ZOMBIE SCHOOLS GO NATIONAL. ANOTHER "ACADEMY" TO BRAINWASH UP-AND-COMING PUBLIC SERVANTS?

PETER'S NEW YORK, July 26, 2007---An unfortunate development has come to my attention. It seems that the "Zombie School" phenomenon has reached the national level. Now what is the "Zombie School" phenomenon? It is the school where mature people are inculcated with what they must do and how they must behave in order to be a part of the "establishment." You can spot them miles away. They have the same smell, the same feel, they talk and walk the same. LackeyLand. (That's a trade-mark! LackeyLand! Don't you try to copy it! Nah, just kidding.)

Bills have been introduced to both the US House and Senate that would establish a National Public Service Academy. Seems innocuous enough.

To get down to specifics for a moment, I will quote from the newsletter of Christopher Shays, the US representative from Connecticut.

"Funded through a public-private partnership, the Public Service Academy would serve to strengthen and protect the United States by creating a corps of well-trained, highly-qualified civilian leaders willing to devote themselves to leadership through patriotic public service."

For the unschooled, this really means nothing. Sounds like a good idea. But for those of us who have seen, heard and watched the goings and comings of the previous decade, the buzz words are as loud as 9-11.

First, let's take the phrase "public-private partnership." What this really means is that private interests will get off on American taxpayers by letting them foot the bill for what these private interests want to put over on them. The private interests will put in a little of their money, and the public will foot the rest of the bill, so it's a real bonus for whatever the private side is promoting on the backs of the hard-working middle class who they deem not good enough to lick their shoes. This results in circumventing the purpose of democracy, which is public discourse and informed decision making on the part of the electorate. It's a way that private interests seek to control public policy without being elected or allowing these policies to be vetted in the public.

So now that that is taken care of, let's try to unravel what these private interests, whoever they may be, want to put over on the American people.

"the Public Service Academy...."

Academy....hmmmm...sounds familiar....something like the New York City Leadership Academy (http://www.nycleadershipacademy.org/)...yes, I've heard of that..(Leadership Academy for New York City Public school Principals outed!).....The Leadership Academy was supposed to be for New York City principals, training them to replace sitting principals that had worked their way up the ladder.

You may be saying, well, Peter, so the names are similar, but really, what's the big deal? So now I have to go into the deep details to show you that it's not just a chance similarity of names. Names have a kind of lineage, or precedent. And the people who are behind the Academy are famous for crafting names that are similar sounding. Let me give you an example. For quite a while, there was a proliferation of the word "Partnership." It was another one of these buzz words like "Academy" is becoming. There was, for example, the "Poughkeepsie Partnership," a sort of alliance between the public and the private sector that was to deal with certain municipal issues. There were all kinds of "partnerships" around, usually associated with cities, and many of them still exist. But the "mother of all partnerships" was of course the "New York City Partnership." Using "New York City" in its name made this organization sound like some kind of official arm of New York City government. This organization was founded by David Rockefeller, or at least he was a founding chairman. You can check all of this out yourselves by going to their website at http://www.nycp.org/, although I notice that there's not much about the history of the organization on the site.

In the 1990s, I  happened to find myself working at The Partnership for a short time. And, I happened to be there when The Partnership was developing "Leadership training."  You might think that this was leadership training for the young and upcoming people, but NOT; these were training sessions to be attended by CEOs, presidents and vice presidents of the top companies in New York City. I was of course aghast at the strangeness of it all; how these leaders from major companies could be pummeled to falling in line and taking part in these programs. My sense was that they were somehow being groomed for entering public service.

I like  to think of The New York City Partnership as David Rockefeller's little mayor's office in  New York City. The offices of The Partnership were actually on the same floor as, and shared a lobby with, the New York City Chamber of Commerce. I thought this especially strange. One would think that the New York Chamber of Commerce was a robust, independent institution. But not so. It had somehow come under the effective control of the Partnership.

