Time columnist Joe Klein jumped to Newt Gingrich‘s defense (12/19/11) when the Republican presidential candidate floated the idea that poor school children should work as janitors at their schools. Klein’s endorsement (FAIR Blog, 12/9/11) earned him a coveted P.U. Litzer Prize. But apparently there’s more to it.
As Klein explains in this week’s issue of Time (in an article that bears a title “Racial Slant Aside, Newt’s Poverty Plan Could Work”), “When you strip away the racial appeals, though, Gingrich proposes some very creative ways to address poverty and dependency.”
He added:
And yes, as Newt suggested, that last idea did come from me–although I put a slightly different twist on it.
I first made the suggestion in 1991, after the New York City janitors negotiated a gaudy contract that required them to mop the cafeteria floor only once a week.
The difference, apparently, is that Klein wanted to see “students and their parents help keep the schools clean,” and “not just poor students–all students, even those attending the city’s elite high schools. It was a form of public service, intended to build a sense of responsibility and community in students of every income level.”
Well, at least Gingrich was going to pay the kids.
How about expanding the idea further, though: Why not let high school students take turns writing a column for a national news magazine? It’d be a nice form of public service. And consider the benefit to Time readers.
This is such a great idea – especially for children of janitors, who would go to work when their parents were fired from their “high paying” jobs so poor children could learn what it feels like to work in a world without child labour laws. My question then is, will Joe Klein and Newt Gingrich create other programmes for the poor children so they can find other work to make up for the lost wages of their parents? Newt says something like 37 children for every lost janitor – does that mean a child would have to find 1480 hours per week (37 * 40hours/week) in work to make up for his/her parent’s lost wages? Do you think they’d get a pass from all the homework they might not get to considering the fact they’d be working all those hours? Just curious.
Maybe Klein should be Gingrich’s VP running mate – they seem so simpatico!
I believe that there is dignity and meaning in doing an honest day’s hard work and I believe that Joe Klein and Newt Gingrich desperately need some dignity and meaning.
Newt is a spaghetti on the wall idea man. He has no filters. He gets an idea and throws it on the wall to see if it sticks. Like running for president.
In defense of Joe Klein, children cleaning their schools isn’t such a terrible thing. I have had the opportunity to see the Japanese education system where ALL children engage in cleaning every day from 1st grade to the end of high school in both public and private schools. Kids seemed more attached to their schools than kids in the US do (although this is a subjective judgement and there are other factors involved). Of course, the Japanese education system lends itself better to having children clean their schools because, in elementary school, the children spend almost all of their time in the same classroom throughout the day so there is a clear area that they are obviously responsible for.
My point is such a change shouldn’t be ridiculed without considering its merits, and those merits do extend beyond eliminating the need for a janitorial staff.
Please, oh please, Joe/Newt, go into some of these “poor” junior high schools and organize the cleaning of that school. You’ll be at one end and the kids at the other end will be throwing wet sponges at each other. You make it sound so easy but the fact is that it would require an enormous amount of organization and monitoring.
Kids are always walking the halls between classes. Just give them feather dusters and have them wear fuzzy slippers. Problem solved!
“…and those merits do extend beyond eliminating the need for a janitorial staff.” – Brian Baker
A. Kids cannot replace a janitorial staff if you want a clean and well-maintained school.
2. What do you propose all those laid-off janitorial staff do in this no-job economic atmosphere?
Great – the conservatives/right wingers (with the help of triangulating Bill Clinton) got rid of ‘low-level’ jobs by transferring whole manufacturing industries (textiles, leather goods, electronics, most mass production) to cheap overseas producers by the promotion/implementation of NAFTA, CAFTA, etc, but it was going to be offset by all the service jobs that would somehow inexplicably arise (but somehow never really did). Now they’re coming up with ways to reduce the remaining ‘low-level’ service jobs too, by turning them into child-labor ‘jobs’ (how long would it be before classroom cleaning would HAVE to be done to earn their little kindergarten lunches?) or even charitable, pro-bono work. Meanwhile, what happens to ALL the people who were doing all this low-level work? Since there are only so many sycophantic toadying jobs assuaging the upper-class’ mini-conscience to go around (and Joe Klein, George Will, et al, pretty much have those spoken for), these people become long-term unemployed. Subsequently, a lot of these people become discouraged & desperate and often go on state assistance and/or run afoul of the law which (even if you want to coldly ignore the human misery cost) can end up costing society significant amounts for welfare, incarceration, police, prosecution, etc, etc. All this so that the upper-crust can have a 3rd vacation home or take a 20 day European trip rather than a meager 10 day one or similar extravagances?
