Chicago’s Coppers plan for Nato Fascism Chicago police are planning a range of tactics — some old, some new — to control protests outside the NATO summit scheduled for May 20 and 21. A look at some crowd-control techniques and the department’s position on them:   http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/chicago-police-to-deploy-range-of-protest-tactics-at-upcoming-summit-of-nato-leaders/2012/05/11/gIQA3BblIU_story.html

Congratulations to Ravi Kumar for the edited edition

Poland–unionists kidnap parliament Hundreds of Polish trade union members protesting against plans to raise the retirement age chained together barriers meant to keep them out of Parliament on Friday, locking lawmakers in for more than an hour. “We will decide when they will leave,”     http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/world/europe/poland-unionists-protest-new-retirement-age.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Collection of Rouge Forum Videos from RF/AERA http://www.youtube.com/user/iceschannel

Rouge Forum Keynoter Paul Street on the “Occupy” Phenomenom Eager to find and amplify signs of mass radical potential in a period when the capitalist rich are ever more clearly destroying democracy and the Earth – the chances for a decent future –we on the United States left are understandably prone to underestimate the ideological power of the ruling class. Recently, for example, a comrade sent me a link and suggested that I look at, and join him in celebrating, a December 2011 Pew Research Center opinion survey showing that nearly two-thirds of the American people think there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor. The percentage of Americans who think this has apparently risen 19 points since 2009.
Pew attributes part of this public opinion to the success of the Occupy Movement in putting the problem of economic inequality into the political and media culture.[1] So does my correspondent, quite eagerly. I’m pretty sure they are right about that.
Identifying a Phenomenon v. Opposing It
But so what? Perceiving that strong class conflict exists is simply not the same as thinking that America’s harsh class inequality (see below) is a problem that should be overcome and undone through reform and/or revolution. As Pew noted in the online write-up of its aforementioned survey, rising perceptions of class conflict do not necessarily mean increasing grievances toward the rich or support for measures to reduce inequality. In fact, as Pew staffer Rich Morin added, “a recent Gallup survey found that a smaller share of the public believes that income inequality is a problem ‘that needs to be fixed’ than held this belief in 1998 (45% vs. 52%):”[2]   http://www.zcommunications.org/left-educational-tasks-in-a-capital-occupied-nation-by-paul-street

San Francisco School Workers vote to strike, sometime…. San Francisco Unified School District teachers have voted to authorize a strike in response to a stalemate in contract negotiations with the district, union officials said Friday.
About 97 percent of teachers on Thursday night approved the strike vote, according to Matthew Hardy, a spokesman for the union United Educators of San Francisco.
The vote, according to Hardy, is the first part in a two-step process, and teachers would need to vote a second time before going out on strike.     http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/education/sf-teachers-overwhelming-vote-strike/nN4Wn/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

A note to farcical school reformers from the Moor A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.
We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.     http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

Systematically gutting the Capitalist schools of California The share of California high school graduates enrolling in the University of California and the California State University declined by 20 percent from 2007 to 2010, a new study has found.
San Diego County had the largest drop among the state’s more populous counties, with a 25 percent decline in graduates enrolling in the two systems.
The report by the Public Policy Institute of California blames the decrease on reductions in state funding for higher education.
The report — “Defunding Higher Education: What are the Effects on College Enrollment?” — notes that the university systems have cut courses, programs and services in response to funding cuts, while also capping enrollment at more desirable campuses.
Another barrier to enrollment is the sharp increase in tuition at UC and CSU in recent years, according to the report. In fall 2007, 21.9 percent of the state’s high school graduates enrolled in UC or CSU. By fall 2010, that number had declined to 17.8 percent. Among the state’s best prepared high school graduates — those that completed a college prep curriculum — the number decline was even greater: 67.5 percent in 2007 to 54.9 percent in 2010.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/09/high-school-grad-enrollment-rates-drop-at-uc-csu/

After Pink Slips to the Entire Teaching force, Detroit Hires principals, and TFA, for bad bank district Covington said he was unable Friday morning to disclose how many students have enrolled for EAA schools. EAA officials have said they hope about 12,000 students will leave DPS schools and be counted as students in the new authority.
Covington said the principals will begin the teacher selection process today and continue interviews on May 19 and June 2, 16 and 23.
An estimated 500 teachers will need to be hired for the 16 EAA schools. Covington said about 1,100 have applied for jobs. The district has signed a contract with Teach for America for about 200 teachers, officials said.
The new principals declined to speak Friday, based on a request by EAA officials.
Students attending the new school district can expect longer school days, a longer school year and each will get an individualized education plan.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120511/SCHOOLS/205110428/1026/schools/Principals-named-Michigan-s-new-recovery-school-district

Tucson–the MAS fight is still on! Sean Arce may not have a job anymore, but he’s still going to defend the program he used to direct. Arce, the former director of Tucson Unified School District’s now-suspended Mexican American Studies program, was fired earlier this month in the latest crackdown on the program in what has become a years-long saga over the fate of the popular program.   Sean Arce may not have a job anymore, but he’s still going to defend the program he used to direct. Arce, the former director of Tucson Unified School District’s now-suspended Mexican American Studies program, was fired earlier this month in the latest crackdown on the program in what has become a years-long saga over the fate of the popular program.

Phd’s on the Aid “I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.
That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.
“I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,” she says.  http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/

A Unit on the War on Vietnam http://www.richgibson.com/vietnam/

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

So Long, Iraqi Coppers. In the face of spiraling costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place, the State Department has slashed — and may jettison entirely by the end of the year — a multibillion-dollar police training program that was to have been the centerpiece of a hugely expanded civilian mission here.  What was originally envisioned as a training cadre of about 350 American law enforcement officers was quickly scaled back to 190 and then to 100. The latest restructuring calls for 50 advisers, but most experts and even some State Department officials say even they may be withdrawn by the end of this year.
The training effort, which began in October and has already cost $500 million, was conceived of as the largest component of a mission billed as the most ambitious American aid effort since the Marshall Plan. Instead, it has emerged as the latest high-profile example of the waning American influence here following the military withdrawal, and it reflects a costly miscalculation on the part of American officials, who did not count on the Iraqi government to assert its sovereignty so aggressively.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/world/middleeast/us-may-scrap-costly-effort-to-train-iraqi-police.html?ref=global-home

Afghan Commanders to NATO, the Bartleby Maneuver: “No. We Prefer Not to” Afghan commanders have refused more than a dozen times within the past two months to act on U.S. intelligence regarding high-level insurgents, arguing that night-time operations to target the men would result in civilian casualties, Afghan officials say.
The defiance highlights the shift underway in Afghanistan as Afghan commanders make use of their newfound power to veto operations proposed by their NATO counterparts.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/afghan-commanders-show-new-defiance-in-dealings-with-americans/2012/05/11/gIQAMdNTHU_story.html

Chesepeake Boss took 1.1 billion in Unreported Loans McClendon has borrowed as much as $1.1 billion in the last three years by pledging his stake in the company’s oil and natural gas wells as collateral, documents reviewed by Reuters show.
The loans were made through three companies controlled by McClendon that list Chesapeake’s headquarters as their address. The money is being used to help finance what could be a lucrative perk of his job – the opportunity to buy into the very same well stakes that he is using as collateral for the borrowings.   http://world.einnews.com/article/91526543/?promo=800&utm_source=MailingList&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Copy+of+Breaking+News%3A+world16+-+tuesday

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, to Hank Paulson, begging Dimon to help the US government in 2008, on the verge of government collapse–”Hank, I would do anything for the United States—but not at the expense of JP Morgan,” has now misplaced 2 billion dollars. Oops. Bad on Him. Dimon had to face stock analysts and reporters on Thursday and confess to a “flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored” trading strategy that lost a surprise $2 billion.The revelation caused traders to shave almost 10 percent off JPMorgan’s stock price the following day and brought a shower of complaints from industry observers and lawmakers who said banks needed tighter scrutiny.
Making the black eye worse for Dimon, the loss came in derivatives trading, the complex financial maneuvering that — on a much greater scale — led to large losses and dissolved banks during the financial crisis.
Dimon “staked so much of his reputation on creating this perception of being the ultimate, infallible risk manager,” said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who is now a professor at MIT. “And along comes this huge mistake.”   http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/markets/dimon-praised-after-financial-crisis-suddenly-finds-himself-with-a-2-billion-black-eye/2012/05/12/gIQARuOQKU_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop

California over the Cliff, or Brown scheme to Raise Taxes? Gov. Jerry Brown announced on Saturday that the state’s deficit has ballooned to $16 billion, a huge increase over his $9.2-billion estimate in January.
The bigger deficit is a significant setback for California, which has struggled to turn the page on a devastating budget crisis. Brown, who announced the deficit on YouTube, is expected to outline his full budget proposal on Monday in Sacramento.
“This means we will have to go much further, and make cuts far greater, than I asked for at the beginning of the year,” Brown said in the video.     http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/05/california-budget-jerry-brown.html

Nearly 100 thousand Californians lose UCB About 93,000 Californians are scheduled to have their extended federal unemployment benefits cut off Saturday because the state is no longer eligible for the long-term aid.
A drop in the state’s unemployment rate to 11 percent — a tenth of a percent above its lowest mark in three years — is triggering the cutoff.    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/09/unemployment-benefits-abruptly-cut-100k-california/

Who are those guys anyway? 2 more Afghan troops kill NATO troops Two British NATO troops were killed by two men in Afghan police uniforms in southern Afghanistan Saturday, in what has become a near daily occurrence of Afghans shooting their Western trainers.   http://news.antiwar.com/2012/05/12/men-in-afghan-uniforms-kill-2-more-nato-soldiers/

Too Much. The Scream for 119.9 mil and more A version of Edvard Munch’s iconic 1895 painting, The Scream, sold at auction in New York last week for $119.9 million, an all-time art auction record. The bidding took 12 minutes, not counting the cheering when the hammer fell. Cheers for over-the-top indulging? Sometimes you just want to you-know-what.
But sometimes we can’t scream. On Capitol Hill this week, Politico reports, the House Budget Committee will be putting “the final touches” on an appropriations package that denies jobless Americans unemployment benefits “until they spend down their cash savings below $2,000.” Scream at that in the Budget Committee chambers, and you’ll be thrown out on your ear.
Sometimes, on the other hand, we can just be too dumbfounded to scream. A mega millionaire who made his fortune playing private equity games with Mitt Romney at Bain Capital has a new book out. His theme: The more unequal America gets, the better life gets for everybody!
We have more on this mega millionaire — and lots of his super-rich pals — in this week’s Too Much. Also this week: some constructive alternatives to screaming.

Emerging Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Capitalism has produced a world in which we must worry that a man with a bomb in his crotch will blow up our plane in order to get 1000 virgins—but he is a cop! What would Freud say? The CIA takedown of an Al Qaeda plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner involved an international sting operation with a double agent tricking terrorists into handing over a prized possession: a new bomb purportedly designed to slip through airport security.
U.S. officials Tuesday described an operation in which Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, working closely with the CIA, used an informant to pose as a would-be suicide bomber. His job was to persuade Al Qaeda bomb makers in Yemen to give him the bomb.
After weeks operating undercover in Yemen, the double agent arranged to deliver the device and a trove of vital intelligence to U.S. and other authorities waiting in another country, officials said. He is now safely out of Yemen.     http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-bomb-plot-20120509,0,4461116.story

Election in Mexico–choose one head or another of the same snake. Americans take note It was, in a manner of speaking, the biggest moment of Sunday night’s presidential debate in Mexico.
To mark the debate’s start, a stunning, undeniably well-endowed model took the floor, smiling silently and carrying a box with four pieces of paper in it that candidates drew to see who went first.
The candidates managed a straight face, but at first sight of her, dozens of journalists inside the debate press room at Mexico City’s World Trade Center gasped and jeered.
The woman, identified later as a model and former playmate for Mexican Playboy, Julia Orayen, almost immediately became a trending topic on Twitter.
Orayen was serving as an edecan, a role that has long been traditional to formal political, business, or entertainment events in Mexico.   http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/mexico-debate-edecan-model-woman-twitter.html

Greek Nazis Made Gains Election advertisements for Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party called for “taking the dirt out of the country,” “cleaning up Athens” and planting landmines along the borders to stop illegal immigrants from crossing in.
On Sunday, Golden Dawn won enough votes to earn seats in the Parliament, and now Greeks – and the estimated 1 million foreign immigrants here – are bracing to see how the party, with its swastika-like logo and the black-shirted toughs who come to its rallies, will try to commandeer the debate.   http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/05/07/148044/neo-nazi-party-plots-rise-as-first.html

The Magical Mystery Tour

20 thousand mystified fanatics celebrate football suicide while Chargers demand a free stadium A crowd estimated at about 20,000 rocked Qualcomm Stadium as it listened to and sometimes participated in tributes to Seau.
“I don’t believe there has ever been a player in the National Football League that has played in a city like San Diego that has done more for that city than what Junior Seau has done for San Diego,” said Bobby Ross, who coached the Chargers from 1992 to ‘96.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/11/fans-friends-chargers-honor-seau-stadium/

So Long Maurice Sendak, Dedicated Anti-fascist intellectual Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/maurice-sendak-childrens-author-dies-at-83.html?_r=4

Happy Birthday Karl Marx! May 5.

Happy Mayday!

Never Forget! Dien Bien Phu May 1954

Workers Rise In Brazil — The revolt here on the banks of the Madeira River, the Amazon’s largest tributary, flared after sunset. At the simmering end of a 26-day strike by 17,000 workers last month, a faction of laborers who were furious over wages and living conditions began setting fire to the construction site at the Jirau Dam.   Throughout the night, they burned more than 30 structures to the ground and looted company stores, capturing the mayhem on their own cellphone cameras, before firefighters extinguished the blazes. The authorities in Brasília flew in hundreds of troops from an elite force to quell the unrest.
Men in camouflage fatigues still patrol the sprawling work site, reflecting a dilemma for Brazil’s leaders. Even as they move to tap one of the world’s last great reserves of hydroelectric power, the Amazon basin, strikes and worker uprisings at the biggest projects are producing delays and cost overruns.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/world/americas/brazils-rush-to-develop-hydroelectric-power-brings-unrest.html?ref=global-home

The Little Red Schoolhouse

We shall show that the historical development of the educational system reflects a counterpoint of reproduction and contradiction. As we have already seen, capitalist economic development leads to continual shifts in the social relationships of production and the attendant class structure. These social relationships have involved class conflicts which, throughout U.S. history. have periodically changed in both form and content. In important respects the educational system has served to defuse and attenuate these conflicts. Thus the changing character of social conflict, rooted in shifts in the class structure and in other relations of power and privilege has resulted in periodic reorganizations of educational institutions. At the same time the educational system has evolved in ways which intensify and politicize the basic contradictions and conflicts of capitalist society.    http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/education/bg/bg-ch-5.html

Endemic Corruption in Capitalist Schools–another Test Scam A major tutoring company failed the honesty test, authorities charged yesterday.
The feds slapped The Princeton Review with a civil suit that accuses the test-prep giant of scamming millions of dollars through a taxpayer-funded after-school program for needy kids.
Court papers say company workers routinely falsified documents to fraudulently boost attendance at its Supplemental Educational Services tutoring classes at “underperforming” schools.
Under the program, The Princeton Review was paid between $35 and $75 an hour for each student under terms of the No Child Left Behind Act, the suit says.   But between 2006 and 2010, “most, if not all, of the monthly invoices” allegedly contained false information, and TPR billed the city Department of Education for “thousands of hours of tutoring services that Princeton Review never actually provided.”
According to the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office, evidence in the case includes “obvious” forgeries of student signatures, including several where they “change in appearance from class to class,” and another in which a child’s name was misspelled “Donate” instead of Dontae.   http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/test_aid_firm_cheat_shock_ouyjDAXQRj6UMWxJ2jY1hL

A Better Way to Train Robots–New Online Testing in Michigan, home of the Moronic MEAP In two years, Michigan’s students will take a test in which they’ll succeed once they start getting half the questions wrong.
Michigan, along with more than two dozen states, is radically changing how it measures student progress, ditching paper and pencil tests for online-only assessments that they hope will be more comprehensive and allow for greater classroom help.
A major component: Tests that get harder when students get the correct answer and easier when they get the wrong one. The goal is to better define the student’s achievement level.
State education officials this week outlined the changes, which will see Michigan working with 26 other states to develop the tests. They now are scheduled to begin in the 2014-15 school year. The Michigan Education Assessment Program will be discontinued.    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120504/METRO/205040371/1026/schools/Online-tests-works-assess-student-progress

Assaulting the Poor, UCSD Kills Community College Guarantee The UC San Diego program that guarantees transfer admission to community college students who meet certain requirements will come to an end in 2014, campus officials have decided.
They said explosive growth in the number applications under the program, coupled with sharp cuts in state funding for the University of California, have threatened to swamp the campus.
Administrators and students at area community colleges said the decision will disproportionally harm disadvantaged students.
“If this decision is final … that pathway, that gateway will be closed to many students from our local colleges. We think this decision is shortsighted,” said Francisco Rodriguez, superintendent/president of MiraCosta Community College District.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/01/ucsd-ends-community-college-transfer-program/

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

US Returns to Drone Bombing Pakistan The United States resumed drone missile strikes against Pakistan-based militants Sunday for the first time since the nation’s parliament demanded an end to such attacks as one of several conditions for fully normalizing relations with the United States.
The strikes, which have for years infuriated the Pakistani public, killed four al-Qaeda-linked fighters in a girls’ school they had taken over in the North Warizistan tribal agency, security officials there said.   ..Last week, Pakistan told U.S. negotiators after two days of talks in Islamabad that it would not reopen its territory to Afghanistan-bound NATO supply convoys unless the United States unconditionally apologized for November air attacks that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border. Although the U.S. has expressed regret for the killings, which it called accidental, the Pentagon says both sides share blame.
Washington has made clear that an apology will not be forthcoming,    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/us-drone-strikes-resume-in-pakistan-action-may-complicate-vital-negotiations/2012/04/29/gIQAIprqpT_story.html

From Bill Blum What you need to succeed is sincerity, and if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made. (Old Hollywood axiom)
“A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.” — President Ronald Reagan, 1987 1
On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.
Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?
Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?
Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?    http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer105.html

Praetorian Guard Wants to be MUCH Bigger and Attack the World A top U.S. commander is seeking authority to expand clandestine operations against militants and insurgencies around the globe, a sign of shifting Pentagon tactics and priorities after a grueling decade of large-scale wars.
Adm. William H. McRaven, a Navy SEAL and commander of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, has developed plans that would provide far-reaching new powers to make special operations units “the force of choice” against “emerging threats” over the next decade, internal Defense Department documents show.
America’s secret military forces have grown dramatically over the last decade as the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have increasingly merged missions, including drone strikes and counter-terrorism operations.
But some Pentagon officials and outside experts warn that giving secret soldiers too much additional authority outside the normal chain of command might lead to abuses.
The little-known Special Operations Command, which McRaven heads from his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., oversees more than 60,000 military personnel and civilians.
The command includes Army Green Berets who specialize in training foreign military forces; Ranger light infantry units; Navy SEALs; Air Force squadrons flying drones and aerial gunships; and the Pentagon’s most elite combat units, Delta Force and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, known as DEVGRU,   …But the draft plans appear to challenge assertions by Obama administration officials that the threat from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups has significantly diminished after a decade of unrelenting pressure by America and its allies.
“Non-state actors, such as [Al Qaeda], will increasingly threaten our national security,” notes an unsigned staff memo attached to the documents. “They will establish bases in places not under sovereign control. Moving easily across political boundaries and merging with indigenous populations, these non-state actors will seek to exploit our vulnerabilities.”
The draft plans do not specify where special operations would be increased, but officers and officials familiar with Pentagon thinking say it probably would include remote and chaotic areas of the Middle East, such as Yemen, parts of northern Africa stretching from Somalia to Nigeria and the Maghreb, and to a lesser extent, parts of Asia and Latin America….Special operations forces already are deployed in at least 71 countries, although most are involved in training.     http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-special-forces-20120505,0,5482146.story

Below, Haqqani, Drug Lord, US described terrorist, former White House Guest

A Whiff of Vietnam Napalm–the bogus US and Afghan Strategic Partnership In addition to recognizing the progress that has been made together over the past 10 years, the Strategic Partnership Agreement includes mutual commitments in the areas of:
Protecting and Promoting Shared Democratic Values
Advancing Long-Term Security
Reinforcing Regional Security and Cooperation
Social and Economic Development
Strengthening Afghan Institutions and Governance  (plus three billion dollars a year to Karzai)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/01/fact-sheet-us-afghanistan-strategic-partnership-agreement

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/2012.06.01u.s.-afghanistanspasignedtext.pdf

US Wanders away from 80 million dollar Afghan Compound After signing a 10-year lease and spending more than $80 million on a site envisioned as the United States’ diplomatic hub in northern Afghanistan, American officials say they have abandoned their plans, deeming the location for the proposed compound too dangerous.
Eager to raise an American flag and open a consulate in a bustling downtown district of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sherif, officials in 2009 sought waivers to stringent State Department building rules and overlooked significant security problems at the site, documents show. The problems included relying on local building techniques that made the compound vulnerable to a car bombing, according to an assessment by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that was obtained by The Washington Post.   The decision to give up on the site is the clearest sign to date that, as the U.S.-led military coalition starts to draw down troops amid mounting security concerns, American diplomats are being forced to reassess how to safely keep a viable presence in Afghanistan. The plan for the Mazar-e Sherif consulate, as laid out in a previously undisclosed diplomatic memorandum, is a cautionary tale of wishful thinking, poor planning and the type of stark choices the U.S. government will have to make in coming years as it tries to wind down its role in the war.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/citing-security-us-abandons-consulate-site-in-afghanistan/2012/05/05/gIQA9ZkD4T_story.html

Panetta to Troops–Tho We taught you to Kill Kill Kill, don’t forget to be nice Last month, The Times reported that soldiers serving with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan in 2010 posed with the body parts of suicide bombers. The Times published a photograph showing soldiers standing with Afghan police who were holding up dismembered legs and another showing a soldier with a dead insurgent’s hand on his shoulder.
The photographs were among 18 provided to The Times by a soldier who said he hoped that publication would call attention to what he described as a lack of discipline and leadership in the unit that he felt had compromised soldiers’ safety.
In February, U.S. troops burned copies of the Koran at a base in Afghanistan. The incident, apparently the result of a miscommunication, inflamed emotions in the country and sparked more than a week of deadly riots. In January, a video became public that showed Marines urinating on the bodies of Afghan insurgents.
U.S. officials have denounced the conduct http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-panetta-troops-20120505,0,5233840.story

UC Bosses to Cops (usually ex-military)–Mix some carrots with those Sticks (and gas, spray, etc) University of California police and administrators should use mediation instead of confrontation when dealing with most student protests, but pepper spray might remain a necessary tool of last resort, according to a UC draft report on campus civil disobedience.
The new study, released Friday, urged that campus police be trained to defuse potentially volatile situations and that UC officials not even mobilize police at peaceful demonstrations. In the rare instances when force is required, the report recommended the campus police try “hands-on pain compliance” such as arm twisting or pressure points “before pepper spray or batons whenever feasible.”
However, the high-ranking administrators who led the study said that UC should not ban pepper spray because more national research is needed to compare its health and injury risks to those of batons and Tasers      http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-0505-uc-protest-20120505,0,7344433.story

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

March Jobs Report–massive constant unemployment but productivity  (speed of line) up The country’s employers added a disappointing 120,000 jobs in March, about half the net gains posted in each of the preceding three months. The unemployment rate, which comes from a separate survey of households rather than employers, slipped to 8.2 percent, from 8.3 percent, as a smaller portion of the population looked for work.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/business/economy/us-added-only-120000-jobs-in-march-report-shows.html?pagewanted=all

More Massive Job Losses in Euro Zone Unemployment in the euro zone rose to a new high in March, according to figures released on Wednesday. The data came a few days before crucial elections in France and Greece, and it is likely to prompt more intense calls for an easing of Europe’s austerity drive.
Unemployment in the 17 countries that belong to the euro zone rose to 10.9 percent in March from 10.8 percent in February, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency. In March 2011, the rate was 9.9 percent, a number that illustrates the deterioration of the region’s economy in the last year.
The monthly increase, the 11th in a row, translates into more than 17 million jobless people, and it is in line with other recent indicators showing that the euro zone economy remains distressed. Manufacturing in the region hit a 34-month low in April, according to a survey of purchasing managers released Wednesday by the research firm Markit. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/business/global/unemployment-at-record-high-in-euro-zone.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Profitable Government Motors, Symbol of the Corporate State, Pays Zero Taxes General Motors Co., which has earned more than $13 billion since 2009, said Thursday its worldwide tax rate will increase to as much as 13 percent.
But the Detroit automaker, which reported $1 billion in profits for the first three months of the year, has legally avoided paying U.S. federal income taxes since exiting bankruptcy. And GM likely will pay no income taxes for many more years.
A series of Treasury Department rulings since 2008 let GM use $18 billion in losses — from the “old GM” that was left behind in bankruptcy — to offset any profits.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120504/AUTO0103/205040378/GM-rakes-big-profits-avoids-U-S-income-tax?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Apple’s Tax Dodge with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.
Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.
California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

above Detroit School in ruins

More Voyeurs, or Real Investigators, Take on the Racist Organized decay of Detroit now native filmmakers from the Detroit region are offering their own take on the city’s plight, hoping to provide a more nuanced and insightful examination than what outsiders have contributed. Several recent films, with sharply different approaches, unflinchingly tackle Detroit’s problems without indulging in what has come to be called “ruin porn” or ignoring the residents’ tenacity and resilience.
“There are of course a lot of urban areas in the world and North America that are undergoing similar kinds of problems,” said Elliot Wilhelm, the curator of film and video at the Detroit Institute of Art. “But Detroit has for some time now been used as a poster child for what can go wrong, and at the same time, it’s rapidly becoming a poster child for what kind of creative solutions can be found.”   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/movies/filmmakers-from-detroit-take-their-own-looks-at-the-city.html?_r=1

India Stagnating and Inequality booming (wake up Naxalites!) It may not even look like a slowdown because by developed standards, India’s growth — estimated by the International Monetary Fund at 6.9 percent for 2012 — is still strong. But a slowdown it is: the economy has decelerated from projected rates of more than 8 percent, and negative momentum may bring a further decline. The government reported year-over-year growth in the October-through-December quarter of only 6.1 percent.
What is disturbing is that much of the decline in the growth rate is distributed unevenly, with the greatest burden falling on the poor. If the slower rate continues or worsens, many millions of Indians, for another generation, will fail to rise above extreme penury and want. The problems of the euro zone are a pittance by comparison.
China commands more attention, but Scott B. Sumner, the Bentley College economist, has pointed out it is India that is likely to end up as the world’s largest economy by the next century. China’s population is likely to peak relatively soon while India’s will continue to grow, so under even modestly optimistic projections the Indian economy will be No. 1 in terms of total size.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/business/economic-view-forget-europe-worry-about-india.html?ref=global-home

In the Absence of a Mass, Class Conscious, Revo Movement: Barbarism Another 23 bodies were discovered Friday in the embattled border city of Nuevo Laredo, including five men and four women hanging from a highway overpass, authorities said.
The grisly surge in violence in Nuevo Laredo, across the river from Laredo, Texas, appears to be part of a battle between Mexico’s two largest drug-trafficking gangs for control of the important land corridor.
The nine bodies dangling from the overpass were bloody, some were blindfolded, and, according to authorities, they bore signs of torture. The victims carried no identification but appeared to be between 25 and 30 years old, the state prosecutor’s office said.
A banner hanging alongside them contained a profanity-laden message in which one drug gang, possibly the Zetas, threatens to eliminate another for “heating up the plaza” — that is, provoking the kind of violence that could attract federal troops.
The Zetas have controlled the area, but a faction of the powerful Sinaloa cartel is moving to challenge them and is believed responsible for a car bomb detonated outside police headquarters last month.
Also Friday in Nuevo Laredo, 14 headless bodies were found in black garbage bags in a truck parked outside a government customs building, authorities said. The heads were later found in three ice chests near City Hall. All of these dead were men, also between the ages of 25 and 30. Similarly, a little more than two weeks ago, 14 other dismembered bodies were found near City Hall.
Much of Mexico, meanwhile, remained outraged over the killing of four current or former journalists in less than a week in the coastal state of Veracruz.   http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/23-killed-mexican-border-city-decapitated-hanging-bridge-nuevo-laredo.html

The Horrible Hum From Detroit’s Vile Zug Isle Drives Windsor Nuts

Solidarity Fornever

While more than Half their members were excised, Detroit Fed of teachers did nothing, but cut off dues check off and they go nuts   http://mi.aft.org/dft231/index.cfm?action=downloadasset&assetid=796cd29f-61ad-475f-9172-53ce4b9d28ad

Ca Faculty Union Approves Fake Strike Vote (nothing to distract the Obamagogue vote soon) California State University faculty members have voted overwhelmingly to authorize their leaders to call a strike if contract negotiations cannot be resolved to their satisfaction.
Ninety-five percent of those casting ballots in person on one of the system’s 23 campuses or online between April 16 and 27 voted to authorize a strike.
A spokeswoman for the California Faculty Association said 12,501 instructors, librarians and coaches were eligible to vote. Of those, 8,750 cast ballots.
A strike, if it comes, would likely occur in the fall, with rolling two-day actions across all the system’s campuses over a period of weeks.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/may/02/csu-faculty-members-authorize-strike-call/

Detroit AFL-CIO Loves Counterfeit Occupiers “We’re all in this together to support the 99%,” said Chris Michalakis, president of the metro Detroit AFL-CIO. “It’s good to see our friends in the Occupy movement support workers’ rights. We all got to help each other and fight back.”    http://www.freep.com/article/20120505/NEWS05/205050411/Occupy-Detroit-has-a-home-base-for-learning-organizing?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Remember May 4, 1970    http://www.may4.org/

E L Doctorow on the Four Phases of US Unexceptionalism PHASE FOUR
If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, decide that the police of any and all cities and towns and villages have the absolute authority to strip-search any person whom they, for whatever reason, put under arrest.
With this ruling, the reduction of America to unexceptionalism is complete.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/unexceptionalism-a-primer.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=doctorow&st=Search

John Edwards–Symbol of the Degenerate US Political Class (Setting aside Republican pole dancers) An interior designer testified Thursday about his role in funneling secret money from a reclusive millionaire to an aide of John Edwards’ in a scheme that included checks labeled for fake antique furniture purchases.
Bryan Huffman described, for example, receiving a $100,000 check from 101-year-old heiress Rachel “Bunny” Mellon with “Antique Charleston Table and Chairs” written in the memo line. It was part of an elaborate ruse to hide $725,000 intended for Edwards fr  om the Mellon family’s money managers by sending checks to the designer for a fake furniture business.      http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/former-adviser-recounts-john-edwards-wife-baring-chest-during-confrontation-about-affair/2012/05/02/gIQA4qhgxT_story.html

China–No Bo no Mo — Until recently, visitors who arrived at the urban planning exhibition hall here were greeted with a high-tech shrine to Bo Xilai, who served as the municipality’s charismatic Communist Party chief. A video recounting Mr. Bo’s “smash black” crackdown on organized crime featured mug shots of gangsters emblazoned on tombstones. Maoist revolutionary songs blared from speakers in the “red culture” wing. Lasers zipped across the “honest government” gallery.  But in February, two days after Mr. Bo’s police chief, Wang Lijun, sought refuge in an American consulate, apparently with evidence of a murder plot hatched by Mr. Bo’s wife, the “smash black” exhibit shut its doors. The remaining galleries were closed last month after Mr. Bo was removed from his Communist Party posts in a widening corruption scandal that is roiling the Chinese government. Today, the entire floor is cordoned off.
The sudden demise of the exhibit reflects the headlong race under way to expunge all traces of Mr. Bo and his political fingerprints from the city he spent five years governing. In seeking to airbrush Mr. Bo out of public life, party mandarins in Beijing have dusted off a strategy perfected during the Cultural Revolution and further tweaked during the political purges that followed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
“There is a manual on how to delete the legacies of a fallen leader, and they’ve got it down to the smallest details,” said Minxin Pei, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.
The results have been swift and efficient. Residents say that just 15 hours after Mr. Bo’s ouster, Chongqing’s satellite television station, which he had required to broadcast only commercial-free “red culture” programming, began showing advertisements. Then came a media campaign meant to destroy his reputation.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/world/asia/in-old-tradition-china-races-to-erase-bo-xilais-legacy.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Spy vs Spy

The Old FBi Entrapment Scam THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.   facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.
When an Oregon college student, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, thought of using a car bomb to attack a festive Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving, with Mr. Mohamud in the passenger seat. To trigger the bomb the student punched a number into a cellphone and got no boom, only a bust.
This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?_r=1

Unmasked–The FBI’s Bridge Bomb Plot Snitch The paid informant who helped orchestrate the FBI sting that resulted in the arrest of five anarchists for allegedly plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge is a convicted felon who was arrested on bad check and theft charges in the midst of his cooperation with federal investigators, The Smoking Gun has learned.   Shaquille Azir, 39, was named in a pair of felony indictments filed in January in Cuyahoga County, according to court records. Azir, who TSG has identified as the informant in the federal bombing case, is accused in the indictments of passing bad checks on July 25, 2011 and December 22, 2011.
Azir, pictured in the mug shot at right, “has been working as a source for the FBI since July 20, 2011,” according to the U.S. District Court complaint filed yesterday against the alleged bomb plotters. Wearing a body recorder, Azir captured the five self-styled anarchists plotting to use C-4 explosive to take down a Cleveland-area bridge.
Azir arranged for the purchase of the C-4 from an undercover FBI agent. He also fronted the alleged conspirators money for the buy of the material, which had been rendered inert by federal investigators. If the bombing case goes to trial, defense lawyers will certainly portray the 6’ 5”, 350-pound Azir as the plot’s instigator, a snitch who pocketed the FBI’s money to help entrap the five defendants   http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/fbi-informant-shaquille-azir-756123

Those Raymond Davis (merc) Murders Reverberate Still The widow and mother-in-law of a Pakistani man killed by a C.I.A. contractor last year were killed Monday, apparently by the widow’s father, who may have feared that she would remarry and take the money she received as compensation with her, the police said. The families of the two men killed by the contractor, Raymond A. Davis, in January 2011 received hundreds of thousands of dollars of “blood money” in exchange for pardoning Mr. Davis, a common legal practice in Pakistan. Mr. Davis said he shot the two men because they tried to rob him. The United States denied paying compensation to the families, but many believe it was simply routed through Pakistani officials. Zohra Haider, the widow of one of the men, wanted to remarry and was supported by her mother, said a police officer, Athar Waheed. But her father, Shahzad Butt, apparently killed the two women because he was outraged that his daughter planned to remarry and take her money to a new household, Mr. Waheed said. He is still at large, the police said   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/world/asia/pakistan-blood-money-linked-to-widows-killing-police-say.html?_r=3&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The Magical Mystery Tour

Ireland’s Protector of Rapist Won’t Quit The Irish Catholic primate, Sean Brady, is under intense pressure to stand down over a child abuse row after further calls for his resignation were made by Ireland’s Foreign Minister and the editor of the influential newspaper The Irish Catholic.
Cardinal Brady is resisting demands that he step down after revelations on television this week that he failed to inform parents and police about a list of children who were being sexually abused by one of Ireland’s most notorious paedophile priests.
The leader of Ireland’s Catholics has refused to accept he should resign his position despite the scandal over a 1975 deal between a young boy abused by Father Brendan Smyth and the church which bought the young victim’s silence for decades.   A BBC investigation found the victim gave Cardinal Brady, who was a note-taker at the meeting where the deal was made, a list of names and addresses of children Smyth was abusing. Cardinal Brady, who was then a priest, did not inform the children’s parents or the police.
Sam Adair, one of those abused by Father Smyth after 1975, told Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE: ”The facts of the matter are that this man was a leading, skilled canon lawyer, highly paid and sought after, and promoted to the highest rank of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. He was a skilled canon lawyer; he was not a note-taker.”   http://www.smh.com.au/world/cardinal-in-child-abuse-conspiracy-urged-to-quit-20120504-1y44x.html

http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/

Hundreds of Detroit Youth Walkout from Schools and Start Freedom Schools Two of 100 Detroit Public Schools students suspended for walking out of school to protest district-wide downsizing and to demand a better education started a “Freedom School” on Friday, across the street from their high school.
Raychel Gafford and Freddie Burse, students at Western International High School, were each suspended for five days after they and 98 other students walked out of school on Wednesday and into nearby Clark Park in southwest Detroit.
The students said they were protesting the impending closure of Southwestern High School and inequitable conditions at schools, including overcrowded classrooms, inadequate textbooks and supplies, and what they describe as “low expectations” from teachers on their academic futures.
Gafford said the Freedom School is for all suspended students and will offer courses on several subjects, including social justice, hip-hop music and poetry workshops taught by community members, including a pair of university professors.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120427/SCHOOLS/204270424/1026/schools/Two-suspended-DPS-students-start-Freedom-School-

What We Can Do From Afar in Solidarity With Detroit Youth Dear Friends,
We need your help right away.
On Wednesday, April 25 in Detroit, hundreds of Western International
High School students walked out in solidarity with fellow students
from nearby Southwestern High School to protest the state-imposed
Emergency Manager’s decision to shut down Southwestern at the end of
the school year.
(http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120426/METRO01/204260493/1026/
schools/180-Detroit-high-school-students-suspended-after-protesting-
closures).
Students from both schools gathered peacefully in Clark Park in a
jubilant speak out and celebration of their demand for quality
education for all Detroit students.
Today at least 100 students (possibly more than 180) at Western
International High School and 20 students at Southwestern were
suspended-some for up to ten days-for the walk out. A large
proportion of those suspended are Latino, in a city where the
immigrant population is under constant assault over status issues.
Many of the youth and their families are fearful for what the near
term future will bring.
Consistent with their demand to receive a quality, relevant education,
students from both schools are forming the Southwest Detroit Freedom
School in Clark Park, which holds its first class this morning at
10:55 a.m. (consistent with the time of their joint walkouts).
(https://www.facebook.com/groups/390675970977100/?ref=ts#!/groups/
390675970977100/members/)
The students are now asking all of us, as their allies, to contact the
following Detroit Public Schools officials immediately to demand:
(1) that the suspensions of the Southwestern and Western International
High School students be rescinded;
(2) that public schools be kept open; and
(3) that spaces are created for students, families, and community
members to have legitimate dialogue about decisions concerning their
schools.

