Why Are Things As They Are?

Congratulations to Paula Allman on the publication of the paperback edition of “Critical Education Against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx and Revolutionary Critical Education” at Amazon www.amazon.com/Critical-Education-Against-Global-Capitalism/dp/946091263X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

Little Red Schoolhouse:

“My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything.” Mark Twain- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

CSU System Ups TUITION (not fees anymore) 242% Since 2002 and UC To Follow With 8% Hike: The California State University Board of Trustees has approved a 15% hike in undergraduate tuition, arguing that the action was an essential step to provide access to the Cal State system by more students.

Dozens of protesters, including some faculty, staff and students from several of the university’s 23 campuses, protested outside the trustees’ meeting in Long Beach, hoisting colorful balloons and signs.

Inside, students asked trustees to reject the fee hike, saying it placed an unfair financial burden on their shoulders, coming on top of a 5% hike this fall and a 32% fee increase last year.

The two-step increase will raise undergraduate fees 5%: $105 for the rest of the school year, and an additional 10% — or about $440 — for next year. latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/colleges-and-universities/

Brit Students and Profs Smash Up in Response to Cutbacks (video embedded):
www.infowars.com/student-tuition-fee-protests-turn-violent-as-tory-headquarters-evacuated/
University students broke into the office headquarters of Prime Minister David Cameron’s party in London Wednesday during a chaotic protest against the government’s plan to triple tuition fees.

Demonstrators smashed the building’s ground floor windows, forcing their way into the Conservative Party’s offices, where they damaged the walls and furniture in the lobby and collapsed the ceiling.

Students also hurled objects at police officers from the roof of the building, while others lit a bonfire in the street in front of the building. blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2010/11/10/britain-student-fee-protests-turn-violent/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmudJafnQh0

Russia TV on England’s Student Uprising vis a vis USA(at 2:00):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZUr8-hSUcc

Radicalism and Numbers Drained From March 4th Movement as Liberals, Dues Eaters, and Zombie Sects Fished for Recruits But All Out Against the Cutbacks and Again on March 2nd and Mayday!–“On March 4th, 2010, masses of students, school workers, and community people organized under banners that said, “Educate! Agitate! Organize! Strike! Occupy! Teach-in!” Their actions, which included building seizures, express-way sit-downs, walk-outs, rallies, marches, and freedom schooling, varied from area to area but the connection of capitalism/war/racism/class war was made in every case I saw.

The organizers then called for similar actions on October 7th and a national conference in San Francisco in late October.

In the interim, the expert dis-organizers from the unions, the Democratic Party, and the usual sects showed up. As I write, with radical students only now returning to campuses, the movement veered from its radical beginnings to the reactionary call, “Defend Public Education,” and mobilizing to get out the vote–rather like urging people into church where they know their children will be raped, where they are expected to tithe, but it’s all for the common good–some day.” www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1768&section=Article

The October 7th actions proved to be much smaller than March 4th for a variety of reasons: some schools were just starting; the cutbacks that were felt severely in March were not duplicated in the Fall semester and many students needed to be reminded, the election served as a predictable distraction for some, and the persistent work of the sects, liberals, and the unionites kept the movement off balance. On most campuses, actions on October 7th were about 1/4 the size of M4 and were, sensibly, less militant.

www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1768&section=Article

Time Mag Promises The Education Agenda as War Agenda Will Remain Bi-Partisan: First, the good news: Boehner cares deeply about education — and not just when he’s stumping on campaign trails. He was one of the “big four” — along with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, Republican Senator Judd Gregg and Democratic Representative George Miller — who helped craft the bipartisan No Child Left Behind legislation that was signed into law in 2002. Boehner and Kennedy also hosted annual dinners in Washington, D.C., that raised millions of dollars for Catholic schools in the city.

Perpetual War

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRv56gsqkzs

Obamagogue and His Hunter Killers, Mercs, Dronies, and the Ruling Class Like Afghanistan so Much, They May Just Stay there Forever (o, that wasn’t a lie before, rather miscalculation):
The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.

The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies.

What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/09/103468/obama-administration-moving-away.html

Juan Cole on The Obamagogue Trip, the Decay of the US Empire, and Militarized Jobs: Despite his feel-good trip to India last weekend, during which he announced some important business deals for U.S. goods, Obama has remarkably little to offer the Indians. That undoubtedly is why the president unexpectedly announced Washington’s largely symbolic support for a coveted seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a ringing confirmation of India’s status as a rising power.

