The Big Banks are running the show. Not the banks, there are 956 of those operating in the US and 950 of them lost money last year. Its the Big Banks headed by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and the six of those made so much money last year that the banking industry as a whole turned a handsome profit. Goldman Sachs, the top campaign contributor to Barack Obama, decided that he rather than John McCain would take over for George W. Bush in January 2009 and also dictated that there would be essentially no changes in the direction of the United States. And the transformation has been seamless.

The Big Banks count on their partners in the US Chamber of Commerce to share the load of governance. The Chamber’s far-right wing embodied by the Koch brothers has generated the Tea Party, the working class shock troops that are necessary if fascism, a term that describes the corporate-state, is to actually function in the US. And the Chamber launders the money of the Chinese, German, Japanese, Indian, Saudi and other foreign corporate entities seeking to advance their interests in the US political arena. After demonstrating the extent of their control in the elections of 2010, Chamber President Thomas Donohue assured a nervous and shellacked-feeling Barack Obama that he would be allowed a second term in the role he enjoys so, President of the United States. “The chamber has not, does not and will not participate in presidential politics,” Donohue told reporters. “And it is not our intention to participate in any activity to weaken the president for his re-election. We are not seeking any activity that would limit the president’s ability to advance his own re-election.” Obama then genuflected to the bosses, bringing JP Morgan Chase’s William J. Daley and General Electric’s Jeff Immelt into his Administration.

Just who are the corporate “people” whose free speech rights the US Supreme Court established in the Citizens United Decision and who are now unleashed to do as they please. Let’s look at some snapshots from the Chamber’s Annual Picnic last year.

Over there in pavilion eight, why it’s the murders of Nataline Sarkisyan and thousands of other Americans who must go without basic life-saving medical care for the sake of CIGNA HealthCare profits. And look in the next pavilion over the murders of 29 mineworkers at the Upper Big Branch Mine in southern West Virginia, Massey Energy Co., when basic safety concerns were set aside for profits sake. There in three pavilions in close proximity, the criminal corporate syndicate of BP, Halliburton and Transocean that executed the crime of the century beginning with the murders of 11 oil workers on the Deepwater Horizon and ending with the poisoning death of the Gulf of Mexico. Not far away, the five corporate media giants, Newscorp (Fox), Time Warner (CNN), General Electric and Comcast (NBC, MSNBC), Disney (ABC) and Viacom (CBS and MTV), that helped the Obama Administration bury the crime in a massive PR blitz.

And there were the Chambers foreign guests in happier times, like the fellows from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), who were happily operating their General Electric designed nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi despite warnings, according to Wikileaks, from the International Atomic Energy Commission and even US diplomats that the flaunting of safety concerns invited catastrophe. But ignoring the warnings was good for business so the catastrophe is upon us all multiplied to the tenth power. The world’s third largest economy is mortally wounded and it is not out of the question that Japan is now destroyed and will have to be evacuated. The only hope for Japan rests on the shoulders of TEPCO workers who are volunteering for suicide missions against the ongoing nuclear reactor meltdowns to give their working class brothers and sisters the chance to survive into a civilized future, the chance to deal with those corporate ghouls who profited from cutting corners and falsifying reports.

Then Saudi Aramco was there too. The state owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia stands watch over the heart of global capitalism. Who knew then that in a few months they would send their troops in the guise of the Gulf Cooperation Council into neighboring Bahrain in a vain attempt to hold back the revolutionary human tsunami sweeping across the Middle East. Soon Saudi oil will be as difficult to extract as Libyan oil is now and then?

Well then the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission will be placed where it belongs in history–on the compost heap of American’s backyard food gardens.

When the banks and their corporate partners decided to maximize profits and globalize the economy the war was on. It was then that the US was de-industrialized and the great industrial trade unions were smashed. The United Auto Workers, the United Steel Workers, the United Mine Workers unions are just shells of their former selves.

That hollowing out of the US has left the teacher’s unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) combined, as the largest national force of organized workers left. And that explains the withering attack on teachers, not just in Wisconsin, but from coast to coast which is currently in progress . The forces of globalization see more profits to be won by destroying the public schools and impoverishing teachers and other public sector workers. At the same time they seek to destroy public worker pensions and will ultimately mount a full frontal assault on Social Security and Medicare.

