moore and vouchers: everything connects

so i saw fahrenheit 9/11 last thursday,
and i have nothing to add to the collective wisdom about this movie, except something an intern buddy said about it afterwards: he knows certain families of people in the military to whom he'd say, "please do not go see this movie." i agree. the movie's thesis is that this war is being fought for no reason other than to serve the interests of the financial and political elite, and for their benefit alone innocent people are dying and becoming killers. i don't fully agree with this statement, but even if i did, i wouldn't go out and shout it to someone whose kid is out there.

that said,
the movie did its job and rekindled my desire to see bush booted. i didn't think it was as loose on facts as some have said, and i think the argument that it's not a real documentary is ridiculous. documentary film's founding fathers saw the medium as a "creative treatment of actuality." if you want actuality untained, watch cspan. moore's best argument - that it's the rich who benefit from war, but it's the poor who actually fight it, and whose lives are destroyed by it - is necessary and right on.

and i even agree with some of the "conspiracy theory," if by conspiracy you mean that bush has used the war to reward his political and business friends (is there a difference?). which leads me to ..

the voucher tie-in
(you knew it was coming.) after the movie, conspiracies dancing through my head, i went to get dinner and pulled out some articles i'd printed out on the recent florida voucher scandal.

basically, officials at a religious school in polk county, florida have been charged with racketeering, grand theft, and forgery after defrauding the state out of more than $200,000 in mckay voucher and other money. the school's director had previous arrests for writing bad checks, yet the state still sent voucher money her way, no questions asked. the palm beach post reports that:

Had a Bank of America examiner not been personal friends with an investigator in Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher's office and pointed out the string of curious state checks that had been deposited in the account of Bartow's "Deliverance Worldwide Crusade Ministry Inc.," state officials might to this day not have known that a school had received $53,000 in McKay vouchers for students who were not even there.

why is this allowed to happen?

because jeb bush's campaign donors wanted it that way.

not to say that they wanted scandal after scandal delegitimizing the program. but major republican donors wanted oversight to be as lax as possible, because, to them, government oversight creates bad schools. (the result? here's a piece of voucher propaganda that lays it all out.)

my point is, the schools with child-molester principals, drug-toting custodians, and defrauding directors, the schools where kids play cards all day, are not the ones that rich kids go to. these "bad apples" hurt poor kids only. lax oversight may work for schools with lots of resources and expertise, but those are not the ones that poor kids go to.

the rant
so don't push your voucher schemes and tell me you want to help poor kids. don't push your war on iraq and tell me you want to liberate oppressed people. and don't you dare claim to represent "the silent majority," when all you really represent is the silent minority - the top 2% who silently sign checks, and whose corporate interests oppress the poor so silently that you can pretend the oppression doesn't even exist.

i realize that nobody wants to hurt anyone's kids, not even the bush bros. and i'm not saying that these guys don't truly believe that their voucher program, or their iraq war, will ultimately benefit everyone. but the fact is that it's their people who benefit.



one more bit of fodder for the old conspiracy mill:
this comes out of the AFT's officers' report:

More than any other chief executive, President Bush has delivered victories for his pro-voucher constituency that would have been almost unimaginable four years ago.

The White House made aggressive use of the Solicitor General's Office two years ago to help win a bitterly divided 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of a private school voucher program in Cleveland. The administration followed up with another major legislative attack on public education: Working in concert with GOP congressional leaders, and making ample use of a veto threat, the White House helped secure a model voucher program in the District of Columbia. Significantly, the voucher program would not have survived on its own merit. Instead, it was rolled into a catch-all spending bill in an effort to pressure congressional voucher opponents to go along or risk being labeled budget "obstructionists."