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Scott SoCal said:
The education system is just a sham and has gone way past its expiration point thanks to a superficial and materialist neoliberal society that holds anything of intelligence, culture and class with the greatest contempt, because in secret feels inferior and inadequate or else has lost all sense and comprehension of these things. Instead of forcing students to remember facts and events, upon which to construct a critical argument, they are being told that such is superfluous and the result is that they come up with equally superfluous arguments.
Then we have a situation in which the private business sector has muscled its way into the mentality of the school administrations, which is of course nothing surprising, and this has adversely conditioned the relationship between teacher and students. Students are no longer to be treated with rigor, we can't place too high expectations upon them, we can't express a value system that might be construed as "provocative", as this may be earth shattering to them and goes against everything the oligarchy has told them, we can't challenge accepted viewpoints. All because they are paying clients and no longer students who have more right to "assess" their instructors then the teachers have a right to give them an appropriate grade, hence grade inflation is rampant in the system and they, the students, mistake mediocrity for excellence. They don't study, they don't even know what it means to study seriously, they don't take notes because the feel they don't have to or believe it just all goes into their heads after hearing it once. They are always looking for the easy way out. They claim they can't remember names, dates, events, that anything which goes beyond the merely superficial in what they are presented is overwhelming to them. They don't know how to think critically about the world around them and especially about the past, because everything exists in the eternal now, though they are first class consumers. They thus can't make connections between what they have been presented before, with something new. They don't read. They have no sense of culture beyond materialism and the market. They don't have even a basic understanding of the historical forces that have conditioned civilization to the present. They spend more time on face book (at times in the classroom) than they do on their homework, let alone at serious research. They can be insolent, presumptuous and have a sense of entitlement, because they have been raised with it, that is not in any way justified by what they actually produce and how they think. The liberal arts education is dead, has been murdered by the a-critical, materialist, consumeristic and highly superficial society that conservative America has produced.
I could go on and on, but I will only add that I once taught at a Philadelphia charter high school and it was a complete joke. There was a pompous and incompetent board of directives made up of so called professionals and financiers who more then anyhting liked to pat themselves on the back in an appalling self-congratulatory display of nauseating vanity, types without any pedogogical background who thought that just throwing money into the situation would act as a magical solution to the grave problems of education. Folks who think that money can replace culture and that treating education like any business enterprise would produce sensational results, though education without culture, without a working pedagogical methodology is a complete farce and so this is precisely what they produced. Then there are all these standardized tests and quotas and percentages to aim for, which will then result in more state funding like a salary bonus for reaching selling goals in the corporate world. Students don't have to present, neither orally nor in written form, serious critical analysis of events anymore, their world is governed by statistics, by a mad and senseless statistical analysis of everything, litereally everything.
What a ghastly world of ignorance and stupidity the school board directors have produced! Students can't write anymore, they don't like taking any type of exam for which they have not already been presented the topics and questions to answer, that isn't multiple-choice like some game show quiz.
Private sector education is receiving ever increasing funds from the private business world to indoctrinate the young citizenry, whereas public education is being systematically defrauded and reduced to a feeble system of incompetence, poorly remunerated teachers that are often under qualified and the brainless products of an equally brainless preparation. It is a pedagogical world that has been neutered, in which no one is allowed to have a position about anything but only wish-woshy impartial and worthless analysis that only breeds confusion, ignorance and contempt.
The schools today are the world's largest factories of ignorance and contempt, I've thought.
We need public schools that are taken seriously again, that honor the youth by actually holding students responsible for their learning curve, that actually challenges them to think critically, that presents them with strong positions on both sides of the ideological fence with which they can formulate their own cultural, social, political world views and make them informed citizens. We need to liberate the schools from the mindless stupidity of the business world that has taken them over and which has caused a vast and ghastly superficiality among today's Americans. We need to rattle this society down to its bones to wake it form the induced coma in which the corporations have placed it. We need a strong public school system that's democratically accessible to all social classes irrespective of wealth and earnings and at liberty to educate towards being good citizens first, before being CEOs. Other than the type of inane competition, as if the logic of the market, could replace humanistic culture in the schools. The competition is crap, just as the public system is crap. Everything is crap and can only beget more crap until we gain some sense of what really needs to be corrected.
