As usual Jimmy Dore and company give such a well-rounded look at what's really going on with a situation:

As he says, "they're striking for funding for the classroom, for books, for chairs, for desks for supplies, for heat in the building. And they're striking so that other people who work in the cafeterias, janitors, so that they also get a living wage."

Teachers selling their plasma for money, work double duty as janitors, have to work other jobs (which isn't all that extraordinary if it's summer jobs, but during the school year is a whole other indsidious thing), - while the Governor compares teacher strikers to "teenage kids who want a car." This is the state she governs:

...a quarter of Oklahoma City's teachers leave every year and the state
had to issue a record number of emergency teaching certificates - 1,917 - for the current school year. A growing number of students in Oklahoma don't have properly certified teachers

Photo posted by a teacher in OKLAHOMA. ... these are his students textbooks! I have a friend who was born in Mexico City, said schools in Mexico texts DON'T LOOK LIKE THESE! Another has 27 desks for 38 students. Stand by our teachers! #oklahomateacherwalkout #Teachers #OklaEd pic.twitter.com/us5yxlnlQb

— Debby Bilyew (@ForeverABoomer) April 5, 2018

Coincidence? I think not. #oklahomateacherwalkout pic.twitter.com/6K0b34s9gA

— Ashli Nalley (@AshliNalley) April 5, 2018

How would you feel if your children had to learn from these old, tattered textbooks? Now imagine yourselves in the shoes of their underpaid teacher. Our kids, our educators, and our public education system deserve better. #OklahomaTeacherWalkout (via @AlexiaCampbell) pic.twitter.com/7bU4O95DOV

— Amy Vilela (@amy4thepeople) April 5, 2018

That first photo, featured in Dore's report (damn, he's doing such great work!), just sent me into a fit of rage and disgust.

And again, this is why Twitter is so much more important, in my view, than Farcebook. It is setup to be We-oriented, not Me-oriented. To the extent that the #hashtag provides the flashpoint for discussion, instead of being barraged by the inanity of family/lunch/pet photos, cringe-inducing self-aggrandizement and tawdry gossip from people you went to jr high school with. I don't follow any "friends" on Twitter, just investigative journalists and activists.

This Teachers' Strike is the kind of story, that if given a national platform with real dialogue and investigation, could really coalesce a mass class movement. Because people might begin to ask themselves and begin nudging others to do similarly, "how does something like this transpire in the Richest Country In The History of the World, where Wall ST Economic Terrorists, the same inveterate criminal gamblers with municipal funds who are behind ransacking the pensions of and defunding these schools and their teachers, get obscenely filthy rich while teachers have to beg for crumbs - and no one gives a shit?" It's because the public is not getting these stories in any measure that could change things. People would be riled with righteous indignation - if they only saw these stories reflected back to them.

The MSM is a complete propaganda tool for the status quo, which is what their owners and shareholders demand so that they can keep looting while we fuss and fight, divided and conquered. I bet folks striking, which hopefully will extend across the country, see themselves as political partisans too, just as the media cements them in with.

But when the teachers and students have common cause all that bullshit partisanship stoked by propaganda goes by the wayside and they start to see the bigger picture, that it's really the 99% vs 1%. Black schools have been victimized like this for decades. Now maybe they can empathize and coalesce into a bigger, serious movement that begins to ask why. It's a much different thing having the proverbial water cooler chat in the teacher's lounge than it is to be holding signs together and talking on the picket line about the machinations of corrupt government beholden to corporate and banking donors. When there's solidarity around an issue such as theirs, there's no more Red/Blue, Dem/Rep, Lib/Con divide. Which is why the partisan driven networks of MSNBC and Fox won't cover it. It confuses their viewership, who always need to demonize the other side.

I know a fair amount of teachers, ranging from grade school to college, who all have horror stories. Same stuff too: had to buy teaching materials for their classrooms, the long insane hours of grading papers after long day in the classroom, and then still only being able to afford a small, cramped basement apartment. One professor I know commutes to Boston from Brooklyn as an adjunct because she couldn'd find a job closer. Another has been teaching for four decades and has similarly been bounced around, having been let go at yet another new gig.

Chris Hedges, who brilliantly goes into this in probably his best book "Death of the Liberal Class," warned that the revolution will come not from the oppression of the working class, but will when the middle class finds itself suddenly without the framework of job security or the expectation of mobility.

It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt. Much of the urban poor has been crippled and in many cases broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African-American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our internal colonies, as Malcolm X called them—mobilization, at least at first, will be difficult. The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread,” W.E.B. Du Bois commented acidly.

Again folks, apologies in advance. I'm down in the thick of it here. But was watching this Dore segment while having lunch and was so outraged that I had to share it.