Not to worry. The Chamber of Commerce has since been completely swallowed by the Partnership, and the new entity that was the result is called the Partnership for New York City. The Chamber, an organization that was over 200 years old and had an illustrious history, disappeared into thin air overnight.

You may think that I am going far afield, but please stay with me.

The Partnership pushed a number of issues. One was charter schools. Charter schools were a big deal for the Partnership. In fact, one might say that the impetus for charter schools in the New York City public school system comes from the Partnership.  Then they created the New York City Leadership Academy, and supported, if they did not initiate, the dissolution of school boards and the installation of Bloomberg as "dictator for life" of the public schools system.

Oddly enough, even though the Leadership Academy's job is to train school principals, it is a "public-private partnership." This means that the curriculum is decided by the "private" part of the public/private partnership. Why, I would ask as a citizen, are public school teachers being trained by a private entity? Cannot the school system have its own publically owned and controlled training facility? And what do they teach in there? My guess is population control techniques and a smattering of other stuff, such as how to create a top-down organization of sycophants.

Now we come back to the new proposal for the Public Service Academy. Now what will this Academy do?

It, according to the description in Mr. Shay's newsletter, "would serve to strengthen and protect the United States..." Yes, we've had a lot of that lately, like the invasion and occupation and demolition of Iraq, called the "War in Iraq" for short. This comes from the philosophy of real politik, a kind of cynical program of pragmatism in foreign policy that denies basic human values and elevates greed as a virtue. Now the types of decisions that led to the War in Iraq will undoubtedly be inculcated at this wonderful "Public Service Academy." You will find that Dove/Hawk Hillary Clinton, also known in some circles as Bush III, is a big supporter of the Academy. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright (the Bomber of Belgrade) is as well. What is it really? It is an unabashed attempt to finally put decision making in the hands of a narrow, elite portion of the private sector. Democracy is outdated, so these elites believe, and it has shown that people are not capable of self-government. These elites already effectively govern, through a huge flotilla of nonprofits and their lobbies on Capitol Hill. Now they will finally take control of who serves in the public sector and under what terms. It will be a training ground for dedicated Globalistikas and their local counterparts.

By the way, a few little tidbits, some interconnections that I have not mentioned.

David Rockefeller, of the Partnership, is honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization dubbed "The Citadel of the Foreign Policy Elite" by a well-connected writer for the Wall Street Journal. Their offices are located in a townhouse-like building (I guess they call that kind of architecture beaux arts or something) on Park Avenue and 68th Street, and I have had the dubious honor having visited these headquarters on official business, so I know what is inside. The sponsors of the Academy legislation include many CFR members, including Clinton, who has given many a speech at their headquarters, and Madeline Albright.

Ok, now another connection. David Rockefeller is also honorary chairman for the famous Museum of Modern Art, known to warehouse the largest collection of attic junk in the country.

The museum actually gives an award every year called the David Rockefeller Award, and this award goes, not to struggling artists, but to people such as Katherine Graham, now deceased,  but formerly owner of the Washington Post; James Wolfenson, formerly president of the World Bank; Mr. Seagrams... I mean Edgar Bronfman Jr.  And most importantly, just as he was assuming the office of mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.

Now,  Bloomberg decided that he only needed a dollar to run New York City. So the city council sold out because they thought they were going to get a good deal. They only pay him a dollar a year. Of course this is totally outrageous. The mayor should get a regular salary, whatever it comes to, so that he is answerable to the people of the City of New York. But the city council sold out to the mayor, and made like New Yorkers are beggar boys and girls who need a handout from Bloomberg. Well, now, for that dollar, Bloomberg put his daughter in a position where she only gets a dollar annual salary, the low salary being a trade-off for office space in city hall. And what was she doing there? She was, to the best of my knowledge, when she was there, that is, raising money money for the private-public Leadership Academy, if I am correct, along with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. There is something very strange going on when public and private funds are mixed like this, when public and private spaces are shared. Ok, I'm starting to get dizzy. Let's get back to fellow traveler Shay's description of the National Public Service Academy. We'll read it in its entirety from the top:

Proposing a National Public Service Academy

Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA) and I re-introduced H.R. 1671, the U.S. Public Service Academy Act, to instill in our young people a desire to enter the field of public service. The bill would create the first national civilian institution of higher education in the United States providing a competitive, federally subsidized, public service-driven undergraduate education to students from across the United States and around the world. In return for a four-year liberal arts education, students would be required to serve our country for five years in the public sector after graduation.