But right now it’s organized teachers in the cross-hairs. Recently, a teacher in Oakland named Anthony Cody reacted to the events in Wisconsin in the context of the stunning appearance of President Obama with Jeb Bush at a South Florida inner-city high school. Cody, who is a National Board Certified teacher and taught science for 18-years in the inner-city, paid homage to the teachers of Florida. He wrote:

Florida teachers showed us last year how to fight this trend. They made a powerful alliance with parents, and put immense pressure on their political leaders to stop Senate Bill 6. They ultimately convinced Republican governor Charlie Crist to veto the bill. This year they have launched a campaign called Awake the State that is holding dozens of rallies across Florida to oppose the huge budget cuts that loom for schools and social services.

An insiders account from Florida would have to concede to Brother Cody that there was indeed immense pressure from teachers and their parent allies. This pressure included a massive demonstration in Tallahassee, volumes of testimony before committees of the Legislature, visits to the Legislator’s home offices, a well-funded lobbying campaign run through the Florida Education Association (FEA), a mountain of e-mail and other communications to the lawmakers, the creation by parents of powerful YouTube videos that went viral on the Internet, and the wearing of red T-shirts in public schools around the State.

And SB6 sailed through both chambers of the Florida Legislature! Not a vote was changed because money calls the shots now in Florida and all the teachers and parents and people of the state can demonstrate and e-mail and vote until they’re blue in the face and money will still make the law.

Getting back to our story, though, as the legislation worked its way to the governor’s office, Charlie Crist had made nothing but supportive statements. He repeatedly assured the bill’s prime sponsor, Jeb Bush’s man, Sen. John Thrasher of Jacksonville, that he intended to sign it. Never was heard a discouraging word from Crist on SB6.

Then something happened that changed everything. There was a clap of thunder and the sleeping giant stirred.

I’m not at liberty to reveal the teacher’s name, but in Miami-Dade County, the largest district in Florida and the fourth largest in the country, a former US Army Ranger and conservative Republican began calling and texting his long list of contacts with a message. “You have a doctor’s appointment Monday” went the text and Monday referred to April 12, 2010. It was a call to sick-out, in effect, an illegal strike.

Administration of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) got wind of the proposed action and began warning teachers of the dangers of it. Staffers for the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) fanned out across the District to instill the fear of job loss and even criminal prosecution in the membership. Word began to spread statewide and so the Florida Education Association (FEA) reminded all teachers that a sickout was a violation of law. Teachers should just keep on wearing their red shirts and e-mailing Gov. Crist and even if SB6 did become law, teachers would still retain the right to beg for mercy.

But on the appointed Monday 6,300 of Miami-Dade’s 21,260 teachers called in sick. The teachers of Miami-Dade County shut down the District’s public schools with an act of civil disobedience! Lo and behold, that next Friday, Gov. Charlie Crist did a complete about face and vetoed SB6. The FEA and UTD bent over backwards to give all the credit to Crist. Teachers were urged to write “thank you notes” to the governor. Our red clothing and e-mails had carried the day.

Very few thank you notes went to the now retired Crist from Miami-Dade. Teachers there knew better. We had done it! We had the power! When we moved together, nothing could stop us! And they knew it too! Not a single teacher among the 6,300 MDCPS teachers from the illegal strike was fired or disciplined in any form or fashion. Administrators, union bureaucrats, teachers, parents and students just celebrated the defeat of SB6 and President Obama’s new friend, Jeb Bush.

Much the same dynamic is playing itself out on a larger scale in Wisconsin today. The teachers united, an irresistible force, has become conscious of itself. Teachers shut down schools in Madison and several other districts for three days when Gov. Scott Walker’s machinations became clear. He even threatened them with the National Guard but they remain unbowed. They forced Gov. Scott Walker to resort to thoroughly undemocratic measures, the acts of a petty tyrant, to get his union busting way.

As with Charlie Crist in Florida, some are determined to give the lion’s share of credit in Wisconsin to 14 Democratic politicians who crossed the state line into Illinois. It is critical that someone else get the credit because their power is the secret that must be kept from teachers around the country if the public schools are to be destroyed. Teachers in Wisconsin are now being misdirected away from their real power, the ability to shut down and eventually to take over the schools, into dead ends like recall petitions and electoral politics. So Wisconsin may prove that we are not quite ready to win yet.

But Florida one year and Wisconsin the next. We are getting close!

When he wrote the above line the great James Baldwin, who’s A Talk to Teachers should be required reading in every school of education, was doing a riff on the age-old warning to be careful what you wish for because you might just get it.

