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Idiots in charge


Raleigh News & Observer: Pat McCrory, newly elected governor of North Carolina, dedicated corporate servant

You would think, wouldn’t you, that if an anti-education red state governor wanted to say something stupid like the quote below about North Carolina’s university system, he’d first have one of his aides do a little fact-checking. Here’s the quote as given in the Raleigh News & Observer:

“If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job…. Right now I’m looking for engineers, I’m looking for technicians, I’m looking for mechanics.”

You’d think that North Carolina’s university system is turning out a bunch of English majors and gender studies majors. Hardly, as the chart below shows. All the same, this false charge will be used to further degrade and corporatize North Carolina’s once strong education system. And by the way, I’d bet a nickel that that talking point about gender studies was written by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) the out-of-state right-wing outfit which actually has written most of the legislation that these corporate-owned politicians are enacting — not just in North Carolina, but all over the country.

But McCrory doesn’t care about facts. He just believes in his gut that “education” is just trade school that ought to serve corporations, and he does not approve of liberal arts educations. It’s the same medieval mindset that caused the Republican Party of Texas to oppose the teaching of “higher order thinking skills.” Undermines parental authority, you know. These people don’t want us to think for ourselves. They want us dumb, so we’ll believe what we hear on TV, and so we’ll keep electing people like them.

Right-wingers now control the legislature and the governor’s office in North Carolina. Their agenda: to put private corporate profit above everything else; to decimate the state’s educational system, including letting for-profit outfits encroach on the public schools; to frack the state; to roll back clean energy initiatives; to shift the tax burden away from corporations and the rich onto the backs of working people; to make it harder for people they don’t like to vote.

North Carolina is screwed. The know-nothing white rural folk who voted in these clowns will be the people most hurt by what Raleigh is getting ready to do. But they won’t know what hit them, because they’re all sitting in front of the television watching Fox News.

Here’s the kind of graduates we actually have in North Carolina. Source: ƒ„Statistical Abstract of Higher Education in North Carolina, 2011-2012.


Postscript: And here’s the kind of guy this legislature has put in charge of ethics. The Senate chair of the Legislative Ethics Committee paid off his personal credit cards with campaign donations. This is the kind of people who want to educate us, to frack us, to tax us, while distracting us with blather about god and guns and jobs.

Update: Here’s an editorial in the Raleigh News & Observer on McCrory’s stupidity.

Update 2: An essay by the president of Macalester College.

3 Comments

  1. brother doc wrote:

    I am upset, as you are, that the next 2 years, really the next decade, will doom NC’s once-admired educational system. More corporate subsidies, more private, for profit prisons, more charter schools, etc. All in line with ALEC and the insidious Art Pope, now the governor’s go-to guy on budgets. I am a product of two NC schools, a private college and a UNC school. I dread what the next generation of bright Carolinians will have to do to make the good life work for them.
    Have not looked at the blog for a while, got a new laptop and in the process lost my old bookmarks but glad I found you again.

    Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 6:26 pm | Permalink
  2. admin wrote:

    Welcome back, Brother Doc!

    Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 6:32 pm | Permalink
  3. Uptown Jimmy wrote:

    Down here in GA (shudder) everyone admires NC for her beauty and civilized ways.

    I hardly ever mention her long tradition of Jesse Helms.

    If NC allows the loons and nutters to dismantle her vaunted educational system just as the state starts to turn a light shade of blue, well, I don’t know what to say.

    Friday, February 1, 2013 at 7:26 am | Permalink

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