Sunday, February 4, 2007
It's all about the money.
Deanna Spingola
February 4, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
We repeatedly hear claims from the Propaganda Ministry that Iran, the current "axis of evil," is developing devastating nuclear power and for this reason deserves sanctions and a warning from the U.S. which, if unheeded, may ultimately result in a "shock and awe" air invasion targeting strategic facilities resulting in inevitable collateral damage, a more socially acceptable word for catastrophic numbers of dead civilians. The real goal is total dominance of the entire oil-rich Middle East through profit-producing war accompanied by expensive reconstruction. There is more profit in death and destruction than there is in life and production.
Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush, from March 1989 to January 1993 during which time he directed Operation Just Cause in Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, paid Brown & Root Services, a private company, $3.9 million to provide a classified document detailing how they could supply goods and services to American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later that very same year, the Pentagon spent an additional $5 million with BRS to update their report. They immediately received a five year contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia."[1]
Brown & Root Services had been acquired by Halliburton in 1962, a major company in the burgeoning military/industrial complex. As Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney created an "unprecedented lucrative market for the firm he would go on to head - Halliburton."[2]
Always closely allied to greedy politicians, Texas based BRS, a huge campaign contributor, built roads, harbors, landing strips and military bases in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. BRS, who paid LBJ's 1948 campaign expenses, had a long relationship with war hawk Lyndon B. Johnson, U.N. devotee,[3] who used the Tonkin Bay incident (read his remarks to Congress) to escalate the Vietnam War after JFK's unfortunate death (Johnson chose the Warren Commission members). "The abuse of political influence is endemic to Brown & Root, a pathology that repeats itself decade after decade."[4] Texas appears to be a unique spawning ground.
After Cheney left the Defense Department on January 20, 1993, he became a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) until October 1995 when this life-long government insider became chairman and CEO of Halliburton who hired him for his Capital Hill cronyism and Pentagon contacts; they were not disappointed. Under Cheney's direction, Halliburton, from 1995-2000, increased its taxpayer-insured, Export-Import bank loans from $100 million to $3.8 billion in addition to nearly doubling the government contract business. The company became one of the Pentagon's top contractors. By 1999, the Pentagon had spent over $1.2 billion with BRS. Then in May 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave BRS another five year contract worth $731 million for services in the Balkans.[5]
President Bill Clinton stated in his Executive Order #12957, dated March 15, 1995, "that the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat." That Executive Order entitled "Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to the Development of Iranian Petroleum Resources"[6] which prohibited "certain transactions with respect to the development of Iranian petroleum resources" by any U.S. citizen or company. Members of Congress were aware of this order and it was published in the Federal Register.
The Executive Order notwithstanding, Halliburton CEO Cheney lobbied congressional cronies against sanctioning Iran so that his company could do business with this "axis of evil." Cheney went to the Middle East in March 1996, where he spoke to a group of mostly U.S. businessmen. He said "that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and Libya to foster better relationships." He further stated: "Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well. I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what's best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like."[7]
Obviously, Cheney was and continues to be amply rewarded. Cheney is paid between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year in "deferred compensation."[8] Cheney either hired or promoted many of the executives who currently direct Halliburton and KBR. Interestingly, Cheney resigned from his lucrative Halliburton position on July 25, 2000, to spearhead the selection process in finding a running mate for George W. Bush.
During Cheney's five years at Halliburton, benefactors of many no-bid government contracts, the company made substantial political contributions, mostly to Republicans - a total of $1,212,000 in soft and hard money to candidates and parties. In the previous five years, the company gave $534,750.[9] Do campaign contributions affect votes? See these graphs.
Cheney has been the most powerful number two in U.S. history. It was no surprise that Rumsfeld, long-time cohort, was installed at the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. Cheney also insisted, despite the strenuous objections of Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that Neo-con Paul Wolfowitz be second in command at the Pentagon. He further insisted, against Powell's objections, on installing "ultra-unilateralist" John Bolton, then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Cheney, stacking the administration, was also behind the appointment of Elliott Abrams as the head of the Middle East office on the National Security Council. Cheney chose I. Lewis '"Scooter" Libby as his chief of staff and national security adviser. Libby and Wolfowitz had worked on a 1992 draft strategy that called for global U.S. military dominance. Libby and Cheney purportedly visited CIA headquarters numerous times prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion. This was viewed as applying pressure on CIA analysts to develop a link between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda.[10]
SNIP!
