March 29th, 2017

Obama and Clinton neo-liberals used ESSA to pretend to have the power to eliminate Federal Department of Education directives around EQUAL PROTECTION ----OPPORTUNITY AND ACCESS EDUCATION-----when they never had that power. One thing about a US Constitution those grounds our Federal court system to COMMON LAW and court precedence is this----it doesn't just go away.  WE THE PEOPLE have the problem of NO CHECKS AND BALANCES as all our branches of government designed to protect against TYRANNY have been stacked with global Wall Street players ----that does not make what they are doing legal or constitutional---it makes it easy peasy to VOID.

As this citizen shouts---CHOICE MEANS CORPORATE SCHOOLS DO THE CHOOSING----and yes religious schools are corporate schools.  As Baltimore City School Board allows corporate schools to be labelled PUBLIC-----they are capturing our ability to rebuild our REAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS.  That is what the 99% of people must reverse.  We don't care if corporations want to build their own corporate schools----we simply need to have broad access to public schools for citizens to HAVE CHOICE.  If parents want to send their child to a K-career  global McDonalds or Volkswagen school ---fine.  What we are MOVING FORWARD towards is forced vocational tracking.  As this article states if we allow global Wall Street to write a NEW CONSTITUTION and that is what they are doing----there will be no rights of disabled.  We have shouted that throughout RACE TO THE TOP/COMMONER CORE.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS DO NOT HAVE TO ADHERE TO SPECIAL EDUCATION MANDATES----BUT THESE PRIVATE SCHOOLS ARE BEING ALLOWED TO BE LABELLED PUBLIC TO GET THAT FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL EDUCATION FUNDING.



Sarah Lahm shared a link to the group:

Public Education Justice Alliance of Minnesota.
March 27 at 8:41am · Parents take on the neo voucher bill moving through the MN legislature:
“Choice sounds good,” McLaren acknowledges, “but I don’t think people realize that private schools do the choosing.” She maintains that religious schools, for example, do not have to follow Minnesota’s Human Rights law, while private schools do not have to adhere to federal special education mandates.

WOW ----independent education news----sounds like local media for the 99%.  We knew right away when a global Wall Street talks about designer classrooms and lessons for the disabled at the same time closing and dismantling all public agencies tied to serving the disabled this was LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE POSING----they say this to circumvent these Federal and US Constitutional rights of disabled.


Bright Light Small City
Independent education news and analysis from Minneapolis



Parents of Special Education Students Protest Minnesota’s Neo-Voucher Proposal

March 27, 2017

Minneapolis-based attorney Sarah McLaren should be forgiven for dissolving into tears while testifying at a Minnesota Education Policy Committee hearing in early February, since she had not planned on speaking out that day. Instead, she was on her way to work on February 9 when she heard a brief news report on public radio, detailing a new tax credit scholarship, or “neo-voucher,” education bill that was moving through the state legislature.


“Right away,” she recalled over coffee recently, “I turned my car around, drove to the Senate Office Building and testified that day.” In a video recording of McLaren’s testimony, she can be seen dressed in a black and white speckled suit jacket, clutching a framed picture of her six-year old daughter, Eleanor. Eleanor, McLaren’s only child, has autism spectrum disorder; because of that, McLaren says, “it will always be more expensive to educate my daughter.” 
This realization is what compelled McLaren to make a detour to the Senate Office Building on February 9. Once there, McLaren says she “surprised everyone in the room” by delivering an unscripted, at times tearful rebuke of Republican representative Ron Kresha’s tax credit scholarship bill. Kresha’s bill, whose roots can be traced to similar, “cookie cutter” ALEC bills being proposed around the country, seeks to give wealthy individuals and corporations in Minnesota a tax break–up to $35 million, statewide–for donations to private school scholarship funds. These funds are then supposed to help lower (and middle) income students afford tuition payments. 


Proponents of this approach bristle at any obvious comparison to school voucher plans, which drain money directly out of a state’s general education fund–after tax funds have been collected. Vouchers have proven to be both unpopular and unsuccessful, leading school choice advocates to instead propose Kresha-like tax breaks that divert money from the general education fund before it is collected. Such schemes can then be considered voluntary “tax incentive plans,” rather than outright, distasteful voucher programs.



Either way, the public school funding pool would take a hit, while religious and private schools stand to benefit. While observing a January rally for the tax credit bill, I spoke with a rural Minnesotan who helps run a small Lutheran school. One reason he is so in favor of Kresha’s bill is competition from charter schools. Because charters are free, he explained to me, they are siphoning students from the Lutheran school’s already limited enrollment base. This taps into one reason religious schools tend to favor these tax credit scholarship schemes: survival.



Catholic schools in particular have been out front about how such diversions of public tax dollars could benefit their schools:


Enrollment in US Catholic schools peaked in the 1960s with more than 5 million students, and in the last 20 years, more than 1,500 Catholic schools have shuttered. Supporters say that without an infusion of funds – either in the form of vouchers or tax credit scholarship programs – the very future of Catholic education in this country is at risk.


--“Catholic schools look to tax credits to save them,”  The Crux, 2015


But McLaren wasn’t drawn to the neo voucher issue because she is opposed to religious or private schools. Instead, she insists that expanding school choice schemes will leave children like hers behind. As an infant and toddler, McLaren’s daughter attended a private center near her home–a “well-regarded program,” McLaren recalls, that billed itself as being “experts in early childhood care and education.” Along the way, Eleanor’s as yet undiagnosed autism began to surface, through biting incidents and other behavior issues.


Around age three, Eleanor’s autism was identified, and it soon became clear that the private program was neither equipped, nor particularly interested, in adapting to her needs. McLaren remembers being called to an “urgent” meeting about Eleanor’s behavior, where she was told that the school “had to think of the other children.” Eleanor was biting other students and parents were not happy about it.


