And I'm sick and tired of Ivy-League-blogger theorizing assholes and op-ed douchebag pundits who've never had a job that required any work different than a dorm room bull session trashing teachers.For a bunch of people whose only tangible achievements involved being a student, they sure seem awfully butt-hurt about the subject. What's the matter, Matt, did your high school English teacher not give you an A+ on a paper that showed your pure brilliance?
I'm also sick and tired of the liberal pants peeing over unions. When corporations or our government play hardball in a negotiation, either Wall Street cheers, or, in the case of the government, a Graham-McCain-Liberman memo is issued praising the dead bodies we left. But when a group of teachers has the chutzpah to get tough, well, then every liberal pundit starts actin like a freeper caricature of themselves and runs away crying and scared. In my profession, I see both sides of these negotiations and I have yet to understand why only one team is allowed to throw an elbow. Even Bears fans expect Aaron Rodgers to throw the ball and his linemen to block for him; they expect the Packers to try and stop their run game and sack their quarterback (such as he is). No one in sports has palpitations because the other team has the temerity to take the field. But, in labor negotiations, you can forget fair referees or good sportsmanship. The pro-management press just acts as shocked as a Victorian countess at someone wearing black tie before 6pm that some teachers (those base servants!) would take the field and try to move the ball.
But most of all, I'm tired of the "I've got mine" attitude. Which is mostly what this is all about.
Which is of course counter-productive. Ask any real estate agent (who for some reason lean (R)) what the single #1 factor in property values is: good schools. Funding schools is like paying yourself if you're fortunate enough to own a home in real, measurable equity, and even if you rent, it's worth the investment, of course, too.
I'm tired of teachers wanting to make a middle-class, head-of-household wage an excuse for aiming political fire at them so that the vampire-drain capitalist class can pay less taxes than they already do.
The best thing any Congress could do is simply passing a law paying every teacher in America 3x what they're making now and hiring 3x more*. It would pay itself back 100 fold.
All of these same worshippers of the free market seem unwilling to apply the simple supply and demand principle to teacher's salaries and pay them more. This isn't to say that there aren't already talented teachers: of course! but if being a teacher is as highly coveted a job as being a mere rearranger-of-rich-people's-money like me, we will be in a better country and a better planet.
Even if none of this were true, it would still be STUPID for any liberal to go along with criticisms of teachers because it is not driven by a group of good faith good government types, it is driven by a bunch of fundie assholes who want to destroy public education and take America back to the dark ages so their kids won't have to learn such outrages as set theory.
This is not to say that all teachers everywhere are perfect and that we should offer unqualified, unthinking support. It's just that for a bunch of people who are supposed to be so smart as to tell us about how to think about things, the liberal pundit class is getting shamed by a bunch of neoliberal rhetoric that has been discredited worse than Mickey Kaus's election loss.
So here's my challenge to this scum. Fire your agent or manager. Next time you want to write a book about how brilliant you are, or make the leap from The Atlantic to The Washington Post to Slate to wherever, just go ask the management what they want to pay you and immediately take it. I mean, you're writing about The Most Important Things Ever, right? What about the voters you need to inform? Are you going to deny them your wisdom about Grand Bargains and yucky lady parts over a few measly points on the back end?
/rant
* No, this is not hyperbole. This is me "doubling down" on this comment.