Revenge of America’s deep state

Stanly Johny in The Hindu


Not many had foreseen such an abrupt end to Michael Flynn’s role in the Donald Trump presidency. Mr. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s National Security Adviser for 24 days, the shortest stint for anybody since the post was created over 60 years ago, was seen as a key architect of the new administration’s foreign and security policies. He was one of the first military figures to endorse Mr. Trump and had been closely associated with him through his rise to the White House.

Still he was forced to leave amid a growing scandal over his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador in Washington. While the sudden resignation may be surprising, for those who closely watch the events that led to Mr. Flynn’s downfall, it’s not difficult to see an underlying pattern in them, which points to a growing tussle between the Trump team and U.S. intelligence agencies. The U.S. deep state, a web of military (intelligence), political and other interests operating behind the scene to ensure the status quo prevails, may not be as visible to the public as in dictatorships. That’s mainly because its interests have always been taken care of by the political leadership. However Mr. Trump’s attack on the establishment and his seemingly friendly approach towards Russia, the arch enemy of the U.S. in Washington parlance, clearly upset the deep state.

The Russia factor

So the tussle between Mr. Trump and intelligence agencies dates back to the billionaire property mogul’s surprising election victory on November 8, 2016. Within a month, the American media carried reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had concluded that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election to help Mr. Trump become President. The finding was that Russian hackers attacked Democratic campaign servers, stole emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, which released them to the public apparently hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances in the election. Barack Obama, by then a lame-duck President, quickly acted on the intelligence reports, imposing fresh sanctions on Russia and expelling 35 Russian diplomats. Clearly, it made any reset in ties difficult for his successor.

Another report that came a month later, again leaked by intelligence officials, claimed that Russia had “compromising personal and financial” information about Mr. Trump.

There were even allegations in Washington by influential people such as Strobe Talbott, a former Deputy Secretary of State, and Michael Morell, a former acting CIA director, that Mr. Trump is a “Kremlin stooge” and a “Putin recruit”. The leaks did not stop after Mr. Trump assumed office or his nominees took over the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Mr. Flynn’s fall is a case in point. To bring him down, intelligence officials have leaked the contents of intercepted communication, something which is seen as one of the most serious felonies among crimes involving leaking classified information. Mr. Flynn talked to the Russian Ambassador multiple times on the phone on December 29, the day Mr. Obama imposed fresh sanctions on Russia and sacked the diplomats. He first denied having spoken of sanctions. So did the White House. But the Ambassador had been wiretapped and the intelligence community had the details of what was discussed. Once the media got hold of these details, the White House had no option but to give up on Mr. Flynn. 

What connects all these exposés and allegations is the Russia factor. Mr. Trump had sought better cooperation with Moscow in the war against the Islamic State. He had also challenged certain accepted notions among the Washington establishment such as the role and relevance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This was unacceptable for the deep state, for which the presidency is temporary and the system permanent. The first major leak by the CIA on the Russian involvement in the cyberattack on Democratic campaign servers was a declaration of war. This doesn’t mean that the leaks are bad. Any attempt to make information public, irrespective of its cause and effect, is welcome. But in this case, information is being used as a weapon in a battle between powerful groups. It’s also to be noted that the establishment doesn’t have a problem with Mr. Trump’s more dangerous (for both the U.S. and the world) and provocative policy measures. The Republican leadership, including Paul Ryan, defended his Muslim ban. His belligerence on West Asia is unlikely to invite significant opposition. The opposition comes only over the red line, and that’s Russia.

Mr. Trump could either fight back or make peace. Two days after Mr. Flynn’s resignation, he has signalled both. He attacked the intelligence agencies on Twitter on Wednesday, while the White House indicated that the promised détente with Russia was over. But Mr. Flynn has set in motion a process that is unlikely to be controlled by a seemingly incompetent administration like Mr. Trump’s. With chaos engulfing his government, Mr. Trump will be forced to conform.

Who will the Brexiteers blame when the milk and honey fails to flow?

Rafael Behr in The Guardian


There is a question that was never put to the leaders of the campaign for Brexit and has not, as far as I’m aware, been put to the prime minister since her conversion to the cause. It is this: what will you do on the morning of formal separation from the EU that you could not have done the day before?