Some Indian politicians and policy-makers, however, are insisting that their country’s increasing demographic, military, and economic hegemony over South Asia be recognized by Washington, and that the U.S. cease its support of, and massive arms sales to, Pakistan. In addition, New Delhi is eager to expand its geopolitical position in Afghanistan, where it is a major funder of civilian reconstruction projects, and is apprehensive about any plans for a U.S. withdrawal from that country. An Indian-dominated Afghanistan is, of course, Pakistan’s worst fear.

In addition, India’s need for petroleum is expected to grow by 40% during the next decade and a half. Energy-hungry, like neighboring Pakistan, it can’t help glancing longingly at Iran’s natural gas and petroleum fields, despite Washington’s threats to slap third-party sanctions on any firm that helps develop them. American attempts to push India toward dirty energy sources, including nuclear power (the waste product of which is long-lived and problematic) and shale gas, as a way of reducing its interest in Iranian and Persian Gulf oil and gas, are another Washington “solution” for the region likely to be largely ignored, given how close at hand inexpensive Gulf hydrocarbons are. www.tomdispatch.com/post/175319/tomgram%3A_juan_cole%2C_the_asian_century/#more

Obamagogue Trip A Flop In Every Way (btw, currency wars can become trade wars which can become…) but he Keeps Lying anyway: The president headed to Japan without the coveted trade pact with Korea or a united front with other countries against China’s currency policy. He also endured a gusher of criticism from other countries about a decision by the U.S. central bank to pump $600 billion into the U.S. economy, something China, Germany and others believe could weaken the dollar and lead to inflation.

After the talks here beginning Saturday, Obama will return to the U.S. to confront Republicans empowered by their gains in this month’s midterm

Even so, the president contended that his standing with world leaders is not diminished.  http://www.cnbc.com/id/40130051

We Say Fight Back

Ireland: Students Rise Against Fee Increase: Around 25,000 students took to the streets of Dublin on Wednesday in protest at plans to increase college registration fees. And in the Dail today Taoiseach Brian Cowen refused to be drawn on the possible doubling of fees in next month’s budget.

While the protest by the Union of Students in Ireland was generally peaceful, many were confronted by riot police on foot and horseback afterwards.

Trouble flared up when police charged about 2,000 people gathered near the Department of Finance after the main march on Leinster House…”This violence from the state must be met with renewed mobilisations of all working people whose living standards are under attack in the state’s attempt to save the ultra-rich from the consequences of their actions.

“It is incumbent on the Irish Confederation of Trade Unions to make sure their demonstration on November 27 matches the same determination and mobilisation that Irish students have shown.”
www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/97261

2010 is the Sixtieth Anniversary of This Land is Your Land! Remember Woody’s Advice

There Goes the Economy

and Slate on Income Inequality: according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul’s classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: “You’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.” www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026

Banksters Steal from Prols in Yet Another Way (like Four Billion plus): The subprime mortgage crisis isn’t the only calamity Wall Street created that’s upending the finances of U.S. states and cities.

For more than a decade, banks and insurance companies convinced governments and nonprofits that financial engineering would lower interest rates on bonds sold for public projects such as roads, bridges and schools. That failed promise has cost more than $4 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as hundreds of borrowers from the Bay Area Toll Authority in Oakland, California, to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, quietly paid Wall Street to end agreements since 2008.

California’s water resources department this year spent $305 million unwinding interest-rate bets that backfired, handing over the money to banks led by New York-based Morgan Stanley. North Carolina paid $59.8 million in August, enough to cover the annual salaries of about 1,400 full-time state employees. Reading, Pennsylvania, which sought protection in the state’s fiscally distressed communities program, got caught on the wrong end of the deals, costing it $21 million, equal to more than a year’s worth of real-estate taxes. www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-10/wall-street-collects-4-billion-from-taxpayers-as-swaps-backfire.html

Seven Pillars of G20 Friction: the G20 looks more like it is foreshadowing the international conflicts of the 21st century. The central tension on most issues is between the US and China. But the world is not splitting into a pro-American and pro-Chinese camp. Instead, there are now seven major axes that divide the world. www.ft.com/cms/s/0/980b2040-eb43-11df-811d-00144feab49a.html#axzz14x0ezCei

With Capital in Deep Crisis, Every Fiscal and Monetary Move Becomes the Wrong Move: The U.S. looks set to get just what it doesn’t want — a strong dollar.

By introducing more quantitative easing last week, the Federal Reserve might well have been hoping for a further decline in the U.S. currency to help boost the economic recovery alongside the increased monetary kick that a $600 billion dose of bond buying will give.

