Corporate Goliaths: Unstoppable?
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2012/03/corporate-goliaths-have-they-now-become.html
When David went up against Goliath back in the Bible, Goliath was really truly HUGE. But just how did this guy manage to get that big in the first place? I’m assuming that he started out by eating up everything in sight. At first his mommy probably fed him. But as he grew larger, he started grabbing his weaker neighbors’ food for himself. And as he continued to get more massive, he started getting more greedy — and soon he wanted it ALL. All of it. All of it for him. Nothing for anyone else.
And that’s when David stepped in.
American and international corporate giants have become very much like the old biblical Goliath. So here we are today, getting sucked up by their endless appetites, like we were Skittles or potato chips or something — but there are no modern-day Davids in sight.
In both America and worldwide, these corporate Goliaths have kept growing and growing. How? By lowering our wages so that they can make more profit at our expense, seizing ownership of our media so they can get us to believe that what they’re doing is right, and taking over our government so that it can happily feed these monsters our lifeblood.
These snowballing Goliaths have taken over our armies, our treasury, our healthcare, our food, our regulatory systems, our ability to be industrially self-sufficient, our churches and synagogues, even our children’s future, and are pushing all of it into their endlessly massive gaping maws. Yuck. And the more money and resources that the corporatists take, the weaker the rest of us become.
Have these Goliaths finally grown large enough to become completely unstoppable? Surely, even against such great odds, there must be SOME way to stop this vast, terrifying and still-growing avalanche of Goliaths? But how? Perhaps by finding another source of power, something beyond what they consider important? Perhaps their unwieldy Goliath model has become outmoded? Perhaps they too can be slain by an opposing avalanche of nimble Davids?
It worked back in Biblical days. Why not now?
Since the advent of the internet, what it means to be a society has changed. What it means to be an individual has changed. What it means to be a country has changed. We are no longer powerless and alone. And we too can become Davids. We can do this. We are doing this already.
PS: Just look at what happened to one of the first Goliaths to fall: Rush Limbaugh.
Improving The U.S. Public School System
For the majority of children and parents, who rely on it, public education continues to fail the needs and the learning outcomes of the children attempting to get a quality education. Believe me, I know first-hand in many ways.
Improving public education seems to be a never-ending battle.
For the majority of children and parents, who rely on it, public education continues to fail the needs and the learning outcomes of the children attempting to get a quality education. As I said above, I know first-hand. I almost dropped out of a large public high school that had 6,000 kids enrolled. It was easy to get lost and to fall inside the cracks of the public education system back then, as it is now. The sheer numbers (of students) make public education a difficult, if not impossible and overwhelming effort.
However, perhaps I was a little smarter and/or luckier than most. After much “stumbling” I forced myself to continue my education, got a BA degree and received my first Masters Degree from one of the top higher education facilities in the nation. I have two additional post graduate degrees. Against all odds, I became a public high school teacher and then a Middle School Principal. I then achieved the status of Program Director for the Alternative Education Division of the Board of Education in a major U.S. city. I also became a University Professor at several top universities and a community college. I was in significant overview of the entire scope of the educational process and I didn’t like what I saw.
Finally, after 10 years mixed of joy and frustration, it was a sad day when I finally left teaching because of politics and burnout, trying to teach in a system whose politics and lack of reality-based focus that fights teachers and good administrators every step of the way in providing a quality education for our children. I left public education to enter business as a Director of Information Services, upon which I achieved respect and made a lot of money, but I always missed working with children.
After so many years, public education still needs help, even more so in today’s world. There have been many leaders who have tried to “fix” it, but all have failed for one reason or another. I have a simpler solution for success. It will save a ton of tax dollars and will achieve better learning outcomes. It will provide the type of public education the majority of our children need in order to succeed in life. It will be less biased and less complicated, more logical and it will work for all of them.
• Teach children the basic needs in learning and life: reading, writing, math along with some basic science and core history. Do it so learning is fun. Stop viewing success as passing state examinations and stop fiddling with textbooks riddled with inaccuracies and special interest judgments, politics and commentaries
• Reduce class sizes in half. I know all the comments against it, but just do it!
• Then give them one elective period where they can pursue whatever topic they, their parents and/or educators want
• Teach them better communication and life training skills that actually are important in daily living, e.g., like maintaining a checking account, writing a business letter, interview skills and job resume writing, and to learn the PROCESS before proceeding on any objective or endeavor so that children know the steps to take to achieve a goal or direction.
