Stop the DC Voucher Program in the Senate!

As you may have heard, the House of Representatives has already passedtheir version of the DC voucher bill, HR 471, that would send taxpayer money to private and religious schools in the District of Columbia. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has sponsored the Senate version of the bill, S 206, which would restart and expand the failed DC school voucher experiment. …

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QUEEN’S COMMENTS

Public education is the foundation of a democratic society. Millionaires and billionaires, with the assistance of their pet political monkeys like John Boehner and Joe Lieberman, are making inroads in the destruction of public education with their school voucher schemes.

Here is the part that they don’t tell you about their school voucher program:  It is nothing but more government welfare for the rich.

If you think that a school voucher would ever  pay enough to cover a child’s tuition in a private school, you are dreaming. For example, the Sidwell Friends School, attended by the Obama children and the Biden grandchildren, charges $28,000 tuition per year per child. Two children would cost $56,000 a year–an amount that exceeds the total income for most single parent families in the USA.

George Carlin was right when he said: ” I’ll tell you what they don’t want.  They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.  They don’t want well-informed, well-eduated people capable of critical thinking.  They are not interested in that.  That doesn’t help them.  They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they are getting shafted by a system that threw them overboard thirty years ago.  They don’t want that.”

Who are the billionaires who are funding this effort to dismantle public education?

BETSY DEVOS

Betsy DeVos, former head of the Republican Party in Michigan, married into the billionaire family of multi-level marketing founders of Amway and sister to Prince who founded BlackWater–the ultimate in a government welfare corporation devoted to war profiteering. She is the driving force behind school voucher legislation in Florida and Pennsylvania.  Other billionaires like David and Charles Koch and members of the Mellon-Scaife family  also help to fund this movement to dismantle one of the most basic cornerstones to any democracy–a free public education.

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ADDENDUM: THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT’S CONTRIBUTION TO THESE EFFORTS TO DISMANTLE PUBLIC EDUCATION According to a recent piece published by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Religious right in America is lavishly funded and politically well-connected.  The top 12 most powerful Christian Right Groups have a total in annual budgets that exceed $1billion.  These figures were obtained from public tax documents from 2009 and 2010.

To provide an example of what they offer:

David Barton, a Texan who makes his living promoting bogus “Christian nation” history to fundamentalist groups helped rewrite Texas social studies standards which downplay church-state separation and elevate the “Christian nation” view.  Barton does not have a degree in history but that does not stop him from posing as a historian.  His degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University–the same “university” that Michele Bachmann earned her law degree from.

Despite his lack of legitimate academic credentials, Barton’s prominence has increased because of a number of appearances that he made on Glenn Beck’s program.

Mike Huckabee, the man who would be president-elect in 2012 had this to say about Barton:  Addressing a Religious Right gathering earlier this year he said that all Americans should be forced “at gunpoint. . .to listen to every David Barton message.”

And that is the Religious Right’s idea of “education”–to force religious ideology on Americans at gun point.  Well I guess I understand better now their aversion to gun laws.