The GOP’s hidden Head Start agenda March 16, 2011 Jill I’m writing in the Daily News about the Republican attacks on Head Start, and how they aren’t about the program’s efficacy — they’re about enforcing conservative gender roles. Check it out.
I was always under the impression that Daily News leaned pretty conservative, not as convservative as the Post, but close…am I wrong?
Once again, just like with Planned Parenthood, it’s the people with larger incomes deciding what’s best for society when they’ve probably never been on the needy end of the spectrum.
Kirby DeLauter, another Maryland Republican [said] “education of your kids starts at home, okay? I never relied on anyone else to guarantee the education of my kids.” (His wife, whom he relied on entirely for the education of his children, apparently doesn’t count as “anyone else.”) Of course she doesn’t count as anyone else. She’s his property, so whatever he does with her is still ‘doing it himself.’ If he used his hammer to drive a nail, he would say he’d done it himself, without relying on anyone else. The hammer doesn’t have its own agency or independence – any more than a woman does in his antique worldview. From the day he took ownership of her, whether by official marriage certificate or the ‘you poke it you own it’ rule, she stopped existing. If she ever really existed at all – to go along with a monster like this, a woman would probably need to be led to believe she was property of her father from birth to marriage.
I sometimes have elaborate fantasies that the people making the decisions for the rest of their country’s children will consider the needs of the children above a political agenda. But it’s quite likely that Mssrs Smith and DeLauter would argue that’s exactly what they’re doing now. I’m not impressed.
This is absolutely insane. It is a war on the poor, who are primarily women and children. Do you have any idea the cost of daycare? These policies are forcing single parents to work and devote 80% of their pay to childcare. Welfare to work is a sham and disgusting on so many levels. It creates a base of poor low-wage workers with no upward mobility. 9 years ago, when my daughter who I raise by myself was 2 years old, I had limited choices: work full time at min wage $5.15 per hour (any job that was not nights and weekends) and pay $6-$8 per hour for daycare OR go to community college with student work min wage where the daycare was $2 per hour. Either way, I was screwed. Today, due to budget cuts in education, that very community college has bulldozed the daycare. I wonder what a young single mother in that same position can do today? What options has she? She can hand off her child for someone else to raise while she is at work, but she is still destitute and unable to pay her bills since she is having to buy daycare. Welfare is so limited it is a joke. If she was to lose her job, her Welfare is sanctioned (btw mine was $240 per mo./ my rent $325), but that doesn’t matter because it is only available for 5 years max federally (my state 4 yrs) and it is paid back though moneys highjacked by a middle man over at child support enforcement anyway! The conservatives and their bogus “family values” need to get bent. They want to take away our rights to abortion, meanwhile when a woman does the “right” thing, there is no meaningful way out of poverty. Nottomention the brain is a sponge during early childhood; to say that early childhood education is important is a vast understatement. This Head Start debate on the surface is about how we treat the impoverished, but look deeper and see that it is all about how we educate the next generation. It is about the future of this country.
But, Chally, the mad are mad because they are immoral. This policy is clearly immoral, therefore it is insane, right?
But don’t you dare touch those sweet, sweet tax cuts worth $700 billion. That’s for important people to use to trickle!
Christ on a cracker! I clicked through to the animal cruelty article, and my computer is thankfully slow. I knew that putting the ax to Head Start was senseless and specifically anti-woman, but to read what those politicians said exemplifies the arrogance and entitlement of the religious right. I live in AZ, so I’m regularly shocked by what politicians are willing to say. But I am beyond shocked. I’m fucking horrified at what the R’s are doing, horrified at what they’re saying, and horrified at the relative lack of attention it’s getting. When I read those quotations, a part of me wilted.
“Enrolling a child in a Head Start program doubles his or her chances to be employed later in life” Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World…. Obviously this helps everyone in the long run by helping to break the cycle of poverty.
The resulting masses of poor people who have no hope of ever achieving upward mobility as the result of conservative cuts to social programs is a FEATURE, not a BUG, of the conservative agenda. Never ever forget that in their efforts to keep a large pool of American Underclass ultimately benefits them by driving down wages across the entire labor market as a whole. The whole idea behind these types of policies is to force people from formerly middle-class lifestyles to abject poverty, because they figure the more hungry and desperate, the more docile their labor force. The only way to beat them at their rigged game is not to play. And by that, I mean a Lysistrata-type full-on reproductive strike, where we all invest all our money in higher education and hoard our earnings in the form of savings and retirement accounts, instead of reproducing. This is literally our only option, because the conservatives have achieved their ultimate goal of seeing that only wealthy Americans can afford to reproduce.
Mezosub: The resulting masses of poor people who have no hope of ever achieving upward mobility as the result of conservative cuts to social programs is a FEATURE, not a BUG, of the conservative agenda. Never ever forget that in their efforts to keep a large pool of American Underclass ultimately benefits them by driving down wages across the entire labor market as a whole. The whole idea behind these types of policies is to force people from formerly middle-class lifestyles to abject poverty, because they figure the more hungry and desperate, the more docile their labor force. … When reading this comment, something clicked. Suddenly, the Republican agenda made sense. By slashing Head Start and eliminating a woman’s right to an abortion, they are breeding a new group of workers to replace undocumented persons, whom they are planning to deport. I think I’m going to throw up now.
By slashing Head Start and eliminating a woman’s right to an abortion, they are breeding a new group of workers to replace undocumented persons, whom they are planning to deport. They already tried that with slave labor in the prisons.
I’m sure you know the history but it bears repeating-there were severe restrictions on reading and writing for slaves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes So, yes, illiteracy is definitely a way to control and create a “lesser” class of people.