I predict that the legacy of President Obama and his multi-millionaire
congress will be a stain on America for generations to come. The American government looks more like a
monarchy than a democratic republic. One
of the most shameful effects of the privileged group of millionaires in
congress, and there are many, has been the re-segregation and militarization of
our public schools.
This congress operates as a royal family unanswerable to the
American people, enacting laws and rules that serve to enrich themselves at the
expense of those who “elected” them. For
instance, today it was reported that ex-speaker of the House John Boehner and
his staff will be on the taxpayer’s dole for the next five years. From RollCall:
Excerpt:
The former House speaker, whose
resignation from Congress became effective over the weekend, is taking
advantage of little-known perks and
privileges taxpayers provide BY LAW to those vacating the chamber’s
highest office. Boehner is setting up a
government-funded office that may have as many as three aides with salaries
of more than $100,000 each.
The Ohio Republican can maintain the outpost for up to five
years, with taxpayers footing the bill for office operations, franked mail
and personnel costs….
“No statutory restrictions exist on the cost, type, or location of
a former Speaker’s office,” wrote Matthew E. Glassman in a Congressional
Research Service report from May. Boehner
could pay his three aides salaries of up to $158,000, $133,000 and $116,000 for
2015, Glassman noted…
Former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert,
R-Ill., spent about $1.5 million
running his post-speaker office between 2008 and 2012…
Hastert, who pleaded guilty last week to charges of evading federal
bank reporting requirements, resigned from Congress in 2007. He maintained his post-speaker office while also acting as a registered federal
lobbyist for clients such
as Lorillard Tobacco and Bridgepoint Education, lobbying records
show, while also spending federal funds for
his wind-down office from 2009 to 2012.
Hmmm, Bridgepoint Education.
I wonder what that is that the taxpayers paid the criminal felon Hastert
$1.5 million for his lobbying efforts?
And if the taxpayers paid for his office space and his staff’s salaries,
what did Bridgepoint pay Hastert? So
here’s what Senate.gov has to say about Bridgepoint Education:
Excerpt:
Introduction
Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
(“Bridgepoint”) was created as the
result of the purchase of a small religious college in 2005, and now
offers primarily online 4-year
degrees. Bridgepoint has experienced some of the most dramatic increases in student enrollment, Federal funds,
and profit of any
company examined.
Along with this rapid growth, have
come rapid increases in student
withdrawal rates (the student
withdrawal rates for the Associate programs is the highest of any company analyzed), student loan defaults, and spending on marketing and executive compensation. These outcomes call into question whether
Bridgepoint’s students are receiving an education that affords them to the
ability to repay the loan debt they incurred.
My, my, my. So
Bridgeport was created in 2005 after
W. Bush along with Ted Kennedy pushed through “no child left behind” that
started the mass privatization of public schools into private charters. How else has Bridgepoint engorged themselves
with taxpayer funds courtesy of ex-Speaker Hastert?
Bridgepoint Education, was formed
in 2003 with the backing of Warburg Pincus, a Wall Street private equity firm. In 2005, the company purchased The Franciscan University of
the Prairies in Clinton, IA. Franciscan University
was a small regionally accredited
non-profit college facing serious financial troubles because of low
enrollment.
At the time of purchase, Franciscan University enrolled 312 students. Bridgepoint
acquired the Colorado School of Professional Psychology in 2007 and renamed it
University of the Rockies. At the time
of acquisition, the school had 75
students and did not offer any online
courses or programs.
Bridgepoint had its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the New York Stock
Exchange in 2009….
In July 2011 Warburg Pincus
announced that it may, in the next 36 months, sell its entire share of the
company. At the company’s average share
price over the past 12 months, Warburg
would stand to earn $773.1 million from selling its holdings.
Since 2005, enrollment at Bridgepoint has grown over 7,800 percent from 968 (including both Ashford and University of the Rockies)
students that year to 77,179 students in 2010. Unlike many other for-profit education companies, Bridgepoint has not seen the same
decrease in its 2011 and 2012 enrollment, and as of March 2012, the company
enrolled approximately 95,000 students.
The growth in enrollment has led to
growth in revenue. Over the past 3
years, from $85.7 million in fiscal year 2007 to $713.2 million in 2010.
Well, well, well it sure pays to have an ex-Speaker of the
House, paid by the taxpayers to lobby congress for on your behalf. In the
year 2009, Obama came into the Executive Office and appointed Arnie Duncan as
Education Secretary, with Duncan’s “Race
to the Trough” er, I mean “Race to the Top” program billions more were taken out of public
schools to fund private for-profit charter schools. From BlackAgenda Report:
Excerpt:
…Duncan was an old friend of the president-elect with a spotty
resume who'd come to the Chicago Public Schools straight from the mayor's
office where he'd been a budget guy, and had
never taught a day in his life.
Duncan had closed dozens of Chicago schools and replaced them with charters, often in neighborhoods under
pressure from gentrifiers, and fired hundreds of qualified, experienced and
largely black teachers…
Duncan and Obama soon announced their intention to close and privatize (in their language
“turn around”) what they called “5,000
underperforming public schools” across the country, with the “underperformance to be mostly indicated by
low scores on standardized tests.
