michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Aug 28, 2006 11:24:27 GMT 4
TeenScreen - Normal Kids Labeled Mentally IllDuring the course of a conversation I had this past week, the topic came up of the number of children and adults on psychotropic drugs. The high level of this mass drugging of our population is astounding. Nearly every person I meet is on some kind of antidepressant. I was looking through news to post and the article below came to my attention; so I took it as a clue from the Universe that this needs to be presented. Now I'm not taking away one bit of the huge karmic debt the pharmaceutical companies owe to humanity but doesn't much of this dependence on psychotropic drugs belong to society? Earlier today, before I saw the article, my thinking went to how people don't want to feel any kind of pain anymore, particularly emotional pain. It's so easy to pop a pill and make it all go away. Emotional pain and discomfort need to be validated and felt when going through life's transitions and sorrows. Many times Humans experience emotional pain for a reason; it tells us 'something is wrong in paradise.' It serves as motivation to change: change our way of navigating through life, change our situations, change our emotional reactions to situations and other people, and finally to change the course of society. The following article brings to light the horrendous and VERY PROFITABLE, mandatory in-school mental screening of our children, which schools have no business doing. I believe it is a good thing for parents to fight against this. But in all the articles I see on this topic, the only questions ever asked are why is the government allowing this and such. Never do we reframe the questioning to ask, "What are our children and their behavior telling us?" or, "What's wrong with our society?" and, "Why are we so quick to take the pain away?" Might I suggest that all parents here read WITH their children, The Giver by Lois Lowry and see for yourselves what happens to a society that doesn't want to feel any pain. www.sparknotes.com/lit/giver/summary.htmlMichelle PS: Many thanks to 'David' for planting this seed. One never knows who or what the Creator will put in your path to cause enough 'discomfort' to review how one looks at life. TeenScreen - Normal Kids Labeled Mentally IllAugust 23, 2006 by Evelyn Pringle Despite years of public outcry, based on recommendations by President Bush's New Freedom Commission to screen all school children for mental illness, TeenScreen is now being administered in the nation's public school system and children are being regularly diagnosed with one, or more, disorders chosen from the close to 400 listed in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV" (DSM), also known as the psychiatric "Billing Bible." The list of mental disorders to chose from when diagnosing children mentally ill with TeenScreen, are "voted" into the Billing Bible by members of the American Psychiatric Association, and include, among others, conduct disorder, avoidant personality disorder, mathematics disorder, reading disorder, disorder of written expression, general anxiety disorder, nightmare disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and factious disorder. A mental illness that drew a lot of ridicule recently, is called the "intermittent explosive disorder," for people who fly into occasional but unwarranted fits of rage. Critics view TeenScreen is a main components in an overall pharmaceutical industry-backed marketing scheme pushed along by the NFC, aimed at recruiting new customers for psychiatric drugs. The NFC's report specifically identifies the target population Big Pharma is after when it states: "Schools are in a key position to identify mental health problems early and to provide a link to appropriate services. Every day more than 52 million students attend over 114,000 schools in the U.S. When combined with the six million adults working at those schools, almost one-fifth of the population passes through the Nation's schools on any given weekday." The TeenScreen survey is billed as a suicide prevention tool, but according to former government investigator, Allen Jones, "Teen Screen is a nefarious effort to recruit our children into the quagmire of biological psychiatry." "The program employs dubious screening tools administered by non-professionals," he states. "It is based on misleading science and diagnostic criteria that would be downright laughable if the stakes were not so high," he adds. "While the idea of screening kids for mental problems seems like a good idea, it ends up being nothing more than a Drugging Dragnet," says Jim Gottstein, an attorney who represents clients harmed by the psychiatric industrial complex. "The high rate at which we are drugging America's children with psychotropics," he says, "is a national disgrace." "This is junk science at it's worst," says Dr Jan Johnson, MD, "follow the money, the trail leads right back to the drug companies." Activist groups against TeenScreen have posted an online petition and plan to send it to federal, state and local lawmakers. The petition can also be used to educate people about TeenScreen because it conveys many of the facts about mental health screening and can be printed off and presented to school board members or legislators. Persons interested in signing the petition can click on the following link: www.petitiononline.com/TScreen/petition.htmlAs an additional bonus to Big Pharma, Bush set it up the overall scheme so that tax payers will foot the bill for the implementation of the TeenScreen program. On October 21, 2004, he signed a bill into law that authorized $82 million to be spent over 3 years for programs like TeenScreen. From there, the way the scheme is set up, if a child is diagnosed with a mental illness and the family can not afford the expensive regiment of psychiatric drugs, tax payers will fund the purchase of the drugs as well through public health care programs like Medicaid. The fact is, Bush and most of his Republican puppets in Congress, would not be in office today if not for the financial support of Big Pharma. Drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year sending lobbyists to Washington to call in their markers by getting industry-friendly legislation passed. According to a 2004, report by the consumer group, Public Citizen, drug companies, HMOs, their trade associations and industry-backed advocacy groups spent nearly $141 million on lobbying in 2003, and deployed over 950 lobbyists to do their bidding on Capitol Hill and at the White House. In 2003, the top 10 drug makers and trade associations spent $55.8 million on lobbying, accounting for 60% of the industry's total lobbying expenditures. A record 24 companies and trade groups each spent $1 million, or more, on lobbying in 2002. However, spending on lobbying is a drop in the bucket when compared with the $35.9 billion in profits recorded in 2003, by the 10 top companies. The industry soared past all other sectors, with profits five-and-a-half times greater than the median for industries represented in the Fortune 500. And, the efforts to influence lawmakers have not been limited to lobbying. Since 1997, the top 25 drug companies with the highest lobbying expenditures, also gave $48.6 million in campaign contributions, with 80% going to Republicans. According to concerned citizen Barbara Becker, "TeenScreen and similar projects are nothing more than a stealth trolling of the general population for drug consumers." "The roots of these projects," she says, "grow straight from the drooling over additional excessive profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry, with the blessings of too many ever-grateful politicians who also profit from it through enormous pharmaceutical political contributions." In all fairness, it should be noted that Big Pharma has managed to cozy up with a few Democrats as well. For instance, Senator Joe Lieberman has been known to pal around with lobbyists representing drug companies that provides large contributions to his campaign. In fact, according to Joe Conason in the July 17, 2006, New York Observer, Mr Liberman, "has literally been sleeping with one of their Washington representatives ever since his wife Hadassah joined Hill & Knowlton last year." "The legendary lobbying and P.R. firm," Mr Conason explains, "hired her as a 'senior counselor' in its 'health and pharmaceuticals practice.' One of the firm's clients is GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of flu vaccines, as well as many other drugs, and Mrs Lieberman joined the firm in March 2006. "In April 2005," according to Mr Conason, "Mr. Lieberman introduced a bill that would award an array of new government 'incentives' to companies like GSK to produce more vaccines'notably patent extensions on other products, at a cost of billions to governments and consumers." Mr Conason noted that the bill drew a critical commentary from by Mr Lieberman's hometown newspaper, the New Haven Register, titled, 'Lieberman Crafts Drug Company Perk.' The newspaper described the bill as being even more generous to the industry than a similar proposal by Republicans. 'The government can offer incentives and guarantees for needed public health measures,' the Register said. 'But it should not write a blank check, as these bills do," it read, "to the pharmaceutical industry that has such a large cost to the public with what may be an uncertain or dubious return.' In return for industry support, lawmakers have been very generous when doling out tax dollars to fund marketing schemes like TeenScreen. On September 21, 2005, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) announced grants of over $9.7 million in funding for the implementation of the TeenScreen Program. "The Columbia University TeenScreen Program," the press release said, "provides early identification of mental health problems, such as depression, that can lead to suicide." TeenScreen uses a voice computer version of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC ), and claims it can show signs of 30 disorders, according to an article by Reuters on October 13, 2003. On March 2, 2004, TeenScreen's Executive Director, Laurie Flynn, testified at a congressional hearing and said that in the screening process, "youth complete a 10-minute self-administered questionnaire that screens for social phobia, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicidality." The goal mentioned by Dr Paul, is obviously being reached because kids are "flunking" TeenScreen all over the country. According to Anne Yates, from Colorado, when the program was piloted at two sites in that state, at the high school, 'a whopping 50% were found to be at risk of suicide.' 'Figures from a homeless shelter,' she reports, 'were even more outrageous: 71% of the youth screened were found to have "mental disorders." 'You can bet psychiatric drugs were pushed at these kids,' Ms Yates says, 'TeenScreen is a feeder line to the drug companies.' During an interview with award-winning investigative journalist, Kelly O'Meara, officials from the highly respected Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS), described suicide screening in schools as "a dangerous scheme that will heap even more coercive pressure on parents to medicate children with potentially dangerous side effects." Further, they told Ms O'Meara, "even the government's own task force has concluded that mental health screening does little to prevent suicide." Critics say, TeenScreen asks teens about normal thoughts, feelings and emotions in a way that turns them into symptoms of mental illness. Concerned parent, Dennis McLoth says, "it looks like a way to make more young people dependent on prescription drugs earlier in life when all they really need is to deal with growing up, just like we all did before there was a drug for every ailment and new ailment to justify even more new drugs." Human rights groups contend children are being diagnosed with disorders based on nothing more than a list of behaviors. Kevin Hall, New England Director of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, notes that 'unlike medical illnesses that are found through scientific research and discovery, mental disorders are merely groups of symptoms that are voted into existence by American Psychiatric Association committees.' A May 20, 2006, article on TeenScreen in the National Journal, includes a admission by Steven Sharfstein, President of the American Psychiatric Association, that states: "medical science has no biological or chemical tests that can determine whether a person is depressed, suicidal, schizophrenic, or afflicted with another mental problem. There is no laboratory test that establishes a specific diagnosis." Psychiatrist, Dr Nathaniel Lehrman says the claim that TeenScreen can reduce suicides is unsupported by any data. "It is impossible," he explains, "on cursory examination, or on the basis of the Program's brief written screening test, to detect suicidality or "mental illness," however we define it." Another complaint heard often from activists is the fact that TeenScreen labels children mentally ill without testing for possible underlying health problems such as nutritional deficiencies, allergies, or other physical illnesses, before initiating drug treatment. And, the medications the children end up taking as a result of the screening are the most high-priced and dangerous psychotropic drugs on the market, and include selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor antidepressants (SSRIs), like Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, and Effexor, and atypical antipsychotics, such as Zyprexa, Risperdal, Geodon, Seroquel, Clozaril, and Abilify, and ADHD stimulant drugs such as Adderall, Dexedrine and Ritalin. In recent years, the use of these drugs with children has escalated. An examination of prescriptions by Medco Health Solutions in 2004, for 300,000 children ages 19 and younger, concluded that for the first time in history, spending on drugs for behavior problems with kids exceeded expenditures for any other medication category, including antibiotics. According to Dr Barry Duncan, author of the book, "What's Right With You," more than 150 million prescriptions were written for antidepressants in 2003, with sales worth more than $14 billion. And he goes on to note that the "rates of depression have not changed for thirty years," and "suicide rates, despite the millions taking antidepressants, have not reduced." In June 2005, the Washington Post reported that despite "a dramatic increase in treatment of psychiatric disorders during the past 10 years, there has been no decrease in the rate of suicidal thoughts and behavior among adults," citing a study by researchers from Harvard Medical school and elsewhere, primarily funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. The study found that although people who attempt suicide were far more likely to be treated with antidepressants in 2001-03, compared to 1990-92, the rates of suicidal ideation, gestures and attempts remained basically unchanged, the Post said. TeenScreen is being used as a vehicle to get kids on SSRIs, even though there has been a steady stream of warnings against treating kids with SSRIs for years, and even though the drugs are not approved for use with children. Back on June 10, 2003, British pubic health authorities issued a warning of a two-to three-fold increased risk of suicide in pediatric clinical trials during testing of SSRIs. A week or so later, on June 18, 2003, Glaxo issued a warning to British physicians against the use of Paxil in children, acknowledging failure of clinical trials "to demonstrate efficacy in major depressive disorders and doubling the rate of reported adverse events - including suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts - compared to placebo." On August 22, 2003, Wyeth sent warnings to UK and US healthcare professionals stating: "In pediatric clinical trials, there were increased reports of hostility and especially in Major Depressive Disorder, suicide-related adverse events such as suicidal ideation and self-harm." On December 18, 2003, Eli Lilly issued two letters to British healthcare professionals, indicating that Prozac was not recommended for children - for any use. During FDA hearings on SSRIs back in February 2004, researchers presented evidence showing SSRIs to be little or no more effective than placebos. Psychologist, David Antonuccio, from the University of Nevada Medical School, was part of a team that analyzed 12 studies and told the committee, 'Our conclusions were that the advantages of the antidepressants in children were so small and so trivial as to be clinically insignificant.' 'In order to evaluate the cost effectiveness of antidepressant use in children, the committee must consider the benefits, as well as the risks,' Dr Antonuccio testified. 'Clinically meaningful benefits have not been adequately demonstrated in depressed children," he said, "therefore, no extra risk is warranted.' 'An increased risk of suicidal behavior is certainly not justified by these minimal benefits,' he warned. 'Neither are the established increased risks of other commonly reported side effects, which include agitation, insomnia, and gastrointestinal problems,' he added. On July 21, 2004, the Journal of the American Medical Association, also reported that there was a significantly higher risk of suicide and suicidal thoughts during the first 9 days of treatment with SSRIs, and that children who were first starting treatment were 4 times more likely to think about suicide, and 38 times more likely to commit suicide and that children as young as five had committed suicide while taking these drugs. In the fall of 2004, the FDA ordered drug makers to post a black box warning on SSRIs, the most serious warning a drug can carry. The problem is black box warnings do not stop doctors from prescribing SSRIs to children. "Unfortunately," said Senator Charles Grassley, who had been conducting oversight of the FDA from his position as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, in response to the news of a black box warning on SSRIs, "the poor performance data for these drugs has been coupled with the very compelling and heart-wrenching testimony from parents and other public witnesses who identify the medications themselves as triggering tragic and unexpected suicides and suicidal behavior among users." "I understand," he continued, "that the testimony yesterday even included discussions about patients who had not been suffering from depression, yet were prescribed these powerful drugs by physicians who may perhaps have been all too ready to medicate their patients." When reviewing studies that had previously been suppressed, the FDA found one trial on the SSRI, Paxil, with a "possibly suicide-related" risk of 6.5 percent, and a 5.4% risk of suicide attempts, compared to a 1.1% and zero, respectively in patients taking a placebo. In fact, in 2004, Paxil maker, Glaxo, was sued by New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, for committing fraud by hiding studies that "not only failed to show any benefit for the drug in children but demonstrated that children taking Paxil were more likely to become suicidal than those taking a placebo." In September 2005, British public health officials instructed doctors to never prescribe SSRIs to children without providing psychotherapy as well. Physicians were also told to never prescribe the drugs without trying other alternative drugs first, and to not prescribe Effexor or Paxil to children under any condition. In addition to all the other problems with SSRIs, previously suppressed studies also show the drugs are addictive. In June 2003, Glaxo, removed labels that said Paxil was not habit-forming after thousands of patients claimed they had become addicted to the drug. Experts warn that SSRIs can also cause children to become violent as well as suicidal. According to Dr Julian Whitaker, SSRIs cause akathisia, a mental and physical agitation that sparks self-destructive, violent behavior, and induce disassociative reactions that make patients who take the drugs insensitive to the consequences of their behavior. This is the type of drug, he says, that Eric Harris was taking when he killed his fellow students at Columbine. Kip Kinkel was on Prozac, Dr Whitaker says, when he killed his parents and then went to his high school in Oregon, and killed two students and wounded 22 others, and says Joseph Wesbecker was also taking Prozac when he killed 7 people at a printing plant in Kentucky, before taking his own life. In 2003, seventeen-year-old, Julie Woodward, took a test at North Penn High School, in North Wales, Pennsylvania, that said she was suffering from depression and two doctors convinced her parents, Tom and Kathy Woodward, to put her on Zoloft. Julie's parents say they watched as her behaviors got steadily worse as soon as she began taking the drug. On the third day, Julie was arguing with her mother, and all of a sudden pushed her mother down to the floor. Everyone in the family was shocked because Julie had never been violent before. 'It was an out-of-character act,' Tom Woodward notes. Over the next few days, the usually calm Julie, became extremely irritable, could not sit still, and began pacing incessantly. She also became reclusive, her parents recall. Six days after she began taking Zoloft, Julie hanged herself in the family's garage. Since their daughter's suicide, Tom and Kathy have become activists and have work diligently in attempt to educate others parents about the dangers of SSRIs. Sue Weibert, is an ardent activist against TeenScreen, and has been investigating the program for well over a year. She recently found that when a school enters into a contract to administer the TeenScreen survey, it must agree to screen a minimum of 200 children per season. According to Ms Weibert, a recent study showed 33% of the kids screened test positive, and quoting a figure provided by Dr Shafer seven years ago in 1999, the study said the cost was about $37 per child per screening. So all total, 200 times a rounded off fee of $35 would amount to $7,000 in tax dollars just for the screening. After that, the 33% who screen positive are sent for a "further assessment" at an average cost of $250 to parents. Screening promoters claim that currently, only one out of every 3 children who are mentally ill receives treatment. "That being the case," says Jan Eastgate, the International President of the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, "with mass screening already in play, if we do not act to prevent this, we can very shortly expect to have 30 million American children prescribed mind-altering drugs." Parents are beginning to strike back against schools when their children are screened without their consent. Last year, an Indiana high school was sued for subjecting 15-year-old student to mental health testing with TeenScreen and diagnosing the teen with two mental illnesses, without her parents' knowledge or consent. A Massachusetts department of education investigation recently determined that a counselor at the Thomas Hamilton Primary School violated federal law in April 2005, when a student, who was enrolled in a special education class due to a speech delay, was screened for ADHD, without parental consent. The investigation followed complaints by the mother that the counselor had pressured her to put her daughter on drugs for 3 years. The mother said she did not give consent for a mental evaluation and pulled her children out of the school because of the incident. Wilmette, Illinois, attorney, S Randolph Kretchmar, defends patients who are violated by the psychiatric industry, and says he is dead against drugging and labeling children with mental health disorders. 'The great crime of psychiatry and the pushers of psychiatric drugs,' he advises, 'is that they have purposely confused us to sell their products.' 'What the drugs do is disable people,' he says, 'it's just that simple.''They may disable people from behaving badly,' he explains, 'but they also disable people in other ways, generally, neurologically.' He points out that a slow reader or difficult middle-schooler is no threat to public safety. 'When it becomes popular,' he says, 'to neurologically disable children from being disagreeable to their teachers and their parents, we descend into some horrific barbarism, and sacrifice the future of the human race.'This month, the CCHR issued a report titled, "The Side Effects of Common Psychiatric Drugs," that explains the various adverse effects of psychiatric drugs and defines the complex medical terms that often makes it hard for readers to understand the side effects. The report also includes the recent FDA warnings about specific drugs, as well as information, they say drug makers have kept hidden for years. Copies of the report can be obtained from their web site. SOURCE: www.NewsTarget.com/020092.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Sept 7, 2006 13:28:17 GMT 4
U.S. Lags in Race to Educate Its Young Population; Nation's Affordable College Opportunities DeterioratingHere's another effect of the Bush administration's dismanteling of our social programs. When you run a country into the ground, the population has to be prepared to accept low paying jobs. And, you wouldn't want the citizens to have minds trained for higher enlightened thinking.......MichelleU.S. Lags in Race to Educate Its Young Population; Nation's Affordable College Opportunities Deteriorating9/7/2006 3:02:00 AM Contact: Daphne Borromeo of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 408-271-2699 or dborromeo@highereducation.orgSAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 7 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Long the world leader in higher education, the United States has fallen behind other nations in the race to educate its young adults and workers, says a new report. Moreover, college affordability continues to deteriorate for most American students and their families.The study, Measuring Up 2006: The National Report Card on Higher Education, was released today by the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. The report card finds that as the country's well- educated baby boomer generation begins to retire, the diverse young population that will replace it does not appear prepared educationally to maintain the U.S. edge in the global economy. "The report card's findings challenge the notion that the American higher education system is still the 'best in the world,'" said Governor James B. Hunt Jr., chair of the National Center's board of directors and former governor of North Carolina. "In such key areas as college access and completion, the U.S. has made little or no progress, while other countries have made substantial gains. Our country must not remain satisfied with past achievements or reputation; we can and must mobilize our nation, our states, and our colleges for success in this global competition." Measuring Up 2006 is the fourth in a series of biennial report cards issued by the National Center, based in San Jose, California. Like the earlier reports, this one measures the performance of the nation and of each state in providing education and training beyond high school. This report card is the first in the series to compare national and state higher education performance with other nations. The Measuring Up 2006 findings show that younger Americans are falling behind young people of other nations in college enrollment and completion rates. While the United States is still a world leader in the proportion of Americans ages 35 to 64 with a college degree, it ranks seventh on this measure for 25- to 34- year-olds. Several nations have overtaken the U.S. in college access and others are close behind. In rates of college completion, the U.S. ranks in the bottom half in the most recent international comparisons."For most American families, college affordability has continued to deteriorate," Hunt added. "The share of family income required to pay for a year of college has continued to escalate for all but the wealthiest families. And financial aid for qualified students who can't afford college has not kept pace with tuition increases."Looking at trends since the early 1990s in these performance areas, the report finds: -- The proportion of family income needed to pay net college costs (after accounting for all student financial aid) at public four-year colleges has grown from 28 percent to 42 percent in Ohio; from 24 percent to 37 percent in New Jersey; from 18 percent to 30 percent in Iowa; from 25 percent to 36 percent in Oregon; and from 20 percent to 31 percent in Washington.-- State support of need-based financial aid improved significantly in Washington, California, and Maryland. -- Gaps in college participation between high- and low-income students persist. In Virginia, 58 percent of high-income and 14 percent of low-income young adults (18- to 24-year-olds) are enrolled in college; in Connecticut, the gap is 58 percent to 16 percent; in Ohio, 61 percent to 20 percent; in New Jersey, 51 percent to 20 percent; and in Illinois, 52 percent to 23 percent. -- There have been small gains in certificate and degree completion - the proportion of enrolled students earning certificates and associate's and bachelor's degrees. Most of the improvements have been in certificate completion (usually for occupational programs) rather than degree completion. Even in the best-performing states, only 65 percent of community college students return for their second year and only 67 percent of students in four-year institutions complete degrees within six years of enrolling. The United States compares very poorly with other countries in this area, according to the international comparisons in Measuring Up 2006.