Roy S. Roberts, Emergency Manager, Detroit Public Schools
Phone: (313) 870-3772
Fax: (313) 870-3726

Steve Wasko, DPS Chief Communications Officer
steven.wasko@detroitk12.org
Phone: (313) 873-4892
Fax: (313) 873-4565

Karen Ridgeway, DPS Superintendent of Academics
karen.ridgeway@detroitk12.org
Phone: (313) 576-0050
Fax: (313) 873-6446 Please share and forward this message broadly.
Best,
Tom Pedroni

The Detroit Freedom School Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/groups/390675970977100/

More on Detroit Suspensions (schools closed by civil strife are superior to open, normal, schools) Between 100 and 180 students were suspended Thursday for walking out of Western International High School to protest school closures and school conditions .
“Their cellphones were taken from them and messages and numbers were gone through by security. The police deleted numbers and messages from the students’ phones,” Detroit Board of Education member Elena Herrada said in an email.
Herrada said about 180 students were suspended and the suspensions range from one day to two weeks.
DPS spokesman Steve Wasko said about 100 students were suspended for five days. He wasn’t immediately able to verify Thursday night if student phones were checked as part of school policies.  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120426/METRO01/204260493/1026/schools/180-Detroit-high-school-students-suspended-after-protesting-closures

Montreal Students’ Uprising Still Solid and Growing Despite Fascist Repression  (photo essay) http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/montreal-protest/

Why No News of the Quebec Uprisings? So, why haven’t you heard about this yet?
While the Quebec student strike is comparable in scale to student movements in Europe and Latin America, it is entirely unique in the context of Canada and the continental United States, which makes the absence of media coverage outside the province puzzling at best and disturbing at worst. As the veteran Canadian activist Judy Rebick observed in a recent rabble.ca column, “it is incredible that there has been almost no coverage of this extraordinary uprising of young people in Quebec in English Canada,”   http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-biggest-student-uprising-youve-never-heard-of

Bay Area Nurses Plan Mayday Strike
HOSPITAL CHAIN’S DEMAND FOR OVER 100 CUTS IN CARE, RN STANDARDS WHILE AMASSING HUGE PROFITS PROMPTS THIRD ONE-DAY RN STRIKE
With the wealthy Sutter Health corporation continuing to demand more than 100 sweeping reductions in patient care and nurses’ standards and workplace conditions, registered nurses at eight Northern California Sutter hospitals will hold a one-day strike May 1, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United announced today.
Some 4,500 RNs are affected by the planned walkout, which will occur at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center facilities in Berkeley and Oakland, Mills-Peninsula Health Services hospitals in Burlingame and San Mateo, Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, San Leandro Hospital, Sutter Delta in Antioch, Sutter Solano in Vallejo, Novato Community Hospital, and Sutter Lakeside.
Despite making over $4 billion in profits since 2007, and handing its chief executive Pat Fry a 215 percent pay hike to over $4 million a year, Sutter is demanding huge cuts for its RNs, many of which would pose risks to patient safety. Since the last strike in December, the corporate chain has refused to modify its massive call for cuts, and at several hospitals imposed reductions in standards for nurses and their families.
“As an RN at Sutter Delta Medical Center, I feel I need to go on strike for the safety of my patients,” said Sutter Delta RN Amy Black. “The medical center is attempting to take away sick leave, vacation time, and education time which effectively forces me to come to work sick, stressed, and not up to date on the latest advancements of my profession.”  http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/04/23/18711960.php

Beat The Tests–Post them to the Net Photos of California Standards Tests and the state’s high school exit exam are showing up on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The photos could lead to scores being invalidated for entire schools or prevent the state from using certain tests.   In the worst-case scenario, the photos could lead to invalidating test scores for entire schools or prevent the state from using certain tests. For now, officials have warned school districts to heighten test security and investigate breaches. Students are not allowed to have access to cellphones or other devices that can take pictures when the tests are administered.  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0428-test-cheating-20120428,0,44798.story

The Little Red Schoolhouse

How To Tell A Human Test Scorer from A Zombie Robot? Impossible! How to tell a Teacher who only teaches to test from a Zombie Robot? The Zombie Robot will soon be Paid more. Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, collected more than 16,000 middle school and high school test essays from six states that had been graded by humans. He then used automated systems developed by nine companies to score those essays.
Computer scoring produced “virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable,” according to a University of Akron news release.
“A Win for the Robo-Readers” is how an Inside Higher Ed blog post summed things up.
For people with a weakness for humans, there is more bad news. Graders working as quickly as they can — the Pearson education company expects readers to spend no more than two to three minutes per essay— might be capable of scoring 30 writing samples in an hour.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-used-to-grade-test-essays.html?_r=3&emc=eta1

Philly Closes 40 schools. Who cares? In what should be the biggest story of the week, the city of Philadelphia’s school system announced Tuesday that it expects to close 40 public schools next year and 64 by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of current enrollment to charter schools, the streets or wherever, and put thousands of experienced, well qualified teachers, often grounded in the communities where they teach, on the street.
Ominously, the shredding of Philadelphia’s public schools isn’t even news outside Philly. This correspondent would never have known about it save for a friend’s Facebook posting early this week. Corporate media in other cities don’t mention massive school closings, whether in Chicago, Atlanta, NYC, or in this case Philadelphia, perhaps so people won’t have given the issue much deep thought before the same crisis is manufactured in their town. Even inside Philadelphia the voices of actual parents, communities, students and teachers are shut out of most newspaper and broadcast accounts. http://thetrialbyfire.org/2012/04/25/why-isnt-closing-40-philadelphia-public-schools-national-news-where-is-the-black-political-class/

More on Atlanta Big Test Cheats and those Blue Ribbon Schools Among the highest honors bestowed by the U.S. Department of Education is the National Blue Ribbon School Award, which is based in large part on substantial increases in standardized test scores. An analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 27 of 605 public elementary and middle schools honored in 2009, 2010 and 2011 won despite statistically improbable gains in the five previous years.
The gains are measured as standard deviations above the mean score increase in each school’s state.
These schools had at least one class – an entire group of fourth-graders, for example – that improved by at least three standard deviations in one year. The odds of such a gain are one in 741. The odds of a gain of four standard deviations are one in 31,574. The odds of a gain of five standard deviations are one in 3,486,914. Gains of more than six standard deviations are infinitesimal and are considered virtually impossible.  http://www.ajc.com/news/list-of-blue-ribbon-1424560.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

” All this should be compared with numerous references by Marx and Engels to the example of the British labor movement, showing how industrial “property” leads to attempts “to buy the proletariat” (Briefwechsel, Vol. 1, p. 136).[3] to divert them from the struggle; how this prosperity in general “demoralizes the workers” (Vol. 2, p. 218); how the British proletariat becomes “bourgeoisified”—“this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie” Chartists (1866; Vol. 3, p. 305)[4]; how the British workers’ leaders are becoming a type midway between “a radical bourgeois and a worker” (in reference to Holyoak, Vol. 4, p. 209); how, owning to Britain’s monopoly, and as long as that monopoly lasts, “the British workingman will not budge” (Vol. 4, p. 433) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch05.htm

Still Secret Deal Handcuffs US to Corrupt Afghan Government for Ten Years After months of negotiations, the United States and Afghanistan completed drafts of a strategic partnership agreement on Sunday that pledges American support for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of combat troops at the end of 2014.   ..The agreement came despite a series of setbacks in Afghan-American relations, including the burning of Korans, the massacre of 16 civilians attributed to a lone Army sergeant, and the appearance of grisly photos of American soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/world/asia/us-and-afghanistan-reach-partnership-agreement.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&ref=global-home

US To Increase Drone Strikes In Yemen The White House has given the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon broader authority to carry out drone strikes in Yemen against terrorists who imperil the United States, reflecting rising concerns about the country as a safe haven for Al Qaeda, a senior administration official said Wednesday night.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/world/middleeast/us-to-step-up-drone-strikes-inside-yemen.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

US Fears China’s Military as all Sides Prep for WW3 NO MATTER how often China has emphasised the idea of a peaceful rise, the pace and nature of its military modernisation inevitably cause alarm. As America and the big European powers reduce their defence spending, China looks likely to maintain the past decade’s increases of about 12% a year. Even though its defence budget is less than a quarter the size of America’s today, China’s generals are ambitious. The country is on course to become the world’s largest military spender in just 20 years or so (see article).

Much of its effort is aimed at deterring America from intervening in a future crisis over Taiwan. China is investing heavily in “asymmetric capabilities” designed to blunt America’s once-overwhelming capacity to project power in the region. This “anti-access/area denial” approach includes thousands of accurate land-based ballistic and cruise missiles, modern jets with anti-ship missiles, a fleet of submarines (both conventionally and nuclear-powered), long-range radars and surveillance satellites, and cyber and space weapons intended to “blind” American forces. Most talked about is a new ballistic missile said to be able to put a manoeuvrable warhead onto the deck of an aircraft-carrier 2,700km (1,700 miles) out at sea.  China says all this is defensive, but its tactical doctrines emphasise striking first if it must. Accordingly, China aims to be able to launch disabling attacks on American bases in the western Pacific and push America’s carrier groups beyond what it calls the “first island chain”, sealing off the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and East China Sea inside an arc running from the Aleutians in the north to Borneo in the south. Were Taiwan to attempt formal secession from the mainland, China could launch a series of pre-emptive strikes to delay American intervention and raise its cost prohibitively.   http://www.economist.com/node/21552212

Runup to War, US redesigns Defense Department Intelligence (sic) Services The Pentagon is revamping its spy operations to focus on high-priority targets like Iran and China in a reorganization that reflects a shift away from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan that have dominated America’s security landscape for the past decade.   Under the plan approved last week by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, case officers from the new Defense Clandestine Service would work more closely with counterparts from the Central Intelligence Agency at a time when the military and spy agency are increasingly focused on similar threats.
“It will thicken our coverage across the board,” said a senior Defense Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss with a small group of reporters on Monday what he called a “realignment” of the military’s human espionage efforts.
Case officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency already secretly gather intelligence on a range of global issues — including terrorism and weapons proliferation — typically working out of C.I.A. stations in American embassies and undercover like their C.I.A. counterparts.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/asia/defense-department-plans-new-spy-service.html?_r=3&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

US/Pakistan Talks Break Down –Supply Routes Cut/Aid Halted–who is losing? The first concentrated high-level talks aimed at breaking a five-month diplomatic deadlock between the United States and Pakistan ended in failure on Friday over Pakistani demands for an unconditional apology from the Obama administration for an airstrike. The White House, angered by the recent spectacular Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, refuses to apologize.    The Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, left the Pakistani capital Friday night with no agreement after two days of discussions aimed at patching up the damage caused by the American airstrikes last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghanistan border.
Both sides insist that they are now ready to make up and restore an uneasy alliance that at its best offers support for American efforts in Afghanistan as well as the battle against some extremist groups operating from Pakistan. The administration had been seriously debating whether to say “I’m sorry” to the Pakistanis’ satisfaction — until April 15, when multiple, simultaneous attacks struck Kabul and other Afghan cities.
“What changed was the 15th of April,” said a senior administration official.
American military and intelligence officials concluded the attacks came at the direction of a group working from a base in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal belt: the Haqqani network, an association of border criminals and smugglers that has mounted lethal attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan. That confirmed longstanding American mistrust about Pakistani intentions — a poison that infects nearly every other aspect of the strained relationship. That swung the raging debate on whether Mr. Obama or another senior American should go beyond the expression of regret that the administration had already given, and apologize.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/world/asia/talks-between-us-and-pakistan-fail-over-airstrike-apology.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

50 Lehman Pig Bosses Stole $700 million before Collapse  (Good old Doc Gullotine!) Less than a year before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. plunged the global economy into a terrifying free fall, the Wall Street firm awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest-paid employees, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
The documents, which were among the millions of pages submitted in Lehman’s bankruptcy, show the list of top earners each were pledged $8 million to $51 million in cash, stock and other compensation. How much, if any, of the stock was cashed in before the bankruptcy wiped out its value couldn’t be determined.
Still, the rich pay packages for so many people raised eyebrows even among compensation experts and provided fresh evidence of the money-driven Wall Street culture that was blamed for triggering the financial crisis.
“Many people are going to be stunned at how well some people were being paid,” said Brian Foley, an executive compensation expert in White Plains, N.Y. “This wasn’t a matter of five or six people being paid a lot.”   http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-compensation-20120427,0,6481155.story

CBS Video: The Case Vs Lehman Bros http://news.yahoo.com/1-2-graduates-jobless-underemployed-140300522.html

So Long, Old Jobs Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped by 1,000 to 388,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday.
”This was a disappointing number and offers more evidence that the labor market continues to lose traction,” said Joe Manimbo, an analyst at Western Union Business Solutions.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected new jobless claims to fall to 375,000.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/business/economy/us-jobless-claims-remain-near-3-month-high.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Welcome Home Vets! But apply for that job somwhere else Iraq, rejection is a special ordeal. Veterans’ advocacy groups, and many unemployed veterans, say civilian employers don’t always appreciate veterans’ skills and maturity. They point out that this is the first generation of employers who have no widespread military experience and thus no inherent appreciation for what the institution can provide.
Further, the increased military and media attention given topost-traumatic stress disorderand traumatic brain injury has had the effect of stigmatizing veterans, advocates say. Some employers fear that soldiers diagnosed with these conditions are prone to violence or instability.
The unemployment rate for veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq is 10.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For veterans age 24 and under, the rate is 29.1%, or 12 points higher than for civilians the same age. That compares with 8.2% unemployment nationally, and 7.5% for all veterans.
A survey this year by the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found that a quarter of its members could not find a job to match their skill level, and half said they did not believe employers were open to hiring veterans.      http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-na-vets-unemployed-20120426,0,2627227.story

Got that BA? How Nice! Maybe Walmart will Like you The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.   http://news.yahoo.com/1-2-graduates-jobless-underemployed-140300522.html

For Black People in S. LA, the Job Climate is worse than in ’92 Median income, when adjusted for inflation, is lower. Many middle-class blacks have fled in search of safer neighborhoods and better schools.
And the unemployment rate, which was bad at the time of the riots, has reached even more dire levels. In two areas of South Los Angeles — Florence Graham and Westmont — unemployment is almost 24%. Back in 1992, it was 21% in Florence Graham and 17% in Westmont   http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-black-unemployment-20120428,0,4285270.story

China’s Social Fascist Bosses Face Legitimacy Crisis (withdrawing the mandate from heaven) On the day that former Chongqing boss Bo Xilai was removed from all his Chinese Communist Party posts and his wife announced to be a murder suspect, a mob of at least 10,000 people took over the streets of one of the municipality’s distant districts.
The crowds hurled rocks at security officers and smashed or set fire to more than a dozen police cars before reinforcements arrived to lock things down.
The chaos was not sparked by Bo’s dismissal. Instead, public anger had exploded about reductions in medical insurance and social security after the merger of two of Chongqing’s districts.
The rioting of April 10 and 11, however, provided a stark reminder of the peril the Communist Party confronts as the scandal surrounding Bo grows ever deeper.
Many Chinese already have little or no trust in local officials and their allies, who they often believe are corrupt, venal and, at times, murderous. Should they come to believe the same about national figures, then the careful dance that takes place whenever there is unrest in China _ people pinning hopes on intervention from the central government _ could lose its footing.
In a nation known for reliance on police state tactics, it’s difficult to predict what might follow.    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/04/20/146204/in-bo-xilai-scandal-chinas-national.html

China Captures the Earth Today, China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earths but sits on just about one-third of the world’s reserves of the elements — with the rest scattered from the United States (13 percent) to Australia (5 percent). That was not always the case. A few decades ago, the United States led production, primarily through a large mine in California owned by the mining firm Molycorp. But as California’s environmental regulations tightened in the 1990s, costs rose and profits declined, prompting the American industry eventually to shutter.      http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137602/damien-ma/china-digs-it?cid=nlc-this_week_on_foreignaffairs_co-042612-china_digs_it_3-042612

The Princling and the Red Ferrari that Could revitalize some Red in China As the Chinese capital heaves with speculation over a British businessman’s mysterious death, the downfall of a Machiavellian politician and the future of the ruling Communist Party, one incendiary question has been keeping the political classes awake at night: Did he or didn’t he drive a red Ferrari?   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/world/asia/bo-guagua-tries-to-defuse-sports-car-scandal.html?_r=3&ref=global-home

US Financial Collapse Leads to Reverse Immigration with Mexico (and the remitances?) A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.
It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-first-time-since-depression-more-mexicans-leave-us-than-enter/2012/04/23/gIQApyiDdT_story.html

Spain–Not Attacking Workers and Students and the Poor Enough–downgraded Since the onset of the debt crisis in Europe more than two years ago, defenders of the currency union have stuck to a basic argument: if the euro zone’s weaker economies would only keep pursuing policies of austerity, even as growth collapsed and job losses mounted, they would be rewarded by investors more willing to buy their bonds.
Yes, the social cost would be high, but over the long term, these economies would benefit from the lower interest rates that can come with the seal of approval from global bond investors. Or so goes the argument.
That approach, though, has failed in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. And now it is being severely tested in Spain, where the more the governbr /ment promises to cut its budget deficit, the more foreigners are unloading their Spanishbondholdings.
Late Thursday, when Standard & Poor’s jumped into the fray by slapping Spanish bonds with a two-notch ratings downgrade,   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/business/global/28iht-euro28.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Patrick Bond on the Sellout ANC Government’s Financial Scams Pretoria can no longer remain in denial about South Africa’s glaring economic HIV+ status, what with our regular breakouts of full-blown financial AIDS, in a world featuring the collapse of so many sickly economies. Indeed, the rampaging plague will infect many more countries now that the IMF has an additional $430 billion to jet around the world with, thanks to careless finance ministers like our Pravin Gordhan.
Three years ago, his predecessor Trevor Manuel was responsible for lobbying the world to grant the IMF a $500 billion capital boost, aimed at firming up world finance after the 2008 melt. Now the banksters’ pimps are back for more, and even the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – were asked to fork out another $100 billion. Gordhan is on record supporting the bailout, even though the other BRICS haven’t yet paid a cent.
For once in his life, Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch spoke for the world’s masses when on Monday he tweeted about Britain’s contribution: “Govt sending IMF another £10bn to the euro. Must be mad. Not even US or China chipping in.”    http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/24/south-africas-dangerously-unsafe-financial-intercourse/

Euro? Schmero. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, announced the resignation of his coalition government on Monday after its partners failed to agree on austerity measures, leaving the Netherlands with a messy leadership vacuum at a time of anxiety about the euro.      http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/europe/dutch-governing-coalition-resigns-after-failing-to-pass-austerity-budget.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Solidarity Fornever

Union Bosses Unite with Big Boss To Force Concessions on Faculty

Dear Southwestern Staff and Faculty Members:
I am writing to you on behalf of your employment representative group leaders and your executive management team. SCEA President Andy MacNeill, CSEA President Bruce MacNintch, Confidential Representative Kim Rader, SCCDAA President Aaron Stark, your Vice Presidents and I are joining together to reach out to employees, providing clarification and support for the Big Table proposal you are preparing to ratify.
The proposal before us is a 5% pay reduction for one year. The proposal is based on the need to reduce $5.6 million in ongoing expenses from our general fund accounts (this is based on maintaining step and column advancements). The salary reductions will cover $3.1 million of this amount. The remaining $2.5 million reduction will come from reserves, overload/part-time budget and supply budget reductions. This is a ONE YEAR solution. Every employee of this district will participate. This includes all Governing Board members, your Superintendent/President, your Vice Presidents, and all hourly and other non-contract employees.
Discussions taking place in forums, via email, and in other venues demonstrate the need for more information and clarification of decisions. It is imperative that all of us have accurate information in order to take the most informed decision.
Please understand there is no other proposal on the table. Your leadership worked tirelessly, in cooperation with all units, to reach a solution that was EQUITABLE and honored our common value of PRESERVING JOBS. No solution will ever be equal in the strictest sense of the term. However, our leaders need to be recognized and commended for having developed a solution that is as equitable as possible given that each unit has different types of employment structures, such as different calendars, hours, vacation pay, etc.
There has been considerable discussion of why different types of reductions could not be preferable. Our negotiation leadership teams reviewed and debated dozens of solutions. Every alternative proposal that I have heard in discussion this week was brought to the Big Table. There was extensive and robust discussion for each and every strategy presented. Over 700 cumulative hours were spent at the Big Table. The rationale for opting out of other types of reductions is complex. You are urged to communicate directly with your unit representatives for full explanations of the various reasons why alternative proposals were rejected in favor of the 5% reduction.
Our budgets are extremely complex and we do not know how deep the future cuts for 2012-2013 will be, but we do know that we must find an ongoing adjustment for last year’s $5.5 million dollar workload reduction. We also need to remember that we had to absorb an additional $2.4 cut this year (property tax and fees shortfall) as well as absorbing a $1.7 million cut (redevelopment funds). We anticipate an additional workload reduction for next year.
We are proposing that we continue to draw down our reserves, and even will present our Governing Board with a request to reduce our 7% reserve policy to 5%. However, with 85% of our general fund budget allocated to salary and benefits, we simply cannot maintain our value of preserving jobs without reducing salaries.
Equity is a value that we must join together in honoring and preserving. Southwestern College has suffered greatly in the past from divisive acts that have pitted groups against others and have resulted in mistrust and retreats into silo mentality.
What we desperately need at this critical point of time is the will to come together and to resolve this financial challenge as an entire college. We need to resist the temptation of viewing ourselves as independent from our Southwestern brothers and sisters.
This is a pivotal moment in our history. Today’s challenge can become an opportunity for us to demonstrate to ourselves, to our students, and to our community that we can address extremely difficult problems as a common body – we can adopt sound solutions – we can trust our elected and appointed unit leaders to represent our specific interests but in a manner that honors the overriding values of the entire college body of employees.
Not to ratify the proposal before you is a choice to relinquish your opportunity to stand together and will certainly result in actions that will directly and very negatively impact each and every one of us – particularly our students.
Many have asked what will happen if we don’t ratify? Can we go back to the Big Table and renegotiate? Basically, we do not have time to do this and arrive at a ratified solution in time for a July 1, 2012 implementation. There is an additional concern. Not to ratify this proposal may push some constituencies away from the Big Table process completely.
If this proposal is not ratified, the college will continue to exist, but the decisions of what to cut will be different.
First, all non-contract employment will be reviewed and reduced to as close to zero as possible. These hourly employees and student workers will not be backfilled.
· Second, any non-mandated costs to programs will be reviewed for elimination.
· Third, overload/part-time budgets will be reduced by more than the proposed $1 million. We will review the option of going into stabilization.
· Fourth, all classified, confidential, and management positions, in every division will be reviewed for layoffs.
A combination of these four actions will be employed to arrive at our $5.6 million reduction of ongoing expenses and will be immediately implemented.
What does this mean? Loss of hourly employees and student workers will result in less student and instructional support services, significantly reduced tutoring staff and significant reductions in hours of operation for most services. Cutting non-mandated costs will reduce funding to many student affairs categorical programs. This will have a negative impact on services which we know are fundamental to student success such a matriculation, EOPS, DSS, and others. Cutting overload/part-time budgets by any amount reduces classes for students. The deeper the cuts, the less likely it will be that students will be able to complete their programs of study in a timely manner, if at all at Southwestern. Finally, layoffs will give us financial flexibility but will greatly damage morale, will have a significant and very negative impact on operations in all areas of the college, and will be highly disruptive as bumping rights are honored and staff begins shifting to positions in a manner that does not allow for properly aligning resources with needs.
We have a choice before us. We can show our support for the time, the talent, and the hard work of our leadership teams and support the proposal that they negotiated, TOGETHER, allowing us to keep all our full-time employees and as many part-time/hourly as possible…and further allowing us to have at least a $5 million solution now since we will need to immediately start work next fall to address the 2013-2014 budget….OR we can dismiss the values of equity and employment integrity and proceed into the “Plan B” approach with hourly, program, overload/part-time cuts, coupled with layoffs.
As your Superintendent/President, as your Vice Presidents, as your SCEA, CSEA, Confidential, and SCCDAA leaders, we ask you to carefully consider the impact of your vote. We ask you to join with us and support the 5% proposal. This is a difficult time for us, but this is the very time that we have the opportunity to demonstrate the strength of what it means to be a member of the Southwestern family by showing our support and resolve to work together for the common good of our college, our students, and our community.
Respectfully,
Melinda Nish, Superintendent/President
C.M. Brahmbhatt, Interim Vice President Business and Financial Affairs
Joe Quarles, Interim Vice President Human Resources
Kathy Tyner, Interim Vice President Academic Affairs
Angelica Suarez, Vice President Student Affairs
Andy MacNeill, SCEA President
Bruce MacNintch, CSEA President
Kim Rader, Confidential Representative
Aaron Stark, SCCDAA President

After Quisling Unions Backer Merger, American Airlines Initiates Assault on Workers American Airlines went to court on Monday to ask a bankruptcy judge to void labor agreements with its three unions, though it signaled that the carrier had made progress in talks with one of those unions, representing its mechanics, that might result in fewer job cuts than American initially sought.     http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/business/american-air-signals-progress-in-union-talks.html?_r=3&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Emerging Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

“Bourgeoisie democracy BREEDS fascism…The more workers place their trust in legalism, in constitutionalism, in bourgeois democracy, the more they make sacrifices to save the existing regime, as the “lesser evil’ against the “menace” of fascism, the heavier become the fascist attacks and the more rapid the advance to capitalism. To preach confidence in legalism, in constitutionalism, in the capitalist state, means to invite and guarantee the victory of fascism.” R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935.p49

We Remember Rodney King and the Uprising of April 29

Obamagogue and His Corporate State Grovel For Rich Puppet Masters The Obama campaign may constantly paint presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney as the corporate fat cat candidate, but a new fundraising invitation from the president may even break the biggest wallets on Wall Street.
For $75,800, donors can attend the Obama-backed 18th Annual National Women’s Issues Conference in Washington. The price tag earns a donor the title of “chairman,” special seating, a photo op and special recognition at the conference. [See pictures of Obama's re-election campaign.]
The Sunlight Foundation, which tracks campaign fundraisers, reports it is the highest contribution request it has ever seen.    http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/04/20/obama-asks-donors-for-a-75800-contribution?s_cid=rss:washington-whispers:obama-asks-donors-for-a-75800-contribution

Look! Up in the Air! It is a Bird! A plane! A Drone! Watching You! Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show a disturbingly large interest in drone surveillance within the United States, with a number of city police departments preparing to turn the Obama Administration’s favorite weapon of war inward as a tool of mass surveillance.
Included were a list of all public and private entities that have sought authorization for drone flights, and a number of certificates issued to drone manufacturers showing that the domain of military and CIA spies could soon blanket the entire nation.
An indication of how hush-hush this whole thing is, the documents came only after lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to force the FAA to comply with the FOIA requests.
EFF warned that the drones pose a serious threat to personal privacy, which of course is the whole point since they are surveillance drones. The documents suggest this is a threat the American public will have to deal with sooner rather than later.   http://english.irib.ir/voj/news/top-stories/item/82449-foia-docs-us-cities-plan-spy-drone-fleets

FBI Refuses to Contact Defendants Victimized by Crooked Crime Lab Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.
Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/convicted-defendants-left-uninformed-of-forensic-flaws-found-by-justice-dept/2012/04/16/gIQAWTcgMT_story.html

International Terrorist Whoremonger Gang Armed With Uzis Is bigger than we Thought! The U.S. Secret Service is investigating allegations of improper conduct last year by personnel sent to El Salvador that mirror the behavior by employees implicated in the agency’s Colombia sex scandal, according to a lawmaker closely tracking the agency’s investigations.
But House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) cautioned that the new inquiry is just part of the agency’s broad investigation into whether agents and officers have interacted with prostitutes in the past.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lawmaker-confirms-secret-service-investigating-new-misconduct-allegations/2012/04/26/gIQAztS8iT_story.html

Understanding the Link of Mysticism and Fascism, Hitler’s Pope, Abridged edition Long-buried Vatican files reveal a new and shocking indictment of World War II’s Pope Plus XII: that in pursuit of absolute power he helped Adolf H itler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20th-century devil. http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

Spy versus Spy

Morris Childs, Master Spy, Who Made Fools of the CPUSA while Delivering Moscow’s Gold

After two years of working his way back into the American Communist fold, Morris was summoned to a meeting where he was instructed to travel to Russia to arrange for financing of the American Communist Party by the Soviets. Traveled to the Soviet Union in April 1958 and met with his old friend Morris Ponomarov who deemed Childs the real United States ambassador. The two devised a plan by which to smuggle Soviet funds into the United States, using Morris’ brother Jack as a courier. Over 30 years, the Childs brothers would facilitate the transfer of more than $30 million, which was then disbursed by Morris throughout the United States to different American communist causes (with the FBI, of course, monitoring the activity http://www.spymuseum.com/pages/agent-childs-morris.html

Pentagon Beefs Up world wide Spy Apparatus (still looking for the moles?) The Pentagon is beefing up its spy service to send several hundred undercover intelligence officers to overseas hot spots to steal secrets on national security threats after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The move comes amid concerns that the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy service, needs to expand operations beyond the war zones and to work more closely with the CIA, according to a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the classified program.
The new Defense Clandestine Service will comprise about 15% of the DIA’s workforce. They will focus on gathering intelligence on terrorist networks, nuclear proliferators and other highly sensitive threats around the world, rather than just gleaning tactical information to assist military commanders on the battlefield, the official said.
“You have to do global coverage,” the official said.
Some of the new spies thus are likely to be assigned to targets that now are intelligence priorities, including parts of Africa and the Middle East where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are active, the nuclear and missile programs in North Korea and Iran, and China’s expanding military.      http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-pentagon-increasing-spy-presence-overseas-20120423,0,6728156.story

Memories of Operation Mockingbird–Pentagon Attacks Reporter Investigating Pentagon A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.  Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.
The timeline of the activity tracks USA TODAY’s reporting on the military’s “information operations” program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticized even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored.   http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-04-19/vanden-brook-locker-propaganda/54419654/1

O Those Kinky Brits: The Spy in the Bag An inquest held just across the Thames from MI6’s headquarters here has brought forth details of the bizarre and lonely death in August 2010 of Gareth Williams, a 31-year-old rising star in supersecret counterterrorism work. He was found in a fetal position, arms crossed on his chest, locked inside a duffel bag resting in an unfilled bathtub at the government flat assigned to him in the upscale Pimlico district of London.
His naked body had been in the bag for a week before it was discovered, so badly decomposed that the police and pathologists have been unable to determine whether he was murdered in what his family’s lawyer has suggested to the court was a plot by others skilled in the “dark arts” of spy work.
That theory has played prominently here, with Mr. Williams depicted alternately as a victim of Russian secret service hit men, extremists with Al Qaeda, or a multitude of other potential assassins working in the murky world of espionage who poisoned him with potassium cyanide or an overdose of a powerful sedative drug, GHB, a theory pathologists said could not be effectively tested because of the advanced decomposition.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/world/europe/britain-riveted-in-death-of-spy-gareth-williams.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

The Magical Mystery Tour

Catholic Priests Victims Still on Hold–documents of abuse remain hidden Vega, who says he was molested as a boy by a priest in Oxnard, went along with the settlement only because his attorneys assured him the church would turn over confidential personnel files that would reveal the truth about priest abusers, and those who shielded them, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. Four years and nine months later, Mahony is retired, but not a single page from the files has seen the light of day.
Complaints about the delay have become a litany trotted out every year, along with accusations the church is stonewalling to protect its own, and Mahony’s, legacy. What’s different about Vega’s complaint is that he blames not only the church but his own lawyers.
“They took the money and ran,” he says.
The Los Angeles settlement required attorneys on both sides to “immediately work cooperatively” so the files could be opened in “a reasonably short period of time.” Raymond Boucher, who represented Vega and other victims, and J. Michael Hennigan, who represents the archdiocese, blame the slow grinding of the legal system for the long delay.
“All we’re doing is what is required by law,” Hennigan said.
“Nobody is more frustrated than I,” Boucher said.
The Diocese of Orange, however, released its confidential priest files five months after reaching a financial settlement with abuse victims. The revelations included church officials dumping one serial molester in Tijuana, welcoming a convicted child abuser from another state into their diocese and offering a repeat abuser up to $19,000 to leave the priesthood quietly.
But then, the pact that victims’ lawyers struck with the L.A. church was never what it was cracked up to be.   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-holland-20120428,0,3166236.column

Pope Lays Off 20 Cardinals! http://www.theonion.com/audio/pope-lays-off-20-cardinals,27996/

April 29/30

1945 Hitler Kills Himself

1975 US Flees Vietnam

The Worst People in the History of the World (except Yanqui fans)

So Long Bert

“The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism, which revealed itself first and most clearly in Great Britain, owing to the fact that certain features of imperialist development were observable there much earlier than in other countries….