Instead, the Fed’s move has raised the ire of its major global competitors and essentially blown the prospect of a negotiated solution to current account imbalances at the upcoming summit of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations in Seoul.

This resumption of the status quo will only help the dollar as the risk of competitive devaluations returns and a slump in risk appetite sends investors scurrying back into safe havens.

The irony is that the need for an adjustment to the imbalances is becoming even more acute than ever.

The latest trade figures from Beijing showed that while China shipped $25 billion of goods into the U.S. last month, the U.S. managed to send only $7 billion of exports to China….A measure of just how isolated the U.S. is on the whole issue came from the wording in a report Tuesday from China’s Dagong Global Credit Rating Company when it downgraded U.S. sovereign debt to A+ from AA.

“It is likely that an overall crisis might be triggered by the U.S. government’s policy to continuously depreciate the U.S. dollar against the will of its creditors.”

Of course, this fierce criticism helps to reduce the chances of any more QE out of the Fed in the future and contribute to dollar strength. blogs.wsj.com/source/2010/11/10/g20-will-play-into-dollars-hands/

Google–Do No Harm But Dodge Those Taxes: Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.” www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html

Solidarity Forever

Unions Just Cannot Sell Members Out Fast Enough But Pour $ into Elections: In 2008, the single largest contributor to state and federal campaigns was the National Education Assn., which spent $56 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The California Teachers Assn. has spent $211 million in the last decade trying to influence state campaigns, roughly double the amount of the next largest group, according to a report by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.In local school board campaigns, not only are unions usually the largest spender by far, they typically supply the largest volunteer force of campaign workers. www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-unions-20101107,0,7068892,full.story

Who Can Get One-half the Working Class to Jail the Other Half? A private prison in Baldwin that closed five years ago when Michigan stopped housing youthful offenders there will soon be taking up to 2,600 California prisoners….Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm welcomed the news today, saying on her Facebook page that it would mean more than 450 jobs. www.freep.com/article/20101105/NEWS06/101105066/1320/California-to-send-inmates-to-Mich.-facility

Spy vs Spy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvAxRzHtCag&playnext=1&list=PL7DCAEE744DFA7789&index=2

A Quiz: Who Must Spies Fear Most? Answer: Their own Center: A Russian newspaper reported Thursday that a senior official in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service had provided the information that enabled the United States to break up a ring of Russian sleeper spies in June.The turncoat official, identified only as Colonel Shcherbakov, was said to have defected to the United States just before the arrests and was now being tracked by a Russian assassination squad, according to the newspaper, Kommersant, considered one of Russia’s most authoritative.
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/world/europe/12spies.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=russian%20spies&st=cse

Harold Ford, Dead CIA Agent, Opposed Robert Gates Lies: Mr. Ford was best known outside the C.I.A. for his public criticism of Robert M. Gates, the former C.I.A. director and current defense secretary, who he believed had deliberately slanted intelligence reports on the Soviet Union while working as a senior agency analyst. Mr. Gates has strongly denied the accusation, which Mr. Ford made in testimony in 1991 at Mr. Gates’s confirmation hearing as C.I.A. chief and in comments to the news media in 2006 when Mr. Gates was named to head the Defense Department. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/world/12ford.html?scp=1&sq=harold%20p%20ford&st=cse

The Heavens Weep

The Emergence of Fascism as a Mass, Multi-tentacled, Popular Movement:

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD-74aLJobM

The old left-the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses-would have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.
www.indypendent.org/2010/11/08/a-recipe-for-facism/

CIA Okayed for Destroying Torture Videos: Internal C.I.A. e-mails, released earlier this year in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, showed that Mr. Rodriguez had argued that “the heat” agency officials would take over destroying the tapes “is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain.”

Mr. Rodriguez told another top C.I.A. official that if the images were disclosed “out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us,” an e-mail said. The tapes showed hours of interrogation of the two detainees, including the infliction of a technique called waterboarding that simulates drowning.

The e-mails showed that the tapes were destroyed on the morning of Nov. 9, 2005. Officials announced the decision on Tuesday because the five-year statute of limitations for filing criminal charges relating to the tapes’ destruction had expired.

