Guest Post by Nat Wilson Turner
Last Fall, I posited that the US and greater West are in the grips of an Interregnum of Unreality that began when Barack Obama successfully papered over the Great Financial Crisis while addressing none of the causes and leaving the very same banksters whose antics caused the crisis in place.
The Interregnum of Unreality is the legacy of Barack Obama who achieved near-total information dominance via traditional and social media and used that power to promulgate a message that everything was fine, nothing ever happens, the neo-liberal order will never end because it rests on two indestructible pillars:
- The perception of American prosperity
- The perception of global American military dominance
Thanks to Trump’s impericidal decision to attack Iran in February, kicking off a war he can’t TACO out of, the reputation of American invincibility has taken a beating.
The estimable Aurelian writes in his latest missive of the global political implications of the ass-whipping the American military has taken in the Ramadan War:
That hit is going to be all the larger because of the massive, orchestrated PR campaign that has been going on for more than a generation, presenting the US as the Empire and the Hegemon, its military the unstoppable colossus trampling small countries underfoot. But the test of a hegemon is not how loudly you shout, but whether you can in fact do what you claim. In spite of defeats in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the ignominious scuttle from the Red Sea, both boosters and critics of the US have been prepared to believe the US had that much power until the last month or so. But now we have price discovery, and it turns out that the US has large and quite capable forces, but it’s not the unstoppable giant ogre that it claimed to be, and never was. The whole “hegemon” thesis, people are beginning to realise, was smoke and mirrors all along: it’s just that now it’s obvious. It’s not just how it is now, it’s how it always was: a traditional result of wars, after all, is to reveal the truth about militaries. No doubt even as I write, pundits are busy composing apologias along the lines of “well, of course by hegemony we just meant Quite a Powerful Nation with a Large Military, actually.” But overselling and underperforming will have their usual political consequences.
He also brings in the second pillar of our interregnum of unreality, the markets:
There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the “Artificial Intelligence” racket, which was similarly hyped, and also expected to somehow guarantee world-dominating status for the US. But in quiet corners away from the hysteria, people who know what they are talking about have been pointing out for several years now that “AI” is a scam, that as an industry it will never be profitable, and that the money, and even more the power and the infrastructure needed, will never be available. And just in the last few weeks, the media are discovering that that’s how it is, and indeed that’s how it always was, if you had bothered to do a few sums. We can add the interesting rider, however, that in a world where generating power is going to have to be rationed, and silicon chips may be scarce, the “AI” scam may come to a swifter and more brutal end than even its worst critics supposed. Exactly what that will do to the US economy I’m not qualified to say, but I imagine it won’t be pretty.
And the damage will not just be financial. Most of the big names of international business, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Altmans and the rest of that lot, treated with fawning reverence by the media and governments of the world, and who have persuaded us that what they think is actually important, will turn out to have empires built on not very much. How badly the poisonous mixture of world depression, financial crisis, and shortage of power and chips will hit them I don’t think anybody knows, but if they survive, their image, and that of the US as a technological leader, will have suffered as badly as the image of its military.
Earlier this week I posted at Naked Capitalism about the deep ties between OpenAI, Oracle and the UAE and that there are indications they are deepening those ties even as the foundations of their partnership are being lit on fire.
The weak links in the AI boom and the Middle East — OpenAI, Oracle, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are strengthening their ties even as the Ramadan War exposes their increasing vulnerabilities.
Spoiler alert: Despite OpenAI’s jarring strategic shifts last week, the UAE is still pouring money down that hole.
Is reality finally intruding on our generation-long delirium?
When Trump failed to calm the markets last week with his ridiculous address to the nation, it seemed that a little reality was peeking through the veils.
But when Iran joined Trump yesterday in claiming that the basic terms of a ceasefire and ensuing negotiations had been reached, the markets roared their approval, with American equities markets posting huge gains.
This despite the ceasefire never taking place and the Strait of Hormuz only being open for a few hours.
As I attempted to document in a post earlier today at Naked Capitalism, “cognitive dissonance and conflicting agendas among key players” has allowed the western media to engage in an orgy of chatter about this ceasefire that never was even as Israel, Iran, and reportedly the UAE all launched strikes at civilians and industrial infrastructure.
One hopes that Trump realizes he went too far in his genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization and will at least refrain from implicitly threatening to nuke Iran going forward.
However it’s almost certain he will attempt more attacks on Iran involving US ground forces and equally certain that those attempts will end as disastrously as his first.
We’re seeing a full-on anti-Trump mutiny from leading MAGA media figures and even 70 of the senescent US House Democrats are calling for Trump to be removed from office because Trump’s rhetoric freaked the American mainstream the fuck out.
Democratic 2028 aspirants Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Chris Murphy both capitalized on the Trump-triggered panic and ensuing TACO to raise their profiles. Most of rest of the Dem 2028 aspirants have been caught flat footed, trapped by their zionist obligations and inability to recognize the political moment.
The freakouts and cognitive dissonance will continue until they can’t.
