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must stop “[allowing] ourselves to be dominated by our old phobias and outdated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.
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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