February 4, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
We repeatedly hear claims from the Propaganda Ministry that Iran, the current "axis of evil," is developing devastating nuclear power and for this reason deserves sanctions and a warning from the U.S. which, if unheeded, may ultimately result in a "shock and awe" air invasion targeting strategic facilities resulting in inevitable collateral damage, a more socially acceptable word for catastrophic numbers of dead civilians. The real goal is total dominance of the entire oil-rich Middle East through profit-producing war accompanied by expensive reconstruction. There is more profit in death and destruction than there is in life and production.
Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the administration of George H. W. Bush, from March 1989 to January 1993 during which time he directed Operation Just Cause in Panama and Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, paid Brown & Root Services, a private company, $3.9 million to provide a classified document detailing how they could supply goods and services to American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later that very same year, the Pentagon spent an additional $5 million with BRS to update their report. They immediately received a five year contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia."[1]
Brown & Root Services had been acquired by Halliburton in 1962, a major company in the burgeoning military/industrial complex. As Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney created an "unprecedented lucrative market for the firm he would go on to head - Halliburton."[2]
Always closely allied to greedy politicians, Texas based BRS, a huge campaign contributor, built roads, harbors, landing strips and military bases in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. BRS, who paid LBJ's 1948 campaign expenses, had a long relationship with war hawk Lyndon B. Johnson, U.N. devotee,[3] who used the Tonkin Bay incident (read his remarks to Congress) to escalate the Vietnam War after JFK's unfortunate death (Johnson chose the Warren Commission members). "The abuse of political influence is endemic to Brown & Root, a pathology that repeats itself decade after decade."[4] Texas appears to be a unique spawning ground.
After Cheney left the Defense Department on January 20, 1993, he became a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) until October 1995 when this life-long government insider became chairman and CEO of Halliburton who hired him for his Capital Hill cronyism and Pentagon contacts; they were not disappointed. Under Cheney's direction, Halliburton, from 1995-2000, increased its taxpayer-insured, Export-Import bank loans from $100 million to $3.8 billion in addition to nearly doubling the government contract business. The company became one of the Pentagon's top contractors. By 1999, the Pentagon had spent over $1.2 billion with BRS. Then in May 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave BRS another five year contract worth $731 million for services in the Balkans.[5]
President Bill Clinton stated in his Executive Order #12957, dated March 15, 1995, "that the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat." That Executive Order entitled "Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to the Development of Iranian Petroleum Resources"[6] which prohibited "certain transactions with respect to the development of Iranian petroleum resources" by any U.S. citizen or company. Members of Congress were aware of this order and it was published in the Federal Register.
The Executive Order notwithstanding, Halliburton CEO Cheney lobbied congressional cronies against sanctioning Iran so that his company could do business with this "axis of evil." Cheney went to the Middle East in March 1996, where he spoke to a group of mostly U.S. businessmen. He said "that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and Libya to foster better relationships." He further stated: "Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well. I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what's best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like."[7]
Obviously, Cheney was and continues to be amply rewarded. Cheney is paid between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year in "deferred compensation."[8] Cheney either hired or promoted many of the executives who currently direct Halliburton and KBR. Interestingly, Cheney resigned from his lucrative Halliburton position on July 25, 2000, to spearhead the selection process in finding a running mate for George W. Bush.
During Cheney's five years at Halliburton, benefactors of many no-bid government contracts, the company made substantial political contributions, mostly to Republicans - a total of $1,212,000 in soft and hard money to candidates and parties. In the previous five years, the company gave $534,750.[9] Do campaign contributions affect votes? See these graphs.
Cheney has been the most powerful number two in U.S. history. It was no surprise that Rumsfeld, long-time cohort, was installed at the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. Cheney also insisted, despite the strenuous objections of Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that Neo-con Paul Wolfowitz be second in command at the Pentagon. He further insisted, against Powell's objections, on installing "ultra-unilateralist" John Bolton, then vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Cheney, stacking the administration, was also behind the appointment of Elliott Abrams as the head of the Middle East office on the National Security Council. Cheney chose I. Lewis '"Scooter" Libby as his chief of staff and national security adviser. Libby and Wolfowitz had worked on a 1992 draft strategy that called for global U.S. military dominance. Libby and Cheney purportedly visited CIA headquarters numerous times prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion. This was viewed as applying pressure on CIA analysts to develop a link between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda.[10]
SNIP!
