Trump, World Leaders Neglect Lessons from Arab Spring Revolutions: Empower the Peoples of the World4/5/2017 Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi embodies the failure of the Arab Spring Revolutions, which took a backseat to growing regional instability and the threat of terrorism. President al-Sisi was elected in an ill-democratic election that excluded competitive alternatives and occurred after then-General al-Sisi overthrew Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi in a military coup that resulted from his attempt to use the fruits of a hurriedly organized election, which gave little time for viable, more representative candidates to establish themselves, to institute Sharia over democracy. Al-Sisi, who has continually proven himself to be an oppressive and brutal leader, is simply a return to the pre-Arab Spring government that was once headed by the ousted Hosni Mubarak. Trump’s very personal, and public, embrace of al-Sisi signals the formal return to the US foreign policy, which prioritizes military and economics interests above American’s democratic values and aspirations.
The Islamic State is considered the top US National Security threat by the Trump Administration. Globalized terrorism, which includes far more organizations than IS and goes beyond Islamic jihad, is a common threat to all the governments and Peoples of the world. The spread of IS was, however, made possible by the corruption-rooted incompetence of the Iraqi military and the Syrian Civil War. The Syrian Civil War was, in turn, part of the Arab Spring Revolutions, which were the direct consequence of oppressive, unresponsive governments neglecting and abusing the Peoples of the region for decades. The US may not have supported Syria’s Assad, but it has supported authoritarian regimes and their oppression of their own Peoples. In renewing America’s support of this kind of governance, which the Obama Administration leaned away from before somewhat embracing the practical need to establish working relationships with these governments, the Trump Administration leads the failure of the world to learn from the Arab Spring Revolutions.
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Education has long been promoted as the primary means to uplift and empower people by advocates from across the political spectrum. In response to poor student performance, school choice has been promoted by a wide range of reformists and privatization advocates as a means to empower students whose futures are dimmed by poorly performing public schools. As the March 29th keynote speaker of the Brookings Institute, Trump Administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos revived calls to use education and choice to empower young Americans while framing the question of public or private as an issue of success instead of an issue of government’s role in education. Although success certainly does trump the question of private or public, as well as nonprofit or for-profit, school choice is not the only, or necessarily the most effective, means of empowering students and parents in their quest for a better education.
Choice can be a powerful force when a critical mass of students and parents choose to abandon one institution for another. Because success in education and the ability to seize opportunities depends on a multitude of variables, there must be an adequate number of choices for competition to have a meaningful and constructive impact on the quality of the choices available. With that in mind, the Achilles Heel of competitions has always been the tendency for unsustainable, degenerative competition to eliminate alternatives and, eventually, yield ineffective private monopolies, which crush fledgling competitors and tend to be far less responsive to public opinion than existing public controlled monopolies. As such, more than school choice is needed to empower students in their pursuit of an education that will allow them to learn and thrive beyond their school years. |
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April 2020
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