The Sky is NOT Falling. NOT! Falling. NOT Falling!
Reminder: Nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee go to Community Coordinator Adam Renner at adamrenner70@gmail.com
Little Red Schoolhouse
Chicago Says No Concessions! Chicago Teachers Union delegates voted unanimously to reject the Board of Education’s demands that the teachers give up nearly $100 million — in salary adjustments and other concessions (such as furlough days) — at a special delegates meeting on Wednesday, August 11. More than 500 delegates and other union members filled the auditorium at the Local 399 Operating Engineers union hall for the two hour meeting. www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1588
Detroit Paints Itself Blue to Lure in Children: Dunson was among 40 volunteers who painted 25 doors the signature blue color of the district’s campaign and assembled lawn signs extolling the district. (beware, kiddies, of the school board president) www.detnews.com/article/20100814/SCHOOLS/8140377/1408/local/DPS-volunteers-paint-doors-blue-for–I-m-in–campaign
Detroit Fed of Teachers Opposes Charters/Starts Charter: For their students to be admitted, parents or guardians must sign a Parent Contract to ensure they support the concept of the program. “The teacher-led school presents a unique and unprecedented opportunity to DFT and DPS,” said Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. “This school will allow teachers to take ownership and direct responsibility for the educational destiny of the children.”
Emergency Financial Manager, Bobb, Leaves Detroit More Broke Than Ever: Although Bobb has worked hard to make cuts and get the district in proper order, the district’s deficit has grown to $363 million from $219 million at the end of last fiscal year.
www.detnews.com/article/20100815/OPINION01/8150304/1008/Detroit-school-board-is-wasting-time
100 Teach For America’s Invade Detroit PS: Their arrival has sparked excitement among educators who embrace the enthusiasm corps members bring. But their presence has reignited concerns from the teachers union, which is upset certified teachers still have layoff notices. The union will challenge the hiring of Teach for America members over qualified teachers waiting to return to work… the applicants aren’t certified teachers. (They’ll study at University of Michigan to earn their certification.) Johnson said certified teachers aren’t automatically better and those without certification aren’t inherently inferior.
www.detnews.com/article/20100820/SCHOOLS/8200387/1026/DPS-enlists-teacher-corps-in-classrooms
Michigan’s Really Really Totally Horrible Schools Under Gun: Sixty-five of the lowest performing schools are in Metro Detroit; 52 are in Wayne County, including 40 Detroit public schools. Seven are charters. Roseville Community Schools had two middle schools ranking as low achieving; Taylor’s Truman High School also landed on the list, as did public high schools in Highland Park, Pontiac, Inkster, Harper Woods, Oak Park and Mount Clemens.
www.detnews.com/article/20100817/SCHOOLS/8170351/1026/Worst-performing-schools-put-on-notice
Berliner: Rich Schools Get Richer and Poor Schools Get Poorer (a shocker!): when poor children go to public schools that serve the poor, and wealthy children go to public schools that serve the wealthy, then the huge gaps in achievement that we see bring us closer to establishing an apartheid public school system. We create through our housing, school attendance, and school districting policies a system designed to encourage castes—a system promoting a greater likelihood of a privileged class and an under class.
voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/new-analysis-of-achievement-ga.html
UTLA’s Duffy Hung on His Own Petard on LATimes Value-Added Farce: Duffy attacked the reliability of standardized tests in general, but then defended the performance of his members in part by pointing to the rising graduation rates and Academic Performance Index scores at many campuses. The API is a separate statistical measure for schools which, at the elementary and middle school level, is entirely based on standardized tests.
www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-react-20100816,0,857875,full.story
Haiti Hide Your Children! Here Comes Paul Vallas! An international development bank interested in helping Haiti rebuild its devastated schools has turned to Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas for advice. www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/02/haiti_rebuilding_effort_draws.html
Obamagogue’s Boy Duncan Loves Those Test Scores (thanks, unionites, for all that campaign money, and thanks to Tom Hayden, Katha Pollit, and all the liberal saps who urged the Demagogue on others): U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children’s teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students’ test scores.
