We deliberately chose to discuss NDAA and education public policy tied to our US military THE WEEK OF VETERAN'S DAY------and we weave discussions of anti-war VIETNAM 1960-70s into this discussion because our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens have FORGOTTEN and/or are being taught in US schools a different notion of what it means to be AMERICAN and a PATRIOT.
To be AMERICAN is a geographical term---we live on a continent called THE AMERICAS. To be a US CITIZEN you live in a sovereign nation called UNITED STATES on AMERICAN continent. Our US public military for 300 years have been taught PATRIOTISM is protecting our US sovereignty and our public militia has a duty to protect our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and their rights under a US CONSTITUTION. Our US military while in active service are taught a military commander must be OBEYED no matter whether right or wrong---no matter what he/she says is TRUTH or lies.
THE DUTIES OF MILITARY TIED TO A US PRESIDENT AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF CHANGED AS EISENHOWER AVIATION ACT OF LATE 1950S----TIED OUR US MILITARY TO GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA.
This is how our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE went from a 1960-70s full of fighting for our US Constitution and rights as citizens not to be forced into ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL WARS-----that being UNPATRIOTIC----
'Patriotism
For 125 years, the Daughters of the American Revolution has carried the torch of patriotism. Love of country was the purpose; ancestors who fought for freedom was the bond that connected women to unite to form an organization that honored heritage and worked to ensure a bright future for our children. Patriotism is the foundation of the many DAR activities that take place in local communities across the country'.
Education
The DAR is passionate about educating America’s youth and supports a variety of different programs, contests and awards to help further this goal. The DAR website offers many different resources that teachers may find useful when they are teaching subjects such as the Revolutionary War, family history/genealogy, the colonial period and early America. Teachers and students are encouraged to explore the available resources and take advantage of the different programs DAR offers.
DAR Educational Programs Educational Resources from DAR
The Daughters of American Revolution seem to think is is our PATRIOTIC duty to protect and defend the US CONSTITUTION----------just as all those LEFTY COMMIES who were not commies but left social progressive LOCKEAN I AM MAN which is on what our US Constitution is founded
'The aims of the Constitution Week celebration are to:
Emphasize citizens' responsibilities for protecting and defending the Constitution.
Inform people that the Constitution is the basis for America's great heritage and the foundation for our way of life.
Encourage the study of the historical events which led to the framing of the Constitution in September 1787'.
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We KNOW both THE DAUGHTERS OF AMERICAN REVOLUTION and this article by LAWRENCE REED are both filled with global banking 5% freemason/Greek players so we do not see all of this as US PUBLIC EDUCATION. While MR REED fighting for ECONOMIC FREEDOMS tied to our US Constitution correctly identifies what PATRIOTISM is ------the motives for getting rid of a GOVERNMENT indeed corrupted has unintended meaning. Being rid of global banking 5% freemason/Greek players black,white, and brown is JUSTICE UNDER US RULE OF LAW AND US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO DUE PROCESS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Getting rid of our US GOVERNMENT structures which we think REED is really pushing-----is the opposite. REED as CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS sounds more like an CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALIST meaning reforming and installing a NEW CONSTITUTION protecting OLD WORLD KINGS GLOBAL CORPORATIONS and that economy---
'It’s the right of a free people to rid themselves of a government that becomes destructive of those ends, as our Founders did in a supreme act of courage and defiance more than two hundred years ago'.
So, a perfectly good definition of PATRIOTISM -----remember, our US founding fathers were throwing out global EAST INDIA CORPORATIONS and OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
The True Meaning of Patriotism
Patriotism Is Not the Waving of a Flag
Friday, July 01, 2016
Lawrence W. Reed
Patriotism these days is like Christmas—lots of people caught up in a festive atmosphere replete with lights and spectacles. We hear reminders about “the true meaning” of Christmas—and we may even mutter a few guilt-ridden words to that effect ourselves—but each of us spends more time and thought in parties, gift-giving, and the other paraphernalia of a secularized holiday than we do deepening our devotion to the true meaning.
So it is with patriotism, especially on Memorial Day in May, Flag Day in June, and Independence Day in July. Walk down Main Street America and ask one citizen after another what patriotism means and with few exceptions, you’ll get a passel of the most self-righteous but superficial and often dead-wrong answers. America’s Founders, the men and women who gave us reason to be patriotic in the first place, would think we’ve lost our way if they could see us now.
Since the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans in near unanimity have been “feeling” patriotic. For most, that sadly suffices to make one a solid patriot. But if I’m right, it’s time for Americans to take a refresher course.
Patriotism is not love of country, if by “country” you mean scenery—amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesty, and the like. Almost every country has pretty collections of rocks, water, and stuff that people grow and eat. If that’s what patriotism is all about, then Americans have precious little for which we can claim any special or unique love. And surely, patriotism cannot mean giving one’s life for a river or a mountain range.
Patriotism is not blind trust in anything our leaders tell us or do. That just replaces some lofty concepts with mindless goose-stepping.
Patriotism is not simply showing up to vote. You need to know a lot more about what motivates a voter before you judge his patriotism. He might be casting a ballot because he just wants something at someone else’s expense. Maybe he doesn’t much care where the politician he’s hiring gets it. Remember Dr. Johnson’s wisdom: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Waving the flag can be an outward sign of patriotism, but let’s not cheapen the term by ever suggesting that it’s anything more than a sign. And while it’s always fitting to mourn those who lost their lives simply because they resided on American soil, that too does not define patriotism.
People in every country and in all times have expressed feelings of something we flippantly call “patriotism,” but that just begs the question. What is this thing, anyway? Can it be so cheap and meaningless that a few gestures and feelings make you patriotic?
Not in my book.
I subscribe to a patriotism rooted in ideas that in turn gave birth to a country, but it’s the ideas that I think of when I’m feeling patriotic. I’m a patriotic American because I revere the ideas that motivated the Founders and compelled them, in many instances, to put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line.
What ideas? Read the Declaration of Independence again. Or, if you’re like most Americans these days, read it for the very first time. It’s all there. All men are created equal. They are endowed not by government but by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Premier among those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government must be limited to protecting the peace and preserving our liberties, and doing so through the consent of the governed. It’s the right of a free people to rid themselves of a government that becomes destructive of those ends, as our Founders did in a supreme act of courage and defiance more than two hundred years ago.
Call it freedom. Call it liberty. Call it whatever you want, but it’s the bedrock on which this nation was founded and from which we stray at our peril. It’s what has defined us as Americans. It’s what almost everyone who has ever lived on this planet has yearned for. It makes life worth living, which means it’s worth fighting and dying for.
An American Spin
I know that this concept of patriotism puts an American spin on the term. But I don’t know how to be patriotic for Uganda or Paraguay. I hope the Ugandans and Paraguayans have lofty ideals they celebrate when they feel patriotic, but whether or not they do is a question you’ll have to ask them. I can only tell you what patriotism means to me as an American.
I understand that America has often fallen short of the superlative ideas expressed in the Declaration. That hasn’t diminished my reverence for them, nor has it dimmed my hope that future generations of Americans will be re-inspired by them.
This brand of patriotism, in fact, gets me through the roughest and most cynical of times. My patriotism is never affected by any politician’s failures, or any shortcoming of some government policy, or any slump in the economy or stock market. I never cease to get that “rush” that comes from watching Old Glory flapping in the breeze, no matter how far today’s generations have departed from the original meaning of those stars and stripes. No outcome of any election, no matter how adverse, makes me feel any less devoted to the ideals our Founders put to pen in 1776. Indeed, as life’s experiences mount, the wisdom of what giants like Jefferson and Madison bestowed on us becomes ever more apparent to me. I get more fired up than ever to help others come to appreciate the same things.
During a recent visit to the land of my ancestors, Scotland, I came across a few very old words that gave me pause. Though they preceded our Declaration of Independence by 456 years, and come from three thousand miles away, I can hardly think of anything ever written here that more powerfully stirs in me the patriotism I’ve defined above. In 1320, in an effort to explain why they had spent the previous 30 years in bloody battle to expel the invading English, Scottish leaders ended their Declaration of Arbroath with this line: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”
Freedom—understanding it, living it, teaching it, and supporting those who are educating others about its principles. That, my fellow Americans, is what patriotism should mean to each of us today.
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Below we see what indeed happened as CLINTON/BUSH started to move our former military troops into classrooms PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY------our US 99% WE THE MILITARY CITIZENS were EDUCATED that PATRIOTISM is tied to war effort-------the opposite of 300 years of US patriotism tied to protecting our US SOVEREIGN CIVILIAN SOCIETY.
When our US 99% of right wing citizens allowed far-right wing global banking 1% BUSH NEO-CONS to call those ANTI-WAR citizens LEFTISTS-----and COMMIES-----they allowed global banking 1% to completely redefine what PATRIOTISM is. BUSH being global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA wanted PATRIOTISM tied to OLD WORLD GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.
'Definition #1: Patriotism as loyalty to the war effort'.
The article below is yet another from US right wing telling us what AMERICAN PATRIOTISM is. This man from BUSH COUNTRY AUSTIN TX is ground zero for global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS killing our US sovereignty and corrupting the meaning of US PATRIOTISM.
So, he makes some good points on what AMERICAN PATRIOTISM is-----never hitting what UNITED STATES PATRIOTISM means. He ends this article by suggesting that our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and new to US immigrants should give up all that being an AMERICAN PATRIOT means because global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS for whom he works did indeed kill US PATRIOTISM.
'We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans'.
Here we have the problem for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE when our US public K-university is controlled by far-right wing working for DARK AGES OLD WORLD KINGS. THE WORLD CANNOT SURVIVE THE PATRIOTISM OF AMERICANS.
REMEMBER, OUR UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION IS A SOVEREIGN DOCUMENT------USING THE TERM AMERICAN IS A GEOGRAPHICAL TERM-----FIGHT FOR OUR US CONSTITUTION AND THE MEANING BEHIND BEING A US PATRIOT.
Robert Jensen writing in GLOBAL ISSUES is telling the global 99% that AMERICAN PATRIOTISM is behind continuous wars and global private military corporations working for GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KNIGHTS OF MALTA. This is why we shout often-----US IS NOT ROGUE----it is the same pre-Christian NERO/CATO/SENECA OLD WORLD KINGS not being AMERICAN.
JENSEN is what we call a global banking 1% ONE WORLD UNITED NATIONS FAKE PEACE ACTIVIST.
Goodbye to Patriotism
The following article appeared in ZNet, the web site of Z Magazine, on the November 10 2001 and has been reposted here. It looks at the issue of patriotism.
You can see the original article at http://www.zmag.org/jensenpatriotism.htm
Saying goodbye to patriotism
by Robert Jensen
[A talk delivered to the Peace Action National Congress, November 10, 2001]
This summer I wrote a book review for an academic journal -- one of those terribly important pieces of writing that will be read by tens and tens of people, some of them actually people outside my own family. The book is about the history of governmental restrictions on U.S. news media during war, and it's a good book in many ways. But I faulted the author for accepting the American mythology about the nobility of our wars and their motivations. I challenged his uncritical use of the term patriotism, which I called "perhaps the single most morally and intellectually bankrupt concept in human history."
By coincidence, the galley proofs for the piece came back to me for review a few days after September 11. I paused as I re-read my words, and I thought about the reaction those words might spark, given the reflexive outpouring of patriotism in the wake of the terrorist attacks. I thought about the controversy that some of my writing had already sparked on campus and, it turned out, beyond the campus. I thought about how easy it would be to take out that sentence.
I thought about all that for some time before deciding to let it stand. My reason was simple: I think that statement was true on September 10, and if anything, I'm more convinced it is true after September 11.
I also believe that nestled in the truth of that assertion is a crucial question for the U.S.-based peace movement, one that we cannot avoid after 9-11:
Are we truly internationalist? Can we get beyond patriotism? Or, in the end, are we just Americans?
That is a way, I think, of asking whether we are truly for peace and justice.
I realize that framing of the question may seem harsh. It may rub the wrong way people who want to hold onto a positive notion of patriotism.
I mean the statement to be harsh because I believe the question is crucial. If in the end we are just Americans, if we cannot move beyond patriotism, then we cannot claim to be internationalists. And, if we are not truly internationalist in our outlook -- all the way to the bone -- then I do not think we truly call ourselves people committed to peace and justice.
Let me try to make the case for this by starting with definitions.
My dictionary defines patriotism as "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country." We'll come back to that, but let's also look beyond the dictionary to how the word is being used at this moment in history, in this country. I would suggest there are two different, and competing, definitions of patriotism circulating these days.
Definition #1: Patriotism as loyalty to the war effort.
It's easy to get a handle on this use of the word. Just listen to the president of the United States speak. Or watch the TV anchors. Or, as I have done, be a guest on a lot of talk radio shows. This view of patriotism is pretty simple: We were attacked. We must defend ourselves. The only real way to defend ourselves is by military force. If you want to be patriotic, you should -- you must -- support the war.
I have been told often that it is fine for me to disagree with that policy, but now is not the time to disagree publicly. A patriotic person, I am told, should remain quiet and support the troops until the war is over, at which point we can all have a discussion about the finer points of policy. If I politely disagree with that, then the invective flows: Commie, terrorist-lover, disloyal, unpatriotic. Love it or leave it.
It is easy to take apart this kind of patriotism. It is a patriotism that is incompatible with democracy or basic human decency. To see just how intellectually and morally bankrupt a notion it is, just ask this question: What would we have said to Soviet citizens who might have made such an argument about patriotic duty as the tanks rolled into Prague in 1968? To draw that analogy is not to say the two cases are exactly alike. Rather, it is to point out that a decision to abandon our responsibility to evaluate government policy and surrender our power to think critically is a profound failure, intellectually and morally.
Definition #2: Patriotism as critique of the war effort.
Many in the peace-and-justice movement, myself included, have suggested that to be truly patriotic one cannot simply accept policies because they are handed down by leaders or endorsed by a majority of people, even if it is an overwhelming majority. Being a citizen in a real democracy, we have said over and over, means exercising our judgment, evaluating policies, engaging in discussion, and organizing to try to help see that the best policies are enacted. When the jingoists start throwing around terms like "anti-American" and "traitor," we point out that true patriotism means staying true to the core commitments of democracy and the obligations that democracy puts on people. There is nothing un-American, we contend, about arguing for peace.
That's all clear enough. As I have said, I have used that line of argument many times. It is the best way -- maybe the only way -- to respond in public at this moment if one wants to be effective in building an antiwar movement. We all remind ourselves, over and over, that we have to start the discussion where people are, not where we wish people were. If people feel "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country," then we have to be aware of that and respond to it.
But increasingly, I feel uncomfortable arguing for patriotism, even with this second definition. And as I listen to friends and allies in the peace-and-justice movement, I have started to wonder whether that claim to patriotism-as-critical-engagement is indeed merely strategic. Or is it motivated by something else?
Are we looking for a way to hold onto patriotism because we really believe in it?
I think it is valuable to ask the question: Is there any way to define the term that doesn't carry with it arrogant and self-indulgent assumptions? Is there any way to salvage patriotism?
I want to argue that invoking patriotism puts us on dangerous ground and that we must be careful about our strategic use of it.
At its ugliest, patriotism means a ranking of the value of the lives of people based on boundaries. To quote Emma Goldman: "Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others."
People have said this directly to me: Yes, the lives of U.S. citizens are more important than the lives of Afghan citizens. If innocent Afghans have to die, have to starve -- even in large numbers -- so that we can achieve our goals, well, that's the way it is, and that's the way it should be. I assume no argument here is needed as to why this type of patriotism is unacceptable. We may understand why people feel it, but it is barbaric.
But what of the effort to hold onto a kinder and gentler style of patriotism by distinguishing it from this kind of crude nationalism? We must ask: What are the unstated assumptions of this other kind of patriotism we have been defending? If patriotism is about loyalty of some sort, to what are we declaring our loyalty?
If we are pledging loyalty to a nation-state, we have already touched on the obvious problems: What if that nation-state pursues an immoral objective? Should we remain loyal to it? The same question is obvious if our loyalty is to a specific government or set of government officials. If they pursue immoral objectives or pursue moral objectives in an immoral fashion, what would it mean to be loyal to them?
Some suggest we should be loyal to the ideals of America, a set of commitments and practices connected with the concepts of freedom and democracy. That's all well and good; freedom and democracy are good things, and I try to not only endorse those values but live them. I assume everyone in this room does as well.
But what makes those values uniquely American?