-- The likelihood of a 9th grader enrolling in college four years later is less than 40 percent; and that likelihood has decreased from 44 percent to 32 percent in Hawaii; from 46 percent to 35 percent in Vermont; and from 45 percent to 37 percent in New York.-- Gaps between ethnic groups in college enrollment rates persist. For example, enrollment rate for white 18-to-24 year- olds in Colorado are 40 percent and 17 percent for non-whites; in New Jersey, 47 percent for whites and 27 percent for non-whites; in Pennsylvania, 39 percent for whites and 21 percent for non- whites. "The knowledge-based global economy has stimulated an intense international competition for college-educated and trained workers. Other nations have approached the need for higher rates of college participation and completion with a real sense of urgency we haven't yet seen in the U.S.," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center. "As the baby boom generation, the best-educated Americans in history, approach retirement age, our country could experience a drop-off in college trained workers just as the rest of the world is gearing up to surpass us in higher education."In addition to the national report card, detailed individual report cards are available for each of the 50 states. The national and state report cards are posted on the National Center's Web site: www.highereducation.orgThe National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. It is not affiliated with any government agency, political party, or college or university. The National Center conducts policy research and fosters public awareness of pressing public policy issues affecting education and training beyond high school. The purpose of the National Center's studies and reports, including Measuring Up 2006, is to stimulate public policies that will improve the effectiveness and accessibility of higher education. --- The National Center has been supported since 1998 by core grants from The Atlantic Philanthropies, The Ford Foundation, and The Pew Charitable Trusts. These grants supported the initiation of its programs and enabled the National Center to launch the report card project. The Measuring Up reports have been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. A grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported an external, independent review of the report data and methodology.
The Measuring Up national report cards on higher education were made possible by these foundations. The statements and views expressed in these reports, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funders, and are the responsibility of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 23, 2006 1:33:33 GMT 4
Bush's Family Profits From "No Child" Act By Walter F. Roche Jr. The Los Angeles Times Sunday 22 October 2006 A company headed by President Bush's brother and partly owned by his parents is benefiting from Republican connections and federal dollars targeted for economically disadvantaged students under the No Child Left Behind Act. With investments from his parents, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, and other backers, Neil Bush's company, Ignite! Learning, has placed its products in 40 U.S. school districts and now plans to market internationally. At least 13 U.S. school districts have used federal funds available through the president's signature education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, to buy Ignite's portable learning centers at $3,800 apiece. The law provides federal funds to help school districts better serve disadvantaged students and improve their performance, especially in reading and math. But Ignite does not offer reading instruction, and its math program will not be available until next year. The federal Department of Education does not monitor individual school district expenditures under the No Child program, but sets guidelines that the states are expected to enforce, spokesman Chad Colby said. Ignite executive Tom Deliganis said that "some districts seem to feel OK" about using No Child money for the Ignite purchases, "and others do not." Neil Bush said in an e-mail to The Times that Ignite's program had demonstrated success in improving the test scores of economically disadvantaged children. He also said political influence had not played a role in Ignite's rapid growth. "As our business matures in the USA we have plans to expand overseas and to work with many distinguished individuals in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa," he wrote. "Not one of these associates by the way has ever asked for any access to either of my political brothers, not one White House tour, not one autographed photo, and not one Lincoln bedroom overnight stay." Funding Laws Unclear Interviews and a review of school district documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act found that educators and legal experts were sharply divided over whether Ignite's products were worth their cost or qualified under the No Child law. The federal law requires schools to show they are meeting educational standards, or risk losing critical funding. If students fail to meet annual performance goals in reading and math tests, schools must supplement their educational offerings with tutoring and other special programs. Leigh Manasevit, a Washington attorney who specializes in federal education funding, said that districts using the No Child funds to buy products like Ignite's would have to meet "very strict" student eligibility requirements and ensure that the Ignite services were supplemental to existing programs. Known as COW, for Curriculum on Wheels (the portable learning centers resemble cows on wheels), Ignite's product line is geared toward middle school social studies, history and science. The company says it has developed a social studies program that meets curriculum requirements in seven states. Its science program meets requirements in six states. Most of Ignite's business has been obtained through sole-source contracts without competitive bidding. Neil Bush has been directly involved in marketing the product. In addition to federal or state funds, foundations and corporations have helped buy Ignite products. The Washington Times Foundation, backed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, head of the South Korea-based Unification Church, has peppered classrooms throughout Virginia with Ignite's COWs under a $1-million grant. Oil companies and Middle East interests with long political ties to the Bush family have made similar bequests. Aramco Services Co., an arm of the Saudi-owned oil company, has donated COWs to schools, as have Apache Corp., BP and Shell Oil Co. Neil Bush said he is a businessman who does not attempt to exert political influence, and he called The Times' inquiries about his venture - made just before the election - "entirely political." Big Supporters Bush's parents joined Neil as Ignite investors in 1999, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents. By 2003, the records show, Neil Bush had raised about $23 million from more than a dozen outside investors, including Mohammed Al Saddah, the head of a Kuwaiti company, and Winston Wong, the head of a Chinese computer firm. Most recently he signed up Russian fugitive business tycoon Boris A. Berezovsky and Berezovsky's partner Badri Patarkatsishvili. Barbara Bush has enthusiastically supported Ignite. In January 2004, she and Neil Bush were guests of honor at a $1,000-atable fundraiser in Oklahoma City organized by a foundation supporting the Western Heights School District. Proceeds were earmarked for the purchase of Ignite products. Organizer Mary Blankenship Pointer said she planned the event because district students were "utilizing Ignite courseware and experiencing great results. Our students were thriving." However, Western Heights school Supt. Joe Kitchens said the district eventually dropped its use of Ignite because it disagreed with changes Ignite had made in its products. "Our interest waned in it," he said.
The former first lady spurred controversy recently when she contributed to a Hurricane Katrina relief foundation for storm victims who had relocated to Texas. Her donation carried one stipulation: It had to be used by local schools for purchases of COWs. Texas accounts for 75% of Ignite's business, which is expanding rapidly in other states, Deliganis said. The company also has COWs deployed in North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, California, the District of Columbia, Georgia and Florida, he said. COWs recently showed up at Hill Classical Middle School in California's Long Beach Unified School District. A San Jose middle school also bought Ignite's products but has since closed. Neil Bush said Ignite has more than 1,700 COWs in classrooms. Shift in Strategy But Ignite's educational strategy has changed dramatically, and some are critical of its new approach. Shortly after Ignite was formed in Austin, Texas, in 1999, it bought the software developed by another small Austin firm, Adaptive Learning Technology. Adaptive Learning founder Mary Schenck-Ross said the software's interactive lessons allowed teachers "to get away from the mass-treatment approach" to education. When a student typed in a response to a question, the software was designed to react and provide a customized learning path. "The original concept was to avoid 'one size fits all.' That was the point," said Catherine Malloy, who worked on the software development. Two years ago, however, Ignite dropped the individualized learning approach. Working with artists and illustrators, it created a large purple COW that could be wheeled from classroom to classroom and plugged in, offering lessons that could be played to a roomful of students. The COWs enticed students with catchy jingles and videos featuring cartoon characters like Mr. Bighead and Norman Einstein. On Ignite's website, a collection of teachers endorsed the COW, saying that it eliminated the need for lesson planning. The COW does it for them. The developers of Adaptive Learning's software complain that Ignite replaced individualized instruction with a gimmick.
"It breaks my heart what they have done. The concept was totally perverted," Schenck-Ross said. Nevertheless, Ignite found many receptive school districts. In Texas, 30 districts use COWs. In Houston, where Neil Bush and his parents live, the district has used various funding sources to acquire $400,000 in Ignite products. An additional $240,000 in purchases has been authorized in the last six months. Correspondence obtained by The Times shows that Neil Bush met with top Houston officials, sent e-mails and left voice mail messages urging bigger and faster allocations. An e-mail from a school procurement official to colleagues said Bush had made it clear that he had a "good working relationship" with a school board member. Another Ignite official asked a Texas state education official to endorse the company. In an e-mail, Neil Bush's partner Ken Leonard asked Michelle Ungurait, state director of social studies programs, to tell Houston officials her "positive impressions of our content, system and approach." Ungurait, identified in another Leonard e-mail as "our good friend" at the state office, told her superiors in response to The Times' inquiry that she never acted on Leonard's request. Leonard said he did not ask Ungurait to do anything that would be improper. Houston school officials gave Ignite's products "high" ratings in eight categories and recommended approval. Some in Houston's schools question the expenditures, however. Jon Dansby was teaching at Houston's Fleming Middle School when Ignite products arrived. "You can't even get basics like paper and scissors, and we went out and bought them. I just see red," he said. In Las Vegas, the schools have approved more than $300,000 in Ignite purchases. Records show the board recommended spending $150,000 in No Child funding on Ignite products. Sources familiar with the Las Vegas purchases said pressure to buy Ignite products came from Sig Rogich, an influential local figure and prominent Republican whose fundraising of more than $200,000 for President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign qualified him as a "Bush Ranger." Rogich, who chairs a foundation that supports local schools, said he applied no pressure but became interested in COWs after Neil Bush contacted him. Rogich donated $6,000 to purchase two COWs for a middle school named after him. Christy Falba, the former Clark County school official who oversaw the contracts, said she and her husband attended a dinner with Neil Bush to discuss the products. She said Rogich encouraged the district "to look at the Ignite program" but applied no pressure. Mixed Reviews Few independent studies have been done to assess the effectiveness of Ignite's teaching strategies. Neil Bush said the company had gotten "great feedback" from educators and planned to conduct a "major scientifically valid study" to assess the COW's impact. The results should be in by next summer, he said. Though Ignite's products get generally rave reviews from Texas educators, the opinion is not universal. The Tornillo, Texas, Independent School District no longer uses the Ignite programs it purchased several years ago for $43,000. "I wouldn't advise anyone else to use it," said Supt. Paul Vranish. "Nobody wanted to use it, and the principal who bought it is no longer here." Ignite's website features glowing videotaped testimonials from teachers, administrators, students and parents. Many of the videos were shot at Del Valle Junior High School near Austin, where school district officials allowed Ignite to film facilities and students. In the video, a student named India says: "I was feeling bad about my grades. I didn't know what my teacher was talking about." The COW changed everything, the girl's father says on the video. Lori, a woman identified as India's teacher, says the child was not paying attention until the COW was brought in. The woman, however, is not India's teacher, but Lori Anderson, a former teacher and now Ignite's marketing director. Ignite says Anderson was simply role-playing. In return for use of its students and facilities, a district spokeswoman said Ignite donated a free COW. Five others were purchased with district funds. District spokeswoman Celina Bley acknowledged that regulations bar school officials from endorsing products. But she said that restriction did not apply to the videos. "It is illegal for individuals to make an endorsement, but this was a districtwide endorsement," Bley said in an e-mail. SOURCE: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/0102206X.shtmlNote from Michelle: Looks like the Bush family sees our children as another Cash COW. BTW, remember Neil Bush's involvement in the Savings and Loan Scandal a few years ago? I guess the family banks on Americans forgetting this. And this isn't the first product marketed by Neil; I believe the first was Success Maker, initially marketed in brother Jeb's state of Florida, until it went national. I observed use of this product first hand in our school district. Struggling students sat alone touching buttons on a computer screen until they got the right answer. Now if a child is having difficulty in school, teachers [the human kind] would give this child more one on one instruction and work to engage them in their learning. How does sitting alone, in front of a computer accomplish this? It doesn't!!!
It is good to see this type of shameless profiteering come to light. If you refer back to page one of this thread, there is more info:« Reply #4 on Oct 10, 2005, 9:10am » SNIP: As seen below it highlights Bush's ardent supporters in the testing and textbook publishing industries. « Reply #12 on May 18, 2006, 5:41pm » She’s Baaack! SNIP: If Stephanopolos had cohones he’d have pointed out that the last time any member of the Bush family promoted school rebuilding post Katrina, it was in order to channel some charity back to the family. When Barbara Bush made a contribution to the Presidents’ Katrina Hurricane Relief Fund she got a tax deduction but the money went with the instruction that it only be spent on school software programs bought from Neil Bush’s company. The Bushes have yet to find a crisis they or their friends can’t make a buck off.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Nov 2, 2006 19:51:24 GMT 4
America 101 Bill Moyers November 01, 2006 Part 1 of 2
Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and a veteran journalist. He delivered these remarks in San Diego on October 27 to the Council of Great City Schools , an organization of the nation’s largest urban public school systems. Let’s be honest about what we mean by “urban education.” We are talking about the poorest and most vulnerable children in America – kids for whom “at risk” has come to describe their fate and not simply their circumstances. Their education should be the centerpiece of a great and diverse America made stronger by equality and shared prosperity. It has instead become the epitome of public neglect, perpetuated by a class divide so permeated by race that it mocks the bedrock principles of the American Promise. It has been said that the mark of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics. If so, America’s governing class should be knocked off their feet by the fact that more than 70 percent of black children are now attending schools that are overwhelmingly non-white. In 1980 that figure was 63 percent. Latino students are even more isolated. Brown v. Board’ s “all deliberate” speed of 1954 has become slow motion in reverse. In Richard Kahlenberg’s words, “With the law in retreat, geography takes command.” Not just the kids suffer. A nation that devalues poor children also demeans their teachers. For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. Children aren’t born lawyers, corporate executives, engineers and doctors. Their achievements bear the imprint of their teachers. There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis. Is there anyone here whose path was not marked by the inspiration of some teacher? Mary Sullivan, Bessie Bryant, Miss White, the Brotze sisters, Inez Hughes – I cannot imagine my life without them. Their classrooms were my world, and each one of them kept enlarging it. Yet teachers now are expected to staff the permanent emergency rooms of our country’s dysfunctional social order. They are expected to compensate for what families, communities, and culture fail to do. Like our soldiers in Iraq, they are sent into urban combat zones, on impossible missions, under inhospitable conditions, and then abandoned by politicians and policy makers who have already cut and run, leaving teachers on their own. Inexcusable Underinvestment
One morning I opened The New York Times to read that tuition at Manhattan’s elite private schools had reached $26,000 a year, starting in kindergarten. On that same page was another story about a school in Mount Vernon, just across the city line from the Bronx, where 97 percent of the students are black and 90 percent of those are so impoverished they are eligible for free lunches. During Black History month, a six-grader researching Langston Hughes could not find a single book by Hughes in the library. This wasn’t an oversight: There were virtually no books relevant to black history in that library. Most of the books on the shelves date back to the l950s and l960s. A child’s primer on work begins with a youngster learning to be a telegraph delivery boy!
It has taken constant litigation to bring to light this chronic neglect of basic learning in poor communities. Just seven years ago, in 1999, the Department of Education said that $127 billion was needed to bring “the nation’s school facilities into good overall condition.” The National Education Association put the figure at $268 billion—that’s just to make sure our kids are physically safe, 28 or 30 or even 32 or more to a classroom. Now the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that the New York City school system alone is due approximately $15 billion “to provide students with their constitutional right to the opportunity to receive a sound basic education.”
Surely this inexcusable underinvestment is one significant reason why, despite our national wealth and GDP which are higher than virtually all of Europe combined, American students as a whole fare so poorly compared to their counterparts in other advanced countries. In 2003, the United States ranked 24th out of 29 advanced countries in combined mathematical literacy, according to the Program for International Student Assessment. A better ranking in combined reading literacy—15th out of 27 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in 2000—might be counted a success when compared to our abysmal math performance, but this can hardly be comforting if we consider that students are performing significantly better in countries without America’s vast wealth.
The neglect of urban education – a capital moral offense in its own right – is but a symptom of what is happening in America. We are retreating from our social compact all down the line.
Our country is falling apart. Literally. Last year (2005) the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a report on our crumbling infrastructure. The engineers said we are “failing to maintain even substandard conditions” in our highway system – with significant economic effects. Poor road conditions cost motorists $54 billion a year in repairs and operating costs, and the 3.5 billion hours per year Americans spend stuck in traffic, costs the economy more than $67 billion annually in lost productivity and wasted fuel.
The report said the country’s power grid is likewise “in urgent need of modernization” as maintenance spending on transmission facilities has declined 1 percent annually since 1992, while growth in demand has risen 2.4 percent annually over the same period. In 2002, the Department of Energy warned that system “bottlenecks” due to transmission constraints were adding to consumer costs and threatening blackouts. The next August (2003) a blackout blanketed the Midwest and Northeast (and parts of Canada), leaving 50 million people in the dark, some for days, costing billions of dollars in lost commerce and production.
Even our much-touted technological superiority is in doubt. As my colleagues and I reported on my most recent PBS special – "The Net at Risk "– Asian and European countries have raced ahead of us in broadband speed – pushing America from 4th to 12th place on the information superhighway. The Japanese, for example, have near-universal access to high-speed broadband connections, averaging 16 times faster than U.S. connections at a much lower cost.
Connect the dots: Neglected schools, crumbling roads, permanent environmental “dead zones,” inadequate emergency systems, understaffed hospitals, library cutbacks, the lack of affordable housing, incompetent government agencies, whether it is FEMA or state bureaucracies charged with protecting helpless children – these are characteristic features of our public sector today. Partly it’s about money; little noticed amid all the concern about growing deficits and entitlement spending is this fact – non-defense discretionary spending declined 38 percent between 1980 and 1999 as a share of Gross Domestic Product. According to economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, federal investment in non-defense capacities, including research and education, plummeted in the 1980s – from over 2.5 percent of GDP to only 1.5 percent in the late 1990s.
A Sea Of Red Ink
The scariest thing is that this is only the beginning. America’s ship of state is floating in a sea of red ink. In an important but largely neglected report in 2002, Kent Smetters and Jagadeesh Gokhale found that our fiscal gap – the difference (in present value) between the government’s future receipts and expenditures – assuming the same net tax rates going forward, was a staggering $45 trillion dollars. This is $4 trillion more than the entire capital stock of industry ($25.9 trillion) and total market capitalization ($14.3 trillion) in 2003.
I said the report was “largely neglected.” Ironically, it was originally commissioned by then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, but the government never released it, and O’Neill was fired shortly after it was completed. Later it was made public by a conservative Washington think tank on the condition that all visible traces to the Treasury Department be expunged. Is it possible the suppression had anything to do with the third round of major tax cuts the White House had on tap for 2003?
In their study Smetters and Gokhale provide a “menu of pain” we can choose from to close the fiscal gap. If we start today, we could raise federal income taxes by 69 percent, or increase payroll taxes (our most repressive tax) by 95 percent. On the other hand, we could cut federal discretionary spending by 106 percent, or permanently cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45 percent. Or we could do a combination of both at more “moderate’’ levels.
The “menu of delayed pain,” if we wait even three years to begin significant changes, is far worse. By 2008, to close the fiscal gap we would need to raise payroll taxes 103 percent or cut benefits by 47 percent. If we wait 15 years, compound interest will raise our fiscal gap to $76 trillion. These figures underestimate the problem because the underlying fiscal gap was dramatically increased, by $6 trillion, when Congress, in one of the biggest giveaways to corporations in recent years, passed that new Medicare drug benefit in 2003.
At $51 trillion, government liabilities outstrip the current net worth of our population by nearly $10 trillion. Put another way, as Matt Crenson recently did for The Associated Press, if the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. “That’s almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included,” says Crenson.
This is the picture as 77 million longer-living baby boomers are on the way to retirement, confronting America with a “coming generational storm” (Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns) that threatens to swamp the U.S. government if not our entire financial system. Gokhale and Smetters calculate that by 2030 Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion.
It’s not that the public at large doesn’t care about the looming catastrophe. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important although a lower priority.
Nonetheless, President Bush acts as if he has a divine mandate to make the fiscal gap even worse. When he took office in 2001, his top priority was to give the richest of the rich hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. (Vice President Cheney said they deserved it.) The President prevailed, even pushing through a second and third round of tax cuts despite increased spending on homeland security and fighting terrorists abroad. Bush’s 2001 tax cut alone gave the richest 1 percent of Americans $ 479 billion over ten years. His first two tax cuts account for a hefty 15 percent of the total fiscal gap going forward.
At the same time, creditors and employers are now blatantly using government to cushion themselves against future losses, in what is certain to be a broadening trend. Last year the President signed a bill some of his richest contributors had been pushing for eight years. The new law imposes a stringent means test designed to force ordinary people in bankruptcy to continue paying a portion of their debt. Yet the bill does nothing about homestead exemptions used by the privileged to shield their money in real estate. Furthermore, after the new bankruptcy law was passed, a federal judge ruled that United Airlines, reorganizing under bankruptcy, could dump $6.6 billion worth of pension obligations onto the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, essentially making taxpayers pay its pension costs and leaving many of its workers with diminished benefits. The pension agency, it should be noted, is itself already $23 billion in the red.
All this comes at a point when American workers are losing ground in the marketplace as cheaper labor overseas becomes increasingly available through globalization, trade agreements, foreign investment, and technological outsourcing.
Blueprint For Failure
Rub the crystal ball: In the next few decades, when the huge liabilities start coming in due to Social Security and Medicare, there may be nothing left – less than nothing left – for public needs like education, highways, disaster relief, and social services, let alone national healthcare.
Small wonder that the Wall Street investor, Pete Peterson, a life-long Republican who served as President Nixon’s Commerce Secretary, says our children’s future is being ruined by a reckless fiscal “theology.” Theology asserts propositions that are believed whether or not they meet the test of reality. Not only do our governing elites act as if there’s no tomorrow, they behave as if there is no reality. Alas, they won’t be around to feel our grandchildren’s pain. In his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , the Pulitzer-prize winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment was one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forests disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare made matters worse as they exhausted dwindling resources. Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, they became casualties of their own privilege.
Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions. Then he describes an America in which elites have cocooned themselves in gated communities, guarded by private security patrols and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. Gradually they lose their motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, social security, and public schools.
“We The People”
The isolation of our schools, the crumbling of our infrastructure and the reckless disregard of our fiscal affairs signal a retreat from the social compact that made America unique among nations. Our culture of democracy derived from the rooted experience of shared values, common dreams, and mutual aspirations that are proclaimed in the most disregarded section in the Constitution – the prologue – which announces a moral contract among “We, the People of the United States.” Yes, I know: When those words were written “We, the People” didn’t include slaves, or women, or exploited workers, or unwelcome immigrants. To our everlasting shame America nurtured slavery in the cradle of liberty. But, oh, the very idea of it, the vision of it, the potential power of “We, the People” let loose in that brief astonishing span of history was to change the consciousness of the world. How radical it was – the notion that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is every human being’s birthright – that all of us are equal in the scheme of Providence – that every citizen shares equally in the consent required for self-government in the grand adventure of independence.
There was a time some years ago when in my head I carried on an argument with Thomas Jefferson about this. I quarreled with his assertion about “equality being self-evident.” Where I lived, talent, opportunity and outcomes were not equal. Then, one day, while I was filming a series at Independence Hall for a documentary on the anniversary of the Constitution, it hit me full force: Jefferson had an intimate understanding of the contradiction in his assertion which would give it even greater force down through the years. The hands that wrote “All men are created equal” also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman named Sally Hemings. It’s true: The man whose noble words fired the revolutionary spirit in his generation had a long-term sexual relationship with this slave, and the children she bore him – his children – were slaves themselves. One guest at Monticello was startled to look up from dinner to see a young servant who was the spitting image of the master at the head of the table. Jefferson never acknowledged these children as his own, and as he grew older, he relied more and more on slavery to keep him financially afloat. When he died his slaves were sold to satisfy his creditors – with this exception: Through an obscure passage in Jefferson’s will – one she must have negotiated with him – Sally Hemings was the only slave at Monticello to secure the freedom of her children.
Think about it: Thomas Jefferson knew the truth even as he was living the lie. He had to know the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms was his equal in her desire for life, her longing for liberty, her passion for happiness. In a PBS series about the Declaration of Independence, the late philosopher Mortimer Adler said that whatever things are really good for any human beings are really good for all human beings – that what the richest parents in the country want for their children – the goods essential for life, liberty, and happiness – is what the poorest parents want for their children. The happy or good life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature. So Sally Hemings’ heart burned with the pain of an inaudible cry: Let my children go!
I believe this is the agitating nucleus of the American experience – the relentless dynamo of desire that drives the American Dream. We want a better life for our children. That dream was made possible by the Revolution, for Jefferson’s Declaration proclaimed an end to arbitrary rule and ultimately produced a form of government that meant kings and their courtiers – the people at the top – the powerful and the privileged – the master class – couldn’t keep it all to themselves. Once let loose the notion “We, the People” – the sentiment of equal rights and equal opportunity and equal citizenship – could never again be caged. In time even slaves would invoke those ideas to claim their freedom. Yes, I know: It took a bloody civil war to end slavery and yet another century before we confronted slavery’s bastard son, segregation. Oppression is stubborn and privilege resistant, and the promise of America has long been ripening. But it’s in our DNA and you can’t kill it – no matter how hard some people keep trying.
Abraham Lincoln understood this. He was the first American president to recognize fully that democracy requires an economic system in which individuals can enjoy the fruits of their labor, and that the job of government was to keep the playing field level. Lincoln fought to preserve the Union because he knew government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” rested on economic opportunity, social mobility, and shared prosperity. America’s great strength, in his eyes, derived from a unique and balanced blend of democracy and capitalism, and as the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stephen Heinz, recently put it, “It is hard to imagine either democracy or capitalism functioning at peak performance without the other.”
But look around: Democracy has been made subservient to capitalism, and the great ideals of the American Revolution as articulated in the Preamble to the Constitution are being sacrificed to the Gospel of Wealth. (For a brilliant exegesis of this development, read The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth by Norton Garfinkle, Yale University Press, 2006.)
CONTINUED........
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Nov 2, 2006 19:53:08 GMT 4
....CONTINUED from above:America 101 Bill Moyers November 01, 2006 Part 2 of 2Concentrated WealthI could recite all the evidence, but I am sure you’ve heard it; you see it every day, all around you. Despite continued growth in the economy, real median household income declined between 2000 and 2004. Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1 percent while the real income of the richest 1 percent rose – by 135 percent. In 1976 the top 1 percent of Americans owned 22 percent of our total wealth. Today, the top 1 percent controls 38 percent of our total wealth. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30 fold. Now it is more than 75 fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that’s not the case. According to Census Bureau data, Americans have become progressively less likely to advance up the socio-economic ladder. One study cited by Stephen Heinz concludes, “The rich are likely to remain rich and the poor are likely to remain poor.” Aristotle thought injustice resulted from pleonexia, literally, “having more.” A class of people having more than their share of the common wealth was the characteristic feature of an unjust society. Plato thought that the common good required a ratio of only 5 to 1 between the richest and poorest members of a society. Even J.P. Morgan thought bosses should only get twenty times more than their workers, at most. How quaint: In 2005 the average CEO earned 262 times what the average worker got. As hard as it is to believe, the average real weekly wage for blue-collar workers, adjusted for rising costs of living, was about $278 a week in 2004 (in constant 1982 dollars). In 1972, it was $332 a week. That’s not a slight downward trend – it’s a significant and steady decline. So what of the panacea, economic growth – remember the rising tide that lifts all boats? What we are seeing today is closer to the old view of class struggle. A recent Goldman Sachs report says it outright: “The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income.” Yet in a country where the press now represents the dominant class through an unprecedented concentration of media ownership, instead of this remarkable divergence of profits and wages making news, what grabs the headlines is the triumphal surge of the stock market to old highs. At the same time, the share of Gross Domestic Product going to wages is now at the lowest point since 1947, when the government started measuring things. Those who look fondly on “market discipline” that’s been keeping wages down, ignore the deep distortions built into a system in which capital is highly organized and workers are not. So it is that to make ends meet in the face of stagnant or declining incomes, regular Americans have gone deeper and deeper in debt – with credit card debt nearly tripling since 1989. Poor kids are dropping out of high school and college at alarming rates, the middle class and working poor have been hit hard by a housing squeeze, 45 million or more Americans – eight out of ten of them in working families – are without health insurance. “The strain on working people,” says the economist Jeffrey Madrick, “has become significant. Working families and the poor are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life.” The American Dream has had its heart cut out, and is on life support. America As A Shared ProjectThis wasn’t meant to be. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Our system of checks and balances – read the Federalist papers -- was going to keep an equilibrium in how power works, and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors – especially the relatively poor – were protected by state law against rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were not restricted to elites. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters’ rights. Equal access to opportunity began to materialize for millions of us. When I was born my father was making $2 a day working on the highway. He and my mother were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression and were poor all their lives. But I had access to good public schools. My brother went to college on the GI Bill. When I borrowed $450 to buy my first car, I drove to a public university on public highways and rested in public parks. I discovered America as a shared project, the central engine of our national experience. I don’t need to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America. And it’s man-made. Over the last 30 years a disciplined, well-funded and closely-coordinated coalition of corporate elites, power-hungry religious conservatives, and hard-line right-wing operatives has mounted an aggressive drive to dismantle the public foundations and philosophy of shared prosperity and fairness in America. It’s all right there in bold letters in the early manifestos of the Reagan Revolution – essential reading like William Simon’s A Time for Truth . He argued that “funds generated by business” would have to “rush by multimillions” into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and the “heretical” morality of the New Deal. An “alliance” between right-wing leaders and “men of action in the capitalist world” must mount a “veritable crusade” against everything brought forth by the Progressive era. Reading right out of the new reactionary playbook, the business press somberly concluded that “some people will obviously have to do with less…It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more,” BusinessWeek sermonized. They succeeded beyond expectations. Instead of trying to keep a level playing field, government now favors the rich, powerful, and privileged. The public institutions, the laws and regulations, the ideas, norms, and beliefs which aimed to protect the common good and helped to create America’s iconic middle class, are now gone, greatly weakened, or increasingly vulnerable to attack. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow sums it up succinctly: What it’s all about, he says, “is the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.” Walking out of Union Station in Washington the other day, I saw the huge dome of the Capitol and was immediately struck by the realization that there’s not a stone in that building that isn’t owned by the people who make the big contributions. They own both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue lock, stock, and barrel. The simple proposition of the common good that might balance the influence of organized wealth with the interests of ordinary people – the most basic assumption of all political teaching since ancient Greece – is written out of Washington life. The Easiest TargetsHere’s an example of the difference it makes. I learned of this parable from the maverick tax journalist David Cay Johnston: Maritza Reyes cleans houses in East Los Angeles. She scrubs toilets and mops floors for about $7,000 a year. She is also a liar and a fraud, if you believe the IRS after agents audited her tax returns. They didn’t find unreported income or mysterious deductions on her returns; no, they found an address they thought made her ineligible to claim an Earned Income Tax Credit. She was ordered to return several years’ credits, equal to nearly a year’s worth of her wages. The Earned Income Tax Credit is for the working poor, mainly those with children. First enacted in 1975, praised by Ronald Reagan, and significantly expanded under President Clinton, it helps lift working-poor families out of poverty by reducing their income taxes below zero and thus supplying a refund. It is essentially a type of wage support. Without it we would have many millions more in poverty today. But after Clinton expanded the credit, the self-styled conservative revolutionaries who took over Congress in 1994 started to attack it as “backdoor welfare,” or, as Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles put it, as an “income redistribution program.” To save it, Clinton cut a deal with the Republicans that gave them more than $100 million a year for IRS audits of people who file for the credit. It was hard for the radicals to repeal a tax policy that rewarded work when they were trying to abolish welfare for rewarding indolence. So they changed their drumbeat to fraud and deceit, making a cottage industry of attacking the credit as a haven for tax cheats.The IRS said Reyes was cheating because she had an address that made it appear she lived with her husband. In fact, they were separated and she lived in a cottage at the back of his lot with their younger son—probably one step away from being homeless. Under the law, she is eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit as a single “head of household” with children, but the IRS set out to prove that she was really living high-off-the-hog under her husband’s roof and her head-of-household filing was a charade designed to bilk the government. But when the Tax Court judges came to Los Angeles in 2000, IRS lawyers had no evidence to disprove Reyes’ claims that she was head of a separate household on her husband’s lot. A student from Chapman Law School helped her prevail before the tax judge, noting that “if just one person had taken the time to listen to her they would have seen what the judge did.” To Frank Doti, head of Chapman’s legal clinic for poor people, Reyes’s case is typical of what he’s seen in recent years: government comes down hardest on the easiest targets—those without resources and power to defend themselves.How does this measure up in the scales of justice? In 2001, 397,000 people who applied for the Earned Income Tax Credit were audited, one out of every 47 returns. That’s a rate eight times higher than the rate for people earning $100,000 or more. Only one out of every 366 returns of wealthy households was audited. Over the previous 11 years, in fact, audit rates for the poor increased by a third, while the wealthiest enjoyed a 90 percent decline in IRS scrutiny. Of all the 744,000 tax returns audited by the IRS in 2002, more than half, David Cay Johnston finds, were filed by the working poor. More than half of IRS audits targeted people who account for less than 20 percent of taxpayers, the poorest 20 percent.Now take at look at the 1998 tax return of President George W. Bush, when he was part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Never mind that he was also Governor of Texas at the time, he reported income of $18.4 million that year, $15 million of which was a capital gain from his Rangers’ stake when the team was sold. In fact, based on his investment, he was only entitled to a $2.2 million capital gain, but he was given a performance bonus for his work as a team executive. This was considered part of his capital gain and not counted as income, however, and so it was taxed at the then-20 percent rate for capital gains (now lowered to 15 percent) instead of at the then-top income tax rate of 39.6 percent. A perfectly legal sleight-of-hand that netted him an extra $3 million dollars in foregone taxes on top of the eight-figure gift conferred by his partners. It doesn’t add up, does it? Spend $100 million a year of taxpayer money to audit the working poor, while actively foregoing billions in revenue from the wealthy who hide or defer their income as capital gains. But of course the government piles much, much more onto the rich man’s side of the scale: every year, as much as $70 billion is legally sheltered from taxation in off-shore trusts and other financial devices. Big accounting firms like Ernst & Young actually sell tax shelters for a good share of their own huge profits. One of their “products” costs $5 million and, in exchange, the client gets up to $20 million in tax obligations wiped out. It’s stunning. All told, we have a “tax gap”—the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid—of more than $345 billion a year, more than nine times our entire homeland security budget. There’s an entire new cottage industry devoted to making tax obligations disappear. In other words, helping the rich get richer at the expense of those who have no choice but to pay their fair share—and mostly feel obligated to do so anyway. And make no mistake; every foregone dollar the rich owe is one you ultimately pay for in either higher taxes or fewer services down the road. When our tax code permits such public larceny, you know who writes the laws in this country.And even those who break the law have less and less to fear: last summer the IRS quietly moved to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of its estate tax auditors, a move that one IRS lawyer described as a “backdoor way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax.” The Power Of Organized PeopleWilliam Henry Harrison, our ill-fated ninth president and unlikely Whig populist, once said that it’s “true Democratic feeling that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.” I’d say it’s more than a feeling. It’s the God’s honest truth, and we need to see it for what it is – the betrayal of the American Revolution. The journalist of the revolution, Thomas Paine, described the United States of his day as the Archimedean point of democratic liberty. He quoted the Greek proverb, “Had we a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.” To Paine, that place was the United States of America in 1792. But that promise has been blunted by the counter-revolution of the last 30 years celebrating ostentatious wealth, inequality, and social Darwinism. The egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is mocked in all but name, and the bar of tolerance for inequality is now brought so low that genetic sorting in the human population is once again respectfully debated as a leading cause. The wealthy governing elites in America today – corporate executives, wealthy contributors, and the officials they have bankrolled into office – possess a degree of power and separation befitting a true ruling class. They are the Mayan kings and priests of the 21st century. [We know now that “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can, indeed, perish. And perish not under fallen battlements and bombs raining down and the sneak attack of some fanatical distant foe, but by the deliberate plunder of an organized minority – for our governing elites do not represent the majority of Americans – that methodically imposes its will on the laws and institutions of a people until the whole foundation has become their very throne. What these 30 years of redistributing wealth upward have done to America is documented in a growing literature on inequality and its social consequences. But the spiritual costs – lost moral confidence in democracy, failing empathy, growing distrust and division – may be greater.Yet history tells us that concentrated wealth and political power can be challenged. The Jeffersonian “second revolution” of the 1790s; the populist revolt of the 1890s that led to the Progressive era of reform; the powerful electoral ratification of the New Deal; the equally powerful rejection of race and gender discrimination in the 1960s -- all manifested the ordinary beliefs and values, collectively revived, to confront the domination by wealthy elites that had debased the American Promise inherent in our revolutionary beginnings. So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution – that it isn’t just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It’s about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn’t be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it. Teach your kids they don’t have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters – heirs, everyone – of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it’s a great big lie – despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they’ve been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image. I was at the Presidio in San Francisco yesterday. That former military enclave beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is now a marvelous and beautiful center of vital commerce and civic purpose – saved from exploitation and despoliation by citizens who rose up on its behalf. On the wall of one of the main buildings I came upon a painting of an enormous deep blue wave with white caps against an equally blue sky. The artist’s inscription beneath the painting reads: “This human wave expresses the concept of people at the bottom rungs of society waking up to using their united strength to claim their universal rights to economic, social, and environmental justice.”