“What’s there to hide?” Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest school system. “In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success.”
Duncan’s comments mark the first time the Obama administration has expressed support for a public airing of information about teacher performance — a move that is sure to fan the already fierce debate over how to better evaluate teachers. www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0817-teachers-react-20100817,0,3598751,full.story
Ohanian on the Common Core Curriculum (common to Gates and Freedom House): James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is recommended for “advanced” 8th graders. Here’s how it begins:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=830
An Oldie but Goodie (From Hell): Milton Friedman on the Role of Government in Education: www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1173402/posts
Perpetual War Front:
Riz Khan Interviews John Pilger on Rebranding the Iraq War:
2011 for Afghanistan Exit? Not!
Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul. There’s construction everywhere. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t expect from a transient presence.
Step off a C-17 cargo plane, as I did very early Friday morning, and you see a flight line packed with planes. When I was last here two years ago, helicopters crowded the runways and fixed-wing aircraft were –- well, if not rare, still a notable sight. Today you’ve got C-17s, Predators, F-16s, F-15s, MC-12 passenger planes … I didn’t see any of the C-130 cargo craft, but they’re here somewhere.
More notable than the overstuffed runways is the over-driven road. Disney Drive, (sic)….
www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/u-s-afghan-mega-base/
Obamagogues Wider and Secret Wars: a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.
The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.
While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed…
The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations….as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/15shadowwar.html?hp
Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson on the End of the World, Sky Falling, etc.: My own role these past 20 years has been that of Cassandra, whom the gods gave the gift of foreseeing the future, but also cursed because no one believed her. I wish I could be more optimistic about what’s in store for the U.S. Instead, there isn’t a day that our own guns of August don’t continue to haunt me. (Johnson, rejecting Marx, sees imperialism as hubris and militarism, ie, a bad attitude, too well armed. Missing the relentless search for raw materials, cheap labor, markets, and regional control as vital to capital and its personifications, he then misses the other side–the real potential of mass, class conscious resistance and transformation–but read his new book anway).
www.tomdispatch.com/post/175286/tomgram:_chalmers_johnson,_portrait_of_a_sagging_empire__/
Category of Ain’t Gonna Happen: Karzai Kicks out Mercs–‘cept his own guards: President Hamid Karzai ordered a four-month phaseout of all private security companies in Afghanistan, domestic and foreign, a move that, if carried out, would create an extraordinary shift in the country’s security, likely slowing many foreign projects and potentially delaying some day-to-day military activities. The sole exception to the order allows private guards to continue to operate within compounds of embassies, consulates, nongovernmental organizations and economic organizations, like the World Bank…The American government alone employs about 26,000 private security contractors who work for 37 private security companies…“These people have no choice but to start robbing people or join the Taliban,”
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/asia/18afghan.html?ref=world
Tragedy for Afghanistan–Huge Oil Field Discovered: “A huge oil resource, which looks like a triangle, with an estimated 1.8 billion barrels of oil, has been discovered by Afghan geologists in cooperation with international geologists between Balkh and Sheberghan provinces,” Jawad Omar, a spokesman for the ministry, www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-15/afghanistan-discovers-1-8-billion-barrel-oilfield-in-north-ministry-says.html
Russia Today on US Farcical Exit From Iraq–Rebranding Occupation:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoGvc4fSXcM&feature=channel
Tomgram: Wiki Leaks and Task Force 373: Task Force 373 team fired five rockets at a compound in Nangar Khel in Paktika province to the south of Khost, in an attempt to kill Abu Laith al-Libi, an alleged al-Qaeda member from Libya. When the U.S. forces made it to the village, they found that Task Force 373 had destroyed a madrassa (or Islamic school), killing six children and grievously wounding a seventh who, despite the efforts of a U.S. medical team, would soon die. (In late January 2008, al-Libi was reported killed by a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone strike in a village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan in Pakistan.)