And as Aurelian pointed out, the consequences of the Interregnum Ending will be serioius:
For the US, as I’ve indicated, the shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilising. Above all, a political culture of entitlement, which is used to issuing demands and threats to try to get what it wants, will suddenly have to cope with the US becoming the demandeur, as it is over the current “ceasefire,” obliged to make compromises and sacrifices to get what it needs to keep the country going, and seeing others expand into the strategic space it has vacated. Whether the current political system will survive the shock, and whether it will be capable of actually making the concessions necessary for survival, are very open questions.
Meanwhile the majority of Americans are getting their faces vigorously rubbed in the litter box of reality every time they pump gas and soon the inflationary impact of Trump’s war will resonate throughout the economy.
The longer it takes for the official narrative to adjust to new circumstances, the longer the Interregnum of Unreality continues, the worse the impact will be and the bigger the looming revolutionary moment will seem to be and the more forceful the ensuing crackdown will need to be to snuff it.
Feral Finster
Empires always operate by means of force and fraud.
Much as I relish seeing the Americans humiliated, and I wish to see Israel driven into the sea, keep in mind that much of Iran’s success is an accident of geography – Iran is mountainous, and the Straits of Hormuz can be easily closed off.
And, no, Trump does not deserve to be merely removed from office (even though doing do might well result in a full-blown civil war).
Trump deserves a Nuermberg-style tribunal, preferably held in Tehran.
cc
The Anglo-Zionist Empire is often referred to as the “Empire of Lies”. It’s also quite apt to think of it as the “Empire of Illusions”.
Look behind the curtains and the US, like Israel, is like a Wizard of Oz that depends on making itself look more intimidating and powerful than it really is.
Oracle has a prominent cameo in the latest Iranian Lego video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A-necgjH-k
Agreed Feral Finster, Trump deserves to be tried for war crimes, as does his Secretary of War Crimes Hegseth, and his master and controller Netanyahu.
JG
Easy read and concise. Given I am an old cat lady. Thank you❤️🐈⬛
different clue
Since Reality is always “out there” and “all around us”, ready to burst into view or ooze into view at some point, would it be simpler to speak of an Interregnum of Mass Illusion?
( Just a suggestion . . . if not, then not).
bruce wilder
the foundation of American hegemonic power was its economic surplus — the result of multiplying abundant natural gifts by the country’s early arrival in the 20th century and rapid advance thru the Second Industrial Revolution. The U.S. was willing to give it away — not as a free gift — exorbitant privilege, indeed — but nevertheless as a benefit of cooperation in an American-branded neoliberal order. The U.S. ran a trade deficit that financed industrial development in Western Europe and the Far East.
That surplus has been exhausted — gone now for twenty years past at least — and the forms of that hegemony are still standing like a theatrical stage set, but empty, hollow. And, a political class in the U.S. and Europe is still expecting to cosplay Power in the empty theatrical set like nothing has changed.
I thought Aurelien was especially apt in describing how the EU had been reduced to post-nationalist “norms” — the passionless, meaningless distillation of neoliberal ideology into a nutrition-free, alcohol-free craft beer.
j
Iran might be an accident of geography, but so is the US. And Gulf countries are accidents of geology, Israel is an accident of US, and so on.
Everyone has something going for them. The US in particular has had pretty much every possible advantage handed to them on a silver platter. Some manage to turn their accidents into success, while others, failure. And while sooner or later all past successes get turned into failures, not all past failures get turned into successes.
Iran, it seems, has taken a good and honest look at their situation, and has built themselves up to thrive in it. The US there, not so much.
The US had a good run, especially after WWII, inheriting all of Europe’s brains, tech, and colonies, but then they went and sacrificed all of that on the altar of neoliberalism. The country now being “led” by one rotting brain old geezer after another eerily rhymes the end of the SU.
As to Nürmberg, well yeah, but pretty much all of DC should go there. And then take the whole bunch and try them again for Epstein Island.
different clue
@j,
Dmitri Orlov wrote books and articles about this. In particular, he wrote a short article and then a whole book about comparisons about the Soviet Collapse and the coming America Collapse. The original article itself has been archived and may be found.
“Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US”
https://web.archive.org/web/20081005233719/http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259
different clue
Here is a tiny single-example case of a particular company discovering where the reality-wall was by driving their business into it.
“Corporation finds out consumers have a breaking point and stopped paying for their product”
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1sg7li4/corporation_finds_out_consumers_have_a_breaking/
spud
Feral Finster:
remember, the attack on iran was planned out under bill clinton in 1994. it was set into motion under clinton, that plan included other countries first, which bush the imbecile, and the con artist obama carried out with gusto.
its not that those before bill clinton have clean hands, they do not. but america became a hyper power under clinton, and he had six wars going under him.
and his plan is being carried out right at this moment.
so war crimes need to stretch back to 1993.
different clue
@spud,
When you say the attack on “Iran” was first crafted under President Slicky Bill, did you mean to say “Iraq”? If you indeed meant “Iran”, then my memory is badly confused and some linky-source correction might be a good thing.
The one big pre-Trump attack on Iran that I remember was the Sadam Hussein attack on Iran during the early days of the Islamic Republic. I don’t remember whether that began under Carter or Reagan. I am guessing it began under Reagan and involved things like giving Hussein-Iraq all kinds of eye-in-the-sky intelligence information about where all the different bunchloads of Iranian soldiers and other things were and where they were moving.
different clue
I am getting the feeling that such ragged tattered chunks of Establishment Mass Media that still exist are trying to move, very slowly and carefully, a particular iceberg of reality into the shipping lanes of illusory perception and perceptional illusion.