• There is no need to teach religious thought, political philosophy and any of that other tripe that have little to do with REAL learning in public education
• Teach kids to learn for learning’s sake, how to research any topic and to enjoy the learning process. Extend that focus on PROCESS because teaching kids to identify and learn the process of each and all things in life is the gateway to success. Once you see the process, you know the steps you need to take to succeed in that effort with hard work
• Increase teacher salaries and benefits, which will ensure a competitive, more professional and higher quality pedagogical staff.
Our schools have become just another business and a volatile political football field. Get politics out of the schools and classrooms. Our classrooms currently are labs for babysitting our children until 3 PM. Reduce class sizes. Instead of 30 or 40 kids to a class, make it 15 kids in a class. The quality of education and learning just improved. It’s a mathematical and commonsense fact.
If we provide the above solutions, our kids will get much more out of education and of life and we can stop trying to run public education like an industrial assembly-line plant. We have to modify education to fit our children, not force our children to fit into education.
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain
However, public education continues to fail children and parents. Public education is failing communities all across the nation. The way it is set up, public schooling interferes with our children’s education.
It is why I have been home schooling my son since he was old enough for nursery school. It is hard enough to raise children these days, but often those “educators” in the State Board of Education (SBOE) ‘pie in the sky building’, far removed from actual education, continue to determine policy and curriculum for all children in public education. They don’t know what they are doing and what they are doing is wrong. That’s as honest as I can be about it.
It is enough that people like this exist in large numbers across the nation, but to subject ALL children to such beliefs and some obscure paths to falsely determined success should be illegal and is a wake-up call to all thinking people. I advocate that people contact their House and Senate representatives and inform them of their anger, disapproval and disappointment of how the SBOE is functioning and how it wants to impede providing honest, factual and appropriate knowledge and direction for all children.
Perhaps as part of the wake-up call, people may need to start filing class action lawsuits against the SBOE in all states, maybe even against various school districts, but it is the SBOE that charts out the direction, courses and learning materials for all state public school districts, pushed by various wealthy and powerful special interests.
We need to change this overall process at the top soon, before we raise a group of misled, incompetent, information biased idiots and misfits who eventually will manage our nation’s education and business sectors.
I believe the current trends of top-down school management will ensure that there will be larger numbers of thinking parents who will opt to home school their children, as I have done. It is not an easy job and fortunately I have the time, desire and experience in doing so.
I also believe that the SBOE hierarchy and its wealthy special interests will continue to push public education and knowledge base further into the Dark Ages. Our children will suffer for it.
Note that I am NOT advocating some ultra “liberal” education for children. I believe in moderation as well as commonsense orientation to life in general, but I also believe we need to provide factual data and true direction to our children, WITHOUT special interest pathways, with an open and creative mind. That’s real education.
That simply does not occur in most states. I teach my son to love learning and how to get the REAL facts for anything he will need in his lifetime. I also teach him the necessary daily life knowledge he will need in the real world of living and business.
As a parent, former public school teacher, school administrator, university professor, business executive and a THINKING person, I am appalled by what has happened to our public education system and the direction that it will have to endure as long as these narrow-minded, falsely opinionated, often delusional and irresponsible people manage education in this and other states. It may not be all of them, but it sure is most of them. The lack of success of public education proves it.
A lot of people are not going to like what I say in this commentary, but it’s the truth.
These days it is almost everything people can do to get jobs, keep them and work at them most of their daily lives. Some unfortunate folks must work more than one job at a time to survive. Families don’t have the “luxury” to sit down at a dinner table. It is often physically, energetically and emotionally impossible.
I know that my family does not “sit down” at the dinner table to eat together and discuss things. My wife and I don’t really eat a dinner. We all eat very light meals often throughout the day. We do eat together formally at least once per week. However, we are close in other ways every day and we take the time daily to communicate and interact.
It doesn’t matter how families do it, but they do need to make the time for close interaction. It is desperately needed. We need to communicate with each other. It is an important part of living and to have a cohesive family.
My son is 15 years old now and we have a very close relationship as father and son. We also are close in that I am his educator and mentor, although he continues to teach me a lot as well. In addition, we are each other’s best friend and I would not trade that for anything in the world. But family is everything to me. I would give up everything I have or what I like to do for myself to keep close with my family. Other people may have other priorities but that is mine.
However, in this world that we have created of difficult everyday living, it is a very hard time for parents and children. Not everyone has the time or inclination to deal with raising a family in the ways that others are able to. I’m not defending it, just confirming the reality.
Education starts and continues with the parents, but it is very helpful for dedicated, honest, knowledgeable and sincere “other” people to help in that education. Certainly, we hope it is found in the classroom, but that is not often the case. It is a hard time for educators.