As a matter of fact the extraordinary rapidity and the particularly revolting character of the development of opportunism is by no means a guarantee that its victory will be durable: the rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it. The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.” (Lenin, Imperialism)

Rouge Forum 2012
June 22-24 at Miami University (Oxford, OH)
About the RF
Accommodations
Call for Proposals
Featured Speakers
Getting There
Registration
RF 2012 Poster
RF Steering Committee
RF@AERA
Proposal deadline extended to May 1

Proposals for presenting at Rouge Forum 2012 will be accepted unti May 1, 2012.

Details for submitting your proposal can be found here.
OCCUPY EDUCATION! Class Conscious Pedagogies and Social Change

Quebec Students Rise Up Angry  (riot police an every day fixture—video embedded) Riot police used tear gas and concussion grenades on hundreds of students protesting outside Montreal’s Palais des congrès Friday, where Premier Jean Charest was speaking at a symposium on northern development.
The mayhem reached deep inside the convention centre, where Charest’s keynote speech was delayed after a group of protesters gained access to the building and confronted police guarding the meetings.
Two police officers and at least two protesters were injured in the standoff, and 17 people were arrested.
Friday’s action is the latest in Quebec’s escalating student movement against planned tuition-fee increases.
Charest admonished the students and said the social disruption is “unacceptable.”  ”This is 2012, this is Quebec. We have had ministers find tanks of gas on their verandas… Molotov cocktails in front of their offices. There are ministers who have had death threats,” the premier said.
“I find it unacceptable that one student association refuses to condemn violence,” he added, singling out CLASSE, the movement’s most militant group.
Charest said debate over Quebec tuition reaches back two decades, and his government’s decision to raise fees was made over a year ago after consultation with different groups.   http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/04/20/students-palais-de-congres.html?cmp=rss

Madison, MI, Teachers Sue to Halt Pay Cut Teachers in the Madison District Public Schools plan to file suit today against the district for imposing retroactive 10 percent pay cuts that take effect today.
Bobby Robinson, a representative for the Madison Education Association, said the union particularly objects to provisions that make the pay cut retroactive to September 2011. An unfair labor practices suit and injunction request to stop the cut is expected in Oakland County Circuit Court.
“The 10 percent pay cut is one thing, but the retroactive part is against the law,” Robinson said.  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120420/SCHOOLS/204200364/1026/schools/Madison-teachers-sue-pay-fight

Taxing the Rich is not Rich/Abolition bwth: In France, François Hollande, the Socialist who may well succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as president, wants to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 75 percent, calling earnings over a million euros “impossible.” A candidate yet farther on the left suggests a top rate of 100 percent.“The debate in Washington is between the Bush-era and Clinton-era tax rates,” said Mr. Diamond, whom Mr. Obama nominated to the Federal Reserve and Republicans blocked. “Our finding is that the debate should be between the pre-1986 Reagan tax rate, which was 50 percent, and the rates that existed from Johnson until Reagan,” which were higher.
“Thirty percent is three times smaller than the 91 percent of Roosevelt,” Mr. Piketty said, responding to the Buffett Rule proposal and referring to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who engineered the New Deal. “And inequality is greater than in the time of Roosevelt.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/business/for-economists-saez-and-piketty-the-buffett-rule-is-just-a-start.html?_r=4&pagewanted=2

Crackup in the Ruling Class: Citigroup Boss Denied Bouus By Shareholders In a stinging rebuke, Citigroup shareholders rebuffed on Tuesday the bank’s $15 million pay package for its chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, marking the first time that stock owners have united in opposition to outsized compensation at a financial giant.
The shareholder vote, which comes amid a rising national debate over income inequality, suggests that anger over pay for chief executives has spread from Occupy Wall Street to wealthy institutional investors like pension fund and mutual fund managers. About 55 percent of the shareholders voting were against the plan, which laid out compensation for the bank’s five top executives, including Mr. Pandit.    http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/citigroup-shareholders-reject-executive-pay-plan/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120418

above, celebrate 41 years of the struggle to preserve Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park and its art

The Department of Education, University of Athens, Greece is hosting the
2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CRITICAL EDUCATION
10-14 July 2012, Athens, Greece
Organized by the journals:
JOURNAL OF CRITICAL EDUCATION POLICY STUDIES (UK)
CULTURAL LOGIC (USA/CANADA)
KRITIKI (GREECE)
RADICAL NOTES (INDIA)
Eleştirel Pedagoji (TURKEY)

http://icce-2012.weebly.com/index.html

Congratulations on the Publication of

George Schmidt review of the book and its relation to the potential Chicago school workers’ struke   http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3202&section=Article

Blast from the Past

The Little Red Schoolhouse

High Stakes exams Eradicate Teaching of LA Rebellion (because the tests teach “it’s not right to rebel”) t two decades after the riots sparked massive violence that would leave dozens dead and thousands injured, lessons about them appear to be limited in Southern California classrooms. For many teachers, the pressure to teach content that will be tested in state standardized tests and Advanced Placement exams next month has crowded out time for the riots, however crucial they are to city history and the nation’s larger civil rights struggle.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has not formally included the riots in its history curriculum because it is not part of the California social studies standards. The district plans to post material on its website for optional teacher use, however.
Michael Reed, the district’s history specialist, said the push to raise test scores has made principals “hawkish” about directing teachers to focus on the areas that will be tested. Test questions from the state’s eighth- and 11th-grade U.S. history exams released by state officials don’t stretch beyond the 1960s, although Reed said the latest tests included a question from the Nixon era of the 1970s.   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-riots-schools-20120415,0,487515.story

Detroit Kids Walk to School Through Hundreds of Danger Zones (even on test days) The city’s crisis is mammoth. More than 3,000 structures in the Denby area alone are considered so dangerous, they need to be torn down. Last year, the city targeted the area around Denby and two other high schools for increased demolitions and patrols: Osborn, adjacent to Denby on the east side, and Cody, on the west side. More than 5,500 homes need to be demolished in the Cody area and more than 2,700 near Osborn.   …More than 20,000 Detroit Public Schools students walk to bus stops to ride city or school buses each morning. Thousands more walk directly to school. For six months out of the year, it’s dark when they navigate around thousands of vacant structures.
And they do so in a city where more than 26,000 streetlights don’t work.   http://www.freep.com/article/20120415/NEWS01/304150016/For-many-kids-in-Detroit-school-zones-are-danger-zones?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Student Loan Debt Over One Trillion Dollars, the next bubble The growing student loan debt has led to concerns that it could harm the economy, especially since federally backed student loans can’t be discharged through bankruptcy. Recent reports show that student loans are on track this year to exceed $1 trillion — more than credit and auto loans. Meanwhile, default rates have climbed.
“Student debt has (been) growing for some time,” said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, an Oakland, Calif., policy organization that runs the Project on Student Debt. “College costs have continued to outpace both family incomes and available grant aid so students and families are increasingly turning to loans to fill that gap.”
The student loan burden comes as cash-strapped states, including Michigan, continue to scale back support to public universities, leading schools to hike tuition, which means more students borrow more money to cover costs. Last week, Central Michigan University became the first of the state’s public universities to announce a tuition increase for the next school year. Others are expected to follow in coming weeks.  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120417/SCHOOLS/204170370/1026/schools/Students-amass-mountain-debt-default-rates-continue-climb

Banksters Clean up as States Borrow from Schools For the past decade governors and state lawmakers desperate to close deficits have adopted budgets that use a little-noticed accounting gimmick called a “deferral” to borrow money from K-12 schools and pay it back in the next fiscal year.
The problem is the state then immediately taps districts for yet another loan, perpetuating a borrowing cycle that persists today.
The cumulative outstanding debt: $9.4 billion to K-12 schools statewide and $600 million to San Diego County districts.
It would be easy to conclude that persistent school budget woes, including teacher layoffs and program cuts, could be minimized — if only the state would stop this temporary pilfering.But districts eventually do see the money months later. And by delaying payments the state avoids making permanent cuts in school funding on top of the ongoing reduction in spending that have hit education in recent years.
Deferrals also give districts the option of going out and borrowing money on their own to avoid deeper reductions locally.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/09/state-borrowing-from-schools-is-adding-up/

Clairemont McKenna SAT Test Cheat “Alone” An investigation has shown that a Claremont McKenna College administrator doctored incoming freshmen’s SAT scores and other statistics in an effort to make the school appear more selective.   The investigation also revealed that former vice president for admission and financial aid Richard Vos said he was responding to pressure from school president Pamela Gann to make the college more selective and did not intend to boost its ranking in U.S. News & World Report listings.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/18/probe-official-inflated-sat-scores-on-his-own/

San Diego Teachers Protest More than a Thousand Pink Slips — Hundreds of teachers turned their classrooms over to substitutes Wednesday to contest pink slips — or simply protest the San Diego school district’s massive proposed personnel cuts — at hearings that give educators a last-ditch effort to save their jobs.
Many showed up in red union T-shirts and carried picket signs. Some brought stacks of papers to grade while they waited through the tedious proceedings. A few even arrived with babies, whose pediatric health care could be cut along with their parents’ jobs.
The San Diego Unified School District issued tentative layoff notices to 1,666 teachers — including 20 percent of the elementary teaching force — last month to cope with the state’s fiscal crisis and help offset a projected $122 million deficit in next year’s $1.1 billion budget.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/18/teachers-appeal-pink-slips/

Evolution Halted In Tennessee Again. Cretinism Sets In We now have compelling evidence that evolution doesn’t happen — at least not in Tennessee. As of April 10, 2012, Tennessee has on its books a new law intended to undermine the teaching of evolution and promote the teaching of creationism in public schools. The legislation was opposed by pretty much every credible organization involved in the teaching of biology: the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association and all eight Tennessee members of the National Academy of Sciences. But the legislators of Tennessee thought they knew better, and Gov. Bill Halsam, demonstrating neither courage nor conviction, allowed the bill to pass into law without his signature   http://www.alternet.org/story/154961/tennessee_skewers_teaching_of_evolution_in_schools_—_is_your_state_next

Ed Department bogs Down on TED Evaluations (send them a 1% raise and they will vote for anything) – When the Education Department writes rules later this year that will change how teacher preparation programs become eligible for students to receive some forms of federal financial aid, it will tackle the task on its own.
A federal panel charged with recommending how best to overhaul regulations governing teacher preparation programs acknowledged Thursday afternoon that it would not reach a consensus on a set of proposals, and that the gaps between some negotiators — and between negotiators and the Education Department — remained too wide on too many issues.
At the heart of the disagreement was what role, if any, evaluations of teachers based on their students’ test scores should play when judging teacher preparation programs and, in the case of programs at colleges and universities, determining eligibility for some forms of financial aid. The failure to agree on new rules means that Education Department officials are free to write their own language, although they will be doing so after hearing strong objections from many negotiators to the federal proposals.    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/13/rule-making-teacher-preparation-programs-fails-reach-consensus

UCSD’s Compton Cookout Reverberates Still Hosted by a fraternity in February 2010, the Compton Cookout invited women to dress as “ghetto chicks” who “usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama and wear cheap clothes.” The invitation, posted on Facebook, promised chicken and watermelon.
When news of the event became public, it was immediately blasted by student leaders, civil rights activists and the chancellor.
African American students contended that the party was part of an overall attitude of harassment and exclusion at the La Jolla campus, where African American students comprised less than 2% of undergraduates.    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/04/uc-san-diego-racial-harassment-settlement.html

California University Bosses Party on While Tuition Booms As San Diego’s public universities scaled back enrollment, cut classes and hiked tuition in recent years, the institutions increased spending on end-of-year and holiday parties for staff, public records show.
The University of California San Diego spent $247,996 on such celebrations in 2011, up from $179,552 in 2010, according to reimbursement records. Much of it was for the medical center staff, which receives little in taxpayer funds but remains a public facility.
The amount put UCSD in first place among 47 public agencies surveyed   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/11/drag-show-lips-and-more-sdsu-party-expenses/

A Sample of the Expenses from San Diego State’s Elites • Faculty and staff in the biology department ventured off campus Dec. 8 to Lips Restaurant for food and drinks and a drag show. The outing totaled $2,633.26. The department spent $2,945 for their holiday gathering the year before held on campus, which featured a disc jockey for four hours.
• SDSU’s university relations and development staff celebrated the holidays Dec. 13, 2011 at Slater’s 50/50 at a cost of $1,816.25.

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

“Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation.”
― Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (Abridged Edition) (Bollingen Series

Vets Comment on the Product of Endless Imperialist Warfare: barbarism In a war directed against an entire population that overwhelmingly opposes the foreign occupation, where every Afghan is considered “fair game,” grotesque conduct as revealed in the most recent photos is inevitable. No condemnation from Pentagon officials will put an end to it. No token punishment of rank-and-file soldiers will prevent further crimes from taking place. No public relations campaign by the White House will change the reality on the ground in Afghanistan.
There is no “good conduct” in a colonial-type war. There is no such thing as a “kinder, gentler” occupation by the most destructive military machine on the planet, attempting to subjugate an impoverished population that stands in strong, determined opposition to foreign troops on their soil. This is the reality of the war, and will be until all U.S. forces have left.  (March Forward)

Panetta: No Kidding. We are Serious this time. We are sorry to have produced too Many Barbarized Ghoul Troups: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta apologized Wednesday for gruesome, newly revealed photographs that show U.S. soldiers posing with the bloodied remains of dead insurgents in Afghanistan. He said war can lead young troops to “foolish decisions” and expressed concern the photos could incite fresh violence against Americans.   http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j0AhpOA5VCO1LuzluMn_jBHMLfiQ?docId=ac5420e77e5145e6aba022b82bce0b35

Say Leon, How do you Feel About WW3? Defense Secretary Leon Panetta offered a blunt assessment of the threats facing the United States on Wednesday, saying the potential for another war breaking out remains high in places like North Korea.
“We’re within an inch of war almost every day in that part of the world,” Panetta said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, in response to a question about the threats in the Korean Peninsula. “And we just have to be very careful about what we say and what we do.”     http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/222387-panetta-were-within-an-inch-of-war-almost-every-day

Mini-Tet? Taliban hits Kabul At least 11 police officers and five civilians were injured and 19 insurgents killed in Sunday’s brazen attacks on foreign and Afghan targets in Afghanistan’s capital and eastern provinces, government officials said.
Fierce fighting continued throughout Kabul seven hours after the attack was launched around lunchtime on the U.S., British, German and Russian embassies, parliament, NATO headquarters and a military academy in some of the capital’s most heavily guarded neighborhoods.
The government said that by early evening all of the attackers in sites around Kabul had been surrounded by Afghan Security Forces.
The Taliban took responsibility for the assaults in a message to the media, calling it part of a spring offensive.
The attacks caused panic and fear throughout Kabul.    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/04/afghanistan-attacks-kabull-embassies.html

Look! Up in the Air! It’s a Plane! It’s A War Plane! No! Wait! It’s A  Job! It’s AMERICA!  It’s BOTH!

The radar-evading F-35 fighter jet, a nearly $400-billion weapons program under development for more than a decade, is facing its worst turbulence since Washington decided to buy it in 2001 — when it was billed as the most affordable, lethal and survivable military aircraft ever built for the U.S. and its allies.
At a time when federal spending is under a microscope, the plan to develop and build 2,443 airplanes is hundreds of billions of dollars over budget. The F-35, known as the Joint Strike Fighter, has been delayed by glitches in its onboard computer systems, cracks in structural components and troubles with its electrical system.
A two-star general serving as the military’s project manager was fired over the program’s never-ending problems. The Pentagon has delayed orders of the aircraft, and the fighter jet is caught in the middle of a major spending fight in Congress. What’s more, the plane has roiled political debate in Canada, the Netherlands and other allies that are picking up 10% of the development costs.    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fighter-jet-woes-20120419,0,2972144.story

Are We Still in Iraq? Are there problems? A string of deadly explosions and other attacks shook Iraq on Thursday, with bombings in Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk resulting in the most fatalities. Over all, nearly three dozen people were killed and more than 100 wounded, according to security officials.
By the standards of Iraq — where attacks occur daily, although at a much diminished rate compared with the height of the war — the wave of violence on Thursday was not extraordinary, although it was a reminder, after weeks of relative calm, that an organized insurgency remained active.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/world/middleeast/iraq-attacks-kill-dozens.html

The US, Biggest Arms Dealer in the World, under Obamagogue, Wants more Secret Deals (liberals who want to disarm Americans Arm the World’s Tyrants) The Obama administration has blunted Congress’s authority over proposed arms sales to other countries in an effort to cut legislators out of an increasingly prominent aspect of U.S. foreign policy.
Overseas arms sales account for a growing percentage, in some cases up to 25 percent or more, of annual revenue for the military-indutrial complex, and the Obama administration wants more authority to approve such sales to top buyers like Israel and Saudi Arabia without congressional oversight.  http://news.antiwar.com/2012/04/19/white-house-curtails-congresss-authority-on-arms-sales/

Marx: It is a small step from Troops Killing themselves, to killing officers HERE’S a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.   An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-veterans-death-the-nations-shame.html?_r=2

US Drones Will Continue to Bomb Pakistan Yesterday’s statement from the Pakistani parliament has not changed anything, according to Obama Administration officials, who insist that drone strikes against Pakistan’s tribal area will continue over any objections. They also addressed reports that the reduction in attacks in recent weeks was an effort to placate Pakistan, insisting that the strikes proved how successful the assassination campaign has been, and that it has sent everyone into hiding.    http://news.antiwar.com/2012/04/13/us-drone-strikes-against-pakistan-will-continue/

More than 9 Sexual Assaults a Day in US Military The number of sexual assault reports involving servicemembers remained relatively unchanged in fiscal 2011, according to an annual Department of Defense report on sexual assaults released Friday afternoon.
The 3,192 reported incidents were just 34 more than the previous year, a 1 percent increase. But so many sexual assaults go unreported that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated earlier this year that the total number is closer to 19,000.
The DOD offers two reporting options for sexual assault victims: restricted and unrestricted. Restricted reports allow victims to seek medical treatment and other services but remain confidential, which means the crimes are not investigated and few details are available.    http://www.stripes.com/news/dod-number-of-sex-assault-reports-holds-steady-in-2011-1.174405

Why Do We Not hear, “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Bahrain”? After a night of clashes between antigovernment demonstrators and the police, a protester was found dead Saturday near the capital as Bahrain struggled to restore calm before an international auto race on Sunday. Opposition groups blamed the police for the death.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/world/middleeast/in-bahrain-more-clashes-and-death-of-a-protester.html?ref=global-home

Who’s Coup in Guinea-Bissau? No elected president here has ever finished a full term. In 2009, the president was assassinated. And in January this year, his replacement, Malam Bacai Sanha, died from complications related to diabetes.
In an emergency presidential election on March 18, Gomes won 49 percent — just shy of enough to win the election outright. A runoff is scheduled for April 29, but opposition candidates, including former President Kumba Yala, declared the first round of elections fraudulent, though international observers said there were no irregularities.
Yala, who has a good relationship with the military, has refused to participate in the runoff election. He warned at a recent press conference: “Whoever dares to campaign will be responsible for what happens.”
The nation also is a hotbed for the cocaine trade. Latin American drug smugglers ferry the drugs here to the nation’s uninhabited islands in the Atlantic Ocean. From there it is trafficked to Europe.

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Financial ‘Reform’ Failure: Chase, Bank Of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Now 30% Bigger; Control Assests Equal To 56% Of U.S. Economy Five banks – JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56% of the U.S. economy, according to the Federal Reserve.” Behold! The fruits of toothless, non-regulating financial ‘reform’! Financial oligarchs now control assets equal to a majority of the U.S. economy. They’ve gained complete control of the European economy, and many others around the world. The conditions have been created for a bigger and more devastating global economic crash,   http://theoldspeakjournal.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/financial-reform-failure-chase-bank-of-america-citigroup-wells-fargo-goldman-sachs-now-30-bigger-control-assests-equal-to-56-of-u-s-economy/

Drunken WhoreMongering Uzi Carrying Decadent Gang Won’t Pay Up (diving into the honeypot) — The Secret Service announced on Friday that three of its employees under investigation in connection with misconduct with prostitutes last week in Colombia have decided to resign, bringing to six the number of individuals forced out of the agency in the case.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/world/americas/secret-service-to-dismiss-2-more-in-scandal-official-says.html?ref=global-home

Cracks in the Chinese Social Fascist Clique (the Long March for this? Let us withdraw this mandate from heaven) After a pampered childhood in the walled compounds of the Chinese capital, he was sent off for schooling in England, where he developed a reputation as an academically indifferent bon vivant with a weakness for European sports cars, first-class air travel, equestrian sports and the tango.   … Bo Guagua’s high living clearly irritated party leaders, who named the son, a 24-year-old student at Harvard, in the official statement describing the reasons for his father’s fall from power.
One former government employee with party ties said the leadership tolerated a certain level of corruption among top officials or their relatives as long as it was kept out of public view. He said Mr. Bo’s collegiate antics, splashed across the Internet, were emblematic of an ambitious, cocksure family who often ignored the party’s conservative standards of public behavior.
The resulting buzz also drew unwanted attention to other so-called princelings, who often leverage their bloodline for financial gain but generally seek to avoid publicity lest it damage the party’s image of self-sacrifice and asceticism.
“If you’re discreet, they look the other way,” the former government employee said. “But Guagua’s behavior was striking by the standards; urinating against a fence at Oxford, kissing foreign girls — it all goes down bad in China.”   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/world/asia/bo-guaguas-parties-and-privilege-aggravate-elite-chinese-familys-fall.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

Jeff Neeley’s and GSA’s $823,000 Bash (clowns! Mediums! Where was the Secret Service?) You knew government bureaucrats were living large when they hired a medium.
And this mind reader who helped government workers communicate with the dead was just the beginning of the scandal involving the General Services Administration’s $823,000 spending spree in Las Vegas.  There was also the $75,000 bicycle-building exercise, the clown show, 1,000 sushi rolls at $7 a pop, $6,325 spent on commemorative coins, $8,130 for souvenir books and 300 helpings of “Boursin Scalloped Potato with Barolo Wine Braised Short Ribs” at $5 each.
The official responsible for the 2010 soiree — Jeffrey Neely — said he wanted his conference to be “over the top.” By all accounts, he achieved his goal — and now the party’s over.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-was-the-gsas-jeffrey-neely-thinking/2012/04/16/gIQAC2nTMT_story.html

The White House has Always been For Sale Although Mr. Obama has made a point of not accepting contributions from registered lobbyists, a review of campaign donations and White House visitor logs shows that special interests have had little trouble making themselves heard. Many of the president’s biggest donors, while not lobbyists, took lobbyists with them to the White House, while others performed essentially the same function on their visits.
More broadly, the review showed that those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others. Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/us/politics/white-house-doors-open-for-big-donors.html?_r=4&hpw

Suicide by Economy Grows in Ruined Europe The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling “suicide by economic crisis.”   …In Greece, the suicide rate among men increased more than 24 percent from 2007 to 2009, government statistics show. In Ireland during the same period, suicides among men rose more than 16 percent. In Italy, suicides motivated by economic difficulties have increased 52 percent, to 187 in 2010 — the most recent year for which statistics were available — from 123 in 2005.
Researchers say the trend has intensified this year as government austerity measures took hold and compounded the hardships for many. While suicides often have many complex causes, researchers have found that severe economic stress corresponds to higher suicide rates.
“Financial crisis puts the lives of ordinary people at risk, but much more dangerous is when there are radical cuts to social protection,”   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/europe/increasingly-in-europe-suicides-by-economic-crisis.html?_r=4&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Taibbi on the Obamagogue’s Fake Jobs Bill After changing the name of the Economic Recovery Committee to the Jobs Council, Obama made a radical switch of the group’s leadership. No more would it be run by a tough-on-crime curmudgeon like Volcker, who complained about the “moral hazard” of massive public assistance to banks coupled with weakened regulation and enforcement; the new council would have a different flavor.
Instead, it would be run by General Electric CEO Jeffery Immelt, a man who basically personified Volcker’s “moral hazard” concerns. Immelt collected tens of millions in salaries and bonuses for running a firm that a) came crying to the state for over a hundred billion dollars in bailouts, guarantees and surreptitious Fed support in the years after the crash, and b) was under investigation at the time of Immelt’s appointment for a variety of crimes.
Anyway, some time after the crash, as Obama’s own SEC was working out how much to fine Immelt’s own company for (among other things) accounting fraud and rigging municipal bond bids, Obama decided to put Immelt in charge of a task force that ultimately would recommend a slackening of regulatory enforcement as a means to create jobs.   http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/yes-virginia-this-is-obama-s-jobs-act-20120412

Navy Personnel Court Martialed for Saying “Tax the Rich” Consider the story of Leah Bolger, the latest American hero up on trial:She is a young female artist in the Midwest. She joins the Navy at 22, is made commander and serves two decades as an anti-submarine warfare specialist. After retiring she joins Veterans for Peace and becomes the organization’s first female president. Then, in October of 2011, she commits the crime of interrupting a public congressional hearing of the Super Committee to deliver a message from the 99 percent: End the wars and tax the rich to fix the deficit.
Because of her 45-second transgression, Commander Bolger now faces a court trial this Thursday morning, April 12, where she could receive a maximum jail sentence of six months. Bolger, 54, intends to plead guilty and use her court appearance to draw the connection between America’s deficit debacle and the three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar defense budget we, as voting taxpayers, spend as a base-mark for failed and unending military ventures overseas.  http://truth-out.org/news/item/8488-naval-commander-stands-trial-for-telling-super-committee-to-end-the-wars

With Two Million Plus in Prison, Obamagogue still loves that Drug War President Barack Obama said Saturday legalizing drug use is not the answer to trafficking in illegal narcotics in the Americas, countering a growing chorus in Latin America to discuss decriminalization as a way to ease deadly cartel violence.    http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57414151/obama-drug-legalization-not-answer-to-cartels/

Walmart In Mexico: $24 Million in Bribes covered up In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.   ..Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”
The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.
Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.
Neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/business/at-wal-mart-in-mexico-a-bribe-inquiry-silenced.html?ref=global-home

John Conyers’ Jailed Wife (the thief) Moves prisons The Federal Bureau of Prisons has cut Monica Conyers loose of “Camp Cupcake” and placed her in a local jail in Virginia.
The ex-Detroit city councilwoman and wife of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who is serving a 37-month prison sentence for bribery, was transferred on April 12 to the Roanoke City Jail in Virginia, according to the BOP. The federal agency would not say why Conyers was transferred out of the federal prison camp she had been staying at in West Virginia – a place dubbed Camp Cupcake for its cozy, sorority-like setting in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.
BOP officials would only say that there are several reasons why inmates are moved, including: they need more or less security, disciplinary issues, medical or psychological treatment, they need to participate in a certain program, or to relieve overcrowding.  Which of these applied to Conyers was not disclosed.  http://www.freep.com/article/20120417/NEWS01/120417043/Monica-Conyers-Camp-Cupcake-Roanoke-jail?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Emerging Fascism as a Mass Popular Movement

Solidarity Fornever

Detroit Issues 4100 Teacher Layoff Slips…Proud DFT does….nothing At least 4,100 Detroit Public Schools teachers received layoff noticesthis week and were told they can reapply for their jobs next month.
Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, confirmed Thursday the notices were sent by the district this week. The layoffs are effective Aug. 24, just days before the start of the 2012-13 school year, and went to all teachers in the district. Nonteaching positions were not affected.    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120413/SCHOOLS/204130364/1026/schools/DPS-teachers-get-layoff-slips

Pontiac School System Evaporates–quisling union offers unemployment counseling Van Fleet was among 45 teachers laid off in the Pontiac School District to help eliminate a $24 million deficit. Teachers at Owen Elementary knew about the layoffs, but the names of the five to be laid off at their school were announced Wednesday. During a press conference in front of the school Friday afternoon, tears flowed from teachers and students as they embraced and said goodbye to each other. Some teachers and their colleagues held boxes to help the laid-off teachers pack their belongings. The cuts also include 27 school administrators, seven secretaries, six support personnel and 12 non-union members. The layoffs come 45 days before the end of the school year.
Pontiac Education Association President Aimee McKeever said she will meet with the laid-off teachers Monday to review unemployment and medical coverage issues.
“The district is saying there’s no chance of recalls,” she said. “They claim at least 500 students will leave the district, but even more will leave now that classrooms will be so overcrowded,” she said. “Because the district mismanaged funds and allowed people to steal from us, they’re putting that burden on the backs of teachers and making the community, the teachers and the students suffer.”    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120414/SCHOOLS/204140349/1026/schools/Pontiac-teachers-exit-emotional

AFL-CIO’s Rallies Pretend to Fight Wall Street;  When Will We Be Defended with Real Action?
By Harry Kelber

Over the past two years, the AFL-CIO has staged a number of rallies and marches to demand that the bankers and investors of Wall Street “pay their fair share” to compensate the millions of people who lost their jobs and homes because of their reckless, greedy behavior.
Remember AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s “Make Wall Street Pay” in front of the Bank of America? Trumka never confronted the bankers or suggested negotiations for a settlement. The Wall Street bankers and financiers never paid a dime. And Trumka dropped the AFL-CIO campaign two days later.
Now, AFL-CIO leaders have decided to call on some 100,000 union members and allies to demonstrate on Tuesday, April 17, “Tax Day” and also “Equal Pay Day.” Unions across the country will be spending lots of time, money and resources to make the demonstration a success.
But does any union member believe that Congress and the White House will be listening? Haven’t they heard the same speeches by our leaders many times before – and ignored them?
Does anyone expect Wall Street to respond to the April 17 spectacles by disgorging their two trillion dollars in cash that could be used to provide jobs for the millions of people it has victimized by its reckless, greedy financial behavior?
Trumka and the AFL-CIO Executive Council know that reliance on marches and e-mails won’t win support in Washington. So why do they refuse to engage in actions that will command the attention of Congress and the White House? Their cool, soft-pedal activities underestimate the anger and despair that millions of workers are feeling, frustrated by leaders who have no plan of action to improve workers’ lives.

There’s No Evidence That Our Leaders Are Feeling Our Rage

While Trumka and other top labor leaders make militant speeches that present our demands, they are not accompanied by strong actions to re-enforce those demands. They have learned nothing from the civil rights movement and avoid non-violence actions.

It is hard to find evidence of Trumka’s empathy with the plight of the unemployed. He has clung to his six-figure salary, not offering to take a 5 percent pay cut as a symbol of his solidarity with workers who have not seen a paycheck in months, maybe longer.

AFL-CIO leaders can be categorized as talkers. They are not “do-ers.” The best of them can analyze a situation, and then leave it to others to try to turn the analysis into a winner. That’s not enough leadership during the crisis that we are now enduring.
What we desperately need is “do-ers,” leaders who know when and how to take risks and come out as winners.