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
What Do You Call Someone Who Wants to Get Their Hands on Your 5-Year-Old?
by Vin Suprynowicz
Three months ago, Nevada held an election. The Democratic candidate, state Sen. Dina Titus, wanted to grab millions more in tax moneys (you thought it would all be free?) and use it to impose mandatory all-day compulsion schooling for 5-year-olds. She ran against a pleasant congressman and former airline pilot named Jim Gibbons, who said he’d prefer to study the results of a current pilot program before committing to such a huge scheme.
Titus lost. Does that mean her plan to grab every 5-year-old out of Nevada homes under threat of armed force is dead?
Oh, please.
Gov. Gibbons’ weak-kneed "Let’s study it" may postpone the inevitable for a few years, but government-funded mandatory schooling from age 4 to 18 (or will it be 22?) will arrive – and bankrupt us – in our lifetimes.
What will the "studies" show? The same thing studies of the federal "Head Start" program show: universal government-run kindergarten improves academic performance in first grade among the kind of kids who didn’t used to attend kindergarten, but all such improvement washes out by the sixth grade.
Given that the main function of the government schools is to slow everyone down and level everyone out, this should hardly come as a surprise.
No net gain for a price of millions: One would think that makes universal tax-funded kindergarten a non-starter. But parents will overwhelmingly enthuse over the prospect of getting someone else to fund their all-day child care a full year earlier, and the program will be adopted with much glee and celebration.
At no point in this "study of the results" of all-day kindergarten will anyone mention the ongoing growth of social pathologies among the young – violent crime, vandalism, unwed pregnancy, drug use, a thorough scorn for their parents’ beliefs and standards, and a total absence of historical context as they’re led by the nose to demand a new government "program" to solve each new manufactured "crisis."
Even though these unpleasant and very costly outcomes track perfectly with the growing amount of time kids have spent in government-run "schools" over the past 70 years, most Americans will look at you like you’re nuts if you posit any CAUSAL relationship between these problems and locking our kids up in mandatory youth propaganda camps for ever more hours, days, and years.
What is "kindergarten"?
Friedrich Froebel opened the first kindergarten, in Germany, in 1840, as a means of "socializing" children, writes Joel Spring, in The American School, 1642–1885.
"As the name implies, the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants."
The idea was borrowed and brought to America in 1873, when the first kindergarten opened in St. Louis. Its purpose, according to its superintendent, William Torrey Harris, was not literacy, but to rescue children from poverty and bad families by bringing them into the school system early in life.
Education historian Marvin Lazerson, in his study of the Boston school system, found 19th century administrators there saw kindergarten as an indirect means of teaching slum parents how to run good homes. The goal was always to increase the child’s time under government supervision, and to do away with "idle time" – by which these experts meant any time out of school – since (in the words of a Massachusetts superintendent of schools in 1897) "Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing."
Mr. Spring comments: "By the early twentieth century the school in fact had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school showers, nurses, social centers and Americanization centers turned the school into a central social agency in urban America. ...Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control."
"Today’s advocates of "early intervention" and year-round schools seem to share that objective," comments Sheldon Richman, author of the 1994 book Separating School and State.
In discussing this subject I often turn to the words of former New York City (and state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, because he learned the reality of modern-day compulsion schooling in the trenches, on the front lines – and because his research stands unrefuted.
In Gatto’s talk "Nine Assumptions of Schooling – and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss" he asks:
"Did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don’t want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. ... Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25 percent time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence? ...
"Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway’s, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan’s? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? ...
"Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can’t be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don’t seem to possess. ...
"If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans."
"Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual development or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering," Mr. Gatto explains, "a world where ‘socializing’ and ‘psychologizing’ the classroom preempted attention and rewards.
"Once this design was in place – and it was firmly in place by 1917 – all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like ‘IQ tests’ or ‘kindergartens’, and a full palette of intermediate colors like ‘multiculturalism’, ‘rainbow’ curricula and ‘universal self esteem’. Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current ‘problem’.
"But the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids. ..."
So kids must be wrested away from their parents and taught that it’s really the state that has their best interests at heart, from the earliest possible age.
