Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

To such heights of evil are people driven by religion. (Lucretius)

“Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

“To end the domination of capital, make war impossible, wipe out state boundaries, transform the whole world into one cooperative commonwealth, and bring about real human brotherhood and freedom.” Aims of the Third (Moscow) International as stated in the Manifesto. It is that or the domination of barbarism.

WaPo Brief: Chechnya in 4 Minutes (nationalism marries mysticism) www.washingtonpost.com/video/thefold/chechnya-200-years-of-background-in-four-minutes/2013/04/19/0518f0ba-a927-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_video.html

Over Half of Gitmo Prisoners on Hunger Strike The number of inmates taking part in the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike has reached 84, which is just over a half of the prison’s population, US military officials have stated, as reported by AP news agency.  http://rt.com/usa/guantanamo-strike-prisoners-inmates-162/\

Anon Threatens Internet blackout in Response to CISPA Passage

Trying Rios Mott Over the past month, survivors of massacres committed 30 years ago have testified how soldiers rampaged through Mayan villages, killing those who did not flee and destroying houses and crops. Women who had been raped covered their faces with shawls as they testified. Men who had been children at the time described seeing their parents or siblings killed. General Ríos Montt, 86, seized power in 1982 and ruled Guatemala for 17 months during a time when the army intensified its scorched-earth operations in the Mayan highlands to flush out leftist guerrillas.
A United Nations truth commission formed after the 1996 peace accord found that the state had committed “acts of genocide” against certain groups of Mayans, including the Mayan-Ixil.   www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/world/americas/judge-rejects-annulment-of-ex-dictators-guatemala-trial.html?ref=global-home

The Little Red Schoolhouse

In the Capitalist UC System, California Students get Jobbed The chances of in-state high school seniors gaining admission to the University of California worsened this year, as more of them applied and the number accepted dropped 2.2%, according to data released Thursday. Meanwhile, the ranks of out-of-staters and international students who were offered a UC spot continued to increase.
A record 99,132 Californians sought to become UC freshmen in the fall and 60,089, or 60.6%, were admitted by at least one of the system’s nine undergraduate campuses. That acceptance rate was the lowest ever — down from more than 70% five years ago.
UC officials contend that this year’s drop is a result of continuing financial constraints on the system and an effort to prevent overcrowding, because more students than anticipated enrolled for the current freshman class. Even though 1,354 fewer Californians were admitted for the 2013-14 school year, administrators said their goal was to enroll about 33,500 state freshmen, the same as last fall.  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-uc-admissions-20130419,0,252956.story

New York Times Loves the Common Core, as they Loved the Iraq + AFPak Wars New York City parents are understandably nervous about tough new state tests that were rolled out last week. And some parents whose children have already taken the tests are outraged. They shouldn’t be: the tests, which measure math and English skills, are an essential part of rigorous education reforms known as Common Core that seek to improve reasoning skills and have been adopted by 45 states.  The city says that it provided adequate advance notice of the tests and that last year more than 90 percent of New York teachers said they understood the Common Core material. The outreach program could have been more aggressive. But with that proviso, New York deserves enormous credit for being one of the first states to carry out what is clearly the most important education reform in the country’s history.
The Common Core standards were the product of a heavily researched, bipartisan effort pioneered by the National Governors Association in collaboration with the Council of Chief State School Officers. The effort arose from a broad recognition that the United States was losing ground to many of its competitors abroad because the learning standards as applied in most states were pathetically weak. The problem came to light when students who sailed through weak state tests did significantly worse on the rigorous federally backed test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.   www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/moving-ahead-with-common-core.html

A Reminder on Why the Common Core the Council of Foreign Relations, led by war-hawk Condoleeza Rice (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,”) issued its Education Task Force Report, demonstrating in clear terms that the education agenda is a war agenda: class and empire’s wars.
“Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security…Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.”
In the midst of World War I, a general demanded that the schools become “human munition factories.” That capitalist schools serve a capitalist state is key to grasping the war project at hand.   www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/28/detroit-and-the-international-war-of-the-rich-on-the-poor/

Hawaii Teachers build the Scaffold that Will Hang Them (Ya Can’t teach a Sneetch) Gov. Neil Abercrombie wasted no time in signing off on the new contract public schoolteachers ratified last night.
At a news conference this morning, the governor and officials with the state Department of Education and the Hawaii State Teachers Association made the four-year deal official. It now heads to the Legislature for funding approvals.
Abercrombie told reporters he believes the contract, which will tie teachers’ pay raises in part to student performance, should be celebrated as one of the most progressive contracts in the country.
Ninety-five percent of teachers voting voted to ratify the deal, which includes annual pay increases and reduced medical premiums for teachers, and ends a two-year labor dispute with the state.  http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/20130418_Abercrombie_HSTA_sign_contract_after_teachers_ratify_deal.html