Even dedicated qualified teachers are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of students they have every day. Even if they put in all the hours of preparation to provide a quality education, they do so at the risk of not providing time to their own families who have the same needs. In addition, they are underpaid and have inadequate health benefits and retirement packages. Teachers also are forced to be police officers in the class room, to maintain a peaceful environment to facilitate learning. Furthermore, teachers often are not provided with the quality materials, textbooks, Xerox facilities, access to teaching methods, etc.
In addition, many top teachers leave the system due to burnout and/or they get better pay in the business sector. I know this for a fact, as I explained above. I left education to make more money in the business sector and because I felt as if I were on some sort of never-ending educational treadmill, spinning my wheels trying to educate and discipline children often without the active support from the school administrators and parents.
Teaching is a very difficult skill and profession. Not everyone who has a certain knowledge or skill can teach it well to others. Not every teacher is a good teacher. In fact, I will go further to say that most teachers are not top quality teachers, much the same as most parents are not top quality parents, or in the same parallel as most people who play golf are not top golfers.
It is a particular skill to be a great teacher. You cannot learn to be one because it is an innate skill and personality, but everyone can learn to be a better teacher.
We should be honoring great teachers as we do great football or basketball teams and players and we should pay them accordingly. Unfortunately, teachers are seldom respected or honored. Once upon a time, the community viewed teachers differently. They were respected because of their importance to the community’s present and future goals and objectives. Frequently, teachers were invited into people’s homes for dinner and to chat. Children once were a community’s most important resource. In today’s world that is simply not the case.
Our society doesn’t do that so we push top teachers out of the education system in search of better opportunities, more respect and better pay. State and school district politics often interfere with the process of educating our children. Every year or two, someone at the top of the ladder arrives at a new panacea that is supposed to save public education. It seldom does.
Bottom-line is that the public education system needs a complete overhaul. That is not going to happen for many reasons.
Think about it.
If our leaders REALLY wanted to improve public education, they would have already done so. It seems they are being paid not to, in various ways.
Legislators and business leaders are not the ones to resolve the major educational issues and problems. They simply do not have the experience and background even if they truly wanted to. However, they still could get the right people to make the changes that public education needs to be successful. Our legislators tried to change public education with many committees, but they always fail. They fail because of endless and unrestricted political power-plays and special interest impedance.
Think about it further.
If public education became successful, everyone would want their kids to go to public schools. What would happen to private schools? They would not do as well or make as much profit. A lot of people also are invested in Charter Schools for that same reason.
In addition, quite a few of our legislators and business leaders sit on the Boards of private and charter schools. There is a reason why they sit there and why they want public education to fail. They may not want public education to fail completely, just enough so private and charter schools are more successful.
There are powerful and wealthy people out there that want public education to fail. But they don’t want it to fail completely because they want a place to house young children during the week. They want big baby-sitting structures but they want the majority of kids to remain, perhaps not uneducated, but certainly less educated than the kids who attend private and/or charter schools. That’s just how it is.
There is a lot of politics at the national, state and local levels that interfere with providing a quality public education to the majority of children. Still, there are simple things that we could do to increase the teaching quality and learning outcomes we currently have available.
To reiterate, doing the following will improve public education:
• Teach children the basic needs in learning and life: reading, writing, math along with some basic science and core history. Do it so learning is fun. Stop viewing success as passing state examinations and stop fiddling with textbooks riddled with inaccuracies and special interest judgments and commentaries
• Reduce class sizes in half
• Then give them one elective period where they can pursue whatever topic they, their parents and/or educators want
• Teach them better communication and life training skills that actually are important in daily living, e.g., like maintaining a checking account, writing a business letter, interview skills and job resume writing, and to learn the complete process before proceeding on any objective or endeavor
• There is no need to teach religious thought, political philosophy or any of that other tripe that have little to do with REAL learning in public education
• Teach kids to learn for learning’s sake, how to research any topic and to view and enjoy the learning process. Extend that focus on process because teaching kids to identify and learn the process of each and all things in life is the gateway to success. Once you see the process, you know the steps you need to take to succeed in that effort with hard work
• Increase teacher salaries and benefits, which will ensure a competitive, more professional and higher quality pedagogical staff.
In closing, we may never get public education on a par with private schools, but we can do a lot to improve them and it doesn’t take a lot of effort or money to do so. In fact, doing what I describe above may actually save a lot of tax dollars, which may cut property taxes as an additional perk. It will also change the priorities and improve educational outcomes. However, we need the right people to create the change but as long as the powerful, wealthy special interests willingly hold back public education, it will remain difficult to achieve quality changes leading to more positive and better directed learning outcomes for our children.