“It was distressing,” McLaren notes. “The focus was immediately on Eleanor as the problem, and nothing about the environment” at the school. The school did not seem invested in supporting Eleanor, and staff were perhaps puzzled by the girl’s behavior. “She seems to repeat our questions a lot,” they told McLaren–with little apparent awareness of how to work with a child with autism. The expectation seemed to be that it was up to Eleanor’s parents to “fix” her behavior. (McLaren believes these messages stigmatize special education, and may make families reluctant to speak out.)


McLaren then describes an up and down journey, of first getting Eleanor placed with a preschool teacher who had some autism experience. When that teacher left the school, it became clear that Eleanor was struggling. “She was overwhelmed,” McLaren says, and responded by “removing herself from the group and spending the whole day alone.” Soon, McLaren and her husband moved Eleanor to Fraser, a Richfield preschool and childcare center that provides services and support–including access to “typical” peers–for special needs children. (Chicago teacher and activist, Xian Franzinger Barrett, has written about how low-income students of color–without access to extra resources–stand to lose the most when public schools are underfunded.)


From there, Eleanor graduated to kindergarten and has been attending a public school in her suburban neighborhood. McLaren quickly asserts that, at both Fraser and Eleanor’s public school, the message has always been, “How can we support her?” In response, Eleanor is thriving. She is at or near grade level, thanks to what McLaren says is “generous support for mainstreaming.” 


That support, though, is expensive. Eleanor’s school provides her with extra personnel, skilled at working with special education students, and Eleanor has access to a variety of strategies that make her school day possible. McLaren says these strategies include “access to sensory tools (headphones, chewy, weighted vest), and breaks as needed. For example, at group time, Eleanor can sit in a child-sized rocking chair instead of on the floor with peers since that is difficult for her.” Eleanor is also allowed regular breaks from the classroom, including “trampoline jumps” in the school’s special education resource room.


Rather than an indulgence, McLaren calls these breaks “essential.” And seeing how Eleanor has benefitted from an inclusive, supportive environment has turned McLaren into a fighter. In January, McLaren watched Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s cringeworthy confirmation hearing, and was appalled by DeVos’s “stunning lack of knowledge about educating kids with different needs.” (DeVos infamously displayed little awareness of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which protects the needs of special education students.)


McLaren then knew she had to “get more public” with her concerns because private schools do not have to educate students like Eleanor. “Choice sounds good,” McLaren acknowledges, “but I don’t think people realize that private schools do the choosing.” She maintains that religious schools, for example, do not have to follow Minnesota’s Human Rights law, while private schools do not have to adhere to federal special education mandates. The fallout, McLaren fears, will be more segregation in education, with “high needs kids left behind” and public schools left with even fewer resources.


McLaren returned to the Capitol one week after her first, spontaneous shot at testifying against Kresha’s bill, and came armed with–again–Eleanor’s framed picture, as well as some support of her own. Flanking McLaren on February 16, when she spoke before the House Tax Committee, was a cohort of fellow parents of students with special needs, as well as representatives from special education advocacy groups like PACER.


If you’ve got a few minutes, and a handkerchief nearby, watch these parents and special education advocates stumble through their testimony, doing their best to be civil and resilient while pointing out what seems painfully obvious:


The children that need the resources most desperately in special education are those that will pay the price if you divert money away from public school resources. That’s why we speak against this.
–Don McNeil, PACER Center representative and parent of special needs students
Minnesota’s tax credit scholarship bill is currently in limbo. It sailed through various policy and finance committees, thanks to party-line votes, and may be included in an end of session omnibus bill. Governor Mark Dayton, however, has remained opposed to such “voucher-light” proposals.


*Some perspective from Texas, where similar bills have been proposed:

Proponents claim donations will help families pay their private school tuition and that will relieve the enrollment burden on public schools or provide access to good schools for disadvantaged students. That’s the sales pitch. In reality, the result is to hand tax dollars over to private schools, increasing the financial strain on public schools and possibly increasing local property taxes in the process to make up for lost funding.
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We knew as well that all Federal funding added to build corporate after-school programs were not being built for the poor---because global neo-liberal education uses for-profit after-school programs to soak the 99% of parents of all their disposable income as they try to keep their children tied to hyper-competitive global corporate vocational tracking achievement.  This is the race to keeping a child from being UNEMPLOYED----sent to global factories---our being a sweat shop professional.

So all those small business after-school program businesses will now go away and global education for-profit corporations tied to after-school programs will be funded.  They again used local small business as a ploy to deregulate and build infrastructure for what was always meant to be for global education corporations.

IT IS THAT 5% TO THE 1% TIED TO GLOBAL WALL STREET DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL JOHNS HOPKINS WHO BRING CITIZENS OUT EVERY TIME TO SUPPORT THESE BAD POLICIES WHO NEED TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE.

Instead those 5% Clinton/Obama Wall Street players will be leading protests against TRUMP.

So, the poor never could afford after-school programs---and soon our US middle-class will become that poor.  It will be those newly rich who are going to be fighting to get into these for-profit global education after-school programs just to fight to be hired as a sweat shop professional by an UnderArmour/Volkswagen/Wells Fargo. 

Did you know if all the global Wall Street and corporate frauds of these few decades were clawed back by simple US RULE OF LAW that a Trump----Clinton---Bush----DeVos----would not have the money to pay for a health insurance policy ---instead they are being called BILLIONAIRES.


Published on
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
by
People's Action Blog


The Big Lie Behind Trump’s Education Budget

by
Jeff Bryant


"School voucher programs, like the ones Trump and DeVos seem intent on funding, are particularly ineffective ways to address the education problems of poor kids. Indeed, these programs seem to not serve the interests of poor kids at all." (Photo: Ryan Stanton/flickr/cc)

Public school supporters are angry at President Trump’s budget proposal, which plans to cut funding to the Department of Education by 13 percent – taking that department’s outlay down to the level it was ten years ago. But the target for their anger should not be just the extent of the cuts but also how the cuts are being pitched to the public.
Trump’s education budget cuts are aimed principally at federal programs that serve poor kids, especially their access to afterschool programs and high-quality teachers.


