Webster G. Tarpley
Islam Times
September 23, 2012
The Chicago public schools
are the third largest school system in the United States, and with
almost 30,000 members the Chicago Teachers Union is one of the flagships
of public sector labor in the country.
The strike was provoked
by the bullying of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former top official of
the Clinton White House who had most recently served as the White House
Chief of Staff for Obama. The teachers have suspended their strike
pending a vote on whether to go back to work, but it is already clear
that the results of this long-overdue labor action are disappointing.
Since
the 19th century, the United States has had a strong tradition of free,
universal, compulsory education, and no country can hope to remain
competitive in today’s world without an effective educational system.
Nevertheless, it is now the ambition of powerful corporate predators to
asset-strip the US school system in the same way that Mitt Romney’s Bain
Capital vulture firm has asset-stripped and destroyed so many
companies.
These corporate privatizers want to realize the
fabulous profits by putting an end to the Chicago public schools. In
this enterprise, they are joined by a lobby of so-called “education
reformers,” represented nationally by such super rich plutocrats as Bill
and Melinda Gates, Eli Broad, and others, who have no background in
education. The approach of these pseudo-reformers claims that the
existence of teachers’ unions capable of collective bargaining is a
betrayal of low income
black and Hispanic pupils in big-city schools. They, therefore, claim
that busting the unions will provide more resources for these pupils.
This
philosophy of education “reform” is emphatically shared by Obama, who
made his own attempt 20 years ago to destroy the Chicago Teachers Union
through an initiative known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. This
attack failed, mainly because of support from black parents for the
teachers’ union. Another of these fake reformers is Obama’s Secretary of
Education, Arnie Duncan, who calls his union-busting program the Race
to the Top. The ultimate outcome of this campaign is likely to be the
end of free, universal, public education in the United States, with
literacy becoming the privilege of the wealthy, as it was in the 19th
century. Naturally, no modern nation can survive on this basis, but the
incompetent US ruling elite is unable to see beyond their greedy desire
to profit from the destruction of the teachers union and the public
schools.
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