Why Are Things As They Are?

Mario Savio Speaks to OWS: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964.

October 21: Anniversary of the First Christian Crusade in 1096, the first Kamakazee  Attacks in 1944, and the heroic March on the Pentagon in 1967. And the rapture! (see far below).

We Say Fightback!

The Bankster who was Kind Enough to Fund OWS: Robert S. Halper, a retired Wall Street trader, spends time each day in Zuccotti Park talking to protesters about politics and their thoughts on reforming the banking system.
But Mr. Halper, a 52-year-old Brooklyn native, never reveals two facts about himself: he is a former vice chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange and the largest single donor to the nonprofit magazine that ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement.  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/he-made-it-on-wall-st-and-used-it-to-help-start-the-protests/?scp=1&sq=robert%20s%20halper&st=cse

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptcx027SApw

Occupy Wall Street… Can it Move from What it is To What it Could Be?  Beyond Chris Hedges’s Promotion of Salvation Occupy Wall Street is being flooded with Democrats, unionites, dogmatic pacifists, a-analytical anarchists, self building millionaries like Michael Moore, petty pols like Tom Hayden, deceptive profs like Cornel West, or the Keynesian Naomi Klein who wants to rescue capitalism and make it gentle—and behind them is an army of cops, behind them the military which is fully prepared to act in the USA, to protect the USA.  ..The OWS movement which has, so far, removed its own head by denying any particular ideology, itself an ideology of the lowest common acceptable set of ideas, wrong as they may be, and and decapitated itself by claiming that there are no real leaders, when there are always real leaders and the absence of a structure just makes it hard for the rank and file to find them–though the cops know who they are.  http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2717&section=Article

Coppers Never Bust Rowdy TPartyites but Cops in Riot Gear Bust OWSers: Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested in Chicago and other cities on Saturday night and Sunday morning, as the anti-corporate fury from the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York continue to spread across the country.
Shortly after 1 a.m. in Chicago, police arrested some 175 protesters who had set up a makeshift tent city and formed a human chain in Congress Plaza by Grant Park, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.
The arrests were mostly peaceful, the report said, although police did face chants of “Shame on you!” and “This is what democracy looks like!” from some of the estimated 500 protesters in the crowd, many of whom were sitting on the ground with their arms interlocked.
The arrests continued until about 3:30 a.m., as police tore down dozens of tents and threw left-behind homemade signs in the garbage, according the Tribune.   www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/10/16/2011-10-16_hundreds_arrested_at_occupy_events_in_chicago_denver_arizona_as_movement_spreads.html

Escalating Protests Led by Chilean Students: Violent clashes have broken out again in Chile’s capital as small groups of hooded youth clashed with police and marred an otherwise peaceful march by as many as 100,000 students demanding changes in public education.
Two huge marches, organised with approval from authorities, converged in a demonstration in Santiago calling on President Sebastian Pinera to expand the central government’s role in educating Chileans.
The changes sought by students, who have been protesting and boycotting classes for nearly six months, would fundamentally overhaul a school system that has been steadily privatised since the 1973-90 dictatorship.
Pinera has insisted on more targeted reforms, such as increasing state subsidies so that poor students can afford to attend private institutions.
As Wednesday’s demonstration broke up, small groups confronted police and violence spread quickly. A gas station was attacked, with vandals spraying flammable gasoline around. ….Students say the costs of free quality education could be more than covered by making the rich pay more in taxes.english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/10/2011102005733193103.html

Congratulations to Robert Parry on the Publication of

Maoist NPA attacks from the Perimeter in the Phillipines (remember The Forrest, re the Huks?) The military says communist rebels have raided a Japanese-managed banana plantation in the southern Philippines just weeks after guerrillas attacked three Japanese-Filipino mining companies.
Lt. Col. Lyndon Paniza of the army’s 10th Infantry Division says about 25 New People’s Army rebels disguised as soldiers surprised security guards at the Sumifru Corp. compound in Compostela Valley province’s Laak township early Thursday.
He says they burned two trucks and the company’s radio communications room and fled with the guards’ weapons and an electric generator. No one was hurt.
The rebels earlier this month burned millions of dollars worth of equipment at three mining companies in southern Surigao del Norte province partly owned by Japan’s Sumitomo Corp.  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/10/20/world/asia/AP-AS-Philippines-Communist-Rebels.html?_r=1&hp