If “it takes a community to raise a child” we are doing a very crummy job of it. We can and should do better.
Peter Stern writes on political issues, is a former Director of Information Services in private industry and government, a university professor, public school administrator and teacher, is a disabled Vietnam Veteran and holds three post-graduate degrees.
Palestinian Children: Born in Captivity
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2012/03/palestinian-children-born-in-captivity.html
Suppose that you are a cute little baby panda or an adorable newborn lion cub that has been born inside a zoo. What happens to you next? Most likely, you will grow up in a zoo and die in a zoo.
But human babies are different from animal babies. It is against the law to keep human babies caged up in a zoo.
Even homeless poverty-stricken American pregnant women who have been sent to jail for whatever — after giving birth behind bars, even their children aren’t forced to remain in captivity and caged up like their moms. Americans are much more humane than that.
Even the poor Sudanese refugee Lost Boys weren’t allowed to be caged. Thousands of them were given good educational opportunities and offered good homes in the United States.
Even the approximately seven million Afghan and Iraqi orphans created by Bush, Cheney and Obama are still being allowed a modicum of freedom once in a while http://www.afceco.org/.
But Palestinian children? No such luck. They are born in captivity, they grow up in captivity and they die in captivity — just because someone else wants their land.
But even sadder still is the fact that most zoo animals are treated more humanely than Palestinian children. Palestinian children’s keepers think nothing of shooting, bombing, starving and siccing dogs on these captive kids, housed in open-air prisons such as Gaza and Ni’lin. Captive baby lions and pandas never have to endure anything even remotely as horrible as this.
PS: A lot of folks in America are currently very upset right now because of Joseph Kony’s war crimes against children in mineral-rich Uganda http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-march-12-2012/my-little-kony — but am I the only person on FaceBook today who also gets upset when Bush, Obama, AIPAC, the U.S. Congress and Netanyahu commit war crime after war crime against the captive children of Palestine?
Perhaps we should make a viral video that will make Bush, Obama, AIPAC, the U.S. Congress and Netanyahu famous for their war crimes against children as well.
A Tale Of Two Soldiers
There are two soldiers that represent so much of what is wrong in our war culture. One is Bradley Manning and the other is Robert Bales.
Bradley Manning, a queer boy bullied at home and abroad, in a final bid to fit the expected “tough boy” mold, joined the Army. In a futile attempt to suppress his feminine side, the very side that yelled every time he watched innocent people die needlessly, he finally succumbed in a desperate hope and belief that if American people could see the horror of war they would stop it. The kinds of atrocities that tore at the soul of Manning were exactly that very evil allegedly committed by Robert Bales.
Robert Bales is the Army Sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers as they slept, including 9 children. What drives a father of two to kill the sleeping children of others? What could have been in his mind as he stabbed innocent babes to death? Revenge? At whom? The Army that sent him back even after he’d suffered a brain injury? The villagers because he’d seen his friend lose a leg to a bomb earlier in the week and so he blamed all Afghans? At himself, hoping someone would stop him, put him out of his own misery and inability to help his own family—who, at that moment, were losing their home?
Both of these soldiers come from the Midwest; Manning from Oklahoma and Bales from Ohio. After Manning’s parents divorced, when he was 13, Manning moved to Wales with his mother. There he suffered bullying in the school system due to his effeminate nature. After passing his secondary school certification exams he returned to Oklahoma City to live with his father. Difficulties at home drove him to move in with an aunt in Washington D.C. After a series of low-paying jobs he enlisted in the Army and trained as an intelligence analyst. He was later deployed to Iraq, all the while a victim of redneck bullying by men probably much like our second soldier.
Bales is a well-established tough guy, fitting all the characteristics mandated by our violent, male-centric society. He played football through high school and college. He was 27 when 9/11/01 occurred. Two months later he enlisted to exact revenge for his country. One year into his service he was brought up on assault charges, which resulted in a warning from the judge to get anger management counseling. He gave up the next 11 years of his life in multiple deployments, the last one seemingly pushing him over the edge. While his government made up lies about WMD to send him to fight in Iraq, his family struggled in the failing war economy at home. Three days before his rampage his wife listed the house on the market, a short sell, as they owe more than the house it is worth, and they are behind in their payments.
