Oh Those Halcyon Days Of Yore Eddication… Your Education… May 23, 2010

Here’s an interesting letter from today’s Globe:

SCOT LEHIGH’S May 14 op-ed “We need it, but who’ll pay for a longer school day?’’ made me wonder: What was his reaction when he was in fifth grade and the bell rang at the end of the day? Was it, “Gee, I wish I could stay here another two hours?’’ Probably he was like most of us. We couldn’t wait for the doors to open.

Many adults tend to romanticize their school days, confusing schooling with learning. Social philosopher Ivan Illich attributed this phenomenon to what he called the “hidden curriculum of schooling.’’ More than any subject matter, more than the content of what is taught, schools teach above all else the necessity of schools. They instill the belief that only in school does real learning take place.

This causes many to have an inflated sense of the benefit and effectiveness of schooling. They think that more school means more learning. The opposite, however, is true. At a certain point, prolonged schooling becomes counterproductive, actually hindering and stifling initiative, creativity, curiosity, and the joy of learning.

How many students today read a book that’s not on a required list? We need less school, not more.

The Lion thinks the writer has it a bit backwards. We need more schooling, but it should be schooling that creates and rewards initiative, creativity, curiosity, and the sheer joy of learning. Education should be messy and sloppy and brimming with the noise of young brains plunging into all kinds of stuff.

That sort of educative atmosphere is not possible when education is focused on passing massive tests like the Massachusetts MCAS. Talk about stifling initiative, creativity, and so on. It’s hard to think of a better way to create dumber students who have absolutely no interest in learning than to subject them to a test-oriented educational regime, a one size fits all mindscrew reminiscent of the Iron Maiden of medieval torture chambers.

We should be promoting schooling that kids eagerly want to go to in the morning and don’t want to leave in the afternoon. Instead we do the opposite, and not for any significant educational reason, but just to make life easier for the bean counters in the various bureaucracies, bean counters who don’t care for the messy matter that results from recognizing that children are exciting and excitable individuals, not statistics to be squeezed like toothpaste into tests and forms that produce nice clean numbers for the learning disabled education bureaucracies in the states and in Washington.

Full disclosure: The Lion is sixty-five years old (sixty five and a half actually) and for the past few years has been struggling to learn classical Greek, formal and informal logic, philosophy, some Latin and Italian, math and geometry and physics, and keep up with politics and social mores and this, that and the other. It’s a struggle, and The Lion is doing it alone, not to pass a test, not to get a reward or a job, but just because the struggle is interesting and fun, because learning is a marvelous thing in itself. The Lion would be the last to claim that he is any good at any of these endeavors, or even particularly successful, but he will claim that heaving his old brain at them has been worth the travail and the frustration. It’s fun. There’s really no other way to describe it (other than challenging and often frustrating to a no-longer-young-and-quick brain). But The Lion seriously doubts he would feel this way if he had spent his entire early education being pounded into an MCAS hole to satisfy a bureaucracy’s need to turn his education into a number that fits neatly into its spreadsheets.

So by all means, let’s have more schooling, let’s have messier schooling, indeed, let’s have smarter schooling.

#

Technorati Tags: Education, MCAS, Massachusetts

Alice In The Asylum: The Democrats Don’t Understand American Politics, And Scott Brown Is The Price They Paid January 20, 2010

Scott Brown, conservative Republican of Massachusetts, known to his supporters as the superhero, Naked Man, trounced a lackluster, decidedly unheroic Attorney General Martha Coakley to win a seat in the United States Senate, a crippled institution of little apparent value to the people of the United States.

Brown’s win was not what the Democrats expected or wanted, but they stuck themselves with it.

The Lion gives credit to the Republican campaign machine, which ran a moneyed, skilled campaign to elect another mediocre candidate to join their stable of mediocrities and nutcases already in Congress.

Now the nation is being inundated by pundits and politicians all spinning Brown’s win in ways that push their own agenda. The Republicans, led by the ever more senile Senator Mitch McConnell, proclaim that the voters elected Brown to send a message that the Democrats and the Obama administration should stop everything they’re doing and let the country sink back into the morass that the Great Republican George W. Bush-Cheney led the United States. Stop everything except the wars, and let’s have more useless wars to match the useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: that’s the Republican spin.

The Democratic spin? Some are running for the hills, crying, “Apocalypse, apocalypse, Armageddon. I’m a conservative, I’m a conservative, we were wrong, we were wrong.” They belong to the Clown Dog wing of the Democratic Party.