Is there something about the United States or the people who live here that make us more committed to, or able to act out, the ideals of freedom and democracy -- more so than, say, Canadians or Indians or Brazilians? Are not people all over the world -- including those who live in countries that do not guarantee freedom to the degree the United States does -- capable of understanding and acting on those ideals? Are not different systems possible for making real those ideals in a complex world?
If freedom and democracy are not unique to us, then they are simply human ideals, endorsed to varying degrees in different places and realized to different degrees by different people acting in different places? If that's true, then they are not distinctly American ideals. They were not invented here, and we do not have a monopoly on them. So, if one is trying to express a commitment to those ideals, why do it in the limiting fashion of talking of patriotism?
Let me attempt an analogy to gender. After 9-11, a number of commentators have argued that criticisms of masculinity should be rethought. Yes, masculinity is often connected to, and expressed through, competition, domination, and violence, they said. But as male firefighters raced into burning buildings and risked their lives to save others, cannot we also see that masculinity encompasses a kind of strength that is rooted in caring and sacrifice?
My response is, yes, of course men often exhibit such strength. But do not women have the capacity for that kind of strength rooted in caring and sacrifice? Do they not exhibit such strength on a regular basis? Why of course they do, most are quick to agree. Then the obvious question is, what makes these distinctly masculine characteristics? Are they not simply human characteristics?
We identify masculine tendencies toward competition, domination, and violence because we see patterns of different behavior; we see that men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We can go on to observe and analyze the ways in which men are socialized to behave in those ways. We do all that work, I would hope, to change those behaviors.
But that is a very different exercise than saying that admirable human qualities present in both men and women are somehow primarily the domain of one of those genders. To assign them to a gender is misguided, and demeaning to the gender that is then assumed not to possess them to the same degree.
Once you start saying "strength and courage are masculine traits," it leads to the conclusion that woman are not as strong or courageous. To say "strength and courage are masculine traits," then, is to be sexist.
The same holds true for patriotism. If we abandon the crude version of patriotism but try to hold onto an allegedly more sophisticated version, we bump up against this obvious question: Why are human characteristics being labeled as American if there is nothing distinctly American about them?
If people want to argue that such terminology is justified because those values are realized to their fullest degree in the United States, then there's some explaining to do. Some explaining to the people of Guatemala and Iran, Nicaragua and South Vietnam, East Timor and Laos, Iraq and Panama. We would have to explain to the victims of U.S. aggression -- direct and indirect -- how it is that our political culture, the highest expression of the ideals of freedom and democracy, has managed routinely to go around the world overthrowing democratically elected governments, supporting brutal dictators, funding and training proxy terrorist armies, and unleashing brutal attacks on civilians when we go to war. If we want to make the claim that we are the fulfillment of history and the ultimate expression of the principles of freedom and justice, our first stop might be Hiroshima. We might want to explain that claim there.
If we are serious about peace and justice in the world, we need to subject this notion of patriotism to scrutiny. If we do that, I would suggest, it is clear that any use of the concept of patriotism is bound to be chauvinistic at some level. At its worst, patriotism can lead easily to support for barbarism. At its best, it is self-indulgent and arrogant in its assumptions about the uniqueness of U.S. culture.
None of what I have said should be taken as a blanket denunciation of the United States, our political institutions, or our culture. People often tell me, "You start with the assumption that everything about the United States is bad." Of course I do not assume that. That would be as absurd a position as the assumption that everything about the United States is good. I can't imagine any reasonable person making either statement. That does raise the question, of course, of who is a reasonable person. We might ask that question about, for example, George Bush, the father. In 1988, after the U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner in a commercial corridor, killing 290 civilians, Bush said, "I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
I want to put forward the radical proposition that we should care what the facts are. We should start with the assumption that everything about the United States, like everything about any country, needs to be examined and assessed. That is what it means to be a moral person.
There is much about this country a citizen can be proud of, and I am in fact proud of those things. The personal freedoms guaranteed (to most people) in this culture, for example, are quite amazing. As someone who regularly tries to use those freedoms, I am as aware as anyone of how precious they are.
There also is much to be appalled by. The obscene gaps in wealth between rich and poor, for example, are quite amazing as well, especially in a wealthy society that claims to be committed to justice.
In that sense, we are like any other grouping of people. That doesn't mean one can't analyze various societies and judge some better than others by principles we can articulate and defend -- so long as they are truly principles, applied honestly and uniformly. But one should maintain a bit of humility in the endeavor. Perhaps instead of saying "The United States is the greatest nation on earth" -- a comment common among politicians, pundits, and the public -- we would be better off saying, "I live in the United States and have deep emotional ties to the people, land, and ideals of this place. Because of these feelings, I want to highlight the positive while working to change what is wrong." That is not moral relativism -- it is a call for all of us to articulate and defend our positions.
We can make that statement without having to argue that we are, in some essential way, better than everyone else. We can make that statement without arrogantly suggesting that other people are inherently less capable of articulating or enacting high ideals. We can make that statement and be ready and willing to engage in debate and discussion about the merits of different values and systems.
We can make that statement, in other words, and be true internationalists, people truly committed to peace and justice. If one wants to call that statement an expression of patriotism, I will not spend too much time arguing. But I will ask: If we make a statement like that, why do we need to call it an expression of patriotism? What can we learn by asking ourselves: What makes us, even people in the peace-and-justice community, want to hold onto the notion of patriotism with such tenacity?
When I write or talk with the general public and raise questions like these, people often respond, "If you hate America so much, why don't you leave?"
But what is this America that I allegedly hate? The land itself? The people who live here? The ideals in the country's founding documents? I do not hate any of those things.
When people say to me "love it or leave it," what is the "it" to which they refer?
No one can ever quite answer that. Still, I have an answer for them.
I will not leave "it" for a simple reason: I have nowhere else to go. I was born here. I was given enormous privileges here. My place in the world is here, where I feel an obligation to use that privilege to be part -- a very small part of, as we all are only a small part -- of a struggle to make real a better world. Whatever small part I can play in that struggle, whatever I can achieve, I will have to achieve here, in the heart of the beast.
I love it, which is to say that I love life -- I love the world in which I live and the people who live in it with me. I will not leave that "it."
That "it" may not be specific enough for some, but it's the best I can do. Maybe it will help to answer in the negative, for I can say more clearly what the "it" is not. I can describe more clearly what is the America I do not love.
The America I love is not this administration, or any other collections of politicians, or the corporations they serve.
It is not the policies of this administration, or any other collection of politicians, or the corporations they serve.
The America I love is not wrapped up in a mythology about "how good we are" that ignores the brutal realities of our own history of conquest and barbarism.
Most of all, I want no part of the America that arrogantly claims that the lives and hopes and dreams of people who happen to live within the boundaries of the United States have more value than those in other places. Nor will I indulge America in the belief that our grief is different. Since September 11, the United States has demanded that the world take our grief more seriously. When some around the world have not done so, we express our outrage.
But we should ask: What makes the grief of a parent who lost a child in the World Trade Center any deeper than the grief of a parent who lost a child in Baghdad when U.S. warplanes rained death on the civilian areas of Iraq in the Gulf War? Or the parents of a child in Nicaragua when the U.S. terrorist proxy army ravaged that country? Soon after 9-11, I heard a television reporter describe lower Manhattan as "Beirut on the Hudson." We might ask, how did Beirut come to look like Beirut, and what is our responsibility in that? And what of the grief of those who saw their loved ones die during the shelling of that city?
We should ask: Where was the empathy of America for the grief of those people?
Certainly we grieve differently, more intensely, when people close to us die. We don't feel the loss of a family member the same way as a death of a casual friend. We feel something different over the death of someone we knew compared with the death of a stranger. But we must understand that the grief we feel when our friends and neighbors became victims of political violence is no different than what people around the world feel. We must understand that each of those lives lost abroad has exactly the same value as the life of any one of our family, friends and neighbors.
September 11 was a dark day. I still remember what it felt like to watch those towers come down, the darkness that settled over me that day, the hopelessness, how tangible death felt -- for me, not only the deaths of those in the towers but also the deaths of those who would face the bombs in the war that might follow, the war that did follow, the war that goes on.
But humans are resilient; in the darkness we tend to look for light, for a way out of the darkness.
I believe there is a light shining out of September 11, out of all that darkness. It is a light that I believe we Americans can follow to our own salvation. That light is contained in a simple truth that is obvious, but which Americans have never really taken to heart: We are part of the world. We cannot any longer hide from that world. We cannot allow our politicians, and generals, and corporate executives to do their dirty business around the world while we hide from the truths about just how dirty that business really is. We can no longer hide from the coups they plan, the wars they start, the sweatshops they run.
For me, all this means saying goodbye to patriotism.
That is the paradox: September 11 has sparked a wave of patriotism, a patriotism that has in many cases been overtly hateful, racist and xenophobic. A patriotism that can lead people to say, as one person wrote to me, "We should bomb [Afghanistan] until there's no more earth to bomb."
But the real lesson of September 11, which I believe we will eventually learn, is that if we are to survive as a free people, as decent people who want honestly to claim the ideals we say we live by, we must say goodbye to patriotism. That patriotism will not relieve our grief, but only deepen it. It will not solve our problems but only extend them. I believe there is no hope for ourselves or for the world if we continue to embrace patriotism, no matter what the definition.
We must give up our "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country" and transfer that love, loyalty and zealousness to the world, and especially the people of the world who have suffered most so that we Americans can live in affluence.
We must be able to say, as the great labor leader of the early 20th century Eugene Debs said, "I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world."
I am with Debs. I believe it is time to declare: I am not patriotic. I am through with trying to redefine the term patriotic to make sense. There is no sense to it.
That kind of statement will anger many, but at some point we must begin to take that risk, for this is not merely an academic argument over semantics.
This is both a struggle to save ourselves and a struggle to save the lives of vulnerable people around the world.
We must say goodbye to patriotism because the kind of America the peace-and-justice movement wants to build cannot be built on, or through, the patriotism of Americans.
We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.
Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective (www.nowarcollective.com), and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (www.peterlangusa.com). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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Our US military and US labor unions are the source of many global banking 5% freemason/Greek players ----and they are the ones making the change from being ALL-UNITED STATES OF AMERICA-----to being ALL-COLONIAL FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE IN THE AMERICAS.
We sign off often as being from BLOOMBERG FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE #2 NORTH AMERICA rather than Baltimore MD USA ----because that is what the article below from global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS HARVARD CORPORATION refers when bringing our US LABOR UNIONS ---TEACHERS' UNION into the discussion of US public schools, patriotism, what it means to be PATRIOTIC.
Remember, our US labor unions during CLINTON/BUSH were connected to INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION---ILO----tied to WORLD BANK/UNITED NATIONS-----working for global corporations.
It is not hard to see where these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA took our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens from being UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTS-----to being AMERICAN PATRIOTS feeling PATRIOTISM is tied to GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.
'Robert Bruno is a Professor of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois’ School of Labor and Employment Relations, Urbana-Champaign. He is also Director of the University’s Labor Education Program and the Project for Middle Class Renewal'.
We like to remind our US 99% WE THE US MILITARY VETERANS tracked either to our US POST OFFICE----or into our US public K-university to kill left social progressive academics and teachers----that these few decades of tracking military troops to classroom have today's US PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS forced out---losing their pensions, killing the teaching profession many being RETIRED MILITARY TROOPS.
As Harvard Review knows----US stopped seeing US teachers as professionals when HARVARD declared there was no more AMERICAN POLITICS no American RULE OF LAW. When a person ties itself to global banking 1% global corporate institutions as ROBERT BRUNO they are 5% freemason/Greek FAKE LABOR players.
LaborWhen Did the U.S. Stop Seeing Teachers as Professionals?
June 20, 2018 UPDATED June 20, 2018
J PAT CARTER/Getty Images
Teachers have had enough. Since March, schools in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina have either been shut down or turned into sites of resistance. In Kansas, teachers are threatening to strike because their legislature continues to fund schools at a level the state Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. One Brookings Institute analysis projected that teacher actions could spread to another 11 states.
Poor pay, increased health care costs, and diminished pension plans are certainly core issues — teachers in Oklahoma haven’t received a pay boost in a decade. But these problems alone aren’t driving the protests. In every state where teachers have recently gone on strike, demands for increase school funding have been made. Disinvestment in schools has also been central to teacher strikes that have occurred since 2011, in Jersey City, Philadelphia, Chicago (twice), Seattle, Portland and Wisconsin.
The teachers’ position is that, under the cover of a commitment to improving schools, school district and local governments have instead closed neighborhood public schools, opened charter schools, instituted standard curriculums, mandated poorly thought out high-stakes standardized testing, attacked teacher tenure, instituted merit pay instead of annual salary increments, restricted collective bargaining rights, and subjected teachers to questionable and punitive evaluation schemes. The result of years of “reform” has been modest improvement but little progress in national student performance.
This, it seems, is the tipping point and brings me to what I believe is at the heart of what is really happening here: Teachers are seeing their own experience be devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the education of their students. In other words, and as others have noted, teachers are balking at the erosion of their status as professionals. In fact, I would submit that it’s precisely because of their sense of professionalism that teachers are driven to an agonizing decision to withhold their labor. Teachers perceive themselves and their students being treated as fungible costs of production, cogs in a bureaucratic machine. To them, nothing less than the education profession is at risk.
What is professionalism exactly?While there are varying definitions and disagreements among sociologists, a set of criteria put forth by Mirko Noordegraaf, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is helpful. The starting point, he says, is “typically an emphasis on ‘good work’ and the social mechanisms for accomplishing this.” He further stresses that a “professional does not merely work; he/she has to be educated and trained, (socialized) as member of an occupational domain, supervised by his/her peers and held accountable.” Noordegraaf then acknowledges an element to professionalism that serves as the locus of historical and contemporary struggle for teachers: “professionals succeed in realizing so-called professional control: they control themselves.” Professionalism demands the capacity to internally organize and protect “professional practices from external influences.”
The work of teachers also substantially accords with renown public administration expert Frederick Mosher’s definition of a profession:
“[…] a more or less specialized and purposeful field of human activity which require some specialized education or training (though it may be acquired on the job), which offers a career of life work, and enjoys a relatively high status. It normally aspires to social, not selfish, purpose. Usually, but not always, it requires a degree or certification, and credential of some kind. Often its members join in a professional organization, local, state, or national, which enunciates standards and ethics of professional performance sometimes with the powers of enforcement.”
This definition is echoed by a 2013 national survey of 20,000 conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It found that 6 out of 10 teachers went directly into teaching after earning their undergraduate or graduate degree. They taught because they wanted to provide a valuable public service. Eighty-five percent of teachers said they went into the profession because they wanted “to make a difference in children’s’ lives,” beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. The survey reported that 99% of teachers “strongly agreed or agreed” with the statement that “teaching is more than academics; it is also about reinforcing good citizenship, resilience and social skills.”
Education, then, is not usually an incremental step to a better way to make a living life or a waystation to another career. Teaching, like pastoring, is often a “calling.” So it stands to reason that teachers themselves are the appropriate people to define the best “educational practices, entrance routes, credentialing requirements, continuing training options, codes of conduct, and methods of enforcement.”
Except today, they’re not. A form of the classical structural-functionalist theory of professionalism prevails. This sociological view, first formulated by Talcott Parsons, holds that a profession is a static thing with attributes that apply without exception. Here, professionalism is a skill that can be practiced and learned over time, by anyone, with success and failure measured based on an agreed-upon objective standard. The recent history of the teaching profession helps explain why this version has come to dominate.
When teaching became “automated”In 1983, President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a much debated and often mischaracterized call-to-arms. The authors sent a clear distress signal: “We report to the American people that… the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” After A Nation at Risk was widely popularized, it became conventional wisdom that education was, in fact, in crisis. Task forces and commissions claimed to have evidence of failing students, obstructionist teacher unions, and poorly performing teachers. The constant saturation of negative school headlines took its toll: The public’s approval rating of public schools fell from 58% in 1973 to 29% in 2012.
It was then that a belief in external controls began influencing the industry. In this view, an independent and external body best regulates teachers, in which teachers are part of an accountable and efficient production system. Schools needed to function more like businesses and successfully compete for students. To this end, teachers’ work has subsequently been the subject of major restructuring over the past three decades. Teachers are increasingly directed to follow a mandated curriculum, abide by grade level or school district units of study, and follow predetermined lesson plans. In addition, test-based accountability has colonized teaching techniques and objectives, teacher performance evaluations are yoked to student test scores, and teacher training programs are de-emphasized. Teachers also have little influence over professional development content, school-wide organization, or school budget decisions.
