welcome back to the big picture i'm sam stocks in for tom hartman and coming up in this half hour we've seen students across the country occupying wall street but i'll tell you how wall street is planning to occupy schools in the future investigative reporter elise thawing joins me to break down the corporate takeover of our schools and finally we might think we've closed the door on slavery in america but it's not until we take tom explains why we've simply relocated it. it's been a rough year for teachers thanks to the bush recession that's such a critical revenue out of state budgets around the country republican governors have declared teachers unions to be public enemy number one pointing out supposedly

to generous salaries and benefit plans of around sixty thousand bucks republican governors argue that teachers' unions are the reason why states are going broke not wall street sucking seven trillion out of the middle class and not tax rates that are at the lowest level in fifty years but it's public school teachers who are responsible for soaring budget deficits. new jersey governor chris christie has reveled in his assault against teachers' unions so too is governor jon case that he declared that he wanted to quote break the back of teachers' unions and then passed s.b. five which to exactly bad by restricting public employees like teachers their right to collectively bargain by the way s b five was just repealed by ohio voters last tuesday and of course there's governor scott walker who also went after teachers' unions cutting their benefits and restricting their rights to collectively bargain as well and now walker could soon lose his job but this recent isolde on teachers is just one piece of

a massive campaign underway right now to completely transform how our nation educate educate our kids states around the country aren't just busting up teachers' unions they're busting up the public education school system itself the playing a simple take the responsibility to educate the next generation of engineers scientists and doctors from the hands of government in spirit occasions system and handed over to you guessed it wall street and its for profit education system to explain how exactly this is happening investigative reporter and contributor to the nation magazine leaf joins me now live welcome to the show hey sam nice to see you and thank. nation basket on for me the opportunity to write this piece i think should invite me onto the show yeah and it was a just a great piece you wrote and that's that's what i want to talk about here you talk about it's not just charter schools but it's these online charter schools that seem

to be the the biggest threat to our public education system now you want to rip on the. sure you know we've seen in the past year there's been an education revolution we've seen the big fights in wisconsin and ohio but my piece does is look at the big money specifically the law street money that undergirds all the political change we've seen and there's so on public teacher unions and teachers themselves there's big money in this because not only are they trying to take out the teachers because they support democrats but they're taking out teachers because they want to replace them with computers and it and what my piece does it goes through the different wall street actors who've worked hand in glove with the conservative movement and with some various education reform philanthropies to uncracked what some have called a five hundred billion to one trillion dollars dollar under-capitalized market meaning that they want to turn education k. twelve education into what happened to health care and ninety's they basically want

to privatized it largely with these technology solutions that replace teachers and i want to do these these doctors you talk about in just a second but when i was reading your article i was reminded of milton friedman the famed neo liberal economists who pretty much let the saint of the free marketeers all around and talks about how it requires a crisis either manufactured or are made up to make the real reforms make the real great changes you want to make and i feel like with state budgets in crisis right now these actors you speak of are exploiting this crisis to push this agenda forward you see that that's a way to yet one of these conferences with but three hundred state lawmakers school superintendents and then dozens of education tech lobbyist they had one seminar called never let a good financial crisis go to waste and i think you bring up a perfect comparison because

a lot of the conservative black groups that are now coordinating with education ten lobbyist. they've created little many web sites in places like wisconsin florida ohio and others to basically engineer a budget crisis that's completely blamed on teachers' unions and they say and you can look through their public statements and some of these documents i've accumulated they're making the argument that if you teaches a student through an online computer school. that saves about two thousand dollars per student and so that's good for the state but they don't really explain how the educational quality suffers and that most of that money goes to firms like a twelve but that with a very poor track record but with lots of big investors hoping to make money off their expansion this year we'll have there have there been any studies are on what are the effects of online education i mean is it good is a bad one of the studies that. there's

a range of strips of studies and i think in some cases online learning makes sense for some extreme situations where you have a very rural school or a school island and it doesn't have access to certain. it resources and in some cases you have a high school students who want to jump into college level courses and this provides a great opportunity but overall the studies basically show that most. online k. through twelve programs do very poorly i think it averaged across the board has about thirty percent of them make the annual performance tests on. math and reading and some of them are just an abysmal one of the major online tech companies in ohio. less than forty percent of their students graduate i understand some months according to one audit of several thousand students only seven actually logged in to take their classes so there's a lot of problems that basically were using students as a guinea pig and

