{"id":11989,"date":"2014-01-07T02:47:01","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T10:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=11989"},"modified":"2014-01-07T02:47:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T10:47:01","slug":"republicans-want-to-make-america-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/07\/republicans-want-to-make-america-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Want to Make America Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Republicans have different reasons for their wars.  Their Ear on Women, for example, is to subjugate them at home.  Their War on the Environment is to increase profits for criminal corporations.  Their War on Voting is to steal elections that they cannot win in a fair contest.  Their Wars on Minorities and LGBT people are to tap the hatred of their rabid base and energize them to activism.  Now, their War on Education is to make America stupid.  Why?<\/font><\/p>\n

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\"0107Education\"Among the many visionary goals of our nation\u2019s right wing\u2014impoverish older people, starve the poor, deny climate change, outlaw abortion and contraception, eliminate healthcare for millions\u2014few are more foundational than  defunding education in general and higher education in particular.<\/a> Public colleges and universities nationwide have seen significant funding cuts over the past five years, and while the recession is usually blamed, the Right keeps the fiscal screws tight by cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Here in Michigan, in Republican Gov. Rick Snyder\u2019s first budget, there was a 15 percent cut in state aid to universities and a $1.8 billion tax cut for businesses<\/strong>. This equals a win-win for the Right: Keep the fat cats in your corner, and constrain the opportunity for young people to learn a host of things that might, well, make them interrogate right-wing policies. The Pew Research Center and others have found that lower income and less-educated whites are <\/strong>becoming more likely to vote Republican than Democrat<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> with 54 percent of those without a college degree identifying as Republican in 2012; only 37 percent identified as Democratic, so the gap is, well, quite wide. <\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the ideological bonus: Public universities, clobbered by defunding,  raise tuition<\/a>. Then conservative pundits like S.E. Cupp can scream about the outrageous unaffordability (and elitism, of course) of a college degree and claim that it\u2019s money down a rat hole. As she put it, colleges are \u201cnot meeting the demand of manufacturers and employers who want people who can\u2019t just, you know, read Freud and Nietzsche \u2026 but who can actually read a business plan.\u201d She\u2019s hardly alone\u2014 stories asking \u201cIs College Worth It?\u201d are everywhere now. Few put two and two together: that the government cuts have to be made up somehow\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Most people are shocked, when I tell them, I do not have a four year degree, just an AA.  I come across ads better educated, because I received a better and more rounded high school education in 1960s than many degrees individuals have today.  In those days the focus was on learning how to think, not what to think, and it instilled in me a thirst for knowledge that still demands I keep learning learning, as I have since my formal education ended.<\/font><\/p>\n

Unless we produce a generation of Americans smart enough to find new innovations to succeed in a competitive world economy, America will become a third world, totalitarian nation under rigid Republican rule.  However, we have teachers that are good enough and students capable of learning.  The only thing preventing us from giving those students what they need to lead the world into a better future for all is the Republican Party.  Removing them from power is a national imperative.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Republicans have different reasons for their wars.  Their Ear on Women, for example, is to subjugate them at home.  Their War on the Environment is to increase profits for criminal corporations.  Their War on Voting is to steal elections that they cannot win in a fair contest.  Their Wars on Minorities and LGBT people are […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}