Stephan: The Inequity Trend has become so exaggerated that I am beginning to see an increased number of stories about it -- most, of course, outside of corporate media. Here is the latest.
I have been thinking all day about the story I did in yesterday's SR about 40 per cent of high school seniors being unable to read competently. Then I read this: "It gets worse. In two of the three categories tested, numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans who are on the cusp of entering the workforce-ages 16 to 24-rank dead last, and is third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds." To this add the fact that hundreds of thousands of students particularly those in church schools are deliberately being taught grotesquely erroneous information about climate change, evolution, and the age of the earth. The net-net: the United States spends more on education than any other nation on earth, and we are consciously creating a generation of semi-literate morons.
From the point of view of billionaires, ideologues, and theological fundamentalists I can understand that this is desirable. Morons are much easier to manipulate than educated rational adults. But for a country it is social suicide.
The game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in her new book A Fighting Chance. It’s rigged because the rich and their lobbyists have rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules are reflected in a tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history.
The result?
America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, roads and rails are falling apart, and our middle class is being gutted out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains.
A rigged tax code and a bloated military budget are starving the federal and state governments of the revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today America looks increasingly like a Third World nation, and now new data shows America’s intellectual resources are also in decline.
For the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts […]