this needs to create outrage!!!!

The following passage is from a group that claims to be progressive, but it clearly is not so. The same text could just as easily have been written by the folks that bring us Straussian and Randian elitist neo-libertarian conservatism, as well as most of the so-called Lierberman-Clinton DLC centrists. Hell the AEI and Heritage could have written this screed.

For the United States to succeed in a new era of global competitiveness, the next generation needs to be equipped for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace. An alarming new state-by-state assessment of our nation's education system indicates that the United States is failing to prepare a 21st century workforce. The new report card, produced by the Chamber of Commerce with assistance from the Center for American Progress, finds that there is not a single state in the country where a majority of 4th and 8th graders are proficient in math and reading. The report's aim is to identify both "leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance" and to highlight the many areas needed for education improvement. The report card's conclusion is unambiguous: states need to do a far better job of monitoring and delivering quality schooling. As Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings noted recently, “The consensus for strengthening our high schools has never been stronger.” Progressives and conservatives are united around common goals for our education system -- better teaching, more innovation, better data, and better management. The report is one step in building the political will needed to upend familiar arrangements and comfortable routines" and achieve much-needed reform.

The first two sentences reveal the vile and horrendous agenda (i would even go so far as suggesting "fascist") for furthering the attack on the planet resources, the failure of global capitalism to control its desired empire, and the lack of any substantive visions regarding how best humans can live on this fragile and dying planet. Curtis White, professor of English published his latest book: The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work late last year, making the point that the notion of "workforce" and capitalized labor, funded by the endless globalizing consumption of the planet's mineral and species (including human) resources is a process that is both insane and self-destructive. It is our on-going behaviors that are killing the Earth. Arguing to continue along that plane of this event horizon will only result in more and greater disparity, increased and exponential collapse of the biosphere, and more and bitter wars. But hey, self-styled progressives think that the answer is more of the same. This is about empire and colonialism; it is about maintaining a failing economic system against all hope that it is worthy of being sustained.

Right up there with this, and obviously overlooked yet part of that "common goal" of centrists and conservatives (real true progressives have much healthier and appropriate visions thank you) is the following quote from the Israeli funded ubermensch neo-conservative John Podhoretz:

"What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarf any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests? ... And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to win a war--every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly trained military in history--except the ability to match our exceed our antagonists in ruthlessness?"

One might add "the will" to demand that those not part of the educated elite (for without the feeder system complex as proposed by the faux-progressives and their conservative bedfellows, we wouldn't have a ruling elite) be coerced and forced into fighting the wars for them. Failed educational visions are so much more damaging to our planet than war. Programming children to enlist in expansion of their own institutionalization from early ages, for longer periods of time, to be "mined" for their intellectual energies, discarded as tailings of residues of toxic and hazardous beings--is a vision that ignores the Earth and all of its species.

For the record, i just spent the last two months visiting nearly all of the schools in my region, interviewing teachers, administrators, students, at all grade levels. The proposals by pseudo-progressive, DLC-supported, veiled fascists are exactly the opposite of what is needed in order for a positive, healthy, and harmonious future for all seven generations. Creating a workforce for global capitalism is no different than enslaving massive populations. Forcing small young children into institutionalization for six to eight hours a day just to sit rigidly being told what to absorb and how to act, all under the threat of the most coercive fear based motivators, is nothing short of post-modern whippings and beatings of the future slaves of the elitists.

Something i post from time to time... as a reminder

I have been actively engaged in a series of trilogues discussing the singular importance of protecting the wisdom and knowledge of planetary survival that is embedded in indigenous tribal languages. We are losing these languages, this wealth of information required for sustainability, the tribes themselves, and most of our co-dependent species each and every day. If we do not actively and aggressive assert their huge importance, we will, as a species, lose our own capability to survive on a damaged and dying planet. One of the outgrowths of this effort is to remind those attending our panels that if we keep insisting that our children and grandchildren are our future energy resources (we live in an information age and the US is the fount of all informational wealth, and we must make our next generations successful and productive, yada yada) we will kill them. John Trudell, the outstanding and singularly important American Indian native poet, recited the following several years ago at the Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley, CA (used w/ permission). Please give him credit, but do pass it on.

WE ARE BEING MINED
By John Trudell

See I think --Of the things that are going on
See I think --We are being mined
See and I think--That the whole objective of life
Is to come through it with some type of understanding, about life
And to leave it—no more disturbed than it was,
As when we got here
And they’re your own ethics
And that takes care of the future --And that takes care of the past
And our relationship to power is connected in this kind of understanding
About what life is

But we live in a technologic perception of reality
And this technologic perception of reality is very real, because it’s here
But I think in this technologic perception of reality we have been turned into fuel
See sometimes I feel I live in a reality with nobody people nobody recognizes,
They don’t know who they are, they don’t know where they are, and they don’t understand
The language they’re speaking
They can say the words, they know many answers
But they understand very little of what they know
They have knowledge without understanding
It is like we are being mined
So we need to recognize who we are
We are human beings, that’s who we are
We are human beings
Human, bone, flesh, blood, metal, mineral, liquid
The DNA, the physical reality
The physical aspect of the human being
The physical aspect of our reality
The human form
The visible aspect
Is made up of the metals, minerals, liquids of the Earth
So we are shapes and forms and parts of the Earth
This is our shape our form--we have being

All the things of the Earth are made up of the same DNA
The same metal, mineral, liquid
And they have their shape and their form and they have their purpose
And they have being

And we live in a technologic perception of reality
Where we understand they can take the other shapes and forms of the Earth
And put them through mining processes
And as a result of them, we take the uranium from the Earth
Put it through a mining refinement process
And convert the being part of that DNA
Convert the being part of that Earth, into a form of energy
A mutation of power, but a form of energy that they tell us is power
But it is really a different thing

And we know they can do it with fossil fuel
They can take the DNA of the Earth and put it through the mining refinement process
and convert the being
The Being part of that physical DNA into a form of energy to run their electrical systems

So I think it would be in our best interests and the best interests of future generations
And the best interest of any type of understanding with Life
To consider the possibility that the human is being put through a mining refinement process
And that the being part is being converted into a form of energy
to run these authoritarian systems
We are being turned into fuel

Feel like something is missing from your life and as we understand
You take the uranium, the DNA of the Earth that is the shape of uranium
And put it through this mining refinement process
And covert it into a form of energy
We understand that leaves behind a toxic waste, a pollution
We understand this with all the fossil fuels

So we need to understand that as part of this process
of being part of the human being that’s mined
That the toxic waste that is left
These are the fears, and the doubts, and the insecurities that dominate
Most human beings’ lives, these days
And it keeps them from understanding what it means to be a human being
And the slight of mined is to convince us that it is all our fault

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society
Building to the new world order
We’re expected to carry the stone

Emperors and the feeding Class
Human beings being used up fast
The miners keep on mining
Intelligence is the mother-load
Imagination as an energy source
In this predators way of dining

Defining how and what we think
As we’re led to the way to believe
Conditioned reaction
We call thought
Our reality rides
In how we perceive

In the ways of being lost and alone
Who runs from their doubt and fear
In the mask of everything’s normal
Who’s not feeling or seeing too clear

Could be we’re being programmed
Anyway our spirit bleeds
All over our lives.
Our lives become fuel
For predator needs

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society

And about this mining process--Everything that ever happens to us, that has ever happened to us
What we have in common because of this DNA
We literally are children of the Earth--We are all descendents of tribes
Each and every one of us is a descendent of a tribe
At some point in the evolution of our DNA and within the evolution of our DNA
We all have a genetic memory, we carry the experience of our evolution
So we have this in common, we all come from tribes

And what happened to the tribes of this hemisphere happened to the tribes of Europe
and the descendents of the tribes of Europe over,
the two to three thousand years period of time before they got here
And by the time the tribes of Europe got here, they no longer knew they were human beings
Because they had been serfs and peasants, and they were owned by the landlords and the royalty
And all these wars for the possession of their souls, all this shit had taken place

So they no longer knew they were human beings, they didn’t understand
It was not a perceptional reality of theirs anymore, in any living practice
They did not know they were not human beings
They were subjects to something other

So all the things that ever happened to the tribes of Europe
and to the descendents of the tribes of Europe
and then their behavior when they got here
Had to do to affect and disconnect our perception of reality
It had to change our perceptional realities
And all of these things had to take place within our intelligence
Because, as human beings,
We were given protection, we were given medicine, we were given self-defense
And that’s our intelligence and we all have it
And this is what we are given

In order for this to be self-defense, and for it to be protection, and for it to be medicine
It must be clear and it must be coherent
But we have had programmed into us these fears, and these doubts, and these insecurities
As a part of the mining process, to keep us from being clear and coherent
Because a clear coherent human being, and a society of clear coherent human beings
Would not live the way that this society lives
No matter what it says
All of these things took place to our intelligence
That is the protection that we were given, is our intelligence
Our imagination, our creativity, our thoughts and our action upon these things
And this is where our access as human beings to power is
Is to clear, coherent use of our intelligence

This is our access to power
Everything else is an access to an illusion of power, authority systems
Do not confuse authority systems and electrical energy systems created by man as power
These are imitations of power
Power is another reality
And our true access to it is in our earthly connection and coherent use of our intelligence
This is our true access to power

And how powerful this is—
everyone just go into their own reality
Go inside their own reality, how much time
Do the fears, doubts, and darksides
How much time, do these things consume, in the individual realities
And how do they affect the others that you are close to, in the individual realities
This is power, it is—incoherently used
No offense, I mean that in a positive way

As a part of this reality check, we should always be honest with ourselves
No matter what it is
If we can’t be real to ourselves,
We can never synchronize the reality of our intentions
And all our good intentions and good motives
If we can’t be real to ourselves—are lost
It is the first step
We must be real to ourselves
Whether our reality is glorious or shameful
It doesn’t matter what it is, what it is
Is it must be recognized
We must be real to ourselves

two stories: common theme... we're screwed

Newsweek on The Hidden War With Iran.

At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something we would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. …

A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident’s spiraling into a crisis are higher than they’ve been in years.

and this one:

Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, IL, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” address. In his speech, Obama reiterated his call to redeploy U.S. forces out of Iraq by March 2008.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol attacked Obama’s Iraq policy, saying he wants to appease terrorists like pro-slavery politician Stephen Douglas tried to appease slave-owners. Kristol said, “Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858.

Well, you figure it out yet?? Maybe this will help: it is the same thang that puts the neo-cons, AIPAC, the furthest-right Straussian/Randian objectivist libertarians, expansively large US energy corporations, and the military/security state industrial economy all in bed together. Still don't see it?

Given the near-exponentially expanding problems created by global climate change, the profusion of treatment resistant bacteria and viral agents, the dessimation and desertization of huge tracts of necessary arable and fertile land, and the collapse of the oceans, the reality that the planet can no longer sustain billions of human beings, requires those completely void of ethical responsibility (the Randian call of the selfish) and swathed in amorality to demand that the US military take any action necessary (including nuclear war) to secure control of the earth's energy and water resources. These people realize that only through direct confrontation will they themselves be able to hold onto power, to survive with most of their assets, property, and lifestyles intact, while millions upon millions suffer and die.

This 5% of the population is controlling every aspect of US governance at this moment. They know that a US economic collapse is potentially imminent if other than US dollars are demonstrated to be the currency of preference for the rest of the planet. To keep USD in the flow, and to artificially maintain the economy for themselves and their own selfish greed, these folks are willing to unleash the full dogs of war, not only against Iran and the rest of the middle-East, but also threaten and demand obediance from Russia and China. The oil of the middle east is the most efficient to refine, a light crude easy to pump, easy to transport, and easy to convert to products. The rest of the world's reserves are heavy and super heavy; they require nearly as much energy to refine as they produce at enormous expense. The other than US powers of the planet want middle-eastern crude now and are willing to pay for it not using USD, but Euros and Yuan. This is a huge problem.

