Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

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/)

Greece: General Strike vs Class War from Above Greek workers walked off the job on Tuesday to protest a new barrage of austerity measures being demanded by the country’s foreign creditors in exchange for a second bailout of $170 billion without which Greece faces a potentially catastrophic default within weeks.

Coppers Sweep Occupy DC Dozens of U.S. Park Police officers in riot gear and on horseback converged before dawn Saturday on one of the nation’s last remaining Occupy sites, with police clearing away tents they said were banned under park rules.   At least seven people were arrested.   www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/feb/05/tp-police-clear-occupy-dc-site-7-held/

Occupy Oxford Ms Perseveres (above)

Above, Occupy Berkeley was swept away and is regrouping, retenting…..

Against Apple SuperExploitation Protesters descended on Apple stores around the world, including in Washington, on Thursday to protest labor conditions at the company’s manufacturing facilities in China.
The issue has become a thorny one for Apple after the factories that make its products experienced explosions in 2011 and worker suicides in 2010. A recent report in The New York Times contained graphic descriptions of cramped working conditions and the voices of workers who said they were suffering injuries from repetitive motion and exposure to chemicals.   www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/apple-store-protests-planned-for-thursday/2012/02/08/gIQAEmE3zQ_story.html

Congratulations to Doug Selwyn for

I am writing Following the threads: Bringing inquiry research to the classroom to encourage and support educators to:

· Make connection between required course content and the lives of their students.

· Offer their students the opportunity to learn how to engage in authentic, ‘real world” research in their classrooms, and to practice these research skills on topics that are of interest and importance to them.

· Encourage students to share their findings with an authentic audience for whom the information is relevant and consequential.

· Give students and teachers permission to disconnect the automatic link that “school” often makes between research and (at least occasionally) boring, academic research papers, and to encourage students to share what they have learned through various media and modes that will best communicate what they have found with their intended audience.

· Provide examples of the ways in which history, our own stories have been hidden from us, or lost to us, and to realize the damage that has done to our understanding of how the world has come to be the way it is.

· Offer students the opportunity to experience the joy and power that comes with learning about issues and subjects of importance to them.  Doug Selwyn

Citizen Self-Help in Detroit The people of Detroit are taking no prisoners. Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.   www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/05/020512-news-detroit-vigilantes-1-5/

The Little Red School House

Dem Jerry Brown’s Assault on People in California Community Colleges California’s 112 community colleges, the nation’s largest higher education system, may change a great deal if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.
Brown, who entered politics nearly a half-century ago as a Los Angeles community college trustee, and state community college Chancellor Jack Scott, a former college administrator and state senator, want the system to refocus on students with firm career or higher education goals. If enacted, it would ration access to consciously discourage, or even ban, attendance by casual students who lack the requisite goals. It would be the biggest cultural change since 1907, when the system was born with authorization for local high schools to offer “postgraduate courses of study.”   …Simply put, if the system serves fewer students, it will cost less. And that makes it a significant component of Brown’s ambitious plan to shrink state spending commitments even as he asks voters to raise taxes.  www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120206/WIRE/120209655?p=2&tc=pg

Detroit: Either Come to your School-to-Jail Prep program or go to the Real Jail Student truancy is noticeable in the city — so much so that Detroit Public Schools made 409 referrals to prosecutors in the 2010-11 year and also lost state funding because it fell below the state minimum of 75 percent attendance on 46 days.
That’s why federal, county and city law enforcement officers worked together with community groups Monday to combat the problem.
About 30 officers performed the first sweep of the year around Denby and Osborn high schools, marked by Detroit Public Schools as areas with high risk for truancy.      www.detroitnews.com/article/20120207/SCHOOLS/202070349/1026/Law-enforcement-agencies-work-together-combat-truancy-Detroit

