Why is it when the rich super class speaks about class warfare, the downtrodden applaud?  When billionaire Warren Buffett said, “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning,” the struggling middle class treated him like one of them, as if he’s on their side.

More recently, billionaire investor George Soros warned of a coming class war in the U.S. as reported by the Daily Beast, where he proudly points out that his prediction of riots in the streets has already begun.

With the Occupy movement’s beginnings having ties to funding by Soros, many believe him to be stoking this so-called class warfare. Although Soros denies directly funding the movement’s beginnings, his vast philanthropic contributions have far-reaching tentacles into many revolutions around the globe.

Even if we are to naively take Soros’ word that he was not involved in spurring these global revolutions, despite the evidence to the contrary, he clearly promotes the idea of class warfare with the political left cheering him as a crusader for good.

Conveniently, the Occupy movement has adopted the catchy but brainless “us versus the 1%” mantra as the rallying call for everyone in the 99% to blame their problems on the so-called rich 1%.  It sounds a lot like stoking class warfare to me.

However, in order to instigate warfare there must be a crisis to cause enough pain to force people to arms, and the sides of good and evil must be defined.  Soros does just that in the Daily Beast article where he says people “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of bailing out the financial system, and that ”the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of evil.”

Of course, those statements are hard to argue with and calling the ruling class “evil” will resonate with the masses.  But again, Soros is clearly in the ruling class 1%, so why would he, like Buffett, pretend they’re outsiders while stoking hatred toward themselves?

It seems they are using the crisis and class warfare paradigm to move the masses to support what the global elite have been striving for all along: less competition and more consolidation of power. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible.” And by impossible he explains the Occupy movement has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.”

To further explain the nature of unintended “evil” in the financial markets, Soros is quoted as saying in the same Daily Beast article “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret.”

To many people, this echoes John D. Rockefeller’s infamous quote “Competition is a sin.”

Rockefeller ran the monopoly oil company Standard Oil, which still exists to this day but goes by different names:

• Standard Oil of New Jersey became Esso, later to be renamed Exxon – which became a key part of ExxonMobil, currently the most profitable company in the world — earning 30 billion, 460 million dollars.
• Standard Oil of California became Chevron – currently the third most profitable company in the world at 19 billion, 24 million dollars per year.
• Continental Oil Company became Conoco, now a part of ConocoPhillips – currently the sixteenth most profitable company in the world at 11 billion, 358 million dollars.
• BP Amoco is a conglomerate of several Standard Oil splinter companies. Yahoo Finance currently lists BP Amoco’s gross profit at 16 billion, 28 million dollars.
• Therefore, four out of the six “supermajors” in the oil industry are direct Rockefeller spinoffs – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. (Source)

Competition has been replaced by the appearance of competition.  And this includes the apparent differences between Soros and Buffett on the left versus the Koch brothers on the right.  Those stuck in the left-right paradigm love to hate them, while they all seek to eliminate genuine competition hidden behind their respective brands of ideology.

Additionally, Soros promotes a single European Treasury with the authority to impose and collect taxes from all member nations as the solution to the Eurozone crisis.  In America, he agrees with Buffett that the rich should pay more in taxes to strengthen the institution of government, as if it hasn’t given enough power to itself despite its failings.

Furthermore, the notion that taxing the “rich” will solve any of America’s or Europe’s financial problems may be the biggest false paradigm of all.  America officially has a national debt of around $15 Trillion with another $26 Trillion in financial bailout costs and double that amount in upcoming liabilities.  There is literally not enough wealth in the world to fix that problem.

What’s more,  the real elite will never have to pay taxes as they move their money globally and play on loopholes within the borders. Anyone remember General Electric paying no taxes on $14.2 billion in profits; in fact they got a $3.2 billion tax credit from Americans?  Need I say more about the silliness of this ever working in the current political environment?

So what does Soros say will be the next immediate battle of this rising class war?

“As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he (Soros) says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself.

It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

As he says “gleefully.”  Still want class warfare?

How about supporting the opposite: decentralization, competition, supporting local commerce, local governance, and local self-sufficiency?

“Government propaganda has been so successful that hundreds of thousands of elected officials and government employees have adamantly accepted lies as truth; they passionately believe that our nation is under attack and freedoms must be forsaken.  Unfortunately, many of the brain washed minions are obedient citizens not blest with acute discernment, men and women who believe the lies of an evil regime and support it to their own detriment, over and over again.”

