Corporate Fascism
May 5,
2006
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, Arvin
Industries, Inc
Louis V Gerstner,
Jr Chairman and CEO, RJR Nabisco,
Inc
Frank Schrontz Chairman and CEO, 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, Martin Marietta
Corporation
John L Clendenin Chairman and CEO, Bellsouth
Corporation
Earl G Graves CEO and Publisher, Black Enterprise Magazine
John R Hall Chairman and CEO, Ashland
Oil, Inc
James R Jones Chairman and CEO, the American
Stock Exchange
John D Ong Chairman, BF Goodrich
Company
James J Renier Chairman and CEO, Honeywell,
Inc
Linda J Wachner President and CEO, WARNACO
Stanley A Weiss Chairman and CEO, Ralstan Trading
and Development Corporation
Kay R Whitmore Chairman, President and CEO, 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 …
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