More Peach State Paralysis. Part Deux.

Maui - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Mike Burnaugh

The main advantage of being a geezer is remembering past mistakes. The disadvantage is that nobody listens to geezers. We aren’t promising anything to the electorate. When I was neck deep in a flooded foxhole in Vietnam, the main folly of LBJ was beginning to play out at home: the belief that we could have both guns and butter. Not only were we going to drop more ordnance on the rice paddies that we did on Hitler and Tojo, but we were going to win the war on poverty. How did that work out for us?

Now that poverty has been eliminated for more than forty years, I can’t understand why we are having an emergency food drive for MUST ministries, our local food bank. What happened to all those billions, even trillions, we spent eliminating poverty? What? It turns out we were just paying the poor to be poor! There will be poor people as long as we pay them to be poor. There will be unemployed as long as we pay them not to work. Is that really so hard to grasp? If you add up the moocher benefits, we will not be surprised that the poor have no plans to join the workers of the world.

Example one: As the great depression spread, Britain put people back to work by eliminating “the dole”: unemployment benefits. Contrast this to New Deal schemes that put people out of work: the minimum wage, acreage allotments for agriculture, price supports for crops in a deflation. To be fair, even Roosevelt’s Socialist stupidities would have helped but for the morons at the Federal Reserve who kept cutting the money supply every time FDR tried a stimulus plan.

You knew I was finally going to get to the City of Atlanta. Open any encyclopedia and you will see a panoramic view of the city next to the topic of CORRUPTION.

Two topics are foremost: Police corruption and School cheating. We’re number one! We’re number one!

Now that one of my two favorite trial attorneys in the whole world has sued the crap out of the City for a violent and rather perverted Red Dog Squad, that problem may be solved. I will leave it to my hero, brother Bullman, to write a synopsis when settlements are reached.

The School Cheating Scandal says more about No Child Left Behind than it does about personal dishonesty, and that says a lot! The gift of Dubya and Teddy Kennedy is succeeding in destroying what is left of public education. I have not spoken to a teacher in any state who argues otherwise. Example one: Standard School (Junior High) in Oildale, California. Oildale is a northern suburb of Bakersfield, and was a tough working class town that ravaged itself with drug use. A high percentage of the children are damaged by mom’s drug and alcohol excesses. In the nineteen eighties The Standard School built a vocational education program that prepared the kids for jobs when they dropped out of high school, as they were bound to do. Reagan’s Education Secretary honored them for their efforts. All that was shut down under Dubya when it was decreed they would all learn algebra before entering high school. Now they are junior high dropouts with no job skills. Congratulations, Washington!

Now every school is tested and punished for failing to improve standardized test results. The administrators in Atlanta considered the task hopeless and cheated. Case closed. They figured they would play out their plan as long as they could, because they had no ideas how to meet unrealistic expectations.

And so, gentle readers, we bring to an end this week’s meanderings of a diseased mind Remember, Both Atlanta and my mind can only get worse!