Teaching History in Afghanistan, like the US: Lie About the Wars. What wars? In a country where the recent past has unfolded like a war epic, officials think they have found a way to teach Afghan history without widening the fractures between long-quarreling ethnic and political groups: leave out the past four decades.
A series of government-issued textbooks funded by the United States and several foreign aid organizations do just that, pausing history in 1973. There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujaheddin, the Taliban or the U.S. military presence. In their efforts to promote a single national identity, Afghan leaders have deemed their own history too controversial.     …In the 1970s, the Soviet Union printed books that stressed communism’s virtues and the importance of Marxist theory. During the last years of the Cold War, the United States spent millions on Afghan textbooks filled with violent images and talk of jihad, part of a covert effort to incite resistance to the Soviet occupation. During the Taliban’s reign in the 1990s, conservative Islamic texts were imported from Pakistan. In western Afghanistan, Iranian textbooks that openly praised Tehran-backed militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas were for years distributed in public schools.   www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-afghanistan-a-new-approach-to-teaching-history-leave-out-the-wars/2012/02/03/gIQA57KNqQ_story_1.html

US Invasion and the Production of Barbarism in Iraq’s Universities It started during the chaos following the invasion. While American troops guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior but ignored cultural heritage sites, looters ransacked the universities. For example, the entire library collections at the University of Baghdad’s College of Arts and at the University of Basra were destroyed. The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandresekara described the scene at Mustansiriya University in 2003: “By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day.”
At the same time, the United States stripped Iraq’s universities of their leadership. In his first executive order PDF as the new head of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, Paul Bremer removed members of the Ba’ath Party from senior management positions at all public institutions. Since one had to join the Ba’ath Party — whether one truly supported the party or not — in order to get ahead in Hussein’s Iraq, this order had the effect of removing most of Iraq’s senior university administrators and professors overnight. In the words of journalist Christina Asquith, after this purge, “half of the intellectual leadership in academia was gone.” Control over Iraq’s universities now lay in the hands of Andrew Erdmann, a 36-year-old American, well-connected in Republican Party patronage networks, who was senior adviser to Iraq’s Ministry of Education. Erdmann spoke no Arabic and had no experience in university administration.  …In just 20 years, then, the Iraqi university system went from being among the best in the Middle East to one of the worst. This extraordinary act of institutional destruction was largely accomplished by American leaders who told us that the US invasion of Iraq would bring modernity, development, and women’s rights. Instead, as political scientist Mark Duffield has observed, it has partly de-modernized that country. In the words of John Tirman, America’s failure to acknowledge the suffering that occupation wreaked in Iraq “is a moral failing as well as a strategic blunder.”      www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/education-occupation

Incapable of Noting the Interpenetration of Class and Race, Researchers Suddenly remember Class Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,”  www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?scp=1&sq=rich%20and%20poor%20further%20apart%20in%20education&st=cse

Prestigious Cheats At Claremont McKenna Downgraded Claremont McKenna College took another blow Friday as a result of the scandal involving its admissions office exaggerating freshman classes’ SAT scores. Kiplinger, the finance magazine, announced that it had dropped the Southern California campus from its list of best values in liberal arts colleges.
“Kiplinger’s has learned that Claremont McKenna College unfairly earned its place as 18th-ranked private liberal arts college in our college rankings by reporting inflated SAT scores,” the magazine announced in an online statement.   www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0204-claremont-20120204,0,1118583.story

Michigan Expands Good-Bank Bad-Bank Schooling in Detroit and the State Saying Detroit Public Schools must discard its outdated educational model to lead the city’s comeback, district officials announced plans Wednesday to close 16 schools and offer four others as candidates to be turned into charter schools.
Emergency Manager Roy Roberts announced the latest round of downsizing at the state’s largest school district, which has shrunk from 150,000 students and more than 200 schools to less than 70,000 students among 130 schools.
Roberts said rather than support buildings that are under-utilized, the district is closing buildings and merging students into other schools, allowing it to drive additional resources to a smaller group of higher-quality facilities and to students in those buildings.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20120208/SCHOOLS/202080413/DPS-close-16-schools-offer-4-others-charters?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

above, the barbarism that a decade and more of war produces

Deja Vu. The US and the Press Lie about the Failed Afghan War “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks in an article summarizing his views titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” It was published online Sunday in The Armed Forces Journal, the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. “No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”
Colonel Davis says his experience has caused him to doubt reports of progress in the war from numerous military leaders, including David H. Petraeus, who commanded the troops in Afghanistan before becoming the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in June.
Last March, for example, Mr. Petraeus, then an Army general, testified before the Senate that the Taliban’s momentum had been “arrested in much of the country” and that progress was “significant,” though fragile, and “on the right azimuth” to allow Afghan forces to take the lead in combat by the end of 2014.
Colonel Davis fiercely disputes such assertions and says few of the troops believe them. At the same time, he is acutely aware of the chasm in stature that separates him from those he is criticizing, and he has no illusions about the impact his public stance may have on his career.
“I’m going to get nuked,“ he said in an interview last month.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/army-colonel-challenges-pentagons-afghanistan-claims.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

