Don't mention Thomas Jefferson to Texas nutbag Ted CruzAs soon as the Texas plutocrats won control over the state Board of Education, through their pathetic Tea Party puppets, one of the first orders of business was to eliminate Thomas Jefferson from the history books. Dangerous revolutionary, that Jefferson, with his subversive ideas. I wonder how long it will take for them to move against historical Jesus too. This account is from 2010:
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers....Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.
No history books that anyone plans to sell in Texas are likely to have the Jefferson quote at the top of the page. The Tea Party hero William Blackstone, a Tory Member of Parliament and a much disliked sociopath and narcissist, who, of course, opposed independence for the American colonies, is a much more fitting figure for the anti-democracy forces than Thomas Jefferson. Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, would probably opt for Jefferson. His essay Saturday is a stark warning that American democracy is in grave jeopardy from the very forces Jefferson saw as the biggest danger to our country's enterprise: the banksters and plutocrats who have been coddled and fluffed by the political elites they finance.
One way to view Detroit’s bankruptcy-- the largest bankruptcy of any American city-- is as a failure of political negotiations over how financial sacrifices should be divided among the city’s creditors, city workers, and municipal retirees-- requiring a court to decide instead. It could also be seen as the inevitable culmination of decades of union agreements offering unaffordable pension and health benefits to city workers.But there’s a more basic story here, and it’s being replicated across America: Americans are segregating by income more than ever before. Forty years ago, most cities (including Detroit) had a mixture of wealthy, middle-class, and poor residents. Now, each income group tends to lives separately in its own city-- with its own tax bases and philanthropies that support, at one extreme, excellent schools, resplendent parks, rapid-response security, efficient transportation, and other first-rate services; or, at the opposite extreme, terrible schools, dilapidated parks, high crime, and third-rate services.The geo-political divide has become so palpable that being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.Detroit is a devastatingly poor, mostly black, increasingly abandoned island in the midst of a sea of comparative affluence that’s mostly white. Its suburbs are among the richest in the nation. Oakland County, for example, is the fourth wealthiest county in the United States, of counties with a million or more residents. Greater Detroit-- which includes the suburbs-- is among the nation’s top five financial centers, the top four centers of high-technology employment, and the second-biggest source of engineering and architectural talent. Not everyone is wealthy, to be sure, but the median household in the region earns close to $50,000 a year, and unemployment is no higher than the nation’s average.The median household in the city of Detroit earns half that amount, and unemployment is staggeringly high. One out of 3 residents is in poverty; more than half of all children in the city are impoverished. Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit lost a quarter of its population as the middle-class and whites fled to the suburbs. That left it with depressed property values, abandoned neighborhoods, empty buildings, lousy schools, high crime, and a dramatically-shrinking tax base. More than half of its parks have closed in the last five years. Forty percent of its streetlights don’t work.In other words, much in modern America depends on where you draw boundaries, and who’s inside and who’s outside. Who is included in the social contract? If “Detroit" is defined as the larger metropolitan area that includes its suburbs, “Detroit" has enough money to provide all its residents with adequate if not good public services, without falling into bankruptcy. Politically, it would come down to a question of whether the more affluent areas of “Detroit" were willing to subsidize the poor inner-city through their tax dollars, and help it rebound. That’s an awkward question that the more affluent areas would probably rather not have to face.But in assuming that the relevant boundary includes just the poor inner-city, and requiring it to take care of its compounded problems by itself, the whiter and more affluent suburbs are off the hook. “Their" city isn’t in trouble. It’s that other one-- called “Detroit."It’s roughly analogous to a Wall Street bank drawing a boundary around its bad assets, selling them off at a fire-sale price, and writing off the loss. Only here we’re dealing with human beings rather than financial capital. And the upcoming fire sale will likely result in even worse municipal services, lousier schools, and more crime for those left behind in the city of Detroit. In an era of widening inequality, this is how America’s wealthy and middle-class are quietly writing off the poor.
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