Under these command and control conditions, teaching looks more like automation then imagination. As University of British Columbia professor Wendy Poole noted, “teachers’ work, once conceived as requiring high discretion and autonomy, is increasingly reduced to technical-rational conceptions of teaching and teachers are increasingly viewed as technicians.” Creativity is squeezed out for conformity and teacher autonomy suppressed; room for going “rogue” is the exception. Unless everyone reads Shakespeare, no one does. I suspect that overhauling the work of teachers and undermining their professional status has also been aided by society’s tendency to undervalue “women’s work” (more than 75% of teachers in the U.S. are women).
This all occurs in an environment where teachers need higher skills — many are required to have advanced degrees and numerous certifications — and are asked to do more with less. In addition to being under pressure to meet or exceed standardized performance indicators, teachers suffer from an intensification of work. They work 60-plus hour work weeks, are in near-constant communication with parents, and must collect copious amounts of student data, among many other administrative and technological tasks. Stagnant job growth in the industry has also led to increased class sizes. In other words, teachers are asked to work harder and longer with a growing number of students while also being told to adhere to an education plan they have little control over.
The impact has been punishing. In one study, 93% of teachers reported high stress levels, while only 7% self identified as “well-adjusted.” A survey by the American Federation of Teachers and the Badass Teachers Association reported that educators find work to be stressful 61% of the time and nearly a quarter of respondents said work was “always” stressful. The survey notes for comparison purposes, “workers in the general population report that work is stressful 30% of the time.”
And yet, for decades, teachers have endured. Why? In our book on the 2012 Chicago teacher strike, my colleague and I note, “Teacher unions have largely made compromises with the prevailing wisdom. They haven’t done so without expressed reservation or opposition, but in the face of an irrational and bipartisan demonization of schoolteachers and their unions, some believed tactical retreat seemed prudent.” And surveys of teachers suggest that many are interested in new school concepts that invite entrepreneurial thinking and experimentation.
For most teachers, small acts of resistance while accommodating new bureaucratic boundaries has been possible, but only when a sense of professional control and a measure of satisfaction could still be derived from the work. In 2013, even as 82% of teachers found the ever-shifting nature of education reform to be the most significant challenge they face, many still maintained a love of the work and the profession. They still do — but their control has been eroded to almost nothing. That’s why they’re striking.
Another theory of professionalismYes, teachers need to be paid more and have better health benefits. But policymakers need to understand the kind of professionalism teachers are demanding, too.
The professionalism practiced by teachers recognizes and prioritizes contextuality. This echoes a theory by LSU School of Library & Information Science professor Suzanne Stauffer who puts forth that there is nothing “discrete, universal, or enduring” about professions because they’re constantly changing in relationship to the market and the state. Because of this, professionalism is not merely a collection of traits or an individual competency that can be mastered — it can’t be, because these traits and expertise are constantly changing depending on context. In other words, teachers recognize that the school environment and children’s needs dictate what professionalism requires at a given moment in time.
This means that a teacher’s classroom experiences, and the teacher-student relationship, is what ultimately creates the boundaries for what it means to be a professional. This does not rely on consultant-developed tests to measure student competency, but instead uses teacher-constructed assessments oriented to the subject matters they teach. Instead of standardized curriculum and lesson plans, teachers have the freedom to determine the best course to help each child acquire the necessary learning standards. The time needed to cover subject content corresponds to each learner’s capacity and not an arbitrary schedule demanding that every kid masters everything at the same moment. A contextualized professionalism would have teachers teach children, not a curriculum.
What’s at stakeThe aspirations of today’s educators are not new. In 1987, the President of the National Educators Association Mary Hatwood Futrell hopefully wrote that, “We may at last be on the brink of realizing the centuries-old dream of American teachers: professional status, professional compensation… professional autonomy.”
We’re clearly not there yet. But with today’s protests, public school teachers are pushing back harder than ever against rigid definitions of professionalism. Instead, they are offering their own student-centered approach, combining training, context, flexibility, and a lifelong commitment to children and society. But the failure of elected officials and school boards to recognize a teacher-constructed professionalism is an invitation to endless conflict. This battle has implications for who sets educational policy and gets to decide the future of public education. The outcome of that struggle will assuredly determine the quality of the nation’s schools and, subsequently, the strength of our country’s democracy.
In the meantime, if the education profession continues to degrade, teachers will do what they know best and what their professional responsibility demands. Whether they’re in the classroom or picketing, they will protect their children. So while teachers have been forced to listen to the corporate-styled version of professionalism for decades, they’re making their voices heard on the streets. Why? Because the non-educators outside of the school have stopped (or never really started) listening to the version cherished by teachers.
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'What is the difference between the USA and America?ad by Quora for Business'
So, HARVARD ---ground zero for all the global banking 1% far-right wing LAISSEZ FAIRE NEO-LIBERALISM ---filled with lying, cheating, stealing, no morals or ethics, no US Rule of Law, and certainly no GOD'S NATURAL LAW----is telling us what EDUCATIONAL PROFESSIONALISM means.
HARVARD as MIT are ground zero for COMMONER CORE RACE TO TOP and ONE WORLD ONE TECHNOLOGY GRID ----online lessons written by global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS having no TRUTH ----but like MAO-----his TRUTH.
Now our US FAKE NEWS media are filling our academic writing with HARVARD knowing what TRUTH IS----and HARVARD being a champion of HUMAN RIGHTS/CIVIL RIGHTS fighting for REAL US PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY especially for our poor----our working class-----for the good of AMERICA.
HARVARD is 100% international ---it has no ties to US as a sovereign nation----it has no ties to our US CONSTITUTION----it does not see our US military as sovereign ---it is CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global private military corporation owned by OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH.
All of this ties to our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown at a LOCAL level where we are fighting for our community schools this way: if we allow our local global banking 5% freemason/Greek players pretend to be small business owners temporarily profiteering from our funding for REAL public schools just until they are then CLOSED for development----we are not PATRIOT CITIZENS----here in Baltimore we have our local black 5% freemason/Greek players killing public schools for our 99% of black citizens in communities around Baltimore---while our local white 5 %freemason/Greek players at GLOBAL HEDGE FUND CORPORATION JOHNS HOPKINS dishes out these RACE TO TOP COMMONER CORE policies FORCING ALL THIS UPON our Baltimore 99% of citizens.
Global hedge fund HARVARD CORPORATION is of course the source of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and all that killing of our strong US public K-UNIVERSITY as well as RACE TO TOP COMMONER CORE. It is the source of global banking 1% global corporate education K-12 CHARTERS now replacing our US community public schools.
'But the failure of elected officials and school boards to recognize a teacher-constructed professionalism is an invitation to endless conflict'.
What we need to understand is this: global banking 1% far-right wing institutions are morphing from LAISSEZ FAIRE NEO-LIBERALISM to far-right wing authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISM.....MAO'S LITTLE RED BOOK which pretends MAO as STALIN as HITLER was a PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION.
What is the difference between the USA and America?ad by Quora for Business
18 Answers
Wesley Riggs, Bachelor's of Geography & Education, University of Kansas (1987)
Updated Jun 19 2017 · Author has 466 answers and 420.1k answer viewsThe name of our country is The United States of America (USA). Thirteen states came together to form the country and 37 other states joined later. “America” is an informal name which refers to the above and to our location within the continent of North America. We refer to ourselves and are known worldwide as Americans.
As with many political words, there is some friction with citizens of Estados Unidos Mexicanos or the United Mexican States. They are also a collection of states and also part of North America. We refer to them in English as Mexicans and to their country as Mexico. In the geographic sense, they are “Americans” as well, because their country is located in North America, as are the nations in the region of Central America and our other neighbor Canada.
Turning to South America, they could also be referred to as “Americans” in the geographic sense. The name “Americans” stuck with citizens of the USA because we are the oldest and largest country by population in either North America or South America. Ecuador was not founded until 24 years after the USA and Brazil has around 119 million fewer people. Canada is the largest country by land mass on either continent, but it was founded much later than Ecuador and has a population of just 35 million.
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This was the turning point for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens as to being US PATRIOTS fighting for our US Constitution and sovereign rights----and fighting for global corporations profiteering off illegal wars to build a global private military complex for GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH.
Our LEFTY COMMIE anti-war protestors were US PATRIOTS------our US 99% of WE THE US VETERANS please WAKE UP and be US PATRIOTS.
TEACH FOR AMERICA IS NOT US PATRIOTIC-----IT IS BLOOMBERG FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE #2 NORTH AMERICAN COLONIAL ENTITY.
Here is yet another article from HOUSTON TX home of global banking 1% BUSH NEO-CONS published in COUNTERPUNCH which we know is a global banking 1% captured media outlet. We have a JIMMY CARTER educating as to why war profiteering was wrong. Our US President JIMMY CARTER was of course FAR-RIGHT GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS 33rd degree freemason---NOT RELIGIOUS----working for foreign sovereignty of MALTA.
The VIETNAM WAR was ONE WORLD flipping the Earth's economic axis from Western Hemisphere to Eastern Hemisphere. GREAT LEAPING LIZARD MAO was partnered with global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS HARVARD/YALE in continuous wars not only in southeast Asia-----but in sacking and looting our US government coffers and people's pockets bringing the US to colonial status. We do not see ANY of that REAL INFORMATION in this far-right wing article.
December 11, 2003
War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
by James M. Carter
While campaigning for President in 2000, George W. Bush made clear his position on nation building saying, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building” adding that, if elected, he would “absolutely not” engage in such open-ended commitments. He was sharply critical of his predecessor’s use of American troops in Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo to “restore order,” to bring about “stable governments,” all objectives of nation building. Nevertheless, Bush and company find themselves scrambling to otherwise define and control a conflict that looks increasingly open-ended, costly and bent on building a very different Iraq. What the Bush foreign policy team seems loath to consider are the remarkable parallels between the circumstances they now face in trying to remake a war-torn Iraq and the efforts of confident, well-heeled American officials of the 1960s who believed they too had history on their side in trying to remake the southern half of Vietnam.
The United States began waging a war in the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam in the early-1960s and continued well into the 1970s, unleashing an unprecedented barrage of firepower on the southern half of that country, below the seventeenth parallel. What is perhaps less well known is that the war in fact followed an equally enormous and failed nation building project. Beginning in 1954, the United States attempted to invent a nation below the 17th parallel, the dividing line decided at the Geneva Conference that same year.
Immediately, the United States began pouring money and expertise into Vietnam to bring off this transformation. A staggering array of specialists and technicians, from civil police, public administration, public finance, military, counterespionage, propaganda, industry, agriculture, education and more immediately descended upon Saigon, the southern city made the capital of the whole project. These experts, along with the U.S. government and military installed Ngo Dinh Diem, removed all viable opponents, began a crackdown on dissidents killing tens of thousands and jailing as many or more, and began to physically transform southern Vietnam. United States government contractors, such as Michigan State University and the construction firm Johnson, Drake and Piper, went to work on the creation of a national communications, transportation and police network. This “mission” built or rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadways and dozens of bridges, dredged hundreds of miles of canals, built airfields and deep draft ports to receive a continuing and growing volume of economic and military aid. They built roads connecting all parts of Vietnam to Saigon, which they promised would result in greater access for both government officials and peasants to sell their crops to a larger market. They trained and equipped a rapidly expanding military force to keep Diem in power and they began to piece together a para-military security force and a Vietnam Bureau of Investigation (VBI) modeled on the American FBI. They even inaugurated an identity card program to catalog the identity and keep track of every Vietnamese in the interest of maintaining security. Nothing would be left to chance; no rogue force would tip the expensive American apple cart. By 1960, the United States had poured into this project over $1.4 billion.
The project failed. Ordinary Vietnamese in concert with northern Viet Minh cadre began to openly resist the whole campaign. By the early 1960s, the United States came to rely almost exclusively on military solutions to put down the growing opposition, soon a broad-based and popular insurgency opposed to continued occupation and Diem’s rule, now referred to as My-Diem or American Diem. John Kennedy increased direct American involvement from around 680 to over 16,000 troops as “advisors” who, despite their title, participated in combat. The administration, at the same time, vastly expanded the military forces built earlier to defend Diem and insure he remained in power. Opposition to the occupation grew at a steady pace. The whole project continued to unravel. By late 1963, a coup de tat finally removed Diem and his influential family from power.
From 1964 into 1965, the experiment was vastly militarized. From around 23,000 troops in Vietnam by the end of 1964, the next year there were 185,000, and the next there were over 385,000. American force levels peaked at around 542,000. By all accounts a traditional society, southern Vietnam needed an infrastructure to receive this influx of military aid. Responsibility for building that necessary infrastructure was given over to the largest construction entity ever, the RMK-BRJ (Raymond International, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root, and J.A. Jones Construction). Calling itself “The Vietnam Builders” and receiving highly lucrative “no bid” contracts, this consortium of private corporations was to turn southern Vietnam into a modern, integrated military installation that would enable the United States to properly defend its client. The Vietnam Builders entered into a contract with the federal government, via the U.S. Navy, as the exclusive contractor for the huge military buildup that was to come; there would be no open bidding or otherwise competitive process.
Brushing aside the messy reality that the nation of “South” Vietnam had yet to be created, U.S. officials ordered a staggering volume of military projects be begun immediately. The congress granted to the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson for 1965 $700 million for the expected ramping up of a direct American military role. Of that sum, $100 million was earmarked for the Defense Department’s construction projects already begun. Soon, the figures ballooned far beyond anyone’s expectation. Initially contracted for around $15 million prior to 1965, the lead corporation, MK, was shocked by the magnitude of orders for rapid construction. As one MK executive said early in 1965, “all we knew was that they wanted a lotta roads, a lotta airfields, a lotta bridges, and a lotta ports, and that they probably would want it all finished by yesterday.” (Fortune, Sept., 1966)
These demands outstripped the capacity of any one of the corporations. Equipment requirements alone for the Vietnam project far exceeded all equipment owned by MK for all of its worldwide operations and all subsidiary companies. The value of the project leapt from its 1964 starting point of $15 million of work in place per month to over $67 million of work in place per month within two years. The Builders could hardly keep pace with the demand for more projects, which numbered over one hundred concurrently at the peak of construction. Suppliers in the US could hardly keep up either and backlogs of three to six months became commonplace. Caterpillar Tractor Company’s annual report to shareholders intoned, “1965 was another recording-breaking year and only the physical limitations of production capacity kept sales and profits from being higher.” (ENR, Feb., 17, 1966; ENR, May, 19, 1966) Three of the four firms making up the Vietnam Builders ranked in the top ten of four hundred U.S. corporation doing business abroad for 1966. Collectively, and individually, they gobbled up hundreds of millions in profits for their efforts. In the process, Vietnam Builders employed 8,600 Americans and over 51,000 Vietnamese. They built six ports with 29 deep-draft berths, six naval bases, eight jet airstrips 10,000 feet in length, twelve airfields, just under twenty hospitals, fourteen million square feet of covered storage, and twenty base camps including housing for 450,000 servicemen and family. In short, they put on the ground in southern Vietnam nearly $2 billion in construction of various kinds of facilities and infrastructure. Military commanders called it the “construction miracle of the decade.” (Jones Construction Centennial)
In deciding to go to war rather than withdraw from Vietnam, the Johnson administration had stepped onto a slippery slope where foreign policy crises meet domestic politics. At home just as in Vietnam, Johnson fought to control inflationary pressures. Now, those pressures mounted as the war in Southeast increased in scope and intensity. The soaring demands on the construction industry certainly meant rising profits, but it also threatened rising prices. Republicans in congress began to criticize Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam situation, warning his policies threatened to over-heat the domestic economy and drive prices up. Some also specifically criticized the way in which aid, both construction/military and economic, was being sent to Vietnam. In 1966, Illinois Representative Donald H. Rumsfeld went perhaps further than most when he charged the administration with letting contracts which “are illegal by statute.” He urged investigation into the relationship between the private consortium working in Vietnam and the Johnson administration, in particular the infamous “President’s Club,” to which Brown & Root, one of the principle Vietnam contractors, had given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Rumsfeld argued on behalf of serious inquiry into the whole affair saying, “under one contract, between the U.S. Government and this combine, [RMK-BRJ] it is officially estimated that obligations will reach at least $900 million by November 1967…why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial.” (Cong. Rec., August 30, 1966) Rumsfeld’s alarm was echoed by others in the congress and in the press as well, although will little affect. All the while, the war in southern Vietnam continued to spiral out of control despite the dramatic increases in firepower and troops and military construction. The government’s contract with the Vietnam Builders ended only in 1972 shortly before the Nixon administration itself quit the commitment to the long failed project.