The business mentality has taken over every facet of American society, and hence the schools as well, and it has reduced them to this debased state of imbecility which I have so far managed to escape. The school boards are being occupied by business managers and not educators and thus these imbeciles in this imbecility has resulted in the continuous decline of the intellectual conditions. No other country has allowed the private business sector to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by business. And what has it given us? Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Larry Page? Yet I can't applaud the fact that we have Steve Jobs but have lost our minds, that we have Larry Page but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Bill Gates but have become more or less brainless and there is no change in site. That we have endless miles of shopping malls, which are only matched by the endless miles of ghettos and slums of our urban decay. This has been underway ever since we have stopped trying to create nice cities, stopped trying to offer good public education, but rather only trying build successful businesses, which is the only success that matters to us. We have built a successful business world but as a society we have become more ignorant, live in brutalized cities and isolating, unstimulating modern suburban housing developments, which are invariably seen as "good" places to raise children! It will be hard, if not impossible, to break free from the business stranglehold, I've thought, as our nation has allowed itself to be exploited more than any other by the business world and it will take centuries, not decades, to repair the intellectual depredations of business. If they can be repaired.
Superficial and amateurish revolutions won't do any good, as we have seen from the experiences tried so far.
Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, is coming to our town to crush union rights
The conservative group Americans for Prosperity will take a pro-Scott Walker blitz on the road beginning Thursday. . . .
"They can't necessarily come to Madison and protest," said Matt Seaholm. "We're hitting everywhere. with the purpose of letting people know that there are people in Wisconsin that are supporting Scott Walker and what the Republicans in the legislature are doing. . . .
Americans for Prosperity is funded by outside donors like the billionaire Koch brothers, who also contributed heavily to Scott Walker's run for governor.
http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/117290393.html
The conservative group Americans for Prosperity will take a pro-Scott Walker blitz on the road beginning Thursday. . . .
"They can't necessarily come to Madison and protest," said Matt Seaholm. "We're hitting everywhere. with the purpose of letting people know that there are people in Wisconsin that are supporting Scott Walker and what the Republicans in the legislature are doing. . . .
Americans for Prosperity is funded by outside donors like the billionaire Koch brothers, who also contributed heavily to Scott Walker's run for governor.
http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/117290393.html
Funny thing about the Koch brothers is how many socialist government handouts they get, and how many government connections they have.
I don't really know why unions get such a bad rap. I do not know of any union running a business to the ground. Or a city. Or a country for that matter.
Thats very true. ....Señ said:
My father worked for a very well known Union for 17 years. When he became disabled they turned their back on him. They were great to come around and let him know what was happening down at the bakery since he was gone but trying to make sure my sister and I had benifits to visit the doctor or dentist....nahhh NOT SO ****ING MUCH.
I hope FoxNews can shed some light on these corrupt unions. LMAO....
Glenn_Wilson said:Thats very true. ....
My father worked for a very well known Union for 17 years. When he became disabled they turned their back on him. They were great to come around and let him know what was happening down at the bakery since he was gone but trying to make sure my sister and I had benifits to visit the doctor or dentist....nahhh NOT SO ****ING MUCH.
I hope FoxNews can shed some light on these corrupt unions. LMAO....
worked for a union?? yup foxnews fits you well
Señor_Contador said:
How about the UAW and Detroit? They were equally complicit in the demise of the auto industry, along with greedy CEOs, managers and shareholders, and corrupt politicians. The International-Harvester downfall is a perfect example.