Jeb Bush has dreamed his whole political life of plunging a dagger in the heart of public education. His fond hopes were probably best confessed in his second inaugural address as Florida’s governor in 2003. Bush told the rapt crowd gathered to hail him, “There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.” Bush could already see it in his mind’s eye. Yes, school buildings empty of teachers, monuments to an abandoned American crusade for universal public education.

On August 9, 2010 at 2:26 a.m., the Florida House of Representatives voted Jeb Bush closer to his life’s dream than he has ever been. At the very same moment they destroyed it. Jeb Bush, like Icarus, has finally flown too close to the sun. A sleeping giant has been roused.

Jeb Bush’s Waterloo comes at the end of a long road.

First give the man his due. He is brilliant. As a youth he sensed how important US relations with Latin America would become and he made the region the focus of his studies in college. He foresaw how important Spanish-speaking immigrant voters would someday be and he made himself fluent in the language and took a Mexican woman as his bride. Early in the movement he sensed the political power of Christian fundamentalism and so he began pretending to be a man of faith.

He would have been President of the United States before his brother George but the first time Jeb Bush ran for governor in 1994 he lost. During the campaign Bush was asked by reporters what his administration might do for Black Floridians. He made a tactical blunder. He gave an honest answer. He said, “Probably nothing”. Jeb Bush got 4% of the African-American vote and Lawton Chiles beat him in a close race.

Nothing if not politically astute, during his second run for governor in 1998 Bush teamed up with the conservative African-American Director of the Urban League of Greater Miami, T. Willard Fair, to establish Florida’s first ever charter school in Miami’s iconic Black community Liberty City. The Liberty Charter School served as an effective campaign prop for Bush and he received 17% of the Black vote this time around. Soon after taking office Bush severed his ties with Liberty Charter and appointed T. Willard Fair to the Florida Board of Education where he remains to this day giving slavish devotion to a man who he once told, “In my judgment, there is no greater person on this Earth than you. I love you.”

Ultimately when historic Liberty Charter School failed and closed its doors due to a lack of ,The Miami Herald sought reaction from Bush. He wrote back, “I am not aware of what this is about.”

Jeb Bush’s political modus operandi has always been to divide the people in the service of his only true constituency—wealthy business interests. That sliver of Florida’s population has always found the public school system to be little more than a boondoggle where billions of dollars escape their clutches. So throughout his first term as governor Jeb Bush relentlessly pounded on public schools with voucher programs, charter school promotion, merit pay plans, standardized testing schemes, larger classes and less money for schools struggling with poverty and deprivation.

In 2002 Florida voters were asked to consider the re-election of Jeb Bush and the Class-Size Amendment to the state Constitution on the same ballot. Both Bush and class-size reduction won. Jeb Bush graciously accepted the will of the voters that he serve a second term as governor but never stopped scheming to reverse the class-size mandate.

Florida Today reported, “Gov. Jeb Bush rolled out of bed the morning after his re-election party with a class-size headache.” The pain had been delivered by now U.S. Representative Kendrick Meek. As the most prominent public face of Florida’s Coalition to Reduce Class Size, Rep. Meek had won the first in a series of epic political battles to genuinely improve public schools. It became a series of battles after Gov. Bush refused to accept the will of Florida’s voters. Commenting on that, Rep. Meek has said, “Floridians expect their governor to be up at night thinking of ways to improve the lives of their children – not hatching ‘devious’ plans to keep them trapped in overcrowded classes.” Meek’s reference to devious plans came from another occasion when Bush was caught telling the truth. He was unaware of a tape recorder in the room.

During the 2005 session of the Florida Legislature Bush hatched his plan to gut the Class-Size Amendment. It deviously pit rural school districts and teachers against the larger urban school districts. The idea never got out of the Legislature thanks to a principled Republican State Senator named Alex Villalobos. Bush’s retribution against him was swift and vindictive. Sen. Villalobos had been a champion of spinal cord research at the University of Miami and assistance to Miami Children’s Hospital. Funding for both of those projects was among $27 million in cuts directed at South Florida counties in Bush’s state budget that year. Apparently unsatisfied that the vetoes had chastened Villalobos, Bush engineered his political humiliation. The man who once was in line to become the first Cuban-born President of the Florida Senate was stripped of the majority leaders post and shown to his new office in the Capitol Building—a broom closet.