And that iceberg of reality is the bigly increase of Trump’s angry dementia. I think the MSM and maybe even the BMM ( Big Murdoch Media) at some point are trying to carefully move stories of Trump’s no-hiding-it-anymore dementia across the radar-screen of mass public perception. EsPECially the perception of the MAGAnon masses and the ArmaRapturite masses and the Christianazian masses . . . which are three separate masses.
I don’t think the mass-mind whisperers think the MAGAnon masses will ever be reached. But I think they can reach the other two masses ( the Christianoid ones) into accepting that the Trump has served its purpose, that the pathetic husk of what used to be Trump should be quietly and politely abandoned, and another tool of Christianoid power should be found and installed into the Offal Office.
If the desperate elites can get the Christianoids to step back and stand down while the elites try performing an energency trumpectomy, perhaps they will then be able to perform their President Transplant. J D ” Little Tattoo” Vance would seem the obvious choice. ( ” Little Tattoo”? That’s a pop-culture referrence to some very recent South Park episodes).
different clue
Oops . . . i forgot to include the story which made me think this is what the MediaLords and Minions are trying to do.
” ‘Out of his damn mind’: Trump’s all-caps tirade stuns observers after NATO meeting ”
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2676683150/
different clue
Perhaps we need a short happiness break from all the certain somethings that are happening. ( If this is too off the subject and distracting to permit to publish, I understand).
Music has a reality all its own.
“The United House of Prayer band playing “It will Never loose its POWER” ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1QnzTnhcw0&list=RDd1QnzTnhcw0&start_radio=1
spud
different clue:
the plans were drawn up under clinton in 1994.
the clintons have been after Iran. the dummy trump is doing the job the clintons wanted to do. what a “MORON”.
“… very tangible hard limits brought to you by all these clever people who outsourced and globalised everything ….”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hillary-clinton-backed-idea-to-obliterate-iran-20-years-ago/ar-AA1HfpM3
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fact-check-did-hillary-clinton-say-the-u-s-would-attack-iran-if-she-became-president/
https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/clinton-says-us-could-totally-obliterate-iran-idUSN22243327/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/04/iran-a24.html
Hillary Clinton threatens to “obliterate” Iran
the empire has been foaming at the mouth for entrance into the Caspian since 1994 under bill clinton.
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/sites/default/files/2013-08/import/u-s-policy-towards-the-caspian-region-can-the-wish-list-be-realized.pdf
“However, besides those who remained phobic about Russia’s long-term
intentions, there was also a plethora of policy advocates who feared the rising
influence of Iran and China.
Hence, planting the US flag in the Caspian Basin
was viewed as a strategic countermeasure to contain the regional power of these
two countries as well.
In the case of Iran, US policy has been more explicit. US
sanctions against Iran are designed to prevent energy companies from investing
in pipelines that would carry Caspian oil or gas to international markets.12
The US Government has worked behind the scenes with mixed success to thwart
foreign companies from joining with with Iran’s national oil company, NIOC, to
construct energy export outlets via Iran.
Were US sanctions against Iran to be eased in a rapprochement between Iran
and the USA, the attractions of various Iranian export routes from the Caspian
could be compelling.”
———
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXdRp-fOULY
This PROVES It Doesn’t Matter Who You Vote For
Jen Perelman and Peter Hager react to some historic clips of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, proving it doesn’t matter who who vote for, especially when it comes to the Iran War.
different clue
@spud,
I will have to read all those entries when I get the time. I assume those entries are meant to show that if Hillary had been elected President, she would have ordered up a war-scale attack on Iran. But I will have to read them to be sure.
But at that time I voted for Trump against Hillary because I considered Hillary the greater war-seeker. Also, I wanted revenge for all of Clinton’s neo-liberal legislation and rule-writing, and also to prevent further Free Trade agreements under a President Clinton.
And because Trump instead of Clinton was elected, we did not get a Clinton war with Iran for those next four years. Which proves that voting did indeed make a difference regarding an Iran War or not from 2016 to 2020. Of course the rest of it may well prove that voting does not make a difference NOW regarding the Iran War. I will have to read the rest of it to decide about that.
Would electing Harris have made a difference about a coming Iran war for vulgar neo-liberal Caspian Sea reasons? It may not have. Would it have made a difference in terms of handing government over to Christian Nazis who want to leverage such an Iran War into a world wide H-bomb war to make Jesus come again? Yes. The Christian Nazis are not neoliberals and the neoliberals were not Christian Nazis.
So pursuing this war in a Christian Nazi government context will lead to pursuit of a different end-game agenda than pursuing it in a Neoliberal Imperial context would have.
The neo liberal agenda would be controlling the investment and the money around, about and from oil drilling investment all around the Caspian Sea. The Christian Nazi agenda is about creating a world wide H-bomb war to make Jesus come again. Both-siderists and Plague-on-both-houses believers will of course ignore that difference.