And once parental authority is undercut, delinquency becomes inevitable, Gatto reports.
"Delinquent behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently intimidated into silence. Or dismissed."
In Chapter 15 of his masterwork, The Underground History of American Education, Gatto goes into detail:
"The push to extend ‘day care’ further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders. ...
"The social pathologies we associate with modern children are natural byproducts of our modern system of schooling which produces:
"Children indifferent to the adult world of values and accomplishment, defying the universal human experience laid down over thousands of years that a close study of grown-ups is always the most exciting and one of the most necessary occupations of youth. Have you noticed how very few people, adults included, want to grow up anymore? Toys are the lingua franca of American society for the masses and the classes. ...
"Children with a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is linked to today. Children who live in a continuous present. Conversely, children with no sense of the past and of how the past has shaped and limited the present, shaped and limited their own choices, predetermined their values and destinies to an overwhelming degree.
"Children who lack compassion for misfortune, who laugh at weakness, who betray their friends and families, who show contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. Children condemned to be alone, to age with bitterness, to die in fear.
"Children who can’t stand intimacy or frankness. Children who masquerade behind personalities hastily fabricated from watching television and from other distorted gauges of human nature. Behind the masks lurk crippled souls. Aware of this, they avoid the close scrutiny intimate relationships demand because it will expose their shallowness of which they have some awareness. ...
"Dependent children who grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified, dependent adults, passive and timid in the face of new challenges. And yet this crippling condition is often hidden under a patina of bravado, anger, aggressiveness."
Sound familiar? Want more of the same? Dragoon every Nevada kid into the mandatory government homogeneity camps at the age of 5.
February 3, 2007
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.
Copyright © 2007 Vin Suprynowicz
by Vin Suprynowicz
Three months ago, Nevada held an election. The Democratic candidate, state Sen. Dina Titus, wanted to grab millions more in tax moneys (you thought it would all be free?) and use it to impose mandatory all-day compulsion schooling for 5-year-olds. She ran against a pleasant congressman and former airline pilot named Jim Gibbons, who said he’d prefer to study the results of a current pilot program before committing to such a huge scheme.
Titus lost. Does that mean her plan to grab every 5-year-old out of Nevada homes under threat of armed force is dead?
Oh, please.
Gov. Gibbons’ weak-kneed "Let’s study it" may postpone the inevitable for a few years, but government-funded mandatory schooling from age 4 to 18 (or will it be 22?) will arrive – and bankrupt us – in our lifetimes.
What will the "studies" show? The same thing studies of the federal "Head Start" program show: universal government-run kindergarten improves academic performance in first grade among the kind of kids who didn’t used to attend kindergarten, but all such improvement washes out by the sixth grade.
Given that the main function of the government schools is to slow everyone down and level everyone out, this should hardly come as a surprise.
No net gain for a price of millions: One would think that makes universal tax-funded kindergarten a non-starter. But parents will overwhelmingly enthuse over the prospect of getting someone else to fund their all-day child care a full year earlier, and the program will be adopted with much glee and celebration.
At no point in this "study of the results" of all-day kindergarten will anyone mention the ongoing growth of social pathologies among the young – violent crime, vandalism, unwed pregnancy, drug use, a thorough scorn for their parents’ beliefs and standards, and a total absence of historical context as they’re led by the nose to demand a new government "program" to solve each new manufactured "crisis."
Even though these unpleasant and very costly outcomes track perfectly with the growing amount of time kids have spent in government-run "schools" over the past 70 years, most Americans will look at you like you’re nuts if you posit any CAUSAL relationship between these problems and locking our kids up in mandatory youth propaganda camps for ever more hours, days, and years.
What is "kindergarten"?
Friedrich Froebel opened the first kindergarten, in Germany, in 1840, as a means of "socializing" children, writes Joel Spring, in The American School, 1642–1885.
"As the name implies, the kindergarten was conceived as a garden of children to be cultivated in the same manner as plants."
The idea was borrowed and brought to America in 1873, when the first kindergarten opened in St. Louis. Its purpose, according to its superintendent, William Torrey Harris, was not literacy, but to rescue children from poverty and bad families by bringing them into the school system early in life.
