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Watch the Celebrated Film About Putin’s Corruption, Made by Navalny

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2024 //
13

This breathtaking film, called “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe,” documented Vladimir Putin’s corruption. It was made by Alexei Navalny and his team and narrated by Navalny.

It shows Putin’s rise from an obscure KGB agent in Dresden to the most powerful man in Russia and —possibly—the richest man in the world.

Navalny shows that Putin’s success was propelled by corruption.

Anne Applebaum wrote about Navalny and the film in The Atlantic.

Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. Right before he boarded the plane, he posted a film titled “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe” on YouTube. The video, nearly two hours long, was an extraordinary feat of investigative reporting. Using secret plans, drone footage, 3-D visualizations, and the testimony of construction workers, Navalny’s video told the story of a hideous $1.3 billion Black Sea villa containing every luxury that a dictator could imagine: a hookah bar, a hockey rink, a helipad, a vineyard, an oyster farm, a church. The video also described the eye-watering costs and the financial trickery that had gone into the construction of the palace on behalf of its true owner, Vladimir Putin.

The film was viewed, she says, by one of every four Russians.

How could Putin, a vain and bitter little man, let Navalny live after this massive insult?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International

60 Minutes Interviews Navalny After He Was Poisoned, 2020

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2024 //
4

Leslie Stahl interviewed Alexei Navalny when he was in Germany, having survived an attempt to kill him with a military-grade poison.

You can see why Putin was afraid of him: he was smart and charismatic, handsome and youthful. Left alone, he might have led an uprising against Putin’s dictatorship.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Fascism, International

Alexei Navalny’s Daughter Speaks About His Courage and Resilience

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2024 //
5

In October 2023, Daria Navalnaya gave a short TED talk about what she learned from her father Alexei Navalny.

She said, “I miss him every single day. I’m scared that my father won’t be able to come to my graduation ceremony or walk me down the aisle at my wedding. But if being my father’s daughter has taught me anything, it is to never succumb to fear and sadness.”

She was right. He won’t be there when she graduates from Stanford University or when she gets married.

If you listen to her 11-minute talk, you will perhaps understand why he believed he had to return to Moscow after he was hospitalized in Berlin and nearly died. He knew he would be arrested, but he couldn’t back down. He was not afraid.

I still wish he had stayed in the West and remained a thorn in Putin’s side. I wish he were alive to warn the world about the corrupt psychopath who controls Russia. But I don’t understand his heroism. I don’t have his courage.

But his daughter understands. His wife too, who spoke through her grief at the Munich Security Conference soon after learning of his death.

As Telegram exploded with the news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death, his wife, Yuliya Navalnaya was in Germany — about to attend the annual Munich Security Conference surrounded by world leaders and defense officials, and within view of countless television cameras.

Navalnaya has generally sought to avoid the spotlight, to shield her two children from the fallout of her husband’s political work and to deny his tormentors in the Kremlin, including President Vladimir Putin, the satisfaction of ever seeing her cry. But as she took to the stage and delivered a dramatic, surprise statement, grief and worry were etched across her swollen face, and her eyes were tearful and blotchy.

She said she was not certain if the reports of her husband’s death were true. But, her voice trembling with fury, she said: “I want Putin, his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know they will pay for what they have done to our country, to our family and my husband. And that day will come very soon.”

She noted that Navalny — who had spoken out forcefully against Russia’s war in Ukraine and called for reparations to be paid from Russia’s oil and gas revenue — would have wanted to be in Munich, were he in her place.

“He would be on this stage,” Navalnaya said, adding, “I want to call the world, everyone who is in this room, people around the world, to together defeat this evil. Defeat this horrible regime in Russia.”

Categories Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, International

Alexei Navalny: This Is What a Post-Putin Russia Should Look Like

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2024 //
23

Today is Alexei Navalny Day on this blog. I was deeply upset when I first heard about his death. I had hoped that he would somehow survive and replace Putin. He was charismatic, courageous and through all his travails, had a great sense of humor. He was handsome and had great energy. In other words, he was everything that Putin is not. Putin was never able to break him. He never stopped laughing at Putin. Even in prison, he cracked jokes. Putin had to get rid of him.

The idea that he went for a “walk” in a penal colony in the Arctic, in brutal weather, is laughable. He was in a prison, not a resort. Most of his time was spent in solitary confinement. Please read about him and watch the documentaries. Navalny was a hero and patriot in a time when heroes are rare.

He stood up to a brutal dictator and refused to be afraid. Instead, he laughed. The one thing that a vicious dictator can’t bear is to be laughed at. Putin hated him. Putin was jealous of Navalny. He had to die.

********************************

On September 22, 2022, The Washington Post published the following essay by Alexei Navalny. Navalny was the most prominent opponent of Putin. He died a few days ago in a remote prison in the Arctic. Putin’s agents tried to poison him in 2020, but he survived. He returned to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested and jailed. While he was in prison, Russian courts added more years of imprisonment to his sentence until it became clear that he would never be released. He was a hero and a patriot. Putin murdered him.

Navalny wrote about what Russia should be after Putin was gone.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony. This essay was conveyed to The Post by his legal team. [Navalny’s prison sentence was increased by another 19 years for “extremism” while he was in prison.]

Navalny wrote:

What does a desirable and realistic end to the criminal war unleashed by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine look like?

If we examine the primary things said by Western leaders on this score, the bottom line remains: Russia (Putin) must not win this war. Ukraine must remain an independent democratic state capable of defending itself.

This is correct, but it is a tactic. The strategy should be to ensure that Russia and its government naturally, without coercion, do not want to start wars and do not find them attractive. This is undoubtedly possible. Right now the urge for aggression is coming from a minority in Russian society.

In my opinion, the problem with the West’s current tactics lies not just in the vagueness of their aim, but in the fact that they ignore the question: What does Russia look like after the tactical goals have been achieved? Even if success is achieved, where is the guarantee that the world will not find itself confronting an even more aggressive regime, tormented by resentment and imperial ideas that have little to do with reality? With a sanctions-stricken but still big economy in a state of permanent military mobilization? And with nuclear weapons that guarantee impunity for all manner of international provocations and adventures?

It is easy to predict that even in the case of a painful military defeat, Putin will still declare that he lost not to Ukraine but to the “collective West and NATO,” whose aggression was unleashed to destroy Russia.

And then, resorting to his usual postmodern repertoire of national symbols — from icons to red flags, from Dostoevsky to ballet — he will vow to create an army so strong and weapons of such unprecedented power that the West will rue the day it defied us, and the honor of our great ancestors will be avenged.

And then we will see a fresh cycle of hybrid warfare and provocations, eventually escalating into new wars.

To avoid this, the issue of postwar Russia should become the central issue — and not just one element among others — of those who are striving for peace. No long-term goals can be achieved without a plan to ensure that the source of the problems stops creating them. Russia must cease to be an instigator of aggression and instability. That is possible, and that is what should be seen as a strategic victory in this war.

There are several important things happening to Russia that need to be understood:

First, jealousy of Ukraine and its possible successes is an innate feature of post-Soviet power in Russia; it was also characteristic of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But since the beginning of Putin’s rule, and especially after the Orange Revolution that began in 2004, hatred of Ukraine’s European choice, and the desire to turn it into a failed state, have become a lasting obsession not only for Putin but also for all politicians of his generation.

Control over Ukraine is the most important article of faith for all Russians with imperial views, from officials to ordinary people. In their opinion, Russia combined with a subordinate Ukraine amounts to a “reborn U.S.S.R. and empire.” Without Ukraine, in this view, Russia is just a country with no chance of world domination. Everything that Ukraine acquires is something taken away from Russia.

Second, the view of war not as a catastrophe but as an amazing means of solving all problems is not just a philosophy of Putin’s top brass, but a practice confirmed by life and evolution. Since the Second Chechen War, which made the little-known Putin the country’s most popular politician, through the war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas and the war in Syria, the Russian elite over the past 23 years has learned rules that have never failed: War is not that expensive, it solves all domestic political problems, it raises public approval sky-high, it does not particularly harm the economy, and — most importantly — winners face no accountability. Sooner or later, one of the constantly changing Western leaders will come to us to negotiate. It does not matter what motives will lead him — the will of the voters or the desire to receive the Nobel Peace Prize — but if you show proper persistence and determination, the West will come to make peace.

Don’t forget that there are many in the United States, Britain and other Western countries in politics who have been defeated and lost ground due to their support for one war or another. In Russia, there is simply no such thing. Here, war is always about profit and success.

Third, therefore, the hopes that Putin’s replacement by another member of his elite will fundamentally change this view on war, and especially war over the “legacy of the U.S.S.R.,” is naive at the very least. The elites simply know from experience that war works — better than anything else.

Perhaps the best example here would be Dmitry Medvedev, the former president on whom the West pinned so many hopes. Today, this amusing Medvedev, who was once taken on a tour of Twitter’s headquarters, makes statements so aggressive that they look like a caricature of Putin’s.

Fourth, the good news is that the bloodthirsty obsession with Ukraine is not at all widespread outside the power elites, no matter what lies pro-government sociologists might tell.

The war raises Putin’s approval rating by super-mobilizing the imperially minded part of society. The news agenda is fully consumed by the war; internal problems recede into the background: “Hurray, we’re back in the game, we are great, they’re reckoning with us!” Yet the aggressive imperialists do not have absolute dominance. They do not make up a solid majority of voters, and even they still require a steady supply of propaganda to sustain their beliefs.

Otherwise Putin would not have needed to call the war a “special operation” and send those who use the word “war” to jail. (Not long ago, a member of a Moscow district council received seven years in prison for this.) He would not have been afraid to send conscripts to the war and would not have been compelled to look for soldiers in maximum-security prisons, as he is doing now. (Several people were “drafted to the front” directly from the penal colony where I am.)

Yes, propaganda and brainwashing have an effect. Yet we can say with certainty that the majority of residents of major cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as young voters, are critical of the war and imperial hysteria. The horror of the suffering of Ukrainians and the brutal killing of innocents resonate in the souls of these voters.

Read this op-ed in Russian

Thus, we can state the following:

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The war with Ukraine was started and waged, of course, by Putin, trying to solve his domestic political problems. But the real war party is the entire elite and the system of power itself, which is an endlessly self-reproducing Russian authoritarianism of the imperial kind. External aggression in any form, from diplomatic rhetoric to outright warfare, is its preferred mode of operation, and Ukraine is its preferred target. This self-generated imperial authoritarianism is the real curse of Russia and the cause of all its troubles. We cannot get rid of it, despite the opportunities regularly provided by history.

Russia had its last chance of this kind after the end of the U.S.S.R., but both the democratic public inside the country and Western leaders at the time made the monstrous mistake of agreeing to the model — proposed by Boris Yeltsin’s team — of a presidential republic with enormous powers for the leader. Giving plenty of power to a good guy seemed logical at the time.

Yet the inevitable soon happened: The good guy went bad. To begin with, he started a war (the Chechen war) himself, and then, without normal elections and fair procedures, he handed over power to the cynical and corrupt Soviet imperialists led by Putin. They have caused several wars and countless international provocations, and are now tormenting a neighboring nation, committing horrible crimes for which neither many generations of Ukrainians nor our own children will forgive us.

In the 31 years since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., we have witnessed a clear pattern: The countries that chose the parliamentary republic model (the Baltic states) are thriving and have successfully joined Europe. Those that chose the presidential-parliamentary model (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia) have faced persistent instability and made little progress. Those that chose strong presidential power (Russia, Belarus and the Central Asian republics) have succumbed to rigid authoritarianism, most of them permanently engaged in military conflicts with their neighbors, daydreaming about their own little empires.

In short, strategic victory means bringing Russia back to this key historical juncture and letting the Russian people make the right choice.

The future model for Russia is not “strong power” and a “firm hand,” but harmony, agreement and consideration of the interests of the whole society. Russia needs a parliamentary republic. That is the only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.

One may argue that a parliamentary republic is not a panacea. Who, after all, is to prevent Putin or his successor from winning elections and gaining full control over the parliament?

Of course, even a parliamentary republic does not offer 100 percent guarantees. It could well be that we are witnessing the transition to the authoritarianism of parliamentary India. After the usurpation of power, parliamentary Turkey has been transformed into a presidential one. The core of Putin’s European fan club is paradoxically in parliamentary Hungary.

And the very notion of a “parliamentary republic” is too broad.

Yet I believe this cure offers us crucial advantages: a radical reduction of power in the hands of one person, the formation of a government by a parliamentary majority, an independent judiciary system, a significant increase in the powers of local authorities. Such institutions have never existed in Russia, and we are in desperate need of them.

As for the possible total control of parliament by Putin’s party, the answer is simple: Once the real opposition is allowed to vote, it will be impossible. A large faction? Yes. A coalition majority? Maybe. Total control? Definitely not. Too many people in Russia are interested in normal life now, not in the phantom of territorial gains. And there are more such people every year. They just don’t have anyone to vote for now.

Certainly, changing Putin’s regime in the country and choosing the path of development are not matters for the West, but jobs for the citizens of Russia. Nevertheless, the West, which has imposed sanctions both on Russia as a state as well as on some of its elites, should make its strategic vision of Russia as a parliamentary democracy as clear as possible. By no means should we repeat the mistake of the West’s cynical approach in the 1990s, when the post-Soviet elite was effectively told: “You do what you want there; just watch your nuclear weapons and supply us with oil and gas.” Indeed, even now we hear cynical voices saying similar things: “Let them just pull back the troops and do what they want from there. The war is over, the mission of the West is accomplished.” That mission was already “accomplished” with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the result is a full-fledged war in Europe in 2022.

This is a simple, honest and fair approach: The Russian people are of course free to choose their own path of development. But Western countries are free to choose the format of their relations with Russia, to lift or not to lift sanctions, and to define the criteria for such decisions. The Russian people and the Russian elite do not need to be forced. They need a clear signal and an explanation of why such a choice is better. Crucially, parliamentary democracy is also a rational and desirable choice for many of the political factions around Putin. It gives them an opportunity to maintain influence and fight for power while ensuring that they are not destroyed by a more aggressive group.

War is a relentless stream of crucial, urgent decisions influenced by constantly shifting factors. Therefore, while I commend European leaders for their ongoing success in supporting Ukraine, I urge them not to lose sight of the fundamental causes of war. The threat to peace and stability in Europe is aggressive imperial authoritarianism, endlessly inflicted by Russia upon itself. Postwar Russia, like post-Putin Russia, will be doomed to become belligerent and Putinist again. This is inevitable as long as the current form of the country’s development is maintained. Only a parliamentary republic can prevent this. It is the first step toward transforming Russia into a good neighbor that helps to solve problems rather than create them.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International

World Leaders Express Outrage Over Navalny’s Death But Trump Is Silent

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2024 //
60

World leaders spoke out about the death of Alexei Navalny, who was obviously murdered on the order of Putin.

One prominent figure said nothing: Donald Trump. Trump has boasted about his friendship with Putin.

Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, was silent following news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death on Friday. Instead, his campaign referred a reporter to a statement that didn’t reference Navalny or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“In just three and a half years under Crooked Joe Biden, the World has experienced Misery, Destruction, and Death. America is no longer respected because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the World is thinking. I am the only one who can bring Peace, Prosperity, and Stability like I did during my first term. America will be respected and feared (if necessary!) again,” Trump said in the vague statement posted to Truth Social.

Nikki Haley blasted Trump.

“Putin murdered his political opponent and Trump hasn’t said a word after he said he would encourage Putin to invade our allies. He has, however, posted 20+ times on social media about his legal drama and fake polls,” Haley said on X, formerly known as Twitter, several hours after Navalny’s death was first reported.

“Putin did this. The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends,” Haley wrote in a social media post reacting to the news earlier Friday morning.

“The same Trump who said: ‘In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that,’” Haley continued, referring to comments Trump made in 2015, when he pushed back against the notion that Putin had killed journalists. Trump also praised Putin’s leadership, describing him as “a strong leader.”

Be sure to watch the CNN documentary NAVALNY tonight at 9 pm EST and midnight. It won an Academy Award as Best Documentary of 2023.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, International

Alexei Navalny, Leading Opponent of Putin, Dies in Russian Prison. He Was a Hero and a Patriot.

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2024 //
48

Putin has finally gotten rid of his chief opponent, Alexei Navalny. Officials announced that he died after taking a “walk” in the remote prison where he was confined.

Navalny was a strapping handsome man of 47 who bravely stood up to Putin. He previously survived an attempt to poison him, a near-death experience. Navalny recovered in a German hospital.

He could have stayed in the West and remained a free man, risking the possibility that Putin’s agents would kill him.

Instead, after his recovery, he returned to Moscow to lead the struggle against Putin. He was arrested the instant he stepped off the plane.

Navalny was repeatedly moved into solitary confinement and suffered harsh conditions. While imprisoned, his jail term was increased again and again.

From today’s New York Times:

Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned with a nerve agent the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.” 

Mr. Navalny had effectively returned from the dead after his 2020 poisoning and had conducted multiple hunger strikes to improve his treatment, with many of his supporters believing him to be all but invincible. 

During his detention, Mr. Navalny was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement, and complained about severe illnesses. In December, he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Navalny was interviewed by the New York Times in 2021.

An excerpt:

What is the likelihood you will be killed in prison?

In interviews, at points like this, there’s usually a remark in parentheses (laughter). You cannot see me right now, but I assure you, I’m laughing.

For many years, I was forced to make excuses in response to questions like: “Why haven’t you been killed yet?” and “Why haven’t you been jailed?” Now that I have both these boxes checked (the one about murder with a side note: “Well, almost”), I’m asked to gauge the probability of my own death while in prison.

Well, the answer, obviously, can be taken from a joke: 50 percent. I’ll either be killed or not be killed.

Let’s not forget that we clearly have to deal with a person who has lost his mind, Putin. A pathological liar with megalomania and persecutory delusion. Twenty-two years in power would do that to anyone, and what we’re witnessing is a classic situation of a half-mad czar.

Putin is at last free of the one man who led a movement to oust him.

Please Google and watch the documentary “Navalny.” The world has lost a man of courage and principle.

Putin killed Navalny, but he never broke his spirit.

Categories Courage, Cruelty, International

Which NATO Countries Did Trump Offer to Putin as Targets for Invasion?

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2024 //
26

At a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, Donald Trump said that he met with “the president of a big country,” who asked him, “Well sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia – will you protect us?”

Trump said he responded:.

“I said: ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ He said: ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay.”

European leaders were shocked by Trump’s casual dismissal of Article 5 of NATO, which binds every member nation to defend any other nation that is attacked. Since NATO was created in 1949, in response to the Soviet threat, Article 5 has been invoked only once, in aid of the United States on September 11, 2001. NATO has kept the peace, as it was meant to do. The USSR has never invaded a NATO nation, which may explain why so many former Soviet satellites weee eager to join NATO.

Thirty-one nations now belong to NATO.

Trump doesn’t understand how it works, so The Washington Post tried to explain it, in hopes that he reads it.

NATO member nations all make payments to cover the operating expenses of the organization, which was founded in the aftermath of World War II to help Western Europe counter the Soviet Union with help from Canada and the United States. But they don’t pay membership fees to remain in the alliance, so there’s no delinquency to speak of.

Countries do, however, commit to spending at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defense each year, with the goal of ensuring the alliance’s military readiness and deterring any potential attacks. The commitment is a guideline, not a requirement, that has been in place for nearly two decades.

Last year, 11 countries met or exceeded that target, according to NATO statistics. The rest spent smaller portions of their GDP on defense. (Iceland, the only member state with no armed forces, is omitted from the data set.)

The nation that spent the most on military readiness was Poland, perhaps because of the years it was subjugated by the USSR.