At the same time, Trump’s spending blueprint calls for pouring $1.4 billion into school choice policies including a $168 million increase for charter schools, $250 million for a new school choice program focused on private schools, and a $1 billion increase for parents to send their kids to private schools at taxpayer expense.


The way the Trump administration is spinning this combination of funding cuts and increases – and the way nearly every news outlet is reporting them – is that there is some sort of strategically important balance between funding programs for poor kids versus “school choice” schemes, as if the two are equivalents and just different means to the same ends. Nothing could be further from the truth.


A False Equivalency


Shortly after Trump unveiled the plan, his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos was quick to echo the false equivalency.

“The president promised to invest in our underserved communities and our increased investment in choice programs will do just that,” she is quoted in a report for U.S. News & World Report.


Another ardent proponent of vouchers and charter schools, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, praised the plan, calling it “a significant step forward” for “the needs of children and families instead of programs and districts.”


The message being spun out of Trump’s education budget is that it takes money away from those awful “adult interests” – like, you know, teachers to actually teach the students and buildings so students have somewhere to go after school to play sports, get tutored, or engage in music and art projects – in order to steer money to “the kids” who will get a meager sum of money to search for learning opportunities in an education system that is increasingly bereft of teachers and buildings.


Even competent education reporters are falling for this spin, writing that education policy is experiencing a “sea change in focus from fixing the failing schools to helping the students in the failing schools.”


However, there’s evidence that federally funded efforts like afterschool programs and class size reduction tend to lead to better academic results for low-income children, while the case for using school choice programs to address the education needs of poor kids is pretty weak.


The Weak Case For Choice


School voucher programs, like the ones Trump and DeVos seem intent on funding, are particularly ineffective ways to address the education problems of poor kids. Indeed, these programs seem to not serve the interests of poor kids at all.

Studies of voucher programs In Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, and Nevada have found that most of the money from the programs goes to parents wealthy enough to already have their children enrolled in private schools.


Voucher programs rarely provide enough money to enable poor minority children to get access to the best private schools. And a new comprehensive study of vouchers finds evidence that vouchers don’t significantly improve student achievement. What they do pose is greater likelihood that students who are the most costly and difficult to educate – low-income kids and children with special needs – will be turned away or pushed out by private schools that are not obligated to serve all students.


Charter schools, another program the Trump budget wants to ramp up funding for, also don’t have a great track record for improving the education attainment of low-income students.
Perhaps the best case made for using charter schools to target the needs of low-income students comes from a study on the impact of charters in urban school systems conducted by research outfit CREDO in 2015. The study indeed found evidence of some positive impact of charters in these communities. But as my colleague at The Progressive Julian Vasquez Heilig points out, the measures of improvement, in standard deviations, are .008 for Latino students and .05 for African American students in charter schools.


“These numbers are larger than zero,” Heilig writes on his personal blog, “but you need a magnifying glass to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction which are far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools. They have 400 percent to 1000 percent more statistical impact than charters.”


Indeed, choice programs in all their forms, at least in how they are being promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters, seem more interested in diverting money away from public schools than they are intent on delivering some sort of education relief to the struggles of poor families.



Direct Harm To Teachers And Students


In the meantime, the negative, direct impact of Trump’s proposed budget cuts on students, especially those living in low-income communities, will be all too real.
In California, Trump’s proposed cuts to federal grants to hire and support more teachers would short the state $252 million at a time when the state is experiencing severe shortages in teachers.


Trump’s proposed cuts to afterschool programs in New Jersey would threaten the existence of these programs in 50 cites in some of the state’s most economically disadvantaged communities including Newark, Trenton, Paterson, and Union City.


The toll of Trump’s budget cuts on schools in South Florida would amount to $25 million in Broward County and $40 million in Miami-Dade. A program for teacher training would likely be eliminated, and afterschool programs in low-income communities could go away.
Politico interviewed state education leaders to learn the potential impact of Trump’s education budget and found concern across the political spectrum. Republican Oklahoma Superintendent Joy Hofmeister said cuts to federal grants for hiring and supporting teachers come at a time when the state is struggling to fill hundreds of teacher vacancies. And Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester worries about the loss of more than $15 million for afterschool programs.


An analysis by Think Progress, the advocacy center for the left-leaning Center for American Progress, looks at the impact of Trump’s proposed education cuts nationwide and tallies the impact of teacher grant program cuts and cuts to afterschool programs. “Trump’s budget would hinder every state’s ability to deliver critical services and resources to their K-12 students,” the analysis concludes, “impacting thousands of teachers and millions of students.”


The Long-Term Danger


While the direct, negative impact of Trump’s proposed budget cuts seems swift and certain, there is potentially a more long-term danger in perpetuating the myth that the budget trade-off of direct aid versus choice is a valid point of policy debate.

Telling the public that allocating education funding is a battle over whether to pay for direct programs for kids versus stoking the coffers of private schools and the charter school industry is not only disingenuous, it’s harmful to the most vulnerable students and families.
_________________________________________
When Obama and Clinton neo-liberals used national media to pose LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE by sending Federal Education funding to our immigrant schools-----this is to where it went.  As US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones started to build as in Texas and CA-----these corporate charters would open and move wherever global labor pool did.  Of course whether Latino now Asian, South Pacific----these immigrant families were rotated from city to city town to town and now they will be pushed into the global labor pool being sent to Bahrain, Malaysia, China as will our US citizens.  This means NEWCOMER SCHOOLS in China will have American children learning to speak Chinese dialects-----so global neo-liberal for-profit education structures are being built BOTH WAYS--don't think they are simply building here in the US for global labor pool in our Foreign Economic Zones.

