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Showing posts with label Scranton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scranton. Show all posts

Povestea înrobirii tale (RO) | The Story of Your Enslavement





Putem fi ţinuţi captivi doar în cuştile pe care nu vedem. O scurtă istorie a înrobirii umane - până la şi inclusiv dumneavoastră. De la Freedomain Radio, cea mai mare şi răspândită conversaţie filozofică din lume. (www.freedomainradio.com)

Sursa: http://www.fdrurl.com/slavestory
Subtitrare: lukasig.com

This is the story of your enslavement; how it came to be, and you can finally be free.


Like all animals, human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them.


At first, we mostly hunted and fished and ate off the land - but then 
something magical and terrible happened to our minds.


We became, alone among the animals, afraid of death, and of future loss.


And this was the start of a great tragedy, and an even greater possibility...


You see, when we became afraid of death, of injury, and imprisonment, 
we became controllable -- 
and so valuable -- in a way that no other resource could ever be.


The greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources, 
or tools, or animals or land -- but other human beings.


You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment, but you 
cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, or with torture or imprisonment in the future, 
because animals have very little sense of tomorrow.


You cannot threaten a cow with torture, or a sheep with death. 
You cannot swing a sword at a tree and scream at it to produce more fruit, 
or hold a burning torch to a field and demand more wheat.


You cannot get more eggs by threatening a hen - but you can get a man 
to give you his eggs by threatening him.


Human farming has been the most profitable -- and destructive -- 
occupation throughout history, and it is now reaching its destructive climax.


Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: 
a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock. 


Some people get confused because governments 
provide healthcare and water and education and roads, 
and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work.


Nothing could be further from reality.


Farmers provide healthcare and irrigation and training to their livestock.


Some people get confused because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine 
that our government protects our freedoms.


But farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields -- and will allow 
certain animals larger stalls or fields if it means they will produce more meat and milk.


In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares 
about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.


Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?


There have been four major phases of human farming.


The first phase, in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion. 
Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind 
remained outside the reach of the whip and the brand and the shackles. 
Slaves remained woefully under-productive and required enormous resources 
to control.


The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted 
some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. 
This increased the wealth of Rome, and thus 
the tax income of the Roman government - and with this additional wealth, 
Rome became an empire, 
destroying the economic freedoms that fed its power, and collapsed.


I'm sure that this does not seem entirely unfamiliar.


After the collapse of Rome, the feudal model introduced the concept of livestock 
ownership and taxation. Instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land 
that they could retain 
as long as they paid off the local warlords. This model broke down due to the 
continual subdivision of productive land, and was destroyed during the 
Enclosure movement, when land was consolidated, and 
hundreds of thousands of peasants were kicked off their ancestral lands, 
because new farming techniques made 
larger farms more productive with fewer people.


The increased productivity of the late Middle Ages created the excess food required 
for the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise 
to the modern Democratic model of human ownership.


As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, a huge stock of cheap human capital 
became available to the rising industrialists - and the ruling class of human farmers 
quickly realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock 
choose their own occupations.


Under the Democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced 
by the Mafia model.  The Mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends 
thugs around once a month to steal from the business "owners."


You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity - 
and thus the taxes you can pay to your masters.


Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners.


The great challenge of the Democratic model is that increases in wealth and freedom 
threaten the farmers.  The ruling classes initially profit from a relatively free market 
in capital and labor, but as their livestock become more used to their freedoms and 
growing wealth, they begin to question why they need rulers at all.


Ah well. Nobody ever said that human farming was easy.


Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes 
is a three phase process.


The first is to indoctrinate the young through government "education." 
As the wealth of democratic countries grew, government schools were universally 
inflicted in order to control the thoughts and souls of the livestock.


The second is to turn citizens against each other through 
the creation of dependent livestock.


It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force -- 
and where it can be achieved, it remains cripplingly under-productive, 
as can be seen in North Korea.  Humans do not breed well 
or produce efficiently in direct captivity. 


If human beings believe that they are free, then they will produce much more 
for their farmers. The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some 
of the livestock on the payroll of the farmer. Those cows that become dependent 
on the existing hierarchy will then attack any other cows who point out the violence, 
hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership.


Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom.


If you can get the cows to attack each other whenever anybody brings up the reality 
of their situation, then you don't have to spend nearly as much controlling them directly.


Those cows who become dependent upon the stolen largess of the farmer 
will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership -- and the 
intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent 
upon the farmers -- will say, to anyone who demands freedom from ownership: 
"You will harm your fellow cows."


The livestock are kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility 
for the destructiveness of a violent system to those who demand real freedom.


The third phase is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened 
livestock cling to the "protection" of the farmers.


This system of human farming is now nearing its end.


The terrible tragedy of the modern American system has occurred 
not in spite of, but because of past economic freedoms.


The massive increases in American wealth throughout the 19th century 
resulted from economic freedom -- and it was this very increase in wealth 
that fed the size and power of the state.


Whenever the livestock become exponentially more productive, you get 
a corresponding increase in the number of farmers and their dependents.


The growth of the state is always proportional to the preceding 
economic freedoms.


Economic freedoms create wealth, and the wealth attracts more thieves 
and political parasites, whose greed then destroys the economic freedoms.


In other words, freedom metastasizes the cancer of the state.


The government that starts off the smallest will always end up the largest.


This is why there can be no viable and sustainable alternative 
to a truly free and peaceful society.



A society without political rulers, without human ownership, 
without the violence of taxation and statism...



To be truly free is both very easy, and very hard.


We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is painful to see it directly.



We dance around the violence of our dying system 
because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock.


But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see.


Wake up...



To see the farm is to leave it.

