Thursday, February 28th, 2019
Stephan: The one thing you have to say about the Koch brothers is that they know how to use their essentially unlimited money to play the long game. If you want to change a country indoctrinate the nation's children. Feed them disinformation and lies that they will remember all their lives. If you want to change a country in a lasting way you indoctrinate the young. If you want to create docile citizen sheep who see the world through your neoliberal christofascist lense bake that world view into their heads as children. That's how you do. You want an example of how you were indoctrinated in just this way? Consider what you know and think about Christopher Columbus.
When you were in elementary school you were told that Columbus was an intrepid explorer of sterling character who opened up the "New World" to the benefits of European civilization, right? That he was such a hero that he was worthy of a national holiday. Did Miss Wright, or Mr. Johnson, or whomever, tell you that Columbus was a genocidal racist grifter who devastated the world he found by capturing pretty young Arawak and Caribe Indian girls and boys and shipping them back to Europe to be exploited as sex slaves? They didn't tell me that either, but it is true. Why didn't they tell us? Because they had been indoctrinated themselves. That's how it works.
The Kochs have hired academics who place career over integrity, who have shown them how this happens, and they are actively trying to create an American society that accepts as appropriate a very particular way of seeing the world. How do you feel about that?
Why the textbook was written is an interesting tale of dark money advancing libertarian propaganda.
Credit: Kundoy/Getty
I was one of a number of community residents who reviewed the textbook, Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship (EE&E), proposed for use in Tucson Unified School District high schools.
To me, the first clue that this textbook lacked academic integrity was when the authors, three philosophy and marketing professors, began their section on trade 40,000 years ago with the claim that the Neanderthals became extinct because they “weren’t entrepreneurs.” Further nonsense included the idea that Jamestown failed because the settlers didn’t have private property rights, that American bison almost became extinct because Native Americans drove them off cliffs, and that towns were founded before agriculture.
Once they get to economics, the authors avoid any major event that challenges their belief that unregulated, “free-market” capitalism is the best of all possible economic systems. Shockingly, they completely ignore two of the most significant economic events: the market crashes of 1929 and 2008.
Lastly, while 90 percent of working people will work […]
Every person should always keep an open mind and read, read, read, until you know the truth you were not told in school or college. Be an autodidactic person like me and my friends.