AmerCon : Intellectual Capital : Education

Intellectual Capital / Education

The United States ranks 14th out of 15 industrialized countries in per capita education

spending.

Why do we pretend we care about our children or our future?

It's clear how this benefits corporate interests, which are becoming accustomed to buying

intellectual capital and manufacturing capacity abroad. Why support taxes in America for

education when you're going to be hiring people in some other country?

But why do the rest of us support this? Corporate interests are but a subset of the nation's

diverse economic interests, and economic interests are not primary in the minds of the

average citizen.

How did limited corporate interests become merged with the nation's moral

and spiritual

interests? How did we lose our true north?

What's painful to note is how well the corporatists have sold this vision of America to the

poorest of Americans -- a vision that takes more and more of their money (under the rubric of

self-sufficiency) and removes more and more of their opportunities (under the guise of moral

standing

What's disturbing is that the Republicans have achieved a dangerous vicious cycle in this

confluence -- the poor vote for Republicans, who spend yet less money on education and

improving

the nation, and

they

are rewarded by garnering more poor who vote for

Republicans.

ehj

Selected Reading

2005.08.05 Ignorance Is Bliss; Sometimes It's Policy

Washington Post / Eugene Robinson

Slate
2004.11.09

To Win you have to fight
by Laura Kipnis

What still seems most startling to me about the Republican victory is the strange fact that a
majority of the American electorate was somehow induced to vote against its own economic
interests. This is quite a feat. Bruce Reed points out that of 28 states with lowest per capita
income levels, Bush carried 26. The percentage of the population that Bush's economic
policies favor is minuscule. Why, despite an economic climate of stagnant wages, job loss,
and an increasing income gap between rich and poor, does the middle class not vote its
pocketbook?

The old left had a term for this kind of thing: "false consciousness," which meant the
tendency to identify with the boss instead of your own class interests, or the way in which
capitalism turns reality upside down to make it seem like the rich got that way through luck
or skill instead of by sheer exploitation. These days, with millionaire faux populism as the
political lingua franca, you'd get laughed out of town as an elitist for using such a hoary
phrase. Instead we're treated to a lot of pseudo-explanatory language about "character" or
"values," which supposedly accounts for the phenomenon of voters ignoring their own
interests. Worse, liberal pundits are jumping on the bandwagon, too, hammering Kerry for
not denouncing Janet Jackson's exposed breast or for having plans instead of "vision."

OK, so what exactly is this elusive all-important quality that Kerry supposedly failed to
display? In a "Mood of the Electorate" piece last Thursday, the New York Times queried
voters on this question, since so many said that character mattered more to them than the
war or the economy. The story's closing paragraph featured a quote from Gene Hadley, a
79-year old Bush supporter from Ohio:

People say George Bush is a cowboy. Well, what's a cowboy but a guy in a white hat,
getting things done for the downtrodden? People say he shoots quick. Well, listen,
sometimes you have to do that, you have to be decisive. Kerry never projected that.

At the risk of sounding like one of those elitist urban Democrats who fails to understand the
heartland: Wait a second, Mr. Hadley—what on earth has George Bush done for the
downtrodden? What did cowboys do for the downtrodden? Perhaps Hadley was thinking of
Robin Hood, whom our president also hardly resembles. At least by "shooting quick," we
can assume what's meant is the war in Iraq, although that turned out to be a disaster of
unprecedented proportion.

So how exactly are Democrats supposed to capture Mr. Hadley's vote, if what counts as
"character" is an incoherent stew of old movies, frontier mythology, and political
misinformation? They can't, which is why the Democrats lost this election a long time
before the 2004 campaign even began.

Here's an interesting little factoid that I share at the risk of sounding, once more, elitist.
(Sorry.) The United States ranks 14th out of 15 industrialized countries in per
capita education spending. If we have an electorate incapable of thinking rationally
about its own interests, who confuse politicians with old movie heroes, don't know much
about history, and lap up the administration's lies about Iraq even after they've been
repeatedly exposed as lies by the media, this might have something to do with never
having been educated in the fundamental skills of critical thinking. (Note that Bush's
much touted No Child Left Behind initiative, favoring rote learning and
standardized testing, is the formula for an even more intellectually pacified and
credulous electorate.)

But corporate America doesn't require an educated or critical citizenry. Quite the
contrary. What it requires is a passive work force narrowly trained to perform
specific occupations for decreasing wages, who will then overconsume lavishly
in their leisure hours. It all works out rather well: Job dissatisfaction is placated by an
endless succession of consumer crap (creating new jobs—though probably overseas—
making more crap); intellectual boredom is assuaged by a steady diet of media crap
(thanks to media deregulation); and any remaining critical stirrings are mollified by
supersize portions of tasteless crappy food (thanks to an unregulated food industry). The
result: a stupefied, overstuffed citizenry glued to pricey entertainment centers, whose
national hobby is ridiculing Europeans for wanting shorter work weeks, resisting American
imports, and denouncing the disastrous American policy in Iraq.

The political culture of a country doesn't only take place in voting booths. It's
lodged in this network of intersecting social institutions and practices—
education, media, religion, workplace dignity (or lack of it), even the kind of food
we eat. And at every instance, Democrats have ceded the territory or never
fought for it in the first place. Into this mix add the brand of superstitious and
authoritarian religiosity now dominating American life. When it comes to religion, once
again, the old left had a few interesting things to say. Someone, I'm a little hesitant to say
who at the moment, once called religion the "opiate of the masses." In other words, a
painkiller, and an indispensable one, given the degree to which social conditions force a
population to live the impoverished lives that make these kinds of substitutes for meaning
and fulfillment necessary.

Then let's add high unemployment and rampant job insecurity—useful techniques for
stifling social demands and crippling whatever opposition a viable labor movement would
provide. Stir in a climate of terror, which this administration has been particularly adept at
milking. It's not just that voting for social progress becomes less likely under such
circumstances, it's that even basic social demands start to seem threatening. The
fact that a majority of the country has come to accept the persistence of vast social
inequities in the face of unprecedented wealth doesn't make these conditions any less
reprehensible.

It's not that Kerry didn't have a clear message—his message was clear enough. The
Democratic defeat was a direct result of the party's ongoing unwillingness to
contest the direction that national political culture has taken in an era of
unregulated corporate triumphalism—and too bad for them, it's a direction that
obviously resonates far more with a Republican than a Democratic agenda.

But what seems most tragic about the 2004 election is that apparently the more you take
away from people—economic security, civil liberties, a semblance of political honesty from
their politicians—the less they think they deserve. Which is exactly what the Republican
Party offers. If Democrats lost the election by trying to offer more, the problem they're
faced with now is understanding their own contributing role in fostering an electoral
psychology that would reject the offer.

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