Gingrich and Klein are leading this country’s slouch toward slavery, fascism, and civil war.
I remember taking my daughter to her first day of school. All went well until the bell rang, and I immediately felt this strong rush of anger come over me. My own school days were no longer a present memory, but how I hated those bells, whose message was “Sit down, shut up, and follow orders!” The school routine itself is preparing kids for a job. They don’t need to become janitors to learn how to be docile, diligent workers. This is what Newt Gingrich, and his mentor, Joe Klein don’t understand.
The adult janitors, on the other hand, play a real role in the education process. They not only clean the school; they befriend the kids and provide an adult role model. My daughter cried when she learned that the school was laying off the janitor that she liked, just as she cried for the teachers who were laid off.
Child labor, a horrible, execrable evil, exists for one reason and one reason only: to reduce the wages of adult workers and intimidate them into obedience.
Great comments(most).Newt has a good point in all this but you have to understand that it is the same old story that will play out.Some kids(the most motivated)will work ,and move forward in ways that will benefit their lives.They will gain positive reinforcement from the experience. Probably the same kids who apply themselves a little more to their schoolwork in spite of bad surroundings.Others will mock it ,and be the same problem they are now.Subliminally libs would see that as creating the same conservative model years ahead, that they so hate.Those who produce ,and those who use.But brian and Barry have great points.Things are seldom so simple.One of the problems with having a legislator like Obama or Newt in charge.They come from a different place far removed from the realities we live with.That is why i almost always favor governors over Congressman or senators some of whom have never had a private sector job or even met a pay role..
To say that politicians shouldn’t be elected to political office is the same as saying that engineers shouldn’t be chosen to design bridges. Politician is a distinct vocation, and though there are good ones and bad ones, the skill set doesn’t necessarily require business experience. Politicians are supposed to balance the needs of one against the needs of many. Politicians these days consider the needs of the rich one heavier by far than the weight of the many. Obama is one of the best politicians to come out in modern times, and we are fortunate so far that he has done as well as he has given the weighted scales he was given.
Well Greg I would say exactly the opposite.I come from a political family.And believe me term limits are in order.Want to de fange all the pay for play in Washington?It is the only way out.Our founding fathers never envisioned Politician as a lifelong advocation.They built Washington in a swamp to keep the politicians from setting up shop.The thing I love about the junior tea party members is when poled 80% say they see themselves back in the private sector in 8 .Libs are exactly reversed on that pole.You need to educate yourself on what a senators life is like on a daily level.What his perks are.His benefits.His staff is massive.It is a fiefdom.All he need do is vote(or not in Obamas case),and work to curry favor and money for the next run.Look at the lefts politicians(no righties yet)involved in insider trading with secure info given to them by the Fed chairmen.Some sold all their stock, or rolled it over minutes after getting insider info.And no they can’t be prosecuted.We have classes alright in this country.The most privileged is the Political class.
Obama is a nightmare.He was a failure as a community activist.Just look at the area he worked in.Worse than ever.As a state senator a disaster.A no show.A dispenser of money down a rat hole.No success what so ever.As a president….more of the same.His next book should be called”how to translate failure -into personal success.”We will never know how he did in school ,or before- because it is all strangely and bizarrely sealed.We take it for granted he is brilliant because he went to Harvard.Big whip…so did I.Knew a lot of idiots there.And how did he get in with his lousy grades?Hmmmmm?By all accounts he did well there.That is one of the only things we know for sure.All his papers and grades even SATs are sealed.That and his book that supposedly showed him to be brilliant.A book I believe was ghost written by William Ayers.(Before you argue that read the evidence)And yes Bill Ayes has admitted as much.And Obama has never answered that question.Their were entire paragraphs lifted from Ayes past books without credit given.Word for word.But Im off on a tangent.Suffice it to say BAM can soon take his secret dealings and be gone.
Typical pap coming from immoral out-of-touch condescending pricks — one avowed stupefying liberal, one an imposter who panders to La Raza for a party filled with cowards.