CIA Is not Leaving Iraq nor Afghanistan The CIA is expected to maintain a large clandestine presence in Iraq and Afghanistan long after the departure of conventional U.S. troops as part of a plan by the Obama administration to rely on a combination of spies and Special Operations forces to protect U.S. interests in the two longtime war zones, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials said that the CIA’s stations in Kabul and Baghdad will probably remain the agency’s largest overseas outposts for years, even if they shrink from record staffing levels set at the height of American efforts in those nations to fend off insurgencies and install capable governments.   The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in December has moved the CIA’s emphasis there toward more traditional espionage — monitoring developments in the increasingly antagonistic government, seeking to suppress al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the country and countering the influence of Iran.
In Afghanistan, the CIA is expected to have a more aggressively operational role. U.S. officials said the agency’s paramilitary capabilities are seen as tools for keeping the Taliban off balance, protecting the government in Kabul and preserving access to Afghan airstrips that enable armed CIA drones to hunt al-Qaeda remnants in Pakistan.

As President Obama seeks to end a decade of large-scale conflict, the emerging assignments for the CIA suggest it will play a significant part in the administration’s search for ways to exert U.S. power      www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-digs-in-as-americans-withdraw-from-iraq-afghanistan/2012/02/07/gIQAFNJTxQ_story.html

Are the US Owned Afghan Defense forces Really the Taliban? Only 1 percent of Afghan police and soldiers are capable of operating independently, a top U.S. commander said on Wednesday, proving further that the nation building effort in Afghanistan has failed.      news.antiwar.com/2012/02/08/less-than-1-percent-of-afghan-forces-are-self-sufficient/

Bureau of Investigative Journalists—Obamagogue Lies about the precise and harmless drones In what can only be described as a gross violation of the Geneva Convention, the CIA-sponsored drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of innocent civilians involved in either rescuing injured victims, or partaking in funerals.
According to a report published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism with the Sunday Times, between 282 and 535 civilians, including 60 minors, have been credibly reported as killed as a result of drone strikes since US President Barack Obama took office three years ago.   www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=91373&Cat=2

Children Freeze to Death via the US Invasion of Afghanistan The war refugee Sayid Mohammad lost his last son on Wednesday, 3-month-old Khan, who became the 24th child to die of exposure in camps here in the past month   ,,,Even by the standards of destitution in these camps, Mr. Mohammad’s story is a hard-luck one; Khan was the eighth of his nine children to die. Back home in the Gereshk district of Helmand Province, six died of disease, he said. Three years ago they fled the fighting in that area for the Nasaji Bagrami Camp here, where a 3-year-old son froze to death last winter, he said. Like most of Kabul’s 35,000 internal refugees, he fled the country’s war zones only to find a life of squalor sometimes as deadly, even in the capital of a country that has received more than $60 billion in nonmilitary aid over 10 years.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/world/asia/in-grip-of-cold-afghan-family-buries-8th-child.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

As US Reaps the Whirlwind, Ghadaffi Fighters Move to Mali Mali from Libya are said to have helped to launch a new rebel group.
The National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad says it is the result of a merger between two rebel groups, boosted by Tuaregs who fought for Col Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.  Mali’s Tuaregs have long complained that they have been marginalised by the southern government.  The NMLA wants independence for northern Mali’s desert region.
The Tuareg are a nomadic community who mostly live in the Sahara desert and nearby regions of countries across north and west Africa.  Mali has been saying since the start of the conflict in Libya that the fall of Col Gaddafi would have a destabilising effect in the region.      www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15334088

