Schools In New Castle County: It’s Over; We’ve Lost

As we race to the top, we fail often to look at the bottom…. What is it like in our schools, lets say in Chrisitina’s School District?

In a recent ranking of Delaware’s schools, Christiana High was ranked on the bottom, followed by Glasgow High, second from the bottom and their flagship school, Newark High, was in the bottom two thirds, at position 21 out of 30….

Why?

In this district, students are in control of the schools. Not teachers, not administrators, not the police officers ( who have now been cut out because of funding), not parents, not voters, ….. no … the people in control of our High Schools in Christiana’s school’s district, are….. the students…

Which students? The ones who intimidate…. For lack of a better word… the thugs.

The thugs control the classrooms… 16 and 17 year olds, completely dominating the classroom environment, making it impossible to teach anything, even to those willing to learn…

You can talk about bullying all you want. But until control is established in Christina’s schools system, bullying will rule simply because it’s there. Students and teachers have to protect themselves; they have no choice but to bow to the stronger force…

And… hopefully this piece will demonstrate, .. those in charge of the schools are the biggest perpetrators of the myth that “nothing is out of the ordinary’…

Excuses like” we’re doing the best we can”, ‘look at what we have to work with”, and “we don’t have the resources we need”…

Now all know… that if I walked into a classroom and the bell rang, and the class did nothing, forcing me to say everyone get in their seat, and all but one does, and I say get in your seat, and he says ok when I’m ready, and at that point I have a choice. Either I can force the issue, or teach the class around him… Teaching the class around him will be difficult simply because no one would pay attention to me, they’d all be looking at him… So I say, I’m sending you down to the principals office. He says, I don’t know where it is, and the class laughs… I say, do you know where that door is? He says no… i can’t see it.. I say you need to go, now… He says, you’re just a teacher, you can’t make me do anything… (under todays rules he is totally correct)… I say go… he says “no, fatty, I’m staying…” Again laughter.. I say then I call security up to remove you… He says go ahead… So I call security and am told that the are no longer on the premise because of budget cutbacks… This of course is over the loudspeaker so the class can hear, and laugh… Now what are you going to do… I try one last time… Leave now… No, he says make me… In fact I ought to come up there and F**k you up!… Everybody here want me to beat that fat piece of sh*t up? Lots of murmurers of approval… What do you say to that fat punk?

He’s won…

Sounds a lot like New York City of the eighties between Koch and Guiliani… Again the same excuses, the same foreboding fatality that things were just that way and couldn’t be changed…

What happened in New York needs to happen in Christiana’s High Schools.

Imagine if an imaginary HB 100 was passed by both houses and signed by the governor. Under Delaware Code, any student disrupting the education of one or more of his fellow students, can be incarcerated up to 2 years, beginning at age 13.

Lets replay that last run…

Then I’m calling security to remove you…. No, don’t do that.. I’ll sit down and be quiet.

Unless I was the first test case and it would go like this.. Ok, go ahead… Two armed guards enter the classroom two minutes later, and bark at the perpetrator to lie down on the floor, put his hands behind him. He refuses and gets a fist implanted into his jaw, popping him off balance and the other guard, propels him to the floor, and sitting on him, locks him up with zip strips… grabbing him by the feet they drag him out of the room face down all the way to a waiting patrol car and off he goes to jail…

At his trial, when his mom speaks up, she is cited for contempt…

Power..

What would the military do in such a situation? The first thing is…. they would acknowledge they were not in control.. Second, is they would plan a campaign to retake control of that area. Third once retaken, they would establish an order so life could function as safely as possible, and normalcy could continue. They would not lie and say, we have full control when they obviously didn’t.

If you don’t know this is happening on a daily basis, then you are obviously being lied to..

Power needs to come back towards the side of good if we, the citizens of Delaware are to win back our schools. Students want to learn. Students want to be grown up. Under the current incentive school officials don’t report most acts… they actually under report class disruptions, so they’ll look better on paper…

That paper doesn’t do a damn thing for those kids who would like to learn…

Reasons Why GE Should Build in Delaware

1. Proximity to one of the top research Universities in the country..

2. Well trained work force, ex Chrysler, GM, DuPont, Siemens,

3. Good relations between unions and management at all Delaware companies.

4. Proximity to Dupont Headquarters.

5. Delaware’s Corporate Legal System.

6. Delaware’s own underutilized and “cheap” access port for import and export ocean traffic .

7. Close proximity to the moneyed and power towns of Washington, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, which is good for investor relations.