Others are saying they’ll just work around the whole filibuster thing. But, as the Prime Prophet Jon Stewart noted, they’ve got an eighteen vote majority in the Senate, so how could they possibly accomplish anything.

Others are saying, “It’s not our fault the voters in Massachusetts are crazy. Just a blip. Just a glitch. No problem.”

Still others who have some tenuous grasp on reality are thinking that maybe they need to tweak the policies they’ve been pushing and that will make everything okay. Or that they need to get out there and really ‘sell’ health care reform.

Well, no.

Democrats, as usual, missed the blaring headline. Once again they failed to understand the emotional content of politics, the power of symbols, the power of simplicity. After all, the electorate is not really very smart. They don’t study policies. They don’t dig into facts and figures. How could they? They’ve resented every tax dollar that went into schools and schooling, and the result is basically an electorate with the mind of a three-year-old child.

But they do get the emotional thing, they do get the symbol thing.

It goes like this:

After eight years of an incompetent Republican regime that brought the terrorist attacks of 9/11 down on us by ignoring intelligence; that brought an unfunded educational mandate down on the states, a mandate that ensured a further dumbing down of students; that brought two unnecessary and useless wars, at least one of which was illegal, and both of which funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into war-profiteering corporations friendly to Bush and Cheney; that told the wealthiest people in America that they pretty much didn’t have to pay taxes anymore; that borrowed so much money that creditors could reduce the United States to an entity poorer than Haiti; that put hacks and losers in charge of key government agencies and then claimed that government could do nothing right; that tortured and murdered prisoners of war and cooked up justifications in a Justice Department that they had already corrupted; that violated the wiretap law thousands of times by listening in on Americans’ communications without even seeking warrants; after all that along came Barack Obama, an intelligent black man, a skilled orator, an accomplished politician, a leader who promised ‘Change’ in Washington.

Naturally people thought all the talk about change meant that Obama would actually change the foul and corrupt culture and practices the Republicans had brought to Washington, and the people were mightily relieved at the thought, so they voted for him.

And then he betrayed them.

He said the torturers, the despicable Americans who tortured and murdered prisoners, should not be brought to justice; instead the nation should look forward, not backwards. In effect he said that America tortures and murders and that that’s okay. That was a betrayal of the common decency of Americans, and it was a betrayal of American law and the American Constitution.

Obama promised health care reform, and immediately took health care reform off the table and replaced it with health insurance company support programs. He cozied up to the insurance industry and the drug industry, two of the most despised industries in the country. He told the American people that he would force them to buy health insurance from the same despicable firms that had been robbing the people blind for decades, indeed, had been killing many of them in order to increase profits. The Great Democrat, the black man, the first black President of the United States, the symbol of freedom and accomplishment, the symbol of the success of Martin Luther King’s long struggle, now proposed to enslave all Americans to a rapacious, greedy, cruel set of masters, the insurance companies. That was betrayal on a profound level.

Then there was the economic disaster the Republicans handed Obama. Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost every month. Credit frozen, banks failing, major investment banks on the verge of collapse. The Bush Republicans, a demonstrably venal and incompetent lot to begin with, decided to hand the Treasury over to the big Wall Street companies that had brought this disaster down on the country, indeed, on the world. The people in charge were Wall Streeters and their minions. It was all very chummy and the people were getting screwed again.

Obama, sensing the urgency of the catastrophe, got all the best minds he could around him to advise him on solutions. All Wall Streeters and their minions. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were handed over to the greedy barons of Wall Street in order to save their bacon and their companies (which, by the way, created nothing, manufactured nothing, produced nothing, contributed nothing to the country), and the barons of Wall Street proceeded to hand themselves handsome bonuses, some even bigger than before the catastrophe, with taxpayer money. And Obama saw that it was good. Meanwhile, the people on Main Street got lip service and lost their homes and their jobs. And the people saw that it was a betrayal.

And even more galling, even a more profound betrayal, Obama turned to the Republicans, expecting a bipartisan effort to heal the country’s ills. No matter that the Republicans bluntly and openly said they would not help, that they would fight him all the way, that they hoped he would fail and fail big; no matter that some of them simply lied and pretended to be interested in helping, when their real goal was to delay and undermine; no matter that the Republicans were still wedded to the destructive policies of the Bush administration. No matter how many times they slapped Obama in the face, he went back for more. That was one more betrayal, perhaps the deepest cut of all, against the people who fought so hard to elect him to the Presidency.

Now anyone can come along and quibble with the facts in these narratives, but  to do so misses the point. The electorate doesn’t much care about the facts. The voters generally aren’t smart enough, aren’t informed enough, don’t care enough to get informed enough to make informed decisions. But they do get the emotional symbolism of these narratives, whereas the Democratic leaders do not.