Josh Landis’ Source on the Wars on Syria: The following Telegraph story based on the account of defecting general Mustafa Ahmad al-Sheikh presents a compelling picture of chaos within the ranks of the Syrian army, just as this CBC story: Syria’s fractured opposition, a long way from victory,describes a divided opposition. Most observers believe an end to the bloody stalemate is a long way off. Even if the Syrian military is weak, the opposition forces have a lot of building to do before they can capitalize on the weaknesses of the Assad regime to destroy it.
It will take a major effort by opposition sponsors to build up a force capably of bringing down the Syria army. Sanctions have seriously undermined government efforts to finance its military, but they have equally impoverished the average Syrian and businessman who can be expected to support the opposition.     syriacomment.com/

Sarkozy Joins Zibignew: Don’t Bomb Iran! “The solution is political, the solution is diplomatic, the solution is in sanctions,” Sarkozy said, referring to a string of U.N. sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program, which the West fears mask designs to build weapons.   www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46308101

AQ and Shabab Killer Mystics Hook Up The Somali militant group al-Shabab has formally joined al-Qaida, according to a video translation released Thursday of a message from al-Qaida’s leader.
Ayman al-Zawahri gave “glad tidings” that al-Shabab had joined al-Qaida, according to the translation of the 15-minute video by the Site Intelligence group.     www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/somalias-militants-group-al-shabab-joins-al-qaida-qaida-leader-says-in-video/2012/02/09/gIQAEvGV1Q_story.html

Charges Dropped against Soldier from Killer Stryker Crew Photographs entered as evidence showed the accused ringleader of the group, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, and other soldiers casually posing with bloodied Afghan corpses, drawing comparisons to the to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq in 2004.
Gibbs was convicted by court-martial in November of murdering three unarmed civilians, drawing an automatic life prison sentence, but he will be eligible for parole in 8 1/2 years.
His chief accuser and onetime right-hand man, Army Specialist Jeremy Morlock, was sentenced in March of last year to 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to the same three murders. As part of his plea deal, Morlock had agreed to testify against the remaining witnesses, including Wagnon.
A third soldier charged with murder, Adam Winfield, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in prison. A fourth, Andrew Holmes, was sentenced to seven years after pleading guilty to a single count of murder.
Wagnon was the last to face court-martial.
The dismissal of charges comes less than two weeks after a U.S. Marine Corps sergeant accused of leading a 2005 massacre of 24 civilians in the Iraqi city of Haditha pleaded guilty to one count of dereliction of duty. As part of his plea deal, the Marine, Frank Wuterich he was spared jail time and instead faces a maximum penalty of demotion to the rank of private.   in.reuters.com/article/2012/02/04/usa-soldiers-crimes-idINDEE81301Q20120204

Who Wants to be the Last Troop to Die in the Failed AFPak War? Times Says: US Lost The Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control of Afghanistan after Nato-led forces withdraw from the country, according to reports citing a classifed assessment by US forces.
The Times described the report as secret and “highly classified”, saying it was put together last month by the US military at Bagram air base in Afghanistan for top Nato officers. The BBC also carried a report on the leaked document.
“Many Afghans are already bracing themselves for an eventual return of the Taliban,” the report was quoted as saying. “Once Isaf (Nato-led forces) is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable.”   www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/01/taliban-rule-afghanistan-leaked-report

Why Do Americans Ignore Civilians Killed in their Wars? The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers.   www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-do-we-ignore-the-civilians-killed-in-american-wars/2011/12/05/gIQALCO4eP_story.html