The people who go to Washington or State Capitals aren’t supposed to go there for the purpose of changing the electorate, or changing citizenship in a state or the country. Becasue then those people who are governing are governing against the people. Forced upon us are the liberal psychobabble regarding the demographics of this nation, how its changing, how Latinos based on illegal entry and fraud-birth have become the fastest growing demographic, and therefore, it is essential that if a political party wants to survive or a politician wants to survive, then they need to address this racist illegitimate group. This is quintessential racism that is destructive of the civil society. And we Americans, regardless of our race, regardless of our color, regardless of our heritage — we Americans — and by that I mean citizens and legal immigrants. We must fight this. All of us.
Gingrich is the typical checker pants RINO politician who is prepared to destroy the fundamental nature of this society, in order to achieve short term electoral victory. Subversives like him do it with propoganda. They do it with race baiting. They do it with appeals to emotion, passion, and in his attempt to codify La Raza — compassion by suggesting ridding our country of illegal aliens is heartless. It is not humane, and it is not compassionate to destroy the American society. And its not racist to say no to La Raza and the deluge of illegal aliens pouring into this nation demanding we play ball or else. People illegally entering our country have no right to demand anything, or suggest how we should handle our affairs no matter how many violins are playing in the background. It is not foolish to allow a demographic that considers Americans their enemy the privilege of being here?
Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Congress has passed seven amnesties:
1). Immigration and Reform Control Act, 1986: A blanket amnesty for over 3 million illegal aliens.
2). Section 245(i) Amnesty, 1994: A temporary rolling amnesty for 578,000 illegal aliens.
3). Section 245(i) Extension Amnesty, 1997: An extension of the rolling amnesty created in 1994.
4). Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) Amnesty, 1997: An amnesty for close to one million illegal aliens from Central America.
5). Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act Amnesty (HRIFA), 1998: An amnesty for 125,000 illegal aliens from Haiti.
6). Late Amnesty, 2000: An amnesty for some illegal aliens who claim they should have been amnestied under the 1986 IRCA amnesty, an estimated 500,000 illegal aliens.
7). LIFE Act Amnesty, 2000: A reinstatement of the rolling Section 245(i) amnesty, an estimated 1,000,000 illegal aliens.
Newt Gingrich supported them all.
Our birthright is being deliberately sold from under us by meretricious snake oil hucksters who have no proof of purchase. And we are now on the verge of bequeathing our children and grandchildren the kind of society that we wouldn’t want to be born into. To put these invasion numbers into perspective, at the end of World War II the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. On August 6, 1945 â┚¬Ã…“Little Boyâ┚¬Ã‚ was dropped on Hiroshima. On August 9, 1945 â┚¬Ã…“Fat Manâ┚¬Ã‚ was dropped on Nagasaki. These are the only time nuclear weapons were used in war. The immediate blast killed approximately 90,000 in Hiroshima, and approximately 70,000 in Nagasaki. Illegal aliens have taken the lives of more than 150,000 innocent Americans through murder and drunk-driving crashes since Sept. 2001 alone.
If we go back just 3 decades, the numbers will surpass those killed in WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq War, and Afghanistan combined. I’m certain his definition of collateral damage is a prevalent euphemism. Why the prolegomenous babbling, rapacious speculation and stereotypes? It would cost this nation nearly $50 billion per year for 6 years to rid ourselves of the illegal alien menace. Currently, it costs the American taxpayer nearly a trillion dollars each year to fund this smash and grab fest.
America is in trouble. The clashes of culture and creed are intensifying and both parties have failed us as a nation. Republicans were repudiated in 2006 and 2008. And the crises that afflict us –culture wars, race division, record deficits, unpayable debt, the deluge tens of millions of illegal aliens, of peoples never before assimilated, gridlock in the capital, not acting as a Superpower, appeasing weaker nations such as Mexico, allowing others to threaten us without consequences, and possible defeat in war â┚¬” may prove too much for us to recover from. We can always deem the â┚¬Ã…“mythicalâ┚¬Ã‚ black community as a foreign entity. Blacks for the most part, have been on this land much longer than many on these threads realize — or care to admit. Some were even here when Europeans first arrived. They have fought in all wars, and built this nation â┚¬” yet read Time, watch any television or cable channel for at least 20 minutes and you’ll discover the constant character assassination of these Americans.
Ginrich would rather pretend he’s a tough guy by disparaging and condescending blacks instead. How about getting the tens of millions of illegal aliens out of the country Newt? Then you won’t have to feign a lack of support for them. Americans will be able to go to work.
Few think to question these perceptions of blacks, or ask how they came to be so deeply lodged in the collective American consciousness. A fortiori, left unexplained, is why ascribing it to a particular ethnicity rather than one’s own indoctrination and subversion is the qualifier And certainly nothing in yet another example of spurious data suggests that we can draw these conclusions regarding the basis of interaction of agenticity and patternicity, in which the only fact presented is that this is nothing but unabashed racial historical ignorance that is typical of liberal pricks such as Joe Klein.