Indonesia: One person killed, hundreds arrested and five persons charged with rebellion at Third Papuan People’s Congress: www.asia-pacific-solidarity.net/southeastasia/westpapua/statements/2011/ahrc_onepersonkilledhundredsar_201011.htm

Vermont Teachers Strike: After a negotiating session lasting more than 14 hours failed to reach an agreement between the school boards and the teachers union, about 270 teachers at schools in Bennington, North Bennington, Pownal and Shaftsbury went on strike today.  http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20111019/NEWS/111019989

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Detroit Fed of Teachers Notes that there are 72 Kids in  a Class, and Does Nothing: : Earlier this month, a science class at Finney High had 72 students, the DFT said.
Without enough chairs or desks for everyone, the teacher took the students to an auditorium, DFT officials said. The class was trimmed to 55 students last week, still well above limits in the teachers’ contract.
“It’s outrageous. … I’m sure they don’t have 72 books in that classroom,”  http://www.detnews.com/article/20111019/SCHOOLS/110190361/1026/DPS-grapples-with-crowded-classes

Susan O on the Bullshit Common Core Standards: “[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” Thus, Common Core Standards architect David Coleman delivered[1] the core pedagogy of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to educators gathered at the New York State Department of Education in April 2011. Listen to a few more of Coleman’s proclamations and you have to ask yourself if this is a man of deep experience and rectitude or just a cuckoo bird let loose on a hapless bunch of educrats who don’t know how to voice dissent. Coleman was on stage one hour 59 minutes in Chancellor’s Hall decreeing the new reality of teaching in public schools across America. No one in the audience challenged his bizarre declarations. dailycensored.com/2011/10/18/the-crocodile-in-the-common-core-standards/

Test Frenzy Begets Cheating, and Lying, and Stealing, and Sloth, and Greed, and Covetousness….A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was “tricky,” and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.   www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/nyregion/how-cheating-cases-at-new-york-schools-played-out.html?_r=1&ref=education

PA. District Refuses to Release Information on Test Cheating: The state Department of Education is refusing to release documents explaining what investigators have done in response to a report that a Shikellamy School District teacher inappropriately copied portions of an old state test and shared the answers with students.
But, a department investigator said that the investigation is still open and pointed to a similar case in Uniontown that ended only after a teacher gave up her license to avoid losing it.
“All we can say is that an investigation is ongoing,” said Educational Assessment Specialist Jack Hoerner. “The department will announce more at the end of the investigation.”
This comes after the Department of Education denied The Daily Item’s Right To Know request for emails from the department to the Shikellamy district about improper preparation by a teacher for the 2010 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests.   dailyitem.com/0100_news/x345569079/Education-department-refuses-to-release-documents

High Stakes Standardized Exams, which Teachers have proctored for a decade and more, logically form the basis For Merit Pay. Now, Which Way UTLA? For the first time, Los Angeles school principals will see previously confidential ratings that estimate teachers’ effectiveness in raising students’ standardized test scores.
Los Angeles Unified officials began issuing the ratings privately to about 12,000 math and English teachers last year and plan to issue new ones this month to about 14,000 instructors, including some who teach science and history.
The scores are based on an analysis the district calls Academic Growth over Time. Taking an approach similar to that used in value-added ratings in other school systems across the country, the district analyzes teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student’s performance is compared with his or her own performances in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teacher-evals-20111016,0,1043954.story

Capitalist Schools as Centers of Corruption–Skank who Stole From Detroit Kids Sobs at Sentencing: Art gallery owner Sherry Washington was sentenced Thursday to seven years in prison for her role in a fraud and kickback scheme and ordered to pay $3.32 million to the cash-strapped Detroit Public School District…Minutes earlier, Washington begged for mercy.

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Obamagogue: Lying, Robbing, Desk Murderer, Pimp for the Rich, and  Barbarous Assassin

The Libyan Dictator Who Was a CIA Asset running US renditions did nothing to provoke the US but was murdered by CIA led fake rebel assassins who killed him because he let Chinese oil interests into his country and because he could not be allowed to spill US oil and intelligence beans at a trial. This assassination is a sharp step up in the emergence of US fascism: Amateur video broadcast on TV channels showed Gadhafi’s purported corpse: a man who appears to be the deposed leader lying in the street, stripped half-naked and splattered with blood. Bystanders, who are chanting, “God is great!” kicked him….Another video broadcast by Arab satellite news stations seemed to show Gadhafi captured alive. The chaotic video shows Gadhafi, bloody and in a military uniform, being pulled from the hood of a truck and pushed into a standing position. At one point he seems to be talking to his captors and gesturing.  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/20/127808/world-waits-on-reports-that-moammar.html

Obamagogue in his No Questions Presss conference Lied about no US troops on the ground in Libya. The CIA is his private Army. And his mention of US planes flying never noted they were bombing entire cities.

