"Let no day pass without discussing goodness"--Socrates

I mentioned in one previous article that "our reality is being sustained by taking business risk, by using aggressive accounting, by relying on smart bombs." Our emphasis on business and on what is absolutely right or wrong is not part of either our civility or our history, and therefore, the New World Order sustained by the axis Bush/Cheney is based on false pretenses.

At a time of recession and ultimate business corruption we have US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan telling the Senate banking Committee that on the issue of financial and statistical literacy our schools should teach basic arithmetic at an earlier time (see editor's note). But the objective of our school system is not to make our youth the financial whizzes of tomorrow; the objective of our school system is to provide an education for our youth so that they can be more intelligent in their language and mathematical skills as well as in sports, drama, and music. The objective of our school system is to ensure we can become always better citizens.

There have been many financial gurus saying that Enron Corp. collapsed because of their practiced aggressive accounting; but all of this BS is the result of being politically correct and misconstruing our own language. The top brass of Enron Corp. didn't practice aggressive accounting, they used statistical and financial tools to specifically make money for themselves and deliberately defraud their shareholders and employees.Recently, US military forces used smart missiles to kill dozens of innocent civilians in Afghanistan. While the Pentagon maintained that it struck military targets, CIA agents in Afghanistan were handing out $1,000 to the family of each civilian killed in these military strikes. This is in accordance to the Chicago School of Economics preached by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; and this school has just acquired another proselyte as Afghanistan interim leader Hamid Karzai has downplayed such atrocities by saying that they were mistakes resulting from "an unfortunate movement of people at the wrong time." Since when was specifically killing people become unfortunate mistakes for killing other people?

Language has been distorted by big corporations and fortunate sons, and this is why democracy has been eroded.

References

Enron execs touted their ethics on an educational CD , by Jason Whitely / 11 News, "Jeff Skilling's: We like risk because you make money by taking risk." 02/05/2002

Enron's leaders still don't get it, by J. Timothy Mcmahon, February 1, 2002, Houston Chronicle

FINANCIAL LITERACY: Greenspan: Teach math skills earlier, From Tribune news services, February 6, 2002

U.S. Forces Capture Wrong People, by Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press Writer, February 6, 2002

Editor's Note: I just can not let this comment pass by without comment. One of the primary problems of almost every industry and every service provided by government is that so much of what passes for administration today is being carried out by financially trained individuals. To hear of the Greenspan's suggest is beyond acceptable sensibility, when you consider that he and his fellow economist have to be held responsible for the mess and mounting crisis we are seeing, he should not be giving anyone advise.

As for mathematics. Beyond ordinal processes (counting) abstract reasoning is related to a developmental event described by the child developmental psychologist Piagia as "formal thinking" this development does not occur until a boy is about age eleven and most girls enter this stage at about ten. Any efforts to teach abstractions prior to that would severely retard and restrict the child's natural development. For this reason the teaching of reading is delayed in China until a child reaches age ten.