Using a pot of almost $4 billion in stimulus money, the Obama administration allowed consultants
from pro-privatization foundations like Eli Broad, Gates, Walton Family
and others to write the guidelines for its signature education program, Race
To The Top…
In seven years, President Obama, his Secretary of Education, and
their corporate funded allies and charter school sugar daddy contributors built upon the foundation
laid by the No Child Left Behind Act, which first gave federal funding to
the charter school and educational privatization industries…
It seems that after Hurricane Katrina the Bush
Administration and then the Obama Administration completely privatized the New
Orleans public school system. From Dr.
Margaret Kimberly at Black Agenda Report:
Excerpt:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan could not contain his gratitude to Hurricane Katrina, which killed or
permanently displaced much of New Orleans’ Black residents…Katrina was welcomed by millions of whites as an opportunity for
economic and ethnic “renewal” – a rationale that would justify genocide…
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans,
Louisiana, and the entire Gulf coast. More than 1,800 people died and thousands
more were permanently displaced. In the
years since, that city regained only two-thirds of its pre-hurricane population.
But this tragedy for multitudes was a
gift to powerful people who wanted to turn New Orleans into Exhibit A for
neo-liberalism…
In 2005 the ruling elites
were over overjoyed because nature gave them the chance to do what they could
not get away with easily. Overnight, New Orleans lost a huge portion of its
poor, black population. The state
legislature used the crisis to arbitrarily declare public schools as “failing” and converted them into
charters.
They fired 7,500 public school employees who won decisions in lower
courts but were undone when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their case.
In short, New Orleans became the face of
disaster capitalism and ethnic cleansing.
While millions of people watched in
horror as the levees broke and homes were flooded, some watched with glee and, as Kristen McQueary of the Tribune
editorial board admits, with envy too. They wondered why they could not
have been fortunate enough to have a black population swept out of town in a
matter of days.
In 2010 … Arne Duncan said that the hurricane was “the best thing to happen
to education in New Orleans….” There is no public input, no permanent
employment. This dystopian hell is perfect in their eyes. “Post-Katrina New Orleans has provided no
‘rebirth’ for black people.”
Yes, where some see lemons others see lemonade, or as Obama’s
first Chief of Staff, Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel said “you never want a
serious crisis to go to waste and what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to
do things you could not do before”.
And what resulted when the Chicago bunch seized the
opportunity that the crisis provided? From Aljazeera.com:
Excerpt:
The resegregation of America’s schools
…Today, segregation — both racial and economic — remains the core organizational feature of American public education.
In 1980, the typical black student attended a school where 36 percent of
students were white. Today, the average black student attends a school where
only 29 percent are. Many black and Latino students attend schools where nearly
every other student is nonwhite — including
in supposed liberal bastions such as New
York and Chicago.
Indeed, New York State’s public schools are the most segregated in the
nation, according to a March report from the Civil Rights Project at
the University of California, Los Angeles. In
New York City, 19 of 32 community school districts are less than 10 percent
white. That includes all of the Bronx, two-thirds of Brooklyn and half of
Manhattan.
“Black children are more racially
and socioeconomically isolated today than at any time” since data became
available in 1970, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic
Policy Institute, wrote in a recent report.
What’s more, schools attended primarily by nonwhite and poor children
are often woefully underfunded.
Take Philadelphia, where, as a reporter for the Philadelphia City
Paper, I cover a largely poor and
nonwhite school district that, after years of underfunding, is going through a
spectacular collapse in the wake of budget cuts implemented by Republican
Gov. Tom Corbett.
Many high schools here are more than 90 percent black. Among the
many things city schools lack are
sufficient nurses, counselors, music and art teachers and libraries. Things
are rather different a few miles over the city line at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, a leafy suburban town with a
median household income of nearly $69,000. There, the funding is stellar. The student body: 8 percent black…
Today’s version of segregation is
enforced not through “whites only” signage or a governor blocking the
schoolhouse door, but through disparate property-tax bases….
A self-described reform movement, which calls for expanded charter schools and
evaluating teacher effectiveness based on test scores, now dominates American
public-education policy debates. It has largely abandoned the civil rights
movement’s dream of integrated schools and instead blames public management and teachers’
unions for poor students’ troubles.
Notably, the Civil Rights Project study found THAT 73 PERCENT OF NEW
YORK CITY CHARTERS ARE “APARTHEID SCHOOLS,” with less than 1 percent white
enrollment.
That’s shocking “73 Percent of New York Charters are
Apartheid Schools with less than 1 percent white enrollment.” That reminded me that recently I had seen Campbell
Brown, who previously was a “journalist” at CNN, making the circuit stumping
for expanded charter schools in New York.
Here is the appearance she made on The
Colbert Report:
According to Mother Jones it appears Campbell Brown has a
conflict of interest:
Before founding PTP, Brown raised
this issue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July 2012. But what she failed to
disclose was that her husband, Dan
Senor, sits on the board of the New York affiliate of StudentsFirst, an
education lobbying group founded by Michelle Rhee, the controversial former Washington,
DC, chancellor.
