Mayor Villaraigosa's vile, reprehensible, repugnant speech at PPIC

"We have our cake, and are eating it too." — Eli Broad (Predatory Pseudo-Philanthropist and Charter-Voucher School Backer)


Don't know if anyone caught the horror that was "Remarks as Prepared for Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa - PPIC "California's Future" Conference - Education Keynote, December 7, 2010," but it is some of the most vile, reprehensible, repugnant filth ever uttered by a politician in my memory, and that includes George W. Bush's racist lies leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Astonishingly, the philandering Mayor's mendacity knows no bounds. This speech, overflowing with falsehoods and outrageous slander, is beyond shameful, and speaks volumes to his complete complicity with the corporate agenda of known privatization proponents like Eli Broad, William Gates III, and the Walton heirs.

The irony is that the pernicious Mayor spells out the real trouble with our schools in the beginning of his ill conceived speech. He says:

"When most of us went to school in the 1950s and 1960s, we were blessed that California public schools were synonymous with excellence."

Villaraigosa knows as well as we do that our schools and the unions haven't changed since that time. In fact, only one thing has changed — spending. But the spineless politician dare not challenge his corporate backers, and then commits an enormous non-sequitur in blaming the hard working women and men that teach in our communities and the working class organizations that protect them from people like Villaraigosa and his junta of privatizers like John Deasy.

While all the fact-free points in his speech are easily rebutted with the truth, his use of his powerful position (again) to tell outrageous lies furthering the corporate agenda is beyond the pale. The most disgusting part is when he refers to his close friend Ben Austin's astro-turf group as if they are a legitimate parent organization. I suppose the fact Ben's wife Tracy Austin of Austin Egoscue Development is the Mayor's fundraising consultant explains much of that.

Mayor Villariagosa, instead of you calling on hardworking teachers to give up the modicum of protections they have against the corporate agenda, why don't you listen to the call of the community? We aren't demanding school privatization and the devaluating of teaching professionals. We aren't calling for outsiders and charter-voucher operators to discriminate against the most vulnerable children, those with special needs. We aren't calling for the resegregation of our schools. We aren't calling for people with no background or knowledge of pedagogy to dictate how our education system should run. We are calling for school to allow more parental and community control, not for you to give schools to private unelected boards that aren't answerable to anyone. We aren't calling for CMO/EMO executives to make themselves ever more rich at the trough of our hard earned tax dollars.

What we are calling for is for you to use your bully pulpit to call out those really responsible for education problems. We are calling on you to tax the rich! However, just like when you were in the State Assembly, Mayor Villaraigosa, you still cower from the ghost of the ghoulish in life Howard Jarvis.

Mayor Villaraigosa's vile, reprehensible, repugnant speech at PPIC