Michigan Governor Snyder’s Secret Plan to Voucherize Capitalist Schooling Gov. Rick Snyder on Friday defended his administration’s involvement in a secret project that is trying to develop a cheaper way to deliver public education through a voucher-like funding system.
The education reform advisory team’s existence had been secret until The Detroit News reported Friday about a months-long “skunk works” project to design a new “value school” that costs $5,000 per child annually to operate — $2,000 less than the state’s minimum per-pupil funding. The group includes employees of software companies, charter school advocates and five state employees.From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20130420/SCHOOLS/304200345#ixzz2R9TbeS7C

National Black Education Agenda on the Common Core Neither the assumptions of “A Nation at Risk” nor the soon to be implemented“Common Standards,” both of which assume an American student population
embodied with a similar history of freedom and cultural neutrality, is sufficient to educate students of African descent whose ancestors in the United States bore the scars of physical and mental chains of enslavement and who themselves, whether they recognize it or not, are still victimized by a white supremacist culture and
school curriculum.

No other race came to America in chains to be suppressed and vilified by Americans of European descent who are presently accorded unearned special privileges because of their skin color and heritage. Although the new standards claim that no specific curriculum materials are being advocated, in several areas that specify common standards in English Language Arts,and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Mathematics, Science, and Technical
Subjects, grades kindergarten through the 12th grade and college, the “sample” of illustrative texts rarely contains any books or writings by Black authors, and, for that matter, of any writings by Hispanic/Latino, Native American or Asian writers! The“illustrative” texts for student reading in grades K5 contain no readings identifiable as written by or about authors of color. Yet, as the Common Core State Standards make clear these are only recommendations, not required readings. States are free to choose their own texts and materials. The State of Texas, for example, has already decided to remove such illustrious Americans as President Thomas Jefferson and Justice Thurgood Marshall from its textbooks and curriculum. The frequent suggestion in ‘The Standards’ that students be paired for diversity is an  implementation deception in schools that are primarily or all of one racial group or where some students are separated into elite “gifted” or “advanced placement” www.scribd.com/doc/136909345/NBEA-CommonCore-Critique42013

College Prez Describes Loss of 500,000 student positions in CA as “slack in Demand” Over the last four years, we have lost 469,000 students statewide, and enrollment demand is slowing down. This “forced change” due to financial contraction has deeply affected the CCC system. We need to embrace the reduced mission of the CCC’s, focusing on success, not just access. One way to address this mission is to work towards increasing unit load, rather than increasing students. This approach supports student success, as we know that full-time students achieve educational goals at a higher rate than part-time students. Finally, we need to continue to work more as a system and not lose the momentum we currently have in addressing student success (SB 1440, SB 1456, etc).
Potentially, this “slack in demand” will allow CCC’s some catch-up time to address areas neglected over the past four years, such as maintenance. While the economic outlook is moderately good, fixed costs will continue to accelerate (STRS, PERS, health benefits, and deferred maintenance). We need to plan for these.  http://www.swccd.edu/index.aspx?page=2276

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Perpetual War Against Exactly What???? The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century. There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China. It’s true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died. When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn’t actually an apocalyptic event.
The enemy was still nearly nonexistent. The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars. It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects. It in no way endangered the state. In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers. It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one. It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years. It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.
When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less. And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment — a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country. The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on “A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century.” If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.  http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175687/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_cathedral_of_the_enemy/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=c39779f5df-TD_Engelhardt4_14_2013&utm_medium=email#more

US Troops Plunge Toward Syria–Jihaddists, we got your back The US will deploy 200 troops to Jordan in the coming weeks in a bid to support that country’s defenses, Washington says, as the Syrian crisis escalates.
The Wednesday statement came from US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in Congress. He said the deployment will assist the efforts to contain violence on the Syrian border, as well as set the groundwork for combating any perceived threats of chemical weapons use in Syria.   rt.com/news/jordan-us-troops-syria-028/

Afghan Opium Crop Doing Just fine For the third year in a row, opium cultivation has increased across Afghanistan, reversing earlier drops stemming from a decade-long international and Afghan government effort to combat the drug trade, according to a United Nations report released on Monday.  The report’s findings raised concerns among international law enforcement officials that if the trend continued, opium would be the country’s major economic activity after the departure of foreign military forces in 2014, leading to the specter of what one referred to as “the world’s first true narco-state.”
Afghanistan is already the world’s largest producer of opium, and last year accounted for 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply. “The assumption is it will reach again to 90 percent this year,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the United Nations’ top counternarcotics official here.