What restored freedom, what action hitherto proscribed by the tyrannical bureaucrats of Brussels, will you indulge as the sparkling English wine is uncorked? Bend a banana, perhaps. Or catch the Eurostar to Paris and savour the sensation of no longer having the automatic right to work there. Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy! … Bliss it will be in that dawn to be alive. Right?

Brexit enthusiasts will complain that my question is unfair. Objections to EU membership were all about democracy, sovereignty and long-term economic opportunity: not pleasures that can be consumed overnight. And while that might be so, it is also true that people tend to vote for things in expectation of tangible benefits. A weekly dividend of £350m for the NHS, for example. So the unlikelihood of quick gratification for leave voters is a problem.

Theresa May identifies a deeper imperative to Brexit than was written on the referendum ballot paper. She hears a collective cry of rage against the economic and political status quo, requiring radical change on multiple fronts. So, in parallel with the prime minister’s plan for a “clean break” from the rest of Europe, Downing Street is thinking of ways to address grievances that generated demand for Brexit in the first place: stagnant wages; anxiety that living standards have peaked and that the next generation is being shafted; the demoralising experience of working all hours without saving a penny.

Government thinking on these issues has so far yielded a modest harvest. Last week’s housing white paper was meant to address a chronic shortage of homes by nudging councils towards quicker approval of new developments. Last month saw the launch of an industrial strategy, embracing state activism to nurture growth in under-resourced sectors and neglected regions. Last year May appointed Matthew Taylor, formerly head of Tony Blair’s policy unit, to lead a review into modern employment practices – the decline of the stable, rewarding full-time career and its replacement by poorly paid, insecure casual servitude.

‘Ed Miliband’s focus on the squeezed middle anticipated Theresa May’s promise to help those who are just-about-managing.’ Photograph: Alamy
A notable feature of this non-Brexit agenda is how closely it tracks arguments made by Ed Miliband in the last parliament. The former Labour leader had a whole thesis about the structural failings of British capitalism and how it corroded people’s confidence in the future, leaving them anxious and angry. His focus on the “squeezed middle” anticipated May’s promise to help those who are “just-about-managing”. Miliband’s calls for state intervention in failing markets were derided by the Tories as socialist delusion at the time, but he opened rhetorical doors through which May is now tentatively stepping. Last week’s housing paper even used a forgotten policy that Labour had launched in 2013 – a “Use it or lose it” threat to developers who hoard land without building on it.

 

Meanwhile, Downing Street has taken a close interest in the commission on economic justice set up by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a thinktank that provided regular policymaking services for Labour in the days before its capture by Corbynism. The commission was recently invited to give a presentation to May’s leading policy advisers inside No 10.

Were it not for Brexit’s domination of political debate, May’s eschewal of conventional left-right dividing lines – her willingness to jettison Thatcherite orthodoxies – might have attracted more notice. But then, as the old Yiddish saying goes, if my granny had balls she’d be my grandpa. The idea that there is some parallel realm of politics that May can develop and for which she will be remembered alongside her EU negotiation is delusional. Timid little steps on housing, industrial strategy and job security are not going to get the prime minister to the promised land of fairness and opportunity in time for Brexit day. And she insists on a diversion to set up more grammar schools along the way, despite nearly every expert in the field warning that educational selection closes more avenues to social mobility than it opens.


Someone will have to level with the country. The dawn of Brexit promises no freedom that wasn’t there the day before

Even on immigration the government cannot meet expectations raised by the leave campaign. There will still be new people arriving because businesses will insist on a capacity to hire from abroad. Millions who arrived in Britain over recent decades, and their children born as British citizens, will stay because the country is their home. Even the most draconian border regime cannot restore the ethnic homogeneity for which some nostalgic Brexiteers pine.

At some point someone is going to have to level with the country. Much of what leave voters were promised is unavailable because the EU was never responsible for a lot of things that made them angry. The dawn of Brexit promises no significant freedom or opportunity that wasn’t there the day before. It isn’t a message that ex-remainers can deliver, for all the reasons that scuppered their campaign last year. It sounded patronising before the referendum and the tone isn’t improved by bitterness in defeat.

None of the original leave campaigners will dare admit their dishonesty in making Brussels the scapegoat for every conceivable social and economic ill. There is no point expecting Boris Johnson or Michael Gove to embark on a self-critical journey of public-expectation management. Far more likely they will be drawn deeper into the old lie: someone must be held responsible when Brexit does not unblock the sluices of wealth and opportunity; when the milk and honey refuse to flow. The obvious candidates are foreigners and fifth columnists – EU governments that negotiate in bad faith; alien interlopers who drain public services; unpatriotic “remoaners” talking the country down.

