Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, is portrayed in a recent Education Next puff piece as a modern day Braveheart in high heels because of the way she ruthlessly chops the jobs of union teachers.

Most of her layoff victims are older teachers. Suspiciously, the race or ethnicity of the teachers who lost their jobs is not yet available. The rumor mill has it that most of the teachers who were cut were black women over the age of 40. The racial mix can be seen in these two youtube videos of a protest march (here and here and here). In addition to lots of people with gray hair there are a few black and white males, perhaps a Hispanic or two — BUT NO ASIANS!

DC schools are following the same pattern I have observed in many states, Louisiana being the most recent example:

1. First, a shortage of teachers is declared. Rhee was hired by DCPS to solve the shortage. But many feel that chancellor Michele Rhee caused the shortage by firing teachers because it served the purpose of her former organization (Teach for America) which was supposedly going to solve a shortage problem that didn’t exist.
2. Then layoffs of a few hundred older teachers takes place. It’s a shell game designed to replace older teachers with younger teachers and American teachers with younger H-1Bs.
3. Foreign teachers on H-1B visas are hired once most of the Americans have been let go. It’s a sure bet that Rhee, who was born in the USA to South Korean immigrants, will be hiring mostly Asians.Labor Condition Applications can be viewed by going to the DOL FLC data center. It reveals that Rhee wants H-1Bs for jobs that could obviously be filled by Americans:

District of Columbia Public Schools  SECONDARY TEACHER  $73,844/yr

District of Columbia Public Schools  ESL TEACHER $44,988/yr

Rhee claims that the Oct. 2 layoffs of 266 teachers and educators were needed to help pay for $43.9 million budget deficit for 2010. Union leaders have denounced the action as an illegal mass firing designed to purge older educators. The two sides have taken the dispute to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (WASHINGTON TEACHERS’ UNION, LOCAL # 6, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, AFL-CIO).

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From CNN:

“A second former medical school colleague of Hasan said several people raised concerns about Hasan’s overall competence.

Even though Hasan earned his medical degree and residency, some of his fellow students believed Hasan “didn’t have the intellect” to be in the program and was not academically rigorous in his coursework.

Hasan “was not fit to be in the military, let alone in the mental health profession,” this classmate told CNN. “No one in class would ever have referred a patient to him or trusted him with anything.”

The first classmate echoed this sentiment.

Hasan was “coddled, accommodated and pushed through that masters of public health despite substandard performance,” the classmate said. He was “put in the fellowship program because they didn’t know what to do with him.”

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

John Steinbeck took a trip around the country in 1959, and wrote it up in Travels with Charley | In Search Of America , 1960. I put up a quote last night. Here he describes meeting a family of French Canadian temporary workers (really!) in Maine

“In due course these people told me quite a bit about themselves. They came over the border every year for the potato harvest. With everyone working, it made a nice little pool against the winter. Did they have any trouble with immigration people at the border? Well, no. The rules seemed to relax during the harvest season, and besides, the way was smoothed by a contractor to whom they paid a small percentage of their pay.

But they didn’t really pay him. He collected directly from the farmers. I’ve known quite a few migrant people over the years-Okies and Mexican wetbacks, and the Negroes who move into New Jersey and Long Island. And wherever I’ve seen them there has always been a contractor in the background to smooth the way for them for a consideration. Years ago the farmers tried to draw more labor than they needed so that they could lower wages. This seems to be no longer true, for government agencies channel only as many laborers as are needed, and some kind of minimum wage is maintained. In other cases the migrants have been driven to movement and seasonal work by poverty and terrible need.

Surely my guests for the evening were neither mistreated nor driven. This clan, having put their own small farm to bed for the winter in the Province of Quebec, came over the line to make a small nest egg. They even carried a little feeling of holiday with them almost like the hops- and strawberry-pickers from London and the Midland cities of England. These were a hardy and self-sufficient people, quite capable of taking care of themselves.”

But that’s not what farmers want, is it? That was in 1959. More recently

“The Mexican government has sued the DeCoster Egg Farm in Maine, accusing it of civil, labor and human rights violations. The lawsuit charges that more than 1,500 former employees suffered from illegal work conditions during the past 10 years, because of racial discrimination aimed at Mexicans.” [NAFTA Monitor, 1998]

The IowaHawk page Steve Sailer links to below is satire, but Ann Coulter has the real headlines:

President Obama honored the victims by immediately warning Americans not to “jump to conclusions” – namely, the obvious conclusion that the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism. As conclusions go, it wasn’t much of a jump.

But the mainstream media waited for no information — indeed actively avoided learning any information — before leaping to the far less obvious conclusion that the suspect’s mass murder was set off by “stress.”

