zenpundit.com

Shlok hits it on the head:

The Rise of the Corporate State

In order to preserve the portfolios of bondholders, Michigan is ramrodding this legislation:

The new law would allow emergency managers to terminate labor contracts, strip local ordinances, hold millage elections, dissolve a government with the governor’s approval, and merge school districts.

It would allow managers to remove pension fund trustees or become a sole trustee if a pension fund is less than 80% funded. It allows managers to recommend that a local government file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, but leaves the final decision to the governor.

State legislatures, the bush leagues of American politics, can often be bought up by a special interest for less than one million dollars in campaign contributions. Governors are slightly to moderately more expensive ( a good bit more expensive in large states). A fantastic ROI when it yields control of billions of tax dollars. Better than anything comparable in the private sector except, perhaps, the illegal drug trade.

Acquisition and divestmentment of public debt under what terms by municipalities, counties and local government entities are political decisions. The Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, has whored himself out to the oligarchy to thwart the ability of local, elected, governments from making smart and perfectly legal business decisions – as contracting parties in a bond market – regarding their public debt so that the taxpayers of Michigan can be farmed as long as possible and at the highest rates, for the benefit of the financial oligarchy. No risk for them but serfdom for you.

This is about as anti-democratic, pro-big government,  pro-high taxes and anti-free market as it gets and it is being promoted by a Republican. 

We need a new major political party if liberty and democracy are to have anyone to speak for them.

A brief point.

AFJ has a feature article by General Martin Dempsey on the need for the Army in it’s professional military education system to build future leaders who are critical thinkers:

Building Critical Thinkers

….The Army Leader Development Strategy identifies three critical leadership attributes for all Army leaders: character, presence and intellect. In addition to those three foundational attributes, we assert that strategic leaders must be inquisitive and open-minded. They must be able to think critically and be capable of developing creative solutions to complex problems. They must be historically minded; that is, they must be able to see and articulate issues in historical context. Possessed of a strong personal and professional ethic, strategic leaders must be able to navigate successfully in ethical “gray zones,” where absolutes may be elusive. Similarly, they must be comfortable with ambiguity and able to provide advice and make decisions with less, not more, information. While all leaders need these qualities, the complexity of problems will increase over the course of an officer’s career and require strategic leaders to develop greater sophistication of thought….

Read the rest here.

The nation is currently undergoing a debate about public education, of sorts. I say “of sorts” because the debate has largely been very dishonest on the part of proponents of certain kinds of “reforms” in which they hope to have a future financial interest, if radical changes can be legislatively imposed that will a) drastically lower labor costs and b) permit a “scalable” curriculum, to use the grammar of certain equity investor CEOs and lobbyists. The former does not concern this topic as much as the second, though the two will work in unison to create a profitable business model for a for-profit management company desiring to contract with local and state governments to run school systems.

“Scalability” builds upon Bush era NCLB legislation that emphasized standardized testing in basic math and reading skills, with punitive accountability measures for schools and districts failing to make “adequate yearly progress”. Due to the penalties and escalating standards, public schools have frequently narrowed their curriculums considerably, reducing instructional time for history, science, complex literature and the arts to put greater emphasis on basic skill drill instruction in just two subjects.

The net effect is that American public school students, roughly 88 % of all school children, spend a greater proportion of their day at concrete level cognitive activities than they did five or ten years ago and far less time on higher-level “critical thinking” like analysis or synthesis, making evaluative judgments, inquiry based learning or problem solving.

 “Scalability” means expanding on this dreary and unstimulating paradigm with digitally delivered, worksheet-like exercises to comprise the largest percentage of the instructional time for the largest number of children possible. It will be a low-cost, high-profit system of remedial education for would-be contractors, provided students are not able to “opt out”, except by leaving the public system entirely.

But only if their parents can afford it.

