America is to going to hell in a hand basket, and the cracks in its foundation are glaring. As Linkin Park’s Burn It Down echoes, “We’re building it up to break it back down,” the cycle of destruction and collapse feels all too familiar. Institutions meant to uphold democracy are being dismantled, only to be rebuilt on even shakier ground. Power is concentrated in the hands of a few, while the vulnerable are left to fend for themselves. Like the song’s imagery of betrayal and downfall, the current political landscape mirrors a system that prioritizes control and greed over people. The flames of collapse are fanned, and the question remains—what will rise from the ashes?
Tag: Corporatocracy
Trump 2.0: Prepare for the further dumbing down of America
No, it’s not Communism! It’s the privatization of education. “School choice” takes away from government spending for public schools!
Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept.
Read More »President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.
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In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.
Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.
Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education.
But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’
Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’
You might think that a history of cultural Marxism would start with Marx, but the poorly coiffed Prussian has almost nothing to do with this tale of insidious infiltration. Instead, the theory took off in the late 1990s due to speeches, essays, and books by William Lind, then with the Free Congress Foundation, and Patrick Buchanan, the firebrand conservative columnist, TV talking head, and sometime presidential candidate. (The idea, though not the name, was hatched earlier, in a 1992 monograph called “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness.” It was written by a disciple of the noted conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche.)
Related:
The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism
Read More »UAW Stellantis workers protest in the streets from coast to coast
WASHINGTON—Back in the days when Stellantis was Chrysler, there was a sense of camaraderie on the shop floor, veteran Auto Workers say. Not anymore. Not under Stellantis. All they perceive now is corporate greed, satisfying investors, and filling honchos’ pockets with workers’ dollars.
UAW Stellantis workers protest in the streets from coast to coast
02-2024: The UAW Strike Saved Their Shuttered Plant, But the Fight Is Just Beginning
Eight months ago, the idling of the Belvidere Assembly Plant had local United Auto Workers questioning their next steps.
2023: Stellantis commits nearly $5B to Belvidere with new UAW contract
The revival of the Stellantis plant is a stunning reversal of fortunes for Belvidere, Ill. But workers say they won’t rest until they see the concrete being poured.
2022: All Biden’s Green Job Losers
Climate industrial policy is costing 1,350 workers their jobs at a Stellantis plant in Illinois.
CBS journalist lights himself on fire over in Washington over US media coverage of Gaza war
A journalist reportedly working with CBS News has lit himself on fire to protest the biased US media coverage of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza which has killed tens of thousands of people including women and children.
CBS journalist lights himself on fire over in Washington over US media coverage of Gaza war
Related:
Aaron Bushnell’s Extreme Act of Protest & Why the World Would be Better if He was Still With Us (odysee)
The ‘scared majority’ could deliver a landslide victory for Trump (rant)
If you believe that Donald Trump & Co represent the working class, congratulations! They’ve successfully pulled the wool over your eyes! Trump’s tax cuts benefitted the rich and his tariffs (and Biden’s) hurt American consumers, not China!
The author is right about one thing—“fear”. The xenophobic fearmongering about illegal immigrants is outlandish, considering Biden has been deporting them on par with Trump (not to mention the ones being detained at GTMO)!
Another thing, for as long as I’ve been able to vote, neither party has represented the working class! Read about the Powell Memorandum!
The ‘scared majority’ could deliver a landslide victory for Trump
Read More »Who Really Controls US Foreign Policy?
From the ongoing US involvement in Ukraine, to an enduring US military presence in the Middle East, and growing US-Chinese tensions in the Asia-Pacific region, regardless of who controls the US Congress and regardless of who sits in the White House, these conflicts continue forward – often with a Democratic president setting the stage for his Republican successor, and vice versa.
[2017] The Trump-Media Circus and Continuity of Agenda
The Trump-Media Circus and Continuity of Agenda
How the US Presidency Really Works
Imagine the United States is a corporation. It thus has a board of directors (Wall Street). It has a CEO (the US President). The candidates for CEO and the CEO are all chosen by the board of directors merely under the guise of “democratic elections.” The CEO then implements the desires of the unelected board of directors, serving also as a spokesperson for the board and a representative of the board’s overarching agenda.This explains how, over the past 16 years from US President George Bush Jr. to now President-elect Donald Trump, singular agendas, including unending war in Iraq and Afghanistan, still rage and expanding confrontations with Russia, China, and Iran continue unabated regardless of who is president, and regardless of the alleged principles, political ideals, and campaign promises they respectively represented.
Rhetorically and ideologically, Presidents Bush Jr. and Obama could not have been any more diametrically opposed, yet the continuity of agenda from one 8-year administration to the other was almost seamless. Upon closer examination of the actual corporate-financier interests underpinning both presidencies’ policies, we find the same profiteering special interests and their agendas at play; from big-defense and big-auto to big-oil and mega-finance. From big-pharma to big-ag, and all of these industries sponsoring the same circle of “policy experts” within the halls of corporate-financier funded “think tanks.”
The presidency of Donald Trump will be no different. There is nothing about either Trump or those he has surrounded himself with that makes him any more “independent” from the defacto “board of directors” that runs corporate America than the administrations of Bush or Obama.
[2012] The Demise of Higher Education in the United States
The United States has experienced two major growth spurts in higher education. In 1862, the Morrill Act changed the face of higher education will by granting each state 30,000 acres of public land for each senator and representative. Sale of the land was intended to create an endowment fund for the support of colleges in each of the states. Prior to the creation of the land-grant colleges, higher education was predominantly intended for wealthy students and those intending to serve as clergy. The land-grant colleges expanded higher education to different regions and a different class of students. This expansion, however, was still incomplete.
Previously:
Sean Gervasi, 1992 lecture: The US Strategy to Dismantle the USSR
Sean Gervasi, 1992 lecture: The US Strategy to Dismantle the USSR
Related RAND Corporation documents:
Economic factors affecting Soviet foreign and defense policy: a summary outline
The Costs of the Soviet Empire
Sitting on bayonets : the Soviet defense burden and the slowdown of Soviet defense spending
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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