Class war hits home hard

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Crumbling schools plagued by leaky pipes, peeling paint, broken-down air-conditioners, ancient buildings, and little cash.

No, that’s not the condition of public schools in Rwanda or Burundi, the two poorest nations in the world. It is a description of the current state of schools in the United States, the self-proclaimed “richest nation in the world,” and specifically of public schools in South Florida, a region which is home to many of the country’s rich and famous, an area dotted with thousands of colossal mansions, its marinas crowded with fabulous yachts.

Miami-Dade, the nation’s fourth largest school district is broke in terms of capital dollars, according to its chief financial officer, and has at least $1.7 billion on its books for unmet capital needs and deferred maintenance for schools and facilities. “How are we keeping things together? With duct tape mostly. We’ve been jerry-rigging everything we can, so we can function,” says one school principal.

Half of the area’s schools are at least forty years old. “This is a safety to life issue, it’s not just that it’s going to be uncomfortable…” says schools facilities officer Jaime Torrens… “No, no, you cannot conduct classes in a windowless school with no air-conditioning.”
Making the squeeze even tighter: Florida has cut off the flow of funds to traditional schools for construction and maintenance from the state’s public education capital outlay, or PECO, while continuing to fund PECO for charter schools.

Thus it is not exactly surprising to learn that Miami-Dade public schools are seeking stable sources of revenue, including through a sales surtax to be used for funding school building and maintenance. Since 2007-2008, Miami-Dade’s overall capital budget, including money for major construction and regular maintenance has dropped 43 percent.
The leading candidate as a source of new revenue for schools is an increase in the sale tax. But sales taxes are regressive. They hit the poor and the middle class harder than the rich. And any such increase would need approval from the Legislature, the same body that for years has engaged in a tax-cut binge. So good luck on that. On the other hand, maybe proposers of the surtax are aware that there is one type of taxes Republicans like: regressive taxes, like sales taxes and the social security payroll tax.   

Meanwhile, in Tallahassee, the state capital, lawmakers cut taxes and hand cities the tab. As the legislature pushes business-friendly tax cuts, local governments must cut spending – or raise taxes to pay for them. In total, the legislature has advanced several billion dollars in new unfunded tax cuts that, if passed, will come out of the coffers of cities and counties across the state. State lawmakers started much of their push to cut taxation last year, slashing corporate taxes and passing a property tax cut that voters are expected to approve at the polls in November. The cost to local governments: $616 million per year.
Last year, desperate Hernando County commissioners even considered ending mosquito control, closing parks and slashing benefits for public employees.

In the meantime, business-friendly, small-government lawmakers continue to plow ahead with a tax-cutting agenda. When state lawmakers have not been falling all over themselves inventing ways to cut the taxes of the haves, they have been busy waging a thinly-disguised class war against the have nots. Or, as Dorene Barker, legislative director with Florida Legal Services says, the Legislature is carrying out an “unprecedented attack on the poor” – from requiring cash welfare recipients to first pass a drug test, to diverting Medicaid patients into managed care, to making it harder for people to keep their unemployment benefits

In Miami, some residents are up in arms because abandoned homes and buildings in the process of foreclosure are on the rise. Without maintenance, many have deteriorated to dangerous levels or become dens for drugs and prostitution. The preferred solution the City of Miami has settled upon – amid an epidemic of homelessness and shortage of shelter beds – is demolition.

Curiously, the highest rate of demolition is in the richest district in the city, Coconut Grove. The answer to the riddle is that the area of Coconut Grove known as the Black Grove is home to some of the poorest residents of the city. Little wonder that some black residents see the demolitions as yet another step toward gentrification. “They should fix up the buildings instead of declaring them unsafe and knocking them down,” said one area resident. “That and build more affordable housing instead of stores like CocoWalk.”

The foregoing facts come directly – in many cases verbatim sans quotation marks – from recent, separate articles in the Miami Herald, especially the Sunday, February 12, 2012 edition. I hereby credit the paper for all the material ripped from its pages with attribution as well as from some fine reporting on: charter school profiteering; the setting of the Legislature’s agenda by a fiercely pro-business ideology buttressed by corporations, their money, and their armies of lobbyists; the war against the poor carried out by successive Republican legislatures and intensified under Governor Rick Scott; and the dire consequences for local needs, from schools to the public health implications of lack of mosquito control.

The reason I opted for omitting quotations is to show that, for all the good reporting, and despite the fact that the information is all there for the very discerning reader, there is something missing and hollow in journalism, especially American journalism with its vows of fealty to the false gods of “objectivity” and “balance,” concepts that in any case turn to dust at the whim of a publisher or the political or economic interests of the corporate overlords publishers report to.

That hollowness is the lack of critical judgment and of a coherent narrative amid the valuable but disjointed information contained in unconnected articles. Indeed, there is a bias against narrative and bald truth-telling in the kind of “according to the flat Earth Society this, according to its critics that,” which passes for balance and objectivity in the corporate press.   

By adding context and commentary and by connecting the dots, my purpose was to show a pattern, that of a multifaceted, vicious top-down class war being carried out by Republicans in one state which, far from being an anomaly, is a template for what is happening in myriad other states as well as a microcosm of the GOP plan for the nation.

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