We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

When Teachers Unions Back War Escalation

by David Swanson from Global Research.
On July 12th I received an Email from the American Federation of Teachers with a soft pink headline and an image of a heart.  It said: "Pink Hearts.  Not Pink Slips."  That sounded nice.  The text continued:

"Now is the time to tell the Senate to put our children first.  The House of Representatives approved an emergency spending bill that included $10 billion to save educator jobs and $5 billion for Pell Grants. It is now up to the Senate to do its part and approve the same level of assistance when it returns to Washington, D.C., this week."
That was true, I suppose, in as far as it went, but horribly misleading because of what it left unsaid.  Congress had not passed an emergency bill to save teachers' jobs.  Congress doesn't treat such things as emergencies.  This was a bill that had been sat on for half a year, and the teacher funding was an amendment tacked onto it.  The bill itself served primarily to dump $33.5 billion into escalating a war in Afghanistan by sending 30,000 more troops plus contractors.  It was called an "emergency" bill purely in order to keep war spending off the books and make the government's overall budget look less imbalanced than it is.
The capitalist ruling class has many such tricks in its bag of tricks designed to fool working people.
This bill combines several.  

It keeps war spending off the books so that war spending is always much higher than official data reveals. This is very useful when so many public expenditures are cut back--you know, like extending unemployment benefits. 

They often put together completely unrelated funding items in order to sweeten a bill that would otherwise be totally unpalatable to working people. You can see that it worked in this case with the teacher's union. 

This way of designing bills also taps into the indoctrination that we've all been subject to in the US--the extreme individualist theme that we must always look ONLY after our own immediate interests.