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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

September 11th reflection: presidents East and West

Putin: “Let go of old phobias in international relations”

Eisenhower: “All peoples come to live together in a peace”
Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

Today a billion people across the world suffer hunger or famine yet the U.S. and its allies instead of relieving suffering create it with regressive policies and incessant violence.

Instead of taking the best of practices and policies from the past and pushing progressively forward, in the best way, the United States trends backward in domestic affairs and global relations.


The 34th U.S. president, Dwight David Eisenhower said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . 

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed [thousands, millions].


State of the U. S. Union: Education breakdown

When you look at the [various foundations] it's clear that there is a very explicit agenda driven by a lot of very wealthy people often from the hedge fund and tech industries …there is probably a lot of good intent but also a very narrow worldview. ─
Queens College Sociology Professor Robin Rogers

The drive to privatize public schools is not confined to Chicago, where teachers today are on strike. It is happening across the United States. Once a Republican policy, privatization, the further breakdown, of U.S. education is now promoted by Democrats up to and including the current U.S. president.

The takeover

Education involves big tax dollars and billionaire philanthropist groups, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are cashing in to run schools “more like businesses.”

While government instead of doing its job is promoting the general welfare, it stands on the sidelines while cash rich entities pour money into Hollywood films that demonize the profession of teaching, teachers and their unions.



Foreign relations breakdown

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin in an interview last week suggested we, those who govern and are governed, those who run for public office, must stop “[allowing] ourselves to be dominated by our old phobias and outdated perceptions of international relations…” We must at last, “Let them go,” Putin said.

But the shortsightedness of this era’s inordinately powerful and mendacious media-government-corporate-NGO-religious cabal has a choke hold on progress.

In the arena of foreign relations, Putin said, “Scholars and experts understand that a unilateral solution will not enhance global stability.” The offensiveness of threat and aggression yields heightened defensive and further entrenchment of a regressive race to obtain and maintain arms.

Together with weak and war-hungry head of state are military lobbies and old-guard, belligerent departments of state and defense.

Among powerful nations, Putin said, “We need to accept as an axiom that ‘yes, we are reliable partners and allies for each other.’

Let’s imagine for a second [that] we have the solution – that means that from now on we jointly assess missile threats and control this defense system together.
Vladimir Putin

This is a highly sensitive area of national defense [and] I am not sure our partners are ready for this kind of cooperation.


Act and rhetoric of aggression (domestic and foreign)

Politicians’ rhetoric also contributes to backwardness.  The idea put forward in the international area that Russia is the “number one geopolitical foe,” an unfriendly “character on the world stage”; declaring a nation self-evidently, without evidence, “An enemy a priori” is in effect, Putin said, “the same as using nationalism and segregation as tools of U.S. domestic policy.”

The author and president of the Public Banking Institute, Ellen Brown, wrote last year in a Global Research article:

Every year since World War II, the United States has been at war somewhere. [Some have said] that if we didn’t have a war to fight, we would have to create one just to keep the war business going. We have a military empire of over 800 bases around the world.…

And contrary to popular opinion, “The military actually destroys jobs in the civilian economy,” Brown reported.

The higher profits from cost-plus military manufacturing cause manufacturers to abandon more competitive civilian endeavors; and the permanent war economy takes engineers, capital and resources away from civilian production.


On this September 11, 2012, we are a country in regress, a country in deterioration: continuing domestic and international relations breakdown. Yet there was a vision to embrace.

“Down the long lane of history yet to be written,” President Eisenhower said in that 1961 speech, “America knows that the world, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate; and must be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals.

The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength.

That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.

Together we must learn how to compose differences ─ not with arms ─ but with intellect and decent purpose.


Concluding these thoughts, President Eisenhower said, “To all the peoples of the world, I give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied;

[t]hat those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full;

[t]hat all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings;

[t]hat those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities;

[t]hat all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity;

[t]hat the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth,

[t]hat, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.



Sources and notes

“The Military as a Jobs Program: There are More Efficient Ways to Stimulate the Economy (Ellen Brown at Global Research), June 22, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25361
Prepared for ‘The Military Industrial Complex at 50,’ a conference in Charlottesville, VA, September 16-18, 2011

A frequent contributor to Global Research, Ellen Brown is an attorney, author, and president of the Public Banking Institute (http://PublicBankingInstitute.org). Her latest of eleven books is Web of Debt; her websites: http://webofdebt.com; http://ellenbrown.com

“‘The Chance for Peace’” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953 — Dwight David Eisenhower

Al Jazeera “Inside Story” September 11, 2012, edition: “U.S. 2012: Should U.S. schools be run like businesses? Increased private sector involvement in U.S. education is raising questions over the future of the public school system.” http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/ins

In this episode of Inside Story: U.S. 2012 we ask: Should U.S. schools be run like businesses?
An estimated 26,000 public school teachers are on strike in Chicago – the first such action in the city for 25 years.

In Chicago and beyond, public school teachers say they are being attacked by the policies of both of the main political parties.


“Putin: Using Al-Qaeda in Syria like sending Gitmo inmates to fight” (RT EXCLUSIVE) published September 6, 2012, http://rt.com/news/vladimir-putin-exclusive-interview-481/

Professor Robin Rogers

Robin Rogers is an associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation (Stanford University Press, 2004) in addition to numerous articles on politics and social policy. Rogers has served as a Congressional Fellow on Women and Public Policy, a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University, and a visiting fellow at Princeton University. She is a recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
http://soc.qc.cuny.edu/faculty/rogers/


Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961; Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040, http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html


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