still be the desire for a public option and we just may get a stronger one.

Second, they said instead they may lower the enrollment age for medicare to 55 years old. THIS is a brilliant plan! The infrastructure is already there. If that works out then perhaps we can lower it even further in the future, and then further, and then finally have the OPTION of medicare for anyone who would like it. GREAT IDEA, didn't I say that a long time ago. Me and many others, I can't take credit for the idea.