One of the compelling events that would play a representation in the ontogenesis of America was the arrival of Africans to Jamestown. A Dutch slave trader bartered his cargo of Africans for food. They were “Negars” from the West Indies. The year was 1619. These Africans became indentured servants, comparable in legal disposition to many poor Englishmen who traded several years labor
in exchange for acceptance into America. Ten slaves were listed in the first census of Jamestown in 1625. The legend propagated the word slave, and did not appear in Virginia records until 1656. Statutes defining the status of blacks began to inadvetently appear in the 1660s.
The inference was that blacks called servants must have the comparable status as white indentured servants. Following the arrival of these twenty Africans, the face of American slavery began to change from the “Indianer” to the “Blackamoor” in the years between 1650 and 1750. Negro indenture, then, was no more than a legal fiction of brief duration in Virginia. Free Blacks (Yes, there were blacks who were not slaves. All one has to do is take a look at the data) would live in a legal limbo until the general emancipation in 1864, unable to stand witness in their own defense against the testimony of any Euro-American. When white servitude is acknowledged as having existed in America, it is almost always termed as temporary indentured servitude or part of the convict trade, which, after the Revolution of 1776, centered on Australia instead of America. The convicts transported to America under the 1723 Waltham Act, numbered several hundred thousand.
The indentured servants who served a period of 9 to 11 years polishing the master’s silver and china, and then taking their place in colonial high society, were a minuscule fraction of the great unsung hundreds of thousands of white slaves who had been worked to death in this country from the early l7th century onward. One-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were whites slaves. They were America’s first slaves. These whites were slaves for life, long before blacks ever were. This type of slavery was even hereditary. White children born to white slaves were also enslaved. Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents, and wives were sold, detached from their husbands. Free black property owners walked the streets of northern and southern American cities while white slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados, Jamaica, and the plantations of Virginia.
The Institution of revisionist history has created the misnomer of indentured servitude to sweep under the rug, and diminish the fact of white slavery. However, bound whites in early America did, in fact, call themselves slaves. Nine-tenths of the white slavery in America was conducted without indentures of any kind but according to the so-called custom of the country, as it was known, which was lifetime slavery administered by the white slave merchants themselves. I challenge anyone to study 17th century colonial America, sift through the documents, the jargon, and the statutes on both sides of the Atlantic and one will discover that white slavery was a far more extensive operation than black enslavement. It is when we come to the 18th century that one begins to encounter more “servitude” on the basis of a contract of indenture and race. But even then, there were kidnappings of Anglo-Saxons who were forced into slavery, as well as convict slavery.
Before the British slavers landed on Africa’s western coast to buy slaves from African chiefs, they sold their own white working class people (“the surplus poor” as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these white were kidnapped children. In fact the very origination of the word kidnapped is “kid-nabbed,” the stealing of white children for enslavement. According to the English Dictionary of the Underworld, under the heading kidnapper is the following definition: A stealer of human beings, esp. of children; originally for exportation to the plantations of North America.
The center of the trade in child-slaves was in the port cities of Britain and Scotland: White slaves transported to the colonies suffered a staggering loss of life in the 17th and 18th century. During the voyage to America, it was customary to keep the white slaves below deck for the entire nine to twelve week journey. A white slave would be confined to a hole not more than sixteen feet long, chained with 50 other men to a board, with padlocked collars around their necks. The weeks of confinement below deck in the ship’s stifling hold often resulted in outbreaks of contagious disease which would sweep through the cargo of white freight chained in the bowels of the ship.
Ships transporting white slaves to America often lost half them to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, “Scattered data reveal that the mortality for (white) servants at certain times equaled that for (black) slaves in the middle passage, and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for black slaves.” Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for white slaves enroute to America. The chronicle of white slavery in America comprises the dustiest shelf in the darkest corner of suppressed American history, ignored by dusty minds.
There will only be racial understanding when knowledge of historical truths are widespread and all can negotiate from positions of strength and not from fantasies of white working class guilt and the uniqueness of black suffering — all stemming from historical ignorance, and lack of research.