Trusted Ally, India, Keeps Buying Iranian Oil: Nations have Interests, not values: India’s determination to continue buying Iranian oil, despite sanctions and growing political pressure from the United States and Europe, has frustrated officials in Washington at a time when the forward momentum in the United States-India relationship has slowed, with differences over issues including civil nuclear cooperation, trade protectionism and military sales.
The situation was exacerbated last week by news reports that India had become Iran’s top oil customer, while an Indian official announced plans to send a trade delegation to Tehran. In New Delhi, diplomats and analysts say India’s purchasing of Iranian oil is a matter of economic necessity, given its dependence on imported oil. Some say the purchases also represent diplomatic hedging in a region bracing for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by 2014, or possibly sooner.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/world/asia/india-trumpets-ties-with-us-amid-iran-oil-deal.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Liddell Hart: Why Can’t We Learn from History? Can people learn that lesson before their prospects of prosperity are splintered beyond repair in an orgy of mutual devastation? The best chance may lie in developing a deeper understanding of modern warfare on their part, together with a realization of their mutual responsibility for the way it has got out of control. The development of means has outstripped the growth of minds.
Science and technology have produced a greater transformation of the physical conditions and apparatus of life in the past hundred years than had taken place in the previous two thousand years. Yet when men turn these tremendous new powers to a war purpose, they employ them as recklessly as their ancestors employed the primitive means of the past, and they pursue the same traditional ends without regard to the difference of effect. Indeed, the Governments of modern nations at war have largely ceased to think of the postwar effects which earlier statesmen were wise enough to bear in mind—a consideration which led in the eighteenth century to a self-imposed limitation of methods. Modern nations have reverted to a more primitive extreme—akin to the practices of warfare between barbaric hordes that were armed with spear and sword—at the same time as they become possessed of science-given instruments for multiple destruction at long range.   infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/liddell/c04.html

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

With the Long Con on Until November, Obamgogue Hugs a Superpac Fearing a tide of spending by outside conservative groups, President Obama is giving his blessing to a pro-Democratic Party “super PAC” that will work to help his reelection, his campaign said late Monday.
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a message to supporters that “our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it stands,” which he said gives a large financial advantage to Republicans and their allied groups. Messina said Obama will throw his support to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC founded by two former White House aides that until now has been unable to match its conservative competitors in fundraising.     www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-in-a-switch-endorses-pro-democratic-super-pac/2012/02/06/gIQAVqnWvQ_story.html

The Mortgage Settlement as Bankster Bailout II What about homeowners? They don’t get much, especially in relation to the scale of the housing crisis. More than 2 million owners have lost their homes to foreclosure during the last four years; this deal will provide 750,000 with a payment of $2,000 each.
Some 11 million homeowners are underwater by about $700 billion combined, or an average of nearly $65,000 each. In a transport of optimism, federal officials are projecting that this deal will help 2 million of them, to the tune of perhaps $20,000 each. By the way, loans owned by the government-sponsored firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t eligible for this relief. Since they own or control the majority of all outstanding mortgages, that’s a rather large black hole. … It may not be long before the euphoria over the settlement evaporates in the realization that the banks that made a travesty of the mortgage market are still getting a pass — not only on their cupidity in making loans to unqualified buyers, but in magnifying their cupidity through forgery, lies and the other building blocks of foreclosure fraud.
In the words of business consultant Susan Webber, who blogs expertly on financial matters under the pen name Yves Smith, “We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2,000 per loan.” She observes, quite properly, that the payoff is a minuscule fraction of the costs these practices have imposed on borrowers, the court system and the economy.
The settlement, meanwhile, provides cover for other stealth bailouts. On Thursday, the day of the big parade, the U.S. Office of the Controller of the Currency quietly settled claims against BofA, Wells Fargo, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase related to cease-and-desist orders the agency issued last year over the banks’ crooked mortgage servicing and foreclosure activities.       www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-hiltzik-20120212,0,7852934.column

12 Reasons to Hate the Bogue Home Bailout Although the fine points are still being hammered out, various news outlets (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal) have details, with Dave Dayen’s overview at Firedoglake the best thus far.  The Wall Street Journal is also reporting that the SEC is about to launch some securities litigation against major banks. Since the statue of limitations has already run out on securities filings more than five years old, this means they’ll clip the banks for some of the very last (and dreckiest) deals they shoved out the door before the subprime market gave up the ghost. The various news services are touting this pact at the biggest multi-state settlement since the tobacco deal in 1998. While narrowly accurate, this deal is bush league by comparison even though the underlying abuses in both cases have had devastating consequences.
The tobacco agreement was pegged as being worth nearly $250 billion over the first 25 years. Adjust that for inflation, and the disparity is even bigger. That shows you the difference in outcomes between a case where the prosecutors have solid evidence backing their charges, versus one where everyone know a lot of bad stuff happened, but no one has come close to marshaling the evidence.
The mortgage settlement terms have not been released, but more of the details have been leaked:
1. The total for the top five servicers is now touted as $26 billion (annoyingly, the FT is calling it “nearly $40 billion”), but of that, roughly $17 billion is credits for principal modifications, which as we pointed out earlier, can and almost assuredly will come largely from mortgages owned by investors. $3 billion is for refis, and only $5 billion will be in the form of hard cash payments, including $1500 to $2000 per borrower foreclosed on between September 2008 and December 2011.