The same year, as the Florida Supreme Court heard oral arguments in yet another attempt to win private school vouchers, proto-typical Bush-backer, Tampa millionaire venture capitalist John Kirtley bused hundreds of school skipping children and their parents to Tallahassee to rally for the governor’s program. Many of the same parents and their children were recalled to the Capitol on February 15, 2006 to hear Gov. Bush announce that he would lead a drive to resurrect his thrice declared unconstitutional school voucher program by way of amending the Florida Constitution. With a sense of neither irony nor shame Jeb Bush told his predominantly African-American audience, “In Florida and the United States today, if you’ve got money you can make a choice. What about the children whose parents don’t have the ability based on income to make that choice? Don’t they have the same dreams? God gives every child the ability to learn. God does that!”

Although term limits forced Jeb Bush to give up his Tallahassee office at the end of 2006, it did not thwart his determination to keep the apparatus of state government under his control. To this day Gov. Charlie Crist can only dream of having as much influence over education policy in the state as Jeb Bush. Bush loyalists were left on the Florida Board of Education and throughout the Florida Department of Education bureaucracy. In 2007 his minions were shot through the Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission which meets every twenty years and has the extraordinary power to go directly to the voters with amendments to the State Constitution. When his former chief of staff as governor, Patricia Levesque, got Bush’s anti-public schools wish list through the Commission, the two traded celebratory text messages.

Funny when State Senator John Thrasher from Jacksonville won passage of Senate Bill 6 he called Jeb Bush immediately too!

Public school teachers in Florida, 168,000 of them, have been frightened and confused by Jeb Bush’s success in the Legislature. They have had to ponder over how ideas so clearly absurd and destructive could win the votes of legislators. They have asked why rationality seems to hold no sway in this matter. The short answer is, of course, that money trumps reason in the Legislature. In fact, money trumps all! What Jeb Bush and the Chamber of Commerce and the builders and the developers want they get in the Florida Legislature.

But the teacher’s initial fear is giving way to something else. They are calling in sick in Miami-Dade. Their student allies are walking out of classrooms and into the streets in protest. Their parent allies have conducted a hunger strike and marched up and down the state on their behalf. Even if Gov. Crist fails to muster the courage to veto the teachers will stop whatever legislation Bush wins in the implementation phase. I know from a quarter century of teaching experience that we run the schools in practice and while we are deferential to authority we’re not suicidal. We will see to our survival and feed our families.

A sleeping giant has been roused.

That’s over with now. Why? For one, because globalization was so successful in its brief heyday. It penetrated every market on the planet. Who would have thought China could become the largest market for autos the way it has this year? It found the absolute lowest wage possible in the undeveloped world. They bumped right up against outright slavery and where possible went over the edge.

The effect of this success was profits on a scale heretofore unimaginable but it also exhausted the systems possibilities for growth. And growth is its lifeblood. Growth kept it healthy and dynamic. When that growth became impossible capitalism turned in on itself. It began to cannibalize itself. That’s when you get Wall Street turning investment banks into casinos and investment vehicles into logarithms. No more real wealth was being created so the bankers turned to magic tricks, in the form of derivatives, to give the appearance of wealth creation. That’s when you get some of the largest corporate entities ever created disappearing into the history books. So long General Motors!

The other thing a global economy had to have if it was going to work was a plentiful and cheap supply of oil. If the world is not now on the downside of the Peak Oil curve, its close enough for government work in the US, China, India, Russia, the EU. Rulers in these developed and developing countries have begun to act along those lines. For instance, the US won’t be getting out of the Middle East anytime soon for the oil supply it offers. US military presence there has nothing to do with silly bleatings over “underwear bombers” or terrorist threats. And for another instance, economic nationalism, in the form of US tariffs on Chinese steel to give one example, is the wave of the future. Globalization cannot withstand the end of free trade or oil driven trade but it faces both.

A US soldier or two, away from the harrowing places they have been sent, given time to consider, has probably wondered why their government has contracted with Blackwater now Xe-type mercenaries at ten times the price to pull duties once assigned to them. It is completely absurd on its face. The product of a hidden agenda is always absurdity. Globalization, which seeks privatization of all things, is that agenda.

Teachers across this country have come to live everyday with this absurdity. Incessant testing with no relation to the real world, the mindless collection of trivia classified as data, forcing the “business model” (like Enron or Lehman Brothers or General Motors) on the public schools, driving the arts and the social sciences out of the curriculum, and having every Chancellor, Superintendent, Commissioner, and Secretary of Education promote charter schools over their own public schools at every turn. Absurd! But why? Globalization.