Paktika Governor Akram Khapalwak met with the U.S. military the day after the raid. Unlike his counterparts in Khost and Nangarhar, Khapalwak agreed to support the “talking points” developed for Task Force 373 to explain the incident to the media. According to the Wikileaks incident report, the governor then “echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this could’ve been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”
However, no military talking points, no matter in whose mouth, could stop the civilian deaths as long as Task Force 373’s raids continued. www.tomdispatch.com/post/175287/tomgram:_pratap_chatterjee,_manhunters,_inc./
Tom Tomorrow Cartoon on the Sillies vs the Serious on War: www.truth-out.org/files/images/TomTomorrow8-18.png
There Goes the Economy:
Yikes! Here Comes The Great Bugout Moment. Fortify Your Home!
David Harvey (animation) on the Reasons for the Financial Collapse (any sensible person today would join an anti-capitalist organization):
Greider (again) on the AIG Bailout (national socialism at work) : the Federal Reserve Board’s intimate relations with the leading powers of Wall Street—the same banks that benefited most from the government’s massive bailout—influenced its strategic decisions on AIG. The panel accuses the Fed and the Treasury Department of brushing aside alternative approaches that would have saved tens of billions in public funds by making these same banks “share the pain.”
Bailing out AIG effectively meant rescuing Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch (as well as a dozens of European banks) from huge losses. Those financial institutions played the derivatives game with AIG, the esoteric practice of placing financial bets on future events. AIG lost its bets, which led to its collapse. But other gamblers—the counterparties in AIG’s derivative deals—were made whole on their bets, paid off 100 cents on the dollar. Taxpayers got stuck with the bill. “The AIG rescue demonstrated that Treasury and the Federal Reserve would commit taxpayers to pay any price and bear any burden to prevent the collapse of America’s largest financial institutions,” the COP report said. This could have been avoided, the report argues, if the Fed had listened to disinterested advisers with a less parochial understanding of the public interest. www.thenation.com/article/153929/aig-bailout-scandal
Joblessness Continues to Boom: New applications for unemployment insurance reached a half million last week, pointing to a job market that is struggling. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/business/economy/20econ.html?hp
Wolff: This is a Systematic Crisis of Capitalism: The unspoken ideological taboo in most public discussion of the economic crisis prohibits seeing or treating the problem as systemic, as a problem of capitalism as a system. Instead, our political, journalistic, and academic leaders mostly see only symptoms and “develop policies” only for those symptoms. Alarms about one symptom — and contested efforts to address it — soon shift to another symptom and “policy responses” for it. Often such policies for one symptom actually worsen another symptom. For example, when stock markets collapsed early in 2000 (symptom), the Federal Reserve drastically cut interest rates (policy response); that move facilitated the excess lending that collapsed the entire economy in 2007.
Today’s alarms focus on housing and huge government subsidies there. To see the systemic problems of the US housing industry, consider its basic economics. The “American dream” of owning one’s home was never affordable to the vast majority of US families because the wages or salaries paid by their employers were never enough.