Congress will do nothing, knowing as they do, that their own lives are part and parcel of the group that will enjoy the outcome of US control of planetary resources. This is, and will never be, about the citizens. This war, these ongoing efforts to expand and increase the war, is for control of the future in their views. When all is said and done, the US will be a nation of two groups. A few million extraordinarily wealthy people living in superb luxury, free to do anything as they please, and hundreds of millions living in environmental collapse, abject poverty, deep depressive pandemics of diseases and hazardous/toxic ravages. The rich and powerful are asking the rest of us to keep them that way at our own expense, as long as we don't know why.

Canis eus id comedit

Consider the following:

Three giant pallets each loaded with cash amounting to more than $4 billion and weighing a total of 363 tons were sent to Baghdad aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, it has been revealed to Congress.

Of the more than $12 billion sent to Iraq, $8.8 billion remains unaccounted, without any paper trail that would lead to a successful audit. Is this a problem?? Apparently not for most of the GOP House members. Their litany of excuses ran from the mundane "war is war," to the more esoteric "it was Saddam's oil money so why would we care?" Perhaps the most heinous of the vile attitudes expressed was from a GOP idiot who suggested that $8.8 billion wasn't really all that much money.

What an asshole. But just for the record, what could $8.8 billion do for our economy at this point. Well, let's start with the original premise that the Iraq war was going to be paid for by Iraq. Thus the billions shipped in US dollars (non-exchangeable in Iraq by the way, by CPA regulations and laws) were allegedly supposed to have been turned over to the Secretary of the Treasury to reimburse the citizens of the US for expenses in Iraq. That clearly didn't happen.

The Iraq billions would cover the shortfall in the US education budget to pay for mandatory and compulsury programs such as NCLB. They could have paid for doubling the Pell and other higher education student loan programs, or covered all of the costs of Title I for one year. There are several states whose combined operating budgets could have been paid for by the billions. Perhaps the most useful of all possible choices would have been to invest the money into levee rebuilding after the Iraq invasion; an effort that would have prevented the damage of Katrina.

Oh well, it wasn't ours, right??

Si hoc signum legere potes, run away, run away

How much more will the people take before the incompetency of the US government forces them to stand up and take it down???? I suspect that Jefferson's suggestion "all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed" is almost too representative of US citizens. The insanity of people who (for the most part are reasonably attentive and intelligent), continue to blithely accept the ever-increasing entropy of their own lives collapsing into depressive chaos, demonstrates the effectiveness of the mind virus that is capitalism.

This week i have read dispatches from people who are all too willing to complete ignore reality, substituting the talking points of Exxon for the actual text of the IPCC report on global climate change. Why they are doing so is beyond me, unless we ascribe the value of disassociative cognition to their thought processes. They know that our way of life is killing the planet, but see no other alternative they can accept other than using whatever means necessary (war) to maintain their levels of convenience and personal consumer habits. And i am not talking about people who are conservatives nor fundamentalists. No, i am describing relatively enlightened liberals, who feel completely justified in promoting classic liberal values through massive capitalization of their lives and "property" at the expense of the planet and most of its living populations. The "me first" fight or flight paradigm is obscuring the impending real collapse of the human life sustaining ecosystems, encouraging people to look at cheaper gasoline prices as a sign of good things rather than the intentional deception of the energy giants to hide their gargantuan 2006 record breaking profits.

If you can't see the forest for the trees, these folks seem to accept cutting down all the trees. Then they won't have to look for the forest at all, but rather stay in their greenhouse gas emitting sealed environments and watch the world go by on the telly. Well, the only good news in this regard is that the planet will make the choice, sooner rather than later, that the homo sapiens experiment wasn't all that successful. Better to dump one whole species than sacrifice the other 97%.