Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart
Author: Patrick J Buchanan
America is coming apart at the seams. Forces foreign and domestic seek an end to U.S. sovereignty and independence. Before us looms the prospect of an America breaking up along the lines of race, ethnicity, class and culture. In Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan reveals the true existential crisis of the nation and shows how President Bush’s post-9/11 conversion to an ideology of “democratism” led us to the precipice of strategic disaster abroad and savage division at home.
Ideology, writes Buchanan, is a Golden Calf, a false god, a secular religion that seeks vainly, like Marxism, to create a paradise on earth.
While free enterprise is good, the worship of a “free trade” that is destroying the dollar, de-industrializing America, and ending our economic independence, is cult madness. While America must stand for freedom and self-determination, the use of U.S. troops to police the planet or serve as advance guard of some “world democratic revolution” is, as Iraq shows, imperial folly that will bring ruin to the republic. While America should speak out for human rights, the idea that we get in Russia’s face and hand out moral report cards to every nation on earth is moral arrogance. While we have benefited from immigration and the melting pot worked with millions of Europeans, the idea we can import endless millions of aliens, legal and illegal, from every culture, clime, creed, and continent on earth, and still remain a country, is absurd.
To save America the first imperative is to remove from power the ideologues of both parties who have nearly killed our country.
In his finalchapter, Buchanan lays out ideas to prevent the end of America. He calls for a bottom-up review of all of America’s Cold War commitments, a ten-point program to secure America’s borders, ideas to halt the erosion of our national sovereignty and restore our manufacturing preeminence and economic independence, and a formula for finding the way to a cold peace in the culture wars.
Buchanan offers a radical but necessary program, for neither party is addressing the real crisis of America -- whether we survive as one nation and people, or disintegrate into what Theodore Roosevelt called a “tangle of squabbling nationalities” and not a nation at all.
IN THIS EYE-OPENING BOOK, PAT BUCHANAN REVEALS THE PERILOUS PATH OUR NATION HAS TAKEN:
- Pax Americana -- the era of U.S. global dominance -- is over.
- A struggle for world hegemony among the United States, China, a resurgent Russia and radical Islam has begun.
- Torn apart by a culture war, America has begun to Balkanize and break down along class, cultural, ethnic, and racial lines.
- Free trade is hollowing out U.S. industry, destroying the dollar, and plunging the country into permanent dependency and unpayable debt.
- One of every six U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished under Bush.
- The Third World invasion through Mexico is a graver threat to U.S. survival than anything happening in Afghanistan or Iraq.
…IS OUR DAY OF RECKONING JUST AHEAD?
The New York Times - Chris Suellentrop
Buchanan can write, and he knows how to provoke. His foreign policy prescriptions—withdraw from NATO, abandon our commitments to Taiwan and South Korea and pretty much everywhere else in the world—are not likely to be adopted by the nominee of either major party in 2008, but he presents them forcefully and often persuasively. They deserve a wider hearing in American politics than they are currently given, if only to challenge the adherents of the prevailing orthodoxy to question their assumptions.
Go to: Best of the Best from Arkansas or Life Uncorked
Many Children Left behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools
Author: Deborah Meier
A citizens' guide to what's wrong with the nation's radical federal education legislation—and a passionate call for change
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has become the most fiercely debated education issue of this election year, and it will be at the center of the national conversation about schools for the foreseeable future. NCLB, signed into law in 2002, purports to improve public schools—and especially the way they serve poor children—by enforcing a system of standards and accountability through high-stakes testing and sanctions. It is radically affecting the life of schools around the country.
Many Children Left Behind is a devastating brief against NCLB. Far from improving public schools and increasing the ability of the system to serve poor and minority children, the authors argue, the law is doing exactly the opposite. Here some of our most prominent, respected voices in education—including Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, and Theodore R. Sizer—come together to show us how, point by point, NCLB undermines the things it claims to improve:
·
How NCLB punishes rather than helps poor and minority kids and their schools
·How NCLB helps further an agenda of privatization and an attack on public schools
·How the focus on testing and test preparation dumbs down classrooms
·How we need alternatives to construing the idea of accountability in terms of test scores and sanctions.
Educators and parents around the country are feeling the harshly counterproductive effects of NCLB. This book is an essential guide to understanding what's wrong and where we should go from here.
Publishers Weekly
In this slim but impassioned manifesto, the founding members of an education think tank argue that the controversial and underfunded No Child Left Behind Act, as currently implemented, is "more likely to undermine the nation's public education system than to improve it." The first section delineates the "baffling" and unfortunate consequences (e.g., cutting kindergarten nap time and middle school recess) of needing more time to prepare for mandated high-stakes tests. The second section looks outside the classroom at gaps in school spending, public involvement (participation on school boards has dropped from one citizen in 500 to one in 20,000) and student health (black children in Detroit, for example, are 16 times more likely to be overexposed to lead than are their white counterparts). As Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards) argues, built-in negative consequences make NCLB "a stalking horse for privatization." In the third section, Monty Neil, executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, offers alternative plans that place accountability more firmly on the shoulders of the state than on the test performance of the child. Though occasionally repetitive, this book is a clarion call for a public education that serves all children well and a reminder that our functioning democracy is at stake. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Table of Contents:
| Introduction | ||
| Preamble : a reminder for Americans | ||
| 1 | From "separate but equal" to "no child left behind" : the collision of new standards and old inequalities | 3 |
| 2 | A view from the field : NCLB's effects on classrooms and schools | 33 |
| 3 | NCLB's selective vision of equality : some gaps count more than others | 53 |
| 4 | NCLB and democracy | 66 |
| 5 | NCLB and the effort to privatize public education | 79 |
| 6 | Leaving no child behind : overhauling NCLB | 101 |
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