Roderick “Teachers are terrorists” Paige, the failed Bush Administration Secretary of Education and a group of corporate shills have released a report calling for privatizing the public schools. The report advances the Republican agenda by calling for the elimination of teacher pension funds and creating re-training accounts which do nothing for those who cannot afford to fund their account.

Looking at this report reminded me that Democrats. liberals, and progressives must get serious about real family values in opposition to the Republican right-wing family values which are used to label people the Republicans don't like as lazy, immoral, or deficient. So, I wrote the response below which actually goes far beyond this report by offering the only real solution to these problems.

Geoff Staples

We Democrats. liberals, and progressives understand that privatizing education for the profit of corporate interests will only advance the right-wing Republican corporate imperialist agenda.

We Democrats. liberals, and progressives understand that our culture doesn't value education. Look at the income and benefits paid to educators and compare them to any other occupation. Look at the disrepair of our schools, the condition of the student materials. Look at the quality of the meals served in school cafeterias. The lack of priority on education is cultural, not limited to any one class of people.

But, we Democrats. liberals, and progressives also understand that many children do not live in homes that can make education a priority. Many simply can't afford to be at home supervising their kids because they are working three jobs just to get by and two hours off from work without pay to go to a parent-teacher conference means not having food on the table for a couple of meals.

We Democrats. liberals, and progressives understand that universal health care, universally excellent public schools, a living wage, and affordable housing will go a long way towards helping those families that do want to get ahead and cannot do it now.

We don't know what percentage of the population will take advantage of this. But, we do understand that many families will take advantage of a family friendly environment as described above, our country, our planet,  our families, and our children will benefit.

We Democrats. liberals, and progressives understand that "throwing money" at the schools is a right-wing Republican sound bite intended to starve public schools so they can be privatized. But, we also understand that money is only part of the answer.

We Democrats. liberals, and progressives understand that we need real family values in this country - not the right-wing Republican "family-values" that are used to label people the Republicans don't like as lazy, immoral, or deficient in other ways so that Republicans can claim they deserve to live in God-ordained poverty while they, the "morally superior" Republicans have been rewarded with wealth by God.

As long as greed and winning - no matter who you have to knock down so you can climb up on their backs - are the idols worshipped by right-wing Republicans and anyone they can dupe into believing them, the United States will continue the race to the bottom in education, health care, trade, and infrastructure.

Sadly, many Americans have listened to the right-wing Republican greed and hate-mongers for too long and have implicitly decided as a nation that greed should be the fundamental American value which supersedes all else.

We Democrats. liberals, and progressives understand that there's only one way to fix these problems and it will fix many other problems as well. We must stop the Republican corporate imperialist rape and pillage of our country and our planet. To do this, we must have publicly financed election campaigns, nonpartisan election administration, and nonpartisan redistricting. Until the voters own our elected officials, nothing much will change.