8. Nearby beach as incentive to draw top engineers from around the nation.

9. Soon to be built, cheap offshore wind power, which will help to moderate utility costs against the ever rising price of coal and natural gas.

10. By getting foot in Delaware’s door, GE could have an inside track at building and installing their top rated turbines off Delaware’s shores…

GE is looking for somewhere to build a new solar plant... Not one requiring tons of sun, but a place to manufacture the thin film necessary for the exchange of electrons necessary to make electricity. Driving down the cost of this film, will drive down the cost of solar electricity.. The lower the cost, the more it will be used, meaning less coal will be burned….

Lower Delaware is the best place in the nation for it.

.. and thanks Nancy for bringing this to our attention….

Imagine

Imagine…. you need some bread… So, you hop in your car, turn on the ignition, back out into your street, and almost hit someone. You get out and see a long line of cars in your normally empty street…. After about an hour, you come to the end of the road in your development, where it empties onto the highway….

Flashing lights. Oh, no, you think… a terrible accident. There at the head of your development stands a policeman holding up traffic. You crane your head out the side window, looking for the accident… You want to know if you can avoid it by going the opposite direction… It must be out of your view, you decide… You can see no activity. And ….. to your surprise, trucks are speeding up and down the highway… They usually don’t go that fast, the occasional ones who venture there, but today there are a lot of them, and they are flying…

The policeman seems to have gotten word on his headsets, and he motions five more cars forward, including yours.. You are on a wide open road and you go straight to the store, now 2 hours behind…. As you pull into the store, you notice a policeman there too, standing on the corner, letting traffic out to go back to where they came….

You notice that if there are trucks on the road, you get held back… Only when there are none, do cars get allowed upon the highway… That’s not fair you think..

So you ask the store clerk, who seems tired of answering the same question…. He tells you…

“Congressional Republicans passed a law that disbands highway neutrality.

“Highway Neutrality? you say…”WTF is that”……

He says, “Well, the roads used to be neutral… that means anyone could use them to go anywhere they wanted. They were just there; you could just drive on them… But the Republicans said that since trucks pay more in taxes, a lot more, the roads were for them… They have first priority.. If they aren’t using the road, then they’ll let cars on them. It’s kinda nice; for the first time here in the city, I actually got my delivery on time. But my sales are about 20% of what they usually are on a Sunday…. Guess people are stayin’ put and don’t want to deal with it…

You say, “:Let me get this right… Because trucks are bigger, they get priority over cars?”

“Yeh, but for a lot of money you can upgrade to truck status, and ride with them…” the clerk volunteers. I think it’s $50 a month…. If you want to go for free, you have to wait for the gate keepers to let you on….

You say. ” but that’s extortion! Since man has been around,… the highways were always free, unless they were a toll road… How can they suddenly take what’s always been free, and start charging an arm and a leg for it?

He says… “People voted Republican… That’s all I can say… I guess the truck lobby sort of owns Republicans… at least they contribute money to their campaign, and to pay them back, we now have lost our highway neutrality… and if you want to go somewhere quickly, you have to pay, and pay, and pay, and pay, and………..

By now you’re boiling mad… You get a lot of groceries because you know, you are not going on the highway for a long while…. It takes you two hours to go one mile…..

While all eyes were on the budget bill and threats of government shutdown, the Republicans two days ago ( 4/8/11) found time to remove neutrality from the internet. Yep, the House voted on a terse statement that says the FCC must rescind their net neutrality policy immediately.. … Once this is done, preference will be given to the large providers, and small ones like all of us, will have to await our turn.

Unless we pay for the upgrade….

