by Greg Palast
Wal-Mart’s own study, by the way, determined that the company had depressed U.S. wages by 2.2%. (This is offset, Wal-Mart quickly adds, by toasters and other goodies now costing, they claim, 3.3% less. That’s quite a bargain.)
Gore followed his put-down of labor unions, which unanimously opposed NAFTA, with praise for Rush Limbaugh as a “distinguished American” (really) and accolades for NAFTA-backer Lee Iacocca, Chairman of Chrysler Motors. Gore didn’t mention that Iacocca had moved Chrysler engine assembly work to Mexico in anticipation of NAFTA. But the unemployed Chrysler workers knew that.
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Sam’s Club on Pennsylvania Avenue
In the debate over NAFTA with Ross Perot, Gore lauded Wal-Mart’s opening in Mexico to sell “American products.” But 83% of Wal-Mart’s products, even then, were not made in the USA. Did Gore know that? Certainly, the former member of the board of directors of Wal-Mart, watching the debate from the White House, knew it. Sam Walton used to call his board member, attorney Hillary Clinton, “my little lady.”
Perot thought free trade with a police state a bit problematic.
I am deeply concerned about workers who, when they go on strike, U.S. companies [operating in Mexico] call in goons, bring in the state police, shoot several workers, kill one, injure dozens, put the workers back to work and cut wages 45 percent. Those are things that are wrong.
Sam Walton’s kind of place. A folksy guy, he liked to chat with his Arkansas workers one-on-one… to personally threaten their jobs if they voted union. That’s illegal, but he had a good little attorney. Of 3,705 Wal-Mart stores in the USA today, zero are unionized. And NAFTA keeps it that way. The three-government NAFTA board itself reports that 62% of U.S. industrial companies threaten to leave the country or shut operations when faced with union recognition votes.
We don’t know what the future Senator Clinton thought of the Gore-Perot debate. But I’m quite certain what Sam Walton was thinking in Heaven: Mission accomplished.
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And they didn’t forget. On November 2, 1994, a stunned Bill Clinton, incoherent and lost before the TV cameras, could not explain what had happened the day before. He and Al had dressed up in Republican drag but the 19.7 million Perot voters, given the choice of the Rich Man’s Party or the Richer Man’s Party, returned to “social” issues and the security of the Republicans’ pledge against gun control. Clinton had done what no Democratic President had ever accomplished: lost 70 Congressional and Senate seats—and both houses of Congress—to the Republicans. Maybe forever.
Admittedly, the entire decline in real wages can’t all be laid at NAFTA’s door. Clinton’s granting “Most Favored Nation” trade status to China was the bullet to the head of the U.S. textile industry. And the drop in real wages did not begin when trade laws were replaced by the laws of the jungle. But honesty requires that we recognize that a Democratic Administration rolled up the border and watched Delco jobs slide into the maquiladora trench.
November 9, 1993, was the Democratic Party’s “Munich,”27 the date on which the DLC’s stalking horse, hoping to appease the chambers of commerce, loosed the dogs of class war upon America’s hourly workers. I cannot get out of my mind how different our world might be today if Al Gore had listened to those 19.7 million, and instead of lecturing them, had invited them into the Democratic Party. But that was a Democratic Party he did not want to join himself, the New Deal Party. Gore’s Rasputin, his guide, was Republican Dick Morris, the guy who in 2004 dissed the polls showing Kerry won. He wrote Gore’s speeches, and it’s known that one time Morris tested out the words on one of the hookers he patronized. (I can’t imagine what a call girl would charge to listen to an Al Gore speech.) How would history have been different if a prep-school kid, his way into the Ivy League and into politics slicked by oil money and Daddy’s connections, became president? Yes, there’s a difference between Gore and Bush. Gore’s oil money, unlike Bush’s, came from Occidental Petroleum, the jungle marauders in Ecuador.
Maybe that’s a bit over the top. It’s personal jealousy and resentment, I suppose. Al Gore never had to fluff his own pillow or worry himself sick over losing a job he hated. I grew up near the GM-Chevy plant in Van Nuys. My dad sold Frigidaire refrigerators, then made by General Motors. If not for dumb luck, I’d be working there—or would have until the shutdown a few years ago.
In 2000, Gore won the election, but lost the presidency. Bush could swipe it only because the vote was so close. It shouldn’t have been close, but Gore lost the NAFTA-wounded states of Ohio and Missouri. Should you run into Al Gore, and he repeats his line that NAFTA didn’t cost American jobs, you might remind him, “It cost you yours.”