The voters see the Democrats selling them out to the corporations, to the bankers, to the rich people who have gotten a free ride on the backs of the working classes. The voters see their tax dollars going into the pockets of wealthy financiers, into corporate coffers from which those dollars will flow back to the politicians who will vote to crush the working classes, drive them into bankruptcy, take their homes, destroy their jobs, all to satisfy the rich people who give money to politicians.

That’s the Obama’s America the voters see. That’s the America they voted against yesterday in Massachusetts by sending a mediocre man of limited intellect who promised nothing more than to drag them back into the Bush years of corporate favoritism, torture and murder, spiraling debt, and provide nothing for their tax dollars but war and more war, fear and more fear. All the voters heard was “I’ll cut taxes” and “I drive a pickup truck.”

It’s not Alice in Wonderland irrationality that prevails in American politics. It’s Alice in the Asylum madness. And the Democrats don’t get it.

#

Technorati Tags: Scott Brown, Massachusetts, Health Care Reform, Democrats, Republicans, Politics, Economy, Torture Investigation, Torture, Iraq, Afghanistan, Obama, Alice in Wonderland

Employers To Employees: Work Hard For Me And I’ll Do Right By You. Really. August 5, 2009

Today’s Globe front page headlines a story about a state program that helps “pay most health insurance costs for 27,000 unemployed Massachusetts residents”.

The program is running out of money because of the recession. It’s supported by a tax on employers of $16.80 per employee per year. Per year. Get that? It means once a year.

The state wants to raise the tax in order to keep unemployed people from losing their health insurance. The tax hasn’t increased since 1990.

From the viewpoint of the poor sod (generically speaking) who’s lost his job through no fault of his own:

For Weymouth resident John Phelan, who lost his retail job in January, the prospect of the Medical Security Program going broke is unsettling. It has helped him afford to keep the insurance he had while working, so he pays just under $200 a month.

“It’s such a relief, so I don’t have to look for affordable health insurance while I am looking for a job,’’ he said. “Just knowing it’s there, should I get sick, is a huge load off my mind.’’

But the bosses have a different take:

“At some point we have to take a good look at the economy and employers’ ability to keep the doors open and decide whether we are maybe being too generous,’’ said Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.

Which is to say they don’t really give a damn about the people who busted their asses to make these businesses a success and put the bosses in their fine homes and fancy cars and their kids in private schools.

A company with one hundred employees would pay less than $1,700 a year. Now if a business is in such bad shape that it can’t come up with that much in a year to help the people who built the business then maybe they should just shut their doors.

Or maybe the boss could come up with $1,700 out of his own pocket for one year at least. But of course these people would rather shoot their dog or sell their middle child than give up a dollar or admit that their employees are what make their businesses successful.

Bottom line: It’s worth seventeen dollars to the bosses to see a former employee get sick and go into bankruptcy or maybe even die.

America the beautiful. Ain’t it grand?

Technorati Tags: Massachusetts, Healthcare, Health Insurance Terror, Medical Security Program, $16.80, Unemployment, Recession

Republican Insurance Executive Runs For Governor In Massachusetts: Offers The Same Old Republican Nonsense July 30, 2009

Charles D. Baker, Jr., an insurance executive described by the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts as “nothing more than an overcompensated insurance executive who placed profits over patients at the expense of hard-working families and employers in Massachusetts’’ is running for governor of Massachusetts as a Republican.

He’s already, on the first day, driven his campaign into the tried-and-true Republican swamp of old and useless bromides that got the country into its current financial mess.

Massachusetts, like most states, has been badly hurt financially by the shenanigans of Wall Street and by the policies of the national Republicans for the last few decades. Baker has no intention of putting things right.

“I’m a no-new-taxes candidate,’’ he said, adding later for the television cameras: “Yeah, read my lips: No new taxes.’’

The state just passed an increase in the sales tax, along with a truckload of cuts to a variety of programs, to help repair the damage. Charlie insists he’ll try to repeal it. Which is pretty much the same thing as saying he’ll cut funds for education, for police, for fire, for social programs, and so on.

Baker, apparently unaware that the state has slashed heavily already, offered this:

When asked what needs to be cut from the budget, Baker said that “everything should be on the table,’’ including scaling back the state’s landmark healthcare initiative.

Sounds a lot like the Republican apes in the Federal Senate and House who say no to every program that threatens the obscene profits of their corporate donors – you know, insurance companies, drug companies, oil companies.