Put that in your core curriculum. It’s America 101.Bill Moyers is grateful to Lew Daly, Senior Fellow of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, for his contributions to this speech.SOURCE:www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/01/america_101.php----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note from Michelle, Some history, for the record:
Mr. Moyers tells us of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings being the only slave at Monticello to secure the freedom of her children. We all know this story; it has been brought to light many times in our media. It causes us confusion when we think of our Founding Fathers being slave owners who 'lived a lie.' There was one Founding Father who cleared himself from 'living the lie'; it was George Washington. Washington was the only one of the principal slaveholding founders to embrace emancipation. In July 1799, Washington wrote a will. He provided for his wife, freed his slaves, left bequests to several educational institutions, and divided his remaining estate among his nieces, nephews, and Custis relations. His calculated net worth was $530,000, a figure that may have entitled him to first rank among the richest men in America.
Washington emancipated his 125 slaves. [More than 300 slaves lived at Mt. Vernon in 1799, but most were the property of the Custis estate; Washington had no power to free them.] Washington's instructions for the future of his bondspeople appeared as the will's second clause:
"It is my will and desire that all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom....And whereas among those who will receive freedom according to this devise, there may be some, who from old age or bodily infirmities, and others who on account of their infancy, that will be unable to support themselves; it is my Will and desire that all who come under the first and second description shall be comfortably clothed and fed by my heirs while they live; and that such of the later description as have no parents living, or if living are unable, or unwilling to provide for them, shall be bound by the Court until they shall arrive at the age of twenty five years....The Negros thus bound, are [by their masters or Mistresses] to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other Poor Children."
The laws that Washington cited had of course been enacted for white children. His wish that the underage slaves be so educated was a bold statement of his belief in the natural abilities of the enslaved. Washington believed that it was the conditions of slavery, and not natural inferiority that had reduced the blacks to a state of dependency. If this is an accurate reconstruction of his views, Washington was more enlightened than most other southern slaveholders. Thomas Jefferson had written that blacks were born inferior to whites in mind and body and that they could never live in American society as a free people. Emancipation, Jefferson maintained, must be accompanied by a program of "colonization" of American blacks to an overseas colony.
George Washington's visions were more expansive. He left no doubt about the importance of emancipation. Nor did he fail to recognize that it might go against the instincts of his survivors. He put a clause in his will to his Executors to see that the clause respecting the Slaves be religiously fulfilled, without evasion, neglect, or delay. The Estate of George Washington, Deceased, paid annual pensions to some of the freed people until 1833. Unfortunately, Virginia's restrictive "black laws" prevented the freed children from being taught to read and write.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Feb 27, 2007 10:22:52 GMT 4
Reading George Orwell’s 1984
1984 is one of the best novels to read of all time, or at least during our now times. Many mention the book but it is my experience that many have not actually read it. 1984 is a book that every adult should read with your kids because frankly, it might be too horrifying for teenagers.
Orwell plunges deeper than anyone else into the totalitarian impulse, the will to absolute power, the lust to inflict pain upon other humans. You don't want to believe that people can be so evil. You don't want to imagine yourself the victim of the cruel and stupid society described in 1984. You probably don't want to deal with these unsettling questions: how would you behave in this inhuman world? Would you betray your family? Could you be made to love Big Brother? Which characters do you most identify with and why?
There is another reason why you should read this book with your kids. Every few years, the academia are offering study units that seem to direct readers away from the book’s actual message. Such as this:
In 2004, there was a project called “1984+20” conducted by the National Council of Teachers of English. The NCTE urged teachers and students to discuss what 1984 “might teach us about life in the contemporary United States.” Can you guess what Orwell was really telling us about our life now? Beware those dress and profanity codes! Look out for surveillance cameras at traffic intersections! NCTE didn't talk much about the evils of totalitarian government, or the millions who were murdered by such governments. If some of you have not read 1984 or you have been misled by these dishonest slants, here are a few sentences from the major character named O’Brien. He is candid in describing the world of 1984:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power...Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing...In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement...There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science...There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness....If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”
The essence of 1984 is not surveillance cameras and two-way televisions, nor corporate conformity and managerial style. The essence is Room 101--the torture chamber where you confront the threat that will finally reduce you to a whimpering remnant capable only of total surrender to Big Brother, and total betrayal of everything and everyone you once loved. In the Party's eyes, as O’Brien explains, an obedient citizen is not enough. “Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” No one can possibly misunderstand this plain English. Why then do educators of our children do so?
Orwell finished the novel in 1949 and died in 1950. He did not write about America now; he wrote about what he had witnessed during his life, and about what Europe might become in a few decades. First, second, and third, 1984 is Orwell’s rage against the savage barbarism perpetrated during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s in Stalin's Russia. Fourth and fifth, 1984 is about Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Sixth, if you like, Orwell is a prophet warning us against whatever you discern in the book.
When you, as a teacher or a parent, study this book with your children, study it with your eyes open and intellectual honesty. Some experts estimate that totalitarian regimes killed nearly 100 million people during the 20th century. Study that. 100 plus million victims deserve this much.
Now one might think that I am suggesting that our educational system is involved in some vast conspiracy. I don't believe that educators are consciously doing this. However, it is my belief that our educational system does not encourage free thinking and that it educates only to produce useful and obedient citizens. A conspiracy? Perhaps, in a sense....it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you, as a concerned parent, begin to take an active role in the shaping of your child's mind.
Lies are the only reality. Beauty is against the law. Executions are a daily routine. A brutal reach for power is all that matters....That is the world described in "1984." Some educators want us to believe the novel is really about corporate conformity and cameras at traffic lights...Sounds disingenuous. One might even say Orwellian...
Michelle
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 23, 2007 15:39:22 GMT 4
Key Initiative Of 'No Child' Under Federal Investigation Officials Profited From Reading First ProgramBy Amit R. Paley Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, April 21, 2007; Page A01 The Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading initiative at the center of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, another blow to a program besieged by allegations of financial conflicts of interest and cronyism, people familiar with the matter said yesterday.The disclosure came as a congressional hearing revealed how people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states. "That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. "You don't get to override the law," he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. "But the fact of the matter is that you did."The Education Department's inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., said he has made several referrals to the Justice Department about the five-year-old program, which provides grants to improve reading for children in kindergarten through third grade. Higgins declined to offer more specifics, but Christopher J. Doherty, former director of Reading First, said in an interview that he was questioned by Justice officials in November. The civil division of the U.S. attorney's office for the District, which can bring criminal charges, is reviewing the matter. Doherty, one of the two Education Department employees who oversaw the initiative, acknowledged yesterday that his wife had worked for a decade as a paid consultant for a reading program, Direct Instruction, that investigators said he improperly tried to force schools to use. He repeatedly failed to disclose the conflict on financial disclosure forms. "I'm very proud of this program and my role in this program," Doherty said in the interview. "I think it's been implemented in accordance with the law." The management of Reading First has come under attacks from members of both parties. Federal investigators say program officials improperly forced states to use certain tests and textbooks created by those officials. One official, Roland H. Good III, said his company made $1.3 million off a reading test, known as DIBELS, that was endorsed by a Reading First evaluation panel he sat on. Good, who owns half the company, Dynamic Measurement Group, told the committee that he donated royalties from the product to the University of Oregon, where he is an associate professor. Two former University of Oregon researchers on the panel, Edward J. Kame'enui and Deborah C. Simmons, said they received about $150,000 in royalties last year for a program that is now packaged with DIBELS. They testified that they received smaller royalties in previous years for the program, Scott Foresman Early Reading Intervention, and did not know it was being sold with DIBELS. Members of the panel said they recused themselves from voting on their own products but did assess their competitors. Of 24 tests approved by the committee, seven were tied to members of the panel. "I regret the perception of conflicts of interest," said Kame'enui, former chairman of the committee, who now works at the department as commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research. "But there was no real conflict of interest being engaged in." Continued at:www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/20/AR2007042002284.html------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Criminal Referral in Reading Program Friday April 20, 2007 10:16 PM By JESSE J. HOLLAND Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal investigator looking into allegations of conflict of interest and mismanagement in a $1 billion-a-year Education Department reading program said Friday he has made criminal referrals to the Justice Department. John Higgins, the Education Department's inspector general, refused to specify for reporters what he has asked government prosecutors to look at, but investigators have been highly critical of the department's management of the Reading First program. Criminal referrals are made by investigators when they encounter evidence of possible federal crimes, which only the Justice Department has authority to prosecute. Reading First, created by President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind law, offers intensive reading help for low-income children in the early grades. But investigators say that federal officials intervened to influence state and local decisions about what programs to use, a potential violation of the law. Some of the people who were influencing those decisions had a financial interest in the programs that were being pushed, officials said. ``I think we're very close to a criminal enterprise here,'' House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller, D-Calif., said at an investigative hearing Friday. ``Have you made any criminal referrals, Mr. Higgins?'' ``We have made referrals to the Department of Justice,'' Higgins said. Miller said his committee may also make criminal referrals. ``I think when we put the evidence together we may join you in those criminal referrals,'' Miller told Higgins. But Reading First's former director told lawmakers Friday he did nothing wrong, despite investigators' findings that the Education Department skirted the law and ethical standards. In scathing exchanges with Miller, former Reading First program director Chris Doherty defended his and his colleagues' work implementing the program. Despite several attempts by Miller to elicit admissions of wrongdoing, Doherty refused, offering explanations for several of the complaints brought by the Education Department's inspector general and the Government Accountability Office. ``You've suggested because of logistics, because of the time frame, because you might get 50 applications all at the same time, you have a whole litany of reasons why you didn't have to abide by the law,'' Miller said. ``We thought then and we think now we did abide by the law,'' replied Doherty, who stepped down last year. An inspector general report late last year stated that the reading program was beset by conflicts of interest and mismanagement. The inspector general stated that the review panels were stacked with people who shared Doherty's views and that Doherty repeatedly used his influence to push states toward programs he favored. ``Our work showed that the department did not comply with the Reading First statute regarding the composition of the application review panel and criteria for acceptable programs,'' said John Higgins, the Education Department's inspector general. ``Further, the department's actions created an appearance that it may have violated statutory provisions that prohibit it from influencing the curriculum of schools.'' More recently, The Associated Press reported that the program may have yet another conflict-of-interest problem. The Education Department contractor hired to help set up and implement key parts of the Reading First program beginning in 2002 also has been brought in to help evaluate how well the program is doing. The Education Department has pledged to make changes to ensure there will not be future problems in the Reading First program. Doherty suggested in prepared testimony that ``a distorted story'' based on ``the worst possible interpretation of events'' has been told about the Reading First program. ``We were never told on any occasion we were violating the law,'' Doherty said at the hearing. Hours before the hearing began, the Education Department released statistics showing Reading First schools saw improvement in reading fluency and comprehension for first and third graders between 2004 and 2006. But from the start, the program has been dogged by accusations of impropriety. ``The Reading First program is too important and too successful to allow it to fall prey to management questions,'' said California Rep. Buck McKeon, the committee's ranking Republican. McKeon and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, have introduced bills that would tighten conflict-of-interest rules in the reading program and make it harder for federal officials or contractors to influence local curriculum decisions. --- On the Net: Education Department: www.ed.gov/ House Education and Labor Committee: edworkforce.house.gov/ Source:www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6574809,00.html Note from Michelle: Please refer to past posts here on the No Child Left Behind Legislation for more on financial conflicts of interest and cronyism.
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Nov 10, 2007 15:33:14 GMT 4
American kids, dumber than dirt Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. historyBefore we get to the article, I'd like to say that I agree totally with the remarks from the teacher friend of the author. Many here may argue that their children and their children's friends aren't at all like that. Well, maybe not, but the fact that you are reading this post says in volumes that you are not quite the norm, and that you're not from the lower rungs of society.
Let me tell you something, I'm from the middle class and I suppose we had more than some because Dad was an executive in Corporate America. However, with 7 kids in my family to feed and clothe we certainly didn't live expensively; we children took jobs in high school for spending cash. I managed to get further education after high school through grants and loans and later worked for various corporations. I won't get into it here, but my life took a huge downward fall and I am now living on less than America's poor do. So, I live in the area of the United States where I see, up close and personal, what the effects of society and public schooling have had on our children from the middle to low income classes. It is frightening; I wouldn't trust many of these kids with my life, possessions, and so on. They are belligerent, and the most selfish self-centered people in existence. My saying is that they are dumber than wood. Of course, their parents aren't much better; each generation's flaws become more intense.
Many parents I watch can't control their kids; some don't even try for whatever reason.....drinking, drugs, or too absorbed in their own lives to care. This isn't just a problem in the lower economic levels; I am amazed how people equate good parenting with the amount of money they earn...Well, their kids are some of the most neglected I've seen. Modern parents just aren't minding the store, in terms of their kids' activities and modeling what's truly important in life.
Now that I've thoroughly bashed modern parenting, let's move on to our public school system. As much I agree with the teacher here, I must add that our educators are unwitting accomplices in the failure of our public school system. I will continue with this after you read the article: American kids, dumber than dirt Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. historyBy Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, October 24, 2007 I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career. And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be. His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying. My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt. Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new. No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that. We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait. It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad. Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home. He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it." But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it. It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler. It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system. Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens. Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog. This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems. I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are. Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky? My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace? As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better. What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means. ------------------------------------------------------ Thoughts about this column? E-mail Mark. Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another small photo of Mark potentially sufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts. Source: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What I'm going to show you here is that American schooling has been replete with chicanery from its very beginnings. That it is actually one of the greatest influences in creating citizens that the teacher fears so much. Before any non-Americans here begin to smile over the idiocy of the American public, be aware that what they learned to do here to children in school is being done around the globe now that corporations are in charge [more or less]. You can't escape the system, the machine; it's taken on a life of its own and these are its products:Americans are NOT stupid - WITH SUBTITLESFrom: eroncoelho Joined: 2 years ago Videos: 9 Added: January 25, 2007 So what if they don´t know how many sides a triangle have? Or who Tony Blair is? That is not fair...just because their president is as intelligent as a door, it doen´t mean they´re all like that...if you still think american people are stupi, watch this video and change your mind VIDEO: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFEPonder upon the following statement; this is the true goal of compulsory schooling......“the control of human behavior.”Today’s corporate sponsors want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives.... This is a young generation of corporate sponsors and they have discovered the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational institutions.— Suzanne Cornforth of Paschall & Associates, public relations consultants. As quoted in The New York Times, July 15, 1998 Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. I know how difficult it is for most of you to comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. What has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down at the end of the nineteenth century. Most likely, what happened would have happened anyway—without the legions of half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. We’re in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two. Who are the villains, really, but ourselves? People can change, but systems cannot without losing their structural integrity. I remind you that what is right for systems is often wrong for human beings and parents willing turn their children over to this system for 6 hours or more per day.