Unionites Endorse Airline Merger, and Job Losses, as Big Fish Eat Little US Airways moved a step closer to merging with bankrupt American Airlines Friday when three key unions announced their support.
If the merger goes forward, the US Airways brand would go the way of Pan Am, TWA and Eastern Airlines, consigned to history as the merged carrier flies under the American banner.  …As with most mergers, jobs would be lost. In this case, analysts said, most of those affected would be airplane mechanics. Bound by union agreements, American has maintained a cadre of in-house mechanics in an era when other airlines have contracted out that work.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/unions-back-american-us-airways-merger/2012/04/20/gIQAfrPXWT_story.html

Spy Versus Spy

New Information on FBI’s attempts to Set Up Terrorism Days before his arrest in Pittsburgh last month, Khalifa Ali al-Akili posted a remarkable message on his Facebook page: A mysterious man who spoke often of jihad had tried to interest Akili in buying a gun, then later introduced him to a second man, whom Akili was assured was “all about the struggle.”  It smelled, Akili wrote on Facebook, like a setup.   “I had a feeling that I had just played out a part in some Hollywood movie where I had just been introduced to the leader of a ‘terrorist’ sleeper cell,” Akili wrote.
When he googled a phone number provided by the second man, it turned out to be to Shahed Hussain, one of the FBI’s most prolific and controversial informants for terrorism cases. Soon the sting was off; Akili was subsequently arrested on gun — not terrorism — charges, which he has denied.
It was a rare miss for Hussain, 55, who ha played a wealthy, dapper member of a Pakistani terrorist group in several FBI operations over nearly a decade.
This role has inflamed Muslim and civil rights activists, who describe Hussain as an “agent provocateur,” and prompted harsh comments from the presiding judge in a 2010 case, who questioned his honesty and the aggressiveness of the FBI’s tactics.
“I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition,” said U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon at the sentencing of four men from Newburgh, N.Y., convicted on terrorism charges. She added, “That does not mean there was no crime.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/documents-provide-rare-insight-into-fbis-terrorism-stings/2012/04/13/gIQASJ6CGT_story.html

Judge Allows Ongoing FBI-CIA SAecrecy on Renditions A judge in Washington, DC has allowed the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency to keep information secret regarding the complicity of British authorities in extraordinary rendition.     http://news.antiwar.com/2012/04/12/judge-allows-cia-fbi-secrecy-on-rendition/

CIA Still Covering Up Failed Bay of Pigs Fiasco The CIA has argued that the final volume can’t be released because it is “an internal draft of a CIA history that was never approved for release or publication.’’
In a court filing, David S. Robarge, currently the CIA’s chief historian, said that “the mere possibility that an initial draft could be released to the public would undoubtedly chill open and frank deliberations” that go into creating CIA histories.
“The release of an unfinished draft of CIA history risks placing inaccurate or incomplete information into the public domain,’’ Robarge said in a statement to the court.
The CIA’s concern is the draft “will confuse the public,’’ Kornbluh said. “Certainly the public is astute enough to judge for itself.’’    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/04/16/145445/final-volume-in-cias-official.html

Spies Infecting US Universities (note that the CIA, FBI, ICE, HS, and merc companines don’t count) Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry.
“We have intelligence and cases indicating that U.S. universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services,” Frank Figliuzzi, Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence, said in a February interview in the bureau’s Washington headquarters.
While overshadowed by espionage against corporations, efforts by foreign countries to penetrate universities have increased in the past five years, Figliuzzi said. The FBI and academia, which have often been at loggerheads, are working together to combat the threat, he said. http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120409/SCHOOLS/204090367/1026/schools/American-universities-infected-by-foreign-spies-detected-by-FBI

Judge Seeks to Silence CIA Whistleblower A federal judge has ruled that a former clandestine case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency will have to forfeit any future money he earns from a book he wrote about the C.I.A. that was published without the agency’s permission. The C.I.A. says the former employee, writing under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones, submitted the book to the agency’s publications review board as required but published the book, “The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture,” before the review was done. After the ruling Thursday by Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., Mr. Jones, who has not disclosed his real identity, said he put the profits in accounts belonging to children of American soldiers killed in action.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/us/judge-rules-on-profits-from-ishmael-jones-cia-book.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The Magical Mystery Tour

above, Russian Orthodox Patriarch wearing $5,000 watch, erased in later photo releases

Psycho Budhist Nationalist Admits he Doesn’t Work Before a sold-out crowd of 4,200, Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader held his own in this scholarly setting, despite a confession.
‘Usually when I give a talk, no notes. No preparation,” he said, smiling. “Reason — I’m lazy.”  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/18/faith-and-reason-dalai-lama-ucsd/

Superstitious Prosecutor Leading Zimmerman Case Corey: The first thing my team and I did upon being appointed was to meet with Trayvon’s family and pray with them. “We opened our meeting with prayer.” Also, Ms. Corey thanked “all those people across this country who have sent positive energy and prayers our way,” and she asked them to continue to pray for Trayvon’s family and for her team. “Remember, it is Trayvon’s family that are our constitutional victims….”   http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2012/04/trayvon-martin-angela-corey-and-prosecutors-ethics.html

So Long Levon

Paul Street will be a keynote Speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference.  Street is a Marxist whose leading influences beyond Marx include Gerrard Winstanley, Edward Palmer Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rosa Luxembourg, Noam Chomsky, and John Pilger. Street is an outspoken critic of pseudo-populism, which is usually engineered with the help of mass media, especially as it perpetuates corporatism and imperialism. Street is also an expert analyst and commentator on contemporary racism in the “post Civil Rights era.”

In an October 2008 interview with Little Village magazine, Street said: “We either transcend the corporate-managed profits system or we descend ever further into barbarism, totalitarianism, and ecological ruin over the long haul.

Please Submit Conference Proposals by April 15. And you are welcome to join us!   http://rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/

Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might
Take the wealth that you are making,
It belongs to you by right.
No one will for bread be crying
We’ll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Workers’ Commonwealth

All out on Mayday! The Classic Rouge Forum Mayday Flyer is here http://richgibson.com/mayday.htm

Chicago Teachers Union Revives Talk of (what?!!) Strike A visibly angry Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union, held a press conference on April 5, 2012, to announce that straw polls of teachers and other union members at at least 150 real Chicago public schools were running overwhelmingly in favor of a strike some time after the current contracts between the unions and the Board of Education end on June 30, 2012. Although Lewis refused to detail which schools were voting how, she told dozens of reporters assembled at the union’s Merchandise Mart headquarters that the teachers’ anger was escalating as the Board of Education continued to take actions that were both insulting and professionally unsound.  http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3187&section=Article

Congratulations to Robert Zieger on the Kindle Publication of

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Rouge Forum Keynoter Ohanian’s Five Points to Fix School based on PUT THE NEEDS OF THE STUDENTS FIRST.
1: Feed them. (Hire Moms/Aunts/Grandmothers/Cousins to cook real food in the cafeteria.)
2: Fix their teeth.
3: Guarantee their housing.
4: Give them a lot of books. . . books they choose. . . books that come without interrogation.
5: Teachers read aloud something (s)he found interesting/suspenseful/amusing/outrageous/inspiring? At least once a week.

The Arne and Michelle Traveling Salvation Show Tarnished a bit by Cheating Scandal (but not so much, really) Mr. Duncan is the education secretary.
Ms. Rhee was the chancellor of schools in Washington from 2007 to 2010.
Since last summer, the Office of the Inspector General in Mr. Duncan’s department has been investigating whether Washington school officials cheated to raise test scores during Ms. Rhee’s tenure.
You would think Mr. Duncan would want to keep Ms. Rhee at arm’s length during the investigation. And yet there they were, sitting side by side last month, two of four featured panelists at a conference in Washington about the use of education data.
“This is an amazing panel, so I’m thrilled to be part of it,” Mr. Duncan said in his opening comment.
If there is any hope of getting to the bottom of what went on in the Washington schools — whether Ms. Rhee is as amazing as Mr. Duncan said, or whether test scores were inflated by cheating — it is through the inquiry by the inspector general. (Catherine Grant, a spokeswoman for the office, confirmed that an investigation was under way, but would not give details.)    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/education/duncan-and-rhee-on-panel-amid-dc-schools-inquiry.html?_r=2

NOT ATTENDED by Obamagogue’s Kids, DC Schools Graduate about 3/5s of Students Less than 60 percent of D.C. high school students graduated on time in 2011, according to a new and more rigorous calculation of completion rates announced Thursday.
Figures released by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education show that 58.6 percent of students in the Class of 2011 obtained high school diplomas within four years. That’s a nearly 20 percent decline over the 73 percent rate reported for 2010.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-dc-schools-59-percent-of-students-get-diploma-on-time/2012/04/05/gIQAMtuTyS_story.html

Highland Park School Boss Indicted Highland Park school board member Robert Davis, an activist who repeatedly challenged the state’s attempted restructuring of Detroit’s finances, was indicted Thursday on charges he stole more than $125,000 from the cash-strapped district.
The 16-count grand jury indictment alleges Davis pocketed the money between 2004 and 2010.
The indictment was filed one day after the city of Detroit reached a consent deal with the state over its finances, which Davis actively opposed by filing numerous lawsuits alleging violations of the state’s Open Meeting Act.    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120406/METRO01/204060376/Highland-Park-School-Board-member-Davis-indicted-does-not-plan-resign?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Occupy the DOE? Not. Enough Said. Or not. What if you gave an occupation, that had no plan to occupy, and nobody came? That might mean opportunism flops.

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

The Last British Soldier in the Retreat from Kabul

One of Many Liars (remember Judith Miller) who Provoked the Iraq War, Confesses A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.
He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”
The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”   US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/man-whose-wmd-lies-led-to-100000-deaths-confesses-all-7606236.html

General Allen, the Next to Fail in Afghanistan, Says War Brings more Violence ahead! “As I look to reduce the numbers of U.S. forces … I will use significant combat power in the east, anticipating we are going to have some good bit of fighting in the east this year,” U.S. General John Allen said Wednesday in an interview.
The unwelcome warning comes as support for the war has hit all time lows after successive high-profile failures, including and especially the unprovoked massacre of 17 Afghan civilians. The debacle in Afghanistan, to the detriment of the Obama administration who is still trying to sell the war and save face, has carried zero good news of late. Predictions of a “good bit of fighting” this summer doesn’t help the case.   http://news.antiwar.com/2012/04/05/gen-allen-afghanistan-will-see-significant-increase-in-fighting-this-summer/

Bill Blum–why Syria and Why Now? The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO, and the European Union — or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Moammar Gaddafi’s rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn’t know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004. Iraq and Libya were the two most modern, educated and secular states in the Middle East; now all four of these countries could qualify as failed states.  http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer104.html

Hersh: Our Men in Iran? the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.
Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html

above by Ted Rall

Cold War Redux. Russia Defends War Lord Arms Dealer A Federal District Court judge in Manhattan sentenced the arms trafficker, Viktor Bout, on Thursday. Mr. Bout was convicted last fall of conspiring to kill Americans after trying to sell weapons to undercover American agents posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
“The American justice system, clearly carrying out a political order, ignored the arguments of lawyers and multiple appeals from different spheres made in the defense of this Russian citizen,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Russia has vocally opposed every stage of Mr. Bout’s four-year legal drama, which began in March 2008 when agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested him in Thailand. There, American agents had reportedly enticed him with an offer to buy millions of dollars worth of military equipment, including AK-47s, missiles, and ultralight airplanes, a deal to which he apparently agreed.
Russian officials have described the case as a conspiracy that involved government collusion with the courts, the American media and even Hollywood. Mr. Bout is said to have been the inspiration behind the 2005 film “Lord of War,” staring Nicolas Cage.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/world/europe/russia-denounces-us-sentencing-of-arms-dealer.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

After Fake spring in Egypt, Muslim Bros out of Closet The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood named its chief strategist and financier as a candidate for president on Saturday, a surprising reversal of an earlier pledge to stay out of the race.   http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/31/libya-pm-announces-ceasefire-after-tribal-clashes-kill-over-150/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Poor Students Shoved out of SAT by Rising Costs Because of a federal budget cut, tens of thousands of low-income high school students will face steeper price tags for their Advanced Placement exams this May — forcing many to scramble to meet costs and others to forgo exams that could save thousands in college tuition.
At El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, where nearly two-thirds of would-be test takers are from low-income families, anxiety over passing is being replaced by worries that students will not be able to afford the college-level exams they have studied for all school year.    http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ap-test-20120331,0,2533838.story

Greek Pensioner Suicides Outside Parliament The government had “annihilated any hope for my survival and I could not get any justice. I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end before I have to start scrounging for food from the rubbish”,” the note said.
The tragedy quickly took on a political dimension, as small, anti-bailout parties gearing up for elections next month pinned the blame on bigger parties and on austerity measures prescribed by European partners and the International Monetary Fund.
“When people start committing suicide in Syntagma square, then it is the final straw that tears apart social cohesion,” far-right leader George Karatzaferis told parliament.    http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/04/us-greece-suicide-idUSBRE8330OB20120404

Bubble bubble, Little toil, lots of Trouble, as Clouds Roll back in Some offer outright dire predictions. There is the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based forecasting firm, which foresees a new recession. There is A. Gary Shilling & Company, a consulting firm in Springfield, N.J., which argues that the economy will weaken through the rest of the year.
There is also the asset manager John P. Hussman. Last month, he wrote in a research note that “while investors and the economic consensus has largely abandoned any concern about a fresh economic downturn, we remain uncomfortable,” given the deterioration of certain leading measures, like consumption growth.
Others — call them the baby bears, perhaps — simply offer what they say are more realistic assessments of both the weakness of the economy and the tepid pace of the recovery, despite a few months in which a spate of reports surprised to the upside.
“The recovery is anemic, subpar, below trend, below potential,” said Nouriel Roubini, the New York economist whose consistently dour predictions (including calling the collapse of the housing bubble) have won him the nickname “Dr. Doom,” and who might fall into that latter camp.
“If we avoid a major external or internal shock,” like a military confrontation with Iran or a major default in the euro zone, “we may avoid another recession and that might be good news. But that’s where the good news ends,” said Professor Roubini,    …The bears point to weakness underlying current numbers. Disposable personal income, a measure of how much money Americans have left over once they have paid their taxes, has barely been increasing of late, raising questions about how much spending the debt-soaked American consumer can contribute to the recovery. The shock of growth at the end of 2011, which gave a shot in the arm to economic confidence this spring, came mostly from wholesalers restocking their inventories as well.
“Final sales are barely growing,” Professor Roubini said. “So I don’t see a sustainable recovery coming from that.”
On top of that, the bears note that some trends could be making the job gains and economic growth of the last few months seem more robust than they really are. One factor is the warm winter, which might have pulled forward economic activity from the spring. In a research note entitled “Sticking With Sluggish,” the relatively pessimistic analysts at Goldman Sachs argued that the “exceptionally mild” winter stole commerce and hiring from March and April.
Moreover, the surge of hiring in the winter, which was unexplained by growth in economic output, could have been from employers who had laid off too many workers during the recession and were swinging the other way by adding too many workers, meaning hiring might slow down again.
Those trends were perhaps borne out in the lower-than-expected jobs number released on Friday,     http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/business/economy/some-dreary-forecasts-from-recovery-skeptics.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Reminder about that 400 million Dollar Exxon Golden Parachute Soaring gas prices are squeezing most Americans at the pump, but at least one man isn’t complaining.
Last year, Exxon made the biggest profit of any company ever, $36 billion, and its retiring chairman appears to be reaping the benefits.
Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million, including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.
Last November, when he was still chairman of Exxon, Raymond told Congress that gas prices were high because of global supply and demand.
“We’re all in this together, everywhere in the world,” he testified.     Raymond, however, was confronted with caustic complaints about his compensation.
“In 2004, Mr. Raymond, your bonus was over $3.6 million,” Sen. Barbara Boxer said.
That was before new corporate documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that revealed Raymond’s retirement deal and his $51.1 million paycheck in 2005. That’s equivalent to $141,000 a day, nearly $6,000 an hour. It’s almost more than five times what the CEO of Chevron made.
“I think it will spark a lot of outrage,” said Sarah Anderson, a fellow in the global economy program at the Institute for Policy Studies, an independent think tank. “Clearly much of his high-level pay is due to the high price of gas.”
Exxon defends Raymond’s compensation, pointing out that during the 12 years he ran the company, Exxon became the largest oil company in the world and that the stock price went up 500 percent.   http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/PainAtThePump/story?id=1841989#.T4CmuGLD59m

Black Unemployment and the Jobless Picture now The unemployment rate for Blacks was 14.0% last month. This is according to the latest report on the nation’s employment situation released Friday morning by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics in its monthly Employment Situation report. This rate was virtually unchanged from February, when unemployment in the Black community stood at 14.1%. For the nation as a whole, unemployment was 8.2% in the month of March; this was virtually unchanged from February when the national unemployment rate stood at
8.3%. Among whites, unemployment was 7.3%; among Latinos, unemployment was 10.3%. Comparable February 2011 figures were 7.3% and 10.7% respectively. Overall, total non-farm payroll employment increased by 120,000 jobs from last month.   http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/blackworkers/monthly/bwreport_2012-04-06_46.pdf

The hell with the Monroe Doctrine, China Buying the Caribbean! China’s economic might has rolled up to America’s doorstep in the Caribbean, with a flurry of loans from state banks, investments by companies and outright gifts from the government in the form of new stadiums, roads, official buildings, ports and resorts in a region where the United States has long been a prime benefactor.
The Chinese have flexed their economic prowess in nearly every corner of the world. But planting a flag so close to the United States has generated intense vetting — and some raised eyebrows — among diplomats, economists and investors.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/world/americas/us-alert-as-chinas-cash-buys-inroads-in-caribbean.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home

US and Chinese Empires Clash in Burma As Chinese workers in hard hats and red overalls bulldoze deep trenches into the orange soil across northern Myanmar for gas and oil pipelines to China, China’s largest energy conglomerate is paying cash for land and trees in the pipelines’ path, and building schools and health clinics for some of the poorest people on earth.   The compensation offered by the China National Petroleum Corporation reflects a bitter lesson China learned about doing business in the new, more democratic Myanmar when construction on a major Chinese hydroelectric dam there was suspended last year after a groundswell of outrage erupted over what was seen as China’s imperious attitude toward Myanmar’s people and its environment.
The gentler approach also reflects hard calculations in an escalating battle with the United States for regional influence. As Myanmar loosens the grip of decades of military dictatorship and improves ties with the United States, China fears a threat to a strategic partnership that offers access to the Indian Ocean and a long-sought shortcut for oil deliveries from the Middle East.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/world/asia/myanmar-reforms-set-us-and-china-in-race-for-sway.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120331

Solidarity ForNever

Harry Kelber:   Corrupt Labor Bosses Control AFL-CIO Money and Policies
For more than 100 years, no officer or member of a State Federation or Central Labor Council has ever held a single position on the AFL-CIO Executive Council, whose membership has ranged from 33 to 51 over the years.
Today, Richard Trumka and a small group of international union presidents still effectively control the AFL-CIO, lock stock and barrel. They run fraudulent elections, ban opposition candidates and guarantee their own re-election for as many terms as they desire.
They spend our dues money as they wish, without consulting the millions of union dues-payers, and they do not issue financial reports. They do not have to worry that the wages of their members are stagnant or worse, and that they have little to show for the tens of millions of dollars they spend on political and economic campaigns.
They are not troubled that the AFL-CIO’s membership and bargaining power is less than it was 50 years ago. Win or lose, the Trumka group is guaranteed their 6-figure salaries and lavish pension deals when they retire. And they use whatever tactics are necessary to prevent interlopers from challenging their power.
How does this small group of mostly white, middle-to-elderly men get away with this colossal power grab? How do they manage to bamboozle 12 million unionists into accepting this outrageously undemocratic, corporatist takeover? Where are the labor activists to challenge them? The Source of Power Lies in the AFL-CIO Constitution…   http://www.laboreducator.org/

Uprising in Palm Beach Fla EA over Firing of Exec Hernandez The president of the union that represents Palm Beach County School District teachers is offering few details about the removal of the union’s executive director, a move that has upset some members .
“The Palm Beach Classroom Teachers Association executive board recently decided to return Tony Hernandez to his previous position as labor relations consultant,” Debra Wilhelm said in a statement issued Monday.

Wilhelm denied that Hernandez, the union’s interim director for 14 months, was fired when the board voted March 5 to remove him effective Friday . His contract “was fully honored,” she said.
Hernandez said he was never given a reason for his removal and was told by Wilhelm to work at home through this week.
The board has not chosen a new director, but member Jane Kirkland said it authorized Wilhelm to approach former director Helene Samango as a possible fill-in .
The union’s executive board ” decided it was in the best interests of CTA and its members to seek a permanent, full-time executive director,” Wilhelm’s statement said .
Teachers last week stormed out of a representatives meeting, saying they had not been told of Hernandez’s ouster. Two teachers, Les Kozlow and Susan Wein, said their colleagues were upset that Wilhelm did not allow them to discuss it at the meeting. Wein said teachers plan to attend Monday’s executive board meeting to ask it to reinstate Hernandez.   She also wants to explore recalling Wilhelm as president.     http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/cta-president-mum-about-leaders-ouster-2280797.html#.T3xpa4P9aQo.email

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Millionaire Supremes Okay Strip Searches for No Cause The Supreme Court ruled Monday that those arrested for even minor violations may be strip-searched before being admitted to jail, saying safety concerns outweigh personal privacy rights.
The court’s conservatives ruled against a New Jersey man who was strip-searched after being mistakenly arrested on an outstanding warrant.  …More than 13 million people are admitted to jails each year, Kennedy wrote.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-upholds-jail-strip-searches–even-for-minor-offenses/2012/04/02/gIQAsZB4qS_story.html

Godfather of Social Fascism, Uncle Joe, Makes a Comeback in Putin’s Russian Textbooks In his generalissimo uniform with a chest full of medals, Stalin now proudly stares from notebook covers on a shelf of the Pedagogical Book House store in downtown Moscow less than a mile from the Kremlin. Customers, mostly adults, are snatching up so many copies that the store runs out of stock each day.
“This edition of notebooks comes in the series of great personalities in the history of Russia like Peter the Great, [composer Sergei] Rachmaninoff, space designer [Sergei] Korolyov and many others,” said Olga Utesheva, deputy commercial director of the Moscow Book House, a chain of popular bookstores that runs the pedagogical books retailer too. “Stalin is one of the most popular figures among the people who left a trace in the history of our country and there is no propaganda here.”   http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-russia-stalin-notebook-20120406,0,7261891.story

Next Step, American Gulags? Bush Official Says they Were doing War Crimes A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime.”
What’s more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.”   Zelikow argued that the Geneva conventions applied to al-Qaida — a position neither the Justice Department nor the White House shared at the time. That made waterboarding and the like a violation of the War Crimes statute and a “felony,” Zelikow tells Danger Room. Asked explicitly if he believed the use of those interrogation techniques were a war crime, Zelikow replied, “Yes.”
Zelikow first revealed the existence of his secret memo, dated Feb. 15, 2006, in an April 2009 blog post, shortly after the Obama administration disclosed many of its predecessor’s legal opinions blessing torture. He briefly described it (.pdf) in a contentious Senate hearing shortly thereafter, revealing then that “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed.”   http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/secret-torture-memo/

For those who think They Can Social Network a Revo, Look to China China started a sweeping crackdown of its vibrant social networking media over the weekend, detaining six people, closing 16 Web sites and shutting off the comment function for two gigantic microblog services.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/asia/china-shuts-down-web-sites-after-coup-rumors.html?ref=global-home

The Electoral Shell Game

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel

Students to Obamagoge: We won’t Be Fooled Again (maybe) Obama’s approval rating among college students dropped to 46 percent last December from 58 percent in November 2009, according to a Harvard University poll. Fifty percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they would “definitely” be voting, an 11 percentage-point decrease from the fall of 2007. A third of respondents said they approved of Democrats in Congress, and 24 percent approved of Republicans. Just 12 percent said the nation was headed in the right direction
“The turnout will not be great,” Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, said in a phone interview. The war in Afghanistan, a lack of progress on closing Guantanamo Bay and a dismal job picture taint Obama’s prospects, he said. The unemployment rate among 18- to 24-year-olds was 16.3 percent at the end of last year, the highest since record-keeping began in 1948, according to a February Pew Research Center report.
“There’s not the sense that four more years of Obama will change the world for the better,”   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-30/obama-campus-fervor-losing-to-apathy-as-students-sour-on-2012.html

Ann Romney: Mitt isn’t a Stiffy : “And one of the things, Ann Romney, that folks talk about with your husband, Mitt Romney, and I’ve seen him in casual conversation-He comes off very smooth and okay. But sometimes he comes off stiff. Do you have to fight back some criticism, like ‘My husband isn’t stiff, OK?’”
Ann Romney responded, laughing, “Well, you know, I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out because he is not!”   http://distriction.com/2012/04/ann-romney-on-stiff-husband-we-better-unzip-mitt-let-real-romney-out/

Unzip Mitt! Tiger Mitt!

Mexico, Pick one of the Three Heads of the Snake It is essentially a battle, cynical commentators joke, between the Pretty Boy, the Quinceañera Doll and the Tired Has-Been.  Mexico’s presidential campaign has begun, and the disdain seeping from these common descriptions of the three main candidates reflects what experts say are low expectations. Mexican voters, polls show, have been losing faith in democracy as their nation teeters between modern success and violent failure.
This is a country of conflicting messages, of economic growth and decapitated heads. It is the United States’ third-largest trading partner and a majority middle-class country, but one held back by corruption, impunity, poverty, red tape, monopolies and a culture of discomfort with confrontation.
Whoever wins on July 1 will inherit a Mexico disillusioned and stuck, caught between forces of the past that resist change and the frustration of those who have begun to expect more from their leaders.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/americas/mexicos-presidential-race-could-be-pivotal.html?ref=global-home

Spy Versus Spy

above, Russian Spy Anna Chapman

Russian Agent, about to Sleep With Obamagogue’s Pal, Busted and Deported in Honeypot Scam Another revelation in the series is the real reason why the FBI swooped on Russian spy Anna Chapman in 2010. Top officials feared the glamorous Russian agent wanted to seduce one of US President Barack Obama’s inner circle. Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s head of counterintelligence, reveals how she got “closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership… she got close enough to disturb us”.

The fear that Chapman would compromise a senior US official in a “honey trap” was a key reason for the arrest and deportation of the Russian spy ring of 10 people, of which she was a part, in 2010. “We were becoming very concerned,” he says. “They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue.” Mr Figliuzzi refuses to name the individual who was being targeted.    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/man-whose-wmd-lies-led-to-100000-deaths-confesses-all-7606236.html

Three Cups of Bullshit Author (liberal fave, and likely Spy) To Repay Charity For Money he Ripped Kansas City, Mo.— The road to hell is typically paved with good intentions. For Greg Mortenson, it was laid down with two New York Times bestsellers, hundreds of public appearances and the idea that Afghanistan and Pakistan could be saved if you built enough schools in them.
Hidden beneath those efforts appear to have been “significant lapses in judgment” involving charity money. Those lapses have led the Montana state attorney general to toss Mortenson out of his own charity, the Central Asia Institute, and now to force him to pay back $1 million, according to the results of an investigation announced Thursday…  That “way” involved donor money — given to promote education and literacy in war-torn and impoverished Central Asia — being spent on charter flights for family vacations, clothing and Internet downloads, the report said. The charismatic Mortenson, whose personal wealth “multiplied significantly” as the charity grew more popular, also took inappropriate speaking fees from the charity for his promotional work, the investigation found.  …“The image of Mortenson that has been created for public consumption is an artifact born of fantasy, audacity, and an apparently insatiable hunger for esteem,” wrote Krakauer, a former Central Asia Institute donor who became one of the charity’s most dogged critics.
“Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built. ‘Three Cups of Tea’ has much in common with ‘A Million Little Pieces,’ the infamous autobiography by James Frey that was exposed as a sham.”   http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-greg-mortenson-central-asia-institute-20120405,0,3566022.story

CIA Agent Arrested for Leaking — A former CIA officer has been indicted on charges that he leaked classified secrets to journalists. A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Thursday returned a five-count indictment against John Kiriakou, who was arrested in January.   The indictment charges Kiriakou with leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer. It also accuses Kiriakou of disclosing the name and contact information of an officer who worked with him on the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Kiriakou is charged with making false statements and with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and the Espionage Act.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/former-cia-officer-indicted-on-charges-of-leaking-classified-information/2012/04/05/gIQApho6xS_story.html

The Vile History of the FBI (and an Obamagogue Sidelight) On Dec. 31, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows for the indefinite military detention, without trial, of any American citizen “who was a part of or substantially supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” This act effectively abrogates the Bill of Rights and removes one of the cornerstones of Western liberty.   But not to worry. In a signing statement, Obama pledged that he would not authorize any such detentions. What a curious position for a former constitutional scholar to take: the promise of one man substituted for the rule of law.

It is just such presidential hubris, Tim Weiner makes clear in his important and disturbing new book, “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” that bears much of the blame for the worst violations of our freedoms in this century.  …Botched confrontations with cults and right-wing radicals left a trail of blood from Whidbey Island to Ruby Ridge to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. The bureau was penetrated again and again by double agents from Russia, China, Cuba, even Al Qaeda. (The Chinese spy Katrina Leung, truly a double agent, seduced both the special agent in charge of her case and “a leading F.B.I. counterintelligence expert on China.”) F.B.I. turncoats like Robert Hanssen and Earl Pitts went undetected for years, costing “hundreds of millions of dollars” and the lives of a “dozen or more foreign agents who worked for the bureau and the C.I.A.”
The best terror informant the bureau actually had was dropped for fear that he might be a double agent, while as late as 2002, only eight agents could speak Arabic. The F.B.I. remained a “pyramid of paper,” mysteriously unable to create a decent computer system; by 2000, “the average American teenager had more computer power than most F.B.I. agents,” according to Weiner, and agents “could not perform a Google search or send e-mails outside their offices.”
Hoover’s successors were mostly clueless bunglers; save for the current director, Robert S. Mueller III, none completed their terms of office. It’s infinitely depressing to read once again the epic of that ultimate loose cannon, Louis Freeh, who decided that his main enemy was the Clinton White House. He did not speak to President Clinton for nearly four years, and ultimately resigned without notice, three months shy of 9/11. It’s infuriating to read of how F.B.I. agents investigating Al Qaeda were stymied from stopping the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, thanks to a bureau misinterpretation of a Justice Department directive about sharing evidence.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/enemies-a-history-of-the-fbi-by-tim-weiner.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books

Salon on those Fake NGO’s being Banned in the Middle East the Reagan administration and a bipartisan majority of Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. The new law stipulated that NED would work largely through three newly created “core grantees” – the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) – and the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, which had a long history of working closely with the CIA.
Would the CIA continue to run the new apparatus under cover of the State’s Department’s “democracy bureaucracy?” It certainly looked that way in November 1985, when the Center for Investigative Reporting teamed up with the French daily Liberation to reveal that NED had secretly intervened against France’s socialist President Francois Mitterrand. As confirmed by the New York Times, NED gave $833,000 to Force Ouvrière and $575,000 to the right-wing National Inter-University Union, which the original exposé described as “the student arm of a banned paramilitary organization linked to political bombings and assassinations.” NED passed the money through the Free Trade Union Institute (now the Solidarity Center), and the AFL-CIO official handling the grant in Paris was the 74-year-old Irving Brown….Flash forward to the present. Both IRI and NDI claim to be private and independent of the U.S. government. But both receive Congressional funding through the Endowment and directly from the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. According to their websites, IRI gets less than 1 percent of its funding from private donors, while NDI gets some additional funding from private foundations as well as multilateral organizations and foreign governments, from the U.K. and Germany to Yemen and Namibia.
Freedom House, the third NGO facing charges in Egypt, appears marginally less dependent on taxpayer money. According to its latest available financial report, the U.S. government provided over 75 percent of its funding. But its independence remains suspect. To cite only one example among many, the Financial Times reported in 2006 that Freedom House was “one of several organizations selected by the State Department to receive funding for clandestine activities inside Iran.” Freedom House confirmed the funding for activities in Iran, but declined to give details.   http://www.salon.com/2012/04/07/the_ngos_that_spooked_egypt/singleton/

UAE Shuts Down Fake Democracy Group Connected to National Endowment for Democracy So far, the U.A.E. have not publicly explained their actions against the organization, the National Democratic Institute, which only recently was one of several nonprofits prosecuted in Egypt amid concerns about what many Egyptians perceive as foreign meddling.
The move by the U.A.E. was not as shocking as that by the Egyptians — in that case, the son of a Cabinet member was charged in criminal court. But it was especially provocative, coming just before Mrs. Clinton arrived in the region for talks with the U.A.E. and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/world/middleeast/uae-shuts-american-democracy-building-group.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

We Want Our War and We Want it Now! For both the House of Saud and Qatar (the other GCCs are just extras), what’s goin’ on in Syria is not about Syria; it’s always been about Iran.
This especially applies to the Saudi pledge to flood the global oil market with a spare oil production capacity that any self-respecting oil analyst knows they don’t have – or rather wouldn’t use; after all, the House of Saud badly needs high oil prices to bribe its restive eastern province population into not even thinking about that Arab Spring nonsense.
Clinton got the pledge from the House of Saud in person, before landing in Istanbul. Washington’s return gift was of the Pentagon kind; the GCC soon will be protected from “evil” Iran by a US-supplied missile shield. That implies that an attack on Iran may have been discarded for 2012 – but it’s certainly “on the table” for 2013.
Asian nations – especially BRICS members China and India – will keep buying oil from Iran; the problem is what the European poodles will do. Other real problems are that the Kurds in northern Iraq are taking their oil off the market until Baghdad pays them the share they had agreed upon. And then there are Syria’s 400,000 barrels a day, which have been dwindling over the past few months.
Still, the Saudis will keep playing the make-believe oil scenario as a gift to Washington – as the US pressures compliant European Union poodle economies and extremely wary Asians they have no reason to keep buying Iranian oil.
But then into this mess in Istanbul Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki – whose power is a direct consequence of Washington’s invasion and destruction of Iraq – steps in with quite a bang.

Here it is, in his own words:
We reject any arming [of Syrian rebels] and the process to overthrow the [Assad] regime, because this will leave a greater crisis in the region … The stance of these two states [Qatar and Saudi Arabia] is very strange … They are calling for sending arms instead of working on putting out the fire, and they will hear our voice, that we are against arming and against foreign interference … We are against the interference of some countries in Syria’s internal affairs, and those countries that are interfering in Syria’s internal affairs will interfere in the internal affairs of any country … It has been one year and the regime did not fall, and it will not fall, and why should it fall?”
Maliki knows very well that the ongoing and already escalating weaponizing of Sunni Syrians – many of the Salafi and jihadi kind – will inevitably spill over into Iraq itself, and threaten his Shi’ite-majority government. And that irrespective of the fact that his administration supports the close Iran-Syria relationship.   http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ND06Ak03.html

Best Things (and some worst sometimes) in the History of the World

Vonnegut’s 8 Tips for Short Story Writing 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/kurt-vonnegut-writing-tips_n_1408289.html

Strike! Mayday!