US Pouring Money on Syrian Jihadists Secretary of State John Kerry announced Sunday morning that the United States would double its aid to the Syrian opposition, providing $123 million in fresh assistance.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/world/middleeast/kerry-says-us-to-double-aid-to-the-opposition-in-syria.html?ref=global-home

The World American Hysterics Made in Pakistan Electioneering has taken a dark twist in northwest Pakistan, where a concerted campaign of Taliban attacks against the main secular party is violently reshaping the democratic landscape before parliamentary elections scheduled for May 11.
In the past 10 days, militants have carried out four bombings and one grenade attack against Mr. Khan’s Awami National Party, which has governed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province since 2008, and whose secular ideology is repugnant to the Taliban’s vision of imposing an Islamic caliphate in Pakistan.
In the worst attack, last Tuesday, a suicide bomber killed 19 people and wounded dozens in central Peshawar, narrowly missing the former railways minister, Ghulam Ahmed Bilour. www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/world/asia/pakistani-taliban-violently-reshape-the-ballot.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

Pakistan’s Gangster Musharraf Back under Arrest Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was arrested and placed in police custody Friday, a day after commandos whisked him away from an Islamabad courthouse where he faces charges of illegally detaining dozens of judges while in power.
Musharraf, who only a few weeks ago presented himself as a patriotic savior returning to his homeland from self-imposed exile, was being held at police headquarters at least until his next court appearance, which was expected within 48 hours. It was not known whether he would be moved back to his Islamabad residence under house arrest or to a jail cell to await trial.  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-musharraf-20130420,0,2015585.story

Ally Karzai Says US Drones Kill A Dozen Children and More The spokesman for President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that the C.I.A. was responsible for calling in an airstrike on April 7 that left 17 Afghan civilians dead, 12 of them children, and that the secret Afghan militias that the agency controls behaved as if they were “responsible to no one.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/world/asia/after-airstrike-afghan-points-to-cia-and-secret-militias.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Klare on Resource Shock Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.
Two nightmare scenarios — a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change — are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition, and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected.
To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.
Resource Shortages and Resource Wars
Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food, and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction, and war. www.tomdispatch.com/post/175690/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_coming_global_explosion/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=2d2291faa3-TD_Klare4_21_2013&utm_medium=email#more

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Gitmo is Killing Me ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either. …I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.  The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.  And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.
I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.
Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.         www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html

Military decrees media access to Manning’s hearing is a privilege, not a right www.bradleymanning.org/

After Dzhokar’s capture Friday evening, authorities decided not to read him his Miranda rights rights against self-incrimination, and hold him under a so-called public safety exception to the law, a move that has quickly raised legal and national security questions.   www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-boston-bombing-investigation-20130420,0,7218006.story

Why are the Americans Afraid of a Trial? Because no political leader can say, “People make gods; gods don’t make people. You psycho, you have evil fairies dancing in your head–and they belong in the third century Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), said Saturday in a joint statement that alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be denied a defense attorney and declared an “enemy combatant.”
They added in a statement on Graham’s Facebook page, “It is clear the events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city.”
The two Republican conservatives have demanded that terror suspects not be Mirandized or tried in federal courts and instead be shipped to the detainee prison on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nn-miranda-boston-bombing-suspect-20130420,0,2852243.story

