Since the 1980s, factories all over southern California have been shutting down or downsizing, many moving to countries where wages are lower, others using technology to replace workers.
Their corporate owners did this to increase their profits, and it worked – the rich got richer by creating unemployment and reducing wages for those still lucky enough to have a job.
Now, in place of these industries, we see big-box shopping centers and malls that replace full-time, well-paid industrial jobs with minimum-wage Walmart and Starbucks jobs.
That terrible shift is having its parallel now in public education. School funding suffered when Prop. 13 drastically reduced property taxes on corporations and commercial property — with a devastating impact on public education.
Where did the money go? Millionaires became billionaires, while wages went down and unemployment rose. We are witnessing the greatest transfer of wealth from the people to the corporations in history. This is why essential services are cut — because we’ve been robbed!
In California — which once had the best educational system in the country, perhaps the world — public education has been underfunded for decades. Fees in the California State University and University of California systems have tripled.
Now this cabal of billionaires wants us to turn our schools over to them. Proclaiming themselves educational reformers, some of the world’s richest — Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Walton (Walmart) family — have financed a charter-school movement that replaces community control and government accountability with control by the oligarchy.
This is a political attack on the role of government itself. To maximize profit in times of world historical crisis, the oligarchy must change the role of government from serving the needs of the people to serving the needs of capital at the people’s expense.
By that, they alter the role of the people themselves. If school boards cannot address the budget crisis who will? “We the People” will have to decide whether our government will be for us or for the capitalists.
The good news is that there is plenty of money to fund quality, free, public education. They stole it from us. We need to take it back.