The question then is whether the prime minister will go along with that game. She has managed so far to sustain the pretence that dealing with the failure of Britain’s economy to share its bounties fairly and quitting the EU are kind of the same thing. If it turns out that they aren’t, and one ambition obstructs the other, who will she blame?

In an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze


GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian


In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines?

Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. So why are they dragooned into rows and made to sit still while they are stuffed with facts?

We succeed in adulthood through collaboration. So why is collaboration in tests and exams called cheating?

Governments claim to want to reduce the number of children being excluded from school. So why are their curriculums and tests so narrow that they alienate any child whose mind does not work in a particular way?

The best teachers use their character, creativity and inspiration to trigger children’s instinct to learn. So why are character, creativity and inspiration suppressed by a stifling regime of micromanagement?

There is, as Graham Brown-Martin explains in his book Learning {Re}imagined, a common reason for these perversities. Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

As far as relevance and utility are concerned, we might as well train children to operate a spinning jenny. Our schools teach skills that are not only redundant but counter-productive. Our children suffer this life-defying, dehumanising system for nothing.


At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era

The less relevant the system becomes, the harder the rules must be enforced, and the greater the stress they inflict. One school’s current advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement asks: “Do you like order and discipline? Do you believe in children being obedient every time? … If you do, then the role of detention director could be for you.” Yes, many schools have discipline problems. But is it surprising when children, bursting with energy and excitement, are confined to the spot like battery chickens?

Teachers are now leaving the profession in droves, their training wasted and their careers destroyed by overwork and a spirit-crushing regime of standardisation, testing and top-down control. The less autonomy they are granted, the more they are blamed for the failures of the system. A major recruitment crisis beckons, especially in crucial subjects such as physics and design and technology. This is what governments call efficiency.

Any attempt to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th, is demonised by governments and newspapers as “social engineering”. Well, of course it is. All teaching is social engineering. At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era. Under Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and a nostalgic government in Britain, it’s likely only to become worse.

When they are allowed to apply their natural creativity and curiosity, children love learning. They learn to walk, to talk, to eat and to play spontaneously, by watching and experimenting. Then they get to school, and we suppress this instinct by sitting them down, force-feeding them with inert facts and testing the life out of them.

There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with help rather than indoctrination. For example, the Essa academy in Bolton gives every pupil an iPad, on which they create projects, share material with their teachers and each other, and can contact their teachers with questions about their homework. By reducing their routine tasks, this system enables teachers to give the children individual help.

Other schools have gone in the opposite direction, taking children outdoors and using the natural world to engage their interests and develop their mental and physical capacities (the Forest School movement promotes this method). But it’s not a matter of high-tech or low-tech; the point is that the world a child enters is rich and diverse enough to ignite their curiosity, and allow them to discover a way of learning that best reflects their character and skills.

There are plenty of teaching programmes designed to work with children, not against them. For example, the Mantle of the Expert encourages them to form teams of inquiry, solving an imaginary task – such as running a container port, excavating a tomb or rescuing people from a disaster – that cuts across traditional subject boundaries. A similar approach, called Quest to Learn, is based on the way children teach themselves to play games. To solve the complex tasks they’re given, they need to acquire plenty of information and skills. They do it with the excitement and tenacity of gamers.

No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system



The Reggio Emilia approach, developed in Italy, allows children to develop their own curriculum, based on what interests them most, opening up the subjects they encounter along the way with the help of their teachers. Ashoka Changemaker schools treat empathy as “a foundational skill on a par with reading and math”, and use it to develop the kind of open, fluid collaboration that, they believe, will be the 21st century’s key skill.

The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a fully democratic method of teaching, whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. Its integrated studies programme, like the new system in Finland, junked traditional subjects in favour of the students’ explorations of themes, such as gold, or relationships, or the ocean. Among its alumni are some of South Africa’s foremost thinkers, politicians and businesspeople.

In countries such as Britain and the United States, such programmes succeed despite the system, not because of it. Had these governments set out to ensure that children find learning difficult and painful, they could not have done a better job. Yes, let’s have some social engineering. Let’s engineer our children out of the factory and into the real world.

Yanis Varoufakis and the Greek Tragedy