Miriam,
Unbeknownst to me, my mother toured the Warren Avenue School, which
was the school where all the low vision and blind children were bused
to. She decided that most of the children were also multiple
handicapped...especially mentally challenged(not the term used back
then), and she did not want me in that setting. Interestingly, years
later the Warren Avenue school was torn down as part of the
development of the Century 21 World's Fair, and John Hay Grade School,
the same school I'd attended, became the grade school for the blind
and low vision children. By then the upwardly Mobil families has
moved on into the stylish suburbs, and the Hill became dotted with
multiple dwellings housing lower middle class and working class
families.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/19/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My public elementary school was not in my immediate neighborhood because the
school with the sight conservation class was in an adjacent neighborhood.
But its population was pretty much the same as mine: white working class
families, a few very poor, mostly families who lived in apartment buildings
or small houses. We were not aware of class differences. I was aware that
some children did better than others, academically.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 11:14 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Escalating Class War Against Bernie
Sanders
Good for Norman Solomon, and, of course, Bernie Sanders.
It's always been a class struggle. It certainly was not the Working Class
that taught us that we lived in a Classless Society. From the first day I
entered school at Seattle's John Hay Grade School, I understood the Class
Mentality. Our teachers, for the most part underpaid middle aged white
women, fawned over the children of the wealthy families.
We elected class officers...never really learning just what their duties
were...always from the "favored" children. Great importance was placed on
"Bank Day". Each Tuesday our Second Grade teacher would report on how many
in the class brought money for their savings accounts. Usually I could not
find so much as a thin dime to bank.
Our teacher would say, "Carl, stand up so the class can see who kept us from
100%".
Our governor was a very conservative Republican named Arthur B.
Langley. His nephew was one of my classmates. Hap Langley. I never did
know his real first name. But his father owned the city's largest sporting
goods store.
Hap Langley came close to being the School Mascot. And yet, with all of the
examples of class favoritism around us, our lesson books continued to teach
us that we lived in a Classless Society.
That early childhood conditioning is hard to get beyond. I wonder just how
many Americans will vote against their best interests, and cast their vote
for Michael Bloomberg. After all, it was a good feeling to know that our
scool's student president was the son of the richest family on Queen Anne
Hill.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/18/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders By Norman Solomon,
Reader Supported News
18 February 20
More than ever, Bernie Sanders is public enemy number one for power
elites that thrive on economic injustice. The Bernie 2020 campaign is
a direct threat to the undemocratic leverage that extremely wealthy
individuals and huge corporations constantly exert on the political
process. No wonder we're now seeing so much anti-Bernie rage from
leading corporate Democrats - eagerly amplified by corporate media.
In American politics, hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned.
Flagrant media biases against Sanders are routine in a wide range of
mainstream outlets. (The media watch group FAIR has long documented
the problem, illuminated by one piece after another after another
after another just this month.) In sharp contrast, positivity toward
Sanders in mass media spheres is scarce.
The pattern is enmeshed with the corporatism that the Sanders campaign
seeks to replace with genuine democracy - disempowering great wealth
and corporate heft while empowering everyday people to participate in
a truly democratic process.
Big media are continually amplifying the voices of well-paid reporters
and pundits whose jobs involve acceptance of corporate power,
including the prerogatives of corporate owners and sponsors. And, in
news coverage of politics, there's an inexhaustible supply of former
Democratic officeholders and appointees who've been lucratively
feeding from corporate troughs as lobbyists, consultants and PR
operatives. Their corporate ties usually go unmentioned.
An important media headquarters for hostility toward the Sanders
campaign is MSNBC, owned by Comcast - a notoriously anti-labor and
anti-consumer corporation. "People need to remember," I pointed out on
Democracy Now!
last
week, "that if you, for instance, don't trust Comcast, why would you
trust a network that is owned by Comcast? These are class interests
being worked out where the top strata of ownership and investors hires
the CEO, hires the managing editors, hires the reporters. And so, what
we're seeing, and not to be rhetorical about it, but we really are
seeing a class war underway."
Routinely, the talking heads and go-to sources for mainline news
outlets are far removed from the economic pressures besetting so many
Americans. And so, media professionals with the most clout and largest
megaphones are quite distant from the Sanders base.
Voting patterns in the New Hampshire primary reflected whose economic
interests the Sanders campaign is promising to serve. With 10 active
candidates on the Democratic ballot, Sanders "won 4 in 10 of voters
with household incomes under $50,000 and nearly 3 in 10 with incomes
between
$50,00 and $99,000," The Washington Post reported.
Meanwhile, a trio of researchers associated with the Institute for New
Economic Thinking - Thomas Ferguson, Jie Chen and Paul Jorgensen -
found that "the higher the town's income, the fewer votes cast" for
Sanders.
"Lower income towns in New Hampshire voted heavily for Sanders; richer
towns did the opposite."
The researchers saw in the data "further dramatic evidence of a point
we have made before: that the Democratic Party is now sharply divided
by social class."
It's a reality with media implications that are hidden in plain sight.
The often-vitriolic and sometimes preposterous attacks on Sanders via
powerful national media outlets are almost always coming from affluent
or outright wealthy people. Meanwhile, low-income Americans have
virtually zero access to the TV studios (other than providing after-hours
janitorial services).
With very few exceptions, the loudest voices to be heard from mass
media are coming from individuals with wealth far above the financial
vicinity of average Americans. Virtually none of the most widely read,
seen and heard journalists are on the low end of the nation's extreme
income inequality.
Viewed in that light - and keeping in mind that corporate ownership
and advertising dominate mainstream media - it shouldn't be surprising
that few prominent journalists have much good to say about a
presidential campaign fiercely aligned with the working class.
"If there is going to be class warfare in this country," Bernie
Sanders told the Iowa AFL-CIO convention last summer, "it's time that
the working class of this country won that war and not just the
corporate elite."
To the corporate elite, goals like that are unacceptable.