No Child’s Behind Left
They take away your overtime, your 40-hour week, your regulatory protection against corporate marauders, your right to courtroom justice, your protection against unfair trade, even the right to get your ballot counted. But there’s always hope. Hope is the last thing to go. And your hope is your kids, that they’ll have an opportunity you didn’t have. On January 21, 2004, the President told you they’d have to take that away too.
On that night, deep into his State of the Union sermon to Congress, when sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, our President opened a new front in the class war. And like the one in Iraq, it began with a lie.
“By passing the No Child Left Behind Act,” our President told us, “We are regularly testing every child…and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”
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“And at Daddy’s Polo Club, the Waiter Is Called A…”
The core of No Child Left Behind is the early-age test. And here’s what they’re testing. The following is taken from the actual practice test given eight-year-olds in the State of New York in 2006. The test determined which children should advance, which should be left behind in the third grade. Ready, class?
The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year.
And here’s one of the four questions:
The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played
A two matches in one day
B against each other
C with two balls at once
D as partners
OK, class, do you know the answer? (By the way, I didn’t cheat: There’s nothing else about “doubles” in the text.)
For your information, I got this from a school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court. There is no tennis court in any of the poverty area schools of New York. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills and Westchester there are as many tennis courts as the schoolkids have live-in maids.
Which kids are best prepared to answer the question about “doubles tennis”? The eight-year-olds in Brownsville who’ve never seen a tennis match or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis coach?
Is this test a measure of “reading comprehension”—or a measure of wealth accumulation?
If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the test, which reads (and I could not make this up):
Helpfully, for Puerto Rican kids, it explains that a “country club” is the “place where people meet.” Yes, but which people?
Class war dismissed.
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He said it. And then that little tongue came out; that weird way our President sticks his tongue out between his lips like a little kid who knows he’s fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snaky tongue dart out and I thought, “He knows.”
And what he knows is this: There are no “better options” for failing ch
ildren, but there are better uses for them. The President ordered testing and more testing to hunt down, identify and target millions of children too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.
Here’s how No Child Left Behind works in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago and New York. Under the No Child Left law, millions of eight-year-olds are given lists of words and phrases. They try to read. Then they are graded like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many (most in fact) failed.
Once the eight-year-olds are stamped and sorted, the parents of children with the test mark of Cain await fulfillment of the President’s tantalizing promise, to “make sure they have better options.”
But there are none. In the delicious doublespeak of class war, when the tests have winnowed out the chaff and kids stamped failed, No Child Left results in that child being left behind in the same grade to repeat the failure another year. And another year and another year.
Hint: When decoding politicians’ babble, to get to the real agenda, don’t read their lips, read their budgets. And in his budget, our President couldn’t spare one thin dime for education, not ten cents. Mr. Big Spender provided for a derisory 8.4 cents on the dollar of the cost of primary and secondary schools. Congress appropriated a half penny of the nation’s income—just one-half of one percent of America’s twelve-trillion-dollar GDP—for primary and secondary education.
President Bush actually requested less. While Congress succeeded in prying out an itty-bitty increase in voted funding, that doesn’t mean the cash is actually given to the schools. Fifteen states have sued the federal government on the grounds that the cost of new testing imposed on schools, $3.9 billion, eats up the entire new funding budgeted for No Child Left.
I can’t say that Mr. Bush doesn’t offer “better options” to the kids stamped “failed.” Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can’t provide more opportunity than that. But Bush does not provide it, he promises it, without putting up a single penny to make it happen. In New York, in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools—in which there were only 8,000 places open. New York is typical. Nationwide, only one out of two hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there’s always the army. (That “option” did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.)
There’s not a lot of loot for schoolkids in the No Child Left law, but Barbara Bush’s kids made out just fine.
Her youngest, Neil Bush, jumped into the No Child biz big time. A company he founded in 1999 in Texas, Ignite! (exclamation point included), promotes robo-teaching. Instead of teachers, kids are plunked in front of a TV screen and blasted with automated lessons. It’s cheap and, I’ll admit, quite effective for communicating rote information and preparing children for a world in which they cannot deviate from the orders coming from machines and screens. This may have been what attracted the education ministries of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to purchase the robot teaching system, though one wonders if the sheikdoms see non-educational bonuses in dropping a few petro-dollars in a Bush child’s pocket.