Do you think class size, teacher compensation, and school revenue have much to do with education quality? If so, the conclusion is inescapable that we are living in a golden age. From 1955 to 1991 the U.S. pupil/teacher ratio dropped 40 percent, the average salary of teachers rose 50 percent (in real terms) and the annual expense per pupil, inflation adjusted, soared 350 percent. Forget the 10 percent drop in SAT and Achievement Test scores the press beats to death with regularity; how do you explain the 37 percent decline since 1972 in students who score above 600 on the SAT? This is an absolute decline, not a relative one. It is not affected by an increase in unsuitable minds taking the test or by an increase in the numbers. The absolute body count of smart students is down drastically with a test not more difficult than yesterday’s but considerably less so. What should be made of a 50 percent decline among the most rarefied group of test-takers, those who score above 750? In 1972, there were 2,817 American students who reached this pinnacle; only 1,438 did in 1994—when kids took a much easier test. Can a 50 percent decline occur in twenty-two years without signaling that some massive leveling in the public school mind is underway?
In a real sense where your own child is concerned you might best forget scores on these tests entirely as a reliable measure of what they purport to assess. According to The Journal of the American Medical Association (December 1995), 33 percent of all patients cannot read and understand instructions on how often to take medication, notices about doctor’s appointments, consent forms, labels on prescription bottles, insurance forms, and other simple parts of self-care. They are rendered helpless by inability to read. Concerning those behind the nation’s prison walls (a population that has tripled since 1980), the National Center for Education Statistics stated in a 1996 report that 80 percent of all prisoners could not interpret a bus schedule, understand a news article or warranty instructions, or read maps, schedules, or payroll forms. Nor could they balance a checkbook. Forty percent could not calculate the cost of a purchase.
Once upon a time we were a new nation that allowed ordinary citizens to learn how to read well and encouraged them to read anything they thought would be useful. Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself. This invitation to commoners extended by America was the most revolutionary pedagogy of all. Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education in its most fundamental civilized sense. Reading, analysis, and discussion are the way we develop reliable judgment, the principal way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances. Without the ability to read and argue we’re just geese to be plucked by governments, marketeers, and religious institutions.
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. Mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. On April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, “the control of human behavior.”
The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like: Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron... John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty... and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance... Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.
Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes: To make good people To make good citizens And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum.
The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose. The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management. Teachers and principals, “scientifically”certified in teachers college practices, were made unaware of the invisible curriculum they really taught.
The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit. Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.
In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.
Even in moments of greatest resistance, the institutions controlling the fourth purpose—great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism—increasingly centralized in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and outwait the competition. The prize was of inestimable value--control of the minds of the young.
After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called "The Workplace," even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.
In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all. This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.
Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.
What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!
As the twentieth century progressed, and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral training centers, laboratories of experimentation in the interests of corporations and the government. The original model for this development had been Prussian Germany, but few remembered.
School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent "standardized" exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.
For instance, take the case of George W. Bush, Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States—with a mediocre SAT score of 550. If you can become governor and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?
In conclusion, the new purpose of schooling—to serve business and government—could only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another. Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor or a jackass President!!!!!
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Feb 25, 2008 13:15:13 GMT 4
Corporations subsidize and use universities as laboratories in which to grow profitable lies. And you pay for your kid to get this type of education!...MichelleHeidi Cee in Plain SightI was mostly left cold by the presentations at last Friday's School of Visual Arts symposium on propaganda, entitled "Where the Truth Lies," www.wherethetruthlies.org/ until a late-afternoon speech by media studies professor Stuart Ewen brought chilling contemporaneity to the timeworn issue. Before Ewen spoke, I was intrigued by aspects of Stephen Duncombe's talk, which urged leftists to create "ethical spectacles," i.e. participatory, openended acts of subversive imagination. Professor and "life-long activist" Duncombe lost me, however, when he mentioned "Spielberg-style emotional manipulation" as a bad thing. How participatory can his aesthetic be when it shuts out the whole generation of people (too young to be among his colleagues, perhaps, but surely including his TAs) who were weaned on E.T.? If there's something unethical about that spectacle, I have yet to discover it. Reagan-era political battles and cultural rifts still perplex many in academia. That's why I was so fascinated by Ewen's speech, which described a real threat to academic freedom that is advancing while many professors focus on the problems of the past. In the spring of 2007, Ewen says, Hunter College's Department of Film & Media Studies offered as part of its major a course in "stealth marketing" with a curriculum designed by IACC www.iacc.org/ (International Anti-Counterfeit Corporation), "a non-profit organization devoted solely to protecting intellectual property and deterring counterfeiting." In essence, IACC's raison d'etre is to lobby for legislation against knockoff goods on behalf of its member companies. One of these, the Coach Corporation, manufacturer of shoes, handbags, and accessories, put up ten thousand dollars to fund the course. A corporation-funded university class with a curriculum created by corporate lobbyists is questionable enough, but further violations of standard academic protocol were apparently involved here. According to Ewen, it appears that the class was the result of a direct request made by the president of the university to the department head. No tenured teachers were told about the department's new curricular direction; an untenured (therefore more pliable) faculty member with no marketing background was selected to teach the class. The anointed instructor voiced objections to the assignment, but ended up teaching the course anyway, with continuous supervision from a Coach lawyer. At no time, the Coach overseer stipulated, was the company's involvement to be mentioned in any of the completed class projects.The product of this semester-long crash course in surreptitious advertising, termed a "college outreach campaign" by the IACC, was an elaborate fiction better suited to a creative-writing seminar than the classes in media criticism normally held within the department. Using authentic-seeming fliers, social networking websites, and a blog encounterheidi.blogspot.com/ , the students wove a narrative concerning a nonexistent Hunter undergrad named "Heidi Cee" and her lost Coach bag, a precious gift from her boyfriend that she was desperate to recover. Heidi ponied up big reward money for the no-questions-asked return of the bag, only to find that she had been taken in by a knockoff. Incensed, she took to the internet in an attempt to crush counterfeiting. The campaign concluded in May with an anti-counterfeiting event at Hunter where IACC literature was distributed, along with free food from Olive Garden. Heidi explained her absence at the crucial event by claiming that her "uncle in Jersey" had suffered a minor stroke. My jaundiced view of higher education usually prevents me from waxing sentimental about academic freedom, but I confess to sharing Professor Ewen's outrage in this case. When Ewen questioned the Ohio-based p.r. firm that created this course about the "Heidi Cee" project's deceptions, he was told by one of the firm's spin artists, "That's what kids do these days: create fake people on the internet." The spin doctor wasn't wrong; the web is hospitable to (young and old) perpetrators of unverifiable lies and half-truths. Some corporations appear to be eager to subsidize and magnify these transgressions, to the point of using universities as laboratories in which to grow profitable lies. Ohio State University, Howard University, and University of Miami are among the schools that have hosted IACC campaigns similar to Hunter's. In this context, it's hard to cheer Coach CEO and Hunter College alum Lew Frankfort's recent donation of a million dollars to his alma mater.Posted by bkessler at February 19, 2008 03:28 PMSource:blogs.graphicdesignforum.com/bkessler/archives/2008/02/heidi_cee_in_pl_1.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 17, 2008 13:44:16 GMT 4
Destroying Public Education in America - by Stephen Lendman Monday, April 07, 2008 Diogenes called education "the foundation of every state." Education reformer and "father of American education" Horace Mann went even further. He said: "The common school (meaning public ones) is the greatest discovery ever made by man." He called it the "great equalizer" that was "common" to all, and as Massachusetts Secretary of Education founded the first board of education and teacher training college in the state where the first (1635) public school was established. Throughout the country today, privatization schemes target them and threaten to end a 373 year tradition.It's part of Chicago's Renaissance 2010 Turnaround strategy for 100 new "high-performing" elementary and high schools in the city by that date. Under five year contracts, they'll "be held accountable....to create innovative learning environments" under one of three "governance structures:" -- charter schools under the 1996 Illinois Charter Schools Law; they're called "public schools of choice, selected by students and parents....to take responsible risks and create new, innovative and more flexible ways of educating children within the public school system;" in 1997, the Illinois General Assembly approved 60 state charter schools; Chicago was authorized 30, the suburbs 15 more, and 15 others downstate. The city bends the rules by operating about 53 charter "campuses" and lots more are planned.Charter schools aren't magnet ones that require students in some cases to have special skills or pass admissions tests. However, they have specific organizing themes and educational philosophies and may target certain learning problems, development needs, or educational possibilities. In all states, they're legislatively authorized; near-autonomous in their operations; free to choose their students and exclude unwanted ones; and up to now are quasi-public with no religious affiliation. Administration and corporate schemes assure they won't stay that way because that's the sinister plan. More on that below.George Bush praised these schools last April when he declared April 29 through May 5 National Charter Schools Week. He said they provide more "choice," are a "valuable educational alternative," and he thanked "educational entrepreneurs for supporting" these schools around the country. Here's what the president praised. Lisa Delpit is executive director of the Center for Urban Education & Innovation. In her capacity, she studies charter school performance and cited evidence from a 2005 Department of Education report. Her conclusion: "charter schools....are less likely than public schools to meet state education goals." Case study examples in five states showed they underperform, and are "less likely than traditional public (ones) to employ teachers meeting state certification standards." Other underperformance evidence came from an unexpected source - an October 1994 Money magazine report on 70 public and private schools. It concluded that "students who attend the best public schools outperform most private school students, that the best public schools offer a more challenging curriculum than most private schools, and that the private school advantage in test scores is due to their selective admission policies."Clearly a failing grade on what's spreading across the country en route to total privatization and the triumph of the market over educating the nation's youths. In 1991, Minnesota passed the first charter school law. California followed in 1992, and it's been off to the races since. By 1995 19 states had them, and in 2007 there were over 4000 charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia with more than one million students in them and growing. Chicago's two other "governance structures" are: -- contract (privatized) schools run by "independent nonprofit organizations;" they operate under a Performance Agreement between the "organization" and the Board of Education; and -- performance schools under Chicago Public Schools (CPS) management "with freedom and flexibility on many district initiatives and policies;" unmentioned is the Democrat mayor's close ties to the Bush administration and their preference for marketplace education; the idea isn't new, but it accelerated rapidly in recent years. Another part of the scheme is in play as well, in Chicago and throughout the country. Inner city schools are being closed, remaining ones are neglected and decrepit, classroom sizes are increasing, and children and parents are being sacrificed on the alter of marketplace triumphalism. Consider recent events under Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago. On February 27, the city's Board of Education unanimously and without discussion voted to close, relocate or otherwise target 19 public schools, fire teachers, and leave students out in the cold. Thousands of parents protested, were ignored and denied access to the Board of Ed meeting where the decision came down pro forma and quick. And it wasn't the first time. For years under the current mayor, Chicago has closed or privatized more schools than anywhere else in the country, and the trend is accelerating. Since July 2001, the city closed 59 elementary and secondary schools and replaced many of them with charter or contract ones.Nationwide Education "Reform"Throughout the country, various type schemes follow the administration's "education reform" blueprint. It began with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) that became law on January 8, 2002. It succeeded the 1994 Goals 2000: Educate America Act that set eight outcomes-based goals for the year 2000 but failed on all counts to meet them. Goals 2000, in turn, goes back to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and specifically its Title I provisions for funding schools and districts with a high percentage of low-income family students. NCLB is outrageous. It's long on testing, school choice, and market-based "reforms" but short on real achievement. It's built around rote learning, standardized tests, requiring teachers to "teach to the test," assessing results by Average Yearly Progress (AYP) scores, and punishing failure harshly - firing teachers and principals, closing schools and transforming them from public to charter or for-profit ones.
Critics denounce the plan as "an endless regimen of test-preparation drills" for poor children. Others call it underfunded and a thinly veiled scheme to privatize education and transfer its costs and responsibilities from the federal government to individuals and impoverished school districts. Mostly, it reflects current era thinking that anything government does business does better, so let it. And Democrats are as complicit as Republicans.So far, NCLB renewal bills remain stalled in both Houses, election year politics have intervened, and final resolution may be for the 111th Congress to decide. For critics, that's positive because the law failed to deliver as promised. Its sponsors claimed it would close the achievement gap between inner city and rural schools and more affluent suburban ones. It's real aim, however, is to commodify education, end government responsibility for it, and make it another business profit center. Last October, the New York Times cited Los Angeles as a vision of the future. It said "more than 1000 of California's 9500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing." Under NCLB, "state officials predict that all 6063" poor district schools will fail and will have to be "restructured" by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading." It's happening throughout the country, and The Times cited examples in New York, Florida and Maryland. Schools get five years to deliver or be declared irredeemable, in which case they must "restructure" with new teachers and principals. In Los Angeles and around the country, "the promised land of universal high achievement seems more distant than ever," and one parent expressed her frustration. Weeks into the new school year, she said teachers focus solely on what's likely to appear on exams. "Maybe the system is not designed for people like us," she complained. Indeed it's not. New Millennium EducationThat's the theme of Time magazine's December 9, 2006 article on the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). It's on NCEE's New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Time called it "a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries, business leaders and a former Governor" and the pre-K to 12 education blueprint they released. It's called "Tough Choices or Tough Times," was funded by the (Bill) Gates Foundation, and below is its corporate wish list:-- moving beyond charter schools to privatized contract ones; charter schools are just stalking horses for what business really wants - privatizing all public schools for their huge profit potential; -- ending high school for many poor and minority students after the 10th grade - for those who score poorly on standardized tests intended for high school seniors; those who do well can finish high school and go on to college; others who barely pass can go to community colleges or technical schools after high school; -- ending remediation and special education aid for low-performance students to cut costs; -- ending teacher pensions and reducing their health and other benefits; -- ending seniority and introducing merit pay and other teacher differentials based on student performance and questionable standards; -- eliminating school board powers, all regulations, and empowering private companies; -- effectively destroying teacher unions; and -- ending public education and creating a nationwide profit center with every incentive to cut costs and cheat students for bottom line gains; this follows an earlier decades-long corporate - public higher education trend that one educator calls a "subtle yet significant change toward (university) privatization, meaning that private entities are gradually replacing taxpayers as the dominant funding source as state appropriations account for a lower and lower percentage of schools' operating resources;" corporations now want elementary and secondary education control for the huge new market they represent. The Skills Commission's earlier 1990s work advanced the scheme and laid the groundwork for NCLB. It came out of its "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages" report on non-college-bound students. It called them "ill-equipped to meet employer's current needs and ill-prepared for the rapidly approaching, high-technology, service-oriented future." It recommended ending an "outmoded model" and adopting a standards-based learning and testing approach to enforce student - teacher accountability. Both Commission reports reflect a corporate wish list to commodify education, benefit the well-off, and consign underprivileged kids to low-wage, no benefit service jobs. It's a continuing trend to shift higher-paying ones abroad, downsize the nation, and end the American dream for millions. So why educate them. School VouchersThey didn't make it into NCLB, but they're very much on the table with a sinister added twist. First some background. It's an old idea dating back to the hard right's favorite economist and man the UK Financial Times called "the last of the great (ones)" when he died in November 2006. Milton Friedman promoted school choice in 1955, then kick-started it in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He opposed public education, supported school vouchers for privately-run ones, and believed marketplace competition improves performance even though voucher amounts are inadequate and mostly go to religious schools in violation of the First Amendment discussed below. Here's how the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice currently describes the voucher scheme: it's the way to let "every parent send their child to the school of their choice regardless of where they live or income." In fact, it's a thinly veiled plot to end public education and use lesser government funding amounts for well-off parents who can make up the difference and send their children to private-for-profit schools. Others are on their own under various programs with "additional restrictions" the Foundation lists without explanation:-- Universal Voucher Programs for all children; -- Means-Tested Voucher Programs for families below a defined income level; -- Failing Schools, Failing Students Voucher Programs for poor students or "failed" schools; -- Special Needs Voucher Programs for children with special educational needs; -- Pre-kindergarten Voucher Programs; and -- Town Tuitioning Programs for communities without operating public schools for some students' grade levels. What else is behind school choice and vouchers? Privatization mostly, but it's also thinly-veiled aid for parochial schools, mainly Christian fundamentalist ones, and the frightening ideology they embrace - racial hatred, male gender dominance, white Christian supremacy, militarism, free market everything, and ending public education and replacing it with private Christian fundamentalist schools.In March 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Lemon v. Kurtzman against parochial funding in what became known as the "Lemon Test." In a unanimous 7 - 0 decision, the Court decided that government assistance for religious schools was unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. It prohibits the federal government from declaring and financially supporting a national religion, and the First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...." That changed in June 2002 when the Court ruled 5 - 4 in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that Cleveland's religious school funding didn't violate the Establishment Clause. The decision used convoluted reasoning that the city's program was for secular, not religious purposes in spite of some glaring facts. In 1999 and 2000, 82% of funding went to religious schools, and 96% of students benefitting were enrolled in them. The Court harmed democracy and the Constitution's letter and spirit. It also contradicted Thomas Jefferson's 1802 affirmation that there should be "a wall of separation between church and state." No longer for the nation's schools. Nationwide Efforts to Privatize EducationIn recent years, privatization efforts have expanded beyond urban inner cities and are surfacing everywhere with large amounts of corporate funding and government support backing them. One effort among many is frightening. It's called "Strong American Schools - ED in '08" and states the following: it's "a nonpartisan public awareness campaign aimed at elevating education to (the nation's top priority)." It says "America's students are losing out," and the "campaign seeks to unite all Americans around the crucial mission of improving our public schools (by using an election year to elevate) the discussion to a national stage." Billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad put up $60 million for the effort for the big returns they expect. Former Colorado governor and (from 2001 - 2006) superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District Roy Romer is the chairman. The Rockefeller (family) Philanthropy Advisors are also involved as one of their efforts "to bring the entire world under their sway" in the words of one analyst. Other steering committee members include former IBM CEO and current Carlyle Group chairman Lou Gerstner; former Michigan governor and current National Association of Manufacturers president John Engler; and Gates Foundation head Allan Golston."Ed in '08" has a three-point agenda: -- ending seniority and substituting merit pay for teachers based on student test scores; -- national education standards based on rote learning; standards are to be uniformly based on "what (business thinks) ought to be taught, grade by grade;" it's to prepare some students for college and the majority for workplace low-skill, low-paid, no-benefit jobs; and -- longer school days and school year; unmentioned but key is eliminating unions or making them weak and ineffective. In addition, the plan involves putting big money behind transforming public and charter schools to private-for-profit ones. It's spreading everywhere, and consider California's "Program Improvement" initiative. Under it, "All schools and local educational agencies (LEAs) (must make) Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)" under NCLB provisions nearly impossible to achieve. Those that fail must divert public money from classrooms to private-for-profit remediating programs. It's part of a continuing effort to defund inner city schools and place them in private hands, then on to the suburbs with other "innovative" schemes to transform them as well. Under the governor's proposed 2008 $4.8 billion education budget cut, transformation got easier. As of mid-March, 20,000 California teachers got layoff notices with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell saying this action puts student performance "in grave jeopardy." Likely by design. Plundering New OrleansNowhere is planned makeover greater than in post-Katrina New Orleans, and last June 28 the Supreme Court made it easier. Its ruling in Meredith v. Jefferson County (KY) and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District effectively gutted the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that affirmed: segregated public schools deny "Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment." In two troubling 5 - 4 decisions, the Roberts Court changed the law. They said public schools can't seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures taking explicit account of a student's race. They rewrote history, so cities henceforth may have separate and unequal education. Then it's on to George Wallace-style racism with policies like: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" with the High Court believing what was good for 1960s Alabama is now right for the country. The Court also made it easy for New Orleans to become a corporate predator's dream, and it didn't take long to exploit it. Consider public schools alone. The storm destroyed over half their buildings and scattered tens of thousands of students and teachers across the country. Within days of the calamity, Governor Kathleen Blanco held a special legislative session. Subject - taking over New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) that serve about 63,000 mostly low-income almost entirely African-American children. Here's what followed:-- two weeks after the hurricane, US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings cited charter schools as "uniquely equipped" to serve Katrina-displaced students; -- two weeks later, she announced the first of two $20 million grants to the state, solely for these schools; -- then in October 2005, the governor issued an executive order waiving key portions of the state's charter school law allowing public schools to be converted to charter ones with no debate, input or even knowledge of parents and teachers; -- a month later in November, the state legislature voted to take over 107 (84%) of the city's 128 public schools and place them under the state-controlled "Recovery School District (RSD);" and -- in February 2006, all unionized city school employees were fired, then selectively rehired at less pay and fewer or no benefits; it affected 7500 teachers as well as custodians, cafeteria workers and others. Within six months of Katrina, the city was largely ethnically cleansed, the public schools infrastructure mostly gutted, and a new framework was in place. It put NOPS into three categories - public, charter and the Recovery School District with the latter ones run by the state as charter or for-profit schools.