Here is a Tabitha Speaks Politics video called “The Battle Continues on the Right!!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCRKExaqfzI
It starts being about the current conflict between different flavors of MAGA spokesfolk and leaders. But from timepoint 7:44 to timepoint 9:34 it talks about a movie made by Liberty University and distributed throughout all different parts of the Christian Nazi Community by Liberty University called: The Trump Prophecy. It is about how Trump was sent by God to achieve and realize all the Christian Nazi goals for America and the world and therefor deserved the vote of every Evanazivangelical Christian in America. After that time interval focused on that movie, she notes how Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones , etc. all supported Trump and worked to get him re-elected. And they only now suspect that his administration is turning out to be a source of genuine danger.
spud
different clue:
it was bill clinton that super charged the religious fascists, he handed them untold millions to fund the fundy schools.
why are the democrats so upset about betsy Devos, bill clinton helped to create her: he signed charter schools into law, then President Bill Clinton provided nearly $100 million to the states for charter schools throughout his presidency.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/24/scho-o24.html
it was Bill Clinton who created the federal grant initiative, Charter Schools Program (CSP), which was expanded by the Obama administration. The CSP has handed out $3 billion in federal funds to charter school chains.
https://www.au.org/church-state/june-2003-church-state/featured/charter-for-controversy
Charter For Controversy
Often Touted As A Breakthrough In ‘Educational Choice,’ Charter Schools Instead Are Raising Church-State Problems Around The Country
June 2003 Featured By Jeremy Leaming
Debra Snell thought she had found the perfect school to challenge and prepare her young son for the future.
A Waldorf charter school promised an innovative approach to learning. Studdents, Snell was told, would paint, reenact plays and fairy tales and rely less on computers and rigid timetables for learning how to read.
Snell was impressed, and she encouraged her local school district in California to open a publicly funded Waldorf charter school in the district, where she and many other parents would enroll their children.
It did not take long for Snell to realize that something was wrong. The curriculum seemed limited, and her son wasn’t learning to read. Snell started investigating Waldorf schools and was shocked by what she found out: Waldorf education is based on a little-known, early 19th-century religion called Anthrodposophy.
“I was duped by the Waldorf people,” Snell told Church & State. “They have a wonderful sales pitch. They call their system a developmentally appropriate art-based school where the children excel. That sounds wonderful, and the schools are cheap to run. They don’t use libraries, textbooks or computers. They are very economical and that looks attractive to public school districts tight on money.”
In 1996, Snell yanked her fifth-grade son out of a Waldorf school close to Sacramento. She formed a non-profit group with Dan Dugan, another parent who had also removed his son from a Waldorf school after a year and half, and they decided to challenge in federal court the use of tax dollars to support Waldorf schools.
Snell was not particularly happy that at age 10 her son was still not able to read and increasingly concerned about the religious nature of the Waldorf system. Dugan was also taken aback by the school’s use of religion and its refusal to teach evolution.
Snell once helped sell the Twin Ridges Elementary School District on the Waldorf charter, but now she’s battling in court to stop the flow of tax dollars to the Waldorf charters.
“I argue now before school boards that are considering a Waldorf charter that the system is based on the occult with a very limited curriculum,” she said. “I stress to parents and school officials that they should not underestimate the dangers of teachers who are operating under a rigid religious system.
I made a mistake of encouraging the Twin Ridges school district to accept the Waldorf charter. If you make a mistake, you fix it the best you can. I’m very committed to this challenge and realize the wheels of justice are slow.”
Snell and Dugan are not alone in their frustration. Across the country, parents are learning that charter schools, once promoted as an educational cure-all, are not all they are cracked up to be. Some schools are lightly staffed and inefficiently run. Others appear to be promoting religion, in possible violation of the First Amendment.
Charter schools, entities run by for-profit companies or small groups of people with ideologically driven goals, were supposed to provide America with educational alternatives that would use innovative ideas to challenge youngsters. Proponents claimed charter schools would offer smaller class sizes and more specialized study than public schools.
Instead, almost a decade after the charter school movement took off, a number of state lawmakers are coming under increasing pressure from concerned parents and citizens to address the woeful lack of accountability that has inherently been a part of charter school operations.
Like Snell and Dugan in California, charter school parents in a number of states, such as Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Missouri, Pennsylvania and New York, have in many situations found their experiences with the schools to be disastrous.
Some parents have had to confront curricula that turn out to be pervasively religious, and others have been caught off guard by abrupt closings of financially drained charters, leaving them desperately scrambling to find other schools to enroll their children.
Despite ongoing media attention to charter school controversies and attempts by state lawmakers to gain greater oversight of charters and to close failing ones, both Democratic and Republican politicians on the federal level have advocated for greater funding of charter schools all over the country.
The push is taking place despite problems with charters in a number of states, including:
Texas: A charter school in Houston run by a Baptist church has been accused of squandering taxpayer funds.
The school, the Prepared Table Charter School, has received a reported $20 million in public funds since 1998. In fall 2002, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) revoked the school’s charter for a number of egregious violations of law, including the squandering of millions in tax dollars.
During a three-day hearing in July 2002, TEA heard ample evidence that the charter, run by the Greater Progressive Tabernacle Baptist Church, was using state funds to enrich the church and its pastor, the Rev. Harold Wilcox. TEA also was given evidence that Prepared Table officials exaggerated school attendance records to obtain additional tax dollars.
