A true story about Bill Bennett
From: Politics
When I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. Eventually Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller, with the White House leadership of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, put that provision in the Telecommunications Law of 1996, and today nearly 90% of all classrooms and libraries do have such access. The schools covered were public and private. So far the federal funding (actually collected from everyone as part of the phone bill) has been matched more or less equally with school district funding to total about $20 billion over the last seven years. More than 90% of all teachers praise the impact of such technology on their work. At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers,charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education. Well, I thought, at least he's candid about his true views. The key Senate committee voted almost on party lines on the bill, all D's for and all R's against, except one -- Olympia Snowe. Her support provided the margin of victory. On the House side, Speaker Gingrich made sure the provision was not in the companion bill, but in conference again Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, with White House support, made the difference. The Internet has been the first technology made available to students in poorly funded schools at about the same time and in about the same way as to students in well funded schools.
Oct 01, 2005 -- 10:53:29 AM EST
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Bill Bennett and School Privatization
This from TPM Cafe today:
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So we're discussing what Bill Bennett said and people are, you know,
ReplyDeletegoing
through their various stages of shock and outrage, whatever it is, and
people are, I'm sure, having their own thoughts about this. The thing that
amazes me is, we all get caught up in words and what people say and get
righteously indignant. "How dare that person say that! Who do you think they
are?" Of course, it's all within these confines of political correctness.
Okay. So Bennett is having a theoretical, philosophical discussion with a
caller about abortion, and the caller is making the point that, "Hey, you
know, if all these kids that have been aborted in the last 30 years had not
been and had been born, a good number of them would have become productive
members of society. They would have become taxpayers. We would have had that
much more money in the federal treasury and we might be not having a Social
Security problem or anything else," and Bennett said, you know, you can go
so many ways on that and it gets tricky. You can talk if you abort here, if
you don't abort there, but that's not the way to talk about abortion. We've
got to talk about it on the issue of morality. It's life. It's wrong to
abort innocent life, pure and simple.
He's just following the lead of his caller and in the midst of his answer
to the caller, he said, "Well, you know, it's true, if you aborted every
black baby, you'd reduce the crime rate." He said, "That would be crazy,
it's reprehensible, morally indefensible. It's silly." You don't go there.
There's shock and outrage. "How dare he say that? How dare he say it?" Who
cares what anybody says? It's only political correctness that's gotten into
this place. What about those who are doing that, folks? What about those who
are doing it? Is talking about abortion, regardless what's said about it,
worse than the act itself? Where's the equal condemnation here? How in the
world are we going to sit around and get all worked up and bent out of sorts
over words, when abortion is happening to the tune of 1.3 million a year and
has been for 30 years? Planned Parenthood? Many of you think it's a grand
organization, very worthwhile, doing great work. Margaret Sanger, founder of
Planned Parenthood, called for the sterilization of "genetically inferior
races" in 1939. Who was she talking about? You don't have to ask. I'll tell
you. In 1939, she organized the Negro Project, and wrote, "The poorer areas,
particularly in the South, are producing alarmingly more than their share of
future generations," hence, she called for the sterilization of "genetically
inferior races." Margaret Sanger was the founder of the National Birth
Control League, now known as Planned Parenthood.
She was an advocate of eugenics, improving human population by control of
hereditary factors in reproduction. There was a big eugenics movement in
this country back in this era, in the '30s and they wanted to pick who could
"mate." They wanted to determine who could have children and who couldn't,
and it was based on IQ and a number of other things. They didn't want to
mess around with all these inferior races and inferior groups and inferior
intellects mass producing out there and creating a bunch of idiots that were
going to live off the federal dime or whatever. Now, you can't even say this
about Margaret Sanger anymore. Planned Parenthood says, "You are
misrepresenting what our founders said!" No, I'm not. Take a look at it.
Now, I'm not saying that the Planned Parenthood movement today is a carbon
copy of Margaret Sanger's ideas, but we do know that Planned Parenthood's
primary objective in life is to abort as many babies as possible regardless
of the color. Now, you tell me, folks, where is the sense here in getting
all upset over the words uttered by somebody -- when they're taken out of
context when you first hear about them; hat's the only way you about them
and they're taken out of context -- you get all upset. "I can't believe
anybody would say that." Well, I frankly can't believe anybody, like a
doctor in Arkansas, would actually ask black evacuees from Hurricane Katrina
to come to his office for abortions. Where is our sense of proportion here?
Like I say, I'm through going on the defensive with these bunch of people
who claim to be superior and morally and intellectually above everybody
else. They're the elites? (RL)