New Orleans Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley described the plunder and called it "a massive (new) experiment....on thousands of (mostly) African American children...." It's in two halves.The first half based on Recovery School District's estimated 30,000 returning students in January 2007: -- "Half of (these children were) enrolled (in) charter schools." They got "tens of millions of dollars" in federal money, but aren't "open to every child....Some charter schools have special selective academic criteria (and can) exclude children in need of special academic help." Others "have special administrative policies (that) effectively screen out many children." This latter category has "accredited teachers in manageable size classes (in schools with) enrollment caps.... These schools also educate far fewer students with academic or emotional disabilities (and) are in better facilities than the other half of the children....""The other half:"These students were "assigned to a one-year-old experiment in public education run by the State of Louisiana called the 'Recovery School District (RSD)' program." Their education "will be compared" to what first half children get in charter schools. "These children are effectively....called the 'control group' of an experiment - those against whom the others will be evaluated."
RSD "other half" schools got no federal funds. Its leadership is inexperienced. It's critically understaffed. Many of its teachers are uncertified. There aren't enough of them, and schools assigned students hadn't been built for their scheduled fall 2007 opening. In addition, some schools reported a "prison atmosphere," and in others, children spent long hours in gymnasiums because teachers hadn't arrived. In addition, there was little academic counseling; college-preparatory math; or science and languages; and class sizes are too large because returning students are assigned to too few of them.
Many RSD schools also have no "working kitchens or water fountains (and their) bathroom facilities are scandalous....Hardly any white children attend this half of the school experiment." RSD schools are for poor black students getting short-changed and denied a real education by an uncaring state and nation and corporations in it for profit.
Quigley described a system for "Haves (and) Have-Nots," and race defines it. He also exposed the lie that charter schools are public ones. Across the country, but especially in New Orleans, school officials are unaccountable, can pick and choose their students, and can decide who gets educated and who doesn't.Separate and UnequalIn his 2005 book "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," Jonathan Kozol explains a problem getting worse, not better. Using data from state and local education agencies, interviews with researchers and policy makers, and the Harvard Civil Rights Project, his account is disturbing at a time of NCLB and other destructive initiatives. Harvard Civil Rights researchers captured the problem in their Brown v. Board of Education 50th anniversary assessment stating: "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation." Desegregation from the 1950s through the late 1980s "has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The percent of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968" with conditions worst of all in the nation's four most segregated states - New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. "Martin Luther King's dream is being celebrated in theory and dishonored in practice" by what's happening in inner-city schools. King would be appalled "that the country would renege on its promises," and the Supreme Court would authorize it in their two above cited decisions and an earlier 1991 one: -- Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell that ruled for resegregating neighborhood schools mostly in areas of the South where desegregation was most advanced. According to recent National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, blacks and Latinos now comprise about 95% of inner-city students in the nation's 100 largest school systems - accounting for more than one-third of all public school students. Kozol writes about "hypersegregation" with "no more than five or 10 white children (in) a student population of as many as 3000," and this is the "norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today." It's "fashionable," he says, to declare integration "failed" and settle for a new millennium version of "Plessey" and its "separate but equal" doctrine that "Brown" repudiated until now. Despite high-minded political posturing and programs like NCLB, the truth is these youngsters are forgotten and abused. They're warehoused in decrepit facilities, curricula offerings ignore their needs, testing is unrelated to learning, teachers don't teach, the whole scheme is swept under the rug, and "educating" the unwanted is "standardized" to produce good workers with pretty low skill levels for the kinds of jobs awaiting them. Kozol refers to "school reform" as a "business enterprise with goals, action plans, implementation targets, and productivity measures," and above all what marketplace potential there is. Separate and unequal is the current inner city school standard. Unless it's exposed, denounced and reversed, (and there's no sign of it), millions of poor and minority children will be denied what the "American dream" increasingly only offers the privileged. And no one in Washington cares or they'd be doing something about it. Disturbing New Dropout DataA new Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center report released April 1 is revealing, disturbing but not surprising. It states only 52% of public high school students in the nation's 50 largest cities completed the full curriculum and graduated in 2003 - 2004. This compares to the national average of 70%. Below are some of the findings: -- 1.2 million public high school students drop out each year; -- 17 of the 50 troubled cities have graduation rates of 50% or lower; in Detroit it's 24.9%; Indianapolis is 30.5%; Cleveland at 34.1%; Baltimore - 34.6%; Columbus - 40.9%; Minneapolis - 43.7%; Dallas - 44.4%; New York - 45.2%; Los Angeles - 45.3%; Oakland - 45.6%; Kansas City - 45.7%; Atlanta - 46%; Milwaukee - 46.1%; Denver - 46.3%; Oklahoma City - 47.5%; Miami - 49%; and Philadelphia - 49.6%; -- Chicago barely came in at 51.5%; -- the data show public education in the 50 largest cities' principal school districts in a virtual state of collapse; -- dropout rates for blacks and Latinos are significantly higher than for white students; -- dropouts are eight times more likely to end up in prison; family income is the main problem; in cities most affected, it goes hand in hand with a lack of good jobs and a sub-standard social infrastructure; -- key to understanding the overall problem nationwide is the gutting of social services, widening income gap between rich and poor, exporting manufacturing and other high-paying jobs abroad, and politicians and business exploiting the needs of the many to benefit the few; -- NCLB "reform" is called the solution; Democrats and Republicans are complicit in promoting it, and no one in government explains the truth - the report reveals a sinister scheme to end public education, say it causes poor student performance, and privatize it so the "market" can provide it to well-off communities and merely exploit the rest for profit. Why else would the (Bill) Gates Foundation have funded the study and Colin Powell's America's Promise Alliance have sponsored it. APA is partnered with business, faith-based (Christian fundamentalist) groups, wealthy funders, and organizations like the American Bankers Association, right wing Aspen Institute, Business Roundtable, Ford Motor, Fannie Mae, Marriott International, National Association of Manufacturers, US Chamber of Commerce and many other for-profit ones and NGOs.Educational Maintenance OrganizationsIt's a new term for an old idea that's much like their failed HMO counterparts. They're private-for-profit businesses that contract with local school districts or individual charter schools to "improve the quality of education without significantly raising current spending levels." They're still rare, but watch out for them and what they're up to.An example is the Edison Project running Edison (for-profit) Schools. It calls itself "the nation's leading public school partner, working with schools and districts to raise student achievement and help every child reach his or her full potential." In the 2006-2007 school year, Edison served over 285,000 "public school" students in 19 states, the District of Columbia and the UK through "management partnerships with districts and charter schools; summer, after-school, and Supplemental Educational Service programs; and achievement management solutions for school systems." Edison Schools, and its controversial charter schools and EMO projects, hope to cash in on privatizing education and is bankrolled by Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen to do it. The company was founded in 1992, its performance record is spotty, and too often deceptive. It cooks the books on its assessments results that unsurprisingly show far more than they achieve. That's clear when independent evaluations are made. Kalamazoo's Western Michigan University's Evaluation Center published one of them in December 2000. Miami-Dade County public schools did another in the late 1990s. Both studies agreed. They showed Edison School students didn't outperform their public school counterparts, and they were kind in their assessment. Even more disturbing was Edison's performance in Texas. It took over two Sherman, Texas schools in 1995, then claimed it raised student performance by 5%. But an independent American Institutes for Research (AIR) study couldn't confirm it because Edison threatened legal action if its results were revealed. It was later learned that AIR's findings weren't exactly glowing and were thus suppressed. However, Sherman schools knew them, and when Edison's contract came up for renewal, the company withdrew before being embarrassed by expulsion. The city's school superintendent had this assessment. He said Edison arrived with promises to educate students at the same cost as public schools and would improve performance. In the end, the city spent an extra $4 million, and students test scores were lower than in other schools. The superintendent added: "They were more about money than teaching," and that's the problem with privatized education in all its forms - charter, contract or EMOs that place profits over students.Unless public action stops it, Edison is the future and so is New Orleans in its worst of all forms. It's spreading fast, and without public knowledge or discussion. It's the privatization of all public spaces and belief that marketplace everything works best. Indeed for business, but not people who always lose out to profits.Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM to 1PM for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests:www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8566Source: sjlendman.blogspot.com/2008/04/destroying-public-education-in-america.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 25, 2008 14:15:47 GMT 4
Our children in New Orleans and more info on our public school systemsI have continued to track the lack of progress in New Orleans since Katrina and will do so until our government ponies up to the devastated communities. You can read more under our United States affairs board, at the Hurricane Response thread.
This post, however, dovetails with the previous here, Destroying Public Education in America - by Stephen Lendman. If you haven't done so, please read it; particularly the info on how within six months of Katrina, the public schools infrastructure was mostly gutted, and a new framework was put in place which is nothing more than a massive (new) experiment....on thousands of (mostly) African American children.
What's being done to our public education system, especially where lower income children are 'educated', boggles one's mind. Michelle Our children in New OrleansIt’s happened twice, once at the beginning of my trip and again as my time in New Orleans draws to a close. A small child - in both cases a black boy - randomly wandered up to me and gave me a big hug (at kneecap level), in each case to the embarrassment of their respective mothers. The first time, I thought it was cute, but the second time, it made me think… What will become of these adorable beings who come to us with such wide open hearts? Statistically, the answer is not good. Child advocates are calling it the “School to Prison Pipeline” and at this point it’s hard for me to see any meaningful moral distinction between how New Orleans and Louisiana treats its black and “minority” children and how the Nazis treated its Jewish ones.Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) states: “Since Hurricane Katrina our School System has drastically changed, and in many cases NOT for the better, because many of our student’s rights are being violated by the School to Prison pipeline.” The American Friends Service Committee published the following on this issue: What is the School to Prison Pipeline?In a 2006 report the NAACP explained that the School to Prison Pipeline refers to “the various policies…that push children out of school and hasten their entry into the juvenile, and eventually the criminal justice system, where prison is the end of the road.” Many of these policies are codified in our school system under various phrases like “Zero-Tolerance” school policies that turn more and more to law enforcement involvement as sources of discipline for school children. What are the facts of the issue?Last year (2007) the Recovery School District in New Orleans expelled 3.5% of the student population. The national average is 0.2% (that’s well over TEN TIMES the national rate) Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of children in the United States - 387 per 100,000 residents Louisiana also has the highest number of children in adult prisons in the United States The vast majority of youth locked up in Louisiana are African American (80%), yet African-Americans make up only one third of Louisiana’s population. Who made this?
We did.
These children didn’t come to us this way.Two groups that are working on this both helping the victims and their families and working to change policy: Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC)www.fflic.orgAmerican Friends Service Committeewww.afsc.org/neworleansThere are occasional marches in New Orleans “against violence.” As someone who grew up in then-ultra violent New York City in the 1970s, that’s always seemed a bit abstract to me. How about marches against official, institutionalized violence - physical and psychic - against children? That would make a lot more sense. Source: foodmusicjustice.com/2008/04/22/our-children-in-new-orleans/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In the previous post, Destroying Public Education in America, mentioned is Jonathan Kozol's book, "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America." I am a long time fan of Jonathan Kozol and recommend you read any of his books. Below, is a review of his book, The Shame of the Nation... It gives some idea on much of what I have been attempting to convey at this thread...MKozol, Jonathan. (2005). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown Publishers. 416 pp. $25 ISBN 1400052440 Reviewed by Ramin Farahmandpur Portland State University February 15, 2006 For another review of this book, see the review by Nathalis G. Wamba For over forty years, Jonathan Kozol has been one of the leading advocates of school desegregation in the United States. He is one of the most widely recognized educators and critics of the disparities in funding of public education. His long list of books including, Savage Inequalities (1991), Amazing Grace (1996) andExtraordinary Resurrections (2001), have depicted the debilitating and inhumane conditions under which children are educated in public schools. Kozol has painstakingly documented these conditions by visiting classrooms in public schools across the United States, and interviewing schoolchildren, teachers, parents, school principals, politicians, and community members. Such extraordinary commitment and unselfish dedication to children—one of the most vulnerable groups of our society—is rare indeed. Faced with the increasing corporate influence in shaping school curriculum, Kozol’s work takes on an even greater importance. The Civil Rights struggles and the growing anti-war movements on college and university campuses across the nation of the 1960s shaped Kozol’s social and political consciousness. Influenced by these social and political upheavals, Kozol decided to work with schoolchildren in segregated schools. He began his teaching career as a fourth grade teacher in Boston, and taught and worked for ten years in various capacities including as a community activist, working with grassroots movements to improve the conditions under which children of color attended public schools. Kozol’s latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America, is a forceful and passionate indictment of the blatant inequities in public schools that continues to plague a nation even today. The questions that Kozol poses in his book highlights the paradoxes and contradictions that persist between public education and democratic values and principles we uphold as a nation. In the documentary Children in America’s Schools (1995), hosted by Bill Moyers, these paradoxes and contradictions unfold. Inspired and based in part on Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (1991), the documentary examines how local property taxes contribute to the unequal funding of public schools in poor and wealthy communities. In the documentary, Kozol points out that more than $100 billion is needed to fix the infrastructure of public schools in America. But since the publication of Kozol’s classic book Savage Inequalities (1991), which exposed the unequal funding of American public schools, no serious measures has been taken to improve the infrastructure of public schools, in particular those in urban communities. In California, for example, more than 47,000 uncertified teachers are teaching in its public schools, and within the next ten years, there will be a demand for 300,000 new teachers. Maryland is also facing similar challenges. Nearly 6 percent of its teaching force lack full certification. In Baltimore, the problem is even far grimmer: over one-third of the school district’s teachers do not hold full teaching credentials. The probability that students will end up in classes with uncertified teachers is much higher for working-class and minority students. Because of this growing trend, in 1998 a record 47 percent of all entering freshmen to the California State University system were required to take remedial English and 54 percent enrolled in remedial math classes. In Chicago, classrooms with as many as fifty-four students are common. At Winton Place Elementary in Ohio, teachers spend anywhere from $500 to $1,500 of their own money every academic year to purchase classroom supplies and material such as scissors and glue (Fattah 2002). Today, after decades of persistent struggles waged against school segregation by educators and Civil Rights activists, social and economic policies have contributed to the growing disturbing trend in school segregation. Since the 1960s, with the shifting population of white middle class families moving from urban to suburban communities, which some sociologists have referred to as the “white flight,” the number of white students in urban public schools has dramatically declined. According to Kozol, today the overwhelming majority of schoolchildren in public schools in large metropolitan areas of the United States are students of color. In Chicago, for example, 87 percent of students who attend public schools are either black or Hispanic. In Washington, that figure is 94 percent. It is even higher in Detroit public schools: an astounding 95 percent. In the New York and Los Angeles public schools system, it stands at 75 percent and 84 percent respectively. Kozol draws attention to these figures to argue that, “racial isolation and the concentration of poverty of children in public schools go hand in hand” (p. 20). One of the major consequences of the white flight has been the decline in funding public schools in urban communities through local property taxes.Kozol writes that in public schools the discourse in educational policy has shifted from “equality” to “adequacy.” The language of ‘higher standards’ and ‘higher expectations’ has replaced ethical and moral standards that were once an important part of the school curriculum. Kozol criticizes the frameworks used to identify the causes of the underachievement of students of color. Most schools now employ what Kozol refers to as “auto-hypnotic slogans” as part of the daily rituals and practices designed to boost student moral. In the so-called under-performing schools, students are encouraged to repeat and memorize phrases like “I can, “ I am smart,” and “I am confident” to raise their level of self-confidence and to improve their academic performance. Kozol believes we need to do more than merely study the ‘psychological effects’ of poverty and oppression on children to find solutions to the social problem they face. The disparities in funding public education for schoolchildren in wealthy and poor communities are disconcerting. Kozol reports that while some public schools in poor neighborhoods spend $8,000, other public schools in the suburbs and wealthy neighborhoods spend between $12,000 and $18,000. The salaries of teachers in poor and wealthy school districts follow a similar pattern. While the average salary of schoolteachers in poor communities is $43,000, the salary of teachers in suburbs like Rye, Manhurst and Scarsdale in New York can range from $74,000 to $81,000. Another contributing factor to the disparities among public schools in poor and wealthy communities is fund-raising activities schools organize to raise money to purchase school supplies and materials. The differences are quite disheartening. Compared to schools in wealthy neighborhoods that have been able to raise up to $200,000, schools in poor districts have only been able to raise $4,000. According to Kozol, urban schools increasingly resemble factory production lines. He notes that “raising test scores,” “social promotion,” “outcome-based objectives,” “time management,” “success for all,” “authentic writing,” “accountable talk,” “active listening” and “zero noise,” all constitute part of the current dominant discourse in public schools. Kozol observes that many urban public schools have adopted business and market “work related themes” and managerial concepts that have become part of the vocabulary used in classroom lessons and instruction. In the “market drive classrooms,” students “negotiate,” “sign contracts,” and take “ownership” of their learning. In many classrooms, students can volunteer as the “pencil manager,” “soap manager,” “door manager,” “line manager,” “time managers” and “coat room manager.” In some fourth grade classrooms, teachers record student assignments and homework using “earning charts.” In these schools, teachers are referred to as “classroom managers,” principals are identified as “building managers,” and students are viewed as “learning managers.” It is commonplace to view schoolchildren as “assets,” “investment,” “productive units” or “team players.” Schools identify skills and knowledge students learn and acquire as “commodities” and “products” to be consumed in the ‘educational marketplace.’ Kozol argues that teachers are treated as “efficiency technicians” who are encouraged to use “strict Skinnerian controls” to manage and teach students in their classroom. Kozol’s moral and ethical vision of education goes beyond the market-driven model of education in which teachers are treated as “floor managers” in public schools, “whose job it is to pump some ‘added-value’ into undervalued children”(p. 285). Kozol raises a number of important questions including: why does society place a value on the worth of children depending on whether they are rich or poor?In some schools, Kozol writes, standardized testing begins in the kindergarten. Many schools have cut back or entirely removed art and music classes from their school curriculum. Other schools have reduced or altogether eliminated recess or naptime. My experience teaching in an urban middle school in Los Angeles confirms many of the observations Kozol documents in his book. Last year, I decided to return to teach sixth grade in a middle school in Los Angeles where I had begun my teaching career back in the early 1990s. I too was surprised to find the removal of many art and music programs from the school curriculum. Some Title I schools even have a testing coordinator. During homeroom, testing coordinators encourage teachers to spend time teaching students test taking skills and strategies. The ‘test-craze’ is a growing epidemic in many large metropolitan public school districts. The Los Angeles Unified School Districts, for example, has developed its own quarterly assessment tests in Math, Science, Social Studies and English. The district tests students every two months. We are told that the purpose of these district assessment tests is to prepare students for the state standardized tests in late spring. Most of the faculty and department meeting time is devoted to sharing and discussing the use of effective strategies and methods to prepare students for quarterly assessment tests or reviewing state and districts standards. Teachers are also encouraged to attend workshops and conferences to learn more on how to align their teaching practices to the state standards. One of the obstacles in making schools more democratic and equitable is the academic tracking of students. In many of the urban schools Kozol visited, including Fremont High School in Los Angeles, students were tracked into vocational programs and classes that teach life skills or offer basic training that prepares students for jobs in the retail and service industry. More demoralizing is school counselors who place high school female students in sewing and cosmetology classes. These classes do little for students who must compete with AP and college tracked students. Some schools, including the middle school in which I taught, offered students “service classes” as an elective in which their primary responsibility was to assist teachers in handing out and collecting student papers.??!!!!![/b] Although studies have shown a disturbing trend toward growing school segregation over the last two decades, some school districts have participated in successful school integration programs. In Milwaukee, for example, twenty-two school districts are part of a student transfer program that promotes school integration. More than 2,400 students who participate in this program attend schools in the suburban areas. In St. Louis, a similar program exists in which 10,000 schoolchildren study in suburban schools while 500 students from the suburbs attend schools in St. Louis. Louisville which involves 9,000 students is yet another example of successful school integration program. Finally, in Boston more than 3,300 students are participating in a school integration program called METCO. In the climate of standardized testing and accountability, the most pressing question is, what social standards do we use to measure the effects of poverty, hunger and emotional and physical abuse on the academic achievement and performance of children. Kozol’s book is a grim and bitter reminder that the crisis public schools face today is in part a reflection of the growing race and class inequality over the last two decades. Without introducing social and economic reforms that would provide basic social services like housing, employment and health care, the challenges public schools face today will continue to exist in the twenty-first century. ReferencesFattah, C. (2002). Unequal education in America: A look at stories from around the country. www.house.gov/fattah/education/ed_sbruneq.htm (accessed January 6, 2006). Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Kozol, J. (1996). Amazing grace: The lives of children and the conscience of a nation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Kozol, J. (2001). Ordinary resurrections: Children in the years of hope. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. About the ReviewerRamin Farahmandpur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Foundations and Administrative Studies at Portland State University. His interests include critical pedagogy and multicultural education. He is the co-author of Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy.Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, (2005). Source: edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev468.htm
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Aug 22, 2008 14:37:04 GMT 4
Chicago 1968 DNC Convention: A Chronology In honor of the protesters going to this year's Denver Democratic Convention, and what they're likely to face, I'm offering a bit of history here. No doubt, the PTBs will try to downplay the size of the protest....wouldn't want to excite the masses....or, they'll try and put a negative spin on the demonstrations....unpatriotic agitators!.... The protesters in Denver are to expect some rough handling and every step has been taken to deter them:See:Re: Wake up and smell the fascism « Reply #34 Today at 1:25pm » [glow=red,2,300]Suppression of Protest at the DNC[/glow] 'Gitmo On The Platte' Set As Holding Cell For DNC'Gitmo On The Platte' Set As Holding Cell For DNC August 23 - 28airdance.proboards50.com/index.cgi?board=america&action=display&thread=114&page=3#3051One might well conclude that the above is horrific and indeed our country has sunk to new lows. But as you will see in the following archive by UC Berkeley of the Chicago Democratic Convention protests in 1968 [and events before/after], rebellion from the masses has always been squashed in this country. We cannot but recognize that this did happen before and that it does now.