Jesus said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”.   Truth brought Him to the Cross.   Truth is scarce and dangerous, seldom accepted and regularly crushed.

“…Once a soul gets activated, and the man realizes that he IS free no matter what people do to him or tell him, there is no turning back. The other candidates are trying to turn heads with snappy one-liners that sound cool. Slaves follow these one-liners like mobs, and follow each other from candidate to candidate…”

by Rafi Farber

Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I sit here in my living room in Karnei Shomron, Israel, on the 8th night of Chanukah, wondering what other miracles lay in store on January 3rd and in the months ahead. The name Ron Paul is constantly at my fingertips. I’ve typed it in so many times the past month it’s insane. I’m experiencing an excitement I’ve rarely ever felt, and I don’t even live in America anymore. During the last Republican debate I woke myself up at 3am Israel time to watch an 8pm EST live stream on YouTube, with no fatigue whatsoever. I’m on overdrive, and I can’t calm myself.

I’ve only recently figured out what this excitement actually is.

I first got interested in the whole freedom movement when I heard that Ron Paul wanted to end all foreign aid, including to my country, Israel. This seemed like a spectacular idea to me. I hate the idea of taking American tax payer money I don’t need. The only reason we take it, by the way, is not because we need it. It’s that we don’t want to feel alone, and Jews always feel a deep existential isolation and loneliness. “As I see them from the mountain tops, gaze on them from the heights, this is a people that dwells alone, not counted among the Nations,” says Balaam of the People of Israel in Numbers 23:9. We still feel that loneliness. So we take the money. It’s shameful, it’s theft, it’s destructive, it’s morally wrong, and it makes people hate us for tying them into a conflict they have no business trying to solve. I wanted it to end and didn’t trust any Israeli leader to give it up on his own, so I looked up more about Ron Paul.

What I found was fascinating. On the forums, I learned of people who, back in ’08, literally gave their lives short of death to this man. Some poured money into his campaign they could not afford to give, and some even lost their marriages because of their single-minded insane dedication. This shocked me. I couldn’t yet understand it, but after a few days of listening to him, it began to click.

What is it about Ron Paul that inspires such extremes? Such maddening support on the one hand, and such fear and loathing on the other? I can give the answer in one word: Soul.

The essential soul of a human being is by definition free. The idea that men are free as determined by God is a concept that is foreign to most men. This is because most men want to control others, to take away their freedom. This is usually referred to as the drive for power. The drive for power is antithetical to freedom because power means the ability to control others. There is only one legitimate thing that power can and should be used for, whether it be military, legislative, or executive power. That is, to legalize freedom.

Ron Paul doesn’t want to be President to “give” me freedom. He doesn’t own my freedom and he didn’t give it to me. The only reason Ron Paul wants to be President is to stop punishing people for using their freedom that is rightfully theirs. He wants no power. This is clear to anyone who listens to him speak.

There are two kinds of human beings. Those who want power, and those who want freedom. You can tell which one’s which very easily. Those who want freedom are straight-edged. They are consistent, principled, and you can feel their human soul when they speak to you. There’s a continuum out there of human souls somewhere in spiritual cyberspace, and when you come into contact with one of these souls, you know immediately, because souls are by definition free. You sense sincerity, realness, consistency, a free human being. If you’re a man who seeks freedom and you come into contact with a real human soul, you become instantly addicted and you swallow up anything you can get your hands on. You want to unite immediately, no matter what you disagree on. There are people in the freedom movement that don’t exactly like Israel, especially me being a “settler” and I don’t care. If they want freedom, I sense it and my human drive for individualism suddenly turns into an intense desire to unite into a collective – but a collective of free individuals. It’s a beautiful dialectic, and it doesn’t matter what we agree or disagree on, as long as we agree on freedom.

You get hooked on Ron Paul and you desperately seek more and more, any video you can find from the past, any speeches you missed, anything he said that you haven’t heard yet, even though you’ve heard it a thousand times already in different words. You can’t help yourself. The voracious hunger to be able to use your God-given freedom takes you over entirely. It’s like you suddenly realize you’re human and the Divine Image with which God created you comes alive and catches fire.

But something else happens to you. Once you get hooked on Ron Paul, you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power, and you become instantly disgusted when they start saying words. Before, they were just boring. Now they’re revolting. Listening to Romney or Gingrich or Bush or Obama makes you sick and you don’t know how Ron Paul gets through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that’s so transparent it’s like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you. You can’t bear it.