Education historian Marvin Lazerson, in his study of the Boston school system, found 19th century administrators there saw kindergarten as an indirect means of teaching slum parents how to run good homes. The goal was always to increase the child’s time under government supervision, and to do away with "idle time" – by which these experts meant any time out of school – since (in the words of a Massachusetts superintendent of schools in 1897) "Idleness is an opportunity for evil-doing."
Mr. Spring comments: "By the early twentieth century the school in fact had expanded its functions into areas not dreamed of in the early part of the previous century. Kindergartens, playgrounds, school showers, nurses, social centers and Americanization centers turned the school into a central social agency in urban America. ...Within this framework, the school became a major agency for social control."
"Today’s advocates of "early intervention" and year-round schools seem to share that objective," comments Sheldon Richman, author of the 1994 book Separating School and State.
In discussing this subject I often turn to the words of former New York City (and state) Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, because he learned the reality of modern-day compulsion schooling in the trenches, on the front lines – and because his research stands unrefuted.
In Gatto’s talk "Nine Assumptions of Schooling – and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss" he asks:
"Did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn’t allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don’t want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. ... Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25 percent time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence? ...
"Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway’s, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan’s? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? ...
"Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can’t be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don’t seem to possess. ...
"If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans."
"Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual development or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering," Mr. Gatto explains, "a world where ‘socializing’ and ‘psychologizing’ the classroom preempted attention and rewards.
"Once this design was in place – and it was firmly in place by 1917 – all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like ‘IQ tests’ or ‘kindergartens’, and a full palette of intermediate colors like ‘multiculturalism’, ‘rainbow’ curricula and ‘universal self esteem’. Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current ‘problem’.
"But the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids. ..."
So kids must be wrested away from their parents and taught that it’s really the state that has their best interests at heart, from the earliest possible age.
And once parental authority is undercut, delinquency becomes inevitable, Gatto reports.
"Delinquent behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently intimidated into silence. Or dismissed."
In Chapter 15 of his masterwork, The Underground History of American Education, Gatto goes into detail:
"The push to extend ‘day care’ further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders. ...
"The social pathologies we associate with modern children are natural byproducts of our modern system of schooling which produces:
"Children indifferent to the adult world of values and accomplishment, defying the universal human experience laid down over thousands of years that a close study of grown-ups is always the most exciting and one of the most necessary occupations of youth. Have you noticed how very few people, adults included, want to grow up anymore? Toys are the lingua franca of American society for the masses and the classes. ...
"Children with a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is linked to today. Children who live in a continuous present. Conversely, children with no sense of the past and of how the past has shaped and limited the present, shaped and limited their own choices, predetermined their values and destinies to an overwhelming degree.
"Children who lack compassion for misfortune, who laugh at weakness, who betray their friends and families, who show contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. Children condemned to be alone, to age with bitterness, to die in fear.
"Children who can’t stand intimacy or frankness. Children who masquerade behind personalities hastily fabricated from watching television and from other distorted gauges of human nature. Behind the masks lurk crippled souls. Aware of this, they avoid the close scrutiny intimate relationships demand because it will expose their shallowness of which they have some awareness. ...
"Dependent children who grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified, dependent adults, passive and timid in the face of new challenges. And yet this crippling condition is often hidden under a patina of bravado, anger, aggressiveness."
Sound familiar? Want more of the same? Dragoon every Nevada kid into the mandatory government homogeneity camps at the age of 5.
February 3, 2007
Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.
Copyright © 2007 Vin Suprynowicz
Freedom is the price for empire.
Nemesis
by Charley Reese
It's axiomatic, based on history, that no nation can maintain an empire abroad and a democracy at home. We are now about to pay for our empire, and the price is American freedom.
This is the message of a new book by Chalmers Johnson, a historian. His latest book is titled Nemesis and is the third work in what has turned out to be a trilogy on the American Empire. The first two were Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.
No American president in my memory has shown more disdain for the Constitution and its limits on power than George W. Bush. His ridiculous claim that his "signing statements" can alter the laws passed by Congress and his latest claim to alter the rule-making of various government agencies are just two examples.
The outrageous claims by his attorney general that the U.S. could conduct warrantless wiretaps and Internet intercepts and that the Constitution does not guarantee the right of habeas corpus are about as stark a warning that freedom is in grave danger as you could ask for. The Bush administration has politicized science and intelligence and taken this country to war based on lies. It has condoned torture and scoffed at international law by using secret prisons where people are tortured and denied the most basic rights.