The U.S. attorney general’s office is also investigating Wilcox for alleged mishandling of federal dollars. The school’s classes were housed in Great Progressive’s sanctuary, and its administrators were also board members of the church.
The charter school paid $68,000 per month in rent to the church, and Wilcox and his wife, both officials of the Prepared Table Charter School, drew extravagant salaries. According to the Kingwood Observer, by the fall of 2000 the charter school was receiving nearly $8 million per year from Texas.
Beyond the charter school’s misuse of state funds and its unconstitutional mix of religion and education, the academic performance of its students proved dismal. The TEA hearing found that slightly more than one-third of the charter school’s 1,000 students passed the state’s 2000-01 proficiency exam.
Following the TEA’s hearing, The Houston Chronicle urged revocation of the school’s charter even if the agency barred Wilcox and other church members from remaining involved with the charter school.
“The mixing of public school money and church finances and, most of all, the poor academic performance of the students should preclude taxpayers from risking another year on all-too-likely failure,” observed the Chronicle.
On Aug. 16, the TEA rescinded the charter school’s funding.
The Prepared Table Charter School was not the only Texas charter to come under intense scrutiny following the implementation of the 1995 law permitting the creation of charter schools.
Dan Dugan and other parents formed a non-profit group to challenge the use of tax dollars to support religiously based Waldorf charter schools.
Texas’ charter school law did not require failing or troubled charters, such as Prepared Table, to return unused or misappropriated state funds. According to a late 2002 Fort Worth Star-Telegram article, troubled charter schools owe the state of Texas anywhere from $5.7 million to millions more.
The Texas legislature is now crafting additions to the charter school law that would provide greater state involvement and oversight of its charter schools. The state attorney general has also sued a number of charters for a slew of alleged wrongdoings and told the Star-Telegram that the charters have “frankly, not been very successful.”
As of late 2002, Texas had 185 charter schools and the process for handing out charters has been slowed by the state so it can stanch the loss of money and improve the operations of charter schools.
Also in November 2002, the state’s education commissioner closed two of seven Dallas-area charters because of their consistently poor showings on achievement tests. Moreover, the commissioner ordered monitors for 34 other charters because of similar problems.
The TEA, before ordering the closures and monitors, had sanctioned 15 other charters around the state. The sanctions, according to The Dallas Morning News, were intended to address academic, management and financial failings.
The two Dallas-area schools that were closed, the Renaissance Charter School and Heritage Academy, are being investigated for misleading the state with inflated numbers of students to garner more funding. The Star-Telegram reported in late 2002 that the two schools combined received $14 million in tax dollars.
The Texas Freedom Network, a public interest group that counters the tactics of religious groups proposing charter schools or vouchers programs, issued a study of charter schools in 2001, which concluded that Renaissance and Heritage “nepotism” was closely linked to the schools’ problems.
Samantha Smoot, executive director of the Network, told the Associated Press that despite the charter school movement’s lofty claims of innovation and improved educational outcomes, “reality keeps intruding on their story with the wreckage of one charter school after another coming to light.”
Arizona: A New York Times reporter recently asserted that the motto for the Arizona’s charter schools is, “Let the free market rule, baby.” Some parents with children enrolled in a Gilbert charter called the “Benchmark School” learned the drawbacks to that philosophy the hard way when the school announced it would be closing in a mere two weeks because of what Benchmark officials described as dwindling student enrollment. A founder of Benchmark promised the surprised and angered parents that the school would re-open in the fall as a performing arts charter with a new name.
The founders of the Benchmark charter are also being investigated by the Arizona Justice Department for allegedly frittering away money and forcing students to take over cleaning jobs after all its janitors were fired in 2002.
According to that March 5 Times piece, Arizona state officials have labeled its charter schools as underperforming at twice the rate as its public schools. Despite that sorry detail, Arizona has 468 charter schools, more than any other state in the Union.
Kansas: The teaching methods of a publicly funded Kansas charter school have sparked controversy. The Associated Press reported on March 11 that students at the mid-Kansas Independent Academy read religious texts for their courses. Using tax dollars, the charter school purchased books such as the Children’s Bible Handbook and Exploring God’s World: Science. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United’s executive director, along with other representatives of constitutional rights groups, warned that the charter school is skirting constitutional strictures.
“This is possibly the most blatant example of an unconstitutional use of taxpayer dollars being used to buy religious materials I’ve seen in decades,” Lynn said.
The Kansas Department of Education is considering cutting funding to the charter.
Pennsylvania: Advocates of adequate public school funding are fighting so-called “cyber charters” in the Keystone State. Pennsylvania instituted a charter school law in 1997 and, like Texas, now faces pressure to change the charter law to stop the drain of tax dollars from public schools. The state has also seen a proliferation of charter schools that purport to deliver instruction to students at home through the Internet.
The Pennsylvania School Boards Association has filed a lawsuit against the state arguing that cyber charters should not be considered charters within the state’s charter school law. Other Pennsylvania public school districts have brought challenges against cyber charters based on a multitude of problems, from improper financial management to inadequate services for special education study.