Video shows Gadhafi was alive when captured in Sirte Fugitive Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi died today from wounds sustained during capture near his hometown of Sirte, according to reports that were confirmed by Libyan transitional authorities and independent journalists.
Amateur video broadcast on TV channels showed Gadhafi’s purported corpse: a man who appears to be the deposed leader lying in the street, stripped half-naked and splattered with blood. Bystanders, who are chanting, “God is great!” kicked him. www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/20/127808/world-waits-on-reports-that-moammar.html

Robert Fisk, Eloquent, on the Asssassination of Ghadaffi: And did he perish so? Shot down while trying to resist? We lived with Ceausescu’s death (and that of his wife), so why not Gaddafi’s? And Gaddafi’s wife is safe. Why shouldn’t the dictator die thus? Interesting question. Did our friends in the National Transitional Council decree his demise? Or was this “natural”, a death at the hands of his enemies, an honourable end to a bad man? I wonder. How the West must have been relieved that there would be no trials, no endless speeches from the Great Leader, no defence of his regime. No trials mean no accounts of rendition and torture and no cutting of sexual parts.  http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-you-cant-blame-gaddafi-for-thinking-he-was-one-of-the-good-guys-2373796.html

The New York Times Collection of Murdered Gadaffi and Murdered Son Videos: thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/new-videos-piece-together-qaddafis-last-minutes/?hp

The CIA’s National Transition Council In Libya: While names and faces of a few top figures are now known, the identities of much of the leadership of the rebel Transitional National Council, as well as who chose them, how they were chosen and why, remain shrouded in mystery. As a Guardian report put it: “Most of their names are kept secret. They often meet in hiding – at times in a church in Benghazi, on other occasions as far away as Tobruk. Some members of what amounts to the government of revolutionary Libya are not seen at all. They are just voices down a phone line.”
There is though one singular exception. We now know the name of the rebels’ military commander although the significance of his presence and his lengthy history in the annals of covert US opposition to Gaddafi has so far escaped the mainstream media. In the middle of March, Khalifa Heftir arrived in Benghazi from his home near Washington DC to a hero’s welcome from rebel supporters but it is likely that his safe arrival was greeted with as much joy and relief in Washington. The CIA’s man in the Libyan opposition was now in the saddle.
Heftir’s history as a former officer in Gaddafi’s military turned CIA-backed opponent of the Libyan regime goes back nearly twenty-five years and while a number of media outlets noted his return to Libya none, so far, have mentioned his CIA backstory. The Daily Mail in Britain, for instance, reported Heftir’s return on March 19th, saying that the former Libyan army officer had “recently returned from exile in America” to give the rebel force some “tactical coherence” without mentioning the background that had provided him with these talents. thebrokenelbow.com/2011/03/31/gaddafi-and-the-cia-a-short-history/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxkQWBzT74

Say, General and Mr Ambassador, we Were Just Wondering why can’t 400,000 People Allied to the World’s Strongest Military defeat a Ragtag Bunch Like the Taliban? Oh. I get it. We need to Exterminate All the Brutes, eh? The U.S. has 98,000 troops here, plus 40,000 from NATO. Around a third of them are combat forces. And you can add to that about 300,000 Afghan troops.
Pelley: Help me understand the order of battle, if there are 400,000 coalition troops and 10,000 Taliban, why can’t we mop that up in a week?
Allen: Let’s be precise now as well. The ANSF — the entire ANSF has yet to become operationally committed, which are both the police and the army. And so it requires, you know, a relative large footprint in order for us to dominate and prevent the Taliban fighters from reentering the population.
Pelley: So it’s not just a matter of hunting down these 10,000 enemy troops and killing them?
Allen: It’s not just a hunter-killer mission that our troops are on. And we do deal with the–with the insurgents. And we deal with them very kinetically when they choose to fight. But they don’t choose to fight on a regular basis.
Pelley: And when you say kinetic, that’s war college talk for shooting them?
Allen: Well, it’s– it’s Marine talk for shootin’ ’em as– as well, frankly.
How can a few thousand Taliban tie up the world’s strongest military? We went to find out in the home of the Taliban, Kandahar Province. Here, the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division is fighting its way into territory no American has occupied. The brigade came in April led by Colonel Patrick Frank. (now for the drumroll from history…) Pelley: They’re not standing and fighting you? www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/16/60minutes/main20120799_page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