In Vietnam, this process took years to unfold. In Iraq, the time table seems dramatically sped up. Following the rapid invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein, U.S. forces quickly occupied key areas of Iraq. Officials and “embedded” reporters gleefully trumpeted American successes after meeting what was described as only token opposition. Postwar planners and experts had been quickly flown into neighboring countries to await a modicum of safety before entering Baghdad to begin their work in stabilizing and rebuilding a ravaged country.
Twelve years of ruinous sanctions had reduced Iraq to a traditional state in terms of its agricultural, communications, transportation, public health and educational infrastructure. Years of neglect as a desperate regime clung to power and funneled its limited resources toward maintaining itself and away from maintenance of the nation also contributed to the erosion and decay of a modern state. (Iraq Under Siege, ch. 2) This otherwise nightmare situation for the people of Iraq actually aided the American military by reducing all kinds of unseemly obstacles to invasion, conquest and occupation that was to follow.
Within weeks, the federal government began its bread line for business by handing out sweet deals to American corporations to “rebuild” Iraq’s infrastructure. And, just as in Vietnam, those with the best relationship to government officials quickly found themselves on an inside track with greater access to the enormous sums of money pouring into Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney’s own Halliburton began riding this “gravy train” even before the invasion was over, building tent cities just outside of Iraq. Once the President declared an end to combat, the big money quickly began to flow.
As of September, Halliburton had received almost one quarter billion dollars in payment for work done so far, with much more to follow. Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is also in the pipeline, having signed lucrative federal contracts, reportedly worth $2.3 billion, to help in the rebuilding of Iraq’s oil producing infrastructure. Bechtel Group, another corporation with solid government connections, has lapped up another $1.03 billion. Even Morrison-Knudsen, now calling itself Washington Group International following a merger, has signed on for around $500,000,000 of the lucre. The contracts through which these deals are codified are those old familiar, certainly to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, “cost-plus-award-fee” types that were used to give away huge sums of money to the Vietnam Builders. The Center for Public Integrity’s recently published investigation into private contractors and the war on “terror” reveals that over 70 American companies have secured close to $8 billion in government contracts to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq. They also shared ongoing and close relations with the federal government and provided more in campaign contributions to George Bush than any other official over a twelve year period. Those companies are currently building and rebuilding all of the infrastructure destroyed over the past dozen years, and then some. They are working on a police network, a military force, a communications grid, transportation system, an integrated media system, the oil production and transportation system, water and sewage treatment systems, and so on.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground inside Iraq has steadily deteriorated since the President’s proclamation of the “end of combat.” A recent CIA analysis finds that ordinary Iraqis are fast losing hope that the Americans have come to help them. The Iraqi Governing Council is no closer to legitimacy and yet remains hamstrung by occupation officials. The war and its aftermath have now taken the lives of some 8,000 innocent civilians. Looking eerily like the situation in Vietnam, albeit after several years of failure there, an insurgency now flourishes in Iraq and the chaos and episodes of heavy-handed American military actions have created fertile ground for greater anti-American violence. President Bush has now called L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official overseeing post-war Iraq, hurriedly back to Washington to hasten the turning over of power to the Iraqis themselves in response to the growing resentment of and attacks on occupation forces. That may now happen as early June, 2004. The situation is bad and getting worse, the congress is now criticizing and investigating the money deals, and the Bush administration wants desperately to distance itself from the whole mess in the run up to the presidential election. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times) Ordinary Iraqis are fast learning what ordinary Vietnamese peasants learned all those years ago; namely, the United States, as George Bush says, does not do nation building.
Rather than avoiding the lessons of such disasters as the “nation building” war in Vietnam, Americans, if not America’s elected leaders, should look to that tragic episode to explain the “quagmire” unfolding in Iraq. This is not a humanitarian mission any more than was the American mission to Southeast Asia forty years ago. It is a fraudulent war that is now perpetuated by political ideologues and war profiteers with much to lose. Without legitimacy among the people, the whole project, including whatever “government” is put in place, is doomed to failure. Iraqi resistance will only grow. The cycle of answering that resistance with greater levels of force is perpetual. It should come as no surprise that the Iraqi people are no less impressed with this version of “nation building” than were the Vietnamese people with the earlier version.
JAMES M. CARTER is a PhD. candidate at the University of Houston. He can be reached at: jmcarter@ev1.net
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We want to say to our new to US 99% of immigrants being brought to US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES-----you are not working for team ALL-AMERICAN ---FREEDOM, LIBERTY, JUSTICE, PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS-----you are working for global banking 1% DARK AGES OLD WORLD KINGS----the same people giving you continuous wars southeast Asia and LEAPING LIZARD MAO. There is no intention of doing good for today's 99% of global labor pool pushed into global slave trading human distribution system.
These foreign Baltimore public school teachers were not pushed out be TRUMP ----SANCTUARY CITY/STATE has nothing to do with protecting our 99% of immigrant workers. MOVING FORWARD is simply rotating not only our immigrant population constantly to new places new jobs---but also our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE. This is the ECONOMIC MODEL for ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE -----and the education policy being taught today in US public schools is not US PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION------COMMONER CORE is no different than MAO'S LITTLE RED BOOK.
Teachers forced out as more and more TEMPORARY CORPORATE CHARTER SCHOOLS CLOSE-------who wins when US 99% of citizens whether black, white, or brown are pushed out of our US public school system?
Do you think these global labor pool immigrants being brought to US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as teachers might be connected to global military corporations as TROOPS overseas?
Foreign teachers in Baltimore schools at risk of losing visas
By Morgan Gstalter - 06/14/18 03:20 PM EDT
Nearly two-dozen foreign Baltimore public school teachers will be forced to leave the country if the Trump administration fails to extend their visas.
The Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday that about 25 teachers, many recruited from the Philippines to fill positions in the mid-2000s, are waiting for the federal government to extend their work visas.
Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the chief human capital officer with Baltimore City Public Schools, said the extensions were filed months ago. The government, though, has been slow to process the applications and has selected some cases for audit.
Grant-Skinner said it could take six to eight months before they know if the extensions are granted.
“These are long-term teachers who we value and we want to be able to keep them here,” he said. “We are at the mercy of the federal government in terms of securing the extension of their visas.”
A majority of the teachers will need to leave the country by the end of the month, the newspaper reported. One teacher’s current visa expires before the school year ends. Two are from Jamaica and the others are all Filipino.
The administration has been cracking down on work visas.
Trump signed the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order last April, aimed at reining in the H-1B visa program.
The program hires highly skilled foreign workers initially for three years and offers the possibility for extensions.
Trump has argued the lottery system used to distribute H-1B visa hurts American workers and drives down wages. As a presidential candidate, he called for the program to end completely.
“They should never be used to replace Americans,” Trump said of the visas.
The White House did not respond to The Sun’s request for comment.
“I’m sad that this administration has made this so difficult,” Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English told The Sun.
“Their attitude toward immigration is really a detriment to the country. These teachers come dedicated. They’re not one or two years and then done. They’re here and it’s just very unfortunate they have to go back," English added.
Hundreds of Filipino teachers have come to Baltimore following a massive recruitment effort that began in 2005.
The district was struggling to find teachers for fields like math, science and special education.
Baltimore public schools still have roughly 250 foreign teachers, The Sun reported.
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We simply want to say to today's citizens of color whether US black and brown ---whether 99% of immigrant citizens now being sold they are the winners in MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as colonial entities filled with global factories operating inside US as they do overseas----please stop being global banking 5% freemason/Greek players thinking our US sovereign economy is about rotating 5% freemason/Greek players from one position to another. This is what changed from 1960-70s civil rights, labor rights, women's rights, ANTI-WAR movements ----REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE movements became CORRUPTED AND CRIMINAL OLD WORLD LAISSEZ FAIRE NEO-LIBERAL/NEO-CON global corporate patronage.
We understand the WE DON'T CARE 5% players may not change---we are educating for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and our new to US 99% of immigrants who DO CARE about the future. It makes no difference if COMMONER CORE CORPORATE SCHOOLS have black teachers------the goals are to kill the US teaching profession.
Our US 99 % of WE THE STUDENTS are being deliberately HARMED and HAVING THEIR FUTURES killed by all this MOVING FORWARD PRETENDING over reforming US public schools.
EducationBaltimore schools step up efforts to recruit, retain black teachers
By Talia Richman
September 3BALTIMORE -- Damien Ford knows the look he gets from black parents dropping off their kids at his downtown Baltimore school. It’s one that says, “Take care of my baby.”
Ford says his skin color means that his job comes with extra pressures and expectations. Black students often look to him to be a father figure; white teachers often look to him to be a disciplinarian.
“When you’re that lone or one of very few black men in the school building, there’s a lot that comes with that,” said Ford, a veteran teacher who works as an educational associate at Baltimore School for the Arts.
In a district where African American children made up about 80 percent of the student body last year, only about 40 percent of its roughly 4,900 teachers were black.
District officials say something must change, for the sake of Baltimore’s future.
The city has for years struggled to recruit and retain a teaching force that reflects the children it serves. The challenge persists even as research emerges showing that a black person’s presence at the front of a classroom has the power to dramatically improve a student’s trajectory.
The school system is convening a work group aimed at understanding the causes of this disparity and recommending solutions. Teachers, system officials and community organizers twice met publicly over the summer, and the district will work toward drafting recommendations throughout the school year, which starts Tuesday.
“We are doing this because we know it’s important for our students to have teachers who look like them,” said Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the district’s chief of human capital.
The problem is far from unique to Baltimore. Nationwide, about 7 percent of public school teachers are black.
Across central Maryland, the numbers are similarly bleak: In Carroll County, 1 percent of teachers are African American. In Harford County, 3.7 percent are. About 7 percent of Anne Arundel teachers are black, and about 10 percent of Howard County teachers are. Even in Baltimore County, where the black student population sits at about 40 percent, just 1 in 10 teachers are black.
ADVERTISINGStill, the disparity stands out in an urban, majority-black district like Baltimore City. Here, the gap between the percentage of black teachers and black students is the widest in the region. It used to be narrower: In the early 2000s, more than 60 percent of Baltimore teachers were black.
Baltimore’s struggle to hire black teachers is fueled by a statewide shortage of minority teaching candidates. And retention is difficult, too, with many black teachers saying they are saddled with extra pressures. The problem traces back decades and is in some ways an unintended legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, which launched schools on a still-unfinished road toward integration. When black students started attending formerly all-white schools, their black teachers rarely came with them.
Grant-Skinner said he can’t pinpoint one reason for the decline since 2003 — but the district isn’t fixating on that.
“We want to really focus on where we are today,” he said.
To strengthen the pipeline, officials know there’s a need to overcome perceptions that teachers are afflicted by low pay and bad working conditions. There’s a need to remove barriers to teacher certification for people who are passionate about education but struggle on required tests. And there’s a need to persuade students to picture themselves as a teacher when, for so long, they’ve mostly seen white faces at the front of classrooms.
“If I go through 12 years of schools without a black teacher, I’m going to believe that black people don’t teach,” said Austin Hill, a former Baltimore educator who teaches in Harford.
The benefits of having a black teacher are clear, students say and research echoes.
Jonothan Gray, a 16-year-old Bard High School Early College student, recalls an incident two years ago when a police officer approached him and his friends at a bus stop and accused them of loitering. Gray remembers the officer cursing and putting his hand on his gun.
The day after the confrontation, Gray told his eighth-grade teacher what happened. The teacher immediately drove him to a police station to report the incident.
“It was important to him not just because he was our teacher, but because he was a black man in Baltimore,” Gray said. “And we felt comfortable going to him because he was that role model for us.”
Diamonte Brown, a native of Baltimore and a graduate of its schools, spent two years teaching at Renaissance Academy. The school has recently lost several students to the city’s rampant violence.
“Sometimes I have to tell my students they have to put their victimization to the side in order to be successful,” said Brown, who now teaches at Booker T. Washington. “That’s a conversation that only someone who has lived your same experience can have with you.”
Jocelyn Providence was the only black teacher in Digital Harbor High School’s math department for years. Some students will come to her for help, even though they aren’t in her class.
When she asks why they’re coming to her instead of their own teachers, the students often respond by saying the others “don’t get it.”
The dynamics of race also play a role in the coursework. During his freshman year at Baltimore City College, Joshua Lynn had only white teachers. Sitting in his English class, he says, he wondered what it would’ve been like to have a black person leading class discussions on “Purple Hibiscus,” a novel about a teenage girl growing up in an abusive home in post-colonial Nigeria.
Brown loves teaching her students “A Raisin in the Sun,” a novel about an African American family living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. She feels she can really “go there” with her students.
“I’m talking to kids about, ‘Why do you want to have track? Why do you want to have European hair? What is this about? Why don’t you want to rock your real hair?’ ” she said. “You can’t have that conversation for real if you’re a white teacher.”
Research shows that a black teacher’s presence can transform a child’s life, with all students benefiting from a more diverse teaching force.
Low-income black students who have at least one black teacher in elementary school are significantly more likely to graduate from high school and consider attending college, according to a 2017 study co-authored by a Johns Hopkins economist. Black teachers are also more likely than white teachers to expect a black student to graduate, studies found, and to identify black students as “gifted.”
The deep relationships built with students — real or perceived — can be a burden for black teachers in Baltimore. Some describe being tapped by white teachers if they’re having a problem with an African American student in their class.
“They come to you and think you’re a catchall black expert,” Hill said. “You have to be the black kid whisperer.”
That pressure can lead to burnout, Hill said. He left teaching for the insurance world after just two years, though he’s since returned.
Davis Dixon, a research associate at the Education Trust, which advocates for students of color and those from low-income families, called this an “invisible tax.”
“Teachers of color get pigeonholed into a role that ends up placing an extra burden on what they do in the school,” he said.
At a recent meeting of the city school district’s work group, teachers called for stronger mentoring and better professional development. Black teachers in difficult work environments need to feel valued if the school system doesn’t want to lose them, some said.
“If we value teachers, if we value black teachers, then let’s follow through on that and really support them,” said Rebecca Yenawine of the Teachers’ Democracy Project, a city schools advocacy group.
The top reason minority teachers leave? Dissatisfaction, according to a study from the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute. Among the reasons they cite are poor workplace conditions, the way school assessments affect teaching and disagreements with administration.
“It’s a climate,” said schools CEO Sonja Santelises. “They’re not leaving because of the kids.”
Hampering efforts to hire more black teachers in the first place is the shortage of educators — of all races — in every Maryland school district.
Just 542 minority candidates graduated from approved educator certification programs in 2015, according to the state education department’s latest teaching staff report. While that number is up from previous years, it doesn’t come close to meeting the need.
“We could hire every one and not fill all the positions we have every year,” Grant-Skinner said.
Enrollment in education programs dropped by about 14 percent across the University System of Maryland from 2010 to last year.
Baltimore is increasingly seeing alternative preparation programs as sources for hiring diverse educators.
One is Teach for America, which recruits college graduates who make an initial two-year commitment to teach in high-need public schools across the country. It has long been regarded as a pipeline for mostly white teachers to teach in largely minority, low-income schools.
Baltimore Teach for America Director Courtney Cass acknowledges the program’s history but said that recruiting a diverse group is a priority. Since 2014, people of color have constituted more than half their corps. The group has averaged 30 percent black over the past five years.
But some, like Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English, still view it as a funnel for out-of-town white people. She feels like teachers with alternative certifications are favored over traditional candidates.
Research shows that roadblocks put African Americans at a disadvantage on nearly every step on the path to becoming a teacher — from evidence of hiring discrimination to a certification test that favors white people.
A person must pass a Praxis exam to become a Maryland teacher. An analysis by the Education Testing Service found that black candidates are much more likely than white candidates to fail the Praxis, which evaluates future teachers’ general content knowledge.
Offering free Praxis tutoring might be one way to help schools close the gap, some teachers have recommended. Others say Baltimore should provide financial incentives to encourage city graduates to come back and teach.
Ford, from the Baltimore School for the Arts, said that persuading just one more black person to teach in the city could have ripple effects.
He still remembers his first black male teacher: Mr. Bragg.
Mr. Bragg was a towering presence who seemed effortlessly comfortable as he navigated the school. He told his seventh-grade science students that he was teaching them out of college physics textbooks, and Ford has no reason to doubt that was true.
“The way he interacted with us, the high expectations he had,” Ford says, “that’s one of the reasons I’m an educator today.”