Rhee made a name for herself as
public enemy No. 1 of the teachers' unions and has become the torchbearer of
the charter school movement. In 2012, her "bipartisan grassroots
organization" backed 105 candidates in state races, 88 percent of them
Republicans. (Senor was also the
spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority following the invasion of
Iraq and served as a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012.)…
But there is much more about PTP
that is less than transparent, including its sources of funding and its overall
agenda. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, PTP
may keep its donors' identities secret and spend money in electoral
campaigns, so long as political activity doesn't consume the majority of its
time and money.
And if you are fortunate enough, as a poor or middle class student,
to graduate and pursue a college or secondary education you are likely to spiral
into and unending vortex of debt that unlike any other debt, can never be
forgiven. From International BusinessTimes:
Excerpt:
Joe Biden Backed Bills To Make It Harder For Americans To Reduce Their
Student Debt
Jennifer Ryan did not love the idea
of taking on debt, but she figured she was investing in her future. Eager to
further her teaching career, she took out loans to gain certification and later
pursued an advanced degree. But her
studies came at a massive cost, leaving her confronting $192,000 in student loan debt.
“It’s overwhelming,” Ryan told
International Business Times of her debts. “I can’t pay it back on the schedule
the lenders have demanded."
In the past, debtors in her position could have used bankruptcy court to shield them from some of their
creditors. But a provision slipped into federal law in 2005 effectively bars most Americans from accessing bankruptcy protections for their PRIVATE
STUDENT LOANS.
In recent months, Democrats have
touted legislation to roll back that law, as
Americans now face more than $1.2 trillion in total outstanding debt from
their government and private student
loans.... Yet one of the lawmakers most responsible for limiting the legal options
of Ryan and students like her is the man who some Democrats hope will be their
party's standard-bearer in 2016: Vice
President Joe Biden.
As a senator from Delaware -- a
corporate tax haven where the financial industry is one of the state’s largest
employers -- Biden was one of the key
proponents of the 2005
legislation… That bill effectively
prevents the $150 billion worth OF
PRIVATE STUDENT DEBT from being discharged,
rescheduled or renegotiated as other debt can be in bankruptcy court.
Biden's efforts in 2005 were
no anomaly. Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion
of the struggling middle class -- a man who famously commutes on Amtrak and
mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers -- the Delaware lawmaker has played a consistent and pivotal role in the
financial industry's four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to
shield themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT
review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s.
Biden's political fortunes rose in tandem with the financial industry's.
At 29, he won the first of seven elections to the U.S. Senate, rising to chairman of the powerful
Judiciary Committee, which vets bankruptcy legislation.
On that committee, Biden helped
lenders make it more difficult for Americans to reduce debt through bankruptcy
-- a trend that experts say encouraged
banks to loan more freely with less fear that courts could erase their
customers’ repayment obligations. At the same time, with more debtors
barred from bankruptcy protections, the
average American’s debt load went up by two-thirds over the last 40 years.
Today, there is more than $10,000 of personal debt for every person in the
country, as compared to roughly $6,000 in the early 1970s.
That increase -- and its attendant
interest payments -- have generated huge profits for a
financial industry that delivered more than $1.9 million of campaign
contributions to Biden over his career, according to data compiled
by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Student debt, which grew as Biden climbed the Senate ladder and
helped lenders tighten bankruptcy laws, spiked
from $24 billion issued annually in 1990-91 to $110 billion in 2012-13,
according to data from the Pew Research Center.
According to the Institute for
College Access and Success, as of 2012, roughly one-fifth of recent graduates’ student debt was from private loans that
“are typically more costly” than government loans.
And another consequence of turning education over to
for-profit, privately owned charters is the school to prison pipeline. From Rutherford.org:
Excerpt:
“Every day in communities across
the United States, children and
adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have
increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.
From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing
electronic surveillance, the public
schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated
on crime, security and violence.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes…
Unfortunately, when you’re a child in the American police state, life
is that much worse. Microcosms of
the police state, America’s public
schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless,
over criminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape
that plagues those of us on the “outside…”
Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource
officers (SROs) have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high
schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals”
in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force….
In their zeal to crack down on guns
and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the
schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million
dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser
International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and
$100,000 shooting detection systems.
According to one law review article
on the school-to-prison pipeline,
“Many school districts have formed their own police departments, some so large
they rival the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety division in New
York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local police
department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”
The term “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to a phenomenon in which
children who are suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of
ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a
student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile
justice system within the next year.”
So John Boehner ex-Speaker of the House, is taking advantage
of the “little-known perks and
privileges taxpayers provide BY LAW” to those member of the “royal
family” or maybe I should say “crime family.” After all, a royal family has
limited control over their people, whereas the American government creates a dangerous
atmosphere and demands protection money from their citizens.
We’ll keep you safe from our actions as long as you pay the
price and the price can be your property, your life, your home, your health and
your children’s future.
And that is Part I of the legacy of Obama and the
Millionaire Congress the “Re-segregation of Schools and $1.2 Trillion in
Student Debt." School’s out.
By Patricia Baeten
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