What’s so maddening about hearing Romney or Gingrich talk is that there’s someone standing there saying things, but there’s no soul in it. These are not free men. These are power men. Not that Romney or Gingrich don’t have souls. They do. They are men just like you and I. But they have practically forfeited their souls to try and attain power, to control others with spin and talking points and contradictory statements like “I want to cut the budget and expand the military!” and they’ll say it with a polished tone and a straight face, just like a soulless recording. Their humanity is so buried under the mountain of lies they have told themselves, that neither they themselves nor you can even sense their souls in the human continuum. The scene of a human body speaking but no soul communicating can drive a free man mad.

The reason that Ron Paul never goes down in the polls is that he’s not “convincing” people in the everyday sense that he’s right on whatever issue. He’s activating human souls, lighting spiritual fires one by one speaking about freedom. Once a soul gets activated, and the man realizes that he IS free no matter what people do to him or tell him, there is no turning back. The other candidates are trying to turn heads with snappy one-liners that sound cool. Slaves follow these one-liners like mobs, and follow each other from candidate to candidate. Slowly but surely, Ron Paul activates a few of the individual souls in the mob as they bob from snappy comeback to snappy comeback and he goes up in the polls.

Yet, we cannot expect every man woman and child to understand or get excited about the message of liberty. In fact, most just can’t handle it. Being truly free is as terrifying as it is electrifying. The Bible tells us this very clearly in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. When Moses finally accepts the role of deliverer from God, he was assigned to say the following to my great-grandparents the Israelites:

“Therefore say to the Israelites: I am God. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with amazing signs. And I will take you to be My people and I will be your God, and you will know that I am the Lord who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians.” (Ex. 6:6-7)

And what was my grandparents’ response?

“And Moses told this to the people, but they didn’t listen due to lack of spirit and cruel bondage.” (6:9)

Not everyone can handle the message of freedom. It’s too frightening for some people, and some are just too enslaved. Those are the people that despise Ron Paul, the same types who rebelled against Moses in the desert and attempted to go back to Egypt. Freedom is too much for them and they can’t handle the Divine gift. They want and need someone to control them. Their souls have been too battered by slavery, taxation, and wars.

But nonetheless, God forced my stiff-necked great grandparents to leave Egypt, and as a result I’m here today, preaching freedom once again, fighting not only for America’s freedom, but for my own from America’s influence in my own region.

Vote Ron Paul and let my people go once again! Stop meddling here and stop trying to buy influence by giving me money. Stop trying to be the all powerful Peace Maker and let us work out the problems here on our own! If we think Iran is a threat, we can handle it and we’ll take the consequences. It’s not America’s problem and you can’t afford another war.

Now I understand why people will give everything to this man. Whenever he’s asked the question, “Would you legalize heroin?” Ron Paul answers, “I want to legalize freedom!” Little do these people understand that freedom is a thousand times more addictive than heroin.

American Jews! Wake up! Set your brothers in Israel free! We were the first nation ever to be set free by God, and we brought the concept of liberty to the world when we left Egypt over 3000 years ago. It’s about time we set the example we were chosen to set.

December 31, 2011

Rafi Farber [send him mail] is a member of Jews for Ron Paul and manages the website World of Judaica.

Copyright © 2011 Rafi Farber

Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when an overwhelming amount of Americans banned together and voiced their opposition to Congress over both the Stop Online Piracy Act, and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Sites that dimmed the screen for a day or two have gone back to normal — Facebook users have swapped their anti-SOPA images for their previous profile pictures.

We may have even believed that the postponement of the vote originally scheduled for January 24th was some sort of white flag of capitulation. But that is certainly not the MO of most lawmakers.

While the outcry did get the attention of Congress, they are simply returning unflinchingly back to the drawing board to wait out our attention spans. Articles whirled that SOPA was dead and the bill was pulled when the bill’s sponsor Lamar Smith said in a statement that there would be no further action “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

Lamar isn’t really listening. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

Actually, SOPA is set to be reformulated in February. PIPA will be revisited with possible amendments in the coming weeks. Case in point, all is still open and possible — nothing is dead, pulled, or cancelled. If that wasn’t enough to keep us on our toes, a new, similar bill has surfaced.

Déjà Vu in the form of OPEN — The New Anti-Piracy Bill

As an alternative to SOPA-PIPA, Representative Darrell Issa (CA-R), and 24 co-sponsors introduced the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) H.R. 3782 on Wednesday, during the Internet blackout.

