Written by Loren Bliss   

THE RSN FUNDING crisis may be the result of the annual autumnal cash shortage inflicted on the U.S. population by austerity -- specifically the ever-greater cuts in federal, state and local education funding.

As the Ayn Randites and their JesuNazi allies methodically shred the few remnants of the social contract, parents, grandparents and students themselves are beset by soaring out-of-pocket K-12 expenses and prohibitive tuition increases at the community college and university levels as well.

A grandparent who is one of my neighbors here in the senior ghetto recently told me of a must-buy list of back-to-school necessities for fifth graders -- the list published by one of the local public school districts -- the out-of-pocket costs of which approached $300. A lot of it was stuff the schools formerly provided – textbooks included.

Also, it seems to me I read somewhere the tuition at Washington state's (allegedly) "public" universities was to jump something like 37 percent either next year or the year after. (Sorry for the factual imprecision; this is not a story I follow closely because amelioration is impossible without genuine revolution, at the very least a la Sanders.)

Whatever its size, this most recent price-gouge is atop the 1,804.8 percent -- that's one thousand, eight hundred four point eight percent (not a typo) -- by which tuition has increased since I was an older, GI-Bill-undergraduate here c. 1971-1976. For comparison, inflation during this same four-decade period was about 350 percent.

In other words, U.S. higher education has already been pushed out of the reach of the Working Class – and now it's the turn of the K-12 public-schools parents to be similarly afflicted. Since the associated costs hit hardest in September, that's the most likely culprit in the RSN funding crisis.

Moreover, even those of us on the Real Left – yes including those of us involved at the grassroots level as I am – often fail to realize just how truly wretched life in the USian Homeland has become.

Because as activists we are relatively accustomed to poverty and deprivation, we also fail to comprehend the magnitude of financial terror, despair and emotional paralysis experienced by the multitudes of naive proletarians who are now for the first time in their lives waking up to the fact that under capitalism they are literally prey – capitalism's targeted victims.

My 1930s-Communist/Marxian-to-the-end father, a dreadfully unfit parent who died in 1971, was nevertheless a profoundly effective political officer, teaching his children "the day will come when things in this country get so bad, the Red Army will be welcomed as an army of liberation.” Hence I knew from the beginning the American Dream was a Big Lie and lived my life accordingly.