Las Américas Newcomer School, also Las Américas Middle School, is an alternative middle school in Sharpstown, Houston, Texas. It is a part of the Houston Independent School District. The school serves grades 6-8 and is on the site of Jane Long Academy in Sharpstown.

It's just the colonial American global slave trade being rebuilt---only watch out 99% of Americans because we are going to be shipped overseas as part of that global labor pool. The goal of ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE is to get rid of sovereign citizens to keep human capital without sovereign connections. So WE THE PEOPLE will be arriving in a Foreign Economic Zone with that NEWCOMER GLOBAL CHARTER ready to teach our children that new language.


Alabama School Launches ‘Newcomer Center’ to Handle Migrant Influx


September 9, 2015 8:43 pm  

• Invasion U.S.A.

(AL.com) – Being the new kid at school has always been a difficult experience for students who move into new communities. From getting acquainted with teachers to navigating cliques and finding a place to sit in the lunchroom, new arrivals face a wide range of challenges.
But that process is greatly compounded for high schoolers from other countries who arrive at their first American schools with little-to-no English proficiency. Left isolated in classrooms where they are surrounded by teachers and students speaking a language they do not understand, many immigrant children without even basic English skills have almost no chance to learn or succeed in the U.S. educational system.


Center Point High School senior Christian Cabrera knows what it is like to be a non-English-speaking immigrant student struggling to adjust to life in an American school. Cabrera arrived in the United States from Honduras three years ago, and had a hard time adjusting to his new school until he made friends with several bilingual students and began to pick up some English, which he now speaks and understands well enough to handle a mainstream courseload.

“It felt weird because, like, somebody would be trying to talk to you and you don’t know English, and you’re trying to know what they’re talking about,” Cabrera said Tuesday morning. “So it’s weird.”


There has been an influx of students with no English proficiency – largely immigrants from Central America, but also children from countries like Yemen, China and Greece – at Jefferson County Schools in recent years, so the school system is launching a new dedicated program aimed at helping them quickly attain rudimentary English skills.


The school system hopes that the fledgling initiative, dubbed the Newcomer Center, will serve the dual purpose of making English-deficient new immigrant students feel welcome in the school system, while getting them started on the path to English fluency.


“It will be like an English immersion. They’ll be working on English skills, they’ll be taking math assessments in their native language, they’ll be able to maintain and understand what’s going on in the classroom so we can assess their level of academics,” Lari Valtierra, ESL supervisor for Jefferson County Schools, said. “There’s always been a need, but it’s become more urgent in the last couple of years as there’s been a large influx of [immigrant] students.”


The center, which is slated to open its doors to students for the first time Thursday morning, is located in a sunny Center Point High School classroom. Headed up by a small but committed team of teachers and administrators, the center will serve students from across all county high schools who score below a certain threshold on English proficiency tests.



The Newcomer Center students will be bussed each day to Center Point from their home district high schools until they attain a high enough level of English proficiency to return to their home schools, where they will rejoin mainstream classes and continue their ESL educations.


Center Point High School Principal Van Phillips says the Newcomer Center – which Jefferson County modeled off of similar initiatives in Baldwin County and other states – is intended to be a crucial bridge between students’ experiences in their native countries and their new academic lives in Alabama.


“The process really started last year. Last spring we received upwards of 12 students from Guatemala and Honduras who spoke absolutely no English, and so we saw an influx of non-English speaking students at that time and we began to make some calls to the Jefferson County Board of Education that we needed some help, and they assigned us some additional resources,” he explained Tuesday morning in his office at Center Point.


“The language barrier prevents them from connecting to the schools and we want to celebrate all cultures at Center Point High School … You try to create an environment where kids feel safe and welcome and motivated to learn.”


Up until this year, much of the work of helping non-English-speakers feel welcome at Center Point and getting them on the path to learning the language was delegated to a crew of bilingual student leaders, who befriended new immigrant students and met with them daily as they adapted to the school.


One such leader, Center Point senior Maximilliano Vasquez, said that though many students will have to ride the bus an extra 30 or 45 minutes each morning and afternoon, he believes the Newcomer Center will be hugely beneficial.

“When you come to a new country, it’s hard. You don’t know anything about it and you don’t know anybody. At our school we have a whole bunch of people from different countries, so they can feel comfortable,” he said Tuesday morning.


“We had a whole bunch of new students come this year and we already had other students from the same country, so they felt comfortable and started talking and became friends almost instantly. Basically, I want every new student, every immigrant, to feel the same way.”


Veronica Bilger was hired this year to be the Newcomer Center’s ESL teacher, and she says that the center will have “multiple benefits” for new immigrant students across Jefferson County. She drives 1 ½ hours to Center Point each day for her new position, which she said provides her the opportunity to help students learn English “from the bottom up,” a rewarding and important job that she believes will elevate her students’ potentials.


“This is something that’s really helping children and helping them become productive citizens and productive adults in this country,” she said Tuesday during a break from setting up the center. “Instead of having them do menial labor jobs because they can’t do anything else with their language level, they’ll actually have opportunities they’d never be able to have.”
______________________________________________

Here is the global neo-liberal corporate school overseas in Foreign Economic Zones these few decades---it is well-developed and will be those receiving US Federal education funding in all US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones doing the same thing here as we see in Chinese Foreign Economic Zones.

This is the global human capital distribution system built by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA that have moved a billion global citizens from Asia, Middle-East, South Pacific, Latin America, Africa now preparing for US citizens.  These are global citizens told they would be brought to a better life to earn money for their families back home and then ---they end up in global sweat shop factories enslaved earning nothing.

THE CLINTON INITIATIVE WORKED HARD BUILDING THESE STRUCTURES TO CREATE GLOBAL CITIZENS---THOSE NOT HAVING ANY SOVEREIGN RIGHTS ALL WHILE NATIONAL MEDIA MADE IT SOUND GOOD FOR THESE GLOBAL LABOR POOL WORKERS.