Second was the United States.

The other nine that met the goal of at least 2% were: Greece, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Latvia, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Slovakia.

The nations that Trump is offering up to Putin as targets for invasion are: France, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Albania, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Czech Republic, Portugal, Italy, Canada, Slovenia, Turkey, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg. None of these countries met their 2% of GDP goal for military spending.

If you have been thinking of vacationing in any of the unprotected nations, like France, Germany, or Spain, it would be best to plan your trip in 2024. Should Trump be elected, those nations might be battlefields or Russian satellites.

Categories Elections, International, Trump

John Sweeney: When Tucker Carlson Met Putin

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2024 //
26

I have not seen Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin but I’ve heard plenty about it. On Chris Wallace’s show, Bret Stephens of the New York Times called Tucker the “Tokyo Rose” of our time. Hillary Clinton, interviewed on MSNBC by Alex Wagner, said he was “a useful idiot,” a term first used by Lenin to describe the dupes who parroted Soviet propaganda.

British investigative journalist John Sweeney reviewed Tucker’s interview and was even more scathing in his reaction. John Sweeney blogs at JohnSweeneyRoars. There is more to read so open the link.

He wrote:

Two narcissists but only one looking-glass: what was so bleakly and blackly comical about the Russian strong man Vladimir Putin granting an audience to the far-right showman, Tucker Carlson, was that even the American stooge could not hide his irritation at how boring the little man in the Kremlin was. Putin sensed that annoyance and gave Carlson bitch-slap after bitch-slap.

It would have been more amusing if Carlson had tottered out but the gravity of their shared neo-fascist agenda kept the two planet-sized egos in orbit, just. However, the big reveal of the-useful-idiot-meets-serial-killer show was that the two beauties really didn’t get on. Down the track, I look forward to a leak of what Carlson really felt about Putin. Lines like: “ungrateful dwarf sonofabitch” come to the novelist in me.

Sweeney the journalist notes the glorious moment when Putin upends the conventions and attacks the supplicant for a previous job application. Putin, puffy cheeked on steroids as ever, is waxing long about the 2014 Maidan revolution when the unarmed Ukrainian opposition took to the streets to bring down Kremlin puppet President Viktor Yanukovych:
Putin: “The armed opposition committed a coup in Kiev. What is that supposed to mean? Who do you think you are? I wanted to ask the then US leadership.

Tucker: With the backing of whom?

Vladimir Putin: With the backing of CIA, of course, the organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. We should thank God, they didn’t let you in.

Carlson looks so mortified that I wondered whether his carefully coiffed hairdo might levitate in horror, as well it might. Who would have known that this career anti-elite hobgoblin had once tried to join the Company? Well, the former head of the Russian intelligence service, for one.

I feel I am entitled to be critical of Tucker Carlson because, firstly, he is a traitor to the human soul, and, secondly, I have interviewed Putin myself. Back in 2014, after the shooting down of MH17 by a Russian BUK missile, my colleagues at BBC Panorama and I worked out that the little man in the Kremlin was going to open some museum of mammothology in Yakutsk in the far east of Siberia. I rocked up, popped my question, Putin was caught in the bright lights of the Kremlin’s patsy media cameras – they thought my popping up had official permission – and Peskov, his PR man, was embarrassed. A few hours a goon came and punched me in the stomach. The Kremlin didn’t like my question. Still, I got off lightly.

Carlson’s interview set out several things about Putin to his core audience of ignorant white Americans who don’t like the twenty-first century (although they have been pretty clear to some of us for two decades, more): that Putin is boring, very; that he is nasty, very; that he is used to getting his own way to a pathological extent; that he is a liar; that he is incapable of explaining why he has invaded Ukraine in simple terms that make sense because he can’t.

Carlson wanted so little from the Russian dictator but the pleonexic couldn’t bring himself to be the least bit generous. Pleonexia is a term first applied to Putin by the great Kremlin-watcher Masha Gessen, meaning: having an irresistible urge to take things that rightfully belong to another. I wrote a whole chapter of my book, Killer In The Kremlin, on Putin’s craving to take from others: objects, countries, yes and yes, but also the time of others too. Putin turned up late for our departed Queen, late for the King of Spain, late for the Pope and four and a half hours late, of course, for then German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. So Carlson should not have been the least bit surprised that Putin stole his time, wasting the precious first half hour of the interview by setting out a dark fairy story that history showed that Russia has a right to repress Ukraine.

How can I best summarise Putin’s case? He was talking bollocks, total bollocks. The evolution of Ukraine and then Russia – Kyiv was a well-organised citadel in the tenth century when Moscow was still a few sticks in a bog – is messy and complicated. But the modern world started in 1945 and rule number one, in Europe at least, was that no country should invade another. Nothing whatsoever from the past trumps that. Full stop.

One other Putin comment which will drive up the Polish defence budget by another five percentage points was that the Poles somehow brought on 1939 themselves, that they should have negotiated with Hitler. What? Hello?