Obamagogue’s New Lie. The US is Leaving Iraq. No Troops (CIA, his army, is not a Troop)

Hillbillary, after a visit to the War Crime Site in Libya, in Kabul, Cutting Taliban Deals: Afghanistan’s already tenuous peace process was plunged into disarray with the Sept. 20 killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the country’s High Peace Council, which was given the task of bringing the Taliban insurgents to the bargaining table.
After Rabbani was slain by an assailant who had posed as a Taliban peace envoy, Karzai said he saw little point in trying to hold direct talks with the Taliban. He asserted that negotiations could only resume with the cooperation of Pakistan, which has long served as a haven for insurgent leaders.
Some members of the Karzai administration said there was evidence that Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, was complicit in Rabbani’s assassination, but Karzai stopped short of making such an accusation.
Clinton’s visit coincides with a thaw in what had been chilly relations between the Obama administration and Karzai. A new civilian-military team, headed by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Allen, the U.S. Marine who now commands Western troops in Afghanistan, has taken a more conciliatory tone toward the Afghan leader, who in turn has lately backed away from stridently anti-U.S. statements.  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/10/clinton-visits-afghanistan.html

US Drone Murders the Son of the American the Drones Killed Days Ago: A SON of the US-born dead al-Qa’ida cleric Anwar al Awlaki was among seven suspected jihadist militants killed by apparent US air strikes in Yemen.
“Abderrahman Anwar al Awlaki was killed in the raid,” the tribal source said, adding that he received confirmation from the militant-controlled Yemeni hospital where the dead and wounded from the strikes were taken.
Awlaki himself was killed in a US drone strike on September 30, which US President Barack Obama hailed as a “major blow” to al-Qa’ida worldwide. www.theaustralian.com.au/news/anwar-al-awlakis-son-killed-in-yemen/story-e6frg6n6-1226167478529

HooRah! A Real Body Count in Afghanistan! Celebrate!  Dead Everywhere!

American and Afghan troops have killed at least 115 insurgents as part of a tough fight to gain control of a critical corridor and resupply route to a key American base in northeastern Afghanistan, according to Afghan and American military officers.  Civilians in the area, as well as American and Afghan soldiers, described an exceptionally intense fight, which was still going on, in which long-range bombers have flown in from as far away as the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, the southern Afghan province of Kandahar and Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, the Afghan capital.
The Americans have also fired long-range rockets from more than 100 miles away as the troops have struggled to oust large numbers of insurgents who month after month have attacked convoys on the road and dominated much of this corner of Kunar Province.
“We had too many F16s and F15s to count, almost continuous coverage,”  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/world/asia/united-states-army-troops-battle-to-control-key-afghan-route.html?hp

If nobody Backed the Colonel who did the Fighting for Eight Months? Ghadaffi Fighters Rise in Tripoli (Historians Against War remain self-silenced): Libya’s new government increased security in Tripoli Saturday with extra roadblocks and house-to-house searches after fighting in the capital with supporters of Muammar Gaddafi raised fears of another insurgency  http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/24246/World/Region/First-sign-of-armed-resistance-to-the-National-Tra.aspx

Hillbillery Gives the ISI a Billion a Year, then Begs her Boys  to Act Right: : US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday reiterated the US government’s message that Pakistan should do more to “squeeze” the Haqqani network from their border areas.In a joint press conference held with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in Islamabad, Clinton urged the Pakistani government to show greater cooperation with the US to corner militants.
“You can’t keep snakes in your back yard and expect them to only bite your neighbours,” Clinton said, making a clear reference to the Haqqani network that the US has accused Pakistan of maintaining links with.  http://tribune.com.pk/story/278815/us-wants-pakistan-to-take-strong-steps-on-afghan-militants/?cid=nlc-dailybrief-daily_news_brief-link16-20111021

