Why Are Things As They Are?

Hide the Kiddies! Padres in Camouflage!

Remember Proposals are Due, April 15, for the Rouge Forum Conference
rougeforumconference.org/

Send Your Articles, Photos, Cartoons, for the RF News to Community Coordinator Adam Renner (arenner@bellarmine.edu).

On April 4th, 43 Years Ago, Martin Luther King gave his speech opposing the war in Vietnam. Here is a link to the speech: “A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”
www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
and an audio link: benfrank.net/nuke/mlk-vietnam_speech_audio.html

On the Little Rouge School Front:

April 24, Mass Meeting of March 4th Movement: Fresno!

Freep Investigation: $57 Million Fraud Rises from One DPS Office: “A former department chief at Detroit Public Schools and his assistant used secret offices and their own computer system to improperly divert more than $57 million in school funds to vendors who provided little, if anything, in return”
www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100328/NEWS01/3280515/1320/DPS-Scam-cost-57-million&template=fullarticle

Where Were the DPS Accountants? “The other significant point to draw from the Hill scandal has to do with the dates for his employment. He worked in DPS from 2001-05, during which time the district was under state, not local, control. The elected school board had been disbanded, and an appointed reform board was in place, ostensibly to help clean up the district’s financial and academic messes.”
freep.com/article/20100331/OPINION01/3310321/1322/Where-were-DPS-accountants-when-57-million-disappeared

Oakland Teachers Voted to Strike On April 22. Will They? progressiveteachersrichmond.blogspot.com/

History of Oakland Teachers’ Strike: www.iww.org/en/node/1955

Florida Teachers Fight Back vs Proposed Ed Law: “Among provisions in the Senate and House bills is testing for students in every course.”
staugustine.com/news/local-news/2010-04-02/teachers-parents-protest-education-bill-senate

History Wars Part X: While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens. “History in the popular world is always a political football,” said Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University. “The right is unusually mobilized at the moment.”
Read more: www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/01/91478/some-conservatives-rewrite-history.html#ixzz0k4LqYlSq

Delaware and Tennessee: Top Ratt Scabs: The Obama administration delivered a jolt to U.S. public education Monday by selecting just two states, Delaware and Tennessee, to receive $600 million in hard-fought grants designed to help districts overhaul their programs.
online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304370304575151682457897668-lMyQjAxMTAwMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html

And Even Though They Didn’t Win, Many States Changed Education Laws: The Suckers List:
“The initiative prompted regulatory changes in California, Illinois, Washington, and Tennessee, where until recently there had been “impenetrable legal barriers to education reform.”
www.pie-network.org/web/guest/home

Teacher Contracts Explained: San Diego EA vs Green Dot Contracts: “lays out two teacher contracts side by side so that readers can both familiarize themselves and compare key dimensions such as teacher pay, evaluation, the rights of the teachers union, and teacher transfers. The contracts are between the San Diego Unified School District and the San Diego Education Association, which was ratified in 2006 and is still in use, and an early contract used by Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles. San Diego is a K-12 school district serving almost 131,000 students through 205 schools, and the 18th largest school district in the United States. Green Dot, founded in 2000, is a network of public charter schools serving more than 10,000 students across 18 campuses. www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=1178962

“Always be sure you are right, then go ahead”

On the Perpetual War Front:

Hedges: Is the US Yearning For Fascism? “The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die….The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become.”
www.truthdig.com/report/item/is_america_yearning_for_fascism_20100329/

McCrystal Lies: Raids on Civilians Continue: “there is a glaring contradiction between McChrystal’s new counterinsurgency credentials and his actual policy toward the politically explosive issue of night raids on private homes by Special Operations Forces (SOF) units targeting suspected Taliban. Since he took over as top commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal has not only refused to curb those raids but has increased them dramatically. And even after they triggered a new round of angry protests from villagers, students and Afghan President Hamid Karzai himself, he has given no signal of reducing his support for them.
www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50868