To be AMERICAN is a geographical term---we live on a continent called THE AMERICAS. To be a US CITIZEN you live in a sovereign nation called UNITED STATES on AMERICAN continent. Our US public military for 300 years have been taught PATRIOTISM is protecting our US sovereignty and our public militia has a duty to protect our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and their rights under a US CONSTITUTION. Our US military while in active service are taught a military commander must be OBEYED no matter whether right or wrong---no matter what he/she says is TRUTH or lies.
THE DUTIES OF MILITARY TIED TO A US PRESIDENT AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF CHANGED AS EISENHOWER AVIATION ACT OF LATE 1950S----TIED OUR US MILITARY TO GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA.
This is how our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE went from a 1960-70s full of fighting for our US Constitution and rights as citizens not to be forced into ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL WARS-----that being UNPATRIOTIC----
'Patriotism
For 125 years, the Daughters of the American Revolution has carried the torch of patriotism. Love of country was the purpose; ancestors who fought for freedom was the bond that connected women to unite to form an organization that honored heritage and worked to ensure a bright future for our children. Patriotism is the foundation of the many DAR activities that take place in local communities across the country'.
Education
The DAR is passionate about educating America’s youth and supports a variety of different programs, contests and awards to help further this goal. The DAR website offers many different resources that teachers may find useful when they are teaching subjects such as the Revolutionary War, family history/genealogy, the colonial period and early America. Teachers and students are encouraged to explore the available resources and take advantage of the different programs DAR offers.
DAR Educational Programs Educational Resources from DAR
- Genealogical Research System (GRS)
- GRS for Educators
- DAR Library
- Forgotten Patriots
- DAR Museum Portable Education Programs
- Signers of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution
The Daughters of American Revolution seem to think is is our PATRIOTIC duty to protect and defend the US CONSTITUTION----------just as all those LEFTY COMMIES who were not commies but left social progressive LOCKEAN I AM MAN which is on what our US Constitution is founded
'The aims of the Constitution Week celebration are to:
Emphasize citizens' responsibilities for protecting and defending the Constitution.
Inform people that the Constitution is the basis for America's great heritage and the foundation for our way of life.
Encourage the study of the historical events which led to the framing of the Constitution in September 1787'.
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We KNOW both THE DAUGHTERS OF AMERICAN REVOLUTION and this article by LAWRENCE REED are both filled with global banking 5% freemason/Greek players so we do not see all of this as US PUBLIC EDUCATION. While MR REED fighting for ECONOMIC FREEDOMS tied to our US Constitution correctly identifies what PATRIOTISM is ------the motives for getting rid of a GOVERNMENT indeed corrupted has unintended meaning. Being rid of global banking 5% freemason/Greek players black,white, and brown is JUSTICE UNDER US RULE OF LAW AND US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO DUE PROCESS AND PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Getting rid of our US GOVERNMENT structures which we think REED is really pushing-----is the opposite. REED as CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS sounds more like an CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALIST meaning reforming and installing a NEW CONSTITUTION protecting OLD WORLD KINGS GLOBAL CORPORATIONS and that economy---
'It’s the right of a free people to rid themselves of a government that becomes destructive of those ends, as our Founders did in a supreme act of courage and defiance more than two hundred years ago'.
So, a perfectly good definition of PATRIOTISM -----remember, our US founding fathers were throwing out global EAST INDIA CORPORATIONS and OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS.
The True Meaning of Patriotism
Patriotism Is Not the Waving of a Flag
Friday, July 01, 2016
Lawrence W. Reed
Patriotism these days is like Christmas—lots of people caught up in a festive atmosphere replete with lights and spectacles. We hear reminders about “the true meaning” of Christmas—and we may even mutter a few guilt-ridden words to that effect ourselves—but each of us spends more time and thought in parties, gift-giving, and the other paraphernalia of a secularized holiday than we do deepening our devotion to the true meaning.
So it is with patriotism, especially on Memorial Day in May, Flag Day in June, and Independence Day in July. Walk down Main Street America and ask one citizen after another what patriotism means and with few exceptions, you’ll get a passel of the most self-righteous but superficial and often dead-wrong answers. America’s Founders, the men and women who gave us reason to be patriotic in the first place, would think we’ve lost our way if they could see us now.
Since the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans in near unanimity have been “feeling” patriotic. For most, that sadly suffices to make one a solid patriot. But if I’m right, it’s time for Americans to take a refresher course.
Patriotism is not love of country, if by “country” you mean scenery—amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesty, and the like. Almost every country has pretty collections of rocks, water, and stuff that people grow and eat. If that’s what patriotism is all about, then Americans have precious little for which we can claim any special or unique love. And surely, patriotism cannot mean giving one’s life for a river or a mountain range.
Patriotism is not blind trust in anything our leaders tell us or do. That just replaces some lofty concepts with mindless goose-stepping.
Patriotism is not simply showing up to vote. You need to know a lot more about what motivates a voter before you judge his patriotism. He might be casting a ballot because he just wants something at someone else’s expense. Maybe he doesn’t much care where the politician he’s hiring gets it. Remember Dr. Johnson’s wisdom: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Waving the flag can be an outward sign of patriotism, but let’s not cheapen the term by ever suggesting that it’s anything more than a sign. And while it’s always fitting to mourn those who lost their lives simply because they resided on American soil, that too does not define patriotism.
People in every country and in all times have expressed feelings of something we flippantly call “patriotism,” but that just begs the question. What is this thing, anyway? Can it be so cheap and meaningless that a few gestures and feelings make you patriotic?
Not in my book.
I subscribe to a patriotism rooted in ideas that in turn gave birth to a country, but it’s the ideas that I think of when I’m feeling patriotic. I’m a patriotic American because I revere the ideas that motivated the Founders and compelled them, in many instances, to put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line.
What ideas? Read the Declaration of Independence again. Or, if you’re like most Americans these days, read it for the very first time. It’s all there. All men are created equal. They are endowed not by government but by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Premier among those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government must be limited to protecting the peace and preserving our liberties, and doing so through the consent of the governed. It’s the right of a free people to rid themselves of a government that becomes destructive of those ends, as our Founders did in a supreme act of courage and defiance more than two hundred years ago.
Call it freedom. Call it liberty. Call it whatever you want, but it’s the bedrock on which this nation was founded and from which we stray at our peril. It’s what has defined us as Americans. It’s what almost everyone who has ever lived on this planet has yearned for. It makes life worth living, which means it’s worth fighting and dying for.
An American Spin
I know that this concept of patriotism puts an American spin on the term. But I don’t know how to be patriotic for Uganda or Paraguay. I hope the Ugandans and Paraguayans have lofty ideals they celebrate when they feel patriotic, but whether or not they do is a question you’ll have to ask them. I can only tell you what patriotism means to me as an American.
I understand that America has often fallen short of the superlative ideas expressed in the Declaration. That hasn’t diminished my reverence for them, nor has it dimmed my hope that future generations of Americans will be re-inspired by them.
This brand of patriotism, in fact, gets me through the roughest and most cynical of times. My patriotism is never affected by any politician’s failures, or any shortcoming of some government policy, or any slump in the economy or stock market. I never cease to get that “rush” that comes from watching Old Glory flapping in the breeze, no matter how far today’s generations have departed from the original meaning of those stars and stripes. No outcome of any election, no matter how adverse, makes me feel any less devoted to the ideals our Founders put to pen in 1776. Indeed, as life’s experiences mount, the wisdom of what giants like Jefferson and Madison bestowed on us becomes ever more apparent to me. I get more fired up than ever to help others come to appreciate the same things.
During a recent visit to the land of my ancestors, Scotland, I came across a few very old words that gave me pause. Though they preceded our Declaration of Independence by 456 years, and come from three thousand miles away, I can hardly think of anything ever written here that more powerfully stirs in me the patriotism I’ve defined above. In 1320, in an effort to explain why they had spent the previous 30 years in bloody battle to expel the invading English, Scottish leaders ended their Declaration of Arbroath with this line: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”
Freedom—understanding it, living it, teaching it, and supporting those who are educating others about its principles. That, my fellow Americans, is what patriotism should mean to each of us today.
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Below we see what indeed happened as CLINTON/BUSH started to move our former military troops into classrooms PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY------our US 99% WE THE MILITARY CITIZENS were EDUCATED that PATRIOTISM is tied to war effort-------the opposite of 300 years of US patriotism tied to protecting our US SOVEREIGN CIVILIAN SOCIETY.
When our US 99% of right wing citizens allowed far-right wing global banking 1% BUSH NEO-CONS to call those ANTI-WAR citizens LEFTISTS-----and COMMIES-----they allowed global banking 1% to completely redefine what PATRIOTISM is. BUSH being global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA wanted PATRIOTISM tied to OLD WORLD GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.
'Definition #1: Patriotism as loyalty to the war effort'.
The article below is yet another from US right wing telling us what AMERICAN PATRIOTISM is. This man from BUSH COUNTRY AUSTIN TX is ground zero for global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS killing our US sovereignty and corrupting the meaning of US PATRIOTISM.
So, he makes some good points on what AMERICAN PATRIOTISM is-----never hitting what UNITED STATES PATRIOTISM means. He ends this article by suggesting that our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and new to US immigrants should give up all that being an AMERICAN PATRIOT means because global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS for whom he works did indeed kill US PATRIOTISM.
'We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans'.
Here we have the problem for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE when our US public K-university is controlled by far-right wing working for DARK AGES OLD WORLD KINGS. THE WORLD CANNOT SURVIVE THE PATRIOTISM OF AMERICANS.
REMEMBER, OUR UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION IS A SOVEREIGN DOCUMENT------USING THE TERM AMERICAN IS A GEOGRAPHICAL TERM-----FIGHT FOR OUR US CONSTITUTION AND THE MEANING BEHIND BEING A US PATRIOT.
Robert Jensen writing in GLOBAL ISSUES is telling the global 99% that AMERICAN PATRIOTISM is behind continuous wars and global private military corporations working for GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KNIGHTS OF MALTA. This is why we shout often-----US IS NOT ROGUE----it is the same pre-Christian NERO/CATO/SENECA OLD WORLD KINGS not being AMERICAN.
JENSEN is what we call a global banking 1% ONE WORLD UNITED NATIONS FAKE PEACE ACTIVIST.
Goodbye to Patriotism
The following article appeared in ZNet, the web site of Z Magazine, on the November 10 2001 and has been reposted here. It looks at the issue of patriotism.
You can see the original article at http://www.zmag.org/jensenpatriotism.htm
Saying goodbye to patriotism
by Robert Jensen
[A talk delivered to the Peace Action National Congress, November 10, 2001]
This summer I wrote a book review for an academic journal -- one of those terribly important pieces of writing that will be read by tens and tens of people, some of them actually people outside my own family. The book is about the history of governmental restrictions on U.S. news media during war, and it's a good book in many ways. But I faulted the author for accepting the American mythology about the nobility of our wars and their motivations. I challenged his uncritical use of the term patriotism, which I called "perhaps the single most morally and intellectually bankrupt concept in human history."
By coincidence, the galley proofs for the piece came back to me for review a few days after September 11. I paused as I re-read my words, and I thought about the reaction those words might spark, given the reflexive outpouring of patriotism in the wake of the terrorist attacks. I thought about the controversy that some of my writing had already sparked on campus and, it turned out, beyond the campus. I thought about how easy it would be to take out that sentence.
I thought about all that for some time before deciding to let it stand. My reason was simple: I think that statement was true on September 10, and if anything, I'm more convinced it is true after September 11.
I also believe that nestled in the truth of that assertion is a crucial question for the U.S.-based peace movement, one that we cannot avoid after 9-11:
Are we truly internationalist? Can we get beyond patriotism? Or, in the end, are we just Americans?
That is a way, I think, of asking whether we are truly for peace and justice.
I realize that framing of the question may seem harsh. It may rub the wrong way people who want to hold onto a positive notion of patriotism.
I mean the statement to be harsh because I believe the question is crucial. If in the end we are just Americans, if we cannot move beyond patriotism, then we cannot claim to be internationalists. And, if we are not truly internationalist in our outlook -- all the way to the bone -- then I do not think we truly call ourselves people committed to peace and justice.
Let me try to make the case for this by starting with definitions.
My dictionary defines patriotism as "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country." We'll come back to that, but let's also look beyond the dictionary to how the word is being used at this moment in history, in this country. I would suggest there are two different, and competing, definitions of patriotism circulating these days.
Definition #1: Patriotism as loyalty to the war effort.
It's easy to get a handle on this use of the word. Just listen to the president of the United States speak. Or watch the TV anchors. Or, as I have done, be a guest on a lot of talk radio shows. This view of patriotism is pretty simple: We were attacked. We must defend ourselves. The only real way to defend ourselves is by military force. If you want to be patriotic, you should -- you must -- support the war.
I have been told often that it is fine for me to disagree with that policy, but now is not the time to disagree publicly. A patriotic person, I am told, should remain quiet and support the troops until the war is over, at which point we can all have a discussion about the finer points of policy. If I politely disagree with that, then the invective flows: Commie, terrorist-lover, disloyal, unpatriotic. Love it or leave it.
It is easy to take apart this kind of patriotism. It is a patriotism that is incompatible with democracy or basic human decency. To see just how intellectually and morally bankrupt a notion it is, just ask this question: What would we have said to Soviet citizens who might have made such an argument about patriotic duty as the tanks rolled into Prague in 1968? To draw that analogy is not to say the two cases are exactly alike. Rather, it is to point out that a decision to abandon our responsibility to evaluate government policy and surrender our power to think critically is a profound failure, intellectually and morally.
Definition #2: Patriotism as critique of the war effort.
Many in the peace-and-justice movement, myself included, have suggested that to be truly patriotic one cannot simply accept policies because they are handed down by leaders or endorsed by a majority of people, even if it is an overwhelming majority. Being a citizen in a real democracy, we have said over and over, means exercising our judgment, evaluating policies, engaging in discussion, and organizing to try to help see that the best policies are enacted. When the jingoists start throwing around terms like "anti-American" and "traitor," we point out that true patriotism means staying true to the core commitments of democracy and the obligations that democracy puts on people. There is nothing un-American, we contend, about arguing for peace.
That's all clear enough. As I have said, I have used that line of argument many times. It is the best way -- maybe the only way -- to respond in public at this moment if one wants to be effective in building an antiwar movement. We all remind ourselves, over and over, that we have to start the discussion where people are, not where we wish people were. If people feel "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country," then we have to be aware of that and respond to it.
But increasingly, I feel uncomfortable arguing for patriotism, even with this second definition. And as I listen to friends and allies in the peace-and-justice movement, I have started to wonder whether that claim to patriotism-as-critical-engagement is indeed merely strategic. Or is it motivated by something else?
Are we looking for a way to hold onto patriotism because we really believe in it?
I think it is valuable to ask the question: Is there any way to define the term that doesn't carry with it arrogant and self-indulgent assumptions? Is there any way to salvage patriotism?
I want to argue that invoking patriotism puts us on dangerous ground and that we must be careful about our strategic use of it.
At its ugliest, patriotism means a ranking of the value of the lives of people based on boundaries. To quote Emma Goldman: "Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others."
People have said this directly to me: Yes, the lives of U.S. citizens are more important than the lives of Afghan citizens. If innocent Afghans have to die, have to starve -- even in large numbers -- so that we can achieve our goals, well, that's the way it is, and that's the way it should be. I assume no argument here is needed as to why this type of patriotism is unacceptable. We may understand why people feel it, but it is barbaric.
But what of the effort to hold onto a kinder and gentler style of patriotism by distinguishing it from this kind of crude nationalism? We must ask: What are the unstated assumptions of this other kind of patriotism we have been defending? If patriotism is about loyalty of some sort, to what are we declaring our loyalty?
If we are pledging loyalty to a nation-state, we have already touched on the obvious problems: What if that nation-state pursues an immoral objective? Should we remain loyal to it? The same question is obvious if our loyalty is to a specific government or set of government officials. If they pursue immoral objectives or pursue moral objectives in an immoral fashion, what would it mean to be loyal to them?
Some suggest we should be loyal to the ideals of America, a set of commitments and practices connected with the concepts of freedom and democracy. That's all well and good; freedom and democracy are good things, and I try to not only endorse those values but live them. I assume everyone in this room does as well.
But what makes those values uniquely American?
Is there something about the United States or the people who live here that make us more committed to, or able to act out, the ideals of freedom and democracy -- more so than, say, Canadians or Indians or Brazilians? Are not people all over the world -- including those who live in countries that do not guarantee freedom to the degree the United States does -- capable of understanding and acting on those ideals? Are not different systems possible for making real those ideals in a complex world?