Susan Ohanian Will be a Keynote Speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference Susan’s advocacy work keeps at its core her 20 years as a teacher. Her more than 300 essays on education issues have appeared in periodicals ranging from Phi Delta Kappan cover stories to The Atlantic, Nation, USA Today, Washington Monthly, Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and numerous education journals. One of her 26 book on education policy and practice introduced the word Standardisto.

Although currently censored at the NCTE online discussion site, Susan’s website received NCTE’s George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honest and Clarity in Public Language. She has delivered the annual MacClement Lecture for Excellence in Education, Queens University, Ontario, Canada, the Helen Oakes lecture at Temple University, and the Biber Lecture, Bank Street College, New York.
Susan notes that although she’s been a featured speaker at both the International Symposium for the Educational Welfare in Seoul, Korea, and British Columbia Teachers’ Federation events, her talk to the Progressive Caucus of the AFT was closed down by angry hoots from the audience.

Susan started a website to protest the passage of NCLB. She had hoped to shut it down by now, but things keep getting worse, so she persists.

Call for Proposals
Rouge Forum 2012
OCCUPY EDUCATION! Class Conscious Pedagogies for Social Change
June 22-24, 2012
Miami University
Oxford, OH
Proposals Due April 15, 2012

The Rouge Forum 2012 will be held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The University’s picturesque campus is located 50 minutes northwest of Cincinnati. The conference will be held June 22-24, 2012.
Proposals for papers, panels, performances, workshops, and other multimedia presentations should include title(s) and names and contact information for presenter(s). The deadline for sending proposals is April 15. The Steering Committee will email acceptance notices by May 1. (details http://rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/rf-2012-call-for-proposals/)

French Workers Detain Boss Translated from Libération, March 26, 2012
Bruno Ferrec, the boss of the nine FNAC stores in Paris, has been held by his workers since the beginning of the afternoon, according to several trade unions. At 2 p.m., some 120 workers shut themselves in with him in a meeting room in the Hotel Ibis in the rue des Plantes in the 16th arrondissement. At 7:30 p.m. they were still there, and the situation seemed to be completely gridlocked.
Today the last round of the obligatory annual negotiations on wages was to be held. Hardly convinced by the offers of Bruno Ferrec (who is applying the program of “wage moderation” desired by the national office) the workers decided to go into high gear.
“Animated discussions”
Christian Lecanu, a representative of the CGT trade union, described the scene: “The ambiance on our side is rather good-humored. Mr. Ferrec is in the middle of the room, he is listening, and he keeps repeating that `the negotiations are over.’ For the moment, we don’t know when we’ll let him go.
Questioned by Libération.fr through the trade unionists present in the room, Bruno Ferrec had no comment.
Beyond the case of Bruno Ferrec, “who accuses us of not working enough and of having put the company’s books into the red,” Christian Lecanu condemns the directors of the company for their “catastrophic strategy.” “They all come from the world of supermarkets, they don’t know our business.”
Philippe Graulière, a representative of the SUD trade union, went further: “We’ll lay siege to the meeting room as long as management remains prostrate in its silence. They’re imposing a wage freeze whereas, at the same time, the PPR corportation [the owner of FNAC - editor's note] is announcing the distribution of dividends. This whole affair truly proves that the regional directors are just the executors of a policy that is desired higher up.”

Detroit Students Educate themselves With Walkout! Schools closed by civil strife are superior to open capitalist schools training obedience and loyalty About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended today after walking out of classes to protest a lack of consistent teachers, the removal of the principal and a host of other administrative problems at the all-boys school.
The students were chanting “We want education!”
Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school’s future. This year, as recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym due to a lack of teachers, parents said    http://www.freep.com/article/20120329/NEWS01/120329019/Detroit-high-school-students-walkout?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE

Congratulations on the Coming Release of “Behind the Crisis, Marx’ Dialectic of Value & Knowledge”

UC Students Break Up Regents Meeting (in good humor) Student protesters stripped down to bathing suits and began tossing around inflatable beach balls Thursday at the UC Regents meeting in what they called a “spring break” demonstration against high tuition.
But the relatively light-hearted atmosphere turned confrontational a short while later as UC police and a handful of protesters got embroiled in a physical tussle that led to three arrests. About 50 demonstrators attended the meeting and some spoke, denouncing the university leaders, during the public comment period of the meeting in San Francisco.
But when officials declared that period finished, the students refused to stop talking or leave the room. About 10 then took off their coats and shirts to show they were wearing beachwear and some put on Hawaiian leis or bathrobes and began dancing around as if they were at a spring break party.    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/03/students-hold-spring-break-party-protest-at-uc-regents-meeting.html

above from http://www.generalstrikecomics.com/category/posters/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

So Long Detroit Teachers–you paid your dues (DPS, not long ago, had 12,000 teachers) A total of 382 employees, including 280 teachers, are retiring from Detroit Public Schools on July 1, taking advantage of a recent court settlement that pays out banked sick time.
But union officials expect the total number of DPS teachers who retire by the start of the next school year this fall to be closer to 600 to 900, Detroit Federation of Teachers President Keith Johnson said.
In recent weeks, more than 820 DPS teachers contacted the union for details on a limited offer that pays retiring employees 50 percent of their saved sick time. Employees had a deadline of Monday to take the offer.
Although between 1,000 and 1,300 DPS teachers are eligible, Johnson said many don’t want to retire because they can make more money working summer school or staying on for another school year.
“Many of our members don’t have enough sick days for it to matter to them about cashing them out. As a result, they were not in a hurry to submit their separation of service. Many will still retire effective April 1, May 1 and even Sept. 1 (because they wish to teach summer school),” Johnson said.
“When all is said and done, we will still end up with between 600-900 retirees by the start of the new school year,” Johnson said.
The DFT represents nearly 6,000 members, including about 3,900 classroom teachers.  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120320/SCHOOLS/203200389/1026/DPS-teacher-union-expects-hundreds-more-retire-by-fall

Corruption is not an Aberration in Capitalist Schooling, it is Inherent in Capitalist Schooling Court documents filed to justify a search of the homes of two former Southwestern College board members show additional instances of meals and entertainment from contractors — and an attempt to hide one such exchange. The District Attorney’s affidavit, released Thursday, was filed in support of last week’s search of the homes of former Southwestern board members Yolanda Salcido and Jorge Dominguez.
It’s part of an ongoing corruption case alleging that South Bay officials took meals and other considerations in exchange for multimillion dollar construction contracts. Salcido and Dominguez have not been charged.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/29/contractor-pulled-fast-one-padres-game/

Capitalist Schools Always Cheat kids but 5 More Atlanta Teachers charged in Cheater Scandal Atlanta Public Schools is taking steps to fire five teachers implicated in a widespread test-cheating scandal, joining 11 others targeted for termination earlier this month.    http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/5-more-aps-teachers-1399952.htm

New Resource on Education Updates   http://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/student-loan-debt-hits-1-trillion/

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

above, Royal Horse Artillery fleeing from Afghan attack at_the Battle of Maiwand

50 grand for 1 Dead (x 16) + 11 grand for 1 wounded–Blood Money or Hush Money? The families of 16 Afghan villagers who were killed this month by a rampaging American soldier were given $50,000 by the United States for each of their relatives who died, Afghan and American officials said.  .. “They said this money is an assistance from Obama,”   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/world/asia/us-compensates-afghan-villagers-for-soldiers-attack.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

How Come Nato Allies Keep Shooting Nato and US Troops? Three NATO soldiers were shot to death on Monday in two separate confrontations involving Afghan security forces, officials said, adding to a string of “green on blue” killings that have complicated the relationship between Afghanistan and its Western allies.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/world/asia/unborn-afghan-child-said-to-be-17th-victim-of-killing-spree.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Citizens vote against Wars. Wars End? The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — 69 percent — thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan. Just four months ago, 53 percent said that Americans should no longer be fighting in the conflict, more than a decade old.
The increased disillusionment was even more pronounced when respondents were asked their impressions of how the war was going. The poll found that 68 percent thought the fighting was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly,” compared with 42 percent who had those impressions in November.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/world/asia/support-for-afghan-war-falls-in-us-poll-finds.html?_r=2&ref=global-home

Libya, Home of CIA’s Fake Revo, Desolving into Tribal War The trend of Libyan tribal militias getting into epic conflicts over trivial disputes continues today, with reports from a doctor in the far southern city of Sabha saying a fight over ownership of a car left 20 killed and 40 others wounded.   http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/26/20-killed-as-militias-clash-in-southern-libya/

Libyan Crisis Caused by US Spills into Mali with Coup Rebel soldiers in Mali’s army seized power last week, arrested President Amadou Toumani Toure and other officials, and are now trying to secure their power and fight a Tuareg insurgency in the north. The U.S. – through its involvement in the Libyan War, its military training of the Malian coup leader, etc. – was at least indirectly responsible for the coup.
The State Department said the U.S. has not yet made a formal decision as to whether a military coup has taken place in Mali. Such a finding would require the Washington to cut off all aid. ”We’re still considering this a ‘mutiny’ with uncertain results,” Nuland said.
The Obama administration took a similar position toward Honduras after the military coup there in 2009, declining to officially categorize it as a coup and continuing to send military and economic aid to the increasingly violent and corrupt regime. Now, Washington’s ties to Honduras are strong as ever, as the U.S. tries to maintain dominance in Central America under the rubric of the war on drugs.  http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/26/us-suspends-some-aid-to-mali-refuses-to-call-it-a-coup/

Marx: The Step from Shooting Yourself to Shooting an Officer is Not long: In 2009, the Marine Corps reported the highest suicide rate among the armed forces — 24 per 100,000. It lost more troops to suicide than combat in Afghanistan last year. Fifty-two took their own lives in 2009, including 11 who did so while deployed.
The active-duty Army had 21.7 suicides per 100,000, its highest rate since the Vietnam War. Its much larger force suffered 160 suspected or confirmed suicides.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2010/may/02/suicide-unseen-enemy-marines/

Obamagogue To Ruskie Boss: “We’ll be lying some More, Won’t We Boris!” President Obama’s unguarded comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” to discuss missile defense after the November election continued to reverberate half a world away Tuesday, both in the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-open-mike-flap-hits-hill-and-campaign-trail/2012/03/27/gIQAFBe6eS_story.html

Yemen, now the US Third Ongoing War US drones attacked a vehicle in Yemen’s Shabwa Province today, destroying the vehicle and killing five “suspects” who were “believed to have had some connection with al-Qaeda.” A second drone strike also destroyed an empty building. An innocent bystander was also killed in the car’s destruction, and five others wounded.  In apparent retaliation for the killings, unnamed attackers struck a liquid natural gas pipeline in the same area, blowing it up and forcing a halt to all production at a plant run primarily by France’s Total SA.

A text message from Ansar al-Sharia, the faction controlling the nearby Abyan Province, claimed credit for the attack, saying that it was “retaliation for the strike for which Crusader America and its obedient slave in Sanaa are responsible.” http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/30/us-drone-strike-kills-five-suspects-and-a-civilian-in-yemen/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Photo by EducationNews.org

Student Loan Debt to top One Trillion Dollars (one of the next bubbles) Total student loan debt in the US is to break through the $1 trillion mark later this year, based on estimates by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This comes after last year’s new record of $100 billion paid out in loans in a single school year. There is now more debt on students loans in the US than Americans have on credit cards, and while consumer credit card and home loan debt has been falling over the past five years, student borrowing has been moving rapidly in the opposite direction, doubling even after adjusting for inflation.
This debt, while being a relatively cheap way of borrowing money, cannot be erased by bankruptcy as Congress has given the lenders much more power than that given to credit card or mortgage lenders.   http://www.educationnews.org/higher-education/student-loan-debt-hits-1-trillion/

Things are Great on Wall Street. How about You? logged its best first-quarter performance since 1998 as investors remained more upbeat about the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 8.14% since January, while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index surged 12%.    http://wyld-about-california.blogspot.com/2012/03/breaking-wall-street-logs-best-first.html

Collective Amnesia at MF Global—too big to remember A former MF Global executive has refused to answer lawmakers’ questions about $200 million that was transferred out of a customer account days before the firm collapsed, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Edith O’Brien, a former assistant treasurer at MF Global, was subpoenaed to testify before the House Financial Services oversight subcommittee hearing about an email she sent, which appears to contradict testimony from Jon Corzine, the firm’s then-CEO.
The email says Corzine ordered the transfer on Oct. 28 to cover an overdraft in the firm’s bank account in London. The committee cited the email in a memo released last week.
“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based on my constitutional right,” O’Brien responded to a question about the transfer.
Corzine testified in December that never directed anyone to use customer funds to fix the overdraft and he wasn’t told that customer money was used.
MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection Oct. 31. The company failed after a disastrous bet on European debt. About $1.6 billion in customer money hasn’t been recovered. Corzine, a former New Jersey governor and U.S. senator from the state, stepped down as CEO in November.    http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-03/D9TPMURO0.htm

Just Who was Running the IMF? Rapist Pimp and Whoremonger Strauss Kahn in Charge of the World’s Money! It was a stunning blow on the home front for Strauss-Kahn, a onetime French presidential hopeful whose sexual behavior has been in the international spotlight over the past year.
The French charges come two days before a New York court takes up a civil case in which a hotel maid accuses Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her.
In the northern French city of Lille on Monday, investigating judges summoned Strauss-Kahn for questioning and held him for about eight hours. Afterward, Strauss-Kahn left in black sedan without speaking publicly.
Lawyer Richard Malka told reporters afterward that Strauss-Kahn was given preliminary charges of “aggravated procurement in an organized gang.”    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/03/26/business/ap-eu-france-strauss-kahn.html?ref=global-home

Man to Woman: “If I pay you $300 million, will you sleep with me?” Reply: “I might.” Man: ” How about for a dollar?”  W: “What do you think I am?” M; “I know what you are. Now we bicker about price.” In the last decade, Pelosi has raised close to $300 million for Democrats, according to her political staff. So far, in this election cycle, she’s raised close to $40 million. Pelosi is the party’s top fundraiser by far, outpacing President Obama in some categories.   Last year, Pelosi attended 400 fundraisers.   http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/30/149698946/on-tour-with-nancy-pelosi-fundraising-rock-star

Solidarity Fornever

Mandela Spells B E T R A Y A L (along with the ANC and every CP in the World) When Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994 he reached out to South Africa (SBK)’s poor and to its rich by promising jobs and a secure climate for business. Eighteen years later, his country has a 24 percent unemployment rate and a debate over nationalizing mines is deterring investment.
Economic growth is less than half the 7 percent level the government says is needed to make inroads into the highest jobless rate of 61 countries tracked by Bloomberg. Stocks have underperformed Brazil and Peru. The ruling African National Congress is considering raising mine taxes and President Jacob Zuma’s government is pushing through a secrecy law that could impede reporting on state corruption.
“They’ve got to make South Africa a much more attractive place for investment,” Mark Mobius, who oversees about $40 billion as executive chairman of Franklin Templeton’s Emerging Markets Group, said in an interview this month in Dubai. “I’m not only talking about foreign investment,” he said. “I’m talking about local investment.”
A lack of opportunity for poor black South Africans, who constitute 90 percent of the population of 50.6 million, has fueled violent street protests and given impetus to a push by the ANC’s youth wing for the seizing of mines, banks and land. That, together with inadequate power supplies and a labor system as rigid as in France and Sweden, is pushing investors to consider alternatives from Australia to Peru.   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-26/mandela-dream-fades-with-one-quarter-of-south-africans-jobless.html

Another Big NEA District Fires Its Exec The union that represents roughly 12,000 Palm Beach County School District teachers has ousted its executive director, causing anger and fears of chaos among some teachers.
“What’s happening now is the destruction of the union,” said teacher and union representative Les Kozlow of the Classroom Teachers Association’s Board of Directors March 5 vote to remove Interim Executive Director Tony Hernandez.   http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/schools/cta-board-ousts-hernandez-as-executive-director-of-2267190.html?cxntcid=breaking_news

Spy Versus Spy

The NSA is Building the World’s Biggest Spy Center (watch what you say) Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted.    In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.   http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Huttaree Case, built on spies and lies, Blown to Hell A federal judge acquitted seven members of the Hutaree militia Tuesday of the most serious charges following six weeks of testimony in a high-profile terror case.
On the second anniversary of the Hutaree arrests, U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts granted a defense motion to acquit the militia members on seven charges, including seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. The most serious charge could have resulted in life prison sentences.
She ordered the trial to continue against Hutaree leader David Stone Sr. and his son, Joshua Stone, on weapons-related charges.
“Wow. Wow,” Joshua Stone’s lawyer, James C. Thomas, said, adding he will move to have his client released on bond. “We’re extremely elated.”
The judge said the government’s case was built largely on circumstantial evidence.
“While this evidence could certainly lead to a rational fact-finder to conclude that ‘something fishy’ was going on, it does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that defendants reached a concrete agreement to forcibly oppose the United States government,” Roberts wrote.    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120327/METRO/203270433/7-Hutaree-acquitted-most-serious-charges?odyssey=mod|breaking|text|FRONTPAGE

Paranoid (?) US Envoy to Russia accuses Tv Station of Hacking his Life Ambassador Michael A. McFaul met with both cheers and criticism in Russia after he confronted a camera crew from state-controlled television, suggesting that they had accessed his schedule by hacking his e-mail or his telephone.   Mr. McFaul engaged in a five-minute debate on Thursday with a reporter from NTV — a station that has produced harsh reports targeting the United States in recent months — after she approached him with a cameraman on the sidewalk on his way to an appointment. He complained that camera crews have been harassing him and asked how they had learned about his meeting with Lev A. Ponomaryov, a human rights campaigner and opposition figure, which was not a matter of public record.
“This is against the Geneva Convention, if you are going to receive my information from my telephone or from my BlackBerry,” Mr. McFaul said, as Mr. Ponomaryov tried to pull him inside. Mr. McFaul remarked on this a few hours later via Twitter, commenting, “I respect press right to go anywhere & ask any question. But do they have a right to read my email and listen to my phone?”   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/world/europe/russia-ambassador-michael-mcfaul-ntv-hacking.html?ref=global-home

Magical Mystery Tour

Konyi Commercializers Get Drunk, Keep Nine Hundred Grand and have a good laugh Two weeks after Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell apparently suffered a breakdown, stripped naked and darted into Pacific Beach traffic, another nonprofit executive has been filmed talking about keeping $900,000 of a charity award for himself.
The celebrity website TMZ released a 52-second video Tuesday showing Jedidiah Jenkins drinking from a vodka bottle, slurring his words and bragging about keeping most of a $1 million charity award for himself.
“I don’t know if you heard this or not but we won a, we won a million dollars, so … That’s pretty rad,” says Jenkins, the Invisible Children director of ideology. “Here’s $100,000 for Haiti and $900,000 extra for me. Get on the bandwagon.”
Throughout the film, Jenkins is unsteady, stumbling over words and his glasses are askew.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/27/kony-exec-jokes-about-pocketing-900000/

Should Commercial Pilots be Tested for Fanatical Mysticism?

Muslim Bros Rise Up from Counterfeit Arab Spring As Egypt’s ruling generals near the end of their formal reign, the country’s main Islamist party is asserting increasing authority over the political system and openly confronting the powerful military.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s growing influence came into sharp focus Sunday as its political wing and other Islamists established a dominant role in the 100-member body chosen by the parliament to write the country’s new, post-revolutionary constitution. Liberals and leftists vowed to boycott the assembly, and at least eight withdrew from it, accusing the Islamist parties of taking over the process.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/muslim-brotherhood-asserts-its-strength-in-egypt-with-challenges-to-military/2012/03/21/gIQAJ9pmaS_story.html

About that Papal Visit–who is this guy anyway? What Ratzinger managed, under cover of the ur-populist, airplane-hopping John Paul II, was to further, and in some sense complete, the isolation of the Church of Rome from the concerns of the world beyond the papal state. He conflated the dogma of infallibility, a baby doctrine in church terms—it dates from 1870 and has only been invoked once, to confirm the assumption of the Virgin—with the papal “teachings” that went through his office, and left a billion Catholics to accept them or to risk their souls dissenting. As Pope, he has regarded his own pronouncements as law; a case in point was his recent reaffirmation of a 1968 encyclical against birth control, issued despite the advice of the Vatican’s own commission on contraception, which found nothing in scripture to justify a ban that, in fact, was always as much concerned with producing Catholic babies as with theology. He has reinstated a small group of ultra-conservative priests, among them a Holocaust denier, who had been excommunicated, along with their renegade archbishop, in the late eighties. And he has continued to marginalize progressive theologians—including the Jesuits of the Pontifical Gregorian University, who have had their interfaith theology seminars put in question. Put simply, he has given Catholics a choice between his heaven and a hell he insists is of their own making.
To call Benedict XVI reactionary or autocratic is perhaps beside the point of the pedophilia scandals plaguing his papacy now. We know he is rigid. His contempt for the rules of the secular world is now, more than ever, apparent. But mainly he remains an enforcer of exemption. From Rome, he has perpetuated a code of silence and neglect at the expense of the Catholics he was elected to nurture and protect   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/03/the-pope-and-the-world.html

above, William Lynn has a laugh

Superstitious Rapist Protector Goes to Trail. Why is this the First? The first Catholic Church official to go on trial for allegedly covering up sexual abuse of children by predator priests was described by prosecutors Monday as more concerned with protecting the church than children.
Prosecutors in Philadelphia told jurors in opening statements that Monsignor William J. Lynn, who was in charge of reviewing complaints about abusive priests, tried to save the church from scandal by covering up child sexual abuse.
“You can’t protect the church without keeping the allegations in the dark,’’ said Assistant Dist. Atty. Jacqueline Coelho, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. “He kept the parishioners in the dark and he kept the faithful in the dark.’’
Calling Lynn “the keeper of secrets,” Coelho said: “The protection of children is the furthest thing from defendant Lynn’s mind.’’   http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-philadelphia-catholic-church-sex-abuse-20120326,0,1979259.story

Amish Zombie Vixens Chopping the Beards that Satan Must have Grown! Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged an additional four women with being involved in beard-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in Ohio, and added new allegations that suspects tried to hide or destroy evidence including a bag of hair from the victims.
The updated indictment filed in federal court in Cleveland also charges alleged ringleader Sam Mullet Jr. with lying to federal agents during their investigation by denying knowledge of an October assault.

Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

One More Time for The Killer Jerry Lee Lewis has married for a seventh time, and we encourage you to get a pencil and paper and keep notes before reading the rest of this post.
The 76-year-old rock-’n'-roller on March 9 married Judith Brown, his caregiver, in Natchez, Miss., CNN reports — and that’s where the easy part ends.
You see, Judith Brown is the ex-wife of Rusty Brown, Lewis’ second cousin. And Rusty Brown would be the brother of Myra Gale Brown, the minor-cousin-once-removed whom Lewis married in 1957.
The 14-year age difference between Lewis and Brown is actually more than the 10-year gap that existed between Lewis and Myra Gale Brown, but then again, Brown was only 13 when they wed, while Lewis was a piano-pummeling 23 getting hitched for the third time.
Publicity from that whole marrying-a-minor-who’s-also-a-relative incident — oops — dealt a crippling blow to the career of the “Great Balls of Fire” singer. Those two divorced after 13 years.
Lewis and his sixth wife, who were married for 20 years, divorced in 2004.  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2012/03/jerry-lewis-married-cousins-ex-wife-judith-brown.html

Smart and Sane People Deal with Anti-Abortion Fanatics Soon after that, the harassing calls from protesters started coming to his home. By the dozens, at all hours. Friends asked him how they could help. He began to take the names and phone numbers down of anyone who contacted him with an unwanted call. And he gave those lists to his friends and asked them to call these folks back.
“In a very calm, very respectful voice, they said that the Stave family thanks you for your prayers,” he said. “They cannot terminate the lease, and they do not want to. They support women’s rights.”
This started with a dozen or so friends, then grew. Soon, there were more than a thousand volunteers dialing.
If they could find the information, Stave’s callers would even ask the family how their children were doing, and mention their names and the name of their school. “And then we’d tell them that we bless their home on such and such street,” giving them their address.
In some cases, the family of a protester who called Stave’s home could get up to 5,000 calls in return.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-clinics-landlord-turns-the-tables-on-anti-abortion-protesters/2012/03/29/gIQAThgwiS_story.html

If You Got this Dispatch, something went wrong for Anon The mysterious group of hackers who go by the name “Anonymous” have threatened to take down the Internet on Saturday. Or not.
The confusion comes from the very nature of the group, which is amorphous and has no identifiable leadership. Several weeks ago, a group identifying itself as Anonymous announced “Operation Global Blackout,” the effect of which would be to bring Web surfing to a halt.   http://www.npr.org/2012/03/30/149712036/anonymous-hacking-group-threatens-the-internet

If You WIn $640 million plus, please just send A meager 1 percent to the good ole Rouge Forum!

So Long Earl (all for one and one for all)

Registration Form and Details on the Rouge Forum Conference  Rouge Forum 2012
June 22-24 at Miami University (Oxford, OH)   http://rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/registration/

Congratulations to the Labadie Collection of Radical Works! 100 Years

View selected items from the world’s foremost archive of international radical social protest movements. “Social protest movements often involve intense passion, so expect to see some edgy and offensive items on display,” says Labadie Collection curator Julie Herrada.
The Labadie Collection is the world’s largest publicly accessible research collection covering just about every 19th, 20th, and 21st century protest movement that can be documented on paper, from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street. It has served as a resource for thousands of people the world over, from high school students to seasoned researchers, from young activists in search of their roots to documentary filmmakers unearthing eye-catching images. Books, serials, manuscripts, pamphlets, photographs, audio recordings, posters, and political buttons are all part of this eclectic group of materials.  
http://www.lib.umich.edu/audubon-room/events/labadieexhibit

The Commune, March 1871

An Invitation to Fight Capitalism  (graphic  text is here  http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/06/05/ezequiel-adamovsky-anti-capitalism/)

Portugal: Transport Workers Strike The Lisbon subway and some of Portugal’s major rail and ferry routes were shut down Thursday as workers staged a strike to protest labor law changes and austerity cuts.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/europe/portugal-strike-disrupts-transportation.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Failed Oil Warrior Condi Rice and Ruling Class Pals Declare,” Our Education agenda is a War Agenda” he nation’s security and economic prosperity are at risk if America’s schools don’t improve, warns a task force led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s school system….According to the panel, 75 percent of young adults don’t qualify to serve in the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records or inadequate levels of education. That’s in part because 1 in 4 students fails to graduate from high school in four years, and a high school diploma or the equivalent is needed to join the military. But another 30 percent of high school graduates don’t do well enough in math, science and English on an aptitude test to serve in the military, the report said.     The panel makes three main recommendations:
—Adopt and expand the common core initiative to include skill sets critical to national security such as science, technology and foreign languages;
—Structural changes to provide students with more choices in where they can go to school, so many students aren’t stuck in underperforming schools;
—A national security readiness audit, prepared by governors working with the federal government, that can be used to judge whether schools are meeting national expectations in education.      http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iLNRIoD1IYG3j8RvE-NUm2oKmzdQ?docId=2b2e388bd8414e8ebc9afe912147c7fb

The Full Education Agenda as a War Agenda CFR bi Partisan Report http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618

The Giant Test Cheating Ponzi Scheme Suspicious test scores in roughly 200 school districts resemble those that entangled Atlanta in the biggest cheating scandal in American history, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.    The newspaper analyzed test results for 69,000 public schools and found high concentrations of suspect math or reading scores in school systems from coast to coast. The findings represent an unprecedented examination of the integrity of school testing.
The analysis doesn’t prove cheating. But it reveals that test scores in hundreds of cities followed a pattern that, in Atlanta, indicated cheating in multiple schools.
A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results underlies bold changes in education policy, the findings show. The tougher teacher evaluations many states are rolling out, for instance, place more weight than ever on tests.
Perhaps more important, the analysis suggests a broad betrayal of schoolchildren across the nation. As Atlanta learned after cheating was uncovered in half its elementary and middle schools last year, falsified test results deny struggling students access to extra help to which they are entitled, and erode confidence in a vital public institution.  http://www.ajc.com/news/cheating-our-children-suspicious-1397022.html

City by City Ponzi Cheat Breakout http://www.ajc.com/news/cheating-our-children-list-1397020.html

Corruption is not a Fluke in Capitalist Schooling. Corruption is an Integral Part of Capitalism A former Pontiac school official accused of stealing $236,000 from the district spent some of the money on luxury vehicles and a Chicago shopping spree and got taxpayers to foot the bill for his law school tuition, according to the FBI. He also got his close friend a job with the district, according to court records.
The allegations against former Pontiac associate superintendent Jumanne Sledge were included in a search warrant affidavit unsealed Wednesday in federal court.
The affidavit offers an unprecedented look into the public corruption case involving a cash-strapped school district and offers details on the 40-year-old Bloomfield Hills resident’s personal life.
“It just makes your stomach drop. It’s sickening, the abject impunity with which this guy went about spending money that should have gone to the most needy in our community — children that need schooling,” lawyer Deborah Gordon said.
Gordon represents former interim superintendent Jonathan Brown, who sued the district last month in Oakland County, alleging he was fired after uncovering fraud and misuse of district money.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120322/SCHOOLS/203220378/FBI-Ex-Pontiac-school-official-misused-funds?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

California State University System to Eliminate 20,000 + Students + Uncounted Faculty ( a get out the vote ploy) California State University will accept no new admissions for the spring semester of 2013 – with a few exceptions – as part of a drastic cost-cutting strategy to reduce enrollment by about 16,000 students next spring, officials said Monday.
Another 20,000 to 25,000 qualified students could be barred from attending CSU in the 2013-14 academic year if voters reject a proposed tax measure that hasn’t yet qualified for the November ballot.  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/19/BAPL1NN1KR.DTL

The Corporate State University of 2102 (with overwhelming faculty consent)Yet for everything we see of the homeland security campus, there is a good deal more that we miss. Behind the riot suits, the baton strikes, and the pepper-spray cannons stands a sprawling infrastructure made possible by multimillion-dollar federal grants, “memoranda of understanding” and “mutual aid” agreements among law enforcement agencies, counter-terrorism training, an FBI-sponsored “Academic Alliance,” and 103 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (which provide “one-stop shopping” for counterterrorism operations to more than 50 federal and 600 state and local agencies)… At a time when entire departments and disciplines are facing the chopping block at America’s universities, the Department of Homeland Security has proven to be the best-funded department of all. Homeland security studies has become a major growth sector in higher education and now has more than 340 certificate- and degree-granting programs. Many colleges have joined the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium, a spinoff of the U.S. Northern Command (the Department of Defense’s “homeland defense” division), which offers a model curriculum to its members.    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175519/tomgram%3A_michael_gould-wartofsky%2C_class_of_2012_meet_the_class_of_1984/#more

What Happens when Kids do not Show up to learn to be loyal and obedient to capital? Busted! A truancy crackdown Friday around the Denby High School area on the city’s east side picked up at least 16 students and brought them to the local police precinct in handcuffs, police said.
The effort was part of Mayor Dave Bing’s Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One component of this initiative is Operation Safe Passage, which is supported by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, Wayne County Sheriff’s Office and Detroit police, local nonprofits and Detroit Public Schools. Operation Safe Passage, approaching its one-year anniversary in April, has intervened with 100 students, Detroit Police Department Sgt. Eren Stephens said.     http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120323/SCHOOLS/203230438/Detroit-police-sweep-Denby-area-students-skipping-school-handcuff-16?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

“The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools.”
― Thucydides

Nine Years in, More Barbarism in Iraq As Iraq prepares to showcase itself to the world next week with a highly anticipated gathering of Arab leaders, a string of suicide attacks and car bombings on Tuesday morning offered a bloody reminder that insurgent violence still wreaks havoc with the country’s tenuous stability.   The attacks killed at least 43 people in a half-dozen cities across the country, security officials said, from a Shiite pilgrimage site in the south to a disputed, ethnically diverse center of Iraq’s oil wealth in the north. More than 100 people were wounded, and while there were no immediate claims of responsibility, the scale and synchronicity of the bombings were nearly identical to previous attacks by the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/world/middleeast/bomb-attacks-in-iraq.html?ref=global-home#commentsContainer

Barbarized American Invader Terrorist Made Two Trips on Killing Spree U.S. investigators believe the U.S. soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians split the slaughter into two episodes, returning to his base after the first attack and later slipping away to kill again, two American officials said Saturday.  This scenario seems to support the U.S. government’s assertion — contested by some Afghans — that the killings were done by one person, since they would have been perpetrated over a longer period of time than assumed when Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was detained March 11 outside his base in southern Afghanistan.
But it also raises new questions about how Bales, who was formally charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder and other crimes, could have carried out the nighttime attacks without drawing attention from any Americans on the Kandahar province base.     http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/03/24/us/politics/ap-us-us-afghanistan-bales.html?ref=global-home

US General Allen: Troops to be in Afghanistan for Foreseeable Future The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Thursday said he believes American troop withdrawals should stop in 2013, keeping at least 68,000 by 2014 in contradiction of Obama administration plans to have combat troops out by that year.    http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/22/top-us-commander-in-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-should-stop-next-year/

Army Tried to Scrub American Troop Terrorist from Web Besides waiting nearly a week before identifying the Army staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers, the U.S. military scrubbed its websites of references to his combat service.
Gone were photographs of the suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, as well as a recounting in his base’s newspaper of a 2007 battle in Iraq involving his unit, a report that quoted him extensively.
But they weren’t really gone.
Given the myriad ways that information remains accessible on the Internet, despite the best efforts to remove it, the material about Bales was still out there and available, such as in cached versions of Web pages. Within minutes of the Pentagon leaking his name Friday evening, news organizations and others found and published his pictures, the account of the battle – which depicts Bales and other soldiers in a glowing light – and excerpts from his wife’s personal blog. So why did the Pentagon try to scrub Bales from the Internet in the first place?
The military said its intention in removing the material wasn’t to lessen the Army’s embarrassment over the horrific attack – nine of the victims were children – but to protect the privacy of Bales’ family.    http://www.military.com/news/article/army-tried-to-delete-bales-from-web-after-arrest.html

above, the battle of Marciano

Asia Times on the Failed Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan ( A government that is losing to an insurgency is not being outfought, it is being outgoverned.- Bernard Fall)  The presence of a large number of foreign troops is seldom welcome by any people. Americans might remember reading of their forbears’ annoyance at the presence of British troops back in the 18th century – and they were not really foreign, yet. Today, a large number of US troops in another country, especially a traditionalist one, presents significant problems.
The rank and file of the US military are drawn from a swaggering, coarse, and often violent youth culture. Trained for war and away from familial restraints, they do not all act responsibly out in the field or just outside the perimeter of an operating base.    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NC20Df01.html

Obamagogue’s Endless War Economy Last Friday, March 16, President Obama issued a creepy Executive Order. Entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” it authorizes the President and cabinet officials to take over crucial aspects of the national economy not only during emergencies but also in peacetime.The order relies on a Korean War-era statute, the Defense Production Act of 1950, to further entwine the domestic industrial economy with the military. It talks of fostering “cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors.”
The stated purpose is to strengthen “the domestic industrial and technological base” so as “to ensure it is capable of responding to the national defense needs of the United States.”  This amounts to putting the economy on permanent war footing, even when there isn’t an emergency.For instance, the Executive Order talks of the need for the economic base “to satisfy [defense] requirements in peacetime and times of national emergency.” And cabinet officials are authorized to “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources . . . to promote the national defense, under both emergency and non-emergency conditions.”
It amounts to a sweeping reassertion of Presidential authority. It reasserts the President’s authority “to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders . . . to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders.”
And it then delegates this extraordinary power to cabinet heads.   http://www.progressive.org/permanent_war_economy.html

Pay No Attention to the Loud Noises. All is Well in Peaceful Iraq Al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks that killed 46 people across the country this week, and said the violence exposes how weak government security is ahead of the upcoming Arab League summit in the capital, Baghdad.
The statement by the Islamic State of Iraq, posted on a website on Wednesday, said its “Sunni lions” targeted the plan of the “fool government preparing” for the summit.
Attacks on Tuesday struck Shia pilgrims in the holy city of Karbala, set cars on fire near a police headquarters in Kirkuk and targeted security forces and government officials in Baghdad.   http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/03/2012321145733544106.html

Mali and the US Trained Coup Leader A US Africa Command official confirmed on Friday the leader of military coup d’état in Mali has visited the US on several occasions, receiving professional military education.
Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo participated in the America’s International Military Education and Training program, sponsored by the US State Department, Public Affairs representative Patrick Barnes revealed to The Washington Post.
Foreign officers are handpicked for the program by US embassies in respective countries. The Malian army is very small, consisting of only 7,000 personnel. With the given small number of officers in this army, it is no wonder that Sanogo had a good chance to get to the US.   http://www.rt.com/news/mali-coup-american-trained-377/

Nobody will be Charged for Murders of 24 in Pakistan The United States military has decided that no service members will face disciplinary charges for their involvement in a NATO airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, an accident that plunged relations between the two countries to new depths and has greatly complicated the allied mission in Afghanistan.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/world/asia/us-plans-no-disciplinary-charges-in-strike-that-killed-24-pakistanis.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Taibbi–the Long Con is Still on–this time the Reload Here’s yet another form of hidden bailout the federal government doles out to our big banks, without the public having much of a clue. This is from the WSJ this morning: Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are lining up to become landlords to cash-strapped Americans by bidding on pools of foreclosed properties being sold by Fannie Mae… While the current approach of selling homes one-by-one has its own high costs and is sometimes inefficient, selling properties in bulk to large investors could require Fannie Mae to sell at a big discount, leading to larger initial costs. In con artistry parlance, they call this the ‘reload.’ That’s when you hit the same mark twice — typically with a second scam designed to ‘fix’ the damage caused by the first scam. Someone robs your house, then comes by the next day and sells you a fancy alarm system, that’s the reload.       In this case, banks pumped up the real estate market by creating huge volumes of subprime loans, then dumped a lot of them on, among others, Fannie and Freddie, the ever-ready enthusiastic state customer. Now the loans have crashed in value, yet the GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises) are still out there feeding the banks money through two continuous bailouts.
One, they continue to buy mortgages from the big banks (until recently, even from Bank of America, whom the GSEs were already suing for sales of toxic MBS), giving the banks a permanent market for home loans.
And secondly, they conduct these quiet bulk sales of mortgages, in which huge packets of home loans are sold to banks at a “big discount.”
By now we’ve come full circle. Banks create the loans, make money selling them off on the market at high prices, then come back and buy them again when they’re low. When the GSEs are in the middle of this transaction, it makes mortgage lending a basically risk-free proposition: Banks get paid for creating home loans and they end up owning valuable property on the cheap, but in between, they offshore the market risk to a government entity and/or to the idiot individual who bought the home mortgage in the first place.

