Quote of the Week: Tito Tricot

"There is something truly perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries. The externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower the costs - 'third world' mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world - and maximize benefits, i.e.: Let others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all. It is precisely this dehumanization of the 'enemy' that makes it easier for the private companies and the U.S. government to recruit mercenaries. It is exactly the same strategy used by the Chilean military to train members of the secret police and make it easy to annihilate opponents of dictatorship. In other words, Chilean mercenaries in Iraq is business as usual." - Tito Tricot- in Jeremy Scahill's brilliant Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Quote of the Day: Inner City Schools

“Attempting to fix inner city schools without fixing the city in which they are embedded, is like trying to clear the air on one side of a screen door. Educational change in the inner city, to be successful, has to be part and parcel of more fundamental social change” - Jean Anyon -

Quote of the Week: Representative Pete Stark

“You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.” Rep Pete Stark (D) CA on the President's veto of SCHIP.

Paulo Freire

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity OR it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” - Paulo Freire-