The government that jails the innocent, tortures the meek and sells your children does NOT care about your frackin otters! The fascistic reality behind modern corporations, and a brief review of tenure for teachers.
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| Hi, everybody. It's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. These are a few quick news items with tasty philosophical angles, which I hope you will find helpful. | |
| First, I have had a deluge of requests to talk about the BP spill or eruption of oil in the Gulf, and I don't really know what to say that I haven't said before, so I'll keep it very concise. | |
| A corporation is a mutant legal shield that is created by the state to protect corporate executives from liability for their actions. | |
| It is vile. | |
| It is disgusting. It is a fascistic state creation. | |
| It has nothing to do with the free market whatsoever in any way, shape, or form. | |
| Corporations are invented for two reasons. | |
| It's to levy further taxes on the workers by having a corporate tax which further reduces their wages. | |
| And second, it is the way that the government pays off the rich for supporting the government. | |
| It is a way to give them the legal shield for their operations. | |
| If you're a BP executive and they say, do you want to spend another half million dollars to sort out this blowout protection thing? | |
| It's like, what do they care? | |
| Fundamentally, you can't go after them personally because they're shielded by this corporation. | |
| And so, of course, they're going to make decisions that are immediate to their own self-interest. | |
| So, corporations are created to exactly excuse just this kind of issue. | |
| The Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska a number of years ago, the corporation ended up being liable for about 500 million out of the original 2.5 billion of clean-up and things. | |
| None of the executives lost their homes, none of the executives lost their savings, none of the executives lost their liberty, because there's this thing called the corporation. | |
| Which shields people from liability. | |
| You get to keep all the profits, you see, but you don't get to assume the legal risk as an individual, which is a pretty sweet treat. | |
| If you're a sociopath, it is a pretty disgusting thing if you're a fan of the free market. | |
| So, of course, there's a cap of $75 million on the liability that BP is going to have to pay, and none of the BP executives or any of the other executives from Halliburton or any of the other companies that are involved in this are going to face any personal consequences whatsoever And it's all complete nonsense. | |
| It's like Toyota getting hit with a $16 million fine. | |
| Well, Toyota's not going to pay it. | |
| The customers are going to pay it through increases in Toyota's cost. | |
| So if you say, Toyota's customers pay, that's the accurate news which you'll never see. | |
| And so this is all nonsense. | |
| And the thing I want to mention about... | |
| Oh, man. When you get this kind of clarity through philosophy... | |
| The world just seems like an entire game of psychedelic twisters, the mental contortionists who could give the Cirque du Soleil dancers a run for their money or a twist for their pretzel, turn themselves into knots to avoid the basic realities of what is going on. | |
| Let's just take the U.S. government. | |
| It doesn't really matter which government you point at, but let's tickle the leg of Uncle Sam for a moment. | |
| The US government, just through its destructive foreign policies alone, has been responsible for the deaths of about 30 million people around the world. | |
| The US government regularly incarcerates significant percentages of its own population for non-violent, quote, crimes, such as having the wrong piece of vegetation in their pocket. | |
| The US government approves torture. | |
| The US government sends people overseas to be tortured. | |
| The US government starts wars. | |
| That kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis for no reason whatsoever. | |
| Well, I guess... And the U.S. government, of course, props up oil dictatorships around the world. | |
| If you really want to get free of dependency on oil, stop propping up the oil dictators, and that would be a good start. | |
| But that, of course, is never going to happen. | |
| This... This is what's so mad about the human species at the moment. | |
| And, I mean, you have to look at it as funny, or, I don't know, you take a swan die. | |
| The U.S. government that destroys the minds of poor children in inner-city public schools, that kills foreign farmers slowly by dumping crops in their countries, and then complains that they want to come into the United States. | |
| The U.S. government that incarcerates its own citizens, that has destroyed habeas corpus, that has upheld the Patriot Act. | |
| And this is Obama. This is the same dude that has upheld the principles of torture. | |
| That blames low-ranking local sociopaths for the decisions of high-ranking sociopaths in the military-industrial complex through Abu Ghraib. | |
| This same genocidal, murderous, violent, sociopathic institution is clamored at by all the Greenpeace-type folks, all the tree-huggers in the world, because they somehow imagine that this government, which has slaughtered 30 million people, is going to give a shit about some sea otters. | |
| Are you kidding me, people? | |
| It doesn't care about your fish! | |
| If it doesn't care about your children, and it doesn't care about the lives of Iraqis, and it doesn't care about the people getting gang-banged in prison, it's not going to care about your freaking shrimp! | |