Even better, many of the banks/investors who buy these home loans back from Fannie/Freddie will rent out their properties instead of reselling them, which can vastly increase their revenue streams. From the WSJ:  http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=147426

Black Agenda Report: Obamagogue and the Magic Wand What are the people who tell us President Obama hasn’t got a “magic wand” really saying? That we have no right to expect a president to use the power of his office to address mass incarceration, the housing, foreclosure, student and consumer debt crises, or end our murderous colonial wars around the world? That we’re immature and unsophisticated to demand or expect much of anything more than his pretty black face in that big white house?  …Besides, our black misleadership class warns us, even when they tell us the same or bigger lies than Republicans tell us, even when they campaign for jobs and peace but wage war and cutbacks in office, even when they’re lying through their teeth to us about “clean coal,” “safe nuclear energy,” and the need to close neighborhood schools and replace experienced black teachers with mostly white temps, Democrats are simply better than Republicans. Always have been, always will be. After all, they’re not ignorant white supremacists, are they?
Let’s get real. Whenever anybody, in or out of office repeats that “magic wand” line, what they mean is that people have no right to demand peace or jobs or justice. They mean that people expecting, demanding or fighting for these things are fools, losers, and if their demands make the president and his party look bad, race traitors when they’re black or white racists if they’re anything else. How much clearer can it get? Only the immature and politically unsophisticated expect any sort of political involvement to change things.    http://blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obama-democratic-expectations-and-magic-wand

Biggest Gender-pay Gap? Wall Street Female personal care and service workers, which include butlers, house sitters and shoe shiners, earned $1.02 for every $1 their male counterparts made in 2010, according to census data compiled by Bloomberg. That job category was the only one of 265 major occupations where the median female salary in the U.S. exceeded the amount paid to men. The six jobs with the largest gender gap in pay and at least 10,000 men and 10,000 women were in the Wall Street-heavy financial sector. Cali Carlin reports on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.” (Source: Bloomberg)    http://www.bloomberg.com/video/88496286/

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Even the Cops can’t Keep Track of the Spies– Drug lords targeted by Fast and Furious were FBI informants When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show.     http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fast-furious-20120322,0,3334424.story

Behind Capital–Violence. Cops Attack (“Clear”) Zucotti Park, again Scores of Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on Saturday night as police officers swept Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and closed it.
Dozens of demonstrators sat down and locked arms as officers moved in about 11:30 p.m. The protesters chanted “we are not afraid” as the police began pulling people from the crowd, one by one, and leading them out of the park in handcuffs.  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/arrests-made-as-protesters-mark-occupy-wall-streets-six-month-anniversary/

A Short Take on the Koni Spectacle Commercializing War Crimes http://richgibson.com/konyi.htm

Solidarity Fornever

The Coming Failure of the UAW to Extort Dues from UAW Workers, Selling their Labor to Bosses The United Auto Workers union is soliciting signatures of support from workers at Volkswagen AG’s U.S. factory, an escalation of its effort to establish a foothold outside the Detroit automakers.

In early March, the UAW started passing out authorization cards for workers to sign in an early formal step needed for union representation, workers at the factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, told Reuters.
UAW President Bob King has said organizing U.S. plants run by foreign automakers, known in the industry as transplants, is crucial for the union’s survival.
After three decades of declining membership, the UAW faces a financial crunch that has been exacerbated by the U.S. economic downturn. This has forced America’s richest union to sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for activities.    http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/23/us-uaw-vw-idUSBRE82M00M20120323

The Torment and Demise of the United Auto Workers Union as Performed by the Auto Bosses, the Labor Leaders, Counterfeit Radicals, Fictional Revolutionaries, and All Those Who Know They Are Not Innocent Either http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

The Counterfeit Tax Fight of CTA, CFT In California CFT and CTA/NEA are carrying on a shadow boxing match over whose proposal is a better method to fool school workers into ballot boxes and the interim electoral frenzy that leads up to the vote. NEA will likely put 60 million dollars into the campaign, and hundreds of thousand of volunteer hours–people filtered away from real unionism, school workers and other unionites becoming tools of their own oppression.
Last year, the California Teachers Association spent more than $6 million in their electoral shams, with nearly nothing going on.
The two unions’ main problems are (1) locking down support for the demagogue, Obama, and his wars, and bailouts–as well as the NDAA and Arne Duncan’s expansion of schools as human munition factories.
(2) The state affiliates have problems, like the shifts to “right to work” laws in states that would radically reduce union tops’ dues income (when unionites say “save collective bargaining, they really mean, “save our chance to force people to pay dues—a la Wisconsin, they have always been prepared to give up everything else). The unions were never created by majority state wide citizen votes, but by direct action on the job. But the last thing the union bosses want is a mass of class conscious workers so the last thing they are planning to do is shut down states that pass those laws.
California has a real budget problem that both CTA and CFT address in counterfeit fashion, below.
Third, the union bosses need to create an illusion of local action where there is really no action, like the Moveon scheme to train 100,000 people in “Non-violent” action—as distinct from the direct action that is necessary, mass strikes and general strikes, student strikes, and mutinies in the military. Moveon, a Democratic Party front, like Truthout, also serves as a bodyguard of illusions, preserving capitalism and its shaky empire.   http://richgibson.com/taxfight.htm

Fake Unions Betray Members on Millionaires’ Tax in CA (don’t strike, vote) This winter the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) sent tremors of hope through its ranks by announcing it was going to spearhead an attempt to place an initiative on the California ballot — appropriately called the “Millionaires Tax” — that would raise taxes only on millionaires (3 percent on those making more than $1 million; 5 percent on those making more than $2 million). The initiative carefully specifies that the money it raises — if it gets on the ballot — will go to public education on all levels (36 percent for K-12 and 24 percent for colleges and universities), social services for children and seniors (25 percent), public safety (10 percent) and infrastructure (5 percent). To qualify for the ballot, somewhere in the order of 800,000 petition signatures are required.    http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/21/the-unions-the-millionaires-tax-and-the-road-to-success/

East Coast Longshoreman Fight to Stay White The longshoremen’s union defied government officials again on Tuesday, insisting that the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor had no authority to demand that all hiring be done without discrimination and refusing to even send a representative to state its case at a commission hearing.
The union’s refusal to certify the fairness of its hiring process was the latest setback to the commission’s campaign to diversify a work force that is predominantly white and male. Some of the union locals that supply workers to the companies that load and unload cargo ships are more than 80 percent white, according to commission members   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/nyregion/longshoremens-union-in-new-york-defiant-over-diversity-plan.html?_r=2

Rank and File Outs Zombro in San Diego EA (why are so many NEA execs being fired?) A controversial San Diego teachers union leader has been ousted from office at a time when the city school district is scrambling to win concessions from labor groups in an effort to rescind some of the 1,600 pink slips issued to educators last week.
Camille Zombro, vice president of the San Diego Education Association, lost her bid for re-election to teacher Lindsay Burningham, according to a tally of votes posted Tuesday on the association website.
Zombro served as union president from 2006 to 2010, clashing with superintendents and school boards throughout her tenure. She has held the post of vice president alongside union President Bill Freeman, who was re-elected    unopposed.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/20/hard-line-teacher-leader-ousted/

The Magical Mystery Tour

Cubans Hide the Children! Papists Coming!

above is future Pope Benedict

French Kill (cannot arrest?) Jihadist Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old former garage mechanic who claimed responsibility for the brutal slayings of four men and three children, was shot dead on Thursday when security forces stormed the apartment where he had barricaded himself for more than 30 hours.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/europe/mohammed-merah-toulouse-shooting-suspect-french-police-standoff.html?_r=3&ref=global-home

Up From the Arab Spring Farce, the New US Allies, the Muslim Bros Muslim Brotherhood officials said on Wednesday that the group was debating whether to field its own candidate in Egypt’s upcoming presidential contest, after failing to persuade several outside figures to run with the group’s backing.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhood-may-offer-presidential-candidate-in-egypt.html?_r=3&ref=global-home

Falsified Culture as a Weapon to Unite those with Opposing Interests Aztec dancers marched up the main street in town, burning fragrant tree-resin incense and blowing conch shells.
They wore their finest headdresses, body paint and ceremonial gowns, arriving at the mountain village of Ixcateopan, Mexico, as they do each year for a festival marking the anniversary of the birth of Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor of the Aztecs and a symbol of noble resistance.
The dancers believe the town’s crumbling ex-church is Cuauhtemoc’s final resting place.
Legend has it that Ixcateopan, in the southern state of Guerrero, is where loyal Aztec warriors smuggled Cuauhtemoc’s bones after his execution on the order of Hernan Cortes in 1525. In honor of the young ruler who heroically stood his ground against the Spanish invaders, the story goes, Cuauhtemoc’s remains were buried in his hometown in 1529 under what would later become the altar of the local church.
Ixcateopan (pronounced Eesh-ka-TAY-OH-pan) guarded its secret for hundreds of years.
The supposed bones of Cuauhtemoc were unearthed in 1949 in a dig led by archaeologist Eulalia Guzman.     http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-aztec-ritual-20120322,0,6531787.story

Santeria and Dead Babies: Comments from the Papacy? — Leave it to Miami to shock even a reality-TV film crew. The crew was shooting footage at Miami International Airport for an upcoming episode when customs agents found a pair of human fetuses in the luggage of two women returning from Havana.
The fetuses were to be delivered to someone in Miami and used in a Santeria-like religious ritual, according to two people knowledgeable about the case. …The two women explained to U.S. authorities that they received the jar in Havana from a babalao – a Santeria priest – and were asked to deliver it to someone in Miami, the airline industry official told the newspaper.
But they insisted that they did not know what was in the jar, and were not charged with any crimes, Rutland noted.
The rites of Cuba’s Catholic-African religions usually involve the sacrifice of small animals such as chickens and goats
Some also use old human bones stolen from cemeteries. Human fetuses are reputed to be used only by some of the more secretive sects.  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/23/142869/fetuses-found-in-luggage-at-miami.html

Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

And One Member of the Invisible Class: Jamie Dimon of J.P Morgan Chase

Susan Ohanian Will be a Keynote Speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference Susan’s advocacy work keeps at its core her 20 years as a teacher. Her more than 300 essays on education issues have appeared in periodicals ranging from Phi Delta Kappan cover stories to The Atlantic, Nation, USA Today, Washington Monthly, Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and numerous education journals. One of her 26 book on education policy and practice introduced the word Standardisto.

Although currently censored at the NCTE online discussion site, Susan’s website received NCTE’s George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honest and Clarity in Public Language. She has delivered the annual MacClement Lecture for Excellence in Education, Queens University, Ontario, Canada, the Helen Oakes lecture at Temple University, and the Biber Lecture, Bank Street College, New York.
Susan notes that although she’s been a featured speaker at both the International Symposium for the Educational Welfare in Seoul, Korea, and British Columbia Teachers’ Federation events, her talk to the Progressive Caucus of the AFT was closed down by angry hoots from the audience.

Susan started a website to protest the passage of NCLB. She had hoped to shut it down by now, but things keep getting worse, so she persists.

Call for Proposals
Rouge Forum 2012
OCCUPY EDUCATION! Class Conscious Pedagogies for Social Change
June 22-24, 2012
Miami University
Oxford, OH
Proposals Due April 15, 2012

The Rouge Forum 2012 will be held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The University’s picturesque campus is located 50 minutes northwest of Cincinnati. The conference will be held June 22-24, 2012.
Proposals for papers, panels, performances, workshops, and other multimedia presentations should include title(s) and names and contact information for presenter(s). The deadline for sending proposals is April 15. The Steering Committee will email acceptance notices by May 1. (details http://rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/rf-2012-call-for-proposals/)

Kenya Strike Wins Public health workers have ended a nearly two-week strike over pay after reaching a deal with the government, which withdrew a threat to fire 25,000 members of the union, officials said on Thursday. The protest, which left patients without medical treatment, was the latest in a string of strikes to grip Kenya as soaring consumer prices have fanned widespread discontent. A spokesman for the union said the government promised to address the workers’ demand for pay raises in July.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/world/africa/kenya-health-workers-end-strike.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Thanks to Substance News for attention to the Rahm Video.

Smuggling Books to Tucson Barnstorming across the country with a caravan of writers and educators, Librotraficante founder Tony Diaz is bringing more than banished books to Tucson students this week.
In a city that has been bitterly divided by Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) Superintendent John Pedicone’s excessive use of police force, the disgraceful confiscation of Mexican American Studies books in front of children, and the demoralizing language of ill-equipped school board members, Diaz and his merry band of “librotraficantes” are providing Tucson with a powerful “teaching moment”: That books matter, and Tucson should be celebrating, not fearing or proscribing, literature from its students and teachers.     http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2012/03/16/beyond-tucsons-banished-books-and-metal-detectors-if-tony-diaz-were-superintendent-of-schools/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

USDA: We Won’t Demand you feed Pink Slime to Kiddies, but hey, it IS Cheaper! After a public uproar sparked by a Houston mom’s online petition, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture on Thursday backed off the federal school lunch program’s use of “pink slime” by letting school districts decide whether to accept the controversial beef product.
A groundswell developed over the “yuck factor” of the ground beef extended with filler that is made from beef renderings and treated with ammonia hydroxide. The USDA says the product is safe.
“USDA only purchases products for the school lunch program that are safe, nutritious and affordable — including all products containing Lean Finely Textured Beef,” as pink slime is officially known, the department said in a statement.
“However, due to customer demand, the department will be adjusting procurement specifications for the next school year so schools can have additional options in procuring ground beef products,” the statement said. “USDA will provide schools with a choice to order product either with or without Lean Finely Textured Beef.”   http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/15/142124/usda-schools-can-opt-not-to-feed.html

Reproducing Class Rule–the Education Agenda is a Class War Agenda Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.
Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive,” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile.   http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/the-reproduction-of-privilege/

So Long LA and CA Schools About 19,500 pink slips were issued to public school teachers this week, which was the state’s legal deadline to do so, according to an estimate from the California Teachers Assn.
The Los Angeles Unified School district issued 9,500 layoff notices, more than any other district in the state, according to the union. The district, California’s largest, has laid off more than 8,000 teachers over the last four years but eventually hired many back.
While figures from some schools have yet to be compiled, so far 206 school districts have reported at least 19,500 notices being issued.
Dean E. Vogel, the union’s president, said notices hurt not only teachers, but also families and the surrounding community. The state ranks 47th in the country in per-pupil funding and has cut $20 billion in public education funding to schools and community colleges in the last four years.     http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/03/about-19500-public-school-teachers-recieve-pink-slips.html

Failed ExBoss of KC Schools Moves to Demolish Whatever is Left of Detroit Schools Fifteen Detroit Public Schools will be taken over by the state and become laboratories this fall for Michigan’s new recovery school system for low-performing schools.
Six DPS high schools and nine elementary-middle schools will come under the Education Achievement Authority — a new system created by Gov. Rick Snyder to turn around failing schools in Michigan — officials with the new system announced Tuesday at an EAA board meeting in Detroit.
An extended year calendar was approved for the EAA schools, increasing the number of days students are in school from 170 days or 1,098 instructional hours in the current schedule to 210 days starting this fall.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120313/SCHOOLS/203130430/15-Detroit-schools-chosen-new-district-fall?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Aged Retiree From Collapsed Government Motors Paid another $250,000 to Wreck Detroit Schools The emergency manager of Detroit’s financially troubled school district has agreed to stay beyond his initial one-year appointment.
Roy Roberts signed a contract on March 7 for another year because the Detroit Public Schools district is making gains, he said. The extension runs through May 16, 2013.
“We’ve made significant progress over the last 9½ months. It’s extremely important that we continue to make this progress going forward to make sure DPS regains its position as a world class leader in public education,” Roberts said Monday.
Roberts, a former General Motors executive, was appointed in May by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder as emergency manager. He became the district’s second state-appointed manager since 2009.   Robert is paid $250,000 a year. http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120312/SCHOOLS/203120376/

So Long White Folks. East Pointe (sic, once East Detroit) School shift A member of the East Detroit school board warns that his district’s participation in a Michigan Schools of Choice program could lead to whites leaving the Macomb County community.
On Monday night, the East Detroit Board of Education voted 5-2 to open the district to neighboring Wayne County schools, including those in Detroit and Harper Woods.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120313/SCHOOLS/203130412/1026/Eastpointe-school-board-member-warns-white-flight-from-Schools-Choice-decision

Austin Press: High Stakes Standardized Tests Suck Standardized achievement tests have long been a routine part of our efforts to measure the educational progress of students. In the distant past, testing days came and went with little notice or fanfare for students, parents and teachers alike. And in those days and times, the tests probably provided fairly accurate assessments of students’ progress in learning from one year to the next.
But those days of relatively relaxed test-taking for students and limited stakes for school districts and teachers are long gone. Test-based accountability systems that attach weighty consequences to student test results for school district staff, teachers, students and public officials are becoming increasingly institutionalized in the education system. There are probably few other places where the stakes attached to these tests are as high as they are in Texas.  http://www.statesman.com/opinion/insight/standardized-tests-with-high-stakes-are-bad-for-2230088.html

Educational Psychology on the Big Tests Even psychologists who subscribe to more traditional views of human intelligence agree that current tests rarely tell the whole story. In Beyond IQ: A Model of Academic Competence and Motivation, educational psychologist and psychometrician Kevin McGrew who helped develop the WJ III IQ test asserts that a student’s scholastic performance is linked to a variety of factors, only one of which is cognitive ability or IQ. Stating that cognitive ability only accounts for 40-50% of school achievement, he believes that factors such as motivation, attitude, social skills, learning styles, and behavior are other important determinants of student success. He therefore argues that the job of schools should be to have more influence on those non-cognitive (or conative) factors in children—those things that are “beyond IQ,” and subject to intervention by educators.
This leads to another criticism of standardized testing—namely, that test scores do not accurately predict a student’s future success   http://www.educationalpsychology.net/no-child-left-behind-and-the-debate-in-educational-psychology/

Georgia Moves against Bonuses For Test Cheats A Senate committee has passed a bill that would revoke bonuses for Georgia teachers who cheat on standardized tests.
The Democratic-backed legislation was approved unanimously by the Senate education committee Monday. It now goes to the full Senate for a vote before heading to the governor’s desk.
Under current policy, teachers can receive bonuses or incentive pay based on the standardized test scores of their students.  http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2012-03-12/state-lawmakers-approve-bill-teacher-bonuses

Future Prezzie of USA, practicing election fraud, Arrested in CSU One of two candidates for student body president at California State University San Marcos has been arrested on several charges, including election fraud, officials said.
Matt Weaver, a junior business administration major, was arrested Thursday evening in a campus computer lab, said Margaret Lutz, a CSUSM spokeswoman.
Campus police found him “to be in possession of several devices that can be used illegally to capture the keystrokes of persons entering their IDs and passwords onto computers without their knowledge,” Lutz said.
Weaver was arrested on suspicion of unlawful access to a computer or database, identity theft and election fraud – all felonies. He was booked into the Vista jail and bailed out about 4 a.m. Friday, said university police Lt. Bob McManus.http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/16/campus-candidate-arrested-election-fraud-alleged/

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Remember the Intolerable Acts, one of the causes of the American Revolution?  The Administration of Justice Act, was aimed at protecting British officials charged with capital offenses during law enforcement by allowing them to go to England or another colony for trial…http://www.harlingen.isd.tenet.edu/coakhist/amrev.html#PRE

American Terrorist Invader Named The soldier suspected of shooting 16 Afghanistan civilians has been identified as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a U.S. official confirmed Friday.    http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-afghan-shooter-identified-20120316,0,4607040.story

Army on their Assassin Sgt who Killed 16: Nothing Really Wrong with His Background As the Army staff sergeant suspected of killing 16 civilians was flown out of Afghanistan, two military officials told McClatchy on Wednesday that investigators combing his medical records had found “no smoking gun” to explain the rampage.
The officials said that the suspect — a 38-year-old father who survived three tours in Iraq before deploying to Afghanistan in December — had no evidence of a serious traumatic brain injury or of post-traumatic stress, despite widespread speculation that those conditions were factors in the killing spree.   http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/14/141981/no-smoking-gun-in-afghan-rampage.html

The Impact of American Terrorism But when Mr. Samad, 60, walked into his mud-walled dwelling here on Sunday morning and found 11 of his relatives sprawled in all directions, shot in the head, stabbed and burned, he learned the culprit was not a Taliban insurgent. The shooting suspect was a 38-year-old United States staff sergeant who had slipped out of the base to kill.
The American soldier is accused of killing 16 people in all in a bloody rampage that has further tarnished Afghan-American relations and devastated Mr. Samad, a respected village elder whose tired eyes poured forth tears one minute and glared ahead in anger the next.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/world/asia/us-army-sergeant-suspected-in-afghanistan-shooting.html?_r=4&ref=global-home

Marionette Karzai Out of Hand! Tells Obamagogue to Send Invaders to their Bases  (who will protect his heroin dealing brother now?) President Hamid Karzai insisted Thursday that the United States confine its troops to major bases in Afghanistan by next year as the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans, both of which served to complicate the Obama administration’s plans for an orderly exit from the country.   shift was at odds with a pledge offered just hours earlier by President Obama to stick to a 2014 withdrawal schedule for troops in Afghanistan. It also ran up against the Pentagon’s stark assessment that Afghan security forces were not yet ready to take over control of the country.
Mr. Karzai’s surprise announcement, which would confine American troops to their bases a year earlier than Mr. Obama proposed, was initially made at a Thursday meeting with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who spent a fraught two days here apologizing in person to the Afghan president for the massacre of civilians by an American soldier last Sunday at a village in Kandahar Province. Upon Mr. Panetta’s arrival, an Afghan interpreter working for coalition forces crashed a stolen pickup truck near his plane.
Further fraying the United States’ efforts to preserve some degree of control over its exit strategy from Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents announced Thursday that they had broken off preliminary peace talks with the Americans.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/world/asia/taliban-call-off-talks-as-karzai-urges-faster-us-transition.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120316

Did one single Rogue Soldier really do all that Killing ? Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday accused the United States of stonewalling an investigation into the killings of 16 Afghan civilians and suggested that more than one soldier may have been involved in the massacre.
Karzai’s claims escalated once again the tensions between Kabul and Washington at a time of flagging support for the war from the U.S. and Afghan publics — and uncertainties over how to end it.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/12-turkish-troops-killed-in-chopper-crash-in-kabul/2012/03/16/gIQA3ZvzFS_story.html

Yeman–Drone Strikes Kill 64 The strikes, which the Yemeni government says killed at least 64 people, centered around the Abyan Province, but also hit the Bayda Province. Officials termed everyone killed an “insurgent.”
The US has declined to comment on any of the strikes, and has been largely silent on Yemen since early this month when they confirmed that US ground troops were attacked in Aden, an odd confirmation since the US had never announced sending ground troops to Yemen.  http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/12/yemen-us-drone-strikes-killed-at-least-64/

Tomgram on the Imperial Presidency as Sole Warmaker on the World The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this country and a new war doctrine to go with it. He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon — and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have been news.   http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175514/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_war_as_the_president’s_private_preserve/#more

Above, British and Afghan leaders meet to sign the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879 (they never learn)

The Drones are Already in the Homeland t it’s easy to imagine how drone surveillance could begin to violate civil liberties. Drones will enable far stealthier and more sophisticated surveillance over a far greater range than police helicopters ever could. Did we mention that some drones can intercept communications? Or peer through windows? Or that, someday soon, they could be equipped with facial- recognition technology?
Recreational drones are largely unregulated, save for the FAA’s modest guidance for model airplanes. A jilted lover stalking an ex might find one useful. So might a drug dealer, an unscrupulous tabloid reporter or a helicopter parent (quite literally now). So might a terrorist. They’re all free to construct one in their garage.
The market for unmanned aircraft seems likely to grow. Congress recently increased research and development financing for drones by about 16 percent, to $2.02 billion in fiscal 2012, according to Bloomberg Government data. The Defense Department said it may continue to increase drone funding even as it scales back other programs. Only 1 percent of the 18,000 or so local law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. have access to a manned aircraft; many more will find uses for the far-cheaper unmanned variety.   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-14/drones-in-u-s-need-to-fly-within-privacy-rules-view.html

Army Suicides Up Eighty Percent The number of suicides in the U.S. Army rose by 80 percent after the United States launched the war on Iraq, American military doctors reported on Thursday.
From 1977 to 2003, the tally of Army suicides had trended slightly downwards, and was far below civilian rates.
But it started to curve upwards in 2004, the year after the U.S.-led invasion, according to their analysis, published in the British journal Injury Prevention.
In 2008, 140 Army personnel committed suicide, a figure 80 percent higher than in 2004 when measured in “person-years,” a benchmark used by health experts, and much higher than in civilian society, it found.  http://www.military.com/news/article/army-suicides-up-80-percent-since-iraq-war-start.html

Another Navy Commander Removed The Navy has fired the commanding officer of the amphibious ship San Diego, which was set to sail today from a Mississippi shipyard for San Diego.
Cmdr. Jon Haydel was relieved of command while allegations of personal misconduct are being investigated.     http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/13/navy-fires-co-new-ship-san-diego/

The War Resisters League Yearly Poster (and explanation) on the Cost Of War https://www.warresisters.org/sites/default/files/FY2013piechart-english-color_0.pdf

Below by George Gitoes

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

above, Goldman Sach’s Blankfein who claims to do God’s work

Holy Crapereeeno! Goldman Sachs is Running a Bunch of Ponzi Schemes and Selfish snobby Scams! TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html

New Brit Lap Poodle Arrives in the Real Mother Country, Sucking Up  (or not) Finally, a conservative who likes President Obama.
And he’s not just any conservative, mind you. He’s a capital-C Conservative, British Prime Minister David Cameron. On his official visit to Washington, the Briton could not say enough good things about his American host.   On Iran: “The president’s tough, reasonable approach has united the world.”
On Libya: “Mr. President, Barack, about Libya . . . none of that would have been possible without the overwhelming support and overwhelming force that the United States provided in the early stages of that campaign — what you promised you would do.”
On Afghanistan: “I think the U.S. surge . . . had a transformative effect.”
On Syria: “Our teams work incredibly closely together on this issue.” The prime minister even defended Obama’s slow progress on debt reduction: “Actually, if you look at the U.S. plans for reducing the deficit over coming years, in many ways they are actually steeper than what we’re going to be doing.”
All that was missing was for Cameron to cut a campaign ad for Obama — and he just about did that, too.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-camerons-special-relationship-with-president-obama/2012/03/14/gIQAj0DnCS_story.html

Beware the Waterfall Fiscal Crisis Ahead, December 2012 (more class war from above)

79,000 South Carolinians to Lose Jobless Benefits Extended federal unemployment benefits are being phased out for almost 80,000 jobless workers in South Carolina despite the state’s high 9.3 percent jobless rate.  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/16/142165/79000-unemployed-south-carolinians.html

Witless Oprah Hugs Obamagogue with Other Parasites  to tune of $5 Million President Barack Obama, turning full attention to his re-election campaign, aimed to raise more than $5 million today with fundraisers in his adopted hometown of Chicago and then Atlanta, where Oprah Winfrey joined with other wealthy donors.
Obama arrived in Chicago as two of the Republicans who want to challenge him in November, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, also had Illinois campaign events before the state’s March 20 presidential primary.   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-16/obama-aims-to-raise-5-million-with-stops-in-chicago-atlanta.html

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

All the structures of fascism are in place:

*the very real promise of perpetual war and war means work–jobs,

*deepening segregation and racism popularized,

*mass color coded incarceration leading to the deprivation of all civil rights when “freed.”

*the continued use of black ops prisons that are unknown, and Guantanamo, the torture center we know,

*official mysticism elevated by the election (and Satan, of course, plus Magic Underwear, when are their speeches not glossolalia?),

*the eradication of whatever civil liberties may have existed (NDAA followed the Patriot Act),

*the extension of the spy and surveillance services into every aspect of life,

*the corporate state financial and auto bailouts which socialized loss and continued the capitalization of profits (an irreversible move, like the Afgan invasion, that cut the legs off of the working class youth of the US and underlined the reality of a corporate state),

*the relentless calls for all class unity (Mitt and Obamagogue),

*a military become a praetorian guard, isolated from the citizenry, filling up with Nazis, religious fanatics, and corruption (drug dealing rampant),

*spectacles heaped on spectacles and transparent diversions (Konyi vs the farcical Invisible Children),

*multiple alliances with openly fascist regimes (Kazakhstan, et al) and false praise for other fascists (Putin via Hlllbillary)

*the CIA no longer an intelligence agency but the President’s private army with a secret budget,

*a powerful propaganda machine matched by opportunistic liberals, fake radicals, and sects who play the organs on their own.     http://richgibson.com/taxfight.htm

Dead Nazi Sobibor Guard Demjanjuk Nazi hunters and protesters who had demonstrated outside his home for years had no doubts. Nor did the Justice Department. Mr. Demjanjuk, stripped of his citizenship in 1981, was deported to Israel, where witnesses and an identity card of “Ivan the Terrible,” a sadist who had murdered thousands of Jews at Treblinka, had turned up. The photograph on the card bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Demjanjuk.

He was placed on trial, convicted in 1988 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to be hanged. But five years later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction when new evidence showed that another Ukrainian was probably the notorious Ivan. Back in America, Mr. Demjanjuk regained his citizenship, only to have it revoked again as new allegations arose.

Deported to Germany in 2009, Mr. Demjanjuk, suffering from bone-marrow and kidney diseases, was tried in a Munich court on charges in the killing of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor camp in German-occupied Poland in 1943. In the nearly seven decades since 250,000 people were put to death at Sobibor, no surviving witnesses, even those who had been shown photographs, could place him at the scene.

Solidarity Fornever

AFL-CIO Pigs Endorse Obamagogue The AFL-CIO formally endorsed President Barack Obama’s re-election bid Tuesday, saying it would mount a vast door-to-door effort for Democratic candidates in response to the flood of outside political money that conservative groups are pouring into the campaign.   Union leaders have said they plan to spend more this election cycle than the $400 million they say they spent helping elect Obama and other Democrats in 2008.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said unions are more enthusiastic about Obama than they were a year ago, when Obama was mired in a debate with House Republicans over deficit reduction and didn’t seem focused on job creation.
“I think he’s made a complete pivot,” Trumka said of Obama.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/afl-cio-endorses-obama-mounts-vast-door-to-door-ground-support-for-democratic-candidates/2012/03/13/gIQA5io59R_story.html

Below, Obamagogue Manipulates his procurer, Rich Trumka, who gets paid and passes along lies.