a huge national experiment as they implemented these laws across the country so usually with these kind of right wing movements and these takeovers you can you can count on two things being behind them one the american legislative exchange council the kind of shadowy right wing group that rights legislation and hands it over to say lawmakers and passing their states and money from the koch brothers. are those two things that kind of behind the curtain here to. well i hate to be cliche but it is and it done very successfully you know nick you ravin up a top lobbyist or executive opera one of these online tech schools she actually chairs the education subcommittee at alec and wrote a bill to expand virtual schools that bill has been distributed all across the country it's pending in several legislatures in tennessee a state lawmaker who introduced the bill didn't even bother to change the name of

the legislation or most of the text it's basically a carbon copy of what alec written by an education check lobbyist gave him and then just like the other laws that are pushed by alec and industry money came flowing into his campaign coffers and before you know it now tennessee is on the largest online learning programs in the country in just the thirty seconds we have left you identify jeb bush as the man behind the virtual curtain here real quick what is his role in all this. he's created several nonprofit groups in florida he pioneered some of the pressure groups but he's taken it to another level he's campaigned all across the country he scored needed but big education reform charities along with a big education for profit corporations combined them and created a powerful lobbying force and notably some of his top aides are cashing in as a lobbyist as well and i think i'm writing a time here but sam thank you so much for covering this issue inviting me today

great reporting some troubling stuff it's good that you're out there reporting on and we keep up the good work thanks for going up next thanks. this idea of a free public education system because all the way back to our nation's founding in fact it was one of the principal causes that thomas jefferson advocated for so much so that he insisted that after he died his tombstone would recognize him as the man who wrote the declaration of independence and founded the university of virginia not that he was the third president of the united states that's right he wanted to be remembered for his contributions to education not politics and free public education is that existed in america ever since. but now it's under attack tom broke down this is may just as republican governors like chris christie scott walker are getting it take a look. raise your hand if you're in violation of your state's constitution that's right the new jersey supreme court ruled yesterday the republican governor chris christie's enormous cuts to education cuts mostly targeting schools and low income

districts are in violation of the state's constitution which requires the state to provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the state between the ages of five and eighteen years key words right there free public education for some reason chris christie as well as a slew of other republicans around the country think they can get around that requirement of free and education by instead offering a free for profit private education or a free religious private education private education that's been proven over and over again to not yield any better results for students than public education but comes with a much higher price because of the nice fat profit margin for education company's c.e.o. the way this all works is the state londres the education money to big corporations

in the state to get around the constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state and then parents end up with poachers for a few thousand dollars each that they can use to send their kids to either for profit schools run by cronies of the governor or religious schools associated with churches that help the governor get and stay elected everybody wins except the kids and the taxpayers kids get an education is no better than public schools and in some cases far worse for example do you want your taxpayers being used to teach children the science is evil in the world is only six thousand years old but great generation of future engineers right but the gov and the republicans. a lot a lot for mega churches fundamentalist religion groups and the for profit school honors and c.e.o.'s that they play golf with and get their campaign contributions from here's how the scam works in jersey republican governor chris christie cut eight hundred twenty million dollars out of his education budget last year then created an eight hundred twenty five million dollars school voucher program this

year and wisconsin governor scott walker is slash the nine hundred million dollars out of his education budget and adding seven hundred fifty million dollars to a school voucher program so forcing us to use our tax dollars to undermine our very own public education systems what's worse some of the private schools that benefit from these vouchers are religious schools so not only are we committing tax dollars toward ruining public education we're also committing tax dollars to tearing down that wall of separation between church and state that thomas jefferson so eloquent wrote about so we have federal education dollars going to c.e.o.'s who only care about profits and federal education dollars going to churches that only care about getting the religious message across and these churches like the corporations have a whole new revenue stream to support their evangelism and a whole crop of young new converts your nickel we as