So this is what Clinton Initiative in our US universities like MICA and Towson Universities will be working to do to US citizens----99% of Americans pushed into the global labor pool is MOVING FORWARD.

You can ask the Greater Baltimore Committee members who are leaders at Morgan State, University of Baltimore, and Johns Hopkins---they know this is the goal for citizens in BLOOMBERG FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE 2 NORTH AMERICA formerly Baltimore MD USA.

Corporate News

GAC Shanghai newcomer welcomed at sponsored school
30 May 14 Shanghai, China – 30 May 2014:


Pupils at the GAC-sponsored Longnan Migrant School gave Mark Delaney a warm welcome when he arrived for his first reading and story-telling session this week.


Though a GAC veteran, Mark has just arrived in Shanghai to take on his new role as GAC China’s Commercial Development Manager. He is also taking over regular voluntary duties at the school from MD Claus Schensema, who is leaving for a new GAC post overseas soon. Mark’s first visit was combined with a ceremony in which the children and teachers bid Claus a fond farewell and vote of thanks for his support.
It’s the continuation of a five-year tradition of support by GAC Shanghai for the school which provides a high standard of education for the children of migrant workers in the city who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it.

About GAC

The GAC Group is committed to ensuring customers’ needs for quality shipping, logistics and marine services are understood and met.The GAC Group is committed to ensuring customers’ needs for quality shipping, logistics and marine services are understood and met. And with over 9,000 professionals working around the clock at more than 300 offices in over 50 countries, we deliver on that promise.

Since the first GAC operation was set up in Kuwait by Swedish entrepreneur Bengt Lindwall in 1956, the Group has evolved into the widely-recognised global provider of integrated shipping, logistics, marine and related services we are today. GAC’s globalisation strategy is to use steady and consistent geographical expansion, achieved through organic / opportunistic growth, joint ventures, partnerships and acquisitions. GAC is local in action and global in attitude.

The value of human dignity is one of the cornerstones of GAC's operating philosophy. We value long-term relationships - with business partners, customers, suppliers and our own staff.

Wherever you go, you will find GAC people striving for excellence in everything they do, driven by a sense of urgency and a desire to meet all their customers’ every service need. That combination of the personal touch with fierce professional pride is our corporate signature.

This is GAC. Welcome to our world!

__________________________________________________

North Carolina is the Wall Street of the south so DUKE University has been that global IVY LEAGUE corporate university just as a global Johns Hopkins and our University of Maryland College Park----they see themselves as MERCHANTS OF VENICE----not our public universities. So all the funding that once went to our university classrooms open to almost any citizen in each state has these few decades been sent to build these overseas structures in Foreign Economic Zones around the world. This is why university tuition soared during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA----

What we see happening is this-----NEWCOMER SCHOOLS become a global human capital tracking of now US citizens to these global corporate campuses as here in China. Now, if you are that global labor pool white collar professional you will soon be that sweat shop professional as all Asian Foreign Economic Zone workers are. If you are brought by a Duke University as a global labor pool factory worker you will be that same Asian Foreign Economic Zone factory worker.

Here is what Obama and Clinton neo-liberals did with Federal Student Loans and pushing global corporate SCHOLARSHIPS as the only pathway to higher education----they tied it to programs leading to EMPLOYMENT----these are the structures in place leading to employment and they will take 99% of Americans overseas to train them as NEWCOMERS to China, Malaysia, Bahrain, Brazil.

EXPORTING US AND UK CITIZENS AS EX-PATS.

This is where I am sure our GREEK FRATS AND SORORITIES are seeing themselves as MERCHANTS OF VENICE----no doubt global GREEKS are tied to these corporate education structures but know what? They are not needed---global corporations and the global 1% have this all covered and will soon not need to pretend to include that 5% to the 1%!

'This meeting of cultures, a 21st-century version of the silk road, is a notion that resonates with students in the US, Europe and China alike. While the past two decades have seen top Western universities — and business schools in particular — launch joint programmes with Chinese universities, there is now a move afoot for them to enter a new phase of commitment, in which they invest in bricks and mortar in China'.


Business Education Western schools lead the way to China Feature of the Week Read next Business School