The US military relies upon the public schools to deliver the initial k-12 education of the overwhelming majority of their officer corps, to say nothing of the enlisted ranks. The soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who went to Andover or similar private institutions before enlisting are very, very few. Today some public schools are excellent, some are failing and the rest are in-between. Most make an effort to challenge students of all ability levels, from those needing extra help to those in AP courses and gifted programs. There is systemic resiliency in a diversity of experiences.

What will be the effect on  the military leadership in the future if critical thought is methodically removed from public education by a nationally imposed, remedially oriented, uniform, “scalable” curriculum that is effectively free of science, history, literature and the arts? What kind of cognitive culture will we be creating primarily to financially benefit a small cadre of highly politically connected, billionaire-backed, would-be contractors?

Can inculcating critical thinking really be left entirely to universities and, in the case of the military, mid-career education?

What kind of thinkers will that system produce?

Better?

Or worse?

“What we think, we become” – Buddha

Heh.

I was going to post on this subject but Dave beat me to it:

Theodore Vail’s America

….Among the greatest barriers to innovation are the industrial giants like GE which have shed jobs at an alarming rate over the last 30 years while wielding intellectual property laws and political clout to crush upstart competitors which are hiring. One way of spurring innovation would be to get dinosaurs like GE, grown huge through rent-seeking, the hell out of the way. I doubt we’ll see suggestions in that vein from Jeffrey Immelt.

The only jobs Immelt will create in America are for K Street lobbyists to secure yet more government contracts for GE. Expect a blizzard of proposed agency regs and executive orders this year as the Oligarchy tries to lock in as much of a permanent rentier economy as they can before the next election cycle.

With quantum mechanics being used as a metaphor.

The New Physics: Key to Strengthening COIN by  A. Lawrence Chickering

….At the present time, most of what is being done for COIN is driven by old physics concepts, while many things we ought to be doing are understandable more in terms of the new physics.

One can see the difference between these two concepts in terms of the distinction between helping and empowering.3 The importance of this distinction is implicit in the widely quoted statement that T.E. Lawrence made in 1917 about the importance of empowering people and giving them ownership by letting them do things. -Do not try to do too much with your own hands,? Lawrence wrote.4 -Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. . . .?5 Helping is a powerful example of simple, Newtonian causation; it produces -concrete, measurable results,? which are the central concern of most philanthropy and donor programs. Unfortunately, the concrete results it produces are far weaker than the outcomes that result from empowerment and ownership.

Helping? is Newtonian and objective. You build a well, and the -measurable result? is a well. -Empowering? and -ownership? are post-Newtonian and subjective. You cannot -see? empowerment or ownership. These concepts have power when they are felt by people. Following Lawrence‘s statement, empowering and ownership are the key in COIN.

Empowering people, encouraging them to do things for themselves, shows the importance of non-local causation and results based only on probabilities. When a local community becomes empowered, there is no certainty what it will do. They will do things people care about-things they value. If you work in 100 communities, you cannot say what each village will do, but you can predict that some percentage will build wells, and some other percentage will build schools-and so on.

You know that empowering will not produce the -concrete, measurable results? you can get if the -helper? does the work, but when the helper does the work, there will be no community ownership and no sense of responsibility for security or maintenance of the -improvement?. With empowerment and ownership, people will protect a well or school and will maintain it. That explains why the well built by -an Arab? (Lawrence‘s phrase) is worth so much more than one built by -us? (the helpers).

The author has a solid point about top-down, outsider-controlled, hierarchically-organized aid activities cultivating an attitude of dependency, passivity or fatalism in populations that COIN forces are attempting to win over.

If we see symptoms of “welfare dependency” and disengagement from civil society in American neighborhoods with minimal levels of employment, high levels of violent crime and atomized social structures, as partly the product of intervention by social workers, police, state court systems and Federal programs, how much more so is this the case with third-country COIN? With bad people running around with RPG’s and AK-47’s? What would you, the impoverished and unarmed farmer of the village do? Stick out your neck? Or keep your head down?