Truthseeker – December 1, 2013

An extensive skills study from the OECD [The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] finds young Americans are ‘dead last’, leaked lesson plans from corporate-controlled schools, expulsion and arrest offences under child ‘zero tolerance’ policies, teen mental patient screening questions, and hundreds of thousands of US college students being forced into prostitution. Seek truth from facts with The Untold History of the United States, co-author Prof. Peter Kuznick, Associate Director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Josh Golin, studentdebtcrisis.org co-founder, Robert Applebaum, Storyleak editor, Anthony Gucciardi, and filmmaker, Michael Moore.

Click image to watch video

RT: Why are America’s children being ranked last place in class? Coming up.

Announcer: Shocking findings in latest schools research. The effects of ‘zero tolerance’. And the sordid profession hundreds of thousands of college students are being forced to do.

RT: The OECD’s latest skill figures put young Americans ‘dead last’. In an article titled ‘Measuring America’s Decline’, The New Yorker notes a shocking slide in US education is no longer in question.

In reading, The New York Times writes, Hong Kong and Russia are top, while Finland’s first at numeracy, the most highly valued skill in the workforce. America’s not just lagging but ‘dead last’ and by a long way. In literacy, it’s beaten to last place by Italy. In problem-solving, it’s topped by every single advanced industrialized country.

The New York Times writes while Obama’s ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan, funding new schools and teachers, ‘all across America’ school budgets are being cut and teachers fired. War spending has more than doubled since 9/11, going to places like Afghanistan, Iraq and now arming Al-Qaeda in Syria. The Pentagon claims it takes just 5% of your tax. But Economics Professor Jurgen Brauer discovered vast expenditures from military debt repayment to veterans affairs, nuclear weapons and many many other direct war costs that taxpayers are unknowingly paying for.

Brauer found an astonishing 68 cents of your every tax dollar now goes on foreign wars, the education of a new generation of Americans gets five.

Professor Peter Kuznick’s co-author of The Untold History of the United States with Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Professor Kuznick joins us, it’s great to see you, what happens in states that choose war over school spending?

Prof. Peter Kuznick, co-author of The Untold History of the United States: The thing that threatens the United States more than terrorism, more than anything, really, is the failure of our educational system. It’s the worst of both worlds, they have the debt and they don’t have the education. What’s going to happen to the US is what’s happening already – the United States is declining. Our Untold History project is dedicated to burying this myth of ‘exceptionalism’, we think it’s noxious. Obnoxious and noxious, both. It’s dangerous for Americans to think they’re God’s gift to humanity.

RT: What worries you about the direction America’s schools are going in?

Kuznick: One of the things the United States was exceptional, in a negative way, is we have these armed guards, and metal detectors and, in some states, they want to arm the teachers.

RT: US education itself is now ‘militarized and criminalized’. Razor wire, surveillance cameras, gun-toting security guards and militarized officers with police dogs roam the grounds. ABC reports they’re breaking girls’ arms unprovoked.

ABC report: He went from 0-60 without any provocation. Had this been a regular person doing this, that person would have been criminally charged.

RT: Another school security guard broke a girl’s wrist, reports Fox News, for spilling some crumbs of a birthday cake, then arrested her. When her mother went to school to find what happened, she was arrested too. And just for taking this photo of the security guard, a classmate was arrested for good measure. Almost all US schools now have policies dubbed ‘zero tolerance’, reports USA Today, for behavior previously called childish or just normal. It’s leading to the most bizarre criminal records:

•  Girls arrested for using perfume.
• A 12-year-old girl who doodled ‘I love my friends Abby and Faith’ on her desk was actually arrested by police and marched out the school in handcuffs.
• In a class when a little girl kissed a little boy on the cheek, authorities called in police and child welfare. Authorities admitted that it was not sexual.
• School kids who have a bottle of Scope mouthwash, or who flick a rubber band, are expelled.
• A seven-year-old was arrested in the cafeteria for nibbling his Pop-Tart into the shape of a hill.
• Kids are now even arrested for burping.

And US schoolchildren now don’t need to do anything wrong, notes investigative site Storyleak, to be forced on mind-altering, psychotropic drugs.

Lawrence Smith, son died from Ritalin: We were told that if we do not follow up with their evaluation of ADHD and take him to the pediatrician and get him on Ritalin, that child protective services could charge us for educational and emotional neglect.