The slightest reflection here will make you surprised at your surprise to see history repeating itself. To be surprised, to wonder is to begin to understand. This is your sport now folks, your luxury, special to the intellectual man/woman. Please share the following with your kids, as they need adults to point out the truth of our history....
Young Einon: The peasants are revolting! Brok: They've always been revolting, prince. Now they're rebellin'. .... Dialogue from Dragonheart, a 1996 film about a dragon and a knight who must overthrow an evil king gifted with partial immortality.
I was Born in to It, And Am Active in It as an Adult, To The Movement! It Lives! MichelleChicago '68: A Chronology 1967
August 15: At a convention of the National Student Association, Allard K. Lowenstein and Curtis Gans formally launch the Dump Johnson movement—an effort to oppose the renomination of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. August 31: Five-day convention of the National Conference for a New Politics opens in Chicago. 3,000 delegates from some 200 left, community, and civil rights groups convene to discuss an electoral strategy for 1968. Some want a third-party slate with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., running for President and peace activist Dr. Benjamin Spock for Vice-president. But the conference breaks up in rancor and division. Leftists who want to be active in a presidential race have nowhere to turn but the Democratic Party. September 23: Allard Lowenstein meets with New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy declines to run as the candidate of the anti-Johnson movement. (In his search for a candidate, Lowenstein will ask California Congressman Don Edwards, Idaho Senator Frank Church, Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, General James M. Gavin, and South Dakota Senator George S. McGovern; no one accepts the role.) October 8: The Democratic Party announces that the 1968 Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago. October 20: Lowenstein meets with Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. McCarthy agrees to be the movement's candidate. October 21-22: A demonstration at the Pentagon organized by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) draws 100,000. Afterwards, MOBE begins to talk about antiwar protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where President Johnson is expected to be nominated for a second term. November 18: Governor George Romney of Michigan declares his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. "A Republican president," he says, "can work for a just peace in Vietnam unshackled by the mistakes of the past." November 30: Senator Eugene McCarthy officially enters the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, running on an antiwar platform. December 31: Activists partying at Abbie Hoffman's New York loft resolve to hold a Festival of Life during the Democrats' "Convention of Death." Paul Krassner christens the group "Yippies." 1968
January 5: Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others are indicted on federal charges of conspiring to counsel draft evasion. January 21: North Vietnamese troops surround the Khe Sanh combat base and begin a seventy-seven day siege of the 6,000 U.S. Marines stationed there. January 23: North Korea seizes the U.S.S. Pueblo, a Navy intelligence ship which the North Koreans claim had violated their territorial waters. One U.S. sailor is killed and 82 are taken prisoner. January 30: The Tet offensive begins in South Vietnam; Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops strike at targets across South Vietnam, reaching even the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Often cited as a turning point in public support for the war. American troops will peak at 542,000 during 1968. February 1: Richard Nixon enters the race for the Republican nomination for President. Nixon says that the war in Vietnam should be prosecuted "more effectively." February 8: Alabama Governor George Wallace enters the presidential race as an Independent. Also on this date, three black students are killed and twenty-seven are wounded at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, when state troopers fire on demonstrators demanding the integration of the local bowling alley. The incident is known as the Orangeburg Massacre. February 27: CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite concludes a special report on Vietnam and the Tet offensive with an editorial, in which he says: "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." President Johnson is said to have responded: "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." February 28: Romney withdraws from the Republican race. March 12: Voters in the New Hampshire primary give President Johnson only a narrow victory over antiwar candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy. March 16: Senator Robert Kennedy reverses his earlier decision and announces his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, criticizing Johnson for his handling of the war. Also on this date, in South Vietnam, Charlie Company (11th Brigade, Americal Division) enters the village of My Lai and kills over 300 apparently unarmed civilians. The American public will not hear about the My Lai atrocities until November 1969. March 22-23: A MOBE conference in Lake Villa, Illinois brings together MOBE, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Yippie activists to plan the Convention demonstrations. March 31: Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the Democratic primary race. Read the New York Times story. April 4: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots break out in more than a hundred cities. On the west side of Chicago, nine blacks are killed and twenty blocks are burned. April 11: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968. While primarily addressing open housing, the Act also includes a new federal anti-riot law, making it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot. April 15: Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley publicly criticizes Superintendent of Police James Conlisk's cautious handling of the riots that followed King's assassination. He said he was giving the police specific instructions "to shoot to kill any arsonist and to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting." April 23: At Columbia University in New York, students opposed to the university's defense contracts and their plans for a new gymnasium to be built on Harlem park land occupy several campus buildings. They are routed by city police a week later: 150 injuries, 700 arrests. April 27: An antiwar march in Chicago draws 8,000 people. When the march ends, Chicago police order the crowd to disperse, then wade in with clubs. The unofficial Sparling report criticizes the police and the Daley administration. Also on this date, Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. April 30: Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, enters the race for the Republican presidential nomination. May 6-30: Student demonstrations in France lead to a general strike throughout the country. Ten million workers strike, 10,000 battle police in Paris. May 10: Peace talks open in Paris with Averell Harriman representing the U.S. and Xan Thuy representing North Vietnam. Talks soon deadlock over the North Vietnamese demand for an end to all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. More than 2,000 American soldiers die in combat in May, the highest monthly loss of the war. May 13: In Washington D.C., Resurrection City rises, a demonstration by the Poor People's Campaign. May 14: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, sends a memorandum to all FBI field offices initiating a counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to disrupt new left groups. June 5: Senator Robert Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. June 14: Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others are convicted of conspiring to counsel draft evasion. June 23: A group of Connecticut McCarthy supporters, disgruntled at being under-represented in their state's delegation to the upcoming convention, meet to create a Commission on the Selection of Presidential Nominees. This commission will submit proposals to the convention's Rules Committee calling for an end to the practice of winner-takes-all in state delegations. [The 1968 convention agreed to study the issue. The resulting committee, the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection—which would be chaired by Senator George McGovern—made recommendations that were adopted by the Democratic National Committee in 1971 and effectively placed control of the Democratic presidential nomination process beyond the reach of the traditional party regulars.] June 29: 1,200 disaffected Democrats meet in Chicago as the Coalition for an Open Convention, an effort largely organized by Allard Lowenstein. The group concludes that time is too short to mount a fourth-party bid for the presidency. They pass a resolution opposing Humphrey. The group's course of action in the event that Humphrey does not get the nomination is unclear; Lowenstein says: "If we get to that bridge, I'll jump off it." July 15: The Yippies apply for permits to camp in Lincoln Park (about two miles north of the Chicago Loop) and to rally at Soldier Field (on the lakefront south of the Loop). July 29: MOBE applies for permits to march to and rally at the International Amphitheatre (site of the Democratic Convention and about five miles southwest of the Loop) and to march to and rally in Grant Park (just east of the Loop). All permits are denied, except one allowing the use of the Grant Park bandshell for a rally. August 5: On the day that the Republican National Convention opens in Miami Beach, Florida, Ronald Reagan declares he is a candidate for the Republican nomination. August 8: Richard M. Nixon wins the Republican party's nomination for President. The first foreign policy objective of his administration, he says in his acceptance speech, will be "to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam." At the same time, not far away in the black neighborhoods of Miami, riots result in four deaths and hundreds of arrests. August 10: Senator George S. McGovern announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. August 21: Soviet tanks and troops roll into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring reform movement. Convention Week August 22, Thursday: Dean Johnson, a seventeen-year-old Sioux Indian from South Dakota, is shot dead by Chicago police on Wells Street. Police say he pulled a gun. A memorial march is held later in the day. August 23, Friday: At the Civic Center plaza (located in the Loop and now known as the Daley Center) the Yippies nominate their presidential contender—Pigasus the pig. Seven Yippies and the pig are arrested. Almost 6,000 National Guardsman are mobilized and practice riot-control drills. Special police platoons do the same. August 24, Saturday: MOBE's marshal training sessions continue in Lincoln Park. Karate, snake dancing, and crowd protection techniques are practiced. Women Strike for Peace holds a women-only picket at the Hilton Hotel, where many delegates are staying. At the 11 PM curfew, poet Allan Ginsberg, chanting, and musician Ed Sanders lead people out of the park. August 25, Sunday: MOBE's "Meet the Delegates" march gathers 800 protesters in Grant Park across from the Hilton Hotel. The Festival of Life, in Lincoln Park, opens with music. 5,000 hear the MC-5 and local bands play. Police refuse to allow a flatbed truck to be brought in as a stage. A fracas breaks out in which several are arrested and others are clubbed. Police reinforcements arrive. At the 11 PM curfew, most of the crowd, now numbering around 2,000, leave the park ahead of a police sweep and congregate between Stockton Drive and Clark Street. The police line then moves into the crowd, pushing it into the street. Many are clubbed, reporters and photographers included. The crowd disperses into the Old Town area, where the battles continue. August 26, Monday: In the early morning, Tom Hayden is among those arrested. 1,000 protesters march towards police headquarters at 11th and State. Dozens of officers surround the building. The march turns north to Grant Park, swarming the General Logan statue. Police react by clearing the hill and the statue. At the International Amphitheatre, Mayor Daley formally opens the 1968 Democratic National Convention. [The convention would have been held in McCormick Place on the Chicago lakefront, but it was destroyed by fire in January 1967.] In his welcoming address, Daley says: "As long as I am mayor of this city, there's going to be law and order in Chicago." As the curfew approaches, some in Lincoln Park build a barricade against the police line to the east. About 1,000 remain in the park after 11 PM. A police car noses into the barricade and is pelted by rocks. Police move in with tear gas. Like Sunday night, street violence ensues. But it is worse. Some area residents are pulled off their porches and clubbed. More reporters are attacked this night than at any other time during the week. August 27, Tuesday: At 1 PM 200 members of the American Friends Service Committee and other pacifist groups leave a near-northside church to march to the Amphitheatre. Joined by others along their route, the marchers eventually number about 1,000. The police stop the march at 39th and Halstead, about half-a-mile north of the Amphitheatre. The marchers set up a picket line and remain in place until 10 AM the next morning. They are then ordered to disperse and 30 resisters are arrested. This is the only march of Convention Week that gets anywhere near the Amphitheatre—it also gets virtually no publicity. About 7 PM Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale speaks in Lincoln Park. He urges people to defend themselves by any means necessary if attacked by the police. An "Unbirthday Party for LBJ" convenes at the Chicago Coliseum. Performers and speakers include Ed Sanders, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Terry Southern, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Rennie Davis. 2,000 later march from the Coliseum to Grant Park. In Lincoln Park, 200 clergy and lay church people, toting a 12-foot cross, join 2,000 protestors to remain in the park past curfew. Again, tear gas and club-swinging police clear the park. Many head south to the Loop and Grant Park. At Grant Park, in front of the Hilton, where the television cameras are, 4,000 demonstrators rally to speeches by Julian Bond, Davis, and Hayden. Mary Traverse and Peter Yarrow sing. The rally is peaceful. At 3 AM the National Guard relieve the police. The crowd is allowed to stay in Grant Park all night. August 28, Wednesday: 10-15,000 gather at the old Grant Park bandshell for the MOBE's antiwar rally. Dellinger, Gregory, Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Jerry Rubin, Carl Oglesby, Hayden, and many others speak. 600 police surround the rally on all sides. National Guardsmen are posted on the roof of the nearby Field Museum. In the Convention at the Amphitheatre, the peace plank proposed for the Democratic party platform is voted down. At the bandshell rally, news of the defeat of the peace plank is heard on radios. A young man begins to lower the American flag flying near the bandshell. Police push through the crowd to arrest him. Then a group, including at least one undercover police officer, completes the flag lowering and raises a red or blood-splattered shirt. Police move in again. A line of MOBE marshals is formed between the police and the crowd. Police charge the marshal line. Rennie Davis is beaten unconscious. At rally's end Dellinger announces a march to the Amphitheatre, while Hayden urges the crowd to move in small groups to the Loop. 6,000 join the march line, but, since it has no permit and the police refuse to allow it to use the sidewalks, the march does not move. After an hour of negotiation, the march line begins to break up. Protestors try to cross over to Michigan Avenue, but the Balbo and Congress bridges have been sealed off by National Guardsmen armed with .30 caliber machine guns and grenade launchers. The crowd moves north and finds that the Jackson Street bridge is unguarded. Thousands surge onto Michigan Avenue. Coincidentally, the mule train of Ralph Abernathy's Poor People's Campaign, which has a permit to go to the Amphitheatre, is passing south on Michigan. The crowd joins it. At Michigan and Balbo the crowd is halted again. Only the mule train is allowed to continue. Deputy Police Superintendent James Rochford orders the police to clear the streets. Demonstrators and bystanders are clubbed, beaten, Maced, and arrested. Some fight back and the attack escalates. The melee last about seventeen minutes and is filmed by the TV crews positioned at the Hilton. While this was probably not the most violent episode of Convention Week—the Lincoln Park and Old Town brawls were more vicious—it drew the most attention from the mass media. Inside the Amphitheatre, presidential nominations are underway. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in his speech nominating George McGovern, denounces the "Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago." Mayor Daley's shouted reaction was on-camera, but off-mike. Lip-readers later decoded a vulgar rage. Hubert H. Humphrey wins the party's nomination on the first ballot. 500 antiwar delegates march from the Amphitheatre to the Hilton; many join the 4,000 protestors in Grant Park. Again, protestors are allowed to stay in the park all night. August 29, Thursday: Senator Eugene McCarthy addresses about 5,000 gathered in Grant Park. Several attempts are made to march to the Amphitheatre. A group of delegates try to lead a march but are turned back with tear gas. Dick Gregory invites all the demonstrators to his house, which happens to be in the direction of the Amphitheatre. This too is turned back, at 18th Street. Near midnight, the 1968 Democratic National Convention is adjourned. August 30, Friday: About 5 AM police raid a McCarthy campaign hospitality suite on the 15th floor of the Hilton Hotel, because objects are being thrown from the windows. A relatively small incident escalates as more rooms of McCarthy campaign workers are entered and several people are hit with nighsticks. The arrest count for Convention Week disturbances stands at 668. An undetermined number of demonstrators sustained injuries, with hospitals reporting that they treated 111 demonstrators. The on-the-street medical teams from the Medical Committee for Human Rights estimated that their medics treated over 1,000 demonstrators at the scene. The police department reported that 192 officers were injured, with 49 officers seeking hospital treatment. During Convention Week, 308 Americans were killed and 1,144 more were injured in the war in Vietnam. September 9: In a press conference, Mayor Daley makes a now-famous slip of the tongue: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder." October 1: The House Committee on Un-American Activities convenes hearings to plumb the extent of Communist subversion in the Convention Week protests. Testifying over the course of the hearings are: Lt. Joseph Healy and Sgt. Joseph Grubisic, both of the Intelligence Division of the Chicago Police Department (the Red Squad); Robert Pierson, a Chicago police officer who went undercover and was Jerry Rubin's bodyguard; Robert Greenblatt, national coordinator of MOBE; Dr. Quentin Young of the Medical Committee for Human Rights; and soon-to-be-indicted Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger. (The hearings recessed on October 3rd and were concluded December 2 through 5.) November 5: Nixon is elected, defeating Humphrey by 500,000 votes. George Wallace receives about 13% of the vote nationwide and wins five Southern states. December 1: Public release of Rights in Conflict, commonly called the Walker Report. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, charged with studying and reporting on urban riots, formed a Chicago Study Team headed by Daniel Walker, to investigate the Convention Week disturbances. They reviewed over 20,000 pages of statements from 3,437 eyewitnesses and participants, 180 hours of film, and over 12,000 still photographs. The Walker Report attached the label "police riot" to the events of Chicago '68. Read an excerpt—the summary to Rights in Conflict. 1969
March 20: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner are indicted on Federal charges of conspiring to cross state lines "with the intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry out a riot." Six defendants—Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, Rubin and Seale—are also individually charged with crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Each of the two charges carried a five-year sentence; each defendant thus faces a ten-year prison term. The indictment charges that Froines and Weiner, in addition to the conspiracy charge, "did teach and demonstrate to other persons the use, application and making of an incendiary device." The same Federal grand jury that returned these criminal indictments also charged eight Chicago policemen with civil rights violations for assaulting demonstrators and news reporters. None of the policemen were convicted. (Forty-one officers of the Chicago Police Department were disciplined after internal investigations, and two resigned, for infractions like removing their badges and nameplates while on duty during Convention Week.) June 8: Gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam begins as Nixon announces that 25,000 troops will be withdrawn. June 18-22: SDS holds it national convention in Chicago. The organization splits into at least two factions—the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM). August 15-17: The Woodstock music festival—the Festival of Life a year late—convenes and communes in upstate New York. September 24: The Chicago 8 conspiracy trial begins in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman. October 8-11: The Weatherman faction of SDS—which split off from RYM—holds its National Actions—the Days of Rage—in Chicago. As if seeking revenge for Convention Week, pipe-wielding Weathermen race through the streets, attacking police, windows, and cars. October 15: An estimated 2 million people across the country participate in the first Moratorium against the war. November 5: The Chicago 8 becomes the Chicago 7, when a mistrial is declared in the case of Bobby Seale and a new, separate trial is ordered. After repeatedly asserting his right to an attorney of his own choosing or to defend himself, Seale had been bound and gagged in the courtroom. He is sentenced to four years for contempt of court. (The sentence is later reversed.) Seale is never convicted of any Convention Week charges. November 15: A MOBE-organized march draws 500,000 people to Washington, D.C.; 150,000 attend a march in San Francisco. December 4: In an early morning raid, Chicago police fire nearly 100 shots into a west side apartment. Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Party member Mark Clark are killed. One or two shots were fired by the Panthers. 1970