FBI Stumbles Again The significance of the trip was magnified late Friday when the F.B.I. disclosed in a statement that in 2011 “a foreign government” — now acknowledged by officials to be Russia — asked for information about Tamerlan. The request was “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”  The senior law enforcement official said the Russians feared he could be a risk, and “they had something on him and were concerned about him, and him traveling to their region.” Chechen extremists pose a greater threat to Russia than they do to the United States, counterterrorism specialists say, though some of the groups have had ties to Al Qaeda.
But the F.B.I. never followed up on Tamerlan once he returned, a senior law enforcement official acknowledged on Saturday, adding that its investigation did not turn up anything and it did not have the legal authority to keep tabs on him. Investigators are now scrambling to review that trip, and learn about any extremists who might have influenced, trained or directed Tamerlan while he was there.   www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The Criminal/Political Class in Mexico Skates on Drug Charges Gen. Tomas Angeles Dauahare, who once held the plum post of military attache to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, was rumored to be the next defense minister of Mexico.
Until that day in May last year when he and three other top military men were arrested on suspicion of working on behalf of a notorious drug cartel.
It was the largest indictment of army officers on charges of drug-trafficking in recent memory, hailed in many quarters as proof of then-President Felipe Calderon’s determination to root out corruption at every level.
But one night last week, Angeles stepped from the Altiplano maximum-security prison, all charges dropped.
The release of Angeles marked the second high-profile prosecution in as many days to be dismissed, raising questions about a series of Calderon-era cases that are collapsing like dominoes.
The failure to win convictions in major drug cases underscores the abysmal state of Mexico’s judicial system, stymied by corruption, antiquated procedures and incompetence.    http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-collapsed-justice-20130421,0,2444382.story

Solidarity for Never

Seiu Boss Pleads Out On March 22, Rufino Sanchez, former president of National Association Government Employees (NAGE) Local R3-10, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York to one count of mail fraud resulting in the loss of $18,565 in funds from the union, formerly based in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. Sanchez had been indicted last July on 22 counts of mail fraud relating to the theft of $15,723 in union funds and arrested in August. NAGE is an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. The indictment, arrest and guilty plea follow a probe by the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.

Teamster Charged, Local Trusteed Al Sprague collected two incomes. Unfortunately, one of them may have been under false pretenses. Late in January the International Brotherhood of Teamsters determined that Sprague, president-business agent of Teamsters Local 164, received unemployment benefits while drawing an income from the Jackson, Mich. union. Apparently, he’s not the only official at the local with ethical problems. To safeguard assets, Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa put the local under trusteeship. “Following the assignment of a Personal Representative to investigate allegations of impropriety regarding the financial administration of Local 164, I have received a report that confirms the Local Union is not being operated in a manner consistent with the requirements of the International Constitution and federal law,” Hoffa wrote in a letter to local officers and members.

AFGE Top Pleads On March 15, Jacquelyn Pugh-Rodgers, former vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 2107, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to one count of mail fraud. Pugh-Rodgers had been indicted in July along with two local officials, James Charleston and Mary Craigen, for two counts of mail fraud and one count of embezzlement in excess of $1,000 from the North Chicago, Ill.-based union. The actions follow a probe by the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.

Spy versus Spy

Shrink in Army/CIA LSD Attacks Dies Gerald D. Klee, a retired psychiatrist and LSD expert who participated in experiments with the hallucinogenic drug on volunteer servicemen at U.S. military installations in the 1950s, has died. He was 86. www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gerald-klee-20130309,0,3203268.story

Klee died Sunday of complications after surgery at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Md., his family said.

In 1975, Klee made headlines when he confirmed reports that the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Psychiatric Institute had been involved in secret research between 1956 and 1959, when hundreds of soldiers were given LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide.

The Magical Mystery Tour

Thank God! Pope Keeps Uppity Nuns in their Place Pope Francis has reaffirmed the reprimand of American nuns issued by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, and endorsed the plan to have three bishops supervise an overhaul of the nation’s largest umbrella group of American nuns.  …The Vatican last year said in its doctrinal assessment that the nuns’ group was tinged with feminist influences, focused too much on ending social and economic injustice and not enough on stopping abortion, and permitted speakers at its meetings who questioned church doctrine.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/us/pope-upholds-reprimand-of-nuns-group.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Best Sorority Email Ever There are two things the Delta Gamma sorority’s University of Maryland chapter refuses to tolerate. The first is Delta Gammas who are “LITERALLY being so fucking AWKWARD.” The second is young ladies who are “so fucking BORING.”
Last week, bitches got told. gawker.com/5994974/the-most-deranged-sorority-girl-email-you-will-ever-read

So Long

Joe Kelner–Sued Kent State Joseph Kelner, a lawyer who took on the sitting governor of Ohio, a former university president and the National Guard in a suit on behalf of the student victims of the Kent State shootings in 1970, died on Monday in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 98. …In 1980, Mr. Kelner was the co-author, with James Munves, of the book “The Kent State Coverup,” in which he alleged that “one governmental agency after another had managed to suppress evidence and shield those responsible for the shootings in a monumental cover-up.” He added, “The same process continued in the Cleveland courtroom.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/us/joseph-kelner-98-dies-led-kent-state-lawsuit.html?pagewanted=all