When film and radio burst onto the American scene in the new century, the racial stereotypes were easily adapted and strengthened in these revolutionary forms of popular culture. Radio captured the imaginations of millions of passive listeners who tuned in for broadcasts of the Amos and Andy shows–the most popular radio show in America in the 1930s. Rooted in the old minstrel shows and blackfaced vaudeville acts, the program portrayed two southern black men who had moved to Chicago. Its characters of the Kingfish, a dishonest and lazy confidence man who massacred the English language by mispronouncing words, and Sapphire, his loud, abrasive, bossy, and emasculating wife, became permanent fixtures in the minds of white Americans. The program dominated radio in the 1930s and 1940s, and played as a popular television show in the 1950s.
Like radio, Hollywood films also presented blacks within the context of images from the minstrel shows and vaudeville. Usually, blacks were presented as faithful and often wise or hapless servants, resolute and devoted Mammy-type characters, and often stupid and silly chicken-stealing blacks. Many of the classic film landmarks of American culture featured such stereotypical portrayals of black Americans. These films included such classics as Birth of a Nation (1915), The Jazz Singer (1927), which was the first sound film, Gone with the Wind (1939), the most popular film of all time, and the sentimental Song of the South (1946), an animated film produced by Walt Disney and based upon the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. White, self-hating liberals and out-of-touch conservatives who claim to care for the welfare of blacks have discarded these Americans to the garbage heap of history.
The American media, revisionists, and scholars have omitted the discoveries of modern genetics that show blacks, whites and Asians are said to be a social construction — generally understood to be the by-products of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. However, this is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism. Social constructionism is usually opposed to essentialism, which instead defines specific phenomena in terms of inherent and transhistorical essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of reality.
Considering the genetic medly of Homo sapiens, the human family cannot be assigned to a definite place or to definite places in a system of perceived white privilege, some stupefying system of class, yet alone classificatory divisions, or a stinking anti-American rag to hide under. Today much of what we see on Turner Television and Pat Robertson’s misnamed Family Channel, are TV films depicting blacks in chains, blacks being whipped, blacks oppressed. Nowhere can we find a cinematic chronicle of the whites who were beaten and killed during slavery. Four-fifths of the white slaves sent to Britain’s sugar colonies in the West Indies did not survive their first year.
If those who use racial historical stereotypes are wearing racist-tinted glasses, even the most accurate truths and historical fact will be the same color as the racial historical stereotype lenses — America, the hue of our culture — as brought to you by the Jerry Bruckheimer’s and Joe Klein’s of the world as the purveyors of our cultural heritage. Thus if we want to to know how Americans who can’t think for themselves know about blacks, or American history, not only in this country, but historically, we must look at the more general manufactured culture in which our lenses are manufactured…
I was helping cleaning my church at age 6 or 7, and I found it both fun and rewarding. In my childhood years after I had a range of other jobs, some longer term than others, such as mentoring other young children or cleaning up communion cups. At my elementary schools, we could help out with cleaning the classroom (and were sometimes asked to) such as cleaning erasers or projectors or moving chairs.
When I was in 8th grade, one of the private schools I went to had chores/janitorial duty as part of the actual curriculum. We would take shifts as to our actual duties for the day (cooking, dishes, sweeping, etc). Opting out was -not- an option unless we could not participate due to health. We were not paid, but because we all took turns cooking (in groups usually) – no one went hungry at lunch time. The students were pretty good about accomodating food allergies as well. My first ‘training’ babysitting job was at nine in tandem with my older sister, but I started babysitting on my own after that.
Newt was NOT advocating that students take on -equal work- to what the janitors are doing now. He even stated it would be ‘light janitorial duties’. School union janitors get paid more than non-union janitors or private sector janitors. He specifically called out the New York janitors – many who make $100,000-$140,000 a year – that’s more than the -teachers- make.
If anyone claims a middle school student old can’t learn how to mop or sweep, or throw away trash, and other simple repetitive tasks, than that is exceedingly disrespectful to the intelligence of youth. (I knew how to sweep, mop, scrub, and do dishes in elementary school. I never liked sweeping, but I did like scrubbing and mopping as chores). I can’t think of many ‘light’ janitorial duties that are tougher than washing a car (a typical youth fundraiser). We used to treat teenagers and tweenagers as junior members of an adult society – not senior members of the kiddy pool.
I got a job in high school as an after school art-assistant TA (I was 14 when I started). I have many relatives who got odd jobs at much younger ages, and they liked getting to work to earn extra cash.
As a further bonus, if students were allowed the option of picking up some of the side janitorial jobs, schools would not have to rely on outside janitors to fill in, which would save money.