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CORPORATE FASCISM

 

 

 

By Lynn Stuter

May 2, 2006

NewsWithViews.com

The evening news last night from Spokane in the state of Washington revealed that while natural gas customers are suffering the budget woes of significantly higher heating bills, the CEO of Avista Utilities, Gary Ely, was paid 2.5 million dollars last year and Avista Utilities has posted yet another sizable profit. The increase in natural gas rates, leaving many Avista customers unable to afford to adequately heat their homes this past winter, was approved by the Washington State Public Utilities Commission under the leadership of the Governor of Washington State, Democrat Christine Gregoire. As one man interviewed last night stated, �They ask us to donate on their bills to help the needy while they stuff their pockets.�

There isn�t a CEO in America that is worth 2.5 million dollars compensation a year. Yet many are receiving compensation well above this amount. Who can ignore the lucrative retirement package given to the retired chairman of Exxon, Lee Raymond; who can ignore the sizable profits posted by oil companies while consumers hawk their valuables to pay for the gas just to get to and from their jobs? Who can ignore the millions of gallons of oil sitting in barges off the coastline of the United States while oil companies claim a shortage and jack up the prices?

Then, of course, there was the Enron debacle in which Enron employees were caught on tape laughing about how they were bleeding the consumers, and especially old ladies, dry. When Enron went bankrupt, the employees were left without a job, without retirement, with nothing, while Kenneth Lay and his minions are certainly not left wanting for money. And while Lay and his minions may be convicted, they most likely will spend their time behind bars in a cushy federal facility built especially for rich white collar criminals.

The evening news last night, on the national level, showed pieces and parts of hearings on Capitol Hill concerning the bilking of the United States taxpayers by companies contracted by the feds to clean up the mess left behind when Hurricane Katrina blew threw. The estimate of $300,000,000 of wasted taxpayer dollars was probably on the conservative side.

In the next breath the news revealed the 65.7 billion dollar package sought by the Bush Administration to continue the imperialist invasion of Iraq. The mental picture that came to mind was from not so long ago when �bails� of American taxpayers dollars were handed out in Iraq to satisfy contracts for services with the federal government but that ended up in private bank accounts for the benefit of the contractors in such places as the Cayman Islands where said contractors bask in the luxury of their ill-gotten gains while the government has done nothing to recoup the money filched from the American taxpayers.

While hard working middle-class American�s can�t afford food for the table, gas for the car, heat for the house, health insurance for them or their families, the money they pay to the federal government in the form of the Federal Income Tax (FICA) is being squandered and the money they pay for utilities and gas is going to line the pockets of corporate leaders � presidents, CEOs and chairmen.

How can this be? This can be because the United States of America is being run by powerful politicians and corporate CEOs who care not one whit about America or the American people in their quest for control of the global economy. Such a public/private partnership is known as fascism.

No better example of this exists than the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), founded under the auspices of the GHW Bush Administration back in the early 1990�s. NASDC brought together multi-million dollar corporation CEOs to accomplish the �thorough-going redesign of America�s schools.� The participants were a who�s who among corporate leaders: James K Baker, Chairman and CEO of Arvin Industries, Inc; Louis V Gerstner, Jr, Chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco, Inc; Frank Schrontz, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company; W Frank Blount, President and Chief Executive Officer, Group Executive, Communication Products of AT&T; Robert E Allen, Chairman and CEO, AT&T; Norman R Augustine, Chairman and CEO of Martin Marietta Corporation; John L Clendenin, Chairman and CEO of Bellsouth Corporation; Earl G Graves, CEO and Publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine; John R Hall, Chairman and CEO of Ashland Oil, Inc; James R Jones, Chairman and CEO of the American Stock Exchange; John D Ong, Chairman of BF Goodrich Company; James J Renier, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell, Inc; Linda J Wachner, President and CEO of WARNACO; Stanley A Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Ralstan Trading and Development Corporation; Kay R Whitmore, Chairman, President and CEO of Eastman Kodak.

The goal of NASDC is more than adequately stated in one sentence published in America�s Choice: high skills or low wages!, written by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (CSAW), also comprised of corporate moguls under the direction of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), Mark Tucker president:

�But in a broad survey of employment needs across America, we found little evidence of a far-reaching desire for a more educated workforce.� (page 25)

Following the publication of America�s Choice: high skills or low wages!, many of the corporate moguls of CSAW went on to become part of the commission established by the Secretary of Labor under GHW Bush, Elizabeth Dole, wife of Bob Dole. The commission established was the Secretaries Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) which established the SCANS competencies � to which every state benchmarked its state education exit outcomes (by whatever name called; in Washington State these are the Essential Academic Learning Requirements or EALRs) of what every child �should know and be able to do� as a result of his/her educational experience.

