[Marxism] How did we get suckered into this?

[David Walters]

Picon wrote:

"Personally what I find the most surprising here is the level of autonomy
that lets individual schools play this dangerous game. Here (Spain) schools
depend on the ministry of education, and while they have certain level of
functional autonomy, things like pay and hiring of teachers, and the like,
are centralized."

A lot of people find this surprising. In fact, I'm surprised this 
doesn't come up in conversation more. The US is organized, if compared 
to a typical non-North American state, as a "Confederation".

Schools: There are over 36,000 autonomous school boards in the US. They 
are regulated, at most, by the 50 States legislatures and depts of 
education in those states. Some states, Texas most notably, has 
something approaching a 'centralized' scheme for education when it comes 
to financing and curriculum. All moves in the recent past to centralize 
this comes from the right-wing seeking to impose socially conservative 
mandates from the Federal gov't like the "No child left behind" act.

States: Each state has it's own set of tax laws and can, and often do, 
impose things like a 'state income tax'. All property taxes, 
additionally, are determined at the state level. Some states grant 
counties their own methods of taxation so that if you drive from one 
county to another you have different rates of sales tax (limited by each 
state but often given county autonomy on how high or low it can go). 
States also determine things like highway speed limits, environmental 
limits that can be placed over Federal regulations, etc etc.

The existence of the States comes out of the original compact of the 13 
original colonies under the British. View originally, kind of, as 
separate nations, this form of confederation was carried up to this day. 
It skews, highly the concept of democracy in the bourgeois state in the 
US because States are given an inordinate amount of power *within* the 
Federal gov't. Up until the early 20th Century, in fact, Senators (two 
from each state) were *appointed* by the Governor of that state or the 
State legislature. States get two Sentator *regardless* of their size. 
It is truly insane. Alaska has a population LESS than the city of San 
Francisco where I live.  California itself has 38,000,000 people!!!! But 
we both get "Two Senators".

This comes from the confederal idea that we are a "nation of states, not 
of people".

I have noted here in the past that a progressive demand would be the 
outright elimination of the Senate from the US Constitution or election 
of a "Senate" based on 1 Senator to, say, 12 Senators, based on an 
averaging from the state with the smallest population (Wyoming in this 
case, with only 500,000 residents).

David