John Marciano on the AFT Obamagogue Endorsement soon to appear in Suny Cortland Newsletter

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, recently discussed the AFT’s Executive Council endorsement of Barack Obama for president. She reviewed the lengthy process it entailed and the specific reasons for the decision. The endorsement was entirely devoted to domestic issues – though without any mention of Obama’s massive bailout of Wall Street and corporations. In the 390-second statement, Weingarten also did not utter a single word about Obama’s foreign wars and his destruction of the Constitution. Not a word about the wars and drone attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that violate international war; not a word about Obama signing the National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) which grants him the right to indefinitely detain without trial “terrorism” suspects who are U.S. citizens; and not a word about the trillions of dollars these wars will take from our treasury (New York’s share of the ultimate costs for the Afghan and Iraq wars alone will be some $252 billion).

As Katha Pollitt argued in The Nation (February 6, 2012), Obama’s “refusal to prosecute the architects of torture in the previous administration [has] meant that those policies were never confronted, debated and decisively rejected, and the people who put them in place and carried them out were never called to account…. That the president can now order the assassination of US citizens anywhere in the world has now become part of the national wallpaper. It’s the way we live now.” But that’s ok with Randi Weingarten and the AFT Executive Council.

The president of the largest labor union in the country endorses a war-mongering president that calls upon yet disgraces the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. – who in 1967 described the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” (April 4, Riverside Church, NYC, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”). There was not a whisper of regret or shame from Weingarten over the violence and devastation the Obama administration has committed around the world.

Scholars have documented the long and sordid AFT history of support for U.S. violence abroad, especially under the leadership of Albert Shanker, who along with George Meany and the AFL-CIO endorsed the destruction of Vietnam; this history includes the AFT swallowing Bush-Cheney lies prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in early 2003 – when it argued that the Hussein regime posed “’a unique threat to the peace and stability of the Middle East’ and the national security interests of the United States.”

What would it have taken for Weingarten and the AFT Executive Council to speak on behalf of those who have been killed, injured and made refugees under Obama’s militaristic foreign policies? Not much. But they could not do this and thus remain a moral disgrace and apologists for war crimes throughout the world.

CTA boss Dean Vogel gets Dancing instructions from Governor Brown

AFT Leader Denounces CFT Betrayal on Tax Scam

Dear Colleagues,

I am extremely disappointed to have to inform you that our statewide CFTPresident Josh Pechthalt and Secretary/Treasurer Jeff Freitas unilaterally, and without any prior consultation with our CFT Executive Council (of which I am member), cut a deal with the Governor to stop collecting signatures on the Millionaires’ Tax.

They are under the delusion that the “compromise” offered by the Governor to reduce the sales tax component of his proposal from 1/2cent to 1/4 cent, along with increasing the tax on those earning over $1 million to 3%, would make the Governor’s initiative palatable enough to the voters to pass. The reality is, whether it’s a 1/2 or 1/4 cents ales tax, any proposal that raises taxes on all voters in this economy is domed for defeat. I say this not just based on my”gut” or a “hunch” which is apparently what theGovernor admitted drove the writing of his initiative, but on eight statewide polls, and dozens of focus groups we conducted throughout theState.

Locally, your AFT Guild leadership is sickened to learn of this back room deal. One of our AFT student interns summed it up best when he stated:

“I hope I’m not the only one who feels kind of used after all of this, like we were just pawns in some game played by guys in fancy suits. We all put ourselves on the line to make this thing happen — and we were doing it too! I know I felt like I was a part, if just a small one, in creating real, concrete change. To then have our legs cut out from under us, well it leaves me feeling sick to my stomach, and more than a little ashamed– as though I lied to all the people I tried to sell on this measure.”

In order to get the so-called”compromise” measure qualified for the ballot, they will need to write the new initiative, send it to the Attorney General’s office to be approved and receive the Title and Summary that goes at the top of the initiative petition signature forms, and then begin collecting signatures starting from scratch. None of the signatures collected to date can be used for this new “compromise” plan. It should also be noted that with so little time remaining to get the initiative qualified,no initiative has ever qualified in this short of time period-ever.

If that’s not enough to make you doubt the viability of this brilliant “compromise” plan, here’s what was reported in the LATimes yesterday afternoon:

“[Senate Leader] Steinberg said Brown will continue to gather signatures on his original measure — which includes a half-cent sales tax hike for four years and a smaller, five-year upper-income tax increase — “as an insurance policy” in case the new measure cannot gather the signatures in time. Steinberg said the [CFT]teachers’ federation has agreed to drop its tax initiative, which would have raised taxes on incomes of only $1 million or more.

Do you feel as if we have just been played for fools? That’s because we have. Words can’t describe how disappointed we are here locally in our CFT leadership’s lack of resolve to do the right thing for all Californians in general, and for the labor movement specifically.

What’s our prediction of what will make it to the ballot and the consequence? The “compromise” initiative won’t gather the required number of signatures in time (surprise) so the Governor’s original plan will be the only measure making it to the ballot. It will fail, just as his brilliant strategy to secure four votes in the legislature last year for a tax extension miserably failed, and we will all suffer another round of devastating cuts as a result. That means more class sections cuts, a continued hiring freeze, and an evengreater budget deficit for each District to try to manage.

This is why leadership, and elections, matter. If you have strong visionary leaders who truly care about the people they serve, and not their own egos and agendas, you can make real social progress. Unfortunately, because of the utter lack of will at the State level, from the Governor, from the leaders of other unions who lined up behind him only to to curry favor regardless of the demerits of his proposal, and ultimately our own CFT leadership who sold us out, hundreds of thousands more Californians will feel real economic pain due to the ego driven actions of our “leaders” in Sacramento.
It’s a sad day for progressive unionism, and I have to say that today I am ashamed to be a member of the CFT.

Sincerely,
Jim
Jim Mahler, President
AFT Guild, Local 1931
San Diego & Grossmont-Cuyamaca
Community Colleges

Jeffrey Perry vs Racist NYC AFT The United Federation of Teachers leadership’s support for mayoral control today follows from the Unity Caucus’ longstanding opposition to community control and affirmative action, which dates from the late 1960’s and the 1968 strikes in particular but which of course has much deeper roots in US history. Support for the mayoral dictatorship follows a 30-year effort by the UFT to control community school boards and defuse and discredit Black and Latino teacher, parent and community leaders who do not accept UFT leadership.
A positive alternative to the current leadership’s continued support for mayoral control is in the immediate self interest of the large majority of active union members, the large majority of students, parents, and the working class people of New York City   …The rationale for decades of trade offs, givebacks, and betrayals is always that “it could have been worse” and “we did the best we could.” The alternative to capitulation and triangulation is a mass based resistance that shifts the balance in the favor of the people. The UFT’s historic opportunism and dogged defense of its legacy leaves them stuck in their own quagmire even while individual leaders may privately admit the inadequate defensive posture which the union currently finds itself in. It is here that an opposition may play a legitimate and positive role by speaking the unspeakable, breaking ranks with a self-defeating white supremacist legacy. In short to show how and why it is in the immediate self-interest of the large majority of the membership to stop acting “white” and join in a people’s movement to end the mayoral dictatorship and create a credible defense against attacks from the white oligarchy.   http://www.jeffreybperry.net/blog.htm?post=844261

San Diego EA Shoves Exec Director Aside (too much unionism there?) Craig Leedham, the outspoken and controversial executive director of the San Diego Education Association, is no longer working at the union’s headquarters in Mission Valley.
The union confirmed Tuesday afternoon that Leedham had been placed on leave. “San Diego Education Association Executive Director Craig Leedham is on paid administrative leave. It is inappropriate for further comment at this time about what is an internal matter,” President Bill Freeman said in a brief statement.   http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/education/article_1c4c35a4-67c3-11e1-ae96-001871e3ce6c.html

Michigan: So Long Checkoff? HB 4929 passed the Senate Reforms and Restructuring Committee on Wednesday morning. Later that day, it passed the full Senate and was concurred in by the House the same afternoon. It has been presented to the Governor for signature and it’s assumed he will sign the legislation.
This bill prohibits school districts from collecting union dues from employees. If a collective bargaining agreement was in place that allows for the collection of union dues, the district may continue that practice until the expiration of that agreement. MASB testified in both the House and Senate against this bill as it’s unnecessarily divisive and further erodes local control. Currently, payroll deduction of dues is a management prerogative that provides a convenience for employees.
It also requires that by March 1 of each year, every exclusive bargaining representative in the state (representing public employees) must file an independent audit of all expenditures attributing the costs of collective bargaining, contract administration and grievance adjustment to MERC. The commission shall make the audits available to the public on their website. For fiscal year 2011-12, $100,000 is appropriated to MERC for the costs of implementing this subsection. http://mymassp.com/content/union_dues_collection_ban_heads_gov_snyder

Anon’s Rat Won’t Face Charges Hector Xavier Monsegur, a hacker with the group Anonymous cooperating in a U.S. probe, won’t face prosecution on charges including attempted drug- dealing and illegal gun possesion, according to a plea deal.
The agreement, made public today, stated Monsegur, 28, won’t face federal charges for hacking the website of an online casino, trying to sell five pounds of marijuana, receiving stolen property and gun possession.    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-08/-anonymous-hacker-sabu-worked-around-the-clock-to-aid-u-s-crime-probe.html

The Konyi Invisible Children (visible rich white liberals–look at us and send us money!) Spectacle Invisible Children’s call for international intervention to bring Kony to justice clearly aligns with the decision of the Obama administration last October to send about 100 “advisors,” mostly special forces troops, to Central Africa to help track down the LRA. U.S. troops are now stationed in Uganda, Congo, South Sudan, and Central African Republic.

Back in October, when the United States sent advisors, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) denounced the LRA as “one of the most horrible groups to ever inhabit the earth” but also provided words of warning about the intervention: “I remember Somalia. I remember Lebanon. We’ve got to be very careful about how we engage. This slippery slope thing could happen there.”   http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/14/kony-2012s-old-fashioned-war-propaganda

Invisible Children Hustlers as Ripoffs That’s when a documentary from Invisible Children called “Kony 2012” about a warlord in Africa exploded across social media and Grant began hearing from from friends who thought they recognized her bracelet in the film.
Stamped metal bracelets are not uncommon in hobby jewelry circles. But the “Kony 2012” bracelets being sold by Invisible Children for $10 are strikingly similar to Grant’s, even in the packaging. They are so popular the charity has them on back order.
Grant believes the San Diego-based charity, which raises awareness of strife in Africa, stole her idea.   http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/15/bracelet-maker-says-invisible-children-took-her-id/?page=1#article

Konyi Wins A Round in San Diego Oops! Jason Russell, 33, one of the co-founder for Invisible Children was detained in Pacific Beach, Calif. on Thursday for being drunk in public and masturbating, according to San Diego Police Department.
NBCSanDiego.com is reporting that Russell, 33, was found masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and possibly under the influence of something, according to Lt. Andra Brown.
Brown said Russell was acting very strange. NBC News reports that Russell was taken into custody.    http://www.freep.com/article/20120316/NEWS07/120316058/Police-pick-up-Invisible-Children-co-founder-Jason-Russell?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

CFR Take on Invisible Children’s Counterfeit Campaign people living in LRA-affected regions have been quick to criticize KONY 2012 as simplistic and naïve. The flash movement’s message, so the feeling goes, neglects local realities of past and present. Ugandan bloggers, opposition politicians, and victims have spoken out. For example, the leader of the Ugandan Democratic Party, Norbert Mao (who appears in the KONY 2012 video), has pointed to the lack of attention given to atrocities committed by the Ugandan army, and the blogger Rosebell Kagumire has taken issue with the idea that the good guys — “the mighty West” — must save Africa from one bad guy. Meanwhile, Victor Ochen, who grew up in a northern Ugandan displacement camp and now runs the African Youth Initiative Network, has argued that the solution that Invisible Children offers will not improve victims’ lives. In the areas where the LRA operates today, residents’ main concerns involve the general lack of security — including protection from Ugandan or Congolese army operations. In short, KONY 2012 misses the point.    http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137327/mareike-schomerus-tim-allen-and-koen-vlassenroot/kony-2012-and-the-prospects-for-change?page=show

IC  Spinoff, the ICC, Convicts Congo War Criminal Nearly 10 years after opening its doors as a bold attempt at a global justice system, the International Criminal Court has reached its first verdict, finding a Congolese rebel leader guilty Wednesday of using child soldiers in violation of international law.
The ruling against Thomas Lubanga, a rebel leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo who was arrested in 2005 by the Congolese government and handed over to the international court for action, gives the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, his first conviction before his 10-year term ends later this year.   http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/14/141964/in-a-first-international-court.html

Spy Versus Spy

Hooray! No Supermax for Underwear Terrorist (dude! Dude! your underwear’s on Fire!) A Thousand Virgins Await in Colorado! Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was transferred to a Colorado prison complex Tuesday that features the most secure lockup in the United States, though his attorney said he was pleased he wasn’t sent to the Supermax prison.
Abdulmutallab, 25, is imprisoned at the high-security prison in Florence, Colo., 90 miles south of Denver, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.In a surprise, Abdulmutallab is not being housed in the Supermax prison, the so-called “Alcatraz of the Rockies” that houses a number of infamous al-Qaida operatives and other inmates. Those inmates include Unabomber and University of Michigan graduate Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, a Lapeer native. “I’m glad he’s not in Supermax,” Abdulmutallab legal adviser Anthony Chambers said. “Not being in Supermax will have its benefits.”

Oh Those Randy Randy Spies (who know their greatest danger is their Center) Unlike the Pentagon, which studies how often service members split up, and knows, for instance, that 29,456 of 798,921 military couples divorced last year, the CIA does not keep official tabs on its employees’ divorce rates.
One retired CIA senior paramilitary officer, who served for more than two decades and lives in Virginia, said he was told several years ago that the divorce rate for the agency’s operations division was astonishingly high.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cia-divorces-the-secrecy-when-spies-split/2012/03/05/gIQAPpBZAS_story.html

The Huttaree Fakeout The government never took the Hutaree militia seriously, but planted undercover spies in the group just to “nail them.”
That’s what the defense in the terror trial argued today in disclosing some embarrassing – and potentially damaging – e-mails written by FBI agents who were investigating the militia group.
One of the emails was written shortly before the FBI planted an undercover agent in the Hutaree who posed as a New Jersey trucker with a knack for working with explosives.
“So we’re hoping our (undercover agent) can target these guys to see if they bite on additional explosives and weapons activity so we can nail them,” FBI agent Leslie Larsen wrote in the email.   http://www.freep.com/article/20120315/NEWS01/120315056/Defense-in-Hutaree-militia-case-argues-government-planted-spies-in-group?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

National Corporate Radio Catches its Own Lies The retraction by “This American Life” is an embarrassing and an unprecedented one for the program, a product of WBEZ, a radio station in Chicago. The program is distributed nationwide by Public Radio International and is partly dependent on donations from listeners.
When the story was first broadcast on Jan. 6, Mr. Glass had acknowledged the risk inherent in repurposing a monologue. After seeing the show on stage, he told listeners, “I wondered, did he get it right? And so we’ve actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show.”
What Mr. Glass didn’t tell listeners was that during the fact-checking process, there was at least one reason to doubt Mr. Daisey’s story. During the process, when Mr. Daisey was asked for the translator’s contact information, he said he had no way to reach her. He also said he changed her name in the show.    http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/this-american-life-retracts-episode-on-apples-suppliers-in-china/?ref=global-home

The Magical Mystery Tour

Welcome to the Reason Rally! The Reason Rally is an event sponsored by many of the country’s largest and most influential secular organizations. It will be free to attend and will take place in Washington, D.C. on March 24th, 2012 from 10:00AM – 6:00PM at the National Mall. There will be music, comedy, speakers, and so much more. We hope you can join us! Please poke around this site for more information, stay tuned for frequent updates, and let us know if you have any questions! Speakers include:   http://www.reasonrally.org/

Petrified Mystic Rapists Move Against SNAP Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/us/catholic-church-pressures-victims-network-with-subpoenas.html?_r=3&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120313

The Gentle Little Amish with Funny Beards and Wagons: Dude Rips off Pals for $17 Simple Millions As members of his community watched quietly in court, an Ohio man admitted Thursday that he had defrauded fellow Amish in 29 states out of nearly $17 million.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/business/amish-man-admits-to-a-17-million-fraud.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

San Diego Teacher Forces Student to Pee in a Bucket in Class A 14-year-old student has filed a claim against the San Diego Unified School District seeking more than $25,000 in damages after she said she was ordered by a Patrick Henry High School teacher to urinate in a bucket in response to asking for a bathroom break.
The teen said in the claim that she was attending a freshman advisory class on Feb. 22 when the teacher refused to let her leave class to go to the bathroom. Instead the teacher took her to a small room and instructed her to urinate in a bucket and empty the contents into an unused classroom sink, according to the document.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/13/student-claims-teacher-made-her-urinate-bucket/

The End of Mexico’s xochimilcho Gardens? The ancient plots and their life-giving canals are weedy and abandoned, overrun by cattle, invaded by exotic fish, sucked dry by urban sprawl — and a dozen agencies of government have failed to save one of the wonders of the world.

March 25 and 26th, look to the night skies, see the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter, and smackerize somebody you love–or who will let you. Romance!

Congratulations on the Publication of Detroit Biography

The Second Marxism and Psychology Conference, Western Mexico Welcome to the website of the Second Marxism & Psychology Conference, which will be held from 9 to 12 August 2012, at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, located in Morelia, Michoacán, Western Mexico. Like the first conference in Prince Edward Island, Canada, this second conference aims at bringing activists, students and scholars together to discuss exciting issues at the intersection of Marxism and Psychology.  
Conference topic areas include:
Marxist Psychology
Marxism and Educational Psychology
Marxism and Clinical Psychology
Marxism and Social Psychology
Marxism and Critical Psychology
Marxism and Psychoanalysis
Marxism, Humanism and Humanistic Psychology
Marxism, Feminism and Psychology
Marxism, Liberation Psychology and Community Psychology
Activity Theory and Cultural Historical Psychology   http://marxpsyconference.teocripsi.com/index.php

Betrayed by Mandela’s CPSA and ANC, South African Workers Rise up Tens of thousands of South Africans marched in the streets of the nation’s major cities on Wednesday in a national strike called by Cosatu, the powerful group of trade unions, a crucial ally of the governing African National Congress that is growing increasingly critical of its policies.,,,“We voted for the A.N.C., but we can’t even send our children to school because of their corruption,” said Thabiso Bopape, 30, a contract worker for the postal system who earns much less than regular government employees doing the same work.
Mr. Bopape and thousands of others gathered in downtown Johannesburg on Wednesday, wearing the T-shirts of their unions and waving placards denouncing corruption and capitalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/world/africa/powerful-trade-union-group-holds-strikes-in-south-africa.html?_r=2&ref=global-home

Judge Blocks Release of UC Davis Pepper Spray Attack report An Alameda County Superior Court judge Tuesday temporarily blocked the release of a University of California investigative report about the controversial pepper-spraying of UC Davis student protesters by campus police in November.   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0307-pepper-spray-20120307,0,144818.story

In Fear of Chicago, G8 Runs off To Camp David Group of Eight leaders have been invited to Camp David, Md., to address a broad range of issues ahead of a NATO summit in May, the White House announced.
Chicago had been announced as the site of the G8 and NATO summits scheduled for May but U.S. President Barack Obama invited G8 leaders to Camp David in Maryland ahead of the NATO meeting.   http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Special/2012/03/06/G8-leaders-summoned-to-Camp-David/UPI-28161331056099/?spt=hs&or=tn

George Schmidt on the Runaway G8 For several months, Chicago has been in the middle of a major debate as the city prepared for the May 2012 meetings of both the “G8″ (the largest economic power countries on earth) and the NATO summits. According to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the corporate cheerleaders who relentlessly back him and reprint his daily talking points and publicity stunts as “news,” the purpose of having both the G8 and NATO in Chicago at the same time in May was to recognize that Chicago is a “world class city” and part of the “global economy.” Could it be that someone actually came to Chicago, reviewed the mayor’s actual plans for May 2012, and then drove across the city south from what would be the site of the summits and witnessed, first hand and without media handlers, that tens of miles of tragedy and devastation that globalization and the “reforms” of the past 20 years (“housing reform,” “welfare reform,” “school reform,” and the corporatization of medical care) have wrought?   http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3127&section=Article

70 Arrested in Sacramento (it is good to resist, but not to save segregated, capitalist, schooling) Thousands of students and activists marched on the state Capitol on Monday to protest cuts in higher education, and authorities arrested 68 of them who refused to leave the building after it closed in the evening.
Four had been arrested earlier in the day, one on suspicion of possessing a switchblade.   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest-20120306,0,718441.story

Bill Blum Lists War Hero Bradley Manning’s Wiki Contributions http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer103.html

The Little Red Schoolhouse

“Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-vale. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune” (Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I).

NEA’s $500,000 a Year Boss, Van Roekel, Shocked, simply Shocked, at Teacher unhappiness! A recent poll showing teacher job satisfaction at its lowest point in decades is “shocking,” union leaders say, though they say reports of increased parental and community involvement are “bright spots.”   http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2012/03/teachers_union_president_poll.html

The Teacher Morale Survey More than half of teachers expressed at least some reservation about their jobs, their highest level of dissatisfaction since 1989, the survey found. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years, citing concerns over job security, as well as the effects of increased class size and deep cuts to services and programs. Just three years ago, the rate was one in four.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/education/teacher-morale-sinks-survey-results-show.html?_r=1

Ohio EA to Allow Testing of Bad-test Teachers? Come September, Ohio will likely be the only state in the country to force thousands of teachers at low-performing schools to take special licensing tests.
A provision in Ohio’s budget law requires that by Sept. 1, the state must rank all public schools and charter schools based on a report card measure called the Performance Index – a calculation of student performance on state tests.
Schools ranked in the bottom 10 percent will require teachers of “core” subjects to take licensing exams within the school year. Core subjects include reading, math, science and social studies.
Re-testing teachers, Gov. John Kasich has said, will hold them more accountable and give districts and charter schools the ability to move ineffective teachers out.    http://communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120304/NEWS0102/303050024/Ohio-puts-teachers-notice?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Atlanta Fires 11 teachers in Test Scandal 11 Atlanta teachers implicated in a standardized test cheating scandal have been fired.
Superintendent Erroll Davis said he met with the group last week and asked them to resign, but most refused.
Letters were sent out Friday, informing the employees of why they were being terminated.
The certified letters list names of potential witnesses that could be called if the employee challenges the decision.
Nearly 180 Atlanta Public Schools employees were implicated in the state’s sweeping investigation that found cheating on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in 44 of the district’s 100 schools.
CBSAtlanta.com will have more information as it becomes available.      http://www.cbsatlanta.com/story/17081002/11-atlanta-school-teachers-fired-in-wake-of-cheating-scandal

Don Perl in Substance Colorado test resister becomes major news story when Pueblo school district marks the child ‘truant’ and claims that every public school students in Colorado is required to take the TCAP test      http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3135&section=Article

MLA on Tucson MAS and Book Banning We believe that teaching Mexican American children about Mexican American history and heritage is teaching them as individuals—indeed, precisely as the individuals they are. But more important, we believe in teaching all American children about Mexican American history and heritage. We therefore reject the reasoning behind HB 2281 and behind the decisions made by Superintendent Huppenthal, Judge Kowal, and President Stegeman, on two counts. First, we reject the idea that Mexican American studies is a subject “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” Throughout the United States, and especially in the Southwest, Mexican American studies is an integral part of the study of American identity and history; ideally, every schoolchild should be acquainted with that fact. Second, we reject the idea that Mexican American studies promotes “resentment toward a race or class of people” or advocates “ethnic solidarity.” Mexican American studies is a field of inquiry, not a form of propaganda. It is designed to lead to a greater understanding of the histories and cultures of the peoples of the United States, not to any partisan political outcome.     http://www.mla.org/ec_tucson

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

March and April, 1945, Japan Launches Biggest Kamakaze Attacks Ever

RTV Documentary on the US Empire of Bases Featuring Chalmers Johnson Over the course of the last century, the US has encircled the world with a web of military bases unlike any other in history. Today, they amount to more than 700, in 40 countries. No continent is spared. They are one of the most powerful forces at play in the world today, yet one of the less talked-about. They have shaped the lives of millions, yet remain a mystery to most. Why do countries like Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea still host hundreds of US military bases and thousands of US soldiers? And why is the US aggressively expanding in many new countries? How do the bases affect local populations, and what stance has president Obama taken on this controversial subject? This documentary film answers these and other questions through the words of prominent experts, intellectuals and ex-insiders Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Chalmers Johnson and others and through the shocking but often inspiring stories of those directly affected by US bases in Italy, Japan, the Indian Ocean and elsewhere.    http://www.standingarmy.it/#!the-documentary

Grand Strategy, and Strategy, from the US Navy Most of the world’s people, resources, and economic activity are not in the Western Hemisphere, but in the other hemisphere, particularly Eurasia. Consequently, a key element of U.S. national strategy, going back many decades, has been to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon in one part of Eurasia or another, because such a hegemon could deny the United States access to some of the Eastern Hemisphere’s resources and economic activity.

Preventing this is a major reason why the U.S. military is structured with force elements—including significant naval forces, long-range bombers, and long-range airlift—that enable it to cross broad expanses of ocean and air space and then conduct sustained, large-scale military operations upon arrival. The United States is the only country with a military designed to do this. The other countries in the Western Hemisphere don’t attempt it because they can’t afford it, and because the United States is, in effect, doing it for them. Countries of the Eastern Hemisphere don’t do it for the very basic reason that they’re already in that hemisphere, where the action is. Consequently, they instead spend their defense money on forces for influencing events in their own neighborhood.      http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012-01/special-us-grand-strategy-and-maritime-power

A Debate on the Obamagogue’s War Strategy my doctrine I would describe as the — as defending the pax Americana, preserving American primacy around the world and not allowing serious challenges to our ability to dominate the world’s oceans, to dominate the world’s skies, to keep space and cyberspace free of serious disruptions and to intervene decisively when we face threats on the ground, whether from genocidal-type human rights violations, from cross-border incursions such as the Iraqi invasion into — into Kuwait, or from dangerous developments, such as the Taliban rule in Afghanistan which allowed it to be used as a launching pad for attack on United States.
And I think we have to keep the ability to fight and win two conflicts at the same time, because again, our enemies are not necessarily going to be obliging enough to fight us in sequence. And it’s not hard to imagine that, for example, the crises in Iran and North Korea could come to a head simultaneously and we would have to be able to exert decisive influence in both theaters at once. And if we can’t, that will be an invitation, I fear, for aggression.    http://www.cfr.org/defense-strategy/obamas-defense-strategy/p27012

Obamagogue’s Private Army, the CIA, to Stay on in Afghanistan (o boy, we are so faked out) Top Pentagon officials are considering putting elite special operations troops under CIA control in Afghanistan after 2014, just as they were during last year’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, sources told The Associated Press.
The plan is one of several possible scenarios being debated by Pentagon staffers. It has not yet been presented to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the White House or Congress, the sources said.
If the plan were adopted, the U.S. and Afghanistan could say there are no more U.S. troops on the ground in the war-torn country because once the SEALs, Rangers and other elite units are assigned to CIA control, even temporarily, they become spies.   http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/ap-sources-cia-led-force-speed-afghan-exit-15840357#.T1vMR23D59n

Leaked Stratfor Emails Show Special Ops Forces in Syria for Months Special operations forces from the U.S. and its allies have been on the ground in Syria since at least December, according to confidential emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that were released by WikiLeaks.   http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/07/stratfor-emails-covert-special-ops-inside-syria-since-december/

There goes the Taliban! US to turn Prison Control over to Karzai? Washington has yielded to pressure from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, agreeing to cede control of all Afghan prisons to Kabul upon departure of most U.S. troops in 2014.   http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/09/us-agrees-to-give-kabul-control-of-prisons/

China, an 11.2 Percent Hike in Military Spending (as the “Red Army is used repeatedly to attack the people) China announced a double-digit increase in military spending on Sunday, a rise that comes amid an intensifying strategic rivalry between the United States and China in Asia and concerns in Washington about the secrecy surrounding the Chinese defense budget.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/world/asia/china-boosts-military-spending-more-than-11-percent.html?_r=2

French Agents Caught in Syria Thirteen French officers have been captured by the Syrian Army, according to Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper. It claims it received the information from a pro-Syrian Palestinian in Damascus.
According to the source, the officers were taken captive in the city of Homs – the heart of the internal conflict between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, and insurrectionists – and are being held in a field hospital there. The source claims the French and Syrian governments are locked in negotiations over the fate of the men.
If confirmed, it would be an embarrassment to France. However the French Foreign Ministry has categorically stated that there are no French soldiers in Syria. Perhaps more intriguingly, the Ministry of Defense has not issued an outright denial, saying instead that it has no knowledge of the situation.    http://rt.com/news/french-army-officers-syria-893/

US Special Forces in India, and More US special forces teams are currently stationed in five South Asian countries including India as part of the counter-terrorism cooperation with these nations, a top Pentagon commander has disclosed.
These teams have been deployed by US Pacific Command as part of its effort to enhance their counter-terrorism capabilities, in particular in the maritime domain, Admiral Robert Willard, the PACOM Commander said on Thursday.
“We have currently special forces assist teams – Pacific assist teams is the term – laid down in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, as well as India,” Willard told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing in response to a question on co-operation with India on counter-terrorism issues.      http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Counter-terrorism-US-special-forces-stationed-in-India-reveals-Pentagon/articleshow/12107378.cms

AIPAC Beats War Drums for Attack on Iran Calling the Iranian threat “more serious than anything faced by the United States and Israel” during his time in office — a claim that would include al-Qaeda, Iraq, China and the Soviet Union — Lieberman pressed for an “iron-clad” resolution: “The United States will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability — by peaceful means if we can, but with military force if we absolutely must.”
The AIPAC participants roared again.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/aipac-beats-the-drums-of-war/2012/03/05/gIQASVMZtR_story.html

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Corey’s Classic book is free, here   http://www.marxists.org/archive/corey/1934/decline/

After Thoroughly Corrupting every Aspect of Afghanistan and Married to the Dope Dealing Karzai, the US Searches for an Honest Man The Americans and Afghans blame each other for the problem’s seeming intractability, contributing to the deterioration in relations that now threatens to scuttle talks on the shape of ties between the countries after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014. What is clear is that the pervasive graft has badly undercut the American war strategy, which hinged on building the Karzai administration into a credible alternative to the Taliban.Still, the Obama administration has concluded that pressing the fight against corruption, as many American officials tried to do in recent years, could further alienate Mr. Karzai and others around him whom Washington is relying on as it tries to manage a graceful drawdown.“It’s a little late in the game to worry about anticorruption measures because what in the world is the alternative going to be?” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If you find people who aren’t corrupt, it is largely because they haven’t had the opportunity.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/world/asia/corruption-remains-intractable-in-afghanistan-under-karzai-government.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120308

Moodys Declares Greece In Default—Who’s Next? Moody’s Investors Service has declared Greece in default on its debt after Athens carved out a deal with private creditors for a bond exchange that will write off $140 billion of its debt.
Moody’s pointed out that even as 85.8 per cent of the holders of Greek-law bonds had signed onto the deal, the exercise of collective action clauses that Athens is applying to its bonds will force the remaining bondholders to participate.
Overall the cost to bondholders, based on the net present value of the debt, will be at least 70 per cent of the investment, Moody’s said.      http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/03/20123923314810827.html

Detroit Social Services Corruption Drags on A City of Detroit social worker used tax dollars intended for poor people to buy herself furniture, a used car, home repairs and high-end washers and dryers, according to charges filed Wednesday by a joint task force investigating the city’s Human Services Department.
Nellie Lavern Jenkins-Kendrick, 47, also accused of sending her daughter to summer camp on the taxpayers’ dime, is the first person to be charged since a series of Free Press stories uncovered millions of dollars in misspending and mismanagement at the scandal-plagued agency.   http://www.freep.com/article/20120307/NEWS01/120307058/Detroit-Human-Services-Department-probe?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Jury Convicts Ponzi Gangster Stanford A federal jury on Tuesday convicted R. Allen Stanford, a Texas financier, on 13 out of 14 counts of fraud in connection with a worldwide scheme that lasted more than two decades and involved more than $7 billion in investments.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/business/jury-convicts-stanford-in-7-billion-ponzi-fraud.html?_r=4&ref=global-home

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

“Bourgeoisie democracy BREEDS fascism…The more workers place their trust in legalism, in constitutionalism, in bourgeois democracy, the more they make sacrifices to save the existing regime, as the “lesser evil’ against the “menace” of fascism, the heavier become the fascist attacks and the more rapid the advance to capitalism. To preach confidence in legalism, in constitutionalism, in the capitalist state, means to invite and guarantee the victory of fascism.” R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935.p49

Obamagogue Signs Anti-Trespass Bill in a Hurry Only days after clearing Congress, US President Barack Obama signed his name to H.R. 347 on Thursday, officially making it a federal offense to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States. http://rt.com/usa/news/trespass-bill-obama-secret-227/

Fascist Eric Holder announces suspension of Civil Liberties if he doesn’t Like You In his most forceful defense yet of the Obama administration’s use of lethal force against U.S. citizens linked to terrorism, Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that the Constitution does not protect U.S. suspects plotting to kill other Americans.    http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-03-05/eric-holder-killing-us-citizens-terrorist-threat/53374776/1

Baghdad–Stoned to Death for Western Dress At least 14 youths have been stoned to death in Baghdad in the past three weeks in what appears to be a campaign by Shi’ite militants against youths wearing Western-style “emo” clothes and haircuts, security and hospital sources say.
Militants in Shi’ite neighborhoods where the stonings have taken place circulated lists on Saturday naming more youths targeted to be killed if they do not change the way they dress.
The killings have taken place since Iraq’s interior ministry drew attention to the “emo” subculture last month, labeling it “Satanism” and ordering a community police force to stamp it out.   http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/10/us-iraq-emo-killings-idUSBRE8290CY20120310

Popular Hitler Memorabilia Fetches Pounds on Pounds A silver tray presented to Hitler as a 50th birthday present yesterday fetched a staggering £28,000 at auction.
The silver presentation tray, which had The Fuhrer’s personal German eagle crest and his initials on it, was expected to sell for around £5,000.   http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk/Hitler-s-tea-tray-makes-reich-old-price/story-15421501-detail/story.html

NGOs to Mexico–So Long, Partners As Mexico battles narcotics and crime groups, U.S. medical and religious missions that for generations had come to build houses, tend the sick and conduct goodwill activities have been forced to retreat.      http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/06/140980/american-aid-missions-fall-victim.html

Solidarity Fornever

Postmodernisim–Religion with an Angry Cloak

The Konyi Diversion: let’s get two things straight: 1) Joseph Kony is not in Uganda and hasn’t been for 6 years; 2) the LRA now numbers at most in the hundreds, and while it is still causing immense suffering, it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality….in 2006, the LRA was pushed out of Uganda and has been operating in extremely remote areas of the DRC, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic — where Kony himself is believed to be now. The Ugandan military has been pursuing the LRA since then but had little success (and several big screw-ups). In October last year, President Obama authorized the deployment of 100 U.S. Army advisors to help the Ugandan military track down Kony, with no results disclosed to date.,,, Along with sharing the movie online, Invisible Children’s call to action is to do three things: 1) sign its pledge, 2) get the Kony 2012 bracelet and action kit (only $30!), and 3) sign up to donate.
There is intense criticism out there over Invisible Children’s finances, including that it spends too much money on administration and filmmaking, while still touting its on the ground NGO-style projects…There are many reasons uninformed and oversimplified advocacy can cause trouble, and Siena Antsis catalogues some of them here, noting that Invisible Children expertly “commodifies white man’s burden on the African continent.” Buy a bracelet, soothe some guilt.
But as researcher Mark Kersten notes, after “stoping Kony”, then what? Or what if the activism just results the the 100 U.S. advisors staying but no Kony?
One of the biggest issues with a simplistic “Stop Kony” message is that discussions of Navy Seals or drone strikes are inevitable when patience runs out with Ugandan-led efforts . But what about the dozens or hundreds of abducted and brainwashed kids? Should we bomb everyone? Will they actually stop fighting after Kony is gone? What if they shoot back?   http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/07/guest_post_joseph_kony_is_not_in_uganda_and_other_complicated_things

Who Is the Rich SoCal White Boy behind Invisible Children whose every sentence starts with “So…”? , Jason graduated from the University of Southern California’s film school with a degree in Cinema Production. He admires Oprah, Bono, Steven Spielberg, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Baz Luhrmann, and Dan Eldon and believes wholeheartedly in magic and the impossible.