If freedom and democracy are not unique to us, then they are simply human ideals, endorsed to varying degrees in different places and realized to different degrees by different people acting in different places? If that's true, then they are not distinctly American ideals. They were not invented here, and we do not have a monopoly on them. So, if one is trying to express a commitment to those ideals, why do it in the limiting fashion of talking of patriotism?
Let me attempt an analogy to gender. After 9-11, a number of commentators have argued that criticisms of masculinity should be rethought. Yes, masculinity is often connected to, and expressed through, competition, domination, and violence, they said. But as male firefighters raced into burning buildings and risked their lives to save others, cannot we also see that masculinity encompasses a kind of strength that is rooted in caring and sacrifice?
My response is, yes, of course men often exhibit such strength. But do not women have the capacity for that kind of strength rooted in caring and sacrifice? Do they not exhibit such strength on a regular basis? Why of course they do, most are quick to agree. Then the obvious question is, what makes these distinctly masculine characteristics? Are they not simply human characteristics?
We identify masculine tendencies toward competition, domination, and violence because we see patterns of different behavior; we see that men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We can go on to observe and analyze the ways in which men are socialized to behave in those ways. We do all that work, I would hope, to change those behaviors.
But that is a very different exercise than saying that admirable human qualities present in both men and women are somehow primarily the domain of one of those genders. To assign them to a gender is misguided, and demeaning to the gender that is then assumed not to possess them to the same degree.
Once you start saying "strength and courage are masculine traits," it leads to the conclusion that woman are not as strong or courageous. To say "strength and courage are masculine traits," then, is to be sexist.
The same holds true for patriotism. If we abandon the crude version of patriotism but try to hold onto an allegedly more sophisticated version, we bump up against this obvious question: Why are human characteristics being labeled as American if there is nothing distinctly American about them?
If people want to argue that such terminology is justified because those values are realized to their fullest degree in the United States, then there's some explaining to do. Some explaining to the people of Guatemala and Iran, Nicaragua and South Vietnam, East Timor and Laos, Iraq and Panama. We would have to explain to the victims of U.S. aggression -- direct and indirect -- how it is that our political culture, the highest expression of the ideals of freedom and democracy, has managed routinely to go around the world overthrowing democratically elected governments, supporting brutal dictators, funding and training proxy terrorist armies, and unleashing brutal attacks on civilians when we go to war. If we want to make the claim that we are the fulfillment of history and the ultimate expression of the principles of freedom and justice, our first stop might be Hiroshima. We might want to explain that claim there.
If we are serious about peace and justice in the world, we need to subject this notion of patriotism to scrutiny. If we do that, I would suggest, it is clear that any use of the concept of patriotism is bound to be chauvinistic at some level. At its worst, patriotism can lead easily to support for barbarism. At its best, it is self-indulgent and arrogant in its assumptions about the uniqueness of U.S. culture.
None of what I have said should be taken as a blanket denunciation of the United States, our political institutions, or our culture. People often tell me, "You start with the assumption that everything about the United States is bad." Of course I do not assume that. That would be as absurd a position as the assumption that everything about the United States is good. I can't imagine any reasonable person making either statement. That does raise the question, of course, of who is a reasonable person. We might ask that question about, for example, George Bush, the father. In 1988, after the U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner in a commercial corridor, killing 290 civilians, Bush said, "I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
I want to put forward the radical proposition that we should care what the facts are. We should start with the assumption that everything about the United States, like everything about any country, needs to be examined and assessed. That is what it means to be a moral person.
There is much about this country a citizen can be proud of, and I am in fact proud of those things. The personal freedoms guaranteed (to most people) in this culture, for example, are quite amazing. As someone who regularly tries to use those freedoms, I am as aware as anyone of how precious they are.
There also is much to be appalled by. The obscene gaps in wealth between rich and poor, for example, are quite amazing as well, especially in a wealthy society that claims to be committed to justice.
In that sense, we are like any other grouping of people. That doesn't mean one can't analyze various societies and judge some better than others by principles we can articulate and defend -- so long as they are truly principles, applied honestly and uniformly. But one should maintain a bit of humility in the endeavor. Perhaps instead of saying "The United States is the greatest nation on earth" -- a comment common among politicians, pundits, and the public -- we would be better off saying, "I live in the United States and have deep emotional ties to the people, land, and ideals of this place. Because of these feelings, I want to highlight the positive while working to change what is wrong." That is not moral relativism -- it is a call for all of us to articulate and defend our positions.
We can make that statement without having to argue that we are, in some essential way, better than everyone else. We can make that statement without arrogantly suggesting that other people are inherently less capable of articulating or enacting high ideals. We can make that statement and be ready and willing to engage in debate and discussion about the merits of different values and systems.
We can make that statement, in other words, and be true internationalists, people truly committed to peace and justice. If one wants to call that statement an expression of patriotism, I will not spend too much time arguing. But I will ask: If we make a statement like that, why do we need to call it an expression of patriotism? What can we learn by asking ourselves: What makes us, even people in the peace-and-justice community, want to hold onto the notion of patriotism with such tenacity?
When I write or talk with the general public and raise questions like these, people often respond, "If you hate America so much, why don't you leave?"
But what is this America that I allegedly hate? The land itself? The people who live here? The ideals in the country's founding documents? I do not hate any of those things.
When people say to me "love it or leave it," what is the "it" to which they refer?
No one can ever quite answer that. Still, I have an answer for them.
I will not leave "it" for a simple reason: I have nowhere else to go. I was born here. I was given enormous privileges here. My place in the world is here, where I feel an obligation to use that privilege to be part -- a very small part of, as we all are only a small part -- of a struggle to make real a better world. Whatever small part I can play in that struggle, whatever I can achieve, I will have to achieve here, in the heart of the beast.
I love it, which is to say that I love life -- I love the world in which I live and the people who live in it with me. I will not leave that "it."
That "it" may not be specific enough for some, but it's the best I can do. Maybe it will help to answer in the negative, for I can say more clearly what the "it" is not. I can describe more clearly what is the America I do not love.
The America I love is not this administration, or any other collections of politicians, or the corporations they serve.
It is not the policies of this administration, or any other collection of politicians, or the corporations they serve.
The America I love is not wrapped up in a mythology about "how good we are" that ignores the brutal realities of our own history of conquest and barbarism.
Most of all, I want no part of the America that arrogantly claims that the lives and hopes and dreams of people who happen to live within the boundaries of the United States have more value than those in other places. Nor will I indulge America in the belief that our grief is different. Since September 11, the United States has demanded that the world take our grief more seriously. When some around the world have not done so, we express our outrage.
But we should ask: What makes the grief of a parent who lost a child in the World Trade Center any deeper than the grief of a parent who lost a child in Baghdad when U.S. warplanes rained death on the civilian areas of Iraq in the Gulf War? Or the parents of a child in Nicaragua when the U.S. terrorist proxy army ravaged that country? Soon after 9-11, I heard a television reporter describe lower Manhattan as "Beirut on the Hudson." We might ask, how did Beirut come to look like Beirut, and what is our responsibility in that? And what of the grief of those who saw their loved ones die during the shelling of that city?
We should ask: Where was the empathy of America for the grief of those people?
Certainly we grieve differently, more intensely, when people close to us die. We don't feel the loss of a family member the same way as a death of a casual friend. We feel something different over the death of someone we knew compared with the death of a stranger. But we must understand that the grief we feel when our friends and neighbors became victims of political violence is no different than what people around the world feel. We must understand that each of those lives lost abroad has exactly the same value as the life of any one of our family, friends and neighbors.
September 11 was a dark day. I still remember what it felt like to watch those towers come down, the darkness that settled over me that day, the hopelessness, how tangible death felt -- for me, not only the deaths of those in the towers but also the deaths of those who would face the bombs in the war that might follow, the war that did follow, the war that goes on.
But humans are resilient; in the darkness we tend to look for light, for a way out of the darkness.
I believe there is a light shining out of September 11, out of all that darkness. It is a light that I believe we Americans can follow to our own salvation. That light is contained in a simple truth that is obvious, but which Americans have never really taken to heart: We are part of the world. We cannot any longer hide from that world. We cannot allow our politicians, and generals, and corporate executives to do their dirty business around the world while we hide from the truths about just how dirty that business really is. We can no longer hide from the coups they plan, the wars they start, the sweatshops they run.
For me, all this means saying goodbye to patriotism.
That is the paradox: September 11 has sparked a wave of patriotism, a patriotism that has in many cases been overtly hateful, racist and xenophobic. A patriotism that can lead people to say, as one person wrote to me, "We should bomb [Afghanistan] until there's no more earth to bomb."
But the real lesson of September 11, which I believe we will eventually learn, is that if we are to survive as a free people, as decent people who want honestly to claim the ideals we say we live by, we must say goodbye to patriotism. That patriotism will not relieve our grief, but only deepen it. It will not solve our problems but only extend them. I believe there is no hope for ourselves or for the world if we continue to embrace patriotism, no matter what the definition.
We must give up our "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country" and transfer that love, loyalty and zealousness to the world, and especially the people of the world who have suffered most so that we Americans can live in affluence.
We must be able to say, as the great labor leader of the early 20th century Eugene Debs said, "I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world."
I am with Debs. I believe it is time to declare: I am not patriotic. I am through with trying to redefine the term patriotic to make sense. There is no sense to it.
That kind of statement will anger many, but at some point we must begin to take that risk, for this is not merely an academic argument over semantics.
This is both a struggle to save ourselves and a struggle to save the lives of vulnerable people around the world.
We must say goodbye to patriotism because the kind of America the peace-and-justice movement wants to build cannot be built on, or through, the patriotism of Americans.
We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.
Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective (www.nowarcollective.com), and author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (www.peterlangusa.com). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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Our US military and US labor unions are the source of many global banking 5% freemason/Greek players ----and they are the ones making the change from being ALL-UNITED STATES OF AMERICA-----to being ALL-COLONIAL FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE IN THE AMERICAS.
We sign off often as being from BLOOMBERG FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE #2 NORTH AMERICA rather than Baltimore MD USA ----because that is what the article below from global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS HARVARD CORPORATION refers when bringing our US LABOR UNIONS ---TEACHERS' UNION into the discussion of US public schools, patriotism, what it means to be PATRIOTIC.
Remember, our US labor unions during CLINTON/BUSH were connected to INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION---ILO----tied to WORLD BANK/UNITED NATIONS-----working for global corporations.
It is not hard to see where these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA took our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens from being UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTS-----to being AMERICAN PATRIOTS feeling PATRIOTISM is tied to GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.
'Robert Bruno is a Professor of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois’ School of Labor and Employment Relations, Urbana-Champaign. He is also Director of the University’s Labor Education Program and the Project for Middle Class Renewal'.
We like to remind our US 99% WE THE US MILITARY VETERANS tracked either to our US POST OFFICE----or into our US public K-university to kill left social progressive academics and teachers----that these few decades of tracking military troops to classroom have today's US PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS forced out---losing their pensions, killing the teaching profession many being RETIRED MILITARY TROOPS.
As Harvard Review knows----US stopped seeing US teachers as professionals when HARVARD declared there was no more AMERICAN POLITICS no American RULE OF LAW. When a person ties itself to global banking 1% global corporate institutions as ROBERT BRUNO they are 5% freemason/Greek FAKE LABOR players.
LaborWhen Did the U.S. Stop Seeing Teachers as Professionals?
June 20, 2018 UPDATED June 20, 2018
J PAT CARTER/Getty Images
Teachers have had enough. Since March, schools in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina have either been shut down or turned into sites of resistance. In Kansas, teachers are threatening to strike because their legislature continues to fund schools at a level the state Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. One Brookings Institute analysis projected that teacher actions could spread to another 11 states.
Poor pay, increased health care costs, and diminished pension plans are certainly core issues — teachers in Oklahoma haven’t received a pay boost in a decade. But these problems alone aren’t driving the protests. In every state where teachers have recently gone on strike, demands for increase school funding have been made. Disinvestment in schools has also been central to teacher strikes that have occurred since 2011, in Jersey City, Philadelphia, Chicago (twice), Seattle, Portland and Wisconsin.
The teachers’ position is that, under the cover of a commitment to improving schools, school district and local governments have instead closed neighborhood public schools, opened charter schools, instituted standard curriculums, mandated poorly thought out high-stakes standardized testing, attacked teacher tenure, instituted merit pay instead of annual salary increments, restricted collective bargaining rights, and subjected teachers to questionable and punitive evaluation schemes. The result of years of “reform” has been modest improvement but little progress in national student performance.
This, it seems, is the tipping point and brings me to what I believe is at the heart of what is really happening here: Teachers are seeing their own experience be devalued by policymakers and other officials with little experience in the education field, and it’s not improving the education of their students. In other words, and as others have noted, teachers are balking at the erosion of their status as professionals. In fact, I would submit that it’s precisely because of their sense of professionalism that teachers are driven to an agonizing decision to withhold their labor. Teachers perceive themselves and their students being treated as fungible costs of production, cogs in a bureaucratic machine. To them, nothing less than the education profession is at risk.
What is professionalism exactly?While there are varying definitions and disagreements among sociologists, a set of criteria put forth by Mirko Noordegraaf, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is helpful. The starting point, he says, is “typically an emphasis on ‘good work’ and the social mechanisms for accomplishing this.” He further stresses that a “professional does not merely work; he/she has to be educated and trained, (socialized) as member of an occupational domain, supervised by his/her peers and held accountable.” Noordegraaf then acknowledges an element to professionalism that serves as the locus of historical and contemporary struggle for teachers: “professionals succeed in realizing so-called professional control: they control themselves.” Professionalism demands the capacity to internally organize and protect “professional practices from external influences.”
The work of teachers also substantially accords with renown public administration expert Frederick Mosher’s definition of a profession:
“[…] a more or less specialized and purposeful field of human activity which require some specialized education or training (though it may be acquired on the job), which offers a career of life work, and enjoys a relatively high status. It normally aspires to social, not selfish, purpose. Usually, but not always, it requires a degree or certification, and credential of some kind. Often its members join in a professional organization, local, state, or national, which enunciates standards and ethics of professional performance sometimes with the powers of enforcement.”
This definition is echoed by a 2013 national survey of 20,000 conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It found that 6 out of 10 teachers went directly into teaching after earning their undergraduate or graduate degree. They taught because they wanted to provide a valuable public service. Eighty-five percent of teachers said they went into the profession because they wanted “to make a difference in children’s’ lives,” beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. The survey reported that 99% of teachers “strongly agreed or agreed” with the statement that “teaching is more than academics; it is also about reinforcing good citizenship, resilience and social skills.”
Education, then, is not usually an incremental step to a better way to make a living life or a waystation to another career. Teaching, like pastoring, is often a “calling.” So it stands to reason that teachers themselves are the appropriate people to define the best “educational practices, entrance routes, credentialing requirements, continuing training options, codes of conduct, and methods of enforcement.”
Except today, they’re not. A form of the classical structural-functionalist theory of professionalism prevails. This sociological view, first formulated by Talcott Parsons, holds that a profession is a static thing with attributes that apply without exception. Here, professionalism is a skill that can be practiced and learned over time, by anyone, with success and failure measured based on an agreed-upon objective standard. The recent history of the teaching profession helps explain why this version has come to dominate.
When teaching became “automated”In 1983, President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a much debated and often mischaracterized call-to-arms. The authors sent a clear distress signal: “We report to the American people that… the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” After A Nation at Risk was widely popularized, it became conventional wisdom that education was, in fact, in crisis. Task forces and commissions claimed to have evidence of failing students, obstructionist teacher unions, and poorly performing teachers. The constant saturation of negative school headlines took its toll: The public’s approval rating of public schools fell from 58% in 1973 to 29% in 2012.
It was then that a belief in external controls began influencing the industry. In this view, an independent and external body best regulates teachers, in which teachers are part of an accountable and efficient production system. Schools needed to function more like businesses and successfully compete for students. To this end, teachers’ work has subsequently been the subject of major restructuring over the past three decades. Teachers are increasingly directed to follow a mandated curriculum, abide by grade level or school district units of study, and follow predetermined lesson plans. In addition, test-based accountability has colonized teaching techniques and objectives, teacher performance evaluations are yoked to student test scores, and teacher training programs are de-emphasized. Teachers also have little influence over professional development content, school-wide organization, or school budget decisions.