This was just an political exercise. It won’t pass the Senate and Obama will veto if it were to ever make it that far… But the vote was unsurprisingly, along party lines. The usual 6 Democrats crossed over to the Republican side, and two Republicans joined the Democrats on this issue…

So though this won’t pass, it is reminder that if Republicans win in 2012, this will be the future of the internet…

And I don’t know about you, but the internet has become more of a basic right to me than my free speech…. We have a right to free, unrestricted internet. This is a people’s right, not a decision to be left to business…

We need people in Congress who support people instead of big business….

Impact of A Government Shutdown!

I really didn’t know..

What happens when Republicans can’t get their act together, and close our government because women won’t let them into their uterus?

“Uh, … can I go into your Uterus?”

“No…”

“Damn it, bitch! I’m shutting down the government!…”

Here is the list going out of those who stop getting paychecks just because the Republicans retaliated for not being able to go up into a woman’s uterus….

There is no total at the bottom so I added them all up… 350,564… All human beings. most supporting families including children.

Ok, so what’s the average wage? The average wage of Federal Employees is $81,258….

Now, I’ve got a problem with average wages, ever since I learned that the average net worth of a bar’s patrons, jumps up by $3 billion every time Bill Gates walks into a bar…

So I will take for calculative properties only, a lesser figure, $50,000 to judge the impact. (I know when I was starting out, Federal wages weren’t $81,258!, how I wish they were!)

350,564 human beings… On a map you would have to block out the two lower counties of Delaware to show the impact of how many people would be without paychecks… (157,741 {Kent} + 192,747 {Sussex}…. Imagine, just driving down to Fenwick Island next time if all those people didn’t have jobs!… Of course we could accept that if it were due to an atomic bomb that had caused damage…

But to be caused simply because some Republicans couldn’t go up a woman’s uterus?

All those people without jobs, for a uterus? The immediate loss to our economy of $17,528,550,564 a year…. Hmm, per day, that would be…$47,990,556… 3 times the entire daily economic activity of Dover, Delaware, the 235th largest metropolitan center in the United States…. {$6,052,000,000 divided by 365.25}

This ladies and gentlemen, is the current state of our country, and will be, as long as no one dares challenge conservative values for what they are.

Delaware’s Novel Method to Raise Income

At a recent planning session, the edict went out that this year, there would be no new taxes. The state budget would be balanced without any new revenue….

Progressives cringed but accepted the verdict. This year the Democrats were not going to raise taxes to balance the budget; instead they would balance the budget with painful cuts…

As I have on occasion mentioned before, raising the marginal rate on the top one percent, does wonders for an economy… That is the reason the 90′s were so great. Dropping the marginal rate, sucks money from out of the economy. That is the reason the first decade of this century, is less prosperous than the good times under Clinton. It is all about the top tax rate.

That is for the Fed… However, and though I have mentioned it on the state level, there things are a little different. As we saw last November, when you try to raise the tax level by the tiniest amount on the fewest of the richest…. by the time it gets down to the voting public, all they hear is… “raising taxes.” “Hell, no, I won’t have my taxes raised, and they vote accordingly”…

There is another issue. Taxes by businesses are seen in a bad light. Delaware is in competition with 48 larger states, and one smaller state, for a piece of America’s economic pie. We are wooing businesses away from other states; they are wooing our businesses over to them….

Anything that gums up a deal, is counter productive. Sure, we could tax a wealthy person more, which winds up going to pay for the unemployment we could have prevented by bringing in a new manufacturer, one who chose not to come, because he heard we were raising taxes…..

So, is there a unique way to raise the top marginal rate (which does wonders for the economy) and do it in a way that doesn’t raise taxes?

Actually….. yes, there is…

Here is how. We include a new deduction. Money spent on capital investment strictly in the state of Delaware.

I know it is hard for most people to grasp what just happened, so I’ll elaborate a little more…

You make a million dollars each year (income). The top Delaware tax rate goes up 1%… One percent of $1 million is $10,000…. In 2011 since your income is stable, you will pay $10,000 more in taxes than you did on this year’s return, 2010.

Unless, you decide to use that for construction to improve your business, home, or trailer park. Lets say you run a business out of your home. You redo your roof, pave your driveway, and upgrade your data speed…

The rise in marginal tax didn’t cost you a thing. You were planning to go to Ireland this year and blow the extra money there but… because of the tax laws, you spent it on construction in Delaware. You are not out anything. If you put your house up for market, it is now worth $10,000 more with a new roof, new driveway, and top of the line data connection…

But wait, Delaware is out $10,000 dollars.. What’s the point? You didn’t want to cut programs, so you raised the top marginal rate, and then, didn’t take the money? What gives?