The Konyi Delusion Take for example the fact that one of the 12 ‘policy makers’ (US politicians) that they are targeting to help them ensure Kony is arrested is George ‘Dubya’ Bush. The puppet president who presided over the murder of 1.5 million Iraqi civilians. And we’re all meant to believe that people like him are going to care about the plight of Ugandan children? Kony is Bush’s ideological brother for god’s sake.

Other than their complete ignorance of the fact that the US political elite is populated by the world’s worst war criminals, the makers of this video are also massively ignorant of the truth about WHY Uganda, and many other African nations, are subjected to the brutal excesses of war lords and have been for so many decades,,,,To cut a very long and complex story short, people like Joseph Kony (who, by the way, is no longer a real threat to the people of Uganda) and so many other African tin-pot dictators are the product of long-term US (CIA), British, Israeli and French interference in African nations.      http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Kony-2012-Delusion-by-Joe-Quinn-120308-772.html

CSM on the Konyi Hustle Of course Joseph Kony should be captured. But this approach is flawed. The video shows only a Western audience, without any reference to African partners or leaders. They are disempowering and undermining the role of Africans. They failed to recognize the role of individuals like Betty Bigombe, a long-time Ugandan activist, or seek partnerships with African organizations for the launch, such as Ushahidi or Africans Act for Africa.
Invisible Children and other Africa-focused advocacy organizations should deliver more sophisticated, nuanced, and respectful narratives that recognize capturing Kony is a collective responsibility and that Africans must play the primary role in bringing peace to the region.    http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/Africa-Monitor/2012/0308/Joseph-Kony-2012-It-s-fine-to-Stop-Kony-and-the-LRA.-But-Learn-to-Respect-Africans

More on the Konyi Hysteria  http://willyloman.wordpress.com/

California Teachers Association Top Spending Lobbyist in State The California Teachers Assn. spent the most, as it does periodically: $6.5 million    http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/06/local/la-me-lobbying-20120306

FBI Busts Sabu and Sabu Busts Anonymous Federal prosecutors in New York on Tuesday charged five men allegedly associated with the hacking group Anonymous, based on information provided by a group leader who had secretly been working with the FBI since last year.
Prosecutors were led to the five men by Hector Xavier Monsegur, a New York-based hacker known as Sabu, who had pleaded guilty last year in U.S. District Court in New York to 12 charges, including conspiracy to commit computer hacking. Some of the hackers belonged to LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous formed in May 2011.   http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/5-members-of-anonymous-hacking-group-charged/2012/03/06/gIQAJ70FvR_story.html

Bobby Ferguson Robbed Detroit of $58 million plus of money the kids needed Indicted contractor Bobby Ferguson obtained more than $58.5 million by extorting contractors and through other illegal conduct, and he spent a fraction of the money on his kids’ college education, his girlfriend and construction equipment, according to federal court records…. He has been indicted as an alleged member of the “Kilpatrick Enterprise,” which prosecutors say robbed taxpayers of millions of dollars and instilled a culture of corruption in one of the nation’s poorest cities. A trial is set for September.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120309/METRO01/203090367/Feds-Ferguson-extorted-58-5M?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Susan Ohanian Will be a Keynote Speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference Susan’s advocacy work keeps at its core her 20 years as a teacher. Her more than 300 essays on education issues have appeared in periodicals ranging from Phi Delta Kappan cover stories to The Atlantic, Nation, USA Today, Washington Monthly, Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and numerous education journals. One of her 26 book on education policy and practice introduced the word Standardisto.

Although currently censored at the NCTE online discussion site, Susan’s website received NCTE’s George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honest and Clarity in Public Language. She has delivered the annual MacClement Lecture for Excellence in Education, Queens University, Ontario, Canada, the Helen Oakes lecture at Temple University, and the Biber Lecture, Bank Street College, New York.
Susan notes that although she’s been a featured speaker at both the International Symposium for the Educational Welfare in Seoul, Korea, and British Columbia Teachers’ Federation events, her talk to the Progressive Caucus of the AFT was closed down by angry hoots from the audience.

Susan started a website to protest the passage of NCLB. She had hoped to shut it down by now, but things keep getting worse, so she persists.

Call for Proposals
Rouge Forum 2012
OCCUPY EDUCATION! Class Conscious Pedagogies for Social Change
June 22-24, 2012
Miami University
Oxford, OH
Proposals Due April 15, 2012

The Rouge Forum 2012 will be held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The University’s picturesque campus is located 50 minutes northwest of Cincinnati. The conference will be held June 22-24, 2012.
Proposals for papers, panels, performances, workshops, and other multimedia presentations should include title(s) and names and contact information for presenter(s). The deadline for sending proposals is April 15. The Steering Committee will email acceptance notices by May 1. (details http://rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/rf-2012-call-for-proposals/)

March 1 Student Action Hundreds of students, faculty and staff at four San Diego colleges took part in marches and rallies Thursday as part of what was billed as a nationwide protest against cuts in education funding.
At UC San Diego, approximately 200 students marched from a rally in front of Geisel Library to the administration complex where they entered an unoccupied conference room.
A smaller group of students said they planned to stay there overnight. Thursday night university officials said they had made no attempt to oust them but would continue to monitor the situation.    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/01/sd-college-students-stage-walkout-to-protest-cuts/

The education aganda is a war aganda. It is a class war and empires war aganda. The government is an executive committee and armed weapon of the rich–a coporate state. Schools are not being privatized. They are simply machines for capitalism. To demand to raise taxes, which is what this false flag operation is designed to do, is to demand to increase the power of that state, and its ability to make imperialist and class war. Those taxes will be aimed, assuredly, at poor and working people, deepening existing divisions within the class. Walkouts are great as schools closed by civil strife are better than open schools, but think twice about the real goals of this struggle. Don’t dance on the spider’s web.

Britain’s Dave Hill on Capitalist Schooling Schools and universities, echoing Althusser (1971) are ideological state apparatuses whose purpose, for the capitalist class, is to preach and instill pro-capitalist and anti-socialist beliefs and, as Rikowski (for example, 2001, 2004) argues, to re-produce tiered hierarchicalised and socialized /quiescent labour power for the workplace.
The same is true of the media. Those who own the Press, control the Press. Views alternative to capitalism are mocked, vilified, and ignored, if they are fundamental rather than cosmetic alternatives    http://philosophers.posterous.com/

Condemn the Raid on Haiti U Campus We the undersigned, students, professors, teachers, and
other workers, condemn the brutal armed raid on the School of Ethnology campus of
the State University of Haiti (UEH), carried out by the Haitian President
Michel Martelly’s armed supporters, members of his security services, and
pro-Martelly students, on Friday February 17. (See story at Haïti Liberté, www.haiti-liberte.com, 2/26/12.)

The Petition is at  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/condemn-raid-on-haiti-university-campus
BACKGROUND: This attack on the campus tore down fences, smashed
professors’ car windows, trashed the Department of Ethnology office, looted
computers and printers and students’ personal property, and beat up students
and campus workers, sending several to the hospital, while security forces
fired automatic weapons into the air. Martelly has been demonizing the students at this campus since he came to power. They are leaders in fighting for a decent budget and necessities at UEH like courses, library books, a cafeteria, and a dormitory, as well as for radical social change.

Sudan: Cops Attack Student Protestors in Dorms The police arrested hundreds of students in a predawn raid on dormitories in the University of Khartoum on Friday, in a crackdown on a campus that has been at the center of recent antigovernment protests, activists said. The police entered the student housing early Friday, beating and detaining hundreds, a witness said. A member of a committee of student activists said 317 students had been arrested and were being held at 11 police stations. The campus had been closed for about two months since students staged demonstrations over rising prices, unemployment and other issues. The police did not immediately comment on the raid.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/world/africa/sudan-hundreds-of-students-held.html?ref=internationaleducation

New York Times Workers Protest Please join us at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday for a quiet, 10-minute display of unity, around the entrances to the Page One meeting room on the third floor.
The point is to show our common dismay over contract negotiations in which management seems determined to seriously compromise our financial welfare, our access to health care and our security in retirement. We hope that senior editors who witness and understand our mutual resolve will convey the gravity of the situation to management.    http://broadcastunionnews.blogspot.com/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

San Diego Demands More School Worker Concessions The San Diego Unified School District made an eleventh-hour plea to its unions Thursday to accept concessions that would protect class sizes from ballooning and save more than 1,600 teaching positions that have been tapped for elimination next year.
The teacher union president said no discussions should take place until the state produces more solid budget figures this spring.    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/01/sd-unified-again-asks-for-teacher-concessions/

Obamagogue, Gates, And Duncan on the Release of School Worker Ratings Though Bill Gates wrote an oped against the public release of the TDRs last week, it was too little and too late. In fact, he and Arne Duncan supported the LA Times release of similar unreliable ratings in 2010, which named teachers with low ratings, with Duncan saying, “What’s there to hide?”
Indeed, he and Duncan have pushed relentlessly for states to create numerical teacher rating systems based at least in part on value-added student test scores. The feds made this condition for states to be considered for Race to the Top funds and now, in order to obtain a waiver from NCLB.    http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/

Rahm takes Chicago’s Big Lie version of history and reality on the road to a Washington D.C. forum featuring Arne Duncan and the mayors of Los Angeles and New York City  http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3118&section=Article

Mitt Romney attended a Public Elementary School, Walled Lake El, in Bloomfield Hills Michigan, then he went to this private–compare it to your school. Cranbrook’s Motto: “Aim High”

Anne the Librarian and Education in Yosemite

We were lucky in this. Anne Molin, one of Wawona’s librarians, swears that in spite of her thoroughly modern upbringing, at heart she’s an old-fashioned girl. And she proved it to our kids. Wearing the clothing of a Victorian Age visitor to Yosemite — complete with high-neck blouse, strings of pearls and a hat resplendent with feathers, grapes, tulle and bows — Anne took the students through the dos and dont’s of civilized etiquette, circa 1880. “Use only last names as in ‘Miss Molin.’ First names are reserved for family.” “Stand when a woman enters the room.” “Pull out a woman’s chair for her.” “If you want to brag, do it subtly by calling your mother and father by the Latin pater and mater, thereby letting everyone know you are college educated.”
I stand here today, mothers and fathers of Xbox-obsessed children, to tell you that the kids were transfixed by Anne. When she instructed them to never use the word “sweat” because “Horses sweat, men perspire and ladies glow,” I too became a groupie. How does she know these things?    http://sierraclub.typepad.com/explore/2012/02/yosemite-to-manners-born.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

US Confirms its Troops are In South Yeman, as AQ Snickers, their War of the Flea Continues…

Pentagon officials today confirmed that a “security team” of US forces came under attack from Ansar al-Sharia loyalists in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, but denied any injuries as a result of the attack. Ansar al-Sharia claimed one “CIA officer” killed in the exchange.   The difference in versions from the two sides actually misses the much more serious revelation of the report, that US ground troops are operating inside Yemen at all. There has certainly been no announcement to that effect, and indeed, several times the Obama Administration has “ruled out” sending ground troops to Yemen.
With pro-democracy protesters rallying against the US-backed dictator of Yemen virtually throughout 2011, Ansar al-Sharia seized the province of Abyan, and has made inroads in Aden, the former capital city of South Yemen. The US has repeatedly launched drone strikes against Ansar al-Sharia, claiming they are an “al-Qaeda front.”

Admiral Willard: US Troops in India  US Embassy Denies Report From Pacific Commander US Pacific Command head Admiral Robert Willard announced today that US special forces have been deployed to India, along with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives, as an effort to fight the Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT), a militant faction mostly active in Kashmir…Admiral Willard’s admission is particularly interesting because none of the five nations he mentioned was known to have ground troops in it. With the Yemen deployment coming out today, and that only because there happened to be an attack, it seems increasingly the US is making deployments which, if not actually a “secret” they are likewise not being made public in a timely fashion.  http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/02/admiral-willard-us-troops-in-india/

Exactly WHO are the Syrian “Rebels?” Over a hundred foreign mercenaries have reportedly been captured by Syrian government troops after regaining control of rebel-held areas in the city of Homs.
Sources say the majority of them are French , with the rest from several Arab countries.   http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=nebd454gn0boql97ndmj9qtc25&topic=229344.msg1346053#msg1346053

How to Start a War by Forging War Fevor–A Historical Outline Military plotters know that the majority would never support their wars, if it were generally known why they were really being fought. Over the millennia, a special martial art has been deliberately developed to weave elaborate webs of deceit to create the appearance that wars are fought for “just” or “humanitarian” reasons.
If asked to support a war so a small, wealthy elite could shamelessly profit by ruthlessly exploiting and plundering the natural and human resources in far away lands, people would ‘just say no.’
We now face another broad thematic pretext for war, the so-called “War Against Terrorism.” We are told it will be waged in many countries and may continue for generations. It is vitally important to expose this latest attempt to fraudulently conceal the largely economic and geostrategic purposes of war. By asking who benefits from war, we can unmask its pretense and expose the true grounds for instigating it. By throwing light on repeated historical patterns of deception, we can promote skepticism about the government and media yarns that have been spun to encourage this war.
The historical knowledge of how war planners have tricked people into supporting past wars, is like a vaccine. We can use this understanding of history to inoculate the public with healthy doses of distrust for official war pretext narratives and other deceptive stratagems. Through such immunization programs we may help to counter our society’s susceptibility to “war fever.”    http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28554

AFPak: The US Cannot Leave, and the US cannot Stay American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests.   But behind the public pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.
Despite an American-led training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars, the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously unreliable soldiers and police officers.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/world/asia/burning-of-korans-complicates-us-pullout-plan-in-afghanistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

US WIll Punish Grunts for Koran buring. What of the War Criminals who Sent them to the Graveyard of Empires? Military investigators have concluded that five U.S. service members were involved in the incineration of a pile of Korans in Afghanistan last week, according to U.S. military officials who have been briefed on the inquiry.
The burning of the Muslim holy books — which U.S. officials say was accidental — incited a week of protests that left 30 Afghans dead. The burnings also were cited as motivation for at least some of the six fatal attacks on U.S. military personnel that have occurred in Afghanistan in the past eight days.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-probe-of-koran-burning-finds-5-soldiers-responsible-afghan-clerics-demand-public-trial/2012/03/02/gIQAwJqYmR_story.html

Hoschild on WWI Glorified, again, In US Pop Culture and the Those who Resisted then–and now? Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.
In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.
In truth, there’s nothing new in this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.
After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians…. for all the spectacle of boy and horse, thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches, and wartime love and loss, the makers of War Horse, Downton Abbey and — I have no doubt — the similar productions we’ll soon be watching largely skip over the greatest moral drama of those years of conflict, one that continues to echo in our own time of costly and needless wars. They do so by leaving out part of the cast of characters of that moment. The First World War was not just a battle between rival armies, but also a powerful, if one-sided, battle between those who assumed the war was a noble crusade and those who thought it absolute madness.
The war’s opponents went to jail in many countries. There were more than 500 conscientious objectors imprisoned in the United States in those years, for example, plus others jailed for speaking out against joining the conflict. Eugene V. Debs had known prison from his time as a railway union leader, but he spent far longer behind bars — more than two years — for urging American men to resist the draft. Convicted of sedition, he was still in his cell at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in November 1920 when, long after the war ended, he received nearly a million votes as the Socialist candidate for President.    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175508/tomgram%3A_adam_hochschild%2C_antiwar_critics_forgotten_on_oscar_night/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Corporate Profits Up, Worker Wages Down (ahem, crisis of overproduction in industry and finance?) As we’ve been noting, corporate profits have made it back to their pre-recession heights (even if corporate tax revenue hasn’t followed suit). In fact, in 2011, corporate profits hit their highest level since 1950. But as Bloomberg News noted today, this hasn’t translated into wage growth or more purchasing power for workers:
Companies are improving margins and generating profits as wage growth for the American worker lags behind the prices of goods and services…While benefiting the bottom line for businesses, the decline in inflation-adjusted wages bodes ill for the sustainability of economic growth as consumers may eventually be forced to cut back. [...]
Of the 394 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index that have reported since Jan. 9, earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31 increased 5.1 percent on average and beat analyst estimates by 3.2 percent. Some 70 percent of the companies have posted better-than-projected results.
This pattern has become all too familiar during the slow economic recovery. In fact, real wages fell in 2011, despite record corporate profits. “There’s never been a postwar era in which unemployment has been this high for this long,” explained labor economist Gary Burtless. “Workers are in a very weak bargaining position.”
Between 2009 and 2011, 88 percent of national income growth went to corporate profits, while just 1 percent went to wages, a stat that is “historically unprecedented.”   http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/22/430190/corporate-profits-wages-2012/?mobile=nc

Foreclosure Funds from Obamagogue’s Fake Program Untapped A $7.6-billion federal program
to help unemployed homeowners stave off foreclosure has provided little relief two years after being unveiled, with less than $218 million of the money paid out to needy borrowers as of Jan. 1. California, which was allocated nearly $2 billion from the Hardest Hit Fund, provided less than $38.6 million in assistance for 4,357 borrowers by the end of last  year, according to the state’s latest report to the Treasury Department. That amounted to less than 2% of the federal funds available to the state’s Keep Your Home California program.  “It’s about helping the  homeowner, and that’s nothappening,”  http://www.latimes.com/includes/sectionfronts/A1.pdf

Personifications of the corporate state, Obama, Dimon, Geithner

Jamie Dimon (Morgan-Chase) after supping on the $12.9 trillion bailout, how nice it is to be back in the big bucks again Dimon’s remarks weren’t so much a presentation as a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness speech on, among other things, why he thinks J.P. Morgan rocks, why its bankers deserve to be paid top bucks, why the institution will meet all those pesky regulatory requirements, and why the bank’s low stock isn’t really something to worry about right now.
Praising the bank’s recent performance, Dimon said that trend will continue: “I’ll be damned if we don’t have record profits in the next year or two.”
J.P. Morgan, he said, is going to pay competitively. “We need top talent. You cannot run these businesses with second-rate talent.”  http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2012/02/28/j-p-morgans-dimon-rapid-fire-take-on-profits-record-breakups-and-the-press/

If you Don’t Have an $100,000 Account, JP Morgan Doesn’t Want you (but they will set up special branches for those desireable rich people most customers with less than $100,000 in investments and deposits are no longer “profitable” for JPMorgan Chase. The firm generates the bulk of its retail banking revenues — about 55 percent — from affluent customers that boast more than that.  http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/chase_them_away_NfNWot1se50BuFX35ZFPdP

Jamie Dimon, begged by Hank Paulson to help With the Bank Collapse of 2008, on Patriotism: “Hank, I would do anything to help the United States, but not at the expense of JP Morgan.”

For Murder of 29 Workers, a Sweet 36 Months in Jail Last June, Alpha Natural Resources Inc. acquired Massey Energy Co. and liabilities related to the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 men in Montcoal, WV. Recently, Alpha has settled all claims with the families of those killed. Today, another chapter closed in this sad story when mine security chief, Hughie Elbert Stover, was sentenced to 36 months in prison. Stover was found guilty in a short trial in October 2011 and U.S. attorney Booth Goodwin had asked for a 25 year sentence.    http://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2012/02/29/former-massey-energy-security-chief-sentenced-to-36-months-in-prison/

One in Seven USers Hounded by Debt Collectors the number of people subject to third party collections has doubled since 2000, from a little less than 7% to a little over 14% of consumers. Ten years ago, one in fourteen American consumers were pursued by debt collectors. Today it’s one in seven.  http://www.alternet.org/economy/154329/towards_a_creditor_state:_1_in_7_americans_pursued_by_debt_collectors?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet

The Return of Debtors’ Prisons The experience of debt collection can be chilling, as this 2007 ABC News report suggests.Consumers around the country have taped threatening phone calls from collectors who have called in the middle of the night, used abusive language and have threatened to have people fired from work or thrown in jail. All of these tactics are illegal under federal law.
One of the characteristics of the new social contract ushered in by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the increasing power of creditors to govern outright, from tax farming by banks to the use of credit checks to access employment opportunities.
There are now thousands of people legally jailed because they aren’t paying their bills, ie. debtor’s prisons have returned. Occasionally elites let it slip that this is not an accident, but is their goa    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/matt-stoller-towards-a-creditor-state-–-one-in-seven-americans-pursued-by-debt-collectors.html

US  Official Poverty Rate Is Wrong According to experts from the National Center for Children in Poverty and the Economic Policy Institute, the poverty threshold should be at least twice that, published by the federal government. This puts the actual threshold of an annual income over $40,000 for a family of four.    http://www.mndaily.com/2012/02/29/poverty-line-threshold

The BP Deal and its History of Violence Even if this is legally correct, or even normal, it’s still a shame that BP’s mammoth disaster gets the privilege of being viewed in isolation. One would hope that a history of accidents could be visited if only to reveal a cycle of abuse to the environment. PBS Frontline and ProPublica did an excellent job of revealing BP’s cycle of “deadly accidents, disastrous spills and countless safety problems,” all of which tell the narrative of a culture at BP that placed little priority on safety.
But what if, hypothetically, BP’s disaster in the Gulf was viewed as an act of domestic violence, as opposed to just a problem of pollution and corporate irresponsibility? After all, corporations are treated as people for political campaigning and lobbying, and so many of BP’s disasters have reached far into our homes, leaving devastating impacts on families and workers.    http://www.bridgethegulfproject.com/node/566

Having Risen every day for 37 Days, Average San Diego Gas Price $4.37.

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

“Bourgeoisie democracy BREEDS fascism…The more workers place their trust in legalism, in constitutionalism, in bourgeois democracy, the more they make sacrifices to save the existing regime, as the “lesser evil’ against the “menace” of fascism, the heavier become the fascist attacks and the more rapid the advance to capitalism. To preach confidence in legalism, in constitutionalism, in the capitalist state, means to invite and guarantee the victory of fascism.” R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 1935.p49

Stalin, Godfather of Social Fascism, Improved the World and Died, March 5th, 1953. Now, Russians Get to “choose” again

NDAA Extension of Fascist Rule Went into Effect March 1 And now President Obama’s advisers are saying he is withdrawing his veto threat against NDAA, so it will become law.
As will SOPA, since it is becoming ever more apparent that our “elected officials” in Congress are not satisfied with their 9% approval rating. They want a 0% approval rating.
I have no idea why Congress is pushing through anti-American legislation that is not only incompetent, but openly belligerent.
I have no idea why an American media blackout on NDAA is still in effect — Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly and the other broadcast “journalists” have been disgustingly silent on what is undoubtedly the most important news story of the past decade. The single most important news story since September 11th, 2001.
Combined, NDAA and SOPA simply destroy American democracy. That isn’t hype. That isn’t exaggeration. Within a few days, your freedom of speech will be gone — post something controversial online, and the government can legally “disappear” it.     http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-set-to-become-law-the-terror-is-nearer-than-ever-2011-12

In Militarized USA, Act of Valor Tops Box Office and Lying Recruiters Cheer The action film “Act of Valor” — which stars active-duty Navy Seals in a covert mission to rescue a kidnapped CIA officer — came out on top at the box office over Oscars weekend. The film made $24.7 million, handily beating out “Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds” and “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” for the top slot. Otherhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/going-out-gurus/post/act-of-valor-claims-victory-in-weekend-box-office/2012/02/27/gIQAfnYudR_blog.html films in the weekend’s top 10 include “The Vow” and the Ryan Reynolds/Denzel Washington flick “Safe House.”

After the Inquisition, After the Nazis, After the Gulags–psychologists and the CIA torture Mills History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the ” tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The 1963 KUBARK Manual and its later iterations were used widely by U.S. intelligence and disseminated to other governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
The “farce” was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators. Although some of the material in KUBARK remained in use, psychologists augmented already- existing material with newer techniques, some of which had been developed from torture resistance protocols used to train U.S. military personnel to survive capture and interrogation themselves.   …  Psychologists were complicit in designing and using techniques to break subjects rather than aid them, and in so doing they made a mockery of their ethical obligation to “do no harm.”    http://www.fpif.org/articles/psychologists_and_torture_then_and_now

Solidarity Fornever

School worker unions all over the US, particularly NEA locals but AFT too, are facing yet another round of demands for concessions. The last 40 years of the labor “movement” in the US demonstrates that concessions do not save jobs. Like giving blood to sharks, concessions only make bosses want more. The US printed $12.9 trillion and gave that to the banks. Let them print the money and give it to school workers — or do that and give the jobless jobs, and for those who have jobs, a 30 hour week with no cut in pay, and in classrooms, real caps on class sive at 15. What gets people from here to there — strikes, general strikes and civil strife which is far more educative than the test frenzy that goes on in schools now. Meanwhile, NEA has a series of dilemmas: how to pour money and volunteers into the demagogue, Obama’s campaign when his education agenda is simply a war agenda — class and empire’s war? How to beat back the AFT’s millionaire’s tax which makes sense, and replace it with the NEA/Brown tax which taxes poor and working people? How to affiliate with the bankrupt and corrupt AFL-CIO which is only good at beating up its own members? And how to stop job actions which would disrupt the Obama campaign when exactly what is needed is job actions…..should be an interesting summer.

Half-Witted Boss of Las Vegas Teacher Union Boss Made some Big, Big Bucks for Selling Labor Peace Leaders of the local teachers union are lashing out at their former executive director and the Clark County School District superintendent in response to Sunday’s Review-Journal stories about the huge salaries drawn by union officials and the questionable spending of $2.4 million in taxpayer funds.
“We have no justification for the fact that former Executive Director (John) Jasonek was able to triple dip, earning additional and excessive salaries,” Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association, wrote on the union’s website Monday.
Phone calls to Murillo on Monday and Tuesday were not returned.
Murillo’s statement that Jasonek’s $632,546 in compensation was “excessive” is something new. He and current union Executive Director John Vellardita claimed the opposite when interviewed in early February. At the time, they defended Jasonek’s compensation of $632,546 for running the union and two related organizations in 2009, the last year for which a required Internal Revenue Service report is available.  ..The figures for 2009 show the teachers union spent 36.3 percent of its $4.1 million budget on nine leaders. Such salaries, ranging from $139,785 to $208,683, aren’t business as usual.     http://www.lvrj.com/news/teachers-union-leaders-criticize-ex-director-s-excessive-salaries-140820203.html

CA Gov Brown Backs NEA Sellout Tax the Workers Plan, Seeks to Crush “tax the millionaires” Many analysts say that more than one tax measure on the ballot could cause an overwhelmed public to reject them all.
So on Feb. 16, the governor spent two hours nibbling on cheese and crackers, sipping sparkling apple juice and asking Pechthalt to drop his union’s proposal, an income-tax hike on millionaires that would help fund public education, state universities and public works.    http://www.pennlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/analysis-brown-tries-to-quell-the-threat/24728f440d905a397cf0b8a117c21834

Detroit Fed of Teachers Declares an Orwellian Victory as Deal Cuts Member pay and benefits The settlement, announced by the district late Wednesday morning and approved by U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh, includes a lump-sum payment equal to 2.5 percent of employees’ 2011-12 earnings and limited reinstatement of step increases.
The deal also provides partial payment of accumulated sick days for employees who submit a notice of retirement by March 19.
Last July, Roberts reduced district employees’ pay by 10 percent and required them to pay 20 percent of health care costs.   http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120229/SCHOOLS/202290411/1026/schools/DPS-teachers-get-money-back-pay-cut-settlement

UAW AFL-CIO and NEA’s Fake Spring Offensive to elect the Demagogue Imperialist Obama Now we know how United Auto Workers President Bob King will repay Barack Obama for holding the union harmless from the Detroit automakers’ bankruptcy: He’ll provide the ground troops for the president’s class war.
The Daily Caller blog says it found evidence that King and the UAW are behind the “99 Percent Spring,” which aims to train and deploy 100,000 Americans for “non-violent direct action” in the months leading up to November’s presidential election. The Daily Caller says files on the group’s website, which have since disappeared, indicate the UAW is providing the organizational support for protests designed to support the president’s narrative that America is divided into two camps — the wealthy 1 percent and the struggling 99 percent.    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120304/OPINION03/203040311/Column-UAW-troops-will-man-class-war?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

UAW, Expert at Concessions, Manages to Give up More at Fairfax, KC, Plant The first negotiated package was voted down last month by Local 31 members, which triggered another round of talks. Another local contract was approved early Friday morning with 57 percent of production workers and 70 percent of skilled trade employees approving the deal.
“We have a new local contract at Fairfax,” said George Ruiz, president of Local 31. “It was a decent package for the times we live in.”
The issue that proved most troublesome involved work teams at the plant. GM sought a change that would allow it to reassign an employee to another team when returning from a leave of absence.
The teams, often made up of five to 10 employees, typically have better jobs the longer they exist, so a returning employee risked getting a worse job.
Union negotiators were able to stop the change that would have allowed the reassignment but had to give some other things back. Two concessions were a cut in the work clothing allowance, and no longer requiring the automaker to replace clothing damaged on the job.
“If you want something, you have to give something up,” Ruiz said.     http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/02/3463828/local-contract-approved-at-gm.html

The Continuing Ghost Dance Farce at Occupy San Diego and Activist San Diego Approved a proposal to separate finance committee work from ActivistSanDiego, as apparently Pat Barnes is no longer working for ASD, and there is some $7,000 discrepancy in the books, according to ASD.   http://www.copswiki.org/Occupy/OccupySanDiegoEmailBlast2012Feb29?cover=print

Spy Versus Spy

Wikileaks and Anon: Israel Hit Iran Lsst Year The mega-leaks website, WikiLeaks, has partnered with the hackers cooperative Anonymous, to publish internal emails of the American strategic intelligence company Stratfor. In one of the hacked emails, Stratfor officials discuss information obtained from one of their sources who reports that Israeli commandos, in cooperation with Kurdish fighters, have destroyed Iranian nuclear installations.    http://www.forward.com/articles/152048/

Wikileaks Begins Publishing 5 Million Emails From Stratfor oday WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example:   http://pastebin.com/D7sR4zhT

Anon Versus Vatican The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/technology/attack-on-vatican-web-site-offers-view-of-hacker-groups-tactics.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=all

Employment Vacancy: Head of Pakistan’s ISI The race has begun for the coveted slot of director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership has decided against retaining ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Especially in the aftermath of the “Memogate” scandal, he has fallen out of favor not only with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani but also with Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani.
Memogate involved Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz claiming that the Pakistan government had sought the Barack Obama administration’s help to stave off a military coup following al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s May 2, 2011, killed in a covert US commando operation   http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NB24Df02.html

Egypt Releases National Endowment for Democracy Agents, people riot Egypt’s military-backed government faced criticism Thursday for appearing to bow to U.S. pressure by allowing seven Americans accused of fomenting political unrest to leave the country despite months of Cairo casting them as spies and enemies of “foreign hands.”   http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/03/egypt-backlash-travel-ban-american-activists.html

Magical Mystery Tour

Philly Cardinal Protects his Local Rapists

Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua ordered aides to shred a 1994 memo that identified 35 Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests suspected of sexually abusing children, according to a new court filing.
The order, outlined in a handwritten note locked away for years at the archdiocese’s Center City offices, was disclosed Friday by lawyers for Msgr. William J. Lynn, the former church administrator facing trial next month.
They say the shredding directive proves what Lynn has long claimed: that a church conspiracy to conceal clergy sex abuse was orchestrated at levels far above him.

Secretive Agents of Angel Maroni just Cannot Stop Baptizing the Dead Members of the Mormon Church last year posthumously baptized Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and killed by terrorists in Pakistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to records uncovered by a researcher in Utah.    http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-29/news/31111583_1_baptizing-holocaust-victims-mormon-temple-baptism

The Best and Worst things in the History of the World

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2105862/Baby-alligator-grins-ear-ear-sits-mothers-head.html