opinion
Spoofed by the Tea Party
“Challenging people to Shape
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I
t is becoming increasingly
clear that President Obama and
Democrats need pressure from
within the party to force them to
stand their ground against the Tea
Party insurrection in Congress. As
was evident in the recent debt ceil-
ing fiasco, conservative House
Republicans have gravitated even
farther to the right because of pres-
sure from the Tea Party move-
ment. Democrats are being towed
along
kicking
and
screaming.
Well, screaming.
That’s why there is an urgent need
to form a Hot Chocolate Party to
force Democrats to start acting
like Democrats.
Democrats control the White
House and the Senate but they
don’t act like the party in control.
And that’s because they rarely
control anything, including their
own party members. The public
agenda is being driven by the Tea
Party, a small sect that has become
so powerful that its members
forced an embarrassed House
Speaker John Boehner to with-
draw his debt ceiling bill from the
floor.
To his credit, Boehner was
smart enough to regroup and give
the Tea Party what it wanted. To
their discredit, President Obama
and Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid agreed to give the Tea Party
zealots nearly everything they
asked for. In the end, that still was-
n’t enough to satisfy them.
How did Democrats lose their
way?
President Obama, the titular
head of the party, has usually
adopted sensible public policy
stances on such issues as the pub-
lic option in health care and letting
the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy
expire. In the face of withering
Republican opposition, however,
Obama has usually capitulated.
For example, candidate Obama
t hE C urry
r Eport
George E.
Curry
campaigned for universal health
care. At the time, the U.S. was the
only industrialized country in the
world that did not provide univer-
sal health care. Many progressives
wanted a single-payer plan similar
to the one in Canada. With such a
powerful health care lobby in
native Ohio, Boehner could not
afford to look into the eyes of
jobless voters back home and tell
them unemployment benefits
should not be extended. But a
deal was struck giving Obama
the unemployment extension and
allowing Boehner and his GOP
comrades to protect the super
rich.
If the Hot Chocolate Party were
in place, it could have insisted
that the Bush tax cuts expire,
something that would have cut the
federal deficit by half. It also
could have curtailed the practice
U.S. companies hiding most of
their assets overseas to keep from
paying corporate taxes and ending
Democrats control the White House
and the Senate but they don’t act like
the party in control
Washington, there was little
chance of achieving that goal. So
they agreed to go along with the
public option, a government health
insurance agency that competes
with private insurance companies.
Thanks to a president eager to
strike a deal with the Party of No,
the public option was removed as
an option before the legislation
was passed and signed into law.
This was the beginning of the end.
Last December, Republicans
pretended to oppose extending
long-term unemployment benefits,
a major goal of Democrats. But
the quid pro quo was that
Republicans would go along with
the extension if Obama would
agree to a 2-year extension of all
Bush tax cuts. That was another
time I wanted President Obama to
call the GOP bluff, but apparently
fighting is not in his DNA.
With high unemployment in his
the public subsidizing vacation
homes, private jets and boats for
the upper class.
As bad as past deals were, this
deficit showdown was perhaps the
worst example of Democrats
being impotent.
An angry Barack Obama
acknowledged how bad the deal
was after Boehner walked out of
their deficit reduction talks and
refused to return his telephone
calls.
Listen again to why Obama was
angry: “Essentially, what we had
offered Speaker Boehner was over
a trillion dollars in cuts to discre-
tionary spending, both domestic
and defense,” Obama said in a
July 22 news conference. “We
then offered an additional $650
billion in cuts to entitlement pro-
grams – Medicare, Medicaid,
Social Security.”
Here’s the part that proved that
the president was willing to give
up too much: “We were offering a
deal that called for as much discre-
tionary savings as the Gang of Six
[a panel Democratic and
Republican lawmakers]. We were
calling for taxes that were less
than what the Gang of Six had pro-
posed.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid was equally pathetic in trying
to advance his deficit proposal. He
said his bill did not require any
new taxes, something he hoped
would satisfy Republicans. It did-
n’t.
Enough of these wimpy
Democrats. When challenged by
Republicans, they roll over early
and often. Democrats roll over so
easily that they should be renamed
the Roth IRA Party.