a nation decided a long time ago to make education a part of the commons something that belongs to all of us all of us citizens and not for corporations to water down and sell back to us at a profit. for example this was the dream of thomas jefferson who founded the university of virginia as a beacon of public education a school that would serve both aristocrats and paupers the university of virginia was one of jefferson's premier accomplishments in a life of endless accompt accomplishments in fact he widening graves on his tombstone not that he was the third present the united states will find that there on his tombstone but that the he was the founder of the university of virginia that's how much he cared about it and seven hundred eighty six jefferson wrote about a system of public education he wrote i think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people no other sure

foundation can be devised for the preservation and freedom of apparatus of stablish and improve the law for educating the common people let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils of tyranny and oppression and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than a thousandth part of what will be paid to kings priests and nobles who will rise up and among us if we leave the people in ignorance in large part because of jefferson's fight every state in the union today has a provision in their constitution to provide free public education to all of its citizens just the way our founding fathers vision. and the system lasted for years and years until one thousand nine hundred one when ronald reagan started the war of public education he immediately slashed the federal education budget in half he put bill bennett in charge of the federal the education department

a guy who had campaign eliminating their partner until for profit business it's up and pick up the slack and now reagan worshippers like chris christie and scott walker by themselves in positions of power around the country and they want to further expand private education until it completely replaces public education but we can't let them do it just like the new jersey supreme court stood up yesterday for the rights of students to have access to free public education we need to stand up and tell our lawmakers that we're tired of having our education of our kids outsourced to greedy c.e.o.'s are being forced to pay for other people's kids to go to church schools as jefferson warned the taxes we all pay to educate americans are far less than the consequences of not educating them like the cost of tyrants rising to power in an ignorant america. let's kick the profiteers. out of our schools. after the president obama is in asia there is pushing for more

so-called free trade deals. thanks to free trade. drives the world but the. politicians who makes decisions. who can you trust no one. will machinery see where we had a state. capitalism is called sac when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

president obama is in asia tonight pushing for more so-called free trade deals last

week while in hawaii for the asia pacific cooperation summit the president announced that broad outlines had been agreed to for new transpacific partnership trade pact that means more cheap goods for america built in asia and more cheap labor in asia for american companies to pistone and boy do they love cheap labor in fact our nation has a long love affair with cheap labor from the dark days of slavery to the horrors of industrialization in sweatshops to the exploitation now of immigrant workers not to mention the destruction of labor unions in general that have turned our jobs that used to garner a middle class income and the jobs that keep people barely afloat relegating them to the working poor and today thanks to so-called free trade we can pick up right back where we left off employing people for close to nothing in far off places and the added benefit we don't even have to look these new slaves in the eyes of the

more tom weighed in on this consequence of so-called free trade and it's the subject of tonight's deleted. one hundred years ago this year a fire broke out of the triangle shirtwaist factory in downtown manhattan fire killed one hundred forty six employees the factory mostly women who were burned alive or jumped out the windows because their exit doors on the on their floors the eighth ninth and tenth floors were locked so the women couldn't take breaks without management's permission it was the deadliest event in new york city at the time the market stood for ninety years until the attacks of nine eleven and it goes down as the fourth deadliest industrial incident in u.s. history what the fire highlighted was just how dangerous workplaces in america are when they lack safety regulations. with all regulations corporations can make enormous profits by paying workers very little in cutting corners when it comes to things like safety and for most of american history up until the shirtwaist factory

fire that's just what corporations did operating mostly free from government interference and regulation. but the fire changed everything it shocked america the funeral for the dead workers was viewed by nearly a half million people who were outraged at factory owners all across america who put profits out of the lives of their workers from that point on our nation pressured politicians to pass regulations to make sure nothing like this ever happened again it led to the creation of the international ladies garment workers union which by the late seventy's one nine hundred seventy s. was on the ropes when outsourcing started to pick up steam to fight back that union produced a series of ads about how their wages were going to feed the kids and run the house here's one from one nine hundred seventy eight. there used to be more of us in the international ladies garment workers union a lot of our jobs have disappeared a lot of the clothes americans are buying for women and kids are imports are being