People called Ronald Reagan a union buster, but in 1981 the ATC workers were breaking the law when they struck after already agreeing to and signing a contract with $40m (11.4%) increase in wages and benefits, double that of other government workers. He even gave them 48 hours to get back to work, and both he and Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis said they would negotiate more from there. 11,000 didn't go back to work, so he fired them. A lot of people agreed with his actions, and that the union was being unreasonable.
I am not anti-union, and I think Fox News is a joke. I just think there are many sides to an issue and can see why some people are upset at some unions. I will say though that while the union abandoned Glenn's dad, and this happens across America, rarely does the corporation step in to help people like this either.
As I said a few pages ago, if this becomes and issue of union worker versus non-union worker, or government worker versus private sector worker, then the plutocrats like the Koch's have achieved their goal. They can continue suppressing wages and benefits, and bribing politicians, unencumbered.
That's where the real culprit lies.
redtreviso said:
Soros is a guy you will love. I'm surprised with your grasp of Fox News you have never heard of him...
In his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance, for instance, he wrote:
“I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of self-importance―to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of God or an economic reformer like Keynes or, even better, a scientist like Einstein.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=977
It's a good read regarding a guy I'm sure you already worship.
Alpe d'Huez said:
The UAW bankrupted Detroit?????????
W-H-A-T?
Look I think you've got your priorities a little "skewed" here. I'm not even going to get into specifics because unions have had their good and bad days, but that's no reason to take it on the unions, much in the same way we do not do away with capitalism because Maddof and Milken and many others were corrupt a-holes.
The unionized auto workers were interested in making cars, that was their job. The executives in those car companies were interested in making a profit and huge bonuses for themselves. And that's because they have what I like to call "the 5% mentality", meaning they see executives in other non-unionized industries giving themselves huge bonuses and that, eventually, becomes the norm. And when bonuses are the goal, having a profitable business, making quality products and keeping the jobs here becomes secondary. Eventually everything is put on the table, including workers themselves, meaning people and families with little kids and the like. All because some white egomaniac a-hole wants to become part of that 5% keeping 65% of the countries' riches. As if 65% is not friggin enough!!
Yes, but that is not a union problem. The main problem here is that non-unionized employees' salaries have stayed stagnant here in the US, while their unionized counterpart's salaries have, at least, been adjusted for inflation. What unionized employees are saying, if I'm not mistaken, is that other workers ought to unionize and take advantage of collective bargaining.
But people in the private sector have a carrot dangling in front of their faces every single day of the week, and they go to work every day feeling like they're going to be promoted and make it to the next level and make a ton of money and be part of the 5% crowd. The main problem is that 99.9999999999% do not, and that leaves a lot of disgruntled people, not to mention broken families (since anything beyond a regular job requires 60+ hour weeks nowadays).
So, in essence the unionized workers of America are sort of telling people is not to look at them when looking for someone or somebody to blame for their economic problems, they're asking the non-unionized employees to ask themselves who put them in that situation. It certainly wasn't unions.
Heck, my wife is a psychologist. 10 years ago her colleagues at the corporate level (yes, they have psychologists scan potential candidates) were laughing at her because she had chosen to go the NY Department of Education, making half of what the other crowd were making. Nowadays, they tell her that she's got the best job in the world.
What happened, you may ask? The big f***** carrot that was dangling in front of their faces 10 years ago was now being shoved up their poo-poo passage.
Glenn_Wilson said:Thats very true. ....
My father worked for a very well known Union for 17 years. When he became disabled they turned their back on him. They were great to come around and let him know what was happening down at the bakery since he was gone but trying to make sure my sister and I had benifits to visit the doctor or dentist....nahhh NOT SO ****ING MUCH.
I hope FoxNews can shed some light on these corrupt unions. LMAO....
I really don't know what union your father worked for but I can tell you from experience that unions DO NOT turn their backs on the workers they represent (unlike our "politicians").
What union did he work for (if you don't mind me asking)?