CIA PsyOps in Europe: The Red Cell Document to Sell Perpetual War to the People: ‘The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency”, alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own “psyop” element producing output for local media.’ For the domestic media and thereby often the global media, the Pentagon deploys a ‘media Trojan Horse’
www.deepjournal.com/p/43/a/en/2625.html

The Afghan Thieu? Karzai Lashes out: “…effort depends on credible leadership in Kabul. It has long been unclear whether Mr. Karzai can provide it, and his latest comments do not help. Rather than acknowledge his failings and seek to correct them, Mr. Karzai decided to accuse others of falsely criticizing him…Mr. Karzai went further into hazardous territory on Thursday when he said that Western forces fighting the Taliban are on the verge of becoming “invaders.” If that conceit takes hold, it could be a disaster, rallying Afghans to the Taliban.”


The Solidarity Forever Front:

So Long UAW! Membership Sinks to 60 Year Low: “According to its annual report filed with federal overseers Monday, the UAW had 355,191 members at the end of 2009, a loss of 75,846 members, or 18%, from the 431,037 it reported at the end of 2008. The union’s net assets shrank by $69 million to $1.12 billion.”
www.freep.com/article/201003300300/BUSINESS01/3300367

The Torment and Demise of the United Auto-workers Union: The only proof it is not dead is a billion dollar bank account and a layer of union bosses expert at destroying worker-led action:
clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

Last California Auto Plant Closes: “The plant began 25 years ago as a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors Co. GM pulled out last year, and Toyota later announced it would halt production, eliminating about 4,700 jobs.”
www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/01/califs-last-auto-plant-shuts-its-doors/

Toyota Dumps Pension Fund on US Government: For the world’s most profitable automaker to walk away from a pension covering people who, in some cases, worked for more than a quarter of a century doesn’t look good,” Shaiken said. “Especially in the wake of Toyota’s recent recalls.” “http://www.freep.com/article/20100318/BUSINESS01/3180456/Toyota-to-hand-off-pension-bill-to-U.S.

SEIU Sues SEIU Members: “The 1.8 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has already spent, according to critics, an estimated $10 million to sue 26 individuals who are former officers, organizers and staffers of SEIU’s third-largest chapter, the California-based United Healthcare Workers West (UHW).”
www.truthout.org/union-democracy-trial58097

Pope: Rapist Priests Suffering Collective Punishment: “Pope Benedict XVI’s personal preacher on Friday likened accusations against the pope and the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal to “collective violence” suffered by the Jews. www.freep.com/article/20100403/NEWS07/4030358/1322/Popes-preacher-sets-off-storm-of-anger

On the Ooops there Goes the Economy Front:

March US Unemployment Unchanged at 9.7% “A total of 162,000 new jobs were created on non-farm payrolls–the biggest one-month jobs gain in the past three years, but still well below what economists were predicting.” www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/02/AR2010040201040.html

How Come Oil is Up but Demand is Down? Wall Street Speculators: “Experts attribute much of the recent rise in prices to flows of speculative money into oil markets. These bets are fueled by investor expectations that the U.S. and global economies are poised to return to growth and thus spark increased use of oil. Strong growth in China supports the narrative of rising oil consumption and tightening supplies.
Read more: www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/01/91487/whats-driving-up-oil-prices-again.html

The Secret Fed Bailout: “The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout. The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed – then run by Tim Geithner – was very much in the center of the action.” robertreich.org/post/489217942/the-fed-in-hot-water

Classics and Poems:

Mark Twain on the Two Reigns of Terror: “”There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the “horrors of the… momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” ( Twain, writing about the French Revolution, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court).

Song : Guthrie: Do Re Mi: www.youtube.com/watch?v=46mO7jx3JEw

Thanks to Danny, Donna, Carol O., Sandy H., Sue H., Ronna, Toby, Terry, Sherry, Ken and Barb, Amber, Wayne, Tommie and Bob, Mr J and Mr Z, Judy T., Bobbie, Marisol, Ed B., Ruben and Jasmine, George S and George L, Peter M, Steve and Eric H, and Bonnie (good health to you!).

Good luck to us, every one.

r