The federal authorities can break into your home and plant surveillance devices without notifying you. They can get a list of books you buy or check out of a library and put the bookseller or librarian in prison if the person tells you about it. If you are an alien, perfectly legal, you can still be picked up and held indefinitely.
Of course, it is all done in the name of protecting the American people. That is the standard excuse that has been used since the earliest empires. We're only trying to make sure you're safe, they claim. Well, one should remember that there were no safer streets than Moscow under Stalin or Berlin under Hitler – unless, of course, it was the government that wanted to do you harm.
Given a choice between government security and freedom with risks, always choose freedom. Criminals, including terrorists, don't have much power, but government possesses crushing power. Of course, we Americans are conditioned to view our government as friendly and protective, but that is a mistake.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn made an interesting point in his "Gulag Archipelago." He said the reason so few Russians resisted when the secret police came to get them was because they were innocent. They had done nothing wrong, they were loyal, and they expected their government to realize that their arrest was a mistake. The government didn't, of course, because they were victims of a dictator's paranoia.
Unfortunately, Americans have virtually no control over their government between elections. President Bush has two years to go and can do anything he wants to, including taking us to war with Iran. Government propaganda against Iran is following the exact same pattern as propaganda against Iraq. It is accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons in the face of evidence to the contrary. Now it is accusing Iran of making improvised explosive devices for the Iraqi insurgents. That strikes me as a lie. The IED is just a bureaucratic name for a booby trap, and you don't need to be an explosives expert or an electronic wizard to make them.
Congress really has only two choices. It could initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, or it could cut off the funds for the war. I doubt there is enough sand to do either.
February 3, 2007
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Charley Reese Archives
by Charley Reese
It's axiomatic, based on history, that no nation can maintain an empire abroad and a democracy at home. We are now about to pay for our empire, and the price is American freedom.
This is the message of a new book by Chalmers Johnson, a historian. His latest book is titled Nemesis and is the third work in what has turned out to be a trilogy on the American Empire. The first two were Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.
No American president in my memory has shown more disdain for the Constitution and its limits on power than George W. Bush. His ridiculous claim that his "signing statements" can alter the laws passed by Congress and his latest claim to alter the rule-making of various government agencies are just two examples.
The outrageous claims by his attorney general that the U.S. could conduct warrantless wiretaps and Internet intercepts and that the Constitution does not guarantee the right of habeas corpus are about as stark a warning that freedom is in grave danger as you could ask for. The Bush administration has politicized science and intelligence and taken this country to war based on lies. It has condoned torture and scoffed at international law by using secret prisons where people are tortured and denied the most basic rights.
The federal authorities can break into your home and plant surveillance devices without notifying you. They can get a list of books you buy or check out of a library and put the bookseller or librarian in prison if the person tells you about it. If you are an alien, perfectly legal, you can still be picked up and held indefinitely.
Of course, it is all done in the name of protecting the American people. That is the standard excuse that has been used since the earliest empires. We're only trying to make sure you're safe, they claim. Well, one should remember that there were no safer streets than Moscow under Stalin or Berlin under Hitler – unless, of course, it was the government that wanted to do you harm.
Given a choice between government security and freedom with risks, always choose freedom. Criminals, including terrorists, don't have much power, but government possesses crushing power. Of course, we Americans are conditioned to view our government as friendly and protective, but that is a mistake.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn made an interesting point in his "Gulag Archipelago." He said the reason so few Russians resisted when the secret police came to get them was because they were innocent. They had done nothing wrong, they were loyal, and they expected their government to realize that their arrest was a mistake. The government didn't, of course, because they were victims of a dictator's paranoia.
Unfortunately, Americans have virtually no control over their government between elections. President Bush has two years to go and can do anything he wants to, including taking us to war with Iran. Government propaganda against Iran is following the exact same pattern as propaganda against Iraq. It is accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons in the face of evidence to the contrary. Now it is accusing Iran of making improvised explosive devices for the Iraqi insurgents. That strikes me as a lie. The IED is just a bureaucratic name for a booby trap, and you don't need to be an explosives expert or an electronic wizard to make them.
Congress really has only two choices. It could initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, or it could cut off the funds for the war. I doubt there is enough sand to do either.
February 3, 2007
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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