Señor_Contador said:
BCTGM (Bakers, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers) He worked at a company that was called Colonial Baker which is known in most of the United States as Wonder Bread or Rainbow bread. That was owned by Cambell Taggart and eventually purchase in 1982 by Anheuser-Busch. My father became disabled somewhere around 1982 we had union benefits only up until my father became disabled.
Neither the Union nor the Corporation did anything to help our family. They seemed in my point of view to be at ease with the facts that we were on welfare.
To me there is something very ironic in the fact that the Union my father belonged to was also a Tobacco workers union.....He died of Emphysema. He was a smoker from age 9 until the last 3 years of his life.
Glenn_Wilson said:
I'm sorry to hear about your father's passing.
Did the union provide your father with the health care benefits for a decent amount of time though? From what I know, all unions offer comprehensive health coverage until Cobra kicks in.
Did you also try to get your father to quit smoking? I mean, unionized or not, smoking kills. Unions can and do cover the health benefits for illnesses contracted while at work.
Smoking is an entirely different animal though. Every time you light one up you're playing Russian roulette.
My parents have a friend with lung cancer right now. Guy's not unionized. He had to sell his house to pay the hospital bills, and he's been in there for about 2 weeks.
Señor_Contador said:
I am not sure Cobra existed then (1980). I only know that we did not have insurance once he was deemed disabled.
I was young when this was happening. My sister was 16 and I was 15. We were always begging him to stop once we realized it was the cause of his sickness. He was stubborn up until he was had an attack that put him into a comma and he stayed in the Hospital Intensive Care Unit for 4 months and in the hospital a total of 11 months. After that he was not smoking but he was in and out of the hospital for 5 to 6 times a year right up until his death. He died of heart failure. His lungs and heart were working triple duties just to sit up in bed, his heart had to have been tired.
For me the Union he belonged to is only part of the blame for his lack of health coverage. Some resides with the company and some with the government for not having a option for health care. Something we could have paid for that would keep us from having unbelievably debt due to hospital bills. I think the total when he died was somewhere around 3-4 hundred thousand dollars in medical bills.
So I am not a big fan of Unions and all the good they do for the worker. It is true that they have some good programs and benefits. They also have some dealing I do not like for example .... the political mess. I think the Union should not be involved with politics at all and should stick with helping the worker etc. Maybe they see that as part of helping the worker but I see it as a waste of money.
Glenn_Wilson said:
Well, like I said, unions can only help with illnesses contracted while at work. If your father became disabled because of his smoking habit... that's something no one would've been able to help him with. Did your father contact the union secretary to see if they could run a collection on his behalf? I know DC9, which is my father's union, does it all the time.
As far as unions getting involved in politics... it's a necesary evil. There's no other option for them. Unions know they have many enemies and that this new generation of corporate politicians (cp) want to get rid of them precisely because they take power away from the corporations and give it to the workers.
The thing is unions were a necessary and rather enlightened counter measure, to the criminal exploitation of labor by the factory owners during the industrial revolution. They provided workers with a democratic empowerment to clean up the work environment from inhuman conditions, limit weekly hours, obtain higher wages, etc. This spawned, or ran parallel to, the socialist ideologies of the period and into the 20th century and had been at the basis of Europe's Third Way democratic model after World War II, which split the difference, more or less, between US capitalism and Soviet communism. They had also become an ideological polarity divided up between the ultra-right wing nationalists and the marxists and, in Italy, Catholics of the 20's, which in Europe, unfortunately, and with the most devastating effects, was won by the brutality of force and thuggery of the former. Mussolini began a socialist, before his black shirt raid squads went on attacks against its left-wing membership. Hittler was for a a social state limited to a supreme Arian race, though this didn't have any basis in the just workers' struggle.
In any case with the victory of neoliberalism at the markets in the 80's and the fall of the Soviet state the unions have been vilified excessively by the conservatives in America, but also to a lesser degree in Europe. Their arguments against the unions are that they are corrupt, anti-competition, anti-capitalist and anti-modern.
