My Beauty Best Teacher

Here's a post just in from the trenches. DCPS related service providers speak out about our real working conditions that you rarely hear about in our mainstream press as well as the cronyism and nepotism and politicism that are still pervasive even under the helm of our school chancellor. Check this out from a DC School Psychologist.

Candi:
"As always thanks so much for all you do, keeping everyone informed and working tirelessly on our behalf. First, please write to the Obama campaign and respond to Obama's most ill advised praise for our Chancellor and the "great" Mayor for all they are doing for education in this city. They ( Obama and his campaign advisors ) need to see/ read those voluminous articles to the contrary.

Michelle Rhee went to the Democratic National Convention and berated the democrats as shameful for only being concerned about unions and NOT about education of the inner city students ! Can you believe the gall ??? Here in DC we have classes with 35 and 45 students, some reform that is. Her only methodology for reform in fire, fire, fire, hire non-educators - anyone she can find, and let the classroom teacher:student ratio's be damned! Obama just might lose votes by aligning himself with those two DC lightening rods for public contempt.

Most people recognize the "destruction of public education ", and it's replacement with poorly conceived privatization, to be a republican initiative. Just as their repetitive attempts to dissolve the US Department of Education keep coming to the surface. Remember when Service master replaced all school custodians.... and what was the benefit there other than more privatization ?

Secondly, every new DCPS administration comes along with the battle cry of "down with the pernicious practice of friendship, kinship, cronyism and nepotism" as the #1 problem with DCPS staffing. Well, the 5 new School Psychology heads ( including the two who subjected us to the most elementary " ethics training " session recently, are all tight friends, schoolmates, cronies from way back and also long associated through family friendship with one of the administrators under Dr. Phyllis Harris as reports have it.

Additionally, these "program managers" are the least seasoned, least experienced of all the psychology workforce. But then, that's what apparently qualifies one to work under the current regime. When reading the published Human Resource job description for program managers, there is such a massive list of responsibilities that they clearly don't have time to hold "peer review/ case conferences" in addition to staff developments, which rarely develop anything because of a pervasive lack of psychological acumen and creativity." Anonymous DCPS School Psychologist. Posted by The Washington Teacher.

President Barack Obama raised $86 million last quarter in fundraising- and over 40% of that was from bundlers. Twenty-seven big-donor bundlers each collected more than $500,000 in contributions- the list of these donors demonstrates that Obama finds most of his support with celebrities and the well-connected. Another 200 people scooped up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each in contributions for the president, collectively amounting to at least $35 million, and these ranks are filled with lawyers and lobbyists.

You see, the Democrat Party has increasingly become a divided party- super rich politically connected elites who have already made their wealth, and those who they want to control. It is a party of elites who deliver goods to others and others who receive goods from elites- the modern day Democratic Party has become exactly the sort of thing that our nation rebelled against.

This probably explains why the 'Tea-Party' movement has exploded and is marked by symbols and discussions of our founding- the direction that the Democratic Party has lurched under Obama and Pelosi and the other liberal Democrats is a direction that goes directly against the traditional nature of our nation and attacks everything that our nation was born into.

The modern-day Democratic Party seeks to rule over us as lords and nobility- for our own good, we are told. But they are not lords and nobility- those don't exist in America- and so they need to take this following advice from Billy Hollis in his post Eat my peas? Screw you, Obama – I’m not a child for you to raise:

• We need to be responsible for our own retirement. We don’t need to be treated like children who don’t understand the value of money, can’t see the future, and don’t have the self-discipline to save.
• We need to be responsible for our own healthcare. We don’t need to be treated like children who must be told what to eat, when to exercise, and what treatment they are to get when they are sick, without any thought to how to pay for it.
• We need to be responsible for our own businesses. The vast majority of business owners are adult enough to know what safety precautions to take, and what accounting standards to use. The small minority that doesn't understand safety should have their butts sued off and lose their businesses when they are negligent. The tiny minority that commits accounting fraud should be put in prison.
• We need to be responsible for our property. That starts with allowing us to keep our own money, and spend it as we like. It also implies some stability that is not currently in evidence, so that we don’t lose huge sums in real estate and stock investments because of governmental incompetence and cronyism with the executives of large companies.
• We need to be more responsible for our own safety. Sure, there’s always a need for law enforcement, but it can’t be the first resort for personal safety. Any law enforcement that could do that would be indistinguishable from a police state. Therefore, we need the right to buy, possess, and use the weapons that provide that safety.
• We need to be responsible for raising our own children. We need to have more influence over their education, and we particularly need to stop wasting our time reversing the indoctrination they suffer at the hands of the educational bureaucracy.
• We need to be responsible for treating other people appropriately. If we are stupid or obnoxious in our treatment of others, we need to suffer social consequences, not legal ones.

President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress who voted in favor of it are going to stand for election in another year, and when they do it is important to for voters to remember that one of the biggest pieces of legislation that they pushed for and voted for was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as 'Obamacare.'

Part of Obamacare included a provision for temporary waivers, which were put put in place to encourage employers and insurers who are currently offering mini-med plans not to withdraw medical coverage before the full regulations come into force. This is an important aspect of the legislation- if these waivers were not in place, employers and insurers might decide to drop coverage for employees and push these employees into the public system, thereby driving up costs for the public and putting further pressure on our already bankrupt system.

The problem with these waivers is that like most aspects of the Obama administration is that it was a corrupt process- corrupt in the sense that this waiver process became tied up in trading in influence, patronage, cronyism, electoral fraud, and kickbacks. Democrats in Congress were supposed to be proving oversight to this process, but were negligent in their duties, and so there was all sorts of evidence that the waiver process was corrupt. I wrote about it myself in my post Evidence is Mounting that Obamacare is All Sorts of Corrupt?, where I wrote the following:

It was my suspicion several months ago that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a corrupt piece of legislation designed to transfer property and choice from those who have it to those who want it. There would be those who would not want to be part of this process who would then ask for waivers, and it was my suspicion that these waivers would be given out based on political considerations- in other words, they would be given to groups that support the Democratic Party, Obama in particular, or to companies who had access and connections to those Democratic party officials who were making the decisions on the waivers, likely because of their campaign donations. So I started to do some research on the issue- as I stated, the research was by no means an exhaustive list of evidence but did end up being some pretty fair anecdotal evidence that those who are receiving waivers from Obamacare are those who donated large amounts of money to Barack Obama. Check out the post for my little bit of research on this issue.

PSD Blog reports on a debate regarding Latin America's problem with the free market or moreso crony capitalism:

One legitimate reason for the opposition to capitalism in Latin America is that it frequently has been "crony capitalism" as opposed to the competitive capitalism that produces desirable social outcomes. Crony capitalism is a system where companies with close connections to the government gain economic power not by competing better, but by using the government to get favored and protected positions. These favors include monopolies over telecommunications, exclusive licenses to import different goods, and other sizeable economic advantages. Some cronyism is found in all countries, but Mexico and other Latin countries have often taken the influence of political connections to extremes.