State of the US Meltdown II

It's often said you can judge a country by how it treats its children. They are the most vulnerable and weakest members of every society, but they are also its future.

By that standard, the US fails.

The latest example of this failure is Central Falls, Rhode Island. Thanks to the magic of No Child Left Behind -- that domestic-educational version of the colonial war on Afghanistan, designed to stigmatize and punish poor students in every way conceivable -- every teacher in the town has been fired:

Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged


The alleged reason for the firings: low test scores. This, of course, is a crock of stinking neoliberal horse$%^.

How exactly are these kids supposed to learn, when 25% of them are in families just barely scraping by on foodstamps? How are these schools supposed to function without enough books, teachers and materials? For thirty years, neoliberal governments have underfunded our K-12 system, slashed teacher salaries, and refused to pay for infrastructure.

I still remember my shock in 2004-2005 at discovering just how badly the K-12 classrooms had deteriorated in places like Eugene, Oregon and San Jose, California. These were not poor neighborhoods: Eugene is a university town and San Jose has the wealth of Silicon Valley. But there was no trace of that wealth in the schools. Art teachers had been laid off; class sizes were 35-40; textbooks were years out of date. And this was *before* the economic meltdown.

It doesn't have to be this way. We have the money, it's just that we spend $1 trillion every year on a wasteful and useless war machine. We piss away our national wealth by bombing, blasting and invading countries which never attacked us and don't threaten our security. We maintain 750 unnecessary overseas military bases, outfitted with satellite TV, internet, food courts and other amenities which most US schools would give their right arm to have. And we arm ourselves to the teeth against Cold War enemies who don't exist anymore -- Russia is a stable democracy, while China is one of our biggest trading partners and is undergoing significant democratization.

There's only one enemy which is threatening to destroy America: our own imperial stupidity.