RT: From the very first grade, Big Pharma teams up with authorities to screen school kids as mental patients. Prozac reps hold ‘National Depression Screening Days’ to push their products in high-school assemblies which all students must attend, and hand out Prozac gifts. ‘Pop a pill and everything will be alright’, notes The Washington Times, was the message.

Fred Baugman, neurologist: ADHD is a means of making paying patients out of normal individuals, and once they are given a prescription and put on medications that are virtually never discontinued, they have lifetime paying patients. That’s what’s behind the epidemic.

RT: Screening questions are so generalized that every living being on the planet qualifies.

Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging:

– ‘Do you feel sad, blue, unhappy or down in the dumps?’ Sometimes.

– ‘I’ve had periods of great optimism and other periods of equally great pessimism.’ Yeah, that happens a lil’ bit.

– ‘My heart beats faster than usual.’

– ‘I have trouble sleeping.’

– ‘Shortness of breath?’

– ‘Gained weight?’

– ‘Trembling hands?’

– I have an idea that most of these are going to be ‘sometimes’.

– Everyone has.

– Hasn’t everybody?

– All right, my score totaled 42. Bipolar disorder, moderate to severe symptoms.

Allen Jones, Investigator, Office of Inspector General (ret.) Pennsylvania: I absolutely believe that the survey for TeenScreen was intentionally structured to flag as many children as possible as having a possible mental health problem.

RT: We can’t know how many American heroes never will be due to drugs forced on them as children.

The Drugging of Our Children:

Interviewer: If you manifest any number of symptoms, like ‘easily distracted’, ‘blurting out an answer before you’re asked’, ‘daydreaming’, ‘looking out of window’, ‘fidgeting at your desk’, ‘unable to sit still’, that these are symptoms of this mental disorder called ADHD. What do you think about that?

Michael Moore, author and filmmaker: That was me! All those things were me. Seriously, if this had been the way things were run back when I was growing up, I’ll tell you, they would have had me so doped up you guys never would have heard of me.

RT: Anthony Gucciardi is the editor of Storyleak, it’s great to see you, what’s going on?

Anthony Gucciardi, Storyleak editor: This is what happens in a society that is now beyond Orwellian. We’ve had parents contact me and say ‘hey, my children were in a classroom, they were learning about history and they asked a simple question, maybe about a historical event, and they said you must go to a doctor because you have ADHD.’ Just being active, just having an active mind now is against the system, it’s now considered a mental illness.

RT: What happens when someone takes these drugs?

Gucciardi: When I was very young in the classroom I was speaking to my peers and I was asking a lot of questions. They sent me to my doctor and I filled out a form, I think it had five questions on it. The number one question was ‘Who is your hero, who is your idol?’ And all of these weird Orwellian questions that had nothing to do with actual science at all, it was all just opinion. And then the doctor came in and said ‘yeah, he likes to listen to music, I think he probably has ADHD’, and he prescribed me pills that I had to take every single day.

And when I took them I felt like a complete zombie, I could not even put sentences together, it was wrecking my brain entirely. And this is the same thing I hear time and time again across the board from everyone who was put on them. This is turning people into literal zombies. When you walk on the streets of America these days, you can see it in their eyes, you can see it in their eyes, the way they’re cogitating things; they just don’t understand what’s going on.

RT: The makers of Prozac are just one of the corporations that now control school teaching. This is a genuine curriculum and lesson plans that the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education uncovered:

– First graders are taught to count with Domino’s Pizzas.

– Geography’s taught as cities where Tootsie Rolls has factories.

– First graders are taught to read through K-Mart, Pizza Hut, M&M’s, Jell-O and Target logos.

– For biology class, students have to watch Exxon’s video that the Valdez oil disaster was ‘a great example of environmental protection’.

– Kids spend a whole week of academic time learning the life cycle of a Nike sneaker.

– In return for giving Coke exclusive ‘pouring rights’, the Colorado Springs school district pledges to make their students drink ‘at least 70,000 cases of Coke a year’.

– The official Nutrition Curriculum’s created by McDonald’s and fried potato chip manufacturers.

Half of all schools in the US are forced to watch something called Channel One TV in class every day. A John Hopkins University study found an incredible 80% of the content was non-educational fillers and ads.

Read the rest here: http://rt.com/shows/the-truthseeker/us-student-dead-tolerance-544/