What gives, IS….. well, lets track where that money goes first. The business selling the material for the roof and pavement and hardware for the data upgrade, gets 1/2 or $5,000…. They pay a series of taxes on that transaction…The other half goes to labor… Where 10% in taxes is pulled yielding $500. When that money gets spent again, more tax is paid, by the workers getting paid by that money coming in..

Bottom line, is that even though the wealthy individual does not pay taxes, the fact that he spent money in Delaware for that tax deduction,.creates jobs that weren’t there which will pay something into the state treasury….

This is actually the Reagan argument backwards. He argued that if you cut taxes, people would invest in jobs and more would work, pay their share of lower taxes, and the treasury’s revenue would rise… Naively, he, like most of us, assumed that free money would be spent in America. It wasn’t. It was invested overseas, so those people could get jobs, make things cheaper, and profit margins could rise.

All we are doing is modifying Reagan’s proposal, by saying, you can keep your tax liability where it is, only if you build something new here in Delaware.

All we are doing, by raising the top marginal percent …. is forcing that money to stay in Delaware….. Now what Republican could possibly be against that?

Our Counterfactual President

The New Republic recently questioned (and answered) why our president was not getting credit for preventing atrocities in Libya, which surely would have come, had our intervention not been enacted.

The answer is: because he prevented the atrocities. We can’t see what he prevented so we downplay his action. The opposite occurred in Bosnia. There the Serbs killed over 200,000 people before we intervened. We saw displaced persons, mass graves, so upon rectifying that, we felt like something important just got accomplished.

In Libya, we acted quickly. There were no 200,000 bodies for cameras to take pictures. So, the criticism that would have been smoldering as to why we were sitting back, letting people die when we could prevent it, shifts instead to questions of whether or not we have a clear mission, how long we plan to keep it up, and whether the girls of the cabinet are more male than the men are……

Bottom line, there are people walking around in Libya now, who but for us, would be dead …..Underneath all the criticism of mission fogginess, are some very impressive facts! Indeed, though this intervention must have felt painfully slow to the people of Benghazi as Qaddafi’s army bore down upon them, it was, by any objective standard, the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history, with broader international support than any of the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. What we witnessed was a masterpiece of international cooperation, unseen in our lifetimes, that prevented atrocities that were sure to come.

But it is not only in Libya that this sort of thing has happened. Throughout the Obama presidency, we have had miracles take place that get pushed aside in our daily news feed simply because we don’t really get to see what they prevented.

Like the screen that saves the basketball game because it prevented a sure shot before the buzzer, one that would have changed the outcome of a one point game,…. preventing an action is something that never gets shown in the highlights. Instead the highlight reels show something like a shot in the first half, bouncing on the rim three times before going in, ….causing most to think that this, was the reason for the 1 point victory….

The most extreme example of this effect, of course, was the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama signed during his first month in office, when the economy was shedding 700,000 jobs a month. 700,000 jobs a month…. The immediate goal was to avoid a depression, and in that sense it was a tremendous success, stopping the hemorrhaging and stabilizing the scariest economic situation since the Great Depression. (The Congressional Budget Office and other independent analysts estimate that without it, the unemployment rate would be 2% higher today.)

But 8.8% unemployment is still awful. States and cities are still laying off cops and teachers – just not as many as they would have without the stimulus…Last November, voters seemed more aware of actual pain than of the theoretical pain they were saved from feeling.

His health care overhaul included serious efforts to rein in soaring costs, but they haven’t kicked in yet – and when they do, they’ll just make medical care somewhat less exorbitant.

His financial reforms should reduce the chances of another Wall Street meltdown, but it’s classic disaster prevention: if they fail, it’s a scandal, and if they work, we won’t notice.

Chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, calls it the “gift bag” that President Bush left for him...the worst economy in 80 years, a nightmare on Wall Street, a deficit spiraling out of control, one unnecessary war in Iraq and one intractable war in Afghanistan, a dysfunctional health care system, and an energy policy that was broiling the planet and exposing consumers to violent swings in gas prices……

Obama basically ended the war in Iraq, but attention just shifted to the potential quagmire in Afghanistan. He’s been a paragon of fiscal responsibility compared with Bush, but he’s still blamed for the megadeficits primarily created by Bush’s tax cuts and the Great Recession. Obama has jacked up fuel-efficiency standards and his stimulus included the most aggressive clean-energy push in history, but nobody notices when gas costs more than $3.57 a gallon.

Even as the country imploded and collapsed on Bush’s watch, his Republican supporters always pointed out that Cheney/Bush had “kept us safe” from terrorist attacks. Well, Obama also has kept us safe – and he didn’t have a Sept. 11 on his watch. But nobody ever mentions that, not even his supporters. (Apparently there needs to be a spectacular terrorist attack on U.S. soil during your presidency before you can get credit for preventing another one.)

Looking at Obama’s list of accomplishments, they are rather impressive…. What other president in two years has done as much to rectify a collapsing economy, constrain an immoral Wall Street, reworked a Health network fueled by greed, wound down a war in Iraq, initiated radical new clean green energy standards, and in less than two years, create more jobs than Bush did his entire eight?…. One would have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find someone who has done so much in as little time.

But you can’t excite a base with slogans like: “I prevented a disaster”; “It would have been even worse without me”; “That’s us: avoiding even bigger messes since 2009,” ; “We inherited an economy in free fall”; “Aftermaths of financial meltdowns are always long and brutal”; “Depressions are exponentially worse than the nastiest recessions”…

It’s ironical, because preventing a major problem is far better then spending tons of money to fix it after the problem has transpired. But because this president is soo good at preventing absolute calamities, . It’s hard for him to get credit for avoiding that disaster when it’s impossible to prove the disaster would have happened without you. Social scientists call this the counterfactual problem…

So yes, we have a counterfactual president. And when you have a person like this, whether it’s a teacher, or a supervisor, military officer, or tireless public servant, when you have someone that is proactive and sharp enough that great problems on the horizon, never seem to catch up to us, you only realize just how good they were, after it is too late and they’re gone; meanwhile replacement can’t seem to do anything right…………

State Employee Legislators

i’m concerned.

With a lot of discussion aimed at one particular person who is employed by the state, and works for it as well, that something will get washed under the bridge without anyone mentioning it.

That is,

If we disallow state employees to run for office, who does that leave to run? People with Republican sympathies…..

Let me explain. Delaware only pays a legislator $42,000 a year. One can’t live on that… Therefore the only people who can physically serve are those who do not have to work 40 hours for their income…. That can be someone retired,or someone fabulously wealthy, or someone who doesn’t need forty hours of pay to stay alive….

Therefore, every legislator if not independently wealthy, needs a benefactor. If that benefactor is not the state, or other forms of government, it has to be a private concern…. And… a private concern will be much more emphatic that their “owned” legislator, does their bidding…. For proof of this, look no further than Scott Walker, John Kasich, an Rick Scott.

Currently, allowing someone to work as a state employee, and serve as a part time legislator, is the only way a person representing working people, can afford to be a legislator.

It can create some problems of course, such as funneling money to a certain bureau but that pales in comparison to having another friend of Delmarva Power, Bank of America, Waste Management, Dupont, Positive Growth Alliance, Pam Scott Realitors, serving in our state legislator.

Only someone independent of corporate influence can see clearly when it comes time to balance the needs of corporations versus the needs of our state’s people…

One, we’ve already lost that balance. Forcing a legislator to have a corporate benefactor, will only push that balance further in the wrong direction….

So if we force this disconnection between a working state employee and a position as an elected official, we need to also have a way of having voices independent serve on our state boards…

Currently you have land use issues around this state. Residents are in an uproar over changes to their neighborhoods. But, none of them can run… Who can run? A realtor…. So properties get zoned for quick sales, irregardless of the consequences they actually impose upon those who live there!

This is the direction this bill will take us… unless we have something in it to balance corporate takeovers…

I propose that we pull the plug and make our legislators full time….