Insider Ditch winner-takes-all approach in negotiations

February 1, 2015

The past six months have passed in a whirl for David Medina. Until January he was studying hard at Duke University in North Carolina; now he has swapped the leafy Durham campus for Duke’s spanking new venue in Kunshan, close to Shanghai. Sample the FT’s top stories for a week You select the topic, we deliver the news. Select topic Enter email address Invalid email By signing up you confirm that you have read and agree to the terms and conditions, cookie policy and privacy policy. The two are worlds apart, says the management student from the Dominican Republic. “I was prepared for the huge number of people that live here, but it has really surprised me how rush hour (especially in Shanghai) is almost a life or death adventure,” he says. It is just such experiences that Fuqua dean Bill Boulding believes brings real value to Duke’s inaugural two-country Master of Management Studies (MMS) degree, on which close to half the participants are Chinese, the other half from around the world. “The common denominator is people who want the opportunity to be in the US environment and the environment in China,” says Prof Boulding. This meeting of cultures, a 21st-century version of the silk road, is a notion that resonates with students in the US, Europe and China alike. While the past two decades have seen top Western universities — and business schools in particular — launch joint programmes with Chinese universities, there is now a move afoot for them to enter a new phase of commitment, in which they invest in bricks and mortar in China. New York University joins Duke University from the US and Liverpool and Nottingham universities from the UK as the clear leaders in this enterprise. And what is apparent from all of them is that it is the business programmes that are proving most popular and will determine the future of these institutions. These pioneers are just the tip of the iceberg, believes Eitan Zemel, associate vice-chancellor for strategy and dean of business for NYU Shanghai. “I think it is only the beginning. I think there is something much bigger ahead of us,” he says. MBA The residential MBA, the flagship programme of all the big-brand US business schools, is as much about building reputation as earning hard cash. And so it is that while established universities such as Duke and NYU rely on masters and undergraduate students for their business programmes in China, newcomer International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) at XJTLU, in which the UK’s University of Liverpool is a partner, plans to launch a full-time MBA in September 2015. “We are a new business school and we need to launch an MBA to succeed worldwide,” says Roberto Dona, head of MBA Programmes, who believes there will be strong international demand. According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, he says, 40 per cent of MBA graduates worldwide are employed in projects that are in Asia or related to Asia. The school is planning to enrol 40-50 students on the 15-month programme, which will exploit the school’s China knowhow. The second term, dubbed the “New Silk Road”, will include residencies around China and the opportunity to learn the Chinese language. The third term will focus on emerging industries. It is a similar tale at NYU, which has 15 sites around the world. Nottingham University also has a campus in Malaysia as well as Ningbo, where it established its China campus a decade ago. But there is also a real sense that China’s generous welcome to these institutions is part of its own need to modernise its higher education system, says NYU’s Prof Zemel. “I think China is now struggling with the next phase of economic development. They have done a good job but they know that low-cost is running its course,” he says. The next phase is to invest in innovation and this means changing the way students are educated more widely. “The objective of NYU in Shanghai is not to educate the 2000 [enrolled] students,” says Prof Zemel, “but to have a long-term impact on other institutions.” It is a message echoed by Prof Boulding about Duke’s three-way partnership between the university, local government in Kunshan and Wuhan University. “They [Wuhan University] felt this was a great opportunity for them to drive learning and education for that university. What we wanted to do was send a signal that this was a different kind of programme in China, where east meets west”. Under attack is the traditional stereotype of Chinese tertiary level education, in which passive learners listen in awe to the wisdom of esteemed professors. One hundred kilometres west of Shanghai on the Suzhou Innovation Park, Sarah Dixon, dean of the International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University has gone one step further than the others and organised formal teaching for professors from local Chinese universities. Critical thinking and student-centred learning are two of the hot topics on the three programmes at XJTLU — a leadership programme and training programmes for both teaching and administrative staff. In the past three years, more than 150 senior managers from some 70 Chinese universities attended the leadership excellence programme alone. This year will see a steep increase in the number of these trainees. As such XJTLU, which teaches its programmes in English, is a model for future Chinese universities. “We would certainly hope that our university would be emulated by others in China,” says Prof Dixon. Women in Business Q&A Read our interview with Camille Hamel, a masters student at Skema’s Suzhou campus specialising in fashion and luxury management. Just a stone’s throw from XJTLU, France’s Skema business school is training Chinese entrepreneurs rather than professors. It runs two business incubators, says Paul d’Azemar, director of Skema’s Suzhou campus. “The idea is to train Chinese engineers to start their own businesses,” he says. “They [the Chinese] don’t want to be the workshop of the world. They want to be part of the world economy.” These institutions may be the first to open campuses in China, but they are unlikely to be the last. However, this head start should stand them in good stead, says Carl Fey, dean of the business school on Nottingham University’s Ningbo China campus. “It’s understanding how things work, it’s about having a network of alumni in China.” For Mr Medina, a career in China is certainly on the cards at some point in the future. “I have been highly impressed by the ongoing development of this country. Shanghai is an architectural marvel and everywhere I look there are cranes being set up for building high rises,” he says. “It is obvious why this is one of the fastest-evolving economies in the world.”
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Our GREEKS and our freemason groups make up most of that 5% to the 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA being those Robber Barons and passing all those laws breaking down all that is our US citizen rights, freedoms, and governance structure as they are tied to the goals of ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE.
We have shouted for 10 years to these 5% posers --watch out you are going under the bus as they are swimming with sharks. We have seen national media with articles like this growing in number because----as our US public school system is privatized away so too will be the need for GREEKS TO MOVE FORWARD ONE WORLD. Those global IVY LEAGUES will take smaller annual new student populations and those applying will be global citizens so ----pathways in US for any climb of the economic ladder are being dismantled.
THE DARK AGES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE HAD THE 1% PAYING NO ATTENTION TO RULE OF LAW---PAYING NO TAXES----AND THEIR PHYSICIANS WERE SLAVES.


Enough Of Fraternities, Sororities

Trinity trustees set tough new rules for fraternity membership in October 2012 and decreed that campus sororities and fraternities must become coed by 2016. Pi Kappa Alpha is one of the many frat and sorority houses on the Trinity campus. (Stephen Dunn / Hartford Courant)


EditorialThe Hartford Courant

Isn't it time to rethink the relationship between higher education and Greek organizations?

Fraternities and sororities are bastions of exclusion, anachronisms in this global society. They encourage cliques and excesses, and have brought ambulances to campuses far too often.



The latest example: The University of Connecticut has, to its credit, suspended the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity for five years and the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority for four years for a hazing at the fraternity's off-campus house this spring. A member of the sorority said she was forced into heavy drinking at the fraternity until she blacked out and woke up in a hospital. The fraternity had been in trouble with UConn for years. Three other Greek organizations are under suspension as well.
The usual response from Greek headquarters to such (frequent) stories is that they don't condone bad behavior. Yet the bad behavior continues. Bloomberg News has counted more than 60 fraternity-related deaths since 2005.


UConn is far from alone with its problems. Wesleyan and Trinity, to name just two, have also struggled for years with Greek-group headaches.

A Wesleyan student is suing Psi Upsilon fraternity. She alleges she was raped at a party at a chapter house there last May while members watched. The accused student has been expelled.

Wesleyan isn't named in that lawsuit. But the university was named in — and settled for an undisclosed amount — another lawsuit filed by another young woman. She had alleged she was raped at the Mu Epsilon chapter of Beta Theta Pi fraternity in 2010. Her assailant, a non-student, is serving a 15-month prison sentence.