California: An unannounced visit in early 2002 by California’s San Francisco Chronicle to one of 14 charter schools operated by GateWay Charter Academy and housed in a gated community in Fresno called Baladullah exposed a troubling mixture of Islam and secular studies.
The Baladullah site, comprised of about 20 Muslim families, has largely been deserted since the closure of its GateWay charter school. GateWay closed all its charter schools in early 2002 amidst an investigation by the state attorney general into alleged misuse of public funds. Citing an unexplained $1.3 million debt, Fresno’s administrator of charter schools issued a 600-page report calling for an end to state support of GateWay charters.
Fresno Unified administrator Marilyn Shepherd’s report concluded that GateWay hired unqualified teachers and staffers who had not passed criminal background checks. Students at the GateWay charter at Baladullah told Chronicle reporters that their teachers prayed with them in class and that they studied the tenets of Islam.
GateWay officials filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the Unified Fresno School District, arguing that their charter schools were shut down because of a harsh “Islamic smear campaign.” Shepherd called GateWay’s lawsuit “frivolous” and its claims “ridiculous.”
Other states have experienced similar problems. A recent study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California found that almost half of charter school teachers lack teaching certificates and that low-income minority students are not faring any better at charter schools than the under-funded inner city public schools.
The charter school’s classes were held in the sanctuary of Greater Progressive Tabernacle Baptist Church, and the Rev. Harold Wilcox and his wife drew extravagant salaries.
The charter school study, reported in an April 8 New York Times article, also revealed that 55 percent of teachers in charters run by private companies have little or inadequate teacher training and that 45 percent of teachers in charters operated by parents or educators are inexperienced.
Despite these problems, the charter movement continues to gain steam. President Bill Clinton provided nearly $100 million to the states for charter schools throughout his presidency. Thanks in part to that seed money, today 39 states allow for charter schools and more than 2,400 of them exist. President George W. Bush’s recent budget seeks $320 million for charter schools, including $100 million for a program to assist charters in building and improving facilities.
The charter school movement has opened secondary education doors to many groups of people some looking to make money, others intending to bring religion or varying philosophies into schools to combat the religiously neutral approach of traditional public schools.
Parents of charter school students have frequently been lured via slick advertising campaigns promising less government oversight and more freedom for parents to influence their children’s education. But what those parents have too often found in these schools are improper curricula, ranging from the Waldorf curriculum to ones promoting varying types of Christianity and other religions.
That’s not all, however. Many other parents have found charter schools to be operating in poor conditions, in pervasively religious settings and staffed with teachers who are not required to have college educations or pass state background checks for criminal records.
Under these circumstances, litigation was inevitable.
The lawsuit brought by Snell and Dugan is one of the nation’s first. It was lodged in 1998 against a string of California charters that use the “Waldorf” method, named for an Austrian philosopher and industrialist who applied the new approach for use in schools after World War I.
Snell and Dugan were able to assemble an unlikely group of evangelicals and liberals called People for Legal and Nonsectarian Schools (PLANS) to file the suit, arguing before a federal court that the Waldorf method is based on Anthropodsodphy, which they describe as “a cult-like religious sect following the occult teachings of Rudolf Steiner.”
PLANS’s lawsuit was tossed out of court in 2001. But in Febdruary of this year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the suit, saying procedural issues had been cured and that the legal challenge could proceed. Snell said in a press statement that the group intends to “put Waldorf schools back in the private sector where they belong, and seal the crack in the wall of separation of church and state.”
Although no court has ruled on whether Waldorf charter schools indeed teach students a “cult-like” religion, meddia coverage has exdposed some of the schools’ methods.
According to a 1999 Los Angeles Times article, the Waldorf schools do not use computers, textbooks or grades, don’t worry about teaching students to read until they reach later years and frequently have their students acting out fairy tales and other types of mythical stories.
Despite the lawsuit and the press coverage of Waldorf teaching techniques, Dugan told Church & State that publicly financed Waldorf charters have continued to proliferate in California as well as other states. According to a recent article from The Sacramento Bee, about a half-dozen publicly funded Waldorf schools are operating in Northern California and at least two dozen nationally.
“Waldorf representatives make strong presentations before public school boards,” Dugan said. “But it is PLANS’s contention that Waldorf is dishonest about its curricula and lies about it to parents.
When pressed about the schools’ religious teachings, officials claim Anthroposdodphy is a generic type of spirituality, when in fact it is a cult created by Steiner.”
The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions describes Anthroposophy as being based on Steiner’s desire to “develop a view of reality based on direct perception of the spirit world.”
Supporters of Waldorf, however, counter that criticism surrounding its curricula and teaching methods is based on fear of the unfamiliar. Jean Yeager, administrative director of the Anthroposophical Society in America, told The Boston Globe that Anthroposophy is “a path of spiritual research, not religion.”
The proliferation of charters in the face of controversy after controversy is fueled, in part, by the rhetoric of groups that have spent years deriding the public schools as bastions of secularism.
Voucher advocates often promoted charters as an interim step to break the public school “monopoly.” Reagan-era U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett took things one step further and formed his own charter school spinoff, K12 Inc. Bennett, editor of The Book of Virtues and a type of self-appointed national scold, touts K12 Inc.’s curriculum as superior to public school curricula partly because it’s based on the beliefs of Bennett. The K12 Inc. website states that its curriculum is being used by cyber charter schools in seven states, including one in Pennsylvania.