The day after the slaughter, The New York Times ran one editorial and two of three op-eds asserting as much — which was at least one more than the Times usually runs about psycho-killer soldiers going on rampages.

Two days after the mass shooting, the Times’ laughably predictable headlines about the Fort Hood bloodbath were:

– “Preliminary Inquiry Finds No Link to Terror Plot”

– “Painful Stories Take a Toll on Military Therapists”

– “When Soldiers’ Minds Snap”

The Los Angeles Times jumped to the exact same conclusion, running an article on the massacre titled: “Fort Hood Tragedy Rocks Military as It Grapples With Mental Health Issues.” Time magazine followed suit, posting an article titled: “Stresses at Fort Hood Were Likely Intense for Hasan.”

Inasmuch as Maj. Hasan had never been deployed overseas, much less seen combat, liberals seem to have discovered the first recorded case of “pre-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Their point was: The real victim of Fort Hood was Maj. Hasan. Indeed, all Muslims were the victims that day.

Iowa Hawk has a round-up of all the Fort Hood headlines. Well worth checking out.

The December 2009 Atlantic contains an article by David Dobbs entitled The Science of Success that tries to take a Greg Cochran-Henry Harpending idea and give it a Malcolm Gladwell-like spin.

Dobbs’ article begins:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

Dandelions and Orchids are kind of like Malcolm Gladwell’s Picasso and Cezannes: Malcolm gave a speech last year to a conference of math teachers on how some students are like Picasso and everything comes quickly to them, while others are like Cezanne, where it takes them a long time before they become geniuses.

Dobbs then explains about how having social workers come into the homes of new mothers can improve their parenting skills.

This is all part of the ongoing trend toward the future Stolen Generation of African-American children. Notice how there are two movies out this month, Precious and The Blind Side, both about how 350-pound impoverished black teenagers’ lives can be fixed up by caring social workers and/or white adoptive parents. (more…)

The Kvetcher (a.k.a. David Kelsey), in his unswerving search for a peaceful life, has posted on Jewcy.com
The Two-Front War
How Together, the American Jewish Left and Right Endanger the U.S. November 10,2009

Vdare.com has previously chronicled his Immigration-skeptic Jewcy articles here)

This time our friend puts forward the interesting proposition:

The Jewish communal infrastructure has sought to seek a balance between the larger Jewish Left and the more active Jewish Right. That balance has traditionally been to adopt and promote the foreign policies of the Jewish Right, and the domestic policies of the Jewish Left.
Both the Jewish Left and the Jewish Right think they are fighting the good fight. But together, they are fighting American interests.

This immediately produced an appealing comment from one mobius1ski

Just go write for vdare or davidduke.com already

After that, a violent brawl broke out, unfortunately all too instructive for outsiders wishing to understand the American Immigration “Debate”. I strongly recommend the comment thread:

K:

Muslim mass immigration is not going to solve these problem, mobius. Rather, they will — through sheer numbers — increase incidents and discontent dramatically.

Who are you to pretend that you are going to change the views of everyone through aggressive, ostensibly universalist, pushy, ivory tower constructed, almost unilateral Jewish-preferred domestic policy? No wonder you are so offended.

Mobiusk1ski:

how many Christians in America have committed acts of religiously- or politically-motivated violence? Take a look at the stats on anti-abortion violence. They make the threat of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. look practically irrelevant…I reject your characterization of HIAS’ work as “aggressive, ostensibly universalist, pushy, ivory tower constructed, almost unilateral Jewish-preferred domestic policy.”

K:

please note the difference in percentage of the population. Do I really need to explain this to you?…

Look more carefully…did HIAS lead (on the issue of immigration) Jewish organizational community used all its muscle with Progress By Pesach and the Holocaust as a cudgel (would the mainstream Jewish community EVER do such thing? Misuse the Holocaust for preferred policy?!? No way!) behind closed doors?
Hmm…let’s look at the AJC files from this past spring: http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=846743&…
…The Jews are at the forefront of Hate Crimes (see that Forward link) and immigration. All I am asking is for the Jewish Left to stop subverting the will of the American people on this one. They don’t want mass immigration, least of all of Muslims.

Consistently one is amazed by the reasonable nature of The Kvetcher. Where did he learn this? Is he related to Paul Gottfried?

Unfortunately the anti-Christian/Nation animosity of mobius1ski is more typically what patriots have to deal with

John Steinbeck:

“I’ve seen many migrant crop-picking people about the country: Hindus, Filipinos, Mexicans, Okies away from their states. Here in Maine a great many were French Canadians who came over the border for the harvest season. It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.”Travels with Charley | In Search Of America , 1960