Private Schools Are A Throwback to The Fuedal Age

Education is for the masses

By Phyllis Scherrer, SEP candidate for US vice president

As the Socialist Equality Party candidate for vice president of the United States, I denounce the recently announced plans to convert all the public schools in Muskegon Heights and Highland Park, Michigan into for profit charters. These actions represent a new and unprecedented attack on the right to public education. They are part of a nation-wide campaign by the ruling class to undermine public schools, spearheaded by the Obama administration.

In Muskegon Heights, a state appointed Emergency Manager has used the district’s ongoing budget crisis as a rationale for turning the public schools over to a for-profit charter operator. All teachers and staff have been fired and must reapply for their jobs.

In Highland Park, the Emergency Manager in charge of the public schools has also proposed turning the entire district over to a charter operator. All the district’s teachers will likewise have to reapply for their jobs with whatever company is finally selected.

Michigan is at the center of attacks carried out across the United States. The promotion of charter schools is aimed at both attacking the wages and benefits of teachers, and further reducing the quality of education available to the vast majority of working class youth.

In Detroit, scores of public schools have been closed and many turned into charters. The wages and benefits of teachers have been gutted. The state already has almost one-quarter of the charter schools operating in the country, with the vast majority being for-profit. A new law passed by the Michigan legislature exempts charter schools from collective bargaining agreements in their respective districts.

In Washington DC the chancellor of the public schools has announced that the district may close as many as three dozen public schools and replace them with charters.

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Catholic Nun Tells Vatican to Decriminalize Masturbation "Self-Pleasure"

Sister Talks Sex

It’s hard to say which is weirder. A Sister of Mercy writing about the Kama Sutra, sexual desire and “our yearnings for pleasure.”
Or the Vatican getting so hot and bothered about the academic treatise on sexuality that the pope censures it, causing it to shoot from obscurity to the top tier of Amazon’s best-seller list six years after it was published.
Just the latest chapter in the Vatican’s thuggish crusade to push nuns and all Catholic women back into moldy subservience.
Even for a church that moves glacially, this was classic. Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics is written by Sister Margaret Farley, published in 2006. She’s a 77-year-old professor emeritus at Yale’s Divinity School, a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and an award-winning scholar.
The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which seems as hostile to women as the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, spent years pondering it, then censured it March 30 but didn’t publicly release the statement until Monday.
The denunciation of Farley’s book is based on the fact that she deals with the modern world as it is. She refuses to fall in line with a Vatican rigidly clinging to an inbred, illusory world.
One where men rule with no backtalk from women, gays are deviants, the divorced can’t remarry, men and women can’t use contraception, masturbation is a grave disorder and celibacy is enshrined, even as a global pedophilia scandal rages.
In old-fashioned prose steeped in historical and global perspective, Farley’s main argument is that justice needs to govern relationships. In the interest of justice to oneself, she contends that “self-pleasuring” needs “to be moved out of the realm of taboo morality.”
Immanuel Kant, who considered masturbation below the level of animals, must give way to Alfred Kinsey. Sister Margaret Farley writes:
“It is surely the case that many women, following the ‘our bodies our selves’ movement in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, have found great good in self-pleasuring.
“Perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure. Something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers.
“In this way, it could be said that masturbation actually serves relationships rather than hindering them.”
A breath of fresh air in the stultifying church, she makes the case for same-sex relationships and remarriage after divorce.

Romney, Obama, No Sense of Solidarity With Working Class

ROMENY & OBAMA, Two Sides of The Same Coin

By Barry Grey

 

A farcical war of words has erupted in the US elections, with the Republican camp of Mitt Romney and the Democratic Obama camp trading charges of being “out of touch” with the American people.
The controversy began last Friday when Obama, at a press conference on the economy, boasted of “record profits in the corporate sector.” Declaring that the “private sector is doing fine,” he hailed corporate America for “doing a good job creating jobs.”
These remarks came a week after the Labor Department reported a gain of only 69,000 jobs in May, less than half the number needed to keep pace with population growth, along with a rise in the official jobless rate to 8.2 percent. The May report marked the third straight month of plummeting job growth. It shattered the administration’s claims of economic recovery and heralded a further increase in unemployment.
Nevertheless, Obama spoke at his press conference of “a strong, robust recovery.” The cynicism of these words was underscored Monday, when the Federal Reserve reported that the net worth of the median American family fell by 39 percent between 2007 and 2010, wiping out all of the gains since the early 1990s. The report also showed a 7.7 percent decline in earnings over the three years.
Obama let slip his indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans and the real class interests he, his administration and the Democratic Party serve. He is well aware that the record profits of the banks and corporations of which he bragged have been achieved at the direct expense of the jobs, wages and living conditions of the working class.
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Best Candidate to Vote For! Don't Vote For Obama, Vote SEP!

SEP candidate Jerry White discusses experiences of election campaign

 

Why Democrats Cannot Be Trusted - Party of Losers

The Democratic Party is The Losing Party

Democrats have bought into Neoliberal ideology

Neoliberal ideology promotes the belief that everyone is an individual with a unique identity. The free market is meant to enhance our uniqueness.

Even leftists are caught in this trap. The last fifty years has seen the growth of ‘identity politics’.

What matters now is individual lifestyle, the right to sexual equality, sexual difference and freedom to pursue our liberated lifestyles.

Long gone are are values of collectivity, cooperation, solidarity and equality. Leftists have been sucked into neoliberalism’s free-trade fantasy.

It’s become more important to update our Facebook page and tweet supposedly significant comments.
Social media’s echo chamber has replaced collective action. Meanwhile, neoliberalism is free to push the extremes of poverty and wealth.