Finance Head Completely Disconnected from Industrial Body, US Stocks Hit a High   (bubble bubble little toil and lots of trouble) Stocks ended near session highs Friday, with the Dow finishing at its best level since May 2008, buoyed by a monthly government employment report that blew past estimates and a handful of impressive economic news.   All three major averages logged impressive gains for the week.     www.cnbc.com/id/46251590

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxzlG0GT-yw

The Cartels Diversify Most Americans think the trouble at our southern border is just about guns, dope and meth. Goddard argues the Mexican drug cartels are more aptly described as “transnational criminal organizations.” They are branching to new lines of business like production and distribution of pirated music, movies and software, money laundering and hijacking.
“Rather than being just a line in the desert sand, the southwest border is a complex, multidimensional interrelationship of immigration laws, cyberspace money transfers, and international business connections,” Goddard writes.
His second in a series of three reports, “How to Fix a Broken Border: Disrupting Smuggling at Its Source,” was released days ago. In almost every paragraph you can read Goddard’s exasperation with our wrongheaded border policy.  …The cartels are extremely sophisticated in their intel and operations. And their raison d’etre is not violence but making money. They are as committed to profit seeking as any Fortune 500 business. Indeed, they funnel an estimated $40 billion in revenue from U.S. operations back to Mexico annually, according to Goddard.
The key to defeating the cartels will be going after the vital aspects of their businesses.
“Their communication systems must be cracked, jammed, and shut down,” Goddard writes. “Their leaders must be identified, arrested and incarcerated. Most important, the illegal flow of funds across the border into cartel pockets must be disrupted, interrupted and stopped.”
During his time as Arizona attorney general, Goddard won a $94 million settlement with Western Union; he had charged that cartels had used the company extensively in highly complicated money transfers.

www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/08/137789/commentary-mexicos-drug-cartels.html

Fascist Vets Failed Attempt to Bomb MLK Parade The homemade bomb was equipped with an unusual remote-controlled trigger and stuffed with more than 100 heavy fishing weights coated in rat poison. The Spokane County bomb squad disarmed it hours before the route would have been flooded with marchers last year.
If the device had detonated and the weights had torn into the intended victims, the poison would have prevented their blood from coagulating, all but ensuring their deaths, lab analysts concluded.
The intense manhunt that ensued led authorities to a remote cabin in the pine-shrouded hills north of Spokane. In it lived Kevin W. Harpham, an Army veteran who had posted venomously for years on a white supremacist website, the Vanguard News Network.     www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mlk-bomb-20120209,0,6777950,full.story

Years After Fascist Medical Experiments, Guatemalans get a “sorry bout that” IN THE FALL of 2010, the Obama administration acknowledged a shocking truth: From 1946 through 1948, officials working in Guatemala for the U.S. Public Health Service conducted tests on some 5,100 unwitting individuals and deliberately infected at least 1,300 with sexually transmitted diseases. None of the victims — who included prisoners, soldiers, the mentally ill and commercial sex workers — consented to this barbaric treatment. At least 83 people died, and many suffered permanent damage.   www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-must-do-more-than-apologize-to-guatemala-over-std-study/2012/01/13/gIQA08ZUxQ_story.html

Fascist “Bell Curve” Prof Chas Murray has a new Book! Why are people Poor? Not religious enough is one key element plus the rich don’t demand that the poor act like them….. In his new book, “Coming Apart,” Murray flips the script that has energized Republican politics and campaigns since Richard Nixon: the white working class, he argues, is no longer part of a virtuous silent majority. Instead, beginning in the early 1960s, it has become increasingly alienated from what Murray calls “the founding virtues” of civic life. “Our nation is coming apart at the seams,” Murray warns — “not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.”     www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html

Solidarity forphooey!

