This year, Joe Lieberman was the main candidate we targeted for primarying out of office. But it is not too early to start thinking about who we can primary out of office for 2008 for acting like a Republican instead of a Democrat. An early candidate for primarying out of office would be Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. Not only did she sign a bill similar to the most regressive anti-abortion bills in the state. In the wake of the post-Katrina disaster, she has engineered the most regressive Republican-style attacks on public education in the country by taking over the New Orleans school system and turning it over to private management.
On top of that, the Louisiana legislature fired 7,500 school personnel including 4,000 teachers and 3,500 support personnel including custodians and cooks. Joe DeRose of the United Teachers of New Orleans was on Democracy Now yesterday to discuss the firings and the way Governor Blanco has turned the New Orleans School District into a laboratory for right-wing social engineering.
In so doing, Blanco succumbed to the blackmail of the Bush administration. The Bush administration released millions of taxpayer dollars for the New Orleans schools. It seems like a good deal – until you realize that, as pointed out by DeRose, all of the money was earmarked for private schools and none for public schools.
Not only were 7,500 people fired in one fell swoop, DeRose pointed out that none of the people involved knew of their firing until they read about it on the local news. This meant that these people went from middle class to poverty overnight for no justifiable reasons whatsoever. This means more taxpayer dollars will have to be spent for welfare, food stamps, WIC, and other such programs. This sort of behavior from so-called “democrats” is a perfect reason why many people quit voting for democrats – instead, they take refuge in their churches and pastors who tell them to vote for the man who does the best job standing up for unborn children and “Biblical Values.” I suggest the modern Republican Party was built on the betrayal of the middle class by democrats over the last 30 years.
In addition, the dismissal of these employees drove up the insurance rates for the remaining employees – they saw their rates go from $200 a month to $600 overnight. This forced many of these fired teachers and custodians into premature retirement just so they could keep their health insurance.
Only four public schools were left open after the Republican-style purge. These schools are 95% Black. On top of that, these schools are places for the most impoverished students that the private schools don’t want. These are the people whom Barbara Bush does not want to waste her beautiful mind on – after all, some of them secretly have mothers who are not poor, but are really $4 million b–hes in secret. So, if they’re poor, it must be their fault that they did not suck up to one of the $4 million bi—-s.
And not only that, these four schools all have rundown buildings that have not been worked on in years. So, all the poor kids have been relegated to all the crummy schools with all the rundown buildings, while the richer kids get to go to all the nice schools. After all, in Blanco’s world, these people are all well able to take care of themselves – in the meantime, we have to finish God’s work and drown the government in a bathtub and keep true to Uncle Grover’s vision.
DeRose said that Blanco and the legislature originally was not going to open any schools at all – until a public outcry forced them to change their minds. Even there, they had to be dragged screaming and kicking. The first schools did not open until October, and most of them did not start to open until January. After all, I suppose in her book that public education never does anybody any good anyway – after all, they simply teach secular humanism, New Age doctrines disguised as “learning,” witchcraft, and other such horrid doctrines. And when you put the poorest kids in the most rundown schools with the most inexperienced teachers, it “proves” in Blanco’s and the right-winger’s books that the public school system is a massive failure and that we need vouchers and private schools.
Furthermore, there was no adequate transportation for many students who lived far away from one of the charter schools. That meant that kids had to walk through 5-12 miles of dangerous neighborhoods in the worst case scenario given the fact that many families from New Orleans don’t have cars. When a child is totally exhausted from walking several miles a day, there is no time for them to learn.
DeRose pointed out that there are massive conflicts of interest involved – the Ignite Learning Program was used for several of the charter schools; this is the program that is run by Neil Bush. This was also the program that Barbara Bush made such a big show of donating money to when she was engaging in her patronizing behavior. So, the money released by the Bush administration was not really done so out of concern for the students of New Orleans – it was done so for the benefit of Neil, his shady brother.
This leads to a fundamental question – why is Kathleen Blanco even a Democrat? When you have a governor who exploits the poor by taking away their schools, taking away a woman’s right to choose, and playing along with the Bush administration’s plot to set our public school systems up for failure, what is she doing as governor? There are two categories of politicians – politicians who show political courage and who take a stand for the people because it is right, and politicians who are ashamed of their party and ashamed of why they are in office in the first place. Why did she bother to get into politics if she is going to sell our public school systems down the river and allow Bush to set them up for failure? And why did she even bother to get into politics if she is going to engage in a systematic war against privacy and fall in with Bush’s peeping tom act?
Surely, there are people even in red-state Louisiana who have a progressive record who are able to take a stand on the issues. Should Blanco be primaried out in 2008? If so, who should we replace her with?