Global College Crisis is now leading to deaths

Global College Crisis is now leading to deaths

As many of you know from reading this blog I work in education, specifically at the community college level.  Now I can have worked at the four-year level but fortunately a lot of the students at that level would be successful in spite of our best efforts.  The few that wouldn’t were the reason I was there but they were too few and far between.  I decided to work at the community college level because this is where the rubber hits the road.  A high percentage of the students we see every day are educationally and financially disadvantaged, we routinely work with folks who utterly and completely let down by the secondary system, folks who have screwed up and are trying to make their life right.

In California where I work the budgets have been shit for the last three years and we have gradually cut and cut and cut in response.  Today was the first day of school and we had classes that seat 25 people with 28 extra people waiting in the hopes of finding a seat.  At the end of this week I have a department chair who will come into my office and tell me about the over 500 students who couldn’t get into classes in his department this semester.  At our community college alone, we will deny access to over 5000 students this semester.

My school is not unique, there are estimates that the 112 schools in the California Community College system will turn away over 670,000 students this year, that’s not a typo.  We cannot, world-wide, continue to tell young and sometimes not so young, knowledge hungry people that they cannot be educated because we don’t have space.  This is the type of problem that creates the knowledge and wealth gap, that creates the inequity that fuels the anger of the Occupy movement.

Where does this lead to?  Well we may have gotten a little bit of a preview in Johannesburg, South Africa where students trampled each other trying to be first in line to get to some of the few remaining seats in classes available, check out the link below: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/world/africa/stampede-highlights-crisis-at-south-african-universities.html

American Hypocrisy: Pissin on the Taliban

Warning, the following piece contains offensive language, there are words, thoughts and ideas below that may offend you and even worse make you challenge what you believe, finally the piece might just piss you off.  You’ve been warned.

 

American Hypocrisy: Pissin on the Taliban

So as I’m sure most of you have heard by now a video has gone viral on the internet showing several US Marines pissing on Taliban soldiers they had just killed in battle.  If you haven’t somehow heard about this, here’s a link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/asia/video-said-to-show-marines-urinating-on-taliban-corpses.html

Now everyone is of course up in arms that US Marines would do something as horrible as piss on the enemy’s dead.  America, land of the free, home of hypocrisy.  I mean really folks, pissing on a corpse, is this so horrible?  First let’s address the thing you all want to say to me right now, what if it was your relative?  My answer, piss away Marine, piss away and you, can piss off.  If you have ever seen the dead body of a loved one you know, there is nothing in a corpse that is remotely reflective of the individual you once knew.  A corpse is, a piece of rotting meat, or in most cases these days, oddly preserved meat that won’t rot as quickly in the ground.  Really, what’s the point, either can the embalming or don’t waste the flowers.  That’s right kiddies the reason people historically brought flowers to a funeral was to help hide the smell of rotting meat.

You see the hypocrisy I’m point out here is the fact that everyone is ok with us killing people, as long as we treat them with respect once they are dead?  C’mon people, we spend all of our time brainwashing soldiers into thinking that the enemy is inhuman, that’s how you get people to kill other people, by convincing them that the enemy is less than human.  Towel heads, Sand Niggers, Islamic fanatics, people who hate our freedom, liberals, hippies, all of the terms the state and corporations use to dehumanize their perceived enemies.  It’s not a new idea friends gooks, chinks, heinies, krauts, commies and of course Charlie.  It’s a tried and true method, just ask the kikes, the niggers, the faggots and the dykes see if anyone called by those names feels like this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, that we are all created equal under one God.

So in summary my friends, and those of you swearing at me right now, we’re a bunch of hypocrites.  We’re ok with killing the Taliban, bombing civilians to death in Iraq, assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and government approved fake drownings that we gently call “waterboarding.”  We have no problem locking “Taliban” and “terrorists” away for the rest of their lives in Guantanamo Bay (and by the way with recent legislation even Americans), without as much as a trial, a lawyer or even anyone knowing they’re gone.  To those same people who wanted to ask me, I now turn that question around, what if it was your family killed, maimed or abducted in the middle of the night with no notice.   So really people, we’re ok with all of that, but we’re outraged by a couple of US Marines pissing on creatures we have spent our tax dollars convincing them are subhuman, really?

So if no one else will tonight, I will stand up for the US Marines, you know the Marines, when you absolutely, positively have to have something destroyed overnight.  We’ve made them our trained killers, sent them in first to every hellhole on the planet and for that we owe them our thanks, our apologies for what it does to them and their loved ones,  and more than a little forgiveness if they slip out of line now and then and do something as offensive and ultimately innocuous as pissing on some rotten meat.

Occupy Wall Street has a long US tradition

Occupy Wall Street has a long US tradition

There have been worker revolts in the United States pretty much as long as the United States has existed.  However the revolts took on another tenor in the late 60’s.  During the civil rights movement these labor disputes began to be focused racial on blacks.  According to Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States, in 1966, seventy poor blacks occupied an unused barracks on an air force base.  After this event had been resolved, much in the way many occupy encampments were resolved this year a Mrs. Unita Blackwell said,

“I feel that the federal government have proven that it don’t care about poor people.  Everything that we have asked for through these years had been handed down on paper.  It’s never been a reality.  We the poor people of Mississippi is tired.  We’ve tired of it so we’re going to build for ourselves because we don’t have a government that represents us.” 

It’s amazing how 45 years in this country doesn’t seem to change much, this statement, albeit most likely with a little better grammar, would not seem even remotely out of place today.

Again from Zinn, during this time period A. Phillip Randolph advised the president, “ The Negro’s protest today is but the first rumbling of the ‘under-class.’  As the Negro has taken to the streets, so will the unemployed of all races take to the street.”

This is what the Occupy movement is about, not some socialist ideal but an opportunity for people to be treated fairly and decently in this country.  That of course is based upon the idea that it’s not fair or decent that the 1% of the nation live like gods while there are so many people hurting, that’s why people are in the street.  Now that may be a socialist ideal but basic common decency is a socialist ideal I can get behind.

The First Amendment is only valid during daylight hours

The Occupy movement has been told in New York as well as in many other cities that you can only protest during the day.  So I guess your first amendment rights only operate during daylight hours.  The link is to an article about the court decision:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/1115/Judge-tells-Occupy-Wall-Street-You-can-t-sleep-in-Zuccotti-Park-anymore

So you can protest as long as you do it in a way that doesn’t disturb or interupt anything, so to be clear you can complain as long as no one can hear or see you.

Government using police to crack down on the Occupy movement

Over the weekend governments in several cities decided to crack down on the Occupy movement.  I’ve been hearing and reading lots of comments in the news about how it’s time this thing ended.  They made their point now it’s time for them to go home.  At Harvard the campus allows Harvard students to occupy a place on campus, but keeps gates closed to keep non-Harvard occupiers out, apparently we have elitists even within the 99%. 

In Berkeley, police decided to end the protest and proceed to stab protestors in the guts with batons the video at the following link is pretty brutal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSat-nRefXY

The government is scared and so now it will oppress and deny people their first amendment rights to protest.  The protest was acceptable and cute when it was in one park in New York.  Now that it has gone global and there are Occupy protests in many major US cities the government has called out the goon squads.  This does nothing but ramp up the violence, and although many people in the movement quote John Lennon on the mistake of using violence, at some point when the man is cracking your skull open, you’re going to swing back.

People are being injured, are being killed, an Iraq war veteran was shot in the head with a tear gas canister and then people who went to his aid were blasted with a flash grenade.  This is starting to seem like war.

As I watch all of this going down I wonder if this was what it was like watching the civil rights movement happen.  There are a lot of similarities, the mainstream media painting protestors as radicals, trouble makers, fringe elements without popular support.  Denying that the movement is active, or sizable or focused.  Every time they ramp up the oppression they make more people like me want to go out and join them.

Below is a link to an article about several of the crackdowns

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/13/us/occupy-movement/index.html