I Am A Teacher

I am a teacher. Just for the record I did not give a Triple A rating to 5,000 worthless mortgages bundled into derivatives so they could be sold around the world at a huge commissions by the world's great financial institutions I did not take a 40 million dollar golden parachute for running an auto company into the ground and requiring to get a federal bailout I did not close a factory in the middle of the night and move it's operations to Southeast Asia, leaving 2,000 people without jobs they had held for decades. I did not buy up buildings in Harlem and raise the rents, forcing longtime tenants to move to apartments in the Bronx where they were sometimes doubled and tripled up with other families I did not sit on a Fiscal Control Board that require New York City Public schools, in the late 70's, to close their after school programs and night centers and shut down music programs in the schools that were the best in the country and probably the best in the world I did not decided to use stop and frisk tactics to terrorize and intimidate young people of color in cities and towns around the country, nor did I pass drug laws which ended up putting more than 2 million people in the nation's prisons and jails So if you want to blame poverty, inequality, racism and the decline of the middle class on me, be my guest History has a way of taking revenge on liars and thieves.