Obamagogue Sends Troops to Uganda and it has Nothing to do with Oil or China! Nothing. THE US on Monday denied that its renewed interest in Uganda is a strategy to get hold of the newly found oil in the country.
The US government has announced that it will deploy troops to help Uganda fight the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who are currently in the Central African Republic.
Critics have said that the only reason that America seems to be coming up strongly to offer troops to help in fighting Kony when they did not when he was killing people here was because of the oil.  http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/18504-US-denies-interest-in-Uganda-oil.html

Uganda Oil Fields Map

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu2uJWSZkck

The World as You know it, Ending? The biggest Wall Street firms posted their worst quarter in both trading and investment banking since the depths of the financial crisis as they face questions about the future of their business.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Citigroup Inc. (C), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley posted $13.5 billion in trading revenue minus accounting gains for the third quarter, down 35 percent from a year earlier. Investment- banking revenue plunged 41 percent from the second quarter to $4.47 billion.
Bank of America posted a roughly 90 percent drop in fixed- income trading revenue and Goldman Sachs had its lowest debt underwriting quarter since 2003. Corporations put off capital raises and investors sold riskier assets on concern that the U.S. economy was slowing and Europe’s debt crisis would spread.
“The micro has caught up with the macro, and the strains of the financial system have hit these companies,” Charles Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC in New York, said yesterday on Bloomberg Television’s “Inside Track.” “The question is, does that continue going forward?”    he five banks’ combined trading revenue so far this year, excluding debt valuation adjustments, or DVA, is down 16 percent from the same period last year. DVA are accounting gains taken when the value of a firm’s own debt declines, and losses taken when it rises.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index dropped 14 percent during the period, the worst decline since the fourth quarter of 2008. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, or VIX, which measures the cost of buying insurance against drops in the S&P 500, surged 160 percent to its highest quarterly reading since the first three months of 2009.  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-20/wall-street-has-worst-quarter-for-banking-trading-since-financial-crisis.html

1 Million, 2 Million, 3 Million Foreclosures (sing along), 4 Million, 5 Million, 6 Little foreclosures…Officially, there are 3.5 million homes for sale nationwide. But there are millions more lurking in the shadows — hidden neatly away on banks’ balance sheets, stalled in foreclosure court proceedings or simply occupied by nonpaying owners as lenders wait months or years before taking action.
The housing market’s ballooning shadow inventory — buoyed by a yearlong foreclosure slowdown — stands as the most menacing obstacle to the recovery of the residential real estate market.
Clustered mostly in hard-hit cities and states, there are more than 4.5 million homes either owned by lenders or headed for foreclosure. In Miami, for example, there are about 200,000 shadow homes, dwarfing the 30,000 properties that are listed on the active market. Even as prices in Miami have shown signs of stability this year, an impending wave of foreclosures threatens to keep real estate values deflated.
“A lot of people don’t understand how much inventory is set to come on line in the next 18 to 24 months,” said Jack McCabe, the CEO of McCabe Research & Consulting in Deerfield Beach, Fla. “When you compare what the Realtors show as inventory to what’s out there, you realize we have a long way to go.”  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/16/127042/millions-of-homes-lurk-on-bank.html

Watch the Corporate State Emerge. Follow the Money: OpenSecrets.org is your nonpartisan guide to money’s influence on U.S. elections and public policy. Whether you’re a voter, journalist, activist, student or interested citizen, use our free site to shine light on your government www.opensecrets.org/

Citbank Wrist Slapped by Limp and Corrupt SEC, the bankers’ Procurers: Citigroup has agreed to pay $285 million to settle a civil fraud complaint that it misled investors in a $1 billion derivatives deal tied to the United States housing market, then bet against the investors as the housing market began to show signs of distress, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/business/citigroup-to-pay-285-million-to-settle-sec-charges.html?hp

Wait! Yikes! There goes Citigroup! (don’t be last to run on your bank! Panic early!) – U.S. banks fell after Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co., the nation’s third- and fourth-largest lenders, said quarterly revenue dropped amid economic weakness and market turmoil linked to Europe.
Wells Fargo slid 7.3 percent, the most since Aug. 10, to $24.72 at 12:49 p.m. in New York trading, leading a 3 percent decline in the 24-company KBW Bank Index. Citigroup slipped 1.3 percent to $28.02.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/us-banks-fall-as-wells-fargo-citigroup-say-revenue-slumped/2011/10/17/gIQAMqmAsL_story.html