Parents and government officials residing in the states that have invested the most in the charter school movement are not finding superior education for youth. Too often charter school parents have instead been confronted with schools that prove to be poor performers, run by ill-intentioned or incompetent money-managers or ones that use educationally suspect or unconstitutional curriculums.
“The charter school movement has been undermined by those charters that are bent on teaching religious values,” AU’s Lynn said. “The right to be independent from the public school system, yet still operate on public funds, is not a license to ignore or subvert constitutional rights of parents and their children. We plan to monitor this situation closely.”
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the empirical evidence points directly to bill clintons policy of taking down iran any way possible. just as he did to six other nations.
on video for all to see, hillary and kamala scheming to attack iran. and then surrounding china with missiles.
Feral Finster
@different clue:
The actual, official 2024 Democratic Party platform accused Trump of “fecklessness and weakness” for failing to go to war with Iran during his first term. Kamala Harris labeled Iran the #1 enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-world-can-have-peace-or-israel/comments#comment-240684973
Feral Finster
@spud:
“…remember, the attack on iran was planned out under bill clinton in 1994. it was set into motion under clinton, that plan included other countries first, which bush the imbecile, and the con artist obama carried out with gusto.
its not that those before bill clinton have clean hands, they do not. but america became a hyper power under clinton, and he had six wars going under him.
and his plan is being carried out right at this moment.
so war crimes need to stretch back to 1993.”
Never said otherwise.
different clue
@Feral Finster,
Really? That’s not good.
@spud,
I remember reading once about something called “walking back the cat”. In the intelligence-counter intelligence field, if a breach has been discovered; it is worked backwards from, step by step in reverse, till the very first discoverable pawstep; cleaning and sealing up all breaches along the way.
Perhaps we should think of “walking back the cat” on all these bad laws and bad regs and bad de-regs. It would take decades, just like perpetrating it all to begin with took. Maybe less decades. The first step in the process would be admitting to the necessity for it.
Meanwhile, I would suggest that people in “majority blue” and “majority deep blue” areas think about developing Separate Blue Survival Zones. View each Blue Zone as a Fortress Lilypad of Blue Survivalism. Start Parties and Movements in pursuit of that goal. Grow, foster and expand a culture of Separate Blue Survivalism, Think about applying the Transition Town concept. Think about Heinberg’s Power Down. Think about growing all possible food within an electric-truck’s reach of Blue City Center. Think of fostering high density high compression gardening in every feasible suburban yard and in reasonable percentages of all social and public greenspaces . . . church lawns, club lawns, etc.
Explore the Mormon Stake concept and see if it can be applied by non-Mormon communities . . . Presbyterian Stakes, Methodist Stakes, Catholic Stakes, Muslim Stakes, Jewish Stakes, Townville Bowling League Stakes, etc.
Start finding out which economic theories and bodies of information appear to be reality-based. Ecological economics. Biophysiconomics. etc.
Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Charles Walters Junior, Frederick Soddy, etc. Can what they worked out be applicable at the Blue Survival Fortress Lilypad level?
Feral Finster
@different clue:
Don’t kid yourself. The yuppies that make up the core of Team D would not survive long in any “blue survival zone” any more than a parasite can survive without its host.
And cats don’t “walk back” nor are we walked. CIA people or whatever need to touch grass.
spud
different clue:
the worst of the worst started in earnest in 1993. it was bad before that. LBJ was a egomaniac, that could have been remembered as another FDR, but blew it with vietnam.
it was bad almost all the way to the beginning of america, but not a hyper bad. we basically only destroyed one tribe at a time, one country at a time.
bill clinton took on the whole world at once, and declared you better do as you are told, otherwise you will get bombed for sure.
america might end up ungovernable, then split. big country that will take a whole lot of fuel to keep the lid on, so maybe tomorrow, you might be in another country.
different clue
@Feral Finster,
If the Team D Core can’t do it or won’t do it, then someone else should do it. Normal ordinary people who see the need for it and can begin organizing for it and demonstrating what they can of it to see if they can recruit others in their areas into a live-action Survival Fortress Lilypad concept-in-process.
“Walking back the cat” was just a phrase that I read. I don’t think anyone actually thought they could actually make an actual cat actually walk actually backwards.
Roslyn Ross
Feral Finster said: Much as I relish seeing the Americans humiliated, and I wish to see Israel driven into the sea, keep in mind that much of Iran’s success is an accident of geography – Iran is mountainous, and the Straits of Hormuz can be easily closed off.
There is no doubt that Iran has natural power and natural protection which the idiot Americans did not take into account, but there is also no doubt that the Iranians are strategic, calculating, intelligent and have prepared well.
They have handled this war of aggression with common sense and strategic purpose. The fact they buried their weapons factories and created a political and military power structure which makes the loss of leaders, down through various level, largely irrelevant has been important.
The sense one gets is that the Americans and Israelis are fighting old wars and with old ways of war and the Iranians have figured out that times have changed and so have ways of war.