www.truth-out.org/housing-crisis-a-symptom-capitalisms-failure62507
The Back Story to the Second HP Firing: www.cnbc.com//id/38704024
Emerging Fascism Front:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVM3bXiSAc
Lori’s Parole Revoked: A Peruvian court said Wednesday that it had revoked the parole of Lori Berenson, the New Yorker imprisoned in the 1990s on charges of collaborating with a Marxist revolutionary group. It ordered her to be returned to prison to complete five years left in a 20-year sentence. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/world/americas/19berenson.html?_r=1&hp
Video Interview With Lori Berenson www.peruviantimes.com/peruvian-times-interview-with-lori-berenson/197707
The Heavens Weep:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKQ1qibJcUU
Obamagogue/BP Still Lying About Death of the Gulf:The existence of a huge plume of dispersed oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico might pose a continuing threat to wildlife for months or year www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/science/earth/20plume.html?hp
BP Shields Self And Top Defendants: People affected by the spill seeking final settlements face a choice similar to that faced by the 9/11 victims: If they decide to sue instead of accepting a settlement, they could face years of litigation; and if they decide to accept the settlement, it could come before the full damage from the spill is known. www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/us/20spill.html?_r=1&ref=global
Spy vs Spy: (a 29 second video worth every moment):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvAxRzHtCag&feature=related
Sam Smith et al on the Strange Case of the Weathermen (the CPUSA connections are missed but here is a taste): there is the seldom mentioned possibility that the Weather Underground was not what it seemed. Write Bramhall:
“Many former Students for a Democratic Society members believe the Weather Underground was actually a US intelligence creation, formed with the specific objective of infiltrating and shutting down SDS. This view is substantiated by FBI documents that came to light 1973 revealing the role of agent provocateurs in infiltrating and instigating much of the violence attributed to the Weathermen which [Obama friend Bill] Ayers used to have his weapons and bomb making charges dismissed.
“There is also considerable circumstantial evidence to support these allegations. First and foremost is the striking “coincidence” that many of the Weather Underground leadership were, like Bill Ayers, the sons and daughters of wealthy members of the corporate elite. Second is the report of contemporary SDS members that the Weathermen, who did no fundraising to speak of, appeared to have unlimited funds to spend on organizing and military style training. Third are their classic (successful) Cointelpro style tactics in destroying SDS. And last the troubling question of how Bill Ayers can openly brag about his terrorist activities in his 2002 book Fugitive Days and yet instead of facing the death penalty for conspiracy to commit murder, enjoys status and privilege as a tenured professor of education.” prorevnews.blogspot.com/2010/08/obamas-hidden-past-contd.html
National Security Archive (always worth checking): Washington, D.C., August 11, 2010 – Documents posted by the National Security Archive on the 40th anniversary of the death of U.S. advisor Dan Mitrione in Uruguay show the Nixon administration recommended a “threat to kill [detained insurgent] Sendic and other key [leftist insurgent] MLN prisoners if Mitrione is killed.” The secret cable from U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, made public here for the first time, instructed U.S. Ambassador Charles Adair: “If this has not been considered, you should raise it with the Government of Uruguay at once.”
The message to the Uruguayan government, received by the U.S. Embassy at 11:30 am on August 9, 1970, was an attempt to deter Tupamaro insurgents from killing Mitrione at noon on that day. A few minutes later, Ambassador Adair reported back, in another newly-released cable, that “a threat was made to these prisoners that members of the ‘Escuadrón de la Muerte’ [death squad] would take action against the prisoners’ relatives if Mitrione were killed.”
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB324/index.htm
Solidarity Forever:
UAW Members Attack Union Hacks–and Face Down Counterattack: Following an explosive union meeting Sunday in Indianapolis—in which workers shouted down officials from the United Auto Workers union and drove them from the meeting—all the forces of the establishment have united to intimidate the workers at the General Motors stamping plant into taking wage and benefit cuts.
GM announced Tuesday that it plans to stop production at the Indianapolis stamping plant in June 2011, in a move that auto workers condemned as a naked effort to blackmail them into accepting concessions. www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/inds-a18.shtml
King of UAW Continues Union’s War on Foreign Cars: United Auto Workers President Bob King this month reiterated the union’s longstanding policy to ban nonunion vehicles on UAW property, but did so in a more hands-on and publicly forceful fashion that separates him from his predecessors. www.detnews.com/article/20100819/AUTO01/8190362/UAW-s-Bob-King-reiterates-ban-on-foreign-cars-on-union-property
Falling out Among Thieves: AFT National Battles Sellout DC Local: Update 8:30 pm: The WTU has filed suit against the AFT, asking a federal judge to issue an injunction blocking the national union from conducting the local’s election.