| Can we at least understand that? | |
| This is not a place you go to for peaceful, permanent, long-term solutions. | |
| Nobody in the government is going to lose their job because they failed... | |
| To provide correct oversight to this. | |
| Just as nobody at the SEC lost their job because Bernie Madoff pillaged all the savings of the old, and the rich, and sometimes not so rich, the government instead, the people in the government who are responsible for the oversight of these oil rigs, are going to get more money and more power because it's a FUMU. Fudge up, move up. Fuck up, get more funding. | |
| That is the reality of the government. | |
| It's the entire reverse of any sane and rational perspective that you would have about how to solve problems. | |
| So please, please, please try to understand that the government doesn't care about the marshlands. | |
| And we know that because it doesn't care about the people it tortures and kills overseas. | |
| It doesn't care about the people it tortures and gets raped by stuffing them into human cages in the country. | |
| It doesn't care about the children that it sold to China and other foreigners for the future. | |
| It doesn't care about you and it doesn't care about your fish or Or your sea turtles, or your squid, or your octopus. | |
| It doesn't care. | |
| This is not where we go for rational, intelligent, sane solutions. | |
| It is where you go when you want to delude yourself that you're getting something done, when you want to grab the gun in the room and point it at the people that you think Are doing wrong. | |
| The government has created the corporation. | |
| It has created the legal liability, the legal inviolability to liability that is the corporation. | |
| And I say, hey, you know, if that's the way we're going to play it as a society, if you can create a fictional entity, an imaginary friend that can take all the legal hits for you, no problem. | |
| I would suggest that everything that is good that comes out of my show accrues to me. | |
| Anything that is negative should go to this guy. | |
| This action figure is my new corporation, and if I go out and, I don't know, drive my car over a bunch of cats and then get arrested, this guy goes to jail, goes to prison, and I am perfectly free, and then I can just go make a new one because I have a plastic vat of me in the back. | |
| And thank you for the listener who sent this in. | |
| It's a little trippy, but I appreciate the sentiment. | |
| So corporations are just complete madness, and they would never exist in a free market. | |
| It's a payoff. | |
| It's a payoff to the rich for accepting the state, to give them immunity for these kinds of actions. | |
| So please, if you care about the environment, stop running to the state. | |
| It's complete madness. | |
| Anyway, let's move on. | |
| So another thing that's occurring at the moment is teachers are facing a huge number of, well, there's massively greater numbers of teachers wanting to get jobs than are available, and the profession is going through some challenges, and of course the teachers' union is stepping up in a completely unshocking way to defend things like tenure and seniority and so on. | |
| And I think that's fair. | |
| I really do. I think that if you feel that, you know, the way it works with teachers, particularly in New York State, but other places too, is you get hired, and if after three years of, you know, positive reviews and everybody, except for two guys who spontaneously combust, get positive reviews, then you have your job forever, and you can never be fired. | |
| Well, I think that's fine. I think that the way it works logically, the way it works philosophically, is that you should be forever bound in all your contracts by your work contract, right? | |
| So, you should always be bound by the least free contract that you have. | |
| So, if, for instance, you're a teacher and you think it's really great and fair that after a couple of years of positive reviews you can never, ever be fired, no problem. | |
| I think that then you should sign a prenuptial agreement that says that if you don't, I think that's great. | |
| And you can do that for other things as well. | |
| So, for instance, in your cell phone, right? | |
| You need to have a cell phone from 1980 that's about the size of a small surfboard and gets reception only if you're on top of Mount Everest, pointed directly at the satellite. | |
| You can never upgrade your phone. | |
| Because that would be to break your existing contract. | |
| That should be how it works for everything. | |
| You can never, ever move out of your house. | |
| You can never, ever sell your car if you've owned it for three years. | |
| Your contracts, after three years, for everything, become completely permanent and irrevocable, and I think that's perfectly fine. | |
| If you want to do that for your work, then you have to do that for everywhere, because, you know, we want to be consistent in what we call virtue and good, honest, plain dealing. | |
| As far as seniority goes, we're saying that older is better. | |
| The longer you have something, the better. | |
| Fantastic. Then teachers should not be allowed to upgrade their technology. | |
| So they can work their magic technologically. | |
| They can do their social networking. | |
| Using a TRS-80 and a 300-watt modem connected to Teledon. | |
| You can't get access to the internet because that's kind of new. | |
| And according to the teacher's contract, the older something is, the better it is. | |
| So you have to get rid of all your new technology anytime you want to buy something. | |
| And you can only buy the oldest technology that is still available, not even that's made. | |
| And I think that's a consistent and positive and right way to approach it. | |
| And the last thing that I'll mention is... | |
| This is from an article I'll put the link below. | |
| In some states, teachers have been criticized for opposing the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. | |
| Ms. Weingarten says she was receptive to that, but she added that many other factors should be used, including classroom observations, portfolio reviews, self-evaluations, appraisal of lesson plans, as well as students' written work, projects, and presentations. | |
| Can anyone guess or see the one thing that is kind of missing from how we should evaluate teachers? | |
| Anybody? Bueller? | |
| Anybody? Well, the one thing, of course, that's missing is anything the students might perceive or might feel as far as the quality of their education goes. | |
| You know what's actually missing from everything that everyone talks about how to evaluate teachers in schools is the actual experience of the children who are If memory serves me right, the actual goddamn customers of the system. | |
| Oh, but we can't hear from the children! | |
| I mean, my God, how crazy would that be? | |
| To have an educational system designed for children that children actually had any feedback in. | |
| Oh, my heavens! Unthinkable! | |
| So I think that's true. | |
| That's completely mad. | |
| But, of course, the stuff that's going on as far as student evaluations go, it's complete garbage. | |
| It's complete nonsense. If you are a teacher and your pay or your tenure there is dependent upon how well Students do in particular tests, you'll just teach the test, which gives the students, it turns them into parrot robots, so they just spew everything back up. | |
| You have to do multiple choice, which means no thinking but random guesswork or just checking stuff off, which is never, ever how life works. | |
| When was the last time at work somebody handed you a decision that was multiple choice? | |
| You just had to tick one off and hand it back. | |
| I don't think that ever happens. | |
| So, multiple choice questions are complete bullshit. | |
| They're simply designed for two things. | |
| One, it allows the teacher to teach the test, thus depriving the students of learning anything about thinking, reasoning, or communicating, or writing, heaven's sakes. | |
| And number two, it allows teachers to easily cheat on the test by simply changing the answers so that they get the numbers they want, so they get the funding, and they get the raises. | |
| And you can look up, there's lots of research on the web, about the degree of fudging, lying, cheating that goes on in these multiple choice tests whenever government schools are involved. | |
| So, I think that's all very funny. | |
| The last thing to tie this sort of all together is, you know, the corporations and the executives and all of these people in the economy that the government claims so much about. | |
| It's all kind of funny when you think about it that all of the I mean, the governments in all countries pretty much raise children. | |
| You're in state schools for six or more hours, six or seven hours a day. | |
| The time before is getting ready to go to the school, so you're not exactly interacting with your parents. | |
| They're just trying to dress you and get you out the door. | |
| And then you may stay at a daycare, which is either government-run or government-approved, for a couple of hours after school until your parents come to pick you up. | |
| And then, you see, you go home and you do your government homework. | |
| A neighbor next door, a 10-year-old kid, was chatting with me yesterday. | |
| You get two hours of homework to do. | |
| Of course, and homework is completely irrelevant. | |
| To learning. It has nothing. | |
| It's just busy work in a way of further intruding upon family time from the government. | |
| Government loves to intrude and rip apart family time to make sure that the allegiances of the children remain with the government. | |
| So, the government is pretty much raising your children. | |
| You get weekends, right? | |
| You're like some bad divorced parent. | |
| You get your kids on weekends, assuming they don't have any school projects or tests to study for for Monday. | |
| But the government gets your children for 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day. | |
| So, the government is raising your children. | |
| So, if the government is complaining about the actions of its citizens, well, it's like a parent complaining about the actions. | |
| It's like, you're the parent! The government is the parent! | |
| If there are a bunch of irresponsible business executives out there, well, the government either taught them directly or gave licenses and approval to all the schools that did teach them if they were semi-private. | |
| There's no such thing as a private school anymore because they all have to conform to these terrible state standards, and they all have to teach children stuff which is the exact opposite of thinking, in mindless regurgitation and stultification through boredom. | |
| So it's always funny to me when the government rails against a group of private citizens. | |
| It's like, you trained them! | |
| You trained us! You were the ones who told us exactly how we should live. | |
| You had us for 12 years, for 6 to 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day. | |
| So if we've turned out bad, how can you blame us? |