Carlson is a great showman, his glands unctuous, his tongue fluent but he is also a profoundly stupid man who even failed to get a degree from the rich kid’s diploma factory his family money sent him to.  I didn’t expect him to challenge Putin on the Russian’s fairytale history lesson but there is one simple thing that even a very thick CIA reject should have cottoned on to. One of Putin’s beefs about Ukraine is that their leaders are Nazi. President Zelenskiy is Jewish. Hello?

OK, let me break this down in a simple way by telling a true story of just how un-Nazi Ukraine is, from my own personal experience. At the height of the Battle of Kyiv, when the Russian army was twelve miles away from the city centre, I got a call from the Jewish Chronicle in London, inviting me to be their stringer. I explained that I wasn’t Jewish. They replied that they knew but there was no-one else. I said yes because it struck me as funny to work for a Jewish paper in a country the Kremlin said was Nazi. I got to hang out with the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, to see Jewish aid relief to the front lines of Ukraine, to talk to soldiers who were Jewish – and also Muslim and Christian and those with no faith. The one thing I have not seen is strong evidence of Ukraine being Nazi. Because it isn’t.

All Carlson had to do was say: “but Mr Putin, how could Ukraine be Nazi if the President is Jewish?”

He did nothing of the kind. Carlson’s commitment to the cause, some kind of lower case Fascist International, was greater than his nous. But we knew that, didn’t we?
The worry remains that Carlson’s core audience will, once again, place their prejudices above their ability to weigh evidence. That is what the political religion they call MAGA does. What we all saw is a thoroughly horrible human being with a closed mind meeting the President of Russia. The latter, it turns out, is also a thoroughly horrible human being with a very closed mind and a bore – a crushing one at that.

Open the link and read on.

Categories Bias, Extremism, History, International, Media

Thom Hartmann: 56 Years Of Treasonous Acts by GOP Candidates and Presidents

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2024 //
38

Thom Hartmann scores a bulls-eye again with this article.

The American people want the borders to be secure; they want a controlled flow of legal immigrants. It’s up to Congress to establish adequate border security, screening, judges, and border patrol. The Republicans have refused to send additional funds to Ukraine or Israel without a plan for the border. In the Senate, the two parties were close to reaching agreement on a bipartisan deal for the border.

But then, after his victory in New Hampshire, Trump stepped in and told them to kill the almost final agreement. He wants the issue of immigration and border security alive and unresolved for his fall campaign. Terrified of the Wrath of Trump, Senate Republicans fell meekly into line.

Hartmann writes here about previous Republican presidential candidates and presidents who have cynically put their political self-interest above the national interest:

Once again, America and the world are watching with horror as a Republican candidate for president — just to win an election — manipulates world affairs in a way that will cause widespread death and destruction while damaging the interests and reputation of America.

There’s a long tradition of Republicans running for president committing what can best called treason, or at least criminal manipulation of international affairs, to advantage themselves and hurt incumbent Democratic presidents.

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell let the proverbial cat out of the bag. A bipartisan group of senators had been working on a bill to provide funding to Ukraine and Israel, with money for the southern border, and when it looked like they were going to produce something that would actually pass the House and Senate, Donald Trump inserted himself, telling the Republicans they should kill the bill.

Trump apparently wants to run on chaos at the border, and solving the problem as this legislation is intended to do would take that issue away from him. But he’s also explicitly opposed to any further US aid to Ukraine. This is a treasonous twofer, putting Trump’s election above the interests of the United States and world peace.

Trump, of course, knows that if it weren’t for Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, he never would have been president. And he desperately needs a repeat to hold onto his fortune and stay out of jail: he’s in a far greater bind now than when he first ran for president as a hustle to get GE to pay him more for his TV show.

His 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, admitted that during that election he was handing secret internal campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook, an effort that reached 26 million targeted Americans in 6 swing states.

Now, Trump wants Putin’s help again for 2024. He knows that Putin can do things from overseas, including using deepfakes and posing as Americans to spread explicit lies on social media, that would send people to prison for election interference if done here in the US.

Putin’s number one goal, of course, is to seize control of Ukraine while destabilizing western democracies. So, Trump, wanting Putin’s help, is now trying to deliver Ukraine to Putin by killing US aid.

This pattern of Republican presidential candidates criminally intervening in foreign policy just to win elections started in 1968 and has been a feature — not a bug — of every Republican president who succeeded in taking the White House since: it’s time to seriously discuss the five-decade-long problem we have with treasonous and illegitimate GOP presidents.

It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.

Next up was Ronald Reagan.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President of Iran that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.

This is the story that was finally confirmed just last year with The New York Times’ reporting that we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom, including the lieutenant governor of Texas.

This was the second modern-day act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “Iran/Contra October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.

As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran/Contra” scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office. Which is one reason Bush Jr. and Trump believed they could get away with anything.

After Reagan — Bush senior was elected — but like Jerry Ford — Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

And Walsh was now looking into actual criminal activity by Bush himself in support of the Iran/Contra October Surprise.

Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation and protect himself, which Bush did.

The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, AVERTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”

And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busily accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.

The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency.

Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election but then — when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won — she invented a brand new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million nationwide) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: there was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.

The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

To get re-elected in 2004, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.

“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”

Bush lying us into that war was an act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 7,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.

But it did what it was supposed to do: it got Bush re-elected in 2004.

Which brings us to this year’s election.

In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring Trump a “Russian asset.”

It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, as mentioned, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

And now Trump is trying to exacerbate a crisis on our southern border and screw Ukraine in a way that will lead to mass causalities and disrupt the international order — all to give Putin what he wants — the same way Nixon used Vietnam, Reagan used Iran, and Bush used Iraq, just to win a damn election.

While we can’t rewrite history, at least we can try to prevent it from being repeated. Call your members of Congress — your representative and both your senators — and let them know if you agree that Ukraine aid and resolving the issue at the southern border shouldn’t be held hostage to Trump’s need for Putin’s help and approval.

The number for the congressional switchboard is: 202-224-3121.

It’s way past time that America ceased to be the dog wagged by the tail of corrupt Republicans who want to be president.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, International

Yong Zhao: Why Doesn’t the U.S. Scrap PISA?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2024 //
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When I learned that the latest PISA (Program on International Student Assessment had been released, I attended a webinar, where I learned once again that the scores of U.S. 15-year-old students were somewhat below the international average. The PISA tests in math, reading, and science have been offered since 2000, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

My takeaway from the webinar was that we should try to be more like Singapore and Macau.

I have studied the results of international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS for years. Eventually, I began to wonder what the connection was—if any—between the test scores of 15-year-old students and the economic productivity of their nation 10, 15, 20 years later. We’ve been bemoaning our scores since the first international tests were given in the 1960s, even as our economy soars way beyond the nations with higher scores on the tests.

I invited Yong Zhao to share his reaction to the latest PISA scores. His response was as brilliant as I anticipated.

Yong Zhao is one our most accomplished scholars of education. Born in China to an impoverished family, he pursued his dreams, migrated to the United States, and has made his mark as a creative and innovative thinker. He is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Kansas and holds an appointment as Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Melbourne. His list of honors and publications is too long for me to recite here. But you can find it online.

Yong Zhao wrote:

It doesn’t make sense: Why Is the US Still Taking the PISA?

I have always wondered what America has got from participating the PISA every three years. Since 2000, the U.S. has been taking part in this nonsensical global academic horse race. Every time it took the test, American students stood at about the middle of the global league table. Every time the results were released, American media would point out how American students are not the best, but East Asian education systems such as China, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are the best. And then U.S. authorities would invite PISA and other pundits to tell us how to improve American education.

The same story has been going on for more than two decades, but American education has not improved, at least according to the PISA scores. According to the most recent results (NCES, 2023), American students did much worse in math in 2022 than in 2003, with an 18-point decline from 483 to 465. Their reading and science scores, however, remained about the same without significant change over the past two decades. Although PISA experts largely blame the COVID pandemic as the reason for the decline in math, it does not make much sense because there is no decline in reading and science. Did COVID-19 only affect math, not science and reading? Of course, one can try to argue that reading and science are much less sensitive to COVID, but why? 

Basically, the international standing of the US and the test scores of its students have not changed much. Whatever the PISA data revealed and/or the lessons from other countries such as China, Japan, Singapore, or Finland have not helped improve America’s PISA scores. By the way, Finland, the country Americans view with the best education system because of its early stunning PISA performance, has seen a much more dramatic decline in its PISA scores: from 544 to 484—a 60-point decline in math, from 546 to 490—a 56-point decline in reading, and from 563 to 511—a 52-point decline over the past two decades. Not sure if America still views Finland as the best education country, but its scores have dropped to almost the same point as American students. 

In fact, other than Finland, the PISA league tables have not changed much either. East Asian education systems have consistently remained the top performers and the OECD countries’ average scores have been dropping. If PISA had any impact on the world’s education quality and equity, education should not be the same as 20 years ago.

PISA does not really have much to offer to anyone, except those who benefit from the test itself—the consultants, the test makers, the data processors, and possibly some education politicians.

In a review article (Zhao, 2020), I summarized the research about  PISA and found: 1) PISA markets itself as an assessment of abilities needed in the 21st Century, but it is the same as other international tests such as TIMSS, 2) PISA ignores the overall educational purposes of different countries by primarily assessing math, reading, and science, 3) PISA’s tests are not of high quality with numerous theoretical and technical problems, and 4) PISA’s sampling has been manipulated in different countries. My conclusion is that instead of bringing positive changes to the world, PISA wreaked havoc.

America has never excelled in international tests since the beginning of such assessment in the 1960s, but the low scores have not seemed to affect it much. In fact, a correlational analysis done in 2007 showed a negative correlation between international test scores and economic development (Baker, 2007). That is, countries with higher scores in the first international study did worse than countries with lower scores. If PISA or any other international tests truly measure what matters in education, America should no longer be a developed country. On the contrary, East Asian countries have always scored well in international assessments, but their economic development has been more related to economic, political, and international orders than their test scores.