Neil also found an education reform soulmate in exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who met with Neil in Riga, Latvia, in September 2005. Berezovsky is advising Ignite! with a particular eye to the Russian market, where he himself cannot go because of some trouble with the law. (The meeting won’t be repeated, at least in Riga. When the meeting between the First Brother and the fugitive was disclosed, the Latvian government banned Berezovsky’s reentry.)
No Child Left does provide help to underfinanced schools in the form of Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the old days, this was called “tutoring,” but that’s when we energized community volunteers. Today, it’s big business for millions. If several students in a school fail tests, the federal government requires schools to hire tutors from these for-profit outfits. Our President’s federal contribution to these “supplemental services”? Zero. So, how is it funded? A school must pay out 20% of their “Title 1” fund, their tiny federal subsidy, to hire tutors from private companies. That is, schools must cut back their own teaching staff to pay for the contracts with private tutoring companies.
And who are these tutors? By federal law, teachers must be credentialed, trained and tested—but not the tutors who replace them. Their qualifications are…well, there’s the handyman in my apartment building. He was hired by schools-for-profit operator Princeton Review to teach high school math. They contracted to give him the high school math job after he passed a fifth-grade arithmetic proficiency test.
Handyman “Joe” (I promised not to use his real name) is quite a bright guy, who in fact knows geometry and trigonometry. But, he said of his fellow tutors, “Half of them about to be sent to high schools could barely handle it—the fifth grade arithmetic.” The Princeton crew gets 20 hours of training versus a minimum of 1,000 hours for the teachers they replace.
But teaching isn’t the job. Selling is. “Joe” told us:
Last night I accidentally showed up at a training for site directors who are supposed to be educational specialists acting as principals over their teacher-tutors. The site directors were being prepped for “Operation Rapid Deployment.” I shit you not. The Princeton Review now has two weeks to “sell” the “product” to as many “clients” as possible, which means all sorts of promises about one-on-one tutoring (that may or may not be forthcoming). The imperative is to hire as many local kids and parents as possible, all who get paid per student signed.
And the charge is taken out of the school budgets.
The more failures, the more cash for the privateers. And the most cash is had when a school fails continuously for five years. Its “option” then is to fire all its teachers or to turn the school over to a private company.
This privatization is a money tree for Edison. Not Thomas Edison, the lightbulb guy, but Edison Schools, Inc., a company that lifted the brainy man’s name to put over their scheme to eliminate public education in favor of for-profit “charter” schooling for all.
Edison Inc. claims their teach-for-the-money theories proved successful in Sherman, Texas, the full-takeover contract they landed in Gov. George Bush’s test run of privatization in 1995. The company advertised worldwide that it boosted the little Texans’ test scores by 5%. But I talked to Sherman’s superintendent of schools, who, the company fails to mention in its sales pitch, ran them out of town in 2000. The superintendent, Phillip Garrett, told me, “They were more about money than teaching.” A lot more money. Sherman schools had to pay an additional $4 million to cover Edison’s unpaid bills for local services. The promise of better education at no extra cost, the ultimate Free Lunch of the school privatizers, was bogus. And the “5%” improvement was called “dishonest”… by Edison’s own president, Benno Schmidt. (Schmidt, in an interview, told me that anyone who claims student improvement with less than five years’ experience is “dishonest”—not realizing he was commenting on his own company’s sales material.) And Sherman’s superintendent said Edison kids fell behind other Texans—no small feat.
The President offers one more “option,” one more magic trick left for the rubes in front of their tubes to make them believe that the privileged will share the advantages of education with the rest of us: The Great School Voucher Hoax.
The Great Voucher Hoax
What’s better than free money? Nothing, except maybe immortality or three wishes from your fairy godmother. Or, say, a “voucher” to send your kid to a big-shot school like Phillips Academy, where our President got so smart.
The centurions of the better classes love vouchers. On April 1, 2005, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, “Educational Nirvana.” Nirvana, in case you don’t know, is a wonderful place, kind of a Hindu heaven. Buddha’s there. But the Journal wasn’t talki
ng about the place where good Buddhists go; it was talking about Arizona. What made Arizona heavenly in the Journal’s view is that the State Senate voted to give a “school voucher” to all parents who want one to pay to send their kid to any school they want. No more would parents be stuck with Arizona’s horrid, failed, crappy schools. And what a godsend for poor kids stuck in dead-end districts brutalized daily by known members of the teachers’ union.