Hershey’s Exploited Exchange Students Fought Back: The Hershey students finally got the department’s attention on Aug. 17 when 200 of them, waving placards and chanting union slogans, walked out of the plant, the first labor protest in the 50-year history of the department’s exchange programs….The protests raised questions about whether the State Department is equipped to manage what has become a vast temporary work program, especially in times when suitable jobs for foreign students — even short-term jobs — are harder to come by as high unemployment persists in the United States.
The protests also exposed serious lapses by the Council for Educational Travel, USA, a nonprofit group based in California and one of more than 70 sponsors contracted by the State Department to organize the students’ trips to the United States and find jobs and housing for them. …Mr. Torres echoed many students when he said his lowest moment came with his first paycheck. After deductions by Cetusa for rent, utilities, bus fare and other items, he took home $85 for 35 hours of work.
“You wanted a cultural exchange,” Mr. Torres was told by the group representative, he said. “This is America and this is the way we do things here.” Although Cetusa is a nonprofit organization in the United States, commercial affiliates manage housing and insurance for its international student programs.
Mr. Torres finished his job too broke to travel in the United States, he said, and went home in debt, feeling cheated.www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/us/hershey-foreign-exchange-students-pleas-were-ignored.html?_r=1&hpw

Greece Wars on the Workers: After a day of violent demonstrations against government cutbacks, Greek Socialist lawmakers on Thursday gave their final approval to a raft of tough new austerity measures, taking a critical step toward securing crucial foreign aid and averting a default.  The measures — including additional wage cuts, pension cuts, layoffs for public sector workers and changes to collective bargaining rules to make it easier to hire and fire — were passed on Thursday night with the support of all but one of the governing Socialist party’s 154 legislators.www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/europe/protesters-gather-in-athens-on-second-day-of-strike.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Solidarity Fornever

King of the UAW Explains How a Two Tier Wage System is Real Solidarity and how happy the “Twos” Are: SIEGEL: But what do you say to second tier younger auto workers who complain, as some did in a recent online story by labornotes.org, that the only solidarity you now find among auto workers is first tier workers with first tier workers and second tier workers with second tier workers?
KING: You know, I think that’s absolutely not true. I think, you know, I was at Orion, which has large number of tier twos. They were very appreciative of the raise they got, of the support they had.  http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141521159/uaw-president-discusses-ford-contract

The Good News is that nearly 13,000 UAW Members Voted NO on the Ford Sellout: The United Auto Workers has made it official: Its 41,000 members at Ford Motor Co. voted to accept the tentative agreement, the union announced Wednesday.
Results concluded Tuesday at the 58 UAW-Ford locals.
The final tally after two weeks is 63 percent in favor of the agreement with 22,031 “yes” votes to 37 percent voting against or 12,957 “no” votes, including 4,243 skilled trades voting in favor and 2,268 against. Total number of votes cast was 34,988.
“I am pleased with the strong support for this agreement from UAW Ford members. I believe UAW Ford workers understood the importance of each and every vote,” said UAW Vice President Jimmy Settles, head of the union’s Ford Department.
“That was evident in the high voter turnout with 85 percent of the overall membership voting, and at locals like Kansas City, where more than 80 percent of members voted and more than 90 percent of those voted in favor of the agreement.” www.detnews.com/article/20111019/AUTO01/110190388/1148/UAW-ratifies-Ford-deal-with-63–approval

UAW Bosses, Afraid of Members’ Minds, Cover Up Vote Count: Workers, now working toward ratification of its third national contract with a Detroit automaker.
In a surprising turnabout, the union removed the voting results of three Chrysler Group LLC locals from its Facebook page. The explanation: “We will not be posting results until all of the locals have reported. This contract is to be ratified by the entire UAW-represented Chrysler membership, not one local at a time.”
Admirable sentiment, that. Respectful, even, given the fact that public disclosure of trends in early voting effectively disenfranchises those scheduled to vote later — not unlike the now-forbidden practice of East Coast-based television networks calling presidential elections before polls close in California.
But here’s the problem: The UAW spent the better part of the past month boasting about its 21st-century union chops. Its top leaders embraced openness. They called unprecedented news conferences to tout tentative agreements. They posted contract “highlighters” online, and they used powerful social media tools.  http://detnews.com/article/