But Charlie said he ‘would resign’ his position as chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, one of the big local insurance groups.

Naturally he’d put the state’s new health care program on the chopping block: it probably cost him some bonus money when it went into effect.

Of course Charlie criticized the current governor, Deval Patrick, for the state’s financial problems.

“I think he let the budget get away from him, and once the budget gets away from you, really bad things happen,’’ Baker said.

As if Massachusetts had no connection to the rest of the country’s money catastrophe. Oh, wait, Charlie doesn’t think there is a connection.

“I’m not going to participate in national discussions and national politics; I’m interested in what happens here in Massachusetts,’’ he said.

Ya can’t have one without the other, Charlie boy.

But Charlie’s trying to make a game of it. He cites his good points.

Baker said he supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage, adding: “My brother’s gay, and he’s married, and he lives in Massachusetts, so I’m for it. Is that straight enough?’’

Maybe Charlie ought to sit down with his brother and discuss the tone-deaf irony of that remark.

Charlie also supports the death penalty. That’s certainly in line with his past as a health insurance executive, considering that health insurance companies are in the business of killing people for profit by denying care.

Charlie’s come out of the gate as just another slash-and-burn Republican, crowing about screwing the middle class and the poor, refusing to pay for the stuff that lifts up the people and the state in order to line the pockets of his rich friends and his corporate donors.

And just as a general principle, no one, no one who works or worked in the executive branches of the insurance industry should qualify to run for public office. They should stick to what they know, and what they know is thievery.

Sorry, Charlie. We don’t need any more Republican con men in charge of anything.

Technorati Tags: Charles Baker, Massachusetts, Republican, Politics, Governor, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Health Insurance, Health Care

Health Insurance Obfuscation In Massachusetts July 17, 2009

Today’s op-ed page in the Globe carries a piece by a Gene Lindsey, identified as president and CEO of Atrius Health, which is some sort of consortium of a handful of medical groups.

Mr. Lindsey is pimping the latest proposal by the Massachusetts government to rescue itself from its ill-advised health insurance welfare program. That’s welfare for the insurance companies, not welfare for the sick and the disabled. Massachusetts mandated, under law, that everybody had to give their money to the health insurance companies. In return the insurance companies are allowed to provide perfectly crappy health insurance policies.

Health care, in the meantime, and that means mean time, goes begging.

Mr. Lindsey says the State should now adopt a program of global payments, meaning that some insurance bureaucrat, colluding with some government bureaucrat, will tell your doctor he can have only so many dollars to take care of you each year.

It used to be called capitation, and it was lousy when it existed throughout the industry. It wasn’t so bad for the insurance companies, of course, but for the patients it pretty much amounted to decapitation.

One of Canada’s provinces uses a similar program, and it’s apparently not working out so well. Medical costs keep rising and the province can’t keep up.

The global payment program being proposed will be, apparently, the next step in what promises to be a long line of futile next steps as the insurance industry and the politicians squirm and twist and wriggle in their attempt to avoid the obvious, and that is that the insurance industry has to be taken out of the equation. People do not want insurance; people want health care. The insurance industry does not provide health care. It’s business model is based on denying health care to its customers.

The insurers are happy to take your money and to promise you the best health care in the world, but when it comes to paying for your care, well, that requires major surgery on your part to cut the money away from the insurer in order to pay the doctor. Insurance companies kill people. Insurance companies insure that people get sick. Insurance companies don’t want you to visit your doctor, they don’t want you to get surgery, they don’t want you to get the drugs you need to save your life. Every time you need care the insurance company loses money.

America has one of the least healthy societies among modern industrialized nations. America has one of the highest infant mortality rates. Americans live shorter lives. And that is because the country has one of the worst health care delivery systems in the world. It only works for people with money, lots of money, people who can afford to spend fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, or more, a year to take care of a family of four. And even then they have to fight with insurance company drones and contend with increasing co-payments, and still worry about going bankrupt.

The poor and the disabled are better off. Medicare and Medicaid, single payer systems, take care of them with minimal hassle. But everybody else? Screwed by the insurance companies and their bought-and-paid-for politicians in the Congress and in state legislatures around the country. Screwed too by their own ignorance and unthinking beliefs.

Just yesterday a woman caller on one of the news channels, CNN, if The Lion recalls correctly, proclaimed that healthcare is a privilege, not a right.

Not being the most charitable of beings, The Lion hopes that she loses her home and life savings to the tender mercies of the medical and insurance industries and will have the privilege of having to beg for some drug that might save her life. She’s the enemy in an insane war.

