A Stopped Clock..

 ...is right twice a day, and even Mayor Bloomberg has to get something right once in a while.   He rails against the idiotic Arizona law that will enable people to be stopped for the offense of looking different, or having an accent.   And he went further the other day:

"This country is committing national suicide. We just passed a health care bill to give coverage to millions of people, tens of millions of people and we don’t have doctors and we’re not allowing people who want to come here and be doctors to come here. This is just craziness. People are developing new drugs in India, rather than here. They’re going to win the next Nobel prize in China or in Europe, not here. If we want to have a future, we need to have more immigrants here and we should get control of our borders and we should decide who we want, what languages, what skills we need; people who work with their hands and people who work with their minds and we have to get real about the 12 million undocumented here. We’re not going to deport them. Give them permanent status. Don’t make them citizens unless they can qualify, but give them permanent status and let’s get on with this.” 

Now if only he'd apply the same logic to the public school system.  Even as he bemoans the idiocy of killing opportunities for Americans, he plods forward with an effort to expand charters.  Who cares if parents get no say as to whether charters invade schools their children attend?  The fact that they do not actually out-perform real public schools is of no consequence.  The market rules, the cream will always rise to the top, and who cares that the market resulted in the current recession, the worst in my living memory?

The important thing for Mike Bloomberg, and his billionaire buddies Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the union-busting Wal-Mart family is that we plod on with programs to marginalize unions even more than Ronald Reagan did.   After all, who wants health care for all?   Who needs free college education?  Who wants a comfortable retirement?  That's socialism, for gosh sakes!

With folks like Mike Bloomberg and the tabloid editorial writers he pulls out of his pocket like so much loose change, Americans think the way to go is making teachers' lives and jobs miserable.  They're so brainwashed by crap like Fox News and the New York Post,  they don't understand what they do need--to make their own lives better.

Unfortunately, as long as people keep listening to backward-thinking demagogues, the country will just keep moving backwards.