Under these command and control conditions, teaching looks more like automation then imagination. As University of British Columbia professor Wendy Poole noted, “teachers’ work, once conceived as requiring high discretion and autonomy, is increasingly reduced to technical-rational conceptions of teaching and teachers are increasingly viewed as technicians.” Creativity is squeezed out for conformity and teacher autonomy suppressed; room for going “rogue” is the exception. Unless everyone reads Shakespeare, no one does. I suspect that overhauling the work of teachers and undermining their professional status has also been aided by society’s tendency to undervalue “women’s work” (more than 75% of teachers in the U.S. are women).
This all occurs in an environment where teachers need higher skills — many are required to have advanced degrees and numerous certifications — and are asked to do more with less. In addition to being under pressure to meet or exceed standardized performance indicators, teachers suffer from an intensification of work. They work 60-plus hour work weeks, are in near-constant communication with parents, and must collect copious amounts of student data, among many other administrative and technological tasks. Stagnant job growth in the industry has also led to increased class sizes. In other words, teachers are asked to work harder and longer with a growing number of students while also being told to adhere to an education plan they have little control over.
The impact has been punishing. In one study, 93% of teachers reported high stress levels, while only 7% self identified as “well-adjusted.” A survey by the American Federation of Teachers and the Badass Teachers Association reported that educators find work to be stressful 61% of the time and nearly a quarter of respondents said work was “always” stressful. The survey notes for comparison purposes, “workers in the general population report that work is stressful 30% of the time.”
And yet, for decades, teachers have endured. Why? In our book on the 2012 Chicago teacher strike, my colleague and I note, “Teacher unions have largely made compromises with the prevailing wisdom. They haven’t done so without expressed reservation or opposition, but in the face of an irrational and bipartisan demonization of schoolteachers and their unions, some believed tactical retreat seemed prudent.” And surveys of teachers suggest that many are interested in new school concepts that invite entrepreneurial thinking and experimentation.
For most teachers, small acts of resistance while accommodating new bureaucratic boundaries has been possible, but only when a sense of professional control and a measure of satisfaction could still be derived from the work. In 2013, even as 82% of teachers found the ever-shifting nature of education reform to be the most significant challenge they face, many still maintained a love of the work and the profession. They still do — but their control has been eroded to almost nothing. That’s why they’re striking.
Another theory of professionalismYes, teachers need to be paid more and have better health benefits. But policymakers need to understand the kind of professionalism teachers are demanding, too.
The professionalism practiced by teachers recognizes and prioritizes contextuality. This echoes a theory by LSU School of Library & Information Science professor Suzanne Stauffer who puts forth that there is nothing “discrete, universal, or enduring” about professions because they’re constantly changing in relationship to the market and the state. Because of this, professionalism is not merely a collection of traits or an individual competency that can be mastered — it can’t be, because these traits and expertise are constantly changing depending on context. In other words, teachers recognize that the school environment and children’s needs dictate what professionalism requires at a given moment in time.
This means that a teacher’s classroom experiences, and the teacher-student relationship, is what ultimately creates the boundaries for what it means to be a professional. This does not rely on consultant-developed tests to measure student competency, but instead uses teacher-constructed assessments oriented to the subject matters they teach. Instead of standardized curriculum and lesson plans, teachers have the freedom to determine the best course to help each child acquire the necessary learning standards. The time needed to cover subject content corresponds to each learner’s capacity and not an arbitrary schedule demanding that every kid masters everything at the same moment. A contextualized professionalism would have teachers teach children, not a curriculum.
What’s at stakeThe aspirations of today’s educators are not new. In 1987, the President of the National Educators Association Mary Hatwood Futrell hopefully wrote that, “We may at last be on the brink of realizing the centuries-old dream of American teachers: professional status, professional compensation… professional autonomy.”
We’re clearly not there yet. But with today’s protests, public school teachers are pushing back harder than ever against rigid definitions of professionalism. Instead, they are offering their own student-centered approach, combining training, context, flexibility, and a lifelong commitment to children and society. But the failure of elected officials and school boards to recognize a teacher-constructed professionalism is an invitation to endless conflict. This battle has implications for who sets educational policy and gets to decide the future of public education. The outcome of that struggle will assuredly determine the quality of the nation’s schools and, subsequently, the strength of our country’s democracy.
In the meantime, if the education profession continues to degrade, teachers will do what they know best and what their professional responsibility demands. Whether they’re in the classroom or picketing, they will protect their children. So while teachers have been forced to listen to the corporate-styled version of professionalism for decades, they’re making their voices heard on the streets. Why? Because the non-educators outside of the school have stopped (or never really started) listening to the version cherished by teachers.
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'What is the difference between the USA and America?ad by Quora for Business'
So, HARVARD ---ground zero for all the global banking 1% far-right wing LAISSEZ FAIRE NEO-LIBERALISM ---filled with lying, cheating, stealing, no morals or ethics, no US Rule of Law, and certainly no GOD'S NATURAL LAW----is telling us what EDUCATIONAL PROFESSIONALISM means.
HARVARD as MIT are ground zero for COMMONER CORE RACE TO TOP and ONE WORLD ONE TECHNOLOGY GRID ----online lessons written by global 1% OLD WORLD KINGS AND QUEENS having no TRUTH ----but like MAO-----his TRUTH.
Now our US FAKE NEWS media are filling our academic writing with HARVARD knowing what TRUTH IS----and HARVARD being a champion of HUMAN RIGHTS/CIVIL RIGHTS fighting for REAL US PUBLIC K-UNIVERSITY especially for our poor----our working class-----for the good of AMERICA.
HARVARD is 100% international ---it has no ties to US as a sovereign nation----it has no ties to our US CONSTITUTION----it does not see our US military as sovereign ---it is CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global private military corporation owned by OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH.
All of this ties to our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown at a LOCAL level where we are fighting for our community schools this way: if we allow our local global banking 5% freemason/Greek players pretend to be small business owners temporarily profiteering from our funding for REAL public schools just until they are then CLOSED for development----we are not PATRIOT CITIZENS----here in Baltimore we have our local black 5% freemason/Greek players killing public schools for our 99% of black citizens in communities around Baltimore---while our local white 5 %freemason/Greek players at GLOBAL HEDGE FUND CORPORATION JOHNS HOPKINS dishes out these RACE TO TOP COMMONER CORE policies FORCING ALL THIS UPON our Baltimore 99% of citizens.
Global hedge fund HARVARD CORPORATION is of course the source of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA and all that killing of our strong US public K-UNIVERSITY as well as RACE TO TOP COMMONER CORE. It is the source of global banking 1% global corporate education K-12 CHARTERS now replacing our US community public schools.
'But the failure of elected officials and school boards to recognize a teacher-constructed professionalism is an invitation to endless conflict'.
What we need to understand is this: global banking 1% far-right wing institutions are morphing from LAISSEZ FAIRE NEO-LIBERALISM to far-right wing authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISM.....MAO'S LITTLE RED BOOK which pretends MAO as STALIN as HITLER was a PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION.
What is the difference between the USA and America?ad by Quora for Business
18 Answers
Wesley Riggs, Bachelor's of Geography & Education, University of Kansas (1987)
Updated Jun 19 2017 · Author has 466 answers and 420.1k answer viewsThe name of our country is The United States of America (USA). Thirteen states came together to form the country and 37 other states joined later. “America” is an informal name which refers to the above and to our location within the continent of North America. We refer to ourselves and are known worldwide as Americans.
As with many political words, there is some friction with citizens of Estados Unidos Mexicanos or the United Mexican States. They are also a collection of states and also part of North America. We refer to them in English as Mexicans and to their country as Mexico. In the geographic sense, they are “Americans” as well, because their country is located in North America, as are the nations in the region of Central America and our other neighbor Canada.
Turning to South America, they could also be referred to as “Americans” in the geographic sense. The name “Americans” stuck with citizens of the USA because we are the oldest and largest country by population in either North America or South America. Ecuador was not founded until 24 years after the USA and Brazil has around 119 million fewer people. Canada is the largest country by land mass on either continent, but it was founded much later than Ecuador and has a population of just 35 million.
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This was the turning point for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens as to being US PATRIOTS fighting for our US Constitution and sovereign rights----and fighting for global corporations profiteering off illegal wars to build a global private military complex for GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS KNIGHTS OF MALTA TRIBE OF JUDAH.
Our LEFTY COMMIE anti-war protestors were US PATRIOTS------our US 99% of WE THE US VETERANS please WAKE UP and be US PATRIOTS.
TEACH FOR AMERICA IS NOT US PATRIOTIC-----IT IS BLOOMBERG FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE #2 NORTH AMERICAN COLONIAL ENTITY.
Here is yet another article from HOUSTON TX home of global banking 1% BUSH NEO-CONS published in COUNTERPUNCH which we know is a global banking 1% captured media outlet. We have a JIMMY CARTER educating as to why war profiteering was wrong. Our US President JIMMY CARTER was of course FAR-RIGHT GLOBAL BANKING 1% OLD WORLD KINGS 33rd degree freemason---NOT RELIGIOUS----working for foreign sovereignty of MALTA.
The VIETNAM WAR was ONE WORLD flipping the Earth's economic axis from Western Hemisphere to Eastern Hemisphere. GREAT LEAPING LIZARD MAO was partnered with global banking 1% OLD WORLD KINGS HARVARD/YALE in continuous wars not only in southeast Asia-----but in sacking and looting our US government coffers and people's pockets bringing the US to colonial status. We do not see ANY of that REAL INFORMATION in this far-right wing article.
December 11, 2003
War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
by James M. Carter
While campaigning for President in 2000, George W. Bush made clear his position on nation building saying, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building” adding that, if elected, he would “absolutely not” engage in such open-ended commitments. He was sharply critical of his predecessor’s use of American troops in Haiti, Somalia and Kosovo to “restore order,” to bring about “stable governments,” all objectives of nation building. Nevertheless, Bush and company find themselves scrambling to otherwise define and control a conflict that looks increasingly open-ended, costly and bent on building a very different Iraq. What the Bush foreign policy team seems loath to consider are the remarkable parallels between the circumstances they now face in trying to remake a war-torn Iraq and the efforts of confident, well-heeled American officials of the 1960s who believed they too had history on their side in trying to remake the southern half of Vietnam.
The United States began waging a war in the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam in the early-1960s and continued well into the 1970s, unleashing an unprecedented barrage of firepower on the southern half of that country, below the seventeenth parallel. What is perhaps less well known is that the war in fact followed an equally enormous and failed nation building project. Beginning in 1954, the United States attempted to invent a nation below the 17th parallel, the dividing line decided at the Geneva Conference that same year.
Immediately, the United States began pouring money and expertise into Vietnam to bring off this transformation. A staggering array of specialists and technicians, from civil police, public administration, public finance, military, counterespionage, propaganda, industry, agriculture, education and more immediately descended upon Saigon, the southern city made the capital of the whole project. These experts, along with the U.S. government and military installed Ngo Dinh Diem, removed all viable opponents, began a crackdown on dissidents killing tens of thousands and jailing as many or more, and began to physically transform southern Vietnam. United States government contractors, such as Michigan State University and the construction firm Johnson, Drake and Piper, went to work on the creation of a national communications, transportation and police network. This “mission” built or rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadways and dozens of bridges, dredged hundreds of miles of canals, built airfields and deep draft ports to receive a continuing and growing volume of economic and military aid. They built roads connecting all parts of Vietnam to Saigon, which they promised would result in greater access for both government officials and peasants to sell their crops to a larger market. They trained and equipped a rapidly expanding military force to keep Diem in power and they began to piece together a para-military security force and a Vietnam Bureau of Investigation (VBI) modeled on the American FBI. They even inaugurated an identity card program to catalog the identity and keep track of every Vietnamese in the interest of maintaining security. Nothing would be left to chance; no rogue force would tip the expensive American apple cart. By 1960, the United States had poured into this project over $1.4 billion.
The project failed. Ordinary Vietnamese in concert with northern Viet Minh cadre began to openly resist the whole campaign. By the early 1960s, the United States came to rely almost exclusively on military solutions to put down the growing opposition, soon a broad-based and popular insurgency opposed to continued occupation and Diem’s rule, now referred to as My-Diem or American Diem. John Kennedy increased direct American involvement from around 680 to over 16,000 troops as “advisors” who, despite their title, participated in combat. The administration, at the same time, vastly expanded the military forces built earlier to defend Diem and insure he remained in power. Opposition to the occupation grew at a steady pace. The whole project continued to unravel. By late 1963, a coup de tat finally removed Diem and his influential family from power.
From 1964 into 1965, the experiment was vastly militarized. From around 23,000 troops in Vietnam by the end of 1964, the next year there were 185,000, and the next there were over 385,000. American force levels peaked at around 542,000. By all accounts a traditional society, southern Vietnam needed an infrastructure to receive this influx of military aid. Responsibility for building that necessary infrastructure was given over to the largest construction entity ever, the RMK-BRJ (Raymond International, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root, and J.A. Jones Construction). Calling itself “The Vietnam Builders” and receiving highly lucrative “no bid” contracts, this consortium of private corporations was to turn southern Vietnam into a modern, integrated military installation that would enable the United States to properly defend its client. The Vietnam Builders entered into a contract with the federal government, via the U.S. Navy, as the exclusive contractor for the huge military buildup that was to come; there would be no open bidding or otherwise competitive process.
Brushing aside the messy reality that the nation of “South” Vietnam had yet to be created, U.S. officials ordered a staggering volume of military projects be begun immediately. The congress granted to the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson for 1965 $700 million for the expected ramping up of a direct American military role. Of that sum, $100 million was earmarked for the Defense Department’s construction projects already begun. Soon, the figures ballooned far beyond anyone’s expectation. Initially contracted for around $15 million prior to 1965, the lead corporation, MK, was shocked by the magnitude of orders for rapid construction. As one MK executive said early in 1965, “all we knew was that they wanted a lotta roads, a lotta airfields, a lotta bridges, and a lotta ports, and that they probably would want it all finished by yesterday.” (Fortune, Sept., 1966)
These demands outstripped the capacity of any one of the corporations. Equipment requirements alone for the Vietnam project far exceeded all equipment owned by MK for all of its worldwide operations and all subsidiary companies. The value of the project leapt from its 1964 starting point of $15 million of work in place per month to over $67 million of work in place per month within two years. The Builders could hardly keep pace with the demand for more projects, which numbered over one hundred concurrently at the peak of construction. Suppliers in the US could hardly keep up either and backlogs of three to six months became commonplace. Caterpillar Tractor Company’s annual report to shareholders intoned, “1965 was another recording-breaking year and only the physical limitations of production capacity kept sales and profits from being higher.” (ENR, Feb., 17, 1966; ENR, May, 19, 1966) Three of the four firms making up the Vietnam Builders ranked in the top ten of four hundred U.S. corporation doing business abroad for 1966. Collectively, and individually, they gobbled up hundreds of millions in profits for their efforts. In the process, Vietnam Builders employed 8,600 Americans and over 51,000 Vietnamese. They built six ports with 29 deep-draft berths, six naval bases, eight jet airstrips 10,000 feet in length, twelve airfields, just under twenty hospitals, fourteen million square feet of covered storage, and twenty base camps including housing for 450,000 servicemen and family. In short, they put on the ground in southern Vietnam nearly $2 billion in construction of various kinds of facilities and infrastructure. Military commanders called it the “construction miracle of the decade.” (Jones Construction Centennial)
In deciding to go to war rather than withdraw from Vietnam, the Johnson administration had stepped onto a slippery slope where foreign policy crises meet domestic politics. At home just as in Vietnam, Johnson fought to control inflationary pressures. Now, those pressures mounted as the war in Southeast increased in scope and intensity. The soaring demands on the construction industry certainly meant rising profits, but it also threatened rising prices. Republicans in congress began to criticize Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam situation, warning his policies threatened to over-heat the domestic economy and drive prices up. Some also specifically criticized the way in which aid, both construction/military and economic, was being sent to Vietnam. In 1966, Illinois Representative Donald H. Rumsfeld went perhaps further than most when he charged the administration with letting contracts which “are illegal by statute.” He urged investigation into the relationship between the private consortium working in Vietnam and the Johnson administration, in particular the infamous “President’s Club,” to which Brown & Root, one of the principle Vietnam contractors, had given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Rumsfeld argued on behalf of serious inquiry into the whole affair saying, “under one contract, between the U.S. Government and this combine, [RMK-BRJ] it is officially estimated that obligations will reach at least $900 million by November 1967…why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me. The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial.” (Cong. Rec., August 30, 1966) Rumsfeld’s alarm was echoed by others in the congress and in the press as well, although will little affect. All the while, the war in southern Vietnam continued to spiral out of control despite the dramatic increases in firepower and troops and military construction. The government’s contract with the Vietnam Builders ended only in 1972 shortly before the Nixon administration itself quit the commitment to the long failed project.