There is the temptation to believe the global economy will enjoy a “recovery” and in the US we will visit even greater heights of material prosperity. This is a delusion that is being foisted on the American people. There is no rational reason for this system to be revived and there are oligarchs, and people at Goldman Sachs, and people in the US government and military that know this. They have left behind some people in the public schools, “dead-enders” like Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C. and Joel Klein in NYC to soldier on with the corporate catechism. But they are no longer a credible threat.

The new danger appears in the rise of the seamless melding of the corporation and the state in the US. Our new corporate-state is reflected in the unprecedented amount of money Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suddenly has at his disposal to disrupt the public schools. Duncan has put the 50 states in a competition, he calls it the Race To The Top, to become the most effective at destroying public education and building the charter school movement. Over $4-billion will be spread among the winners. The denial of funds is expected to finish off the losers.

Some people are confused as to why President Obama’s education policy is indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush. It is because both are servants of the corporate-state. In regards to the public schools and every other vestige of democracy in US society the corporate-state is the last stage where fighting back will be possible. Next comes the national curriculum from Winston Smith’s world.

It had been so long since dreaming made sense.

There had been the Reagan Revolution and the enshrinement of greed, rapaciousness, and materialism as the state religion. There had been the beginnings in 1991 of the long war to gain control of the planet’s oil supplies. There had been the period of the most “Republican” Democrat ever to occupy the White House, a man so vapid and devoid of character that he sought nothing of his office beyond his own sexual gratification. There had been the eight years of the most utter hopelessness and despair as the United States of America moved as close to fascism and the end of constitutional government as it has ever been.

Today, the dreams of Grant Park were tested in the real world.

Today, a U.S. soldier in Iraq used his weapon to kill five of his comrades and wound three more. The fratricide occurred at a Camp Victory clinic that treats military personnel for stress. President Obama released a statement that “his heart goes out to all the families” but it is clear now that he has no intention of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and ending that war.

Today, Barack Obama’s national security advisor Gen. James Jones, rejected Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s demand the U.S. halt all aerial attacks in that country. Gen. Jones said, “we can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back.” With both hands free a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan’s Farah province killed as many as 130 civilians. Afghan doctors report treating at least 14 victims of severe burns. White phosphorus munitions produce severe burns so human rights organizations will investigate.

President Obama met with his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts on the day of the Farah raid and commented that his “heart went out to the victims” but it is clear now that he has no intention of ending the Democratic Party’s “good war” in Afghanistan and the deadly drone attacks on Pakistan. It’s just a matter of better management. Gen. McKiernan is fired and now Lt. Gen. McChrystal will bring the art of deception he used so effectively after the death of Pat Tillman to the war.

Today, the Advanced Medical Technology Association; the medical device manufacturers, the hospital owners, the HMO’s, the insurance industry, and the drug makers offered the President a $2 trillion IOU to leave them in control of health care in the U.S.. President Obama acknowledged that the American people “desperately need health care reform in 2009″ but he took the vampire’s kiss. There will be no genuine single payer national health care system under this president.

Today, it was reported that “President Barack Obama wants to see 5,000 failing schools close and reopen with new principals and teachers over the next five years.” Failing schools is the race neutral way of saying public inner-city schools. Replacing the principals and teachers identifies them as the reason the schools are failing.

Today, there was no comment from the White House on yesterday’s Mother’s Day protest in Chicago, the hometown of both the President and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The mother’s have lost their school age children to gun violence. “We can’t eat. We can’t sleep. We’re angry. We’re sad. We don’t understand our purpose for life. Our children were our purpose for life,” protesting mother Pam Bosley said. Insight into the reason these mother’s have taken their private grief to the public is provided by the Chicago Sun-Times.

A total of 508 Chicago school kids were shot from September 2007 through December 2008, according to data compiled by the school system and released to the Chicago Sun-Times.

That’s almost 32 children shot each month.

None of these children was shot in school, it’s important to note.

President Obama had voucher and charter school boosters to the White House the other day for advice on educational policy. The nation was treated to the incredible spectacle former Speaker Newt Gingrich posing as an enemy of racism and a proponent of civil rights for his concern over the “achievement gap”. There was no mention of the infant mortality gap, or the life expectancy gap, or the household assets gap, or the employment gap, or the incarceration gap, or the quality of healthcare gap, or any of the other gaps that might shatter the illusion that Newt Gingrich gives a damn about people of color.

And speaking of gaps, today the leaders of historically Black colleges vowed to fight the elimination of a program they called a financial lifeline in a time of economic distress. President Obama’s budget left an $85 million gap in a fund that Black institutions received in the last two years of the Bush Administration.