However it should also be remembered that these are the same conservatives who have happily embraced the actual globalization model we have, which allows for the most anti-democratic, anti-human rights model of production for the West's rich markets in the Third World. The same conservatives who, while finding no problem in moving manufacturing abroad in the interests of the business owners thus depressing entire zones and leaving production workers in a state of desperation, have waged an all out war against the unions and what they represent.
The same private business owners and executives who, while accepting colossal year end bonuses for the amount of sales on the backs of a foreign near slave work force and an increasingly pressured labor force at home to make fiscal sacrifices, have used their money to finance a propaganda campaign with political consent against the unions to help their rich colleagues defeat the "enemy". They are thus the same industry owners and management that wants to "discipline" labor, while justifying the cuts and longer hours to the need for greater competitiveness. This has produced the thoroughly biased, distorted and ultimately falsified image we have, for which the prey has been dressed-up as the predator and the predator exchanged for the pray.
This has also of course destroyed and eviscerated American manufacturing and the American worker, whose children then go to expensive universities to earn degrees they will be having to pay back for years to try an obtain jobs within the service industry that are becoming increasingly scarce and competitive to obtain.
In any case with the victory of neoliberalism at the markets in the 80's and the fall of the Soviet state the unions have been vilified excessively by the conservatives in America, but also to a lesser degree in Europe. Their arguments against the unions are that they are corrupt, anti-competition, anti-capitalist and anti-modern.
However it should also be remembered that these are the same conservatives who have happily embraced the actual globalization model we have, which allows for the most anti-democratic, anti-human rights model of production for the West's rich markets in the Third World. The same conservatives who, while finding no problem in moving manufacturing abroad in the interests of the business owners thus depressing entire zones and leaving production workers in a state of desperation, have waged an all out war against the unions and what they represent.
The same private business owners and executives who, while accepting colossal year end bonuses for the amount of sales on the backs of a foreign near slave work force and an increasingly pressured labor force at home to make fiscal sacrifices, have used their money to finance a propaganda campaign with political consent against the unions to help their rich colleagues defeat the "enemy". They are thus the same industry owners and management that wants to "discipline" labor, while justifying the cuts and longer hours to the need for greater competitiveness. This has produced the thoroughly biased, distorted and ultimately falsified image we have, for which the prey has been dressed-up as the predator and the predator exchanged for the pray.
This has also of course destroyed and eviscerated American manufacturing and the American worker, whose children then go to expensive universities to earn degrees they will be having to pay back for years to try an obtain jobs within the service industry that are becoming increasingly scarce and competitive to obtain.
Glenn_Wilson said:Red…can we get an update on what FoxNews is doing as of late?
there's no time, he's too busy organizing the workers and fighting the man
patricknd said:there's no time, he's too busy organizing the workers and fighting the man
Hes probably on the cafe section of tmz, nfl, nhl, horse racing, mtv and a bunch of other forums telling everyone they watch too much fox and how much intellectually superior he is.
Oh and telling them that they are all alcocholics of course.
A "how to troll for dummies" copy on his desk and a bottle of bourbon by his side, he is no doubt playing over and over tapes from Limbaughs latest show, for quotes he can later in the day atribute to a bunch of people with weird names and strange avatars that he has never met and knows nothing about.
Because that is how you win the internets
Glenn_Wilson said:Red…can we get an update on what FoxNews is doing as of late?
I think Red must have spent the weekend tearing up the desert with Scott Socal on their dirt bikes, the have both been strangely (but refreshingly) silent of late.
Hugh Januss said:I think Red must have spent the weekend tearing up the desert with Scott Socal on their dirt bikes, the have both been strangely (but refreshingly) silent of late.
Oh, now you went and hurt my feelings.
Not to worry tho... I have retired from this thread is all.
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