StickWithANose

Valerie Strauss offers more details on the farce that is Michelle Rhee and IMPACT…

The overall impact of IMPACT is not only unfair but not likely to do the job it is supposed to do: Root out bad teachers. Some great teachers are likely to be tossed out, and others, who know how to play along when the observers come in but don’t do much when they aren’t, could get a pass.

Of course, every school system should fire bad teachers. But they need a sophisticated and fair system to do that, and so far, D.C. doesn’t have one.

Bernie Sanders attempts to warn us that the trajectory the nation is currently traveling is un-sustainable…

Today, not content with huge tax breaks on their income; not content with massive corporate tax loopholes; not content with trade laws enabling them to outsource the jobs of millions of American workers to low-wage countries and not content with tax havens around the world, the ruling elite and their lobbyists are working feverishly to either eliminate the estate tax or substantially lower it. If they are successful at wiping out the estate tax, as they came close to doing in 2006 with every Republican but two voting to do, it would increase the national debt by over $1 trillion during a ten-year period. At a time when we already have a $13 trillion debt, enormous unmet needs and the highest level of wealth inequality in the industrialized world, it is simply obscene to provide more tax breaks to multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Jim Horn looks at Arne Duncan’s idea of equality…

If Arne Duncan’s views on equality are evidenced in his actions, it leaves us with a troubling realization.  For to understand that for Mr. Duncan to be right in saying that “education is the civil rights issue of this generation,” we must stand shamefaced in admitting that civil rights now demands from equality what we previously could expect only from oppression.

Glenn Greenwald asks why the Washington Post series on our ever-expanding, un-accountable surveillance structure has generated so little interest…

Why would the political class possibly want to subvert or weaken their ability to exercise vast spying, detention, and military powers in the dark?  They don’t.  Beyond that, as the Post series highlights, Top Secret America provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government.  Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that.  It’s probably best not to hold your breath waiting for Dianne Feinstein — the Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives in lavish wealth as a result of her husband’s investments in the National Security State (and whose Senate career has a way of oh-so-coincidentally bolstering their wealth) — to meaningfully address any of the issues raised by the Post series.  Despite Feinstein’s rhetoric to the contrary, doing so is decidedly not in her interests for multiple reasons…

The secret, omnipotent National Security State highlighted by The Washington Post will endure and expand as is because those who control the Government (or, as Dick Durbin put it, who “own” the Government) benefit endlessly from it.  Major scandals or citizen-infuriating crises can sometimes lead to some modest and easily circumvented restraints being placed on this power (as just happened with the recently enacted Financial Regulation bill), largely to placate public rage, but it’s simply impossible to conceive of the political class taking any meaningful steps to rein in a limitlessly powerful and unquantifiably profitable National Security and Surveillance State — at least in the absence of serious citizen revolts against it.  That Post series produced so little reaction because what it describes — a Secret Government bestowed with the most extreme powers yet accountable to nobody — is something to which the nation, as part of our State of Endless War, has apparently acquiesced as a permanent and tolerable condition.

Devo sums it all up for us… Being and breathing, pumping gas / Cheeseburger cheeseburger do it again