In Vietnam, this process took years to unfold. In Iraq, the time table seems dramatically sped up. Following the rapid invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein, U.S. forces quickly occupied key areas of Iraq. Officials and “embedded” reporters gleefully trumpeted American successes after meeting what was described as only token opposition. Postwar planners and experts had been quickly flown into neighboring countries to await a modicum of safety before entering Baghdad to begin their work in stabilizing and rebuilding a ravaged country.
Twelve years of ruinous sanctions had reduced Iraq to a traditional state in terms of its agricultural, communications, transportation, public health and educational infrastructure. Years of neglect as a desperate regime clung to power and funneled its limited resources toward maintaining itself and away from maintenance of the nation also contributed to the erosion and decay of a modern state. (Iraq Under Siege, ch. 2) This otherwise nightmare situation for the people of Iraq actually aided the American military by reducing all kinds of unseemly obstacles to invasion, conquest and occupation that was to follow.
Within weeks, the federal government began its bread line for business by handing out sweet deals to American corporations to “rebuild” Iraq’s infrastructure. And, just as in Vietnam, those with the best relationship to government officials quickly found themselves on an inside track with greater access to the enormous sums of money pouring into Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney’s own Halliburton began riding this “gravy train” even before the invasion was over, building tent cities just outside of Iraq. Once the President declared an end to combat, the big money quickly began to flow.
As of September, Halliburton had received almost one quarter billion dollars in payment for work done so far, with much more to follow. Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is also in the pipeline, having signed lucrative federal contracts, reportedly worth $2.3 billion, to help in the rebuilding of Iraq’s oil producing infrastructure. Bechtel Group, another corporation with solid government connections, has lapped up another $1.03 billion. Even Morrison-Knudsen, now calling itself Washington Group International following a merger, has signed on for around $500,000,000 of the lucre. The contracts through which these deals are codified are those old familiar, certainly to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, “cost-plus-award-fee” types that were used to give away huge sums of money to the Vietnam Builders. The Center for Public Integrity’s recently published investigation into private contractors and the war on “terror” reveals that over 70 American companies have secured close to $8 billion in government contracts to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq. They also shared ongoing and close relations with the federal government and provided more in campaign contributions to George Bush than any other official over a twelve year period. Those companies are currently building and rebuilding all of the infrastructure destroyed over the past dozen years, and then some. They are working on a police network, a military force, a communications grid, transportation system, an integrated media system, the oil production and transportation system, water and sewage treatment systems, and so on.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground inside Iraq has steadily deteriorated since the President’s proclamation of the “end of combat.” A recent CIA analysis finds that ordinary Iraqis are fast losing hope that the Americans have come to help them. The Iraqi Governing Council is no closer to legitimacy and yet remains hamstrung by occupation officials. The war and its aftermath have now taken the lives of some 8,000 innocent civilians. Looking eerily like the situation in Vietnam, albeit after several years of failure there, an insurgency now flourishes in Iraq and the chaos and episodes of heavy-handed American military actions have created fertile ground for greater anti-American violence. President Bush has now called L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official overseeing post-war Iraq, hurriedly back to Washington to hasten the turning over of power to the Iraqis themselves in response to the growing resentment of and attacks on occupation forces. That may now happen as early June, 2004. The situation is bad and getting worse, the congress is now criticizing and investigating the money deals, and the Bush administration wants desperately to distance itself from the whole mess in the run up to the presidential election. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times) Ordinary Iraqis are fast learning what ordinary Vietnamese peasants learned all those years ago; namely, the United States, as George Bush says, does not do nation building.
Rather than avoiding the lessons of such disasters as the “nation building” war in Vietnam, Americans, if not America’s elected leaders, should look to that tragic episode to explain the “quagmire” unfolding in Iraq. This is not a humanitarian mission any more than was the American mission to Southeast Asia forty years ago. It is a fraudulent war that is now perpetuated by political ideologues and war profiteers with much to lose. Without legitimacy among the people, the whole project, including whatever “government” is put in place, is doomed to failure. Iraqi resistance will only grow. The cycle of answering that resistance with greater levels of force is perpetual. It should come as no surprise that the Iraqi people are no less impressed with this version of “nation building” than were the Vietnamese people with the earlier version.
JAMES M. CARTER is a PhD. candidate at the University of Houston. He can be reached at: jmcarter@ev1.net
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We want to say to our new to US 99% of immigrants being brought to US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES-----you are not working for team ALL-AMERICAN ---FREEDOM, LIBERTY, JUSTICE, PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS-----you are working for global banking 1% DARK AGES OLD WORLD KINGS----the same people giving you continuous wars southeast Asia and LEAPING LIZARD MAO. There is no intention of doing good for today's 99% of global labor pool pushed into global slave trading human distribution system.
These foreign Baltimore public school teachers were not pushed out be TRUMP ----SANCTUARY CITY/STATE has nothing to do with protecting our 99% of immigrant workers. MOVING FORWARD is simply rotating not only our immigrant population constantly to new places new jobs---but also our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE. This is the ECONOMIC MODEL for ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE -----and the education policy being taught today in US public schools is not US PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION------COMMONER CORE is no different than MAO'S LITTLE RED BOOK.
Teachers forced out as more and more TEMPORARY CORPORATE CHARTER SCHOOLS CLOSE-------who wins when US 99% of citizens whether black, white, or brown are pushed out of our US public school system?
Do you think these global labor pool immigrants being brought to US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as teachers might be connected to global military corporations as TROOPS overseas?
Foreign teachers in Baltimore schools at risk of losing visas
By Morgan Gstalter - 06/14/18 03:20 PM EDT
Nearly two-dozen foreign Baltimore public school teachers will be forced to leave the country if the Trump administration fails to extend their visas.
The Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday that about 25 teachers, many recruited from the Philippines to fill positions in the mid-2000s, are waiting for the federal government to extend their work visas.
Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the chief human capital officer with Baltimore City Public Schools, said the extensions were filed months ago. The government, though, has been slow to process the applications and has selected some cases for audit.
Grant-Skinner said it could take six to eight months before they know if the extensions are granted.
“These are long-term teachers who we value and we want to be able to keep them here,” he said. “We are at the mercy of the federal government in terms of securing the extension of their visas.”
A majority of the teachers will need to leave the country by the end of the month, the newspaper reported. One teacher’s current visa expires before the school year ends. Two are from Jamaica and the others are all Filipino.
The administration has been cracking down on work visas.
Trump signed the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order last April, aimed at reining in the H-1B visa program.
The program hires highly skilled foreign workers initially for three years and offers the possibility for extensions.
Trump has argued the lottery system used to distribute H-1B visa hurts American workers and drives down wages. As a presidential candidate, he called for the program to end completely.
“They should never be used to replace Americans,” Trump said of the visas.
The White House did not respond to The Sun’s request for comment.
“I’m sad that this administration has made this so difficult,” Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English told The Sun.
“Their attitude toward immigration is really a detriment to the country. These teachers come dedicated. They’re not one or two years and then done. They’re here and it’s just very unfortunate they have to go back," English added.
Hundreds of Filipino teachers have come to Baltimore following a massive recruitment effort that began in 2005.
The district was struggling to find teachers for fields like math, science and special education.
Baltimore public schools still have roughly 250 foreign teachers, The Sun reported.
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We simply want to say to today's citizens of color whether US black and brown ---whether 99% of immigrant citizens now being sold they are the winners in MOVING FORWARD US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as colonial entities filled with global factories operating inside US as they do overseas----please stop being global banking 5% freemason/Greek players thinking our US sovereign economy is about rotating 5% freemason/Greek players from one position to another. This is what changed from 1960-70s civil rights, labor rights, women's rights, ANTI-WAR movements ----REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE movements became CORRUPTED AND CRIMINAL OLD WORLD LAISSEZ FAIRE NEO-LIBERAL/NEO-CON global corporate patronage.
We understand the WE DON'T CARE 5% players may not change---we are educating for our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE and our new to US 99% of immigrants who DO CARE about the future. It makes no difference if COMMONER CORE CORPORATE SCHOOLS have black teachers------the goals are to kill the US teaching profession.
Our US 99 % of WE THE STUDENTS are being deliberately HARMED and HAVING THEIR FUTURES killed by all this MOVING FORWARD PRETENDING over reforming US public schools.
EducationBaltimore schools step up efforts to recruit, retain black teachers
By Talia Richman
September 3BALTIMORE -- Damien Ford knows the look he gets from black parents dropping off their kids at his downtown Baltimore school. It’s one that says, “Take care of my baby.”
Ford says his skin color means that his job comes with extra pressures and expectations. Black students often look to him to be a father figure; white teachers often look to him to be a disciplinarian.
“When you’re that lone or one of very few black men in the school building, there’s a lot that comes with that,” said Ford, a veteran teacher who works as an educational associate at Baltimore School for the Arts.
In a district where African American children made up about 80 percent of the student body last year, only about 40 percent of its roughly 4,900 teachers were black.
District officials say something must change, for the sake of Baltimore’s future.
The city has for years struggled to recruit and retain a teaching force that reflects the children it serves. The challenge persists even as research emerges showing that a black person’s presence at the front of a classroom has the power to dramatically improve a student’s trajectory.
The school system is convening a work group aimed at understanding the causes of this disparity and recommending solutions. Teachers, system officials and community organizers twice met publicly over the summer, and the district will work toward drafting recommendations throughout the school year, which starts Tuesday.
“We are doing this because we know it’s important for our students to have teachers who look like them,” said Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the district’s chief of human capital.
The problem is far from unique to Baltimore. Nationwide, about 7 percent of public school teachers are black.
Across central Maryland, the numbers are similarly bleak: In Carroll County, 1 percent of teachers are African American. In Harford County, 3.7 percent are. About 7 percent of Anne Arundel teachers are black, and about 10 percent of Howard County teachers are. Even in Baltimore County, where the black student population sits at about 40 percent, just 1 in 10 teachers are black.
ADVERTISINGStill, the disparity stands out in an urban, majority-black district like Baltimore City. Here, the gap between the percentage of black teachers and black students is the widest in the region. It used to be narrower: In the early 2000s, more than 60 percent of Baltimore teachers were black.
Baltimore’s struggle to hire black teachers is fueled by a statewide shortage of minority teaching candidates. And retention is difficult, too, with many black teachers saying they are saddled with extra pressures. The problem traces back decades and is in some ways an unintended legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, which launched schools on a still-unfinished road toward integration. When black students started attending formerly all-white schools, their black teachers rarely came with them.
Grant-Skinner said he can’t pinpoint one reason for the decline since 2003 — but the district isn’t fixating on that.
“We want to really focus on where we are today,” he said.
To strengthen the pipeline, officials know there’s a need to overcome perceptions that teachers are afflicted by low pay and bad working conditions. There’s a need to remove barriers to teacher certification for people who are passionate about education but struggle on required tests. And there’s a need to persuade students to picture themselves as a teacher when, for so long, they’ve mostly seen white faces at the front of classrooms.
“If I go through 12 years of schools without a black teacher, I’m going to believe that black people don’t teach,” said Austin Hill, a former Baltimore educator who teaches in Harford.
The benefits of having a black teacher are clear, students say and research echoes.
Jonothan Gray, a 16-year-old Bard High School Early College student, recalls an incident two years ago when a police officer approached him and his friends at a bus stop and accused them of loitering. Gray remembers the officer cursing and putting his hand on his gun.
The day after the confrontation, Gray told his eighth-grade teacher what happened. The teacher immediately drove him to a police station to report the incident.
“It was important to him not just because he was our teacher, but because he was a black man in Baltimore,” Gray said. “And we felt comfortable going to him because he was that role model for us.”
Diamonte Brown, a native of Baltimore and a graduate of its schools, spent two years teaching at Renaissance Academy. The school has recently lost several students to the city’s rampant violence.
“Sometimes I have to tell my students they have to put their victimization to the side in order to be successful,” said Brown, who now teaches at Booker T. Washington. “That’s a conversation that only someone who has lived your same experience can have with you.”
Jocelyn Providence was the only black teacher in Digital Harbor High School’s math department for years. Some students will come to her for help, even though they aren’t in her class.
When she asks why they’re coming to her instead of their own teachers, the students often respond by saying the others “don’t get it.”
The dynamics of race also play a role in the coursework. During his freshman year at Baltimore City College, Joshua Lynn had only white teachers. Sitting in his English class, he says, he wondered what it would’ve been like to have a black person leading class discussions on “Purple Hibiscus,” a novel about a teenage girl growing up in an abusive home in post-colonial Nigeria.
Brown loves teaching her students “A Raisin in the Sun,” a novel about an African American family living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. She feels she can really “go there” with her students.
“I’m talking to kids about, ‘Why do you want to have track? Why do you want to have European hair? What is this about? Why don’t you want to rock your real hair?’ ” she said. “You can’t have that conversation for real if you’re a white teacher.”
Research shows that a black teacher’s presence can transform a child’s life, with all students benefiting from a more diverse teaching force.
Low-income black students who have at least one black teacher in elementary school are significantly more likely to graduate from high school and consider attending college, according to a 2017 study co-authored by a Johns Hopkins economist. Black teachers are also more likely than white teachers to expect a black student to graduate, studies found, and to identify black students as “gifted.”
The deep relationships built with students — real or perceived — can be a burden for black teachers in Baltimore. Some describe being tapped by white teachers if they’re having a problem with an African American student in their class.
“They come to you and think you’re a catchall black expert,” Hill said. “You have to be the black kid whisperer.”
That pressure can lead to burnout, Hill said. He left teaching for the insurance world after just two years, though he’s since returned.
Davis Dixon, a research associate at the Education Trust, which advocates for students of color and those from low-income families, called this an “invisible tax.”
“Teachers of color get pigeonholed into a role that ends up placing an extra burden on what they do in the school,” he said.
At a recent meeting of the city school district’s work group, teachers called for stronger mentoring and better professional development. Black teachers in difficult work environments need to feel valued if the school system doesn’t want to lose them, some said.
“If we value teachers, if we value black teachers, then let’s follow through on that and really support them,” said Rebecca Yenawine of the Teachers’ Democracy Project, a city schools advocacy group.
The top reason minority teachers leave? Dissatisfaction, according to a study from the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute. Among the reasons they cite are poor workplace conditions, the way school assessments affect teaching and disagreements with administration.
“It’s a climate,” said schools CEO Sonja Santelises. “They’re not leaving because of the kids.”
Hampering efforts to hire more black teachers in the first place is the shortage of educators — of all races — in every Maryland school district.
Just 542 minority candidates graduated from approved educator certification programs in 2015, according to the state education department’s latest teaching staff report. While that number is up from previous years, it doesn’t come close to meeting the need.
“We could hire every one and not fill all the positions we have every year,” Grant-Skinner said.
Enrollment in education programs dropped by about 14 percent across the University System of Maryland from 2010 to last year.
Baltimore is increasingly seeing alternative preparation programs as sources for hiring diverse educators.
One is Teach for America, which recruits college graduates who make an initial two-year commitment to teach in high-need public schools across the country. It has long been regarded as a pipeline for mostly white teachers to teach in largely minority, low-income schools.
Baltimore Teach for America Director Courtney Cass acknowledges the program’s history but said that recruiting a diverse group is a priority. Since 2014, people of color have constituted more than half their corps. The group has averaged 30 percent black over the past five years.
But some, like Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English, still view it as a funnel for out-of-town white people. She feels like teachers with alternative certifications are favored over traditional candidates.
Research shows that roadblocks put African Americans at a disadvantage on nearly every step on the path to becoming a teacher — from evidence of hiring discrimination to a certification test that favors white people.
A person must pass a Praxis exam to become a Maryland teacher. An analysis by the Education Testing Service found that black candidates are much more likely than white candidates to fail the Praxis, which evaluates future teachers’ general content knowledge.
Offering free Praxis tutoring might be one way to help schools close the gap, some teachers have recommended. Others say Baltimore should provide financial incentives to encourage city graduates to come back and teach.
Ford, from the Baltimore School for the Arts, said that persuading just one more black person to teach in the city could have ripple effects.
He still remembers his first black male teacher: Mr. Bragg.
Mr. Bragg was a towering presence who seemed effortlessly comfortable as he navigated the school. He told his seventh-grade science students that he was teaching them out of college physics textbooks, and Ford has no reason to doubt that was true.
“The way he interacted with us, the high expectations he had,” Ford says, “that’s one of the reasons I’m an educator today.”
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