Robert Bales had been a soldier in good standing, having been awarded several medals, suffering a couple injuries in the line of duty, including a head trauma. He fit the American stereotype of a hero, but was really a monster in the making. He begged the Army not to send him back, but lacked the courage to stand firm and refuse re-deployment so that he could protect his own home and family.
While Manning seemed far from hero material, he showed great courage by pulling back the veil on these wars. He showed us the murderers of the war—those who, as Bales is alleged to have done, engaged in killing because they’ve had too much trauma or stress and are no longer in touch with their humanity. How many more massacres, suicides, and homeless vets and homeless families will it take for Americans to begin to put it all together and see that war, and our “kick-ass” mentality, is just wrong. So many American men have been reduced to the level of mad dogs by this thinking and the alpha males in Washington D.C. are doing little to help them, their families, or the rest of us.
Both men sit in cells in Ft. Leavenworth. One has endured ten months of torture and abuse in Quantico before being transferred after pressure from a concerned public. His life has been dragged through the media, making a mockery of all that is sensitive and caring in his nature, reminding us all that the worst thing to be in a war culture is a woman or woman-like. The other has been treated with compassion and understanding by his captors and the mainstream media. The sad plight of his family is being used as an excuse for his behavior. One will likely spend the rest of his days in a military prison while the other might spend a few years in the system, only to be released into Dante’s next level of Hell, reintegration into a world he’s long lost touch with—or has he?
We are all victims of a war culture. We live in a society that can more quickly forgive a soldier who murders children in their sleep than it can a soldier who reveals the dark secrets of war, embarrassing higher-ups on The Hill with their own leaked words. In truth, Manning embarrassed us all, as war is fought in our names in what we so proudly call a democracy.
War and violence require secrecy. A culture of peace has nothing to hide. There’s no need for WikiLeaks in that world. What if America had evolved to embody peaceful ideas instead of perpetual violence and expansion? We might still have a state-paid body of rigorously trained people who could employ the latest technologies to help our brothers and sisters across the globe. Rather than kill their children to get their oil, we could exchange food and other products or services, providing them with farming technology rather than leaving their fields barren and toxic and littered with unexploded ordnance to ensure we continue to kill their children long after our troops leave.
We used violence to break free of an Empire more than 200 years ago, and we continued to use violence to take over the lands of the First Peoples and now we have become that which we once fought so hard to escape, an evil colonizing empire projecting power across the globe with an iron fist that has now outdone the British Empire.
Our children are weaned on First-shooter video games, teaching their malleable brains how to kill from an early age. The Department of Defense has infiltrated our high schools and our childrens’ private records for recruitment based on personal family demographics, thanks to the No Child Left Behind legislation, clearly meaning no child left un-recruited. Since the early 1990’s fifth graders across America have enjoyed a fun-filled week at a military base under the guise of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education in a program named Starbase. They also get to tour the grounds, touch armored vehicles, look into cockpits of fighter jets, play with bomb diffusing robots and other whiz-bang technology ultimately intended to destroy human life. Even my seven-year-old daughter is not immune to the toxic environment that the war system brings. In her after school program she played with Legos with a boy her age. I commented that it looked like they had built a great city, but they excitedly corrected me that it was, in fact, bombs going off. My country has become so very entangled in the war system. The economies of most cities depend on Pentagon contracts to survive. We all contribute via our tax dollars, and often directly with our labor and knowledge in research. We suckle at the teats of this monster while it starves us both body and soul.
In 1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex as he made his exit from the White House. We didn’t listen. In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, showing the Vietnam War with all its depravity reaching to the very top. Still we didn’t listen. In 2010 Wikileaks exposed volumes of memos and videos of troops gunning down unarmed journalists and civilians from a helicopter, purportedly supplied by Manning. Still we don’t listen. We ignore our own children as they toy with concepts of mass killing and death. We ignore our own hearts at our own peril. War has always been immoral. The question is, are you? All it takes to change is for you, me, and a few million of our closest friends to change our minds, to value life over death. Bradley may die in prison, but he’ll die with a clear conscience. He did the best he could to show us the truth. Bales will not have that option. If he did those murders, he’s taken what cannot be repaid. His best hope is to spend the rest of his days caring for war orphans to heal his own deep wounds and theirs. The karmic wheel of life will exact a toll on him far greater than any court could assign.
As these stories fade from the headlines, what will be their legacy? Will we learn or will we continue, killing more innocent human beings in Iran, or some other place simply to keep the engines of our cars and our war machine churning? Change takes courage. I challenge us all to have that courage to turn away from this and find another path before it is too late.
Terri Shofner, Portland, OR, parents, teaches peace, and does tech industry work.