Mountains and the Straits aside, the Iranians are more than a match for the evil pricks who seek to destroy them.
different clue
I have only a few minutes before I have to clock in for work. I saw this tiny-short Pritzker video and watched a few seconds with the sound off.
” JB Pritzker Asked Point Blank: Should Kamala Harris Be Running For President Again?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKs9NHMwxT8
Yes, well . . . . that certainly is a question, now isn’t it?
That was that, this is this, then was then and now is now. The only way to get a true and real answer to that question is for the DemParty to have a free and open and non-fraudulated and non-rigged primary in which all the nominee-wannabes have to pass all the Darwin tests along the way. If Harris decided to run such a free and fair legitimate gauntlet , and she could hack, slash and chop her way to victorious conquest of the nomination, then the answer would be yes.
Will the DemParty permit such a free and fair Primary Process?
different clue
Here is Trump promising to put more stress on the system.
“Trump promised mass pardons for his top aides before he leaves office”
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1shwykv/trump_promised_mass_pardons_for_his_top_aides/
This promise assures that the Republican officeholders will smack down any Impeachment before next midterms. It also assures that there will not be any use of Article 25. Why would his staff of lawbreakers want him 25’d when he has promised them all infinite pardons for infinite crimes? That will help make the Constitution unreal in the present day and confine it to the status of historical artifact like Hammurabi’s Laws.
different clue
As we roll down the staircase of strangeness, every new stair landed on gives us a new bruise. When we hit a landing we maybe get a chance to rest a bit and if something good happened we get to console ourselves with it before resuming our slow roll down the stairs.
Here’s a good thing. Melania Trump held an uncalled-for unscripted-by-others press conference about how she had zero relationship with Epstein, how she was nobody’s victim . . . least of all Epstein’s, and how she wanted Congress to have open Congressional hearings about the whole Epstein deal.
She must really hate Fat Donnie Two-Dolls. She’s probably hated him for years. She has seen an opportunity to get some very serious revenge for the years of misery, and while revenge is a dish best served over and over and over again; in this case, one helping of revenge might be all that is needed.
Anyway, podcaster Willie D Live has made a little episode about it.
“MAGA IMPLODES Over Melania Trump… Something BIG is About to Happen”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq3HNLjs5Pk
If I thought the No Kings Incorporated organization would pay the least attention to an idea coming from me, I would write them the following suggestion: that they should have their millions of weekend demonstrators ready to hold Hail Dorothy parties when Trump’s death is finally announced. And they should distribute millions of songsheets to those millions of people, so they can all sing that classic song: Ding Dong, the wicked witch is dead.
Ideally they would discuss this all in public while Trump is still alive enough to hear about it. So he knows that millions of people are ready for him to die so they can all say: ” Hail Dorothy! The wicked witch is dead!” And then sing that song in their millions.
different clue
It is hard to abandon illusion and adopt reality-based perception of the surrounding and underlying reality when that reality is changing faster than perception can keep up, especially for those perceivers who don’t want to believe that there is a reality which needs keeping up with. It is like trying to play checkers when the squares are all moving around.
Here is an African videomaker who has sampled some American video-bits and reoffers them. ( There must be an awful lot of American videobits to keep all these African video makers supplied). This one features some FBAmerican content makers who want any Iranian watchers ( if any) that they are aware of Iranian non-hostility to Black America and want Iranian watchers ( if any) to be aware of Black American non-hostility to Iran. Some are respectfully asking Iran to “let us know first” if and before Iran decides to “do something” within the US so that Black people are given a fair chance to avoid the area or clear the area first.) It is a sign of further delamination going on within the US.
I don’t quite know why it is titled:
“Black People Reject Donald Trump for ‘Begging’ Them to Fix Iran Mess He Caused”
but maybe that will be explained deeper in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh-peza5bKg
The very first sample-bit is worth a slow careful listen and pondering, and if the next bits are as info-good, then the whole thing is worth the same.
different clue
Here is a very short video by an Army veteran who thinks it may be possible that large parts of the Armed Forces are against the current Iran war and very against the possibility of escalating it to Dresden-Hamburg style anti-city carpet bombing and very VERY against the possibility of using A-bombs. He notes that several generals, the Secretary of the Army, etc. have been forcibly purged out of the Armed Forces over the last few days and he thinks it is because they opposed the Hegseth Plan and the Hegseth Prime Directive. He further raises the just-suppose possibility that all kinds of nuclear bombers, nuclear missile submariners, etc. were telling their superiors that they would consider orders to release the nukes to be illegal orders which they would not carry out. And that all different low and medium level commanders being told this were passing it along and up chains of command.
Should this be considered as one of the “tectonic reality plates” which are grinding around and which will be seen to be real if/as/when the fogbanks of misperception and illusion begin to burn off under the harsh glaring sunlight of onrolling events?
“What if the military said no”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHiPpvbCdHk
( Separately, can anyone guess what part of the country this video was made in? Is it even possible to guess it down to what part of which two or three states? The landscape reminds me of Southeast Colorado . . . . between the High Plains and the northernmost reaches of the Chihuahua Desert life-zone. So I will guess that this is in Southeast Colorado or even more likely somewhere in the Eastern Half of New Mexico. Does anyone else have any thoughts?