February 18: The jury reaches a verdict and the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial ends. All the defendants are acquitted on conspiracy charges. Froines and Weiner are acquitted on all charges. Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin are each convicted of individually crossing state lines with the intent of inciting a riot; each is sentenced to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Judge Hoffman cites all the defendants—plus their lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass—for numerous contempts of court and imposes sentences ranging from 2½ months to four years. Defendants are freed on bail pending an appeal. March 6: Three members of Weathermen are killed when the bomb they are building in a New York townhouse explodes. April 30: Three divisions of American troops cross the border from Vietnam into Cambodia to destroy enemy camps and supplies. Student strikes shut down hundreds of college campuses in the U.S. over the next few days. May 4: Four students are killed and nine injured by National Guard troops during protests at Kent State University in Ohio. In the aftermath, demonstrations spread to more than a thousand campuses and 100,000 rally in Washington, D.C. May 15: At Jackson State College in Mississippi, two students are killed and twelve are injured when city police and highway patrolmen fire on a dormitory building. August 24: A homemade bomb explodes in a stolen van parked at the loading dock outside the Army Math Research Center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A graduate student is killed and five are injured. The Army Math bombing is the first loss of innocent life caused by antiwar activists and divides the Left into those who condemn it and those who justify it. 1971
March 29: U.S. Army Lieutenant William Calley is found guilty of 22 murders in the My Lai massacre and sentenced to life in prison. (Twenty-six officers and soldiers, including Calley's immediate superior officer, Captain Ernest Medina, were initially charged in connection with their actions at My Lai, but Calley is the only one convicted. Calley's sentence was later reduced and he served less than four years.) May 3: In Washington D.C. tens of thousands of anti-war activists use civil disobedience tactics to try to shut down the Federal government in protest of the Vietnam War. Arrests number about 12,000. Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis is a key organizer of the actions. June 13: The New York Times begins publication of the History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy, better known as the Pentagon Papers—a secret Defense Department study, prepared in 1967-69, of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers were leaked to the Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst. (Read an excerpt from the Pentagon papers.) 1972
February 8: An appeal of the convictions of Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, and Rubin on the individual charges of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot is heard by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. February 9: An appeal of the contempt sentences of the Chicago 7 and their attorneys is heard by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. In a separate proceeding an appeal of the contempt sentences of Bobby Seale is also argued. May 11: Ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals voids a few of the contempt citations of the Chicago 7 and their attorneys, but remands the rest for trial by a judge other than Julius Hoffman. The Court also issues its reversal of the contempt sentences for Seale and remands all the citations for retrial. (The government decides not to proceed with a contempt trial for Seale, but to go to trial on the contempt charges against the Chicago 7 and attorneys Kunstler and Weinglass.) June 17: Five men are arrested in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington's Watergate complex. July 10: The 1972 Democratic National Convention opens in Miami Beach. The new delegate selection rules and processes set into motion by the 1968 convention have changed the makeup of the convention. However Mayor Daley, leader of the Illinois delegation, ignored the new rules. The Daley delegation was challenged and the credentials committee rejected his delegation, replacing it with a delegation led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. George McGovern wins the nomination. November 7: Nixon is re-elected to a second term as President, defeating McGovern. November 21: Ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on the convictions of Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, and Rubin for crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Citing judicial error, the convictions are reversed and a new trial is ordered. The Court adds "that the demeanor of the judge and the prosecutors would require reversal if the other errors did not." 1973
January 4: The U.S. Attorney announces that it will not seek a new trial on the individual counts of Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, and Rubin. January 27: The U.S., North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Vietcong sign a ceasefire agreement in Paris. By April the last American combat soldiers have left Vietnam, leaving only military advisers and security forces. October 29: Trial on the contempt citations of the Chicago 7 and their attorneys before Judge Edward T. Gignoux, a U.S. District Court judge from Maine. For the trial, the government reduces the number of contempt charges to 52. Rubin, Hoffman, and Kunstler are found guilty of two contempts each. Dellinger is found guilty of seven contempts. However in consideration of "judicial error, judicial or prosecutorial misconduct, and judicial or prosecutorial provocation" no sentence is imposed. 1974
July 27-30: The House Judiciary Committee votes three articles of impeachment against President Nixon in connection with the Watergate burglary. August 9: Facing impeachment and eroding public support, Nixon resigns. 1975
April 30: The last American personnel in Vietnam leave via helicopter from the roof of the U.S. Embassy as Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City. Three million Americans served in the war; nearly 58,000 were killed, 150,000 seriously wounded, and over 1,000 are missing in action. Last updated on February 28, 2008. Source: www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/1553/c68chron.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Nov 19, 2008 14:34:10 GMT 4
Obama and the Promise of EducationSunday 16 November 2008 by: Henry Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective Needless to say, like many Americans, I am both delighted and cautious about Barack Obama's election. Symbolically, this is an unprecedented moment in the fight against the legacy of racism while at the same time offering new possibilities for addressing how racism works in a post-Bush period. Politically, I think it puts the brakes on many authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies operating both domestically and abroad, while offering a foothold not only for a fresh critique of neoliberal and neoconservative policies, but also an opportunity to reclaim and energize the language of the social contract and social democracy. While the Bush administration may have been uninterested in critical ideas, debate and dialogue, it was almost rabid about destroying the economic, political and educational conditions that make them possible. In the end, the Bush administration was willing to sacrifice almost any remnant of democracy to further the interests of the rich and powerful, especially those commanded by corporate power. The Obama administration will fail badly if it does not connect the current financial and credit crisis to the crisis of democracy and its poisonous undoing by commanding market forces. Corporate power, rather than simply deregulation, has to be addressed head-on if any of the ensuing reforms undertaken by the Obama administration are going to work. Similarly, the social state has to be resurrected once again against the power and interest of the corporate state; that battle is not just economic and political, but also pedagogical. Of course, the last thing we need is to overly romanticize the Obama election. We don't need lone heroes offering a path to salvation and hope. Obama's victory is not about the gripping story of his personal journey and ultimate victory as a black man, but about the emergence of a certain moment in history when not only small differences matter, but new possibilities appear for making real claims on the promise of democracy to come. What this historic event should make clear is the necessity for various progressive and left-oriented groups to get beyond their isolated demands and form a powerful progressive movement that can push Obama to the left rather than allow him to drift to the center and right. Of course, this means that progressives will have to do more than embrace a language of critique; they will also have to engage in a discourse of hope, but a hope that is concrete, rooted in real struggles, and capable of forging a new political imagination among a highly conservative and fractured polity. This is an especially important time for educators. New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently argued that one of the most remarkable things about this election is that Obama is a practicing intellectual and that the era of anti-intellectualism so pervasive under the Bush administration may be coming to an end. Surely a message that resonates with anyone interested in the power of ideas. But there is more at stake here than an appeal to thoughtfulness, critique and intelligence; there is also the need to rethink the relationship between education and politics, the production of particular kinds of agents as a condition of civic life, and the ways in which new and diverse sites of education in the new millennium have proliferated into one of the most powerful political spheres in history. One of the most important challenges, especially for educators, facing the US in a post-Bush period, is to take seriously the educational force of a culture that is central to constructing a new type of citizen. What is needed are citizens defined less through the hatred and bigotry of racism and the narrow obligations of consumerism than through the values, identities and social relations of a democratic society. ------- Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. His most recent books include "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism" (2008). His primary research areas are: cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and public education. Source: www.truthout.org/111608A
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Nov 25, 2008 15:30:53 GMT 4
America the IlliteratePosted on Nov 10, 2008 By Chris Hedges We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book. The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge. The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world. Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both. The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our advancement. The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates, Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse. In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible , there is a need for constant stimulus. News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain. Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable. Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.” “There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.” The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality. They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills. They seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think. All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them. As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy. They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism. The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us. Source: www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is funny...... Obama Controversy Shocker (November 18, 2008) chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=55213.0Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy Stunning Break with Last Eight Years In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring. According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off." The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said. ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Nov 27, 2008 8:46:56 GMT 4
Give Thanks – and Acknowledge the Truth Friday, November 14, 2008 "The Europeans were able to conquer America not because of their military genius, or their religious motivation, or their ambition, or their greed. They conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological warfare." -- Howard Simpson
"Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?" -- Michael Dorris
"European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home." -- Francis Jennings
What Thanksgiving story are you telling your children or talking about with your guests during this holiday? Most Americans speak of remembering the Pilgrims who, in 1620, chose the land around Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts for their settlement. You might remember from your elementary school days that since they arrived in the winter, they were unprepared for the harsh climate. Fortunately, they were aided by some friendly Indians who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn. When the warm weather came, the colonists planted crops, fished, hunted and became much better prepared for next winter. And when they harvested their first crop, they invited their Indian friends to celebrate with them what was to become the first Thanksgiving. This story is taught today in thousands of classrooms across the nation, and around the world, and is ingrained in most people’s consciousness. Just yesterday, I heard some elementary school teachers telling the story on National Pubic Radio. Unfortunately, the entire story, from start to finish, is a complete lie.[/b] You are going to have to push aside your turkey (or tofu) leftovers if you are going to learn what really happened at the time of the first Thanksgiving in America. In fact, you may not be able to stomach any food for a while after you learn the truth. The story actually begins after 1492 as Europeans came in significant numbers to the newly found Americas. When people began moving, the microbes that they evolved with moved along with them. Before the arrival of Europeans, the inhabitants of North and South America were remarkably healthy. But along with the Europeans came their illnesses and their livestock and the native inhabitants were now exposed to the many diseases that can be passed back and forth between those animals and humans - anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera, streptococcus, ringworm and various poxes.The British and French had fished in Southern New England for some time before the Pilgrims landed in 1620. It is likely that they came in contact with the Indians at that time. The native inhabitants had no resistance to the diseases brought by the Europeans and within three years, a plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England! This death rate was unknown in all previous human experience. For comparison, the Black Plague in the 1300s killed about 30 percent of Europe’s population. This piece of history is usually omitted from most textbooks, yet these plagues, which ravaged the Indian population for the next 15 years, set the tone for the relationship of the European settlers with the indigenous people of America. The English settlers inferred from the plague that God was on their side in taking over the land. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, wrote that the plague was "miraculous." He said "God hath thereby cleared out title to this place..." Is it any wonder that our political leaders of today ask for God’s blessing and protection as they go to war to kill?Between 1520 and 1918, there were 93 epidemics among Native Americans. The affect that these plagues had on the native populations reached into their psyches as well. They felt that God had abandoned them. Some survivors of the Cherokee lost all confidence in their gods and priests and destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe. Indian healers could do nothing and their religion provided no cause. But the Whites usually survived and their religion seemed to save them. Many Indians turned to alcohol, Christianity or simply committed suicide. So it was a psychologically and physically devastated people that for the first 50 years of European occupation presented no real opposition to the invaders. Prior to the arrival of European invaders, the native population of North and South American was 100 million in 1492. The entire population of Europe at the time was 70 million. If colonists had not been able to take over lands that the Indians had already cleared and cultivated, and if the Indian population had not been devastated by disease, there might not have been any colonization at all.
By 1880, the Indian population was 250,000, a drop of 98 percent.It is quite likely that the Pilgrims knew well of these plagues. In fact, pretty much everyone knew about them. Ziner, in the book “Squanto,” wrote that before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us” for sending “this wonderful plague among the savages.” Few Americans know that the Pilgrims numbered only about 35 of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower, which was headed for the new Virginia colony. It is believed by some historians that it is possible that the Pilgrims bribed the Mayflower captain to drop them off in Massachusetts. Some say they may have even hijacked the ship. In any case, the non-Pilgrim majority, who had joined the ship because of the economic opportunity afforded by the Virginia tobacco plantations, were quite upset at being taken someplace else. Historians, in their search for a story that told the mythical beginnings of American culture, probably chose to omit facts about the Pilgrims story rather than tell the tale of Virginia. In Virginia, the British took the Native Americans prisoner and forced them to show the colonists how to farm. James W. Loewen, in his revealing book “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” says, “in 1623, the British indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with the tribes near the Potomac River, headed by Chiskiack. The British offered a toast ‘symbolizing eternal friendship,’ whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison.”The Pilgrims choose their site at Plymouth because it had beautifully cleared fields, recently planted corn, and excellent water supplies. The Pilgrims did not start from scratch in the wildness, but used a common practice of the European invaders of appropriating Indian cornfields for their initial settlements. This is why so many of the names of East Coast towns end in “field.” The Indians who created and lived in this new Plymouth were mostly dead from the plagues, so they provided little opposition. The Pilgrims robbed graves, stole what they could find in abandoned Indian homes, and filled their larder with the harvest of a dying culture’s labors. The reasons for the lies about the origins of Thanksgiving go deep into culture, psyche, and religion and is covered in depth in Loewen’s book. But one thing is for sure: the true history of Thanksgiving reveals some very embarrassing facts, to say the least.The most remarkable part of the story may be that the Pilgrims did not even introduce the tradition of Thanksgiving in America. It wasn’t until 1863 that President Lincoln proclaimed it a national holiday. The fabricated story of the Pilgrims was not even included in the holiday until the 1890’s. The term “Pilgrim” was not even used until the 1870’s. This environmental and social devastation wrought by the European invaders of North America continues today. Oil company explorers, miners and loggers continue to introduce disease to the isolated cultures of Brazil and Venezuela, where one fourth of their population was killed in 1991. The myth of Thanksgiving has created a false sense of self in Americans that has done great damage throughout the world. It has resulted in children being planted with the seeds of racial hatred and white superiority. It is an insult to us all, especially since most Americans are ignorant of the truth, even though the facts about the grave robbing, Indian enslavement and murder, and the plagues, were common knowledge among the settlers of New England. Loewen gives us excellent reasons why we should seek out the truth of American history. If the conflicts of the true story were revealed, he says, then “students might discover that the knowledge they gain has implications for their lives today. Correctly taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.”
We can redefine Thanksgiving for ourselves and our family. We can make it a day when we not only give thanks for the bounty we have received, but a day when we acknowledge the injustices that have been and are being perpetrated on so many people and animals in the world. After feasting, we could choose a way for our families to help lessen the suffering of some creature somewhere in the world, animal or human.We must remember these tragedies as we shape the new millennium. With genetically engineered bacteria, crops and animals being created every day, are we risking a biological devastation like the Indians experienced? We must examine how we are using this stolen gift of a nation. As life support systems crumble and species become extinct every day, can we really say we have learned anything in the last 500 years?Happy Thanksgiving. RESOURCES1.Read "Lies My Teacher Told Me," by James W. Loewen to learn about moresurprises in American history. Buy a few copies and give them to elementary school teachers in your community. If you have children,make sure your child’s teacher has one. Visit a website devoted to this book at: 2.Read the Indian Country Newspaper at: indiancountry.com/ 3.Read about the Indigenous Peoples Earth Science Project at www.purdue.edu/eas/iesp/project_description.shtml4.Visit www.nativeamerican.net/and nativeamericannetroots.net/5.Read about the largest forced relocation in the U.S. since theinternment of Japanese American citizens in World War II at www.diatribune.com/video-mccain-amp-forced-relocation-navajo-update. Posted by Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. at 8:18 AMSource: www.healingourworld.org/
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