Monday, April 13, 2015

The Real Racket

As of three years ago the government was paying nearly $2 billion on standardized testing annually. Yet, you have some people claiming that's not enough. That's the real racket, folks. The money being generated from making and distributing these tests throughout the country is the real racket and it's part of the reason you see this witch hunt that is taking place in a courtroom in downtown Atlanta.

We live in a country where prisons are private corporations that profit from keeping their beds stocked at, or near, capacity and the governing officials scramble to meet contractual “lockup quotas.” Some of these quotas are as low as 80%. While some are between 95% and 100%. In many states taxpayers have to pay for any empty beds should crime rates fall below that quota. The billions of dollars that the private prison corporations make off of mass incarceration is the real racket. Keep in mind these corporations use the reading test scores from these standardized tests of 3rd graders to determine when and where they will need to build new prisons. Are you starting to see the jig rise?

Once a person is incarcerated, other than get free, what is the one thing they want to do? You guessed it, talk to their loved ones on the outside. Did you know it costs about $18 for a 15 minute phone call? That's .89 cents per minute, plus a $3.95 per call fee. Considering that there are over 2.2 million people in federal and state prisons throughout the country, you do the math on how much money the phone companies who have the contracts with the prisons are making. Trust me, they aren't just smuggling in cell phones to check their social media timelines. That's the real racket, folks.

College coaches start tracking players as early as sixth grade in an attempt to get an upper hand on the competition when it comes to recruiting. Feeder programs like AAU help coaches weed out the bad groom the good and the good from the great and the great from the elite. Unfortunately, standardized testing and zero tolerance policies help to do the same for private prison corporations and Corporate America as a whole. Thus, you have the School to Prison Pipeline. In addition, these new Common Core standards are definitely meant to to separate the cream from the crop. Well, what's so wrong with that? Ever see an old classmate who didn't seem very smart and you just knew they weren't going to amount to anything but happens to be doing very well for themselves? That's what's so wrong with it. It doesn't allow for potential growth or evolution. Anyone who knows anything about business knows that you have to be able to forecast in order to maximize opportunities to increase your bottom line. That's precisely what these tests are doing for private prison corporations and Corporate America. That's the real racket, folks. 

A jury has found 11 educators guilty of racketeering or violation of the RICO Act and they face several years in prison. Federal and state racketeeringprofiteering and RICO laws make it against the law for any criminal organization to profit from any legitimate business operation. Which sounds more like racketeering, price gouging people to make phone calls because you hold a monopoly on the phones in prisons, making backroom deals which essentially sell the freedom of citizens in order to meet lockup quotas, setting kids up to fail in order to get them caught up in the system so that you can ensure future occupancy rates, and paying people billions of dollars to make tests that make all of those things go...or erasing a wrong answer and making it right on a test in order to save schools from state take over? Some of the schools involved still didn't make AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress so there was no extra funding to be had.

What those educators did was wrong, but who's the real racketeer?

Friday, January 30, 2015

Let Him Shut Up and Play

Dear members of the media,

When it comes to Marshawn Lynch not wanting to answer your questions, quit passing it off as the fans wanting to know. It's YOU lazy bastards who need a soundbite from an athlete to get your pen moving in the right direction.

I, for one, am tired of the same cookie cutter, clichéd answers that athletes give in interviews. Most Sundays I'm sitting in front of my TV impatiently waiting for the pre-game show to end so that the game can begin already because they pretty much all talk about the same things every week.

It should tell you something when a video game can mimic pre/post-game interviews as accurately as they do. Enter into Career Mode on any sports video game that allows you to create a player and follow their career and watch how the post-game interviews go. You would think you were watching an actual pre/post-game interview on TV with real reporters and players. You know why? Because they are all the same. The reporters ask the same questions and the players give the same pre-fabricated answers. Who wants to keep hearing that? I know I don't.

What Marshawn Lynch is doing when he responds to questions with the same answer, or some variation of it 29 times is no different from every running back in the league using the same response or some variation of it when asked how they feel about the opposing defense. Here's an example of what I mean:

Reporter: How do you feel about your chances against Any Team's defense?

Any Running Back: Well, I think they're a tough group of guys. They swarm to the ball and they are very aggressive. It will be a challenge going up against them, but I'm ready.

Now tell me that's not how it goes... You can take that same cookie cutter type answer and apply it to any other position on the field. In a situation where the player or coach is asked about winning a game, the first thing they are going to do is talk about how good the other team is and say how they were just able to make a play or two to put them over the top. It happens game in and game out, week in and week out, every preseason, every regular season, every postseason, and every Super Bowl. Then, every once in a while a player goes off script and gives the media a soundbite to run with and it's like a bunch of savage piranhas having a frenzy on fresh chum. Marshawn Lynch simply chooses not to drop any chum into the water for you. Why is it so hard for you to hunt in another part of the ocean? 

Many of you bring up his salary as if that justifies your temper tantrums. Make no mistake about it, although it is widely known that players are contractually obligated to make themselves available to the media, Marshawn Lynch and the other 1,695 players in the National Football League are being paid to PLAY FOOTBALL. They aren't being paid to give you a juicy soundbite that might get you a better desk in the newsroom. In fact, most of us fans simply do not care if your articles don't have a direct quote from the player(s) you're writing about. I hate to burst your bubble, but we don't find you to be that damn important anymore. With many athletes, entertainers, and other celebrities taking to social media to tell their own stories, your pieces are becoming more and more obsolete. 

While I can't speak for all fans, I'll say this, just make sure I can find the scores to games I might have missed. That would be enough for me. If a player does something off the field that might be interesting, I'd like to read about that too. Also, if a player decides to grant you an exclusive about something that's going on in his/her life, then I'd be more than happy to support your craft by reading what you write about it. However, I'm not interested in the dog and pony show that you all call pre/post-game interviews. So stop harassing players in the name of the fans wanting to know and use your own creativity to write something about the player that's worth reading instead of letting your sense of entitlement get the best of you and writing bash pieces because someone turned you down for an interview.Likewise, you can stop letting your uber-fandome make you write fluff pieces about players that seem more like a groupie fawning over a crush than professional journalism. Although we'd like to get to know more about them off the field, theses athletes don't owe us any answers. You know who does? Politicians, police, teachers and anyone else whose salaries we pay with our tax dollars are the ones who owe us answers, not athletes. Perhaps if your colleagues went as hard at some of them for answers, our country would be in better shape.

One more thing before I go... Will someone please tell Stephen A. Smith to shut the fuck up!?


Sincerely, 


A fan who'd rather watch the game than hear the players talk about it.


That's the Green Chimp's take on it. What's yours?