Free their minds and their asses would follow
There’s general alarm about Net Neutrality going away.
I’ve been saying for ten years that our Owners would not allow the internet to go on in its free form. The surprise is that Google is the lead dog.
It’s rather like education itself, which was suddenly made plentiful and cheap post 1945, as a kind of Thank You card to the Citizen Soldier, and looking forward to decades in the US when skilled labor would otherwise be in short supply.
But by 1974 our Owners had realized that an educated working class is a pain in the ass. And the dawning Globalization would mean they didn’t need one.
The defamation and starvation of the public schools began, quite abruptly. Direct federal aid to colleges was frozen in the 80s and has never been thawed.
The Pesident of St John’s College in Annapolis, Christopher Nelson, spoke in public for five minutes about the Fed freeze at a fancy fundraiser in New York three years ago, in response to my question re same (itself a response to being told the news by a man who served on the SJC Board of Governors for 20 or 30 years).
Mr Nelson explained that, indeed, the face dollar amount of direct Fed aid was frozen, during the Reagantime, and now, degraded by inflation, gets spread across millions of more students.
Thus the Buying Power Per Student that SJC receives in Fed aid is a pittance of what it was when I was a student in the early 80s — a big part of the reason why tuition skyrocketed not long after we left. And the story, of course, is the same all over.
Put this together with the so-called pension reform of … 1987, if memory serves. (Defined Benefit plans out, Defined Contribution plans in. The 401k Casino.)
What could be clearer? Fordism died under the Reaganauts. Maybe “The Fourth World” is the best name for where most Americans are headed.