Greek houses have given Trinity College in Hartford a party-school reputation that has affected the quality of applicants, according to a 2012 report by the school. That study found that fraternity and sorority members had lower grades than other students. (The report is at courant.com/trinityhouses.)


Trinity that year announced new rules aimed at weakening the Greek system's stranglehold on campus social life. Fraternities and sororities would have to become coed and maintain a respectable grade point average.

Such rule changes are good, and the sooner implemented, the better. Many prestigious colleges, however, have abolished Greek life from campus — and flourished.


Anti-Meritocracies



Indeed, four of the top five liberal arts schools in the nation have done so.
Williams College banned Greek organizations more than 50 years ago, and Amherst College 30 years ago. (Amherst has decreed that as of July 1, any student belonging to one will be subject to suspension or expulsion.) Those schools are No. 1 and 2, respectively, in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of national liberal arts colleges.


Bowdoin and Middlebury, tied at No. 4, have also banned Greek organizations.
Trinity's U.S. News ranking has fallen in the past decade and is now at No. 36 — despite its top-flight faculty and programs. One of the factors in the rankings decline, Trinity said two years ago, was "our growing reputation as a party school."


Greek groups can have other deleterious effects. A three-year National Study of Student Learning in the early '90s found that joining a fraternity or sorority in the first year of college hurt members' cognitive development. Greek affiliation also "had a significant negative effect on openness to diversity and challenge for both men and women." (See courant.com/studentdev.)

To ban fraternities and sororities takes money and courage. Greek housing save colleges the expense of building and maintaining student dorms. And their alumni are influential, as Trinity can attest.


When Trinity President James F. Jones Jr. and his board of trustees decided to force Greek groups to go coed, fundraising plummeted (although it's now coming back). Mr. Jones is retiring this year, a year earlier than planned.

He was right, however, to call fraternities and sororities "the last remaining vestige of an anti-meritocratic structure on campus." It's a structure at odds with the global, inclusive society that higher education is preparing students to live in and lead.

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WE THE PEOPLE are allowing a global 1% to take America to what they call a FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION of global technology and they are retooling our education system around that-----while 99% of US citizens are shouting to protect US sovereignty, our governance structures, and rights as citizens. We cannot allow MOVING FORWARD global technology and keep sovereignty. Loss sovereignty today is not simply moving from being Democratic and Republican to being FAR-RIGHT LIBERTARIAN MARXIST GLOBAL CORPORATE ONE WORLD SOCIALISM---it creates a very narrow economic and societal structure at the same time we are heading towards CLIMATE CHANGE BRINGING FOOD, WATER, AND TEMPERATURE CHALLENGES.
Global Wall Street and the global 1% Robber Barons sucked all our US wealth and personal assets through massive series of frauds and government corruption by those dastardly 5% to the 1%----
WE MUST STOP THIS MOVING FOWARD---WE THE PEOPLE CAN DECIDE WHAT OUR NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WILL LOOK LIKE AND MAKE OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS STRONG IN PROVIDING FOR THAT EDUCATION!
'The largest beneficiaries of innovation tend to be the providers of intellectual and physical capital—the innovators, shareholders, and investors—which explains the rising gap in wealth between those dependent on capital versus labor'.

Snapshot December 12, 2015 Science & Technology

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

What It Means and How to Respond

By Klaus Schwab


We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.
The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.


There are three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.



The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.


Already, artificial intelligence is all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translate or invest. Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests. Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.


CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES


Like the revolutions that preceded it, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to raise global income levels and improve the quality of life for populations around the world. To date, those who have gained the most from it have been consumers able to afford and access the digital world; technology has made possible new products and services that increase the efficiency and pleasure of our personal lives. Ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film, or playing a game—any of these can now be done remotely.


In the future, technological innovation will also lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.


At the same time, as the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, particularly in its potential to disrupt labor markets. As automation substitutes for labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor. On the other hand, it is also possible that the displacement of workers by technology will, in aggregate, result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs.


We cannot foresee at this point which scenario is likely to emerge, and history suggests that the outcome is likely to be some combination of the two. However, I am convinced of one thing—that in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production. This will give rise to a job market increasingly segregated into “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments, which in turn will lead to an increase in social tensions.


In addition to being a key economic concern, inequality represents the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The largest beneficiaries of innovation tend to be the providers of intellectual and physical capital—the innovators, shareholders, and investors—which explains the rising gap in wealth between those dependent on capital versus labor. Technology is therefore one of the main reasons why incomes have stagnated, or even decreased, for a majority of the population in high-income countries: the demand for highly skilled workers has increased while the demand for workers with less education and lower skills has decreased. The result is a job market with a strong demand at the high and low ends, but a hollowing out of the middle.


Given the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s rapid pace of change and broad impacts, legislators and regulators are being challenged to an unprecedented degree and for the most part are proving unable to cope. This helps explain why so many workers are disillusioned and fearful that their own real incomes and those of their children will continue to stagnate. It also helps explain why middle classes around the world are increasingly experiencing a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and unfairness. A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction.


Discontent can also be fueled by the pervasiveness of digital technologies and the dynamics of information sharing typified by social media. More than 30 percent of the global population now uses social media platforms to connect, learn, and share information. In an ideal world, these interactions would provide an opportunity for cross-cultural understanding and cohesion. However, they can also create and propagate unrealistic expectations as to what constitutes success for an individual or a group, as well as offer opportunities for extreme ideas and ideologies to spread.


THE IMPACT ON BUSINESS


An underlying theme in my conversations with global CEOs and senior business executives is that the acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disruption are hard to comprehend or anticipate and that these drivers constitute a source of constant surprise, even for the best connected and most well informed. Indeed, across all industries, there is clear evidence that the technologies that underpin the Fourth Industrial Revolution are having a major impact on businesses.  