Funded through a public-private partnership, the Public Service Academy would serve to strengthen and protect the United States by creating a corps of well-trained, highly-qualified civilian leaders willing to devote themselves to leadership through patriotic public service.

The idea of establishing a National Public Service Academy has received the endorsement of Catholic Charities USA, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the National Urban League, along with the National Peace Corps Association and AmeriCorps Alums.

To learn more about the proposal to establish a National Service Academy, please click here. http://www.house.gov/issues/nationalservice/unitedstatespublicserviceacademy.pdf

BLAH BLAH BLAH. OK, I know that was hard going.

Ok, let me finish. Now don't bother clicking on that link, because it doesn't go anywhere. Click on this link: http://uspublicserviceacademy.org

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE ACADEMY?
Ok, you may have missed why I am against this Academy. My best guess is that, to all the protestations of its founders and sponsors, it will brainwash people into considering issues in a particular way, "Their way." And what is "their way"? Population control, the granddaughter of eugenics, is one of their great causes (that would make Adolph Hitler, "population control's great uncle). The idea is to take the issue out of the public forum, constrict the real debate to a small population of select elites, and just brainwash the sycophants that attend this "Academy" as to how they are to think, and what thought they are to propagate. It's not just about population control. It's about foreign policy, and how we are to think about that. It's about education (there seems to be a significant "education" component in the Adacemy). It's about all kinds of domestic policies. It's about a lot of stuff, and they want to make sure that the people who graduate from this institution will all be "players." All this with the mixing of public and private funds, which is itself an issue that needs to be explored, because there is the potential conflict of interest which these respective revenue streams represent.

Now what is not mentioned on the National Public Service Academy's web site is who is funding this movement. That will always be the key question.  I could not determine the funding at this time. But I did come across an article mentioning that the supposed founders of this academy, sometime teacher Chris Myers Asch and Shawn Raymond. These two apparently did teaching stints in AmeriCorps. Now in some remote manner, national service has something to do with teaching. But public service means not just teaching, but the entire arena of public service. The public sector is, of course, huge. You could perhaps make an argument that teachers, those, at least, who work for municipal school systems, are public servants, although teachers are not always thought of in this way, as we have a strong private-school sector, and a teacher is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a public servant, unlike, say, a mayor, who is always a public servant, or perhaps someone working for the tax or labor administrations, or someone in the diplomatic corps, or one could go on and on, but not teachers. So it is a bit odd that somehow Mr. Asch got a brainstorm that the country needed to train public servants. Somehow I think there is something seriously wrong with this picture.

Of course the question is, how will these servants be trained, and what is the curriculum, and how will that curriculum be structured, and what is its content.

Shawn Raymond is, by the way, a high-powered Texas attorney. You can always use one of those when starting an organization.

Equally baffling is the large base of congressional support they have been able to garner in only two years. You may find a list of supporters by going to the Academy website (I've already given you the link). These are likely the CFR David Rockefeller types. Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeline Albright--all Dove/Hawks, and all sponsors of the legislation.

I have not been able to find any relationship between the National Public Service Academy and the New York City Leadership Academy or the Partnership for New York City. But it sure sounds like more of the same. Even if there is no relationship, one must ask the important questions about this organization before taxpayers throw their money behind something they will know nothing about until it is all said and done, and they find that they have shot themselves, not in the foot this time, but in the head.

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