Tim Cawley, 'BBB' and other modern day Javerts... The 'Student Based Budgeting' scam in Chicago... This kind of 'choice' for poor people was old and cold when 'Les Miserables' was first published by Victor Hugo
It's June, and once again the Chicago Board of Education will be refusing to provide the public with its proposed budget in time for a complete examination, while CPS officials like "Chief Executive Officer" Barbara Byrd Bennett talk about how important their latest attack on the education of poor and working class kids -- "Students Based Budgeting" -- is. But can anyone reading this imagine what would happen if Byrd-Bennett's "Chief Administrative Officer" Tim Cawley went to his neighbors along Chicago's North Shore and explained that because of his new budgeting system the public schools where their wealthy children went could have either a nurse or a librarian -- BUT NOT BOTH!
Capital in the 19th Century (above) and Capital in the 21st Century always found apologists who would spin cynical narratives about "choice" to the poor. Above, Les Miserables, in a 21st Century production, has echoes today from long ago.Or Barbara Byrd Bennett explaining to her neighbors in that gated community where she actually lives in Solon Ohio that "austerity" was forcing them to close a fifth of their schools and jam the remaining children into the remaining buildings?
Actually, the ruling class, viewed as a consistent whole over decades, has been trying to get away with these cynical versions of "choice" for more than a century. Anyone who has seen any of the versions of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" knows how this stuff works -- and who gets lied to and short changed. And little has really changed in the way the plutocratic plunderers try to foist their phony preachings on the public.