The goal of the new schools is not to educate children for intelligence but to produce workers as more than adequately proven by this statement, published in 1994, by the Washington State�s Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board (WTECB), in a booklet titled High Skills, High Wages, page 65:

�To succeed in high performance work organizations, today�s students must master the new basic skills � teamwork, critical thinking, making decisions, communication, adapting to change and understanding whole systems.�

What about reading, writing and arithmetic? Oh, they are incorporated, but only to the extent they are used and applied in addressing the new behaviorally oriented system of �education� whose goal is also delineated in High Skills, High Wages (1994), page 70:

�Knowing what we face, we are confident that Washington has the leadership, energy and perseverance to make it to our destination: a world class workforce.�

If the future worker needs to know that 2+2=4 in the course of addressing a unit theme concerning a �real life issue� such as the rainforest in Brazil, then the future worker will be taught that 2+2=4. The future worker will only be taught, in the area of reading, writing and arithmetic that which he/she needs to know to fill a workforce slot according to regional economic development strategies and regional labor market needs under the auspices of the federal government via Workforce Development Boards established by the Workforce Investment Act. The bulk of the child�s time in the new school � the community learning center � is spent being subjected to behavioral modification techniques, developed over time by humanists, such that the child will demonstrate mastery of the attitudes, values and beliefs wanted to attain and maintain the new �world class worker� according to the humanism/New Age worldview.

Education has been transmogrified from a system educating children for intelligence to a system to produce workers with the wanted attitudes, values and beliefs wanted by the new �consumer of education� � big business. Demonstrating mastery of the state exit outcomes is determined by the state assessment tool. In Washington State that tool is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning or WASL which is neither valid nor reliable, being a subjective measure scored subjectively to a pass/fail bar that is ever changing according to the political landscape to keep the money flowing into a failed system of education.

Once in the workforce system, the worker is trained and retrained according to regional economic development strategies and regional labor market needs.

What about those high wages? The reality of high wages is seen in this quote in the July 1995-June 1996 report to the legislature on High Skills, High Wages, published by the WTECB, page 2,

�The evaluation found that 89 percent of program participants gained employment after completing training; 59 percent of students continued into a second year; and the median wage obtained by graduates was $10.29 or 89 percent of their pre-job loss wage.�

This, by the way, is considered to be a �successful training program.� The reality of this successful training program can be seen here.

This does not include lost wages for middle management people whose jobs are being downsized and outsourced under such agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). With their jobs going out of the United States, middle management people are being thrown into the wage bracket of the worker, taking a considerably larger cut in pay and creating a considerable glut of people requiring retraining. It is obvious that full employment means a body for every job not a job for everybody.

And with the loss of middle management, what is left are the highly paid CEOs and executive officers, paid millions of dollars in compensation yearly, and the workers whose wage scale is dropping rapidly as they are trained and retrained to meet regional economic development strategies and regional labor market needs under the auspices of the federally controlled Workforce Development Board.

This is the reality of the �world class standards� that has been pushed continually as the focus of the transformation of the American education system and workforce development system � America sliding into 3rd world status as people are pushed out of their homes by dropping wages and rising prices for essentials like housing, utilities, food, medical and transportation. World class standards = 3rd world living conditions.

The reality is the destruction of the American economy.

The eradication of the middle class is essential to the fascist state which can also be described as the feudal state in which the rich live at the expense of the huddled masses who eek out a meager living in squalid conditions at the pleasure of the rich feudal lord.

That the government cares not one whit about the plight of the average American is evident in the cavalier manner in which the government squanders the taxpayers� money with no fear of being held accountable. Taxpayers are not but a means to an end.

And when our elected representatives refuse to listen to the average American but pander to the overpaid and powerful CEO�s of the corporate giants, the result, inevitably, is civil unrest.

We are seeing that in every issue today, from illegal aliens to corporate greed, the invasion of Iraq, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), the phony War on Terror, and what really happened on September 11, 2001. Americans, collectively, are holding their breath, fearing what is coming but knowing that it will come if our elected representatives continue to refuse to listen to the people who elected them.

Whoever would have thought that the government�s willingness to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, who have entered the United States in violation of U.S. law, would become the political hot potato that it has and possibly the straw that breaks the camel�s back � the willingness of the American people to tolerate the indifference of their elected representatives.

But more than the issue itself is its measure of the growing dissatisfaction and animosity toward a system of government and the people who represent that government as that government �

1. no longer reflects the intent of our founding documents or the constitutional republic formed by those founding documents;
2. is no longer responsive to the people,
3. is completely out of touch with the people; and
4. is becoming increasingly oppressive.

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As the Declaration of Independence makes clear, �We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.� �In Congress, July 4, 1776.

� 2006 Lynn M. Stuter - All Rights Reserved

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Mother and wife, Stuter has spent the past ten years researching systems theory with a particular emphasis on education. She home schooled two daughters, now grown and on their own. She has worked with legislators, both state and federal, on issues pertaining to systems governance and education reform. She networks nationwide with other researchers and citizens concerned with the transformation of our nation. She has traveled the United States and lived overseas.

Web site: www.learn-usa.com

E-Mail: lmstuter@learn-usa.com


 

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Whoever would have thought that the government�s willingness to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, who have entered the United States in violation of U.S. law, would become the political hot potato that it has and possibly the straw that breaks the camel�s back...