SCRANTON'S BRAIN DRAIN

POVERTY CRISIS CONTRIBUTORS
"IT'S AS IF HIGH ACHIEVEMENT CONCEPT IS WHITE NOISE." 

Disgruntled Teacher (Veteran Member)2012-11-03 02:01:16

"All politics is local."
Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
1977 - 1987

Local politics is killing us in Scranton - not national politics.  Everything negative that we've become over the past twenty years, including unemployed, can be attributed directly to short sighted, and inept political leadership.    This failure of local political leadership is most evident on the Scranton School Board.    The SSD's short comings and failures have been highly publicized over the years.    The end result is:  the SSD has become a low-achieving public school district.   This condition is unacceptable because the only natural resource we have left around here that can be developed is our people.  And yet, according to the recently published Brookings Institute report, we don't have many highly educated people living here at all.   That's the case because there are no jobs in Scranton that require any special technical skills or a college degree.   We invest nearly 120 million dollars annually in our public school system...  for what?

To put it in perspective; there has been over 1000 dropouts from the Scranton School District since the new high school was built.  On the other hand, and I think it not unreasonable to assume - that there has been an equal number of students who finished at the top of their class in the district over that same time period.  But once this second group acquired marketable skills or a degree - they left the area (brain drain).    The dropouts stay.   What else are the skill-less to do?   Some will compete for scarce low paying service industry jobs.  Many more will rely on social services and government assistance for their day-to-day existence.  Additionally these unskilled SSD dropouts that stay are procreating.   And now, it's their children who are entering the public school system today.  The failure of the SSD is becoming generational.   The public school system was developed to be combat poverty, not contribute to it.  The SSD is fast becoming a major contributor to Scranton's poverty crisis.
 The district has high achievers..  the problem is, the SSD just doesn't produce enough of them to attract  any real industry to our region.. see Brookings Report.

Sondra Meyers, a senior fellow for International, Civic and Cultural Projects at the U of S was an OP-ED guest columnist in the TT (Scranton Times-Tribune) this summer and she discussed the tiny island nation of Taiwan in her article.   She reported that the country - lacking large deposits of natural resources; invests a substantial amount of its budget on education.   Not surprisingly, Taiwan is near the top of the list in student achievement world-wide, and Taiwan is not far behind number one in high achievement, Finland.  Both country's have strong economies in part because they cultivate their richest resource - their people.  They're smart about education in those countries too.  They're innovative.  They quickly disregard what doesn't work, and improve on the things that do.  You will never witness anything like that happening in the SSD.  Never..  ever...

The biggest failure of the SSD political leadership is that they've never pursued a high achievement agenda.  They never even mention the words.   It's as if the high achievement concept is white noise.   The political leadership can't wrap its head around it.   For example:  The SSD never applied for the federal government Race To The Top high achievement initiative grant money worth millions of dollars.   They did not apply for the grant contest in part, because, it would require setting a high achievement agenda.  The political leadership on the school board dosen't believe high achievement is possible citing the high student poverty level as the reason.   At that narrow minded dismissal of the problem the conversation ends.

Further evidence of their failure is the pending privatization of an alternative school being planned for the large "at risk" student population the SSD has.  The district has failed these kids, and is now set to farm out to a private, for-profit entity, the job these politicians could not do.  That says a lot about what we are as a city.  We really don't give a rat's ass about education.  Therefore, why the hell would industry leaders ever consider locating to Scranton?  They won't..  Would you?   The achievement level of the local school district is one of the first things they look at.   That has got to be a hard sell for Austin Burke.

That reminds me of the president's visit to Scranton High School last spring.   You know he checked on the SSD's achievement numbers before he arrived to possibly give the political leadership an Attaboy! if the numbers looked good.    I wonder how the conversation went between the U.S. President and the school board president.   "Nice building you have here, Bob."  

There has been an abundance of data available over the past decade foreshadowing what was to come.  If interpreted and used correctly; it could have helped develop long term high achievement education policies.  But for that to have happened in Scranton, it would have required the political leadership to connect the dots.   Unfortunately for us, all of our dot connectors moved to where the skilled jobs are.   The end result being that broad-minded, forward thinking political leadership is in very short supply in this city.

The high unemployment has been with us since 2008, and it is here to stay.  The employment outlook will never improve unless the Scranton School District becomes the number one high achieving public school system in Northeast PA. 

There is great opportunity in Scranton politics for a young person with a good head on their shoulders looking to make a name for them-self.  The challenge here is to turn the Scranton School District into a high-achieving public school system.    That type of political leadership can vault a career-minded politician right out of this local political cesspool, right onto the state or national stage.

It's amusing to watch all the local political hacks attempt to advance their political careers beyond the valley, only to fail miserable.  They fail because they can't connect the dots.  They fail to think the unemployment problem through.   They can all tell you the area needs family sustaining jobs.   But they don't see that the only local taxing body of the three in Scranton, that has any real control over its outcomes is the public school system.     A high achieving public school system is our only real shot at improving our local economy.  And it has to be the Scranton School District.

 As Scranton goes, so goes the valley.

Sorry about the length of this post folks.
DT


MaMa Bear (Guru)2012-11-03 05:27:13

Educated children might start asking questions... The smart ones have to move.


Disgruntled Teacher (Veteran Member)2012-11-03 07:46:00

The U.S. Secretary of Education said we need to educate our way to a better economy.   The Race to the Top grant program was designed to stimulate innovation on the local level to improve our schools.   Great public schools are the core of a sustainable and strong local economy.   It's time to try the education approach to combat high unemployment and poverty.  If they fix the failing Scranton Public School System, all the other socioeconomic problems will start to improve dramatically.  The education approach will work far more effectively.  Twenty years of failed recovery plans says a lot about the what doesn't work.   But.. The definition of insanity is...   The phrase holds true for the way the SSD is managed as well.