made in foreign places when the works down here we can support our families and pay or taxes and buy the things other americans made that's what it means when labels as union. know you a. process. and. the law. from the one nine hundred twenty s. until the reagan presidency that union grew and lobbied hard in state capitals and here in washington d.c. and lawmakers list passing

a bunch of new workplace safety measures in the years after the incident and today factories have to abide by strict fire codes employee safety standards. although today republicans are trying to do away with many of those restrictions cutting for example ninety nine million dollars out of the occupational and safety health administration it will lead to eight thousand fewer safety inspections every year republicans are also introducing legislation that requires all government regulations to expire every two years that way they can use a filibuster when it comes time to extend regulations and kill them off for good they've already killed off the international lady garment workers union we no longer make clothing in the united states in the meantime corporate c.e.o.'s have found a new way to increase profits in an unregulated work environment enter free trade thanks to free trade c.e.o.'s can now just look overseas to set up new factories in

places where there are fewer of those as the regulations in other words they just ship they're trying all shirtwaist factory fire traps elsewhere out of sight and out of the mind of the american people for example in two thousand and one president george w. bush signed into law the jordanian free trade agreement opening the door to set up shop in jordan and import products in the united states without any tariffs no taxes as if they were produced right here in the united states one business taking advantage of this new free trade agreement was a garment company named classic that specializes in making clothes mostly for wal-mart but also lanes and kohl's and a gap in other products and what goes on behind closed doors at the classic factory will shock you a new report by the institute for global labor and human rights details rampant human rights abuses at the classic factory in georgia the report is titled sexual predators and serial rapists run wild at wal-mart supplier in georgia and you can

probably take a guess what the report is talking about from its title. this factory is filled mostly with women of mostly sri lankan origin because the company doesn't want to pay jordanians who would likely ask for higher wages and safer working conditions and these sri lankan women have to work thirteen hours a day seven days a week for sixty one cents an hour their passports are taken away and they're forced to live in cramped dorm rooms that don't have water and they are infested with bed books but that's not even the worst of it they are also routinely subject to sexual violence they were rounded up on a weekly basis and forced to have sex with managers of the factory in a nearby hotel if they refuse then they're beaten and raped and deported back to sri lanka where they become outcasts in a culture that values virginity in order to be eligible for marriage on a daily basis women are selected by the male managers for rape within the factory those who become pregnant are forced deported back to sri lanka usually after being

violently feat and their lives are literally destroyed in every sense of the word. take a look at this interview with one of the female workers at the classic factory. i'm going to meet on the way and he. even. got. the angle. you know. if you're not. even one of them i don't have as many. of them in the bed because they don't really nothing that i do that my comment about not only has the minister of labor and jordan being made aware of these abuses but so too has wal-mart and the other companies that buy from plastic and yet no one has done anything to stop the regular sexual assaults that's because the jordanians are afraid if they speak out then classical shut down the factory costing jordan millions in economic

activity as the factory moves to some other country that allows raping employees at this moment about half the countries in the world fall into that category you see the regular rape of these women actually helps improve profits because the women know that if they complain about working wages working hours or wages they themselves will be the next one raped this is the ugly truth about free trade that people like thomas friedman and other globalists don't want you to know. not only has a promoted corporate human rights abuse as we've seen in jordan and in bangladesh and in dozens of other low wage labor hotspots around the world it's made american small businesses unable to complete to compete in a global market how can small american base businesses compete against transnational corporations but he was read to maximize profits that includes a company like keynes that made over a billion dollars last year wal-mart that made more than fourteen billion dollars last year thanks in large part to buying cheap products from factories like that

classic factory in jordan that uses rape to keep its employees in line. free trade has created a race to the bottom around the world for the most in demand labor force is the least protected the conditions in factories across america have dramatically improved in the hundred years since the triangle shirtwaist factory went up in flames we shouldn't sleep any easier at night just because employee abuse is out of sight and out of mind and exists all around the world in places like jordan and bangladesh or corporate power has overtaken sovereign governments and the power of the protections offered average workers as long as so-called american corporations like walmart are dealing in abusive labor practices around the world then so too is america and the only way to put an end to that abuse. it's for us to put an end to this so-called free trade. and that's the big picture for more information on the stories we covered visit our website tom hartman dot com priest me chad oregon our

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