Today, the dreams of Grant Park are no more than that.

The government of the State of Florida realizes most of its revenues by way of sales and use taxes, intangible taxes and corporate income taxes. Sales and use taxes are the most regressive and hit poor, working and retired people the hardest. These taxes have done nothing but increase and when they are discussed it is in the context of raising them.

Meanwhile, if he could have, Jeb Bush would have relieved Florida’s wealthy persons and corporate entities of their entire tax burden. As it stands he came very near his goal. Tax loopholes created during his administration for corporate income now shelter between $500 and $600 million that was counted as revenue before. $600 million more was lost to the state when Bush eliminated the tax on intangible properties (stocks and bonds) in January 2007.

Jeb Bush tried to privatize all things profitable and make the people assume all risk associated with investment. His program gave a leg up to charter schools and turned elements of the state’s water supply, public roads and social services over to wealthy investors. The lynchpin of his healthcare agenda was to turn Medicaid into a private managed health care system. That program was piloted in five counties. The Department of Children and Families was turned into a massive private gamble that money could be made off Florida’s most vulnerable children.

When investments went bad the working people of Florida ate the loss. In 2002 the state’s short-term investment and pension funds lost $334 million as Enron collapsed, three times the loss of any other fund in the nation. Jeb Bush’s minions invested in Edison charter schools when the stock was valued at $37 and got out when it was worth 14 cents. Another $500 million of the public’s money was lost to enable other corporate adventures.

But the worst was yet to come! Because although term limits forced Jeb Bush to give up his Tallahassee office in 2006, it did not thwart his determination to keep the apparatus of state government under his control. Gov. Charlie Crist can only dream of having as much influence in this state as Jeb Bush. Bush handed his sword over to Speaker Marco Rubio to control the Florida House of Representatives. He moved Sen. Alex Villalobos into a broom closet and out of the line of succession to be President of the Florida Senate. His minions are shot through the Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission and so in November we will be voting on draconian property tax cuts to kill the public schools and vouchers to boost the private schools. He put one of his stooges, Coleman Stipanovich, in charge of making decisions for the multi-billion dollar Local Government Investment Pool and the Florida Retirement System. Then he got himself a spot on the Board of Directors of Lehman Brothers, the giant Wall Street financial services corporation.

The now resigned Stipanovich made $1.5 billion in bad investments, $842 million of them purchased through Lehman Brothers. The pension fund now holds $756 million in worthless paper related to the housing market meltdown, almost 8% of its cash holdings. The state’s short-term investment fund is faced with similar losses. Jeb Bush and Lehman Brothers won’t be losing any sleep over it though because the vulnerability has been dumped on Florida’s 1.1 million current and retired state workers, hundreds of school districts and local governments, the state-created Citizens Property Insurance, and the state treasury.

This fiscal year the state treasury suffered the first waves of the tsunami that is coming. The servile Florida State Legislature was called back into special session barely six months after passing a $71 billion 2007 fiscal year budget to address a 1.1 billion dollar revenue shortfall. On that count, among other blows to the weakest and most vulnerable among us, these servants of the wealthy took $100 from each of Florida’s public school children to balance their budget. The lights had not been turned out in the Capitol Building when the Office of Policy and Budget projected an additional $2.5 billion revenue shortfall over the next 18 months.

Now the state finds itself in a $5 billion revenue hole and the proposed budget for this fiscal year is a crystal clear road map to where Bush’s Florida is headed. The public school system will be closed down! Accommodations for our children are being made in sparkling new prisons. Out of work teachers will turn their kids over to newly hired prison guards.

Under the conditions they are creating the Legislature anticipates an explosion in Florida’s prison population–107,000 inmates by June 2009. So they have earmarked $305 million to build one new private and two new public prisons and hire 1,000 new prison guards. Meanwhile, the public schools will suffer a $2.3 billion reduction in funding. That comes to another $140 less per child for education. There is actually $10 million less for the construction of K-12 school buildings than for prison buildings.

The Secretary of Florida’s Department of Children and Families Robert Butterworth has called this budget the equivalent of “a contract on kids.” In so many words, the Secretary is saying that kids are going to die. These children will be the battered human faces of these legislative choices. And they are choices! The taxes on wealthy Floridians and on corporations could have been restored to pre-Jeb Bush rates. The intangibles tax on stock and bond holders too. Schools could have been put before jails. Teachers and school bus drivers could have been funded before new prison guards even became necessary.