The agency had withheld the fact that the tapes existed from both the federal courts and the Sept. 11 Commission, which had asked the agency for records of the interrogations. The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes was first revealed by The New York Times in December 2007. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/10tapes.html?hp

Magical Mystery Tour:

What No Fairies? What’s Next? Was that Really the 20th Century? Were there really fairies at the bottom of the garden, or was it merely a childhood prank gone strangely and lastingly awry? That, for six decades, was the central question behind the Cottingley fairies mystery, the story of two English schoolgirls who claimed to have taken five pictures of fairy folk in the 1910s and afterward. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/europe/07crawley.html?hpw

Catholic Church Has a Sale Price on Exorcisms: There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.  “Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/us/13exorcism.html?hp

Best Thing in the History of the World

The US Navy Issued a Press Release on 10 November Saying they Would do “The Largest Peacetime Flyover in San Diego History on February 12th..” An Online Blogger, 1Joshua, wrote to say, “Hey Navy! Wake Up! There is a war(s) on. It’s not peacetime. It’s War Time! Those planes fly for imperialism!” Hours later, the San Diego Union Tribune responded to 1Joshua. “Thanks for catching this. The Navy says the release is true even if you take out the ‘peacetime,” term.” Is this classic “blowback”? Is the PR machine so successful that the producers of the “What war?” mantra came to believe it during the recent counterfeit election spasm?

War Profiteer Whipped by Whistle-blower: A nearly $70 million fine announced Friday against one of the U.S. government’s largest Afghanistan contractors is an apparent record war-zone settlement, and it grew from a classic David vs. Goliath confrontation.

New Jersey-based Louis Berger Group, which has overseen the construction of roads, power plants and schools across Afghanistan, acknowledged that it had knowingly and systematically overcharged the U.S. government and agreed to pay $69.3 million in criminal and civil penalties.

Louis Berger’s antagonist was Harold Salomon, a Haitian immigrant and former employee who resisted pressure to keep quiet. He said Friday that he planned to donate part of his whistleblower’s award to a nonprofit he founded that provides health care and other services in Haiti. www.kansascity.com/2010/11/05/2398652/693-million-afghan-contracting.html

Worst Thing in the History of the World

Colbert on Rand P: In the unity of the free market, we are all just different parts of the same billionaire. (05:17) www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/364881/november-08-2010/the-word—nothingness

Did Anyone Out There Lose a Missile? Call Pentagon and Please Describe It: The Pentagon said Tuesday it was trying to determine if a missile was launched Monday off the coast of Southern California and, if so, who might have fired it.

Spokesmen for the Navy, Air Force, and other military organizations said they were looking into a video posted on the CBS News website that shows an object shooting across the sky and leaving a large contrail, or vapor trail, over the Pacific Ocean.

The video was shot by a KCBS helicopter, the station said Tuesday. www.presstelegram.com/breakingnews/ci_16565615

Mayor Bing Can’t Even Demolish Detroit, let Alone Save It: Mayor Dave Bing has made it a centerpiece of his administration to tear down 10,000 vacant homes within four years as part of a larger vision to downsize Detroit.

But the city is less than halfway to its goal of tearing down 3,000 houses by the end of this year and it has completely cleared only 50 lots, according to records obtained by The Detroit News.
www.detnews.com/article/20101112/METRO08/11120384/LeDuff–Detroit-lags-on-vacant-house-demolitions

On These Dates:

November 12 1948 Fascist Tojo Sentenced and Tries Suicide (later hanged)

1968 My Lai Exposed

2001 Taliban Leave Kabul for….Well…Kabul, but later….

Never Forget

November 11, the end of WWI
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5La8fQEd-Is

The Edmund Fitzgerald

So Long Clyde Summers: Mr. Summers, who taught at the Penn law school from 1975 until 2005, was widely viewed as the nation’s leading legal expert on union democracy and union elections. Some old-line labor bosses who disliked his emphasis on individual rights snidely called him “Mr. Democracy.”

In the 1950s, his ground-breaking law review articles about unions violating their members’ rights led to his working with a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, in drafting major parts of the Landrum-Griffin Act, often called the Bill of Rights for union members. The law guarantees freedom of speech for union members and periodic secret elections of union leaders. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/business/12summers.html?scp=1&sq=Clyde%20W%20Summers&st=cse

Thanks to Bob, Penny Brown, Sue H, Amber, Candace, Ruth, Nancy, Chris, Perry, Sandy, Van, Ginny H, Bonnie MacI, Della, Marisol, Adrian, Arturo, Ruben, Jasmine, Josh, Ben, Sherry, Barb and Ken, Terry S on the road again, Victoria (our law firm), Dean, Barb V, Kim B, Wayno, Alan S (who needs to write that book), Jim O, and Jerri.

Good luck to us, every one.

R