mild obsession with :
bookstores
elliott smith
teabags
fad diets
jewish culture
indonesia
hot girls
krispy kreme
the middle east <3
seedless grapes skirtssoshorttheyoffendjesus
tribe called quest
seth cohen
white shirts
the city at dawn
obituaries
socially awkward people
jagerbombs
willy brandt
waiting for godot
das leben der anderen
The creation of a permanent, insecure and frightened underclass is the most effective weapon to thwart rebellion and resistance as our economy worsens. Huge pools of unemployed and underemployed blunt labor organizing, since any job, no matter how menial, is zealously coveted. As state and federal social welfare programs, especially in education, are gutted, we create a wider and wider gulf between the resources available to the tiny elite and the deprivation and suffering visited on our permanent underclass. Access to education, for example, is now largely defined by class. The middle class, taking on huge debt, desperately flees to private institutions to make sure their children have a chance to enter the managerial ranks of the corporate elite. And this is the idea. Public education, which, when it functions, gives opportunities to all citizens, hinders a system of corporate neofeudalism. Corporations are advancing, with Barack Obama’s assistance, charter schools and educational services that are stripped down and designed to train classes for their appropriate vocations, which, if you’re poor means a future in the service sector. The eradication of teachers’ unions, under way in states such as New Jersey, is a vital component in the dismantling of public education. Corporations know that good systems of public education are a hindrance to a rigid caste system. In corporate America everyone will be kept in his or her place.
wow - just looking at the map tells you it has to have something to do with race. (oh, and reading the text on the graphic, which says that “the highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or in high-poverty rural areas, most of the schools have high minority populations.”)
given that parental educational achievement is one of the primary predictors of a student’s educational achievement, this is a cyclical pattern that’s exacerbating existing inequality, driving a bigger and bigger wedge between the privileged and what is becoming a permanent underclass.