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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 7/9/11

Revolution-A Rock and Roll Epistle

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Second, a strike is a use of our Rights as citizens under the Constitution to Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly, to bring to the attention of the rest of the Nation and the World to some injustice. These injustices can include widespread misfeasance or malfeasance by public officials, elected or appointed (which certainly seems the case in Wisconsin), including violations of the rights of the employees under the Constitution of the United States, the state or commonwealth in which they reside, or the charter establishing the authority of their local government.


The American People generally have a finely tuned sense of what is just and unjust. In a poll taken on February 21, 2011, 61% of those who responded strongly opposed taking away collective bargaining power from public employee unions in their states, as Scott Walker was then attempting, and has since temporarily (we hope) succeeded in doing in Wisconsin. ( USA Today, 2/22/11)


The "conservative noise machine" has been laying the foundation for destroying the public employees unions since the 1970's, using teachers in the same way Ronald Reagan used the fictional "welfare queen in a Cadillac," to undermine the teachers' position.


Blaming teachers as a group for the problems with our education system is like blaming the troopers in the Seventh Cavalry for Custer's Last Stand.


One of the primary complaints against teachers is the concept of tenure.


Tenure is held out as education's great evil, because there are incompetent or even potentially dangerous teachers who are protected by their tenure from dismissal.


People forget that tenure was originally established so that the superior, experienced teachers would not be dropped for less experienced, less expensive ones by school administrations looking to cut costs.


We discuss the "incompetence" of teachers in relation to their pay, but we do not have a parallel discussion about the performance of CEO's and other corporate executives and their wages and bonuses. Michael Jensen, Professor Emeritus at Harvard's Graduate School of Business, discovered that over 90 percent of all contracts for CEO's in major corporations do not permit termination without a large severance package. Almost half of those contracts (44%) required a severance package even in the event of conviction for fraud or embezzlement. ("Advocate of Paying Chiefs Well Revises Thinking," Louis Uchitelle, New York Times, September 28, 2007; from Michael Perelman's The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism, 2011; p. 45.)


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Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to (more...)
 

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