From PCWorld:

OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that “willfully” promote copyright violation.

The bill pretends to only target foreign websites, while keeping Americans free to surf and post, but thebill’s wording is wide open to pursue American sites. Just one example: when describing an infringingsite, it starts with those “that are accessed through a non-domestic domain name,” but continues in section (8)(A)(ii) for any site that “conducts business directed to residents of the United States.”

It sounds like, “in general,” copyright holders will be the ones filing complaints to the Commission, but the writing leaves it open for any complainant to file. The ITC would still have the ability to coerce payment processors and ad networks to cease funding and linking the accused in question. Who could determine “willful” infringement?

Also, none of these bills had been decided before the U.S. Government took down New Zealand ownedMegaupload.com during the commotion. To which, Anonymous responded by shutting down the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, Universal Music, Recording Industry Association of America, the U.S. Copyright Office, Broadcast Music Inc. and the Motion Picture Association of America.

“The [DOJ's] action ‘demonstrates why we don’t need SOPA in the first place,’ points out PCWorld’s Tony Bradley.” The government was enforcing a previous anti-piracy law called PRO-IP signed by Bush in 2008.

OPEN is gaining support from groups like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Consumer Electronics Association and more.

While it seems admirable that the bill is transparent and open for public comment, most laws of this nature are broad and allow for bigger, no-common sense crackdowns later. Plus, there might only be a couple concessions and the pacifying effects of “being heard.”

One commenter of the bill aptly noted:

‘Reasonable belief’ and ‘credible evidence’ are too vague and have the appearance of inviting highly subjective interpretation with the option for the commission and/or the provider to exercise sweeping powers with impunity.

Whenever any group is appeased after a battle, it cannot be emphasized enough — the lawmakers’ modus operandi will be: aim high, brace for the outcry, make a couple alterations and sneak the bill back in when no one’s looking. Keep it going and going. Call it by a different name. Haggle. It appears there is compromise and reasoning now, but once the bill passes into law, reason goes out the window, and we are the only ones compromised.

Theft is a reality — although not one that has seriously damaged the growing entertainment industry, or caused massive death and devastation. If Hollywood, pitching the biggest fit, were actually going down, why should we go down with it?

It is more unfortunate that Americans must be so tirelessly vigilant to protect their online activities from the same lawmakers who are tanking the country in so many other truly devastating ways.

The dismantling of Internet freedom will not stop here. Let’s borrow an MO and not let up.

To SOPA — Say NOPA!

To PIPA — Pipe down!

To OPEN — Shut it!

Additional Sources:

http://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/sopa-and-pipa-postponed-but-not-cancelled/
http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/pipa-postponed/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/nternet-spoke-and-finally-congress-listened
http://www.webpronews.com/lamar-smith-to-delay-sopa-until-wider-agreement-on-solution-2012-01

And here is the kicker where he says that Ron Paul has the correct stance on this situation. Good luck trying to find a whore-a-spondent who’ll tell you that!

Everyone, please use the links below to contact your Representatives and Senators!!

Wednesday, January 18, 2012
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, NaturalNews.com went “dark” to protest SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” that is actually a thinly-veiled government censorship effort. We are also protesting PIPA, the “Protect IP Act,” which is similarly destructive in its effects. You may have arrived at this page from our mock “seizure” index page which depicts what might happen if SOPA becomes law.

This is crucial for all NaturalNews readers and fans to understand: If SOPA becomes law, NaturalNews.com will be shut down. In fact, the proposed law contains a specific provision — section 105 — which allows the U.S. government to shut down websites it claims “endanger public health.”

Given that NaturalNews openly and repeatedly advocates things like natural sunlight and vitamin C– both of which the government has said are dangerous — our website could be seized by the government under SOPA. And that doesn’t even consider our public stance against routine vaccinations, processed food chemicals and dangerous prescription medications (which the government is always trying to push on the public to kill people before they live long enough to collect social security).

If passed into law, SOPA would shut down NaturalNews, InfoWars, Drudge, Lew Rockwell, Reddit and many other alternative news websites

Make no mistake about the seriousness of this issue: If SOPA (or PIPA) becomes law, it will sooner or later result in the government seizure and shutdown of virtually all alternative news websites — especially those that disagree with the criminality of the current corrupt political regime in Washington.

Imagine an internet without NaturalNews.com. Imagine the liberty movement without InfoWars.com. Imagine the entire world wide web being “sanitized” by the government to remove any websites that do not agree with the government’s official position on finance, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, pharmaceuticals and vaccines. That’s what we’re facing if SOPA becomes law: A virtual wipeout of all truth across the internet, leaving only theliesof “official” government information… the Ministry of Truth, in other words.