Perhaps she could start her career in beggary by standing in the rain and pounding on the door of one of Mr. Lindsey’s offices. Perhaps the great man himself will come out and discuss with her the benefits of global payments and the fine points of the insurance industry’s policies that guarantee them obscene profits gained from the suffering and misery of sick people. They could have a fruitful conversation, him on the porch, her in the rain, and then she could return, happy in having her view of privilege confirmed, to her cardboard box perched on or near a heating grate on a nameless sidewalk somewhere. Mr. Lindsey will no doubt drive home in his no doubt expensive car to his no doubt expensive house where he will continue his life of privilege. No doubt.

Technorati Tags: Health Care, Health Insurance, Insurance Terror, Gene Lindsey, Atrius Health, CNN

Massachusetts House Speaker DiMasi Indicted On Corruption Charges June 3, 2009

There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile… and got caught.

The Globe’s investigation of former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives a while back finally bore some rotting fruit.

From the lead in today’s front page story:

Former Massachusetts House speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi and three friends were indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury for allegedly orchestrating a scheme that allowed DiMasi to pocket tens of thousands of dollars in payments from a software company while he was using his powerful office to make sure the company won state contracts.

DiMasi got at least $57,000 in payouts.

DiMasi is alleged to have said, “On the soul of Vito Corleone I didn’t do nothing.” (Okay, The Lion made that up.)

He really read this statement:

"Every decision I ever made as speaker or state representative was always made in the best interests of my constituents and of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," DiMasi said, clutching his wife’s hand.

After reading his statement, the DiMasis drove off in his lawyer’s Jaguar.

The Lion is touched. Really. A person has to be touched to live in this state. DiMasi is charged with corruption and he drives away from his bail hearing in a Jaguar?

DiMasi is the third consecutive Massachusetts Speaker to be caught with his hands grabbing someone else’s money. The previous two pled guilty to federal criminal charges.

It is indicative of the climate in the State that the Feds had to do the work to catch these sleazeballs. And it is further indicative of the criminal state of mind of the State legislature that it recently, in a move to clean up corruption, weakened the Ethics Commission that is supposed to investigate corruption, and refused to pass a bill that bans gifts to lawmakers.

The only fair conclusion that can be drawn is that all Massachusetts legislators are corrupt. The operative definition of corruption includes those lawmakers who go along to get along, which legislative philosophy is apparently enshrined in the Massachusetts constitution. (The Lion notes that it also operates in his town of Falmouth which has long been run under GATGA principles.)

Of course all the legislators will complain of being unfairly tarred with the DiMasi brush. They will protest their innocence. And yet not one of them stood up, ever, and publicly denounced by name legislators they knew to be corrupt; not one of them ever stood up for the citizens and publicly fought against or turned down midnight pay raises and blatantly unfair, corrupt pensions for themselves and their friends; not one of them raised his voice in public against an ‘esteemed friend and colleague’ who was pulling a fast one.

Massachusetts legislators can now claim their place with some of the most corrupt states in the Union, places like Rhode Island and Illinois.

Of course the people in DiMasi’s old district, the North End, are shocked at his indictment. One man was quoted in the Globe saying, “We all love him, the whole neighborhood loves him. Whatever anybody says, he was a good guy.”

No, he wasn’t. He was a crook.

Apparently he did all the right things to keep getting elected. Lived in the neighborhood. Took care of the little problems, like rodent infestations (ah, a note of irony). Bought local goods (do they sell Jaguars there?) Probably kissed babies.

And the damn fools decided that was enough to justify keeping him in office. The Lion can only just imagine how offended they were when the Globe started trotting out the truth about DiMasi and his henchmen a while back.

One of today’s quotes from a North Ender went, “Politics is just confusing.”

No. It’s not. Politicians are not your friend. If they do something for you with one hand, you can be sure the other hand is in your pocket scrounging for your money.

No politician, ever, on any level of government, can be trusted. Ever. On anything. The more they smile and the more concern they show for their hair, the less you should trust them. Citizens should question every action, every statement, of their politicians.

They do serve a purpose. They negotiate the differences among all the competing elements of society and craft useful compromises. But most of the time, as in Massachusetts, they set themselves apart from the citizenry and come to believe that the law should serve them rather than that they should serve the law. It doesn’t take them too long to cross that line.

There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile… and he was one of the few who got caught.

 

Technorati Tags: Massachusetts, Salvatore DiMasi, Corruption, Legislature, Rhode Island, Illinois, Boston North End, Crooks, Thieves, Liars, Falmouth, Boston, Politics, Feds