What matters to economic development and prosperity is perhaps the non-cognitive factors that PISA does not typically emphasize. For example, in an analysis, I found that PISA scores are negatively correlated with entrepreneurship confidence across countries (Zhao, 2012b). American students, despite their lower scores, have always had more confidence than their peers in other countries. In fact, confidence has been found to have negative correlations with test scores (Zhao, 2012b, 2014, 2018b). High score education systems, except Finland, have always had a negative impact on students’ social and emotional wellbeing (Zhao, 2012a). Even PISA’s own data show that PISA scores are negatively correlated with life satisfaction of students (OECD, 2019).

Many education systems participate in PISA because they are fooled by its claim to measure global competitiveness. Somehow these educational systems are convinced that their PISA scores and rankings mean how competitive they are globally. But this is not true and cannot be true. In 2022, over 80 education systems took part in the PISA but these systems are hugely different. For example, the U.S. has three hundred million people and does not really have an education system (it has over 50 education systems based on the number of states and over 12,000 systems if we treat each school district as a system). How can it be compared with Macao, China, a tiny place with about 688,000 people and one education system? Likewise, how can the U.S., with a per capita GDP of over $70,000 be compared with Albania, whose per capita GDP is about $6,000.

Moreover, PISA has been operational for over 20 years. The first cohort of 15-year-old students took the test in 2000. If PISA truly has predictive power, it should have produced a longitudinal study to show how these students do in society. They are about 39 years old today. But we haven’t seen any such report except the wild guesses made by some scholars (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2010).

If PISA offers nothing, why does the U.S. spend the money and effort to join the game? For monitoring of basic education conditions, it already has the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) or the national report card, which has been in existence since 1969. Why continue to participate in PISA?

Frankly, it’s inexplicable, for there is truly no reason the U.S. should continue to participate in PISA, let alone to pretend to learn from high performing countries. The lessons PISA offered have not been productive. For example, the lesson that high performing systems (e.g., Singapore, South Korea, and Finland) recruit high performing high school graduates to be teachers (Barber & Mourshed, 2007) is not based on real evidence and does not really produce better education outcomes (Gronqvist & Vlachos, 2008). The lesson that high performing systems have clear definitions of learning expectations, a good structure of different stages, and tough measures to ensure that students have met the expectations (Tucker, 2011) is intended largely to copy East Asian education systems; but, ironically, the East Asian countries have been working very hard to change these practices (Zhao, 2014). International learning may make sense sometimes, but there are great limitations (Zhao, 2018a). American education should focus on developing its own way to improve education instead of trying to catch up with others (Zhao, 2009). 

This is not to say that American education is perfect. Rather, it is to say the way forward is not to look at what others have been doing. The U.S. needs to solve its own problems and work on creating a better future. With the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, the world has changed again. If ChatGPT had taken the 2022 PISA, it is highly likely that it would outscore all the students in the world. It would be the best education system accordingly. Today, many students use AI tools to do their schoolwork, and teachers use AI in their teaching. PISA has become even more irrelevant.

Since 2000, our scores on PISA have barely changed. While there’s much chatter about learning from other systems, it has not happened. There is no reason that the U.S. should continue its participation in PISA.

References:

Baker, K. (2007). Are International Tests Worth Anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104. 

Barber, M., & Mourshed, M. (2007). How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come out on Top. Retrieved from New York: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/how-the-worlds-best-performing-school-systems-come-out-on-top

Gronqvist, E., & Vlachos, J. (2008). One size fits all? The effects of teacher cognitive and non-cognitive abilities on student achievement. Retrieved from Stockholm, Sweden: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1311222

Hanushek, E. A., & Woessmann, L. (2010). The High Cost of Low Educational Performance: The Long-run Economic Impact of Improving PISA Outcomes. Retrieved from Paris: http://books.google.com/books?id=k7AGPo0NvfYC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=hanushek+pisa+gdp&source=bl&ots=2gCfzF-f1_&sig=wwe0XLL5EblVWK9e7RJfb5MyhIU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MLPCUqaOD8-JogS6v4C4Bw&ved=0CGcQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=hanushek%20pisa%20gdp&f=false

NCES. (2023). Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/index.asp

OECD. (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume III): What School Life Means for Students’ Lives. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1787/acd78851-en.

Tucker, M. (Ed.) (2011). Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems. Boston: Harvard Education Press.

Zhao, Y. (2009). Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Zhao, Y. (2012a, December 11). Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?  Retrieved from http://zhaolearning.com/2012/12/11/numbers-can-lie-what-timss-and-pisa-truly-tell-us-if-anything/

Zhao, Y. (2012b). World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Zhao, Y. (2014). Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Zhao, Y. (2018a). Shifting the Education Paradigm: Why International Borrowing Is No Longer Sufficient for Improving Education in China. ECNU Review of Education, 1(1), 76-106. 

Zhao, Y. (2018b). What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Zhao, Y. (2020). Two decades of havoc: A synthesis of criticism against PISA. Journal of Educational Change, 1-22. doi:10.1007/s10833-019-09367-x

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, International, Standardized Testing
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