On the supply side, many industries are seeing the introduction of new technologies that create entirely new ways of serving existing needs and significantly disrupt existing industry value chains. Disruption is also flowing from agile, innovative competitors who, thanks to access to global digital platforms for research, development, marketing, sales, and distribution, can oust well-established incumbents faster than ever by improving the quality, speed, or price at which value is delivered.


Major shifts on the demand side are also occurring, as growing transparency, consumer engagement, and new patterns of consumer behavior (increasingly built upon access to mobile networks and data) force companies to adapt the way they design, market, and deliver products and services.


A key trend is the development of technology-enabled platforms that combine both demand and supply to disrupt existing industry structures, such as those we see within the “sharing” or “on demand” economy. These technology platforms, rendered easy to use by the smartphone, convene people, assets, and data—thus creating entirely new ways of consuming goods and services in the process. In addition, they lower the barriers for businesses and individuals to create wealth, altering the personal and professional environments of workers. These new platform businesses are rapidly multiplying into many new services, ranging from laundry to shopping, from chores to parking, from massages to travel.

On the whole, there are four main effects that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has on business—on customer expectations, on product enhancement, on collaborative innovation, and on organizational forms. Whether consumers or businesses, customers are increasingly at the epicenter of the economy, which is all about improving how customers are served. Physical products and services, moreover, can now be enhanced with digital capabilities that increase their value. New technologies make assets more durable and resilient, while data and analytics are transforming how they are maintained. A world of customer experiences, data-based services, and asset performance through analytics, meanwhile, requires new forms of collaboration, particularly given the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place. And the emergence of global platforms and other new business models, finally, means that talent, culture, and organizational forms will have to be rethought.

Overall, the inexorable shift from simple digitization (the Third Industrial Revolution) to innovation based on combinations of technologies (the Fourth Industrial Revolution) is forcing companies to reexamine the way they do business. The bottom line, however, is the same: business leaders and senior executives need to understand their changing environment, challenge the assumptions of their operating teams, and relentlessly and continuously innovate.



THE IMPACT ON GOVERNMENT


As the physical, digital, and biological worlds continue to converge, new technologies and platforms will increasingly enable citizens to engage with governments, voice their opinions, coordinate their efforts, and even circumvent the supervision of public authorities. Simultaneously, governments will gain new technological powers to increase their control over populations, based on pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure. On the whole, however, governments will increasingly face pressure to change their current approach to public engagement and policymaking, as their central role of conducting policy diminishes owing to new sources of competition and the redistribution and decentralization of power that new technologies make possible.

Ultimately, the ability of government systems and public authorities to adapt will determine their survival. If they prove capable of embracing a world of disruptive change, subjecting their structures to the levels of transparency and efficiency that will enable them to maintain their competitive edge, they will endure. If they cannot evolve, they will face increasing trouble.


This will be particularly true in the realm of regulation. Current systems of public policy and decision-making evolved alongside the Second Industrial Revolution, when decision-makers had time to study a specific issue and develop the necessary response or appropriate regulatory framework. The whole process was designed to be linear and mechanistic, following a strict “top down” approach.


But such an approach is no longer feasible. Given the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s rapid pace of change and broad impacts, legislators and regulators are being challenged to an unprecedented degree and for the most part are proving unable to cope.

How, then, can they preserve the interest of the consumers and the public at large while continuing to support innovation and technological development? By embracing “agile” governance, just as the private sector has increasingly adopted agile responses to software development and business operations more generally. This means regulators must continuously adapt to a new, fast-changing environment, reinventing themselves so they can truly understand what it is they are regulating. To do so, governments and regulatory agencies will need to collaborate closely with business and civil society.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will also profoundly impact the nature of national and international security, affecting both the probability and the nature of conflict. The history of warfare and international security is the history of technological innovation, and today is no exception. Modern conflicts involving states are increasingly “hybrid” in nature, combining traditional battlefield techniques with elements previously associated with nonstate actors. The distinction between war and peace, combatant and noncombatant, and even violence and nonviolence (think cyberwarfare) is becoming uncomfortably blurry.


As this process takes place and new technologies such as autonomous or biological weapons become easier to use, individuals and small groups will increasingly join states in being capable of causing mass harm. This new vulnerability will lead to new fears. But at the same time, advances in technology will create the potential to reduce the scale or impact of violence, through the development of new modes of protection, for example, or greater precision in targeting.


THE IMPACT ON PEOPLE


The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation. The list is endless because it is bound only by our imagination.


I am a great enthusiast and early adopter of technology, but sometimes I wonder whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation. Our relationship with our smartphones is a case in point. Constant connection may deprive us of one of life’s most important assets: the time to pause, reflect, and engage in meaningful conversation.


One of the greatest individual challenges posed by new information technologies is privacy. We instinctively understand why it is so essential, yet the tracking and sharing of information about us is a crucial part of the new connectivity. Debates about fundamental issues such as the impact on our inner lives of the loss of control over our data will only intensify in the years ahead. Similarly, the revolutions occurring in biotechnology and AI, which are redefining what it means to be human by pushing back the current thresholds of life span, health, cognition, and capabilities, will compel us to redefine our moral and ethical boundaries.


SHAPING THE FUTURE

Neither technology nor the disruption that comes with it is an exogenous force over which humans have no control. All of us are responsible for guiding its evolution, in the decisions we make on a daily basis as citizens, consumers, and investors. We should thus grasp the opportunity and power we have to shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution and direct it toward a future that reflects our common objectives and values.
To do this, however, we must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or one of greater potential peril. Today’s decision-makers, however, are too often trapped in traditional, linear thinking, or too absorbed by the multiple crises demanding their attention, to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future.

In the end, it all comes down to people and values. We need to shape a future that works for all of us by putting people first and empowering them. In its most pessimistic, dehumanized form, the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to “robotize” humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul. But as a complement to the best parts of human nature—creativity, empathy, stewardship—it can also lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared sense of destiny. It is incumbent on us all to make sure the latter prevails.