King of the UAW Plans to Scam Members Again with Sham action While He joins Corporate Board United Auto Workers President Bob King used the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Flint Sit-Down Strike to call for “direct action” — including nonviolent civil disobedience — to take back America from the “right-wing Republicans” and “one-percenters” who he says have hijacked this democracy.
King said the UAW would begin training its members and other activists this spring to take part in peaceful, but potentially illegal, protests across America to stop what he called the rollback of workers’ rights and civil rights.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20120210/AUTO01/202100428/King-says-UAW-prepping-nationwide-protests?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Quisling ANC Suspends Nutcase Youth Leader, produced by ANC Mr. Malema’s strident, black-nationalist pronouncements brought sharp criticism, along with his attempts to revive “Shoot the Boer,” a song from the anti-apartheid struggle. He spoke openly about seeking to nationalize South Africa’s mines, and at one stage, bizarrely, seemed to advocate an invasion of neighboring Botswana.
Mr. Malema appealed his sentence and argued that he had not been allowed to present mitigating evidence. His appeal was denied, but he will be permitted to plead for a lesser sentence at a hearing in two weeks.

www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/world/africa/anc-upholds-suspension-of-youth-leader-malema.html?_r=4&ref=global-home

The Magical Mystery Tour

Obamagogue Swears He is Just Afraid of Sexual Pleasure as the Organized Mystics President Obama, seeking to dampen a runaway political furor over birth control and religious liberty, unveiled a plan on Friday that is meant to calm the right’s ire about a new administration rule that would require health insurance plans — including those offered by Roman Catholic hospitals, universities and charities — to provide free birth control to female employees.     www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/health/policy/obama-to-offer-accommodation-on-birth-control-rule-officials-say.html?ref=global-home

Spy versus Spy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHc0bSrFC58

Fake Out! Pakistan’s Courts are Not About to Hobble the ISI Long unchallenged, Pakistan’s top spy agency faces a flurry of court actions that subject its darkest operations to unusual scrutiny, amid growing calls for new restrictions on its largely untrammeled powers.     www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/world/asia/isi-in-pakistan-faces-court-cases.html?ref=global-home

Egypt Still Holding US Spies Connected to N.E.D. Egypt’s military-led government said Sunday that it would put 19 Americans and two dozen others on trial in a politically charged criminal investigation into the foreign financing of nonprofit groups that has shaken the 30-year alliance between the United States and Egypt.   …The prosecution could hardly have been better designed to provoke an American backlash. Although the charges against the 19 Americans are part of a broader crackdown on as many as nine nonprofit groups here, its most prominent targets are two American-financed groups with close ties to the Congressional leadership, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. Both are chartered to promote democracy abroad with nonpartisan training and election monitoring.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/middleeast/egypt-will-try-19-americans-on-criminal-charges.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Obamagogue the Obscurer Moves to Cover Up More and More This very important Document Friday features a very obscure document, just two pages (59033 and 59034) that the Central Intelligence Agency printed in the Federal Register on Friday, 23 September 2011 –without a notice for public comment. These regulations, which the CIA began enforcing in December, are a covert attack on the most effective tool that the public uses to declassify the CIA’s secret documents, Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR).
Overnight, without public comment or notice, the Agency decreed that declassification reviews would now cost requesters up to $72 per hour, even if no information is found or released. To even submit a request –again, even if no documents are released– the public must now agree to pay a minimum of $15.   nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-cias-covert-operation-against-declassification-review-and-obamas-open-government/

Russians Jail Spy An engineer at a Russian space facility primarily used for military rocket launches and ballistic missile research was sentenced to 13 years in prison on Friday for passing on classified military information to the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B.   ..In a closed-door trial at a military court, Mr. Nesterets pleaded guilty to “delivering classified information about tests relating to Russia’s newest strategic military rocket complexes to the C.I.A. in the United States,” the statement said, adding that he received financial compensation for his services.
The F.S.B., a traditionally secretive organization that is Russia’s successor to the K.G.B., did not elaborate on the claims against Mr. Nesterets, nor did it reveal when the crime took place. The C.I.A. declined to comment.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/world/europe/russia-convicts-engineer-of-passing-secrets-to-us.html?ref=global-home