Jump the salary from $42,000 a year to $100,000 a year…. Wow, that’s a 138% increase in a time of recession!

Yes, but it will better equal our capacity to serve the whole of our states population.

Any government worker, can afford to quit to serve as his constituents representative. Any corporate representative, can afford to quit, to serve as his constituents representative…. Any human being, can afford to serve the needs of his constituents, without having to sell his soul to represent some narrow interest group once in….

How much will this cost?

41 plus 21 times $58,000…. equals $3.5 million dollars. or roughly 1 percent of our state’s budget. Whereas that may sound like a lot, we could easily increase the top 1% tax rate slightly to counteract it, and with the stroke of a pen, finally have a government independent of corporate, or labor, or another state department’s influence.

Such is the cost of excellence….

Other state’s paying for full time legislators, are…. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania… Once looking a the the list of salaries paid state by state nationwide, it becomes rather apparent why across this great nation of ours, the whims of government can be quickly changed by one good meal……

Wealth Distribution

Republicans pooh pooh the idea of wealth redistribution. They deride Obama’s policy as being just that.

Truth is, their policies that have caused far more wealth redistribution, than Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or Tojo combined.. It has been redistributed all the wrong way; to the top.

I because curious as I was in line pushing my cart from Costco’s checkouts to my car, scratching my head how I could have spent $50 dollars on a few trinkets: water, bread, paper towels and razor blades. I had only three of the wrong bags (plastic) and had just electronically approved the emptying of my account by $50 dollars…. (The same purchases would have cost $33 back in November, before the Bush tax cuts were extended an additional two years)..

How does that play out in our society?

First a chart:

Yearly income ….(divided by 52 divided by 5)……. daily income

1 million…………………………………………………….$3846
$125,000……………………………………………………$480
$ 75,000…………………………………………………….$288
$ 45,000…………………………………………………….$173
$ 25,000…………………………………………………….$96
$14/hour @ 7.5 hours……………………………………..$105
$10/hour @ 7.5 hours……………………………………..$75
$7.25/hour, 7.5 hours……………………………………..$54
$2.38/hour, 7.5 hours……………………………………..$17

That means almost an entire day of work for someone on minimum wage, was worth those three bags I had in my hand.

Prior to November, they would have at least had $19 more dollars to spend.
Bread, water, paper towels, and a razor plus blades ($9 +$15). (ever wonder why most working protestors have beards?)

Here is a list of countries that I know had protests over wealth distribution, some causing the collapse of their governments… Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Albania, Britain, Wisconsin, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Singapore… I’m sure there are more.

In each case, the people are protesting that they have to live on less and less, while their wealthy, due to unfair lenient tax laws, are making more and more….

1% of Americans, own 40% of our wealth. Wow, that sounds like Mexico, or Columbia! Do they really own that much?

The Gini coefficient is a mathematical term that measures inequality. If everybody has the same amount of wealth, the coefficient will be zero. If one person has all the wealth, then the coefficient would be 100.

Using this tool, we see how the world is stacked. Those countries called socialist by overly rich republicans, who apparently are complaining on having to live on $174,000 these days, and called number one places to live by everyone normal, have relatively low coefficients. Third world countries, where the president owns all the wealth, have relatively high ones

Here is a chart with map showing the rankings…..

Scroll down to see the company the United States keeps…. Georgia, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United States, Morocco…… The only economic power below us is China, which will no doubt pass us up this year.

Far above us (we are ranked 85 our of 149, with some embarrassing countries better off than we are….. Myanmar, Iran, Yemen, Russia, Libya,) lie the top echelon, Denmark, Japan, Iceland, Sweden, Norway…..

What do those countries do differently? The figure out what they need to spend to maintain the quality of life they wish to attain, then spread the tax burden over whomever lives, or works there… Yes taxes are higher than here, … but when they pay $4 dollars for a gallon of milk, it goes toward their next doctor’s visit, not into some foreign investor’s pocket, who is playing with the hedge fund of milk that day.

Therefore they live much better than we can. Unless of course, you over here happen to be a 1 percent-er.

Then. for you, buying bread, water, paper towels, and razors is taking less than 2% of your daily pay, and not the 92% it does for someone who worked all day on minimist of minimum wage….. .