To let Democrats tell it, they roll
over because they want what’s
best for the country and avoiding
default, for example, was achieved
only because they were willing to
give Tea Party fanatics what they
wanted. Compromise is now a
one-way street. It’s time to take
another road.
Let’s put the Hot Chocolate
Party in the driver’s seat to say no
to the Party of No. If they again
threaten to drive the country in a
ditch, to borrow a quote from
President Obama, provide them
with the directions. I suspect that
once they realize Democrats won’t
keep giving in to their empty
threats, we will find out that they
are not as crazy as they appear.
george e. Curry, former editor-
in-chief of emerge magazine and
the nnPa news Service, is a
keynote speaker, moderator, and
media coach. he can be reached
through his web site, www.george-
curry.com You can also follow him
at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.
Zero Tolerance Discipline: A Failing Idea
M
any school children in
America are on summer
break right now, but
here’s a pop quiz about discipline
policies in our nation’s schools
that’s just for grownups:
Would you suspend a student
from school for four months for
sharpening his pencil without per-
mission and giving the teacher a
“threatening” look when asked to
sit down?
Would you expel a student from
school for the rest of a school year
for poking another student with a
ballpoint pen during an exam?
Would you expel a student from
school permanently because her
possession of an antibiotic violat-
ed your school’s zero-tolerance
drug policy?
Would you call the police, hand-
cuff, and then expel a student who
started a snowball fight on school
grounds?
If you answered ‘no’ to any of
these questions because they
sounded too unfair to be the result
of an actual policy, give yourself a
failing grade. All four are real
examples of zero tolerance school
discipline
policies
in
Massachusetts—and there are
thousands of stories like these
throughout that state and across
page 4 The Portland Skanner august 10, 2011
C hIlD W atCh
Marian Wright
Edelman
the country.
Suspended and
expelled students are at greater
risk of dropping out of school and
dropping into the prison pipeline,
and using automatic suspen-
sions and expulsions for minor
infractions often has a major
negative effect on a child’s
entire future.
New research analyzing the
data from the 2009 – 2010
school year in Massachusetts
found nearly 60,000 school
expulsions
and
suspensions. Just over half of
them were for “unassigned offens-
es” – nonviolent, noncriminal
offenses, which can include
behavioral issues such as swear-
ing, talking back to a teacher, and
truancy. (I’ve never understood
why you suspend or expel children
for not coming to school rather
than finding out why!) Of the
approximately 30,000 “unas-
signed offenses,” two-thirds
received out of school suspension,
resulting in 57,000 lost days of
school. What’s more, because
Massachusetts schools aren’t cur-
rently required to report “unas-
signed offenses” resulting in
exclusions of 10 days or less for
regular education students, the
estimated actual number of disci-
plinary exclusions is likely at least
two to three times the 60,000
reported.
Jen Vorse Wilka, a student at
Suspended and
expelled students are
at greater risk of
dropping out
Harvard University’s Kennedy
School of Government, found
these startling statistics when she
studied zero tolerance discipline
policies in Massachusetts as part
of her master’s degree pro-
gram.
Her final report,
“Dismantling the Cradle to Prison
Pipeline:
Analyzing
Zero
Tolerance School Discipline
Policies and Identifying Strategic
Opportunities for Intervention,”
received an award from the
school’s faculty and sheds new
light on the need to address these
harmful policies.
Added together, the tens of thou-
sands of suspensions—many for
minor infractions—have an enor-
mous negative impact. As Wilka
explains, “Children start down the
path to prison in both jarring and
subtle ways. It’s not just the
teenager who ends up behind bars;
it’s also the child who is suspend-
ed for disruptive behavior,
misses a few days of school,
and begins to feel disconnect-
ed. The more disconnected he
becomes, the more he acts out
in class.
This cycle
repeats. National research
suggests that this child is three
times more likely to drop out
of school by 10th grade than a
student who has never been sus-
pended; and dropping out triples
the likelihood this child will end
up incarcerated later in life. It is
this indirect pipeline that can be
addressed by implementing more
nuanced approaches to school dis-
cipline, helping students stay in
See ZEro on page 6