It wasn’t long ago that the Washington Teachers Union and its national parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, were locked in a high-stakes contract fight with Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Now it looks like they’ve gone to war against each other.
AFT president Randi Weingarten has made good on her threat to assume control of the WTU’s stalled elections, announcing late Tuesday that she had placed the local under an “administratorship” to conduct the balloting in a timely manner. The move, which the AFT says does not interfere with the union’s day-to-day operations, came after WTU president George Parker and the union executive board refused to comply with an Aug. 4, order to begin the election immediately. voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/2010/08/aft_moves_on_wtu_election_take.html
We Say Fight Back!
Cops Fire Rubber Bullets At Striking Teachers in S. Africa:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Gt16FIDjs
Joburg on Strike: JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – More than one million South African state workers went on strike for more pay on Wednesday, threatening a prolonged action they say will bring the government in Africa’s largest economy to a halt. af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE67H3ED20100818
Film Released on Women Maoist Fighters in Nepal:
womanrebelfilm.com/?page_id=8
Levin Pied: Ahlam Mohsen, the Michigan State University student who is in jail accused of pelting Sen. Carl Levin with a pie, has a growing coalition of supporters on Facebook.
Anti-war protestors are using the social networking site to update Mohsen’s supporters on her status in the Mecosta County Jail in Big Rapids and to organize a rally Friday in Detroit demanding her release. www.detnews.com/article/20100819/POLITICS03/8190471/1022/Facebook-supporters-organize-rally-for-woman-accused-in-Levin-pie-attack
Magical Mystery Tour
Worst Thing in the History of the World:
Al Shanker: “When school children start paying union dues, that ‘s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
Detroit: Do Two Police Chiefs, Your Bosses–Get Free Hit and Run Pass:
www.detnews.com/article/20100814/METRO01/8140350/1408/LOCAL
Best Thing in the History of the World:
Live Like Froggy!
Do My Thoughts Deceive Me? (Count the Passes at about 12 minutes in, for sure):
Rapid Rajah Indicted–Forked Tongue, not Ball: Clemens’s allegedly false testimony came in a public hearing in which Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee, testifying under oath, directly contradicted each other about whether Clemens had used the banned substances.
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/sports/baseball/20clemens.html?_r=1&hp
Remember Pinky Deras! You couldn’t see the ball,” said Paciorek, who played against Deras in Little League. “He had such a fastball — there was no such thing as a radar gun back then — but his fastball would be the equivalent to a 90 or 100 mph fastball, given the distance (to the plate), no doubt about it.”
And at the plate?
Deras hit .641 with 33 home runs and 112 RBIs
www.detnews.com/article/20100821/SPORTS07/8210322/-Pinky–Deras–The-greatest-Little-Leaguer-there-ever-was
The El Cajon Rock and Roll Rebellion (8/1960): It took police, wielding batons, lobbing teargas and driving their patrol cars onto the sidewalks, almost three hours to disperse the crowd. Veteran cops, accustomed to teenage deference, were shocked by the crowd’s angry defiance. One contingent of about 100 stubbornly held their ground on a gas station parking lot, answering teargas and police charges with volleys of ‘soft drink bottles, glasses and rocks’, slightly injuring two officers. justacarguy.blogspot.com/2008/07/drag-racers-riot-1960-in-san-diego-for.html
Never Forget:
The Battle of Blair Mountain
The Hitler/Stalin Pact of 1939:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-URfx_k9uU&feature=related
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9XrscWjPYs&feature=related
Thanks to Katie, Greg, Amber, Donna, Marisol, Pete, Dirty Edd, Alan J and S, Kerry P, Fredy, Beatrice, Faith and Craig, Gina and Adam, Joe C, Joe B, Joe S, Billy and Tom, Doug, Sharon A, Mrs Kosek, Marc and Bonnie, Weird Eric, Bob, Sherry, Erin, Kelly, Arturo, Ruben, and Don A.
Good luck to us, every one.
r