Huckabee lays claim to improving the education system in Arkansas, but that is a steaming pile of crap. The changes in the education system were mostly to reduce the amount of Science, Civics and secular History taught in school and to increase the amount of Religion and discipline taught in school.
There’s a small town in Arkansas, just north of Little Rock, call Jacksonville. Jacksonville is mostly a town of poor people. Most of the town is made up of small houses that were built as base housing during WWII or trailer parks. Since these houses sell for less that 40k, that brings a constant flow of poor people to town. This town was used as a model for the education reforms that are being enacted throughout the state. The main focus of the education program for the poor is discipline, blind respect for anyone in a position of authority and faith.
Discipline is instilled through putting the kids in uniform and creating massive amounts of arbitrary rules that they have to follow. For instance, the school is divided up into four sections. All of the kids are assigned to one section and all of their classes will be in that section. A child will be punished if they are found in the hallways of the wrong section. They are assigned a restroom that they can use. They will be punished if they are found in the wrong restroom. They only have three minutes to get from one class to another, so if the restroom is too far away to get to between their classes, they just have to hold it. If they take the bus to school, the busses only wait for five minutes, so they only have five minutes to get on the bus. This doesn’t leave any time to use the restroom before the bus ride. Some of the bus rides last for as much as an hour and a half.
If you’ve ever been through a military boot camp, you will recognize this treatment. Not allowing people to look after their physical needs is part of the process of breaking down the personality. And, just like in boot camp they are also not allowed to freely associate with anyone during school hours who is not assigned to their quadrant. Being caught talking to a friend from the neighborhood is a severe infraction.
Religion is insidiously injected at every level of the education process. Religion is taught in every subject except math. The history books are not the history books we all studied in school. Instead of studying the rise and fall of empires, they study Biblical history. The history books they use cover all of the Bible stories and quote the Bible as an absolute factual document. The children in Arkansas know nothing about the French Revolution or the Magna Carta. The US history that they learn is heavily biased towards the Christian history of the US and plays down the role of secularism. The choir classes sing nothing but hymns.
As if there is not enough religion taught in school, They allow church groups to stand on the sidewalk in front of the school and pass out religious literature to the kids as they arrive at school. This sets up an environment of religious zealously. Those children who do not happen to be Christians are harassed up to and including physical attack.
At the middle school level, they took two schools and make one a boy’s only school and the other a girl’s only school. They did this because they believe that boys don’t do as well in school as girls because they are distracted by sexual attraction at the onset of puberty. This allows them to dumb down the education of the girls so that they won’t out score the boys anymore.
All of this must be working because the national scores for the Arkansas schools have been increasing, right? Well, the scores are increasing because they devote one month of every semester to just teaching the tests.
As usual for this insipid group that is running the show, this bill does nothing to address the real causes for the shrinking middle class. Giving the rich tax breaks so they can create more jobs does nothing to ensure that they will actually use it to create jobs or if they do that they will create jobs here.
Publicly owned companies are being forced to downsize or offshore their employees as the stockowners insist upon an increase in profits every quarter. If they don’t get an increase they sell their stock and the company crashes.
For every person that gets the ax, there is one less consumer, so this negative effect trickles down to everyone from the mortgage broker to the button maker. The stockowners are sucking all of the money from the economy and killing the middle class. Can anyone smell a depression in the wind? The last one was caused by the stock market and this will be caused by it also.
If you’ve been paying attention, this analysis should remind you of someone else we’ve grown to hate. I had a disturbing flashback while watching MSNBC on Thursday night. When Huckabee was announced as the winner in the Iowa Republican primary, the press was absolutely gushing about how much the reporters all like this guy.
That’s a really bad sign. If the press likes someone they seem unwilling to dig for the hard facts. And just like George W, there are plenty of hard facts to dig up on the Huckabees. Many of the facts, however, will be hard to find because he destroyed a lot of evidence when he left office in Arkansas.
Huckabee’s last act before he left the Arkansas Governors office was to destroy all of the hard drives from the computers in the state offices. This is a Federal crime, but it can’t be prosecuted unless someone can prove that the information on the drives was official government information that was covered under the Freedom of Information act. Since the drives were destroyed, that would be impossible to prove. His excuse for destroying the drives was that he was protecting social security numbers. Bunk. A simple low-level format would have protected the social security numbers. The only reason to physically destroy the drives is so that they cannot be analyzed by an electron microscope. Since very few private citizens have access to such technology, the drives were destroyed to hide the information on them from law enforcement and government agencies. If this doesn’t raise a red flag, you’ve not been paying attention.
Well, if Huckabee is such a nice guy, why does he break the law? Why do his sons and wife have a history of ethical, moral and legal infractions? This ties into his religion. The Southern Baptists believe that salvation is achieved through faith alone. A bumper sticker that you will frequently see in the south says, “I’m not perfect, I’m just saved.” SoB’s believe that it is ok to do anything they feel like just so long as they go to church on Sunday and testify to their love for Jesus. The flaw in this religion is that there is no motivation for people to be good or do good deeds. Any means to an end is ok. So long as you love Jesus, you will be saved. After all, God wouldn’t motivate you do a certain thing if he didn’t want you to do it, would he?
Does it come as a surprise to anyone that the economy is tanking? All of our finances are interconnected. For every job that is sent offshore, that leaves one less person who can afford to buy a car, means an auto-manufacturer is laid off. They can’t afford to pay their mortgage; a mortgage banker is laid off, who can now no longer afford to buy a car. Multiply that by the millions of jobs that have been lost, that means millions of cars not being purchased, millions of mortgages that are being walked away from, etc.
The Trickle down and Trickle out financial policies of the last 28 years of Republican/Republican-light rule have hollowed out the middle class. Our economy, since the 50’s, has been mostly based on consumerism. All of the jobs that have been lost means that more people are living in their parent’s basement and are no longer consuming. Michigan is being hit hard because it’s economy is mostly tied to an industry that creates big ticket items that less and less people can afford to buy. Like in third world contries, we have to drive our cars until the wheels fall off, then we put on new wheels and drive it some more.