The Internet is the vehicle for restoring freedom and crushing tyranny

Why is the U.S. government working so feverishly to crush independent, truthful information on the internet? Because the globalist controllers realize that the internet is the last bastion of freedom in a world run by global elite corporatists.

While the global elite own and run the mainstream (corporate whore) media, and they own Congress, and they own all the influential non-profits such as the wholly corrupt American Cancer Society, they do not yet control the internet! This freaks them out, especially when they see so much truth being produced by liberty-loving individuals who are exposing the neocons, the socialists, and the criminal-minded thugs who run Wall Street and the White House.

They are desperate to crush internet freedom and SOPA is the tool they hope to use to accomplish that. This is why your opposition to SOPA is absolutely crucial. It’s also why internet giants such as Wikipedia and Reddit have joined in this one-day protest against the tyranny of SOPA and what is fast becoming a government-sponsored “information terrorism” campaign against free speech.

Take action NOW – or you will lose internet free speech forever

This is an absolute must: Take action today to voice your opposition to SOPA. Here’s how you can do that:

Click this link to email your Representative:
http://house.gov/htbin/findrep
(Use the little envelope icon that appears to the right of the picture to send them an email.)

And click here to email your U.S. Senator:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
(Use the “web form” link.)

Send your representatives and Senator a short message that covers the following fundamental points:

* You oppose SOPA.
* You will not support or vote for any candidate that supports SOPA.
* Urge them to vote against SOPA.

You can also call the capitol switchboard at: (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected with your representatives.

Obama may sign SOPA even if he says he opposes it

It is crucial that you take action now, because even though SOPA has been “shelved” and Obama has withdrawn his support for it, remember that Obama also promised he would veto the NDAA, yet he quietly and sneakily signed that on New Year’s Eve, stripping Americans of their due process rights (http://www.naturalnews.com/034537_NDAA_Bill_of_Rights_Obama.html).

Just because Obama says he opposes something doesn’t mean he won’t sign it! And believe me, the tactics of all these evil minions in Washington is to operate in darkness, meaning they will delay SOPA when people are paying attention but then, a few months later, after public awareness has waned, they will insidiously attach it to some spending bill and quietly make it law. One day you will wake up and all your favorite websites will simply be GONE. Remember, the government has already shut down 84,000 websites with no due process (http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mista…).

That’s why you need to voice your opposition to SOPA right now and take a stand for internet Free Speech.

If you don’t, you may very well wake up one day and find NaturalNews.com shut down, InfoWars.com removed from the ‘net, and then your only remaining news options will be CNN, Fox, MSNBC and all the other sources of complete mind-controlled drivel that the corporate “sellout” establishment wants to drill into your head.

Finally, share this article on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Spread the word about SOPA. Encourage others to take action. Remember: The internet is the last bastion of freedom in our modern world. If we lose the internet, the corrupt criminals and tyrants who run Wall Street and Washington D.C. will have total, unrelenting control over all information, and your freedom will be suffocated under a police state agenda of total disinformation.

Spread the word. Take action. Protect freedom! Protect the People against government censorship!

Learn more about SOPA:
Wikipedia explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Details about PIPA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

Mashable.com: Why SOPA is dangerous:
http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-dangerous-opinion/

Full text of the bill:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:

Sergey Brin, Other Notable Founders Speak Out Against SOPA
http://www.webpronews.com/sergey-brin-other-notable-founders-speak-out-ag…

William Gibson Calls SOPA “Draconian”
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/01/17/william-gibson-calls-sopa-draco…

The Guardian: Stop SOPA or the web really will go dark
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/17/stop-sopa-…

Stop American Censorship:
http://americancensorship.org

Reddit.com SOPA page:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/

Infowars: SOPA dead on arrival
http://www.infowars.com/dead-on-arrival-sopa-shelved-indefinitely-obama-s…

Boycott against GoDaddy (Victory! GoDaddy pulled their support for SOPA)
http://godaddyboycott.org

SOPA-related videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uz3M2BVA9s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLYgs0xMDm0

This article Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System by Chris Hedges, is, in my opinion, the most eloquent one that I have ever read on this subject. Kudos to him.

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,”  is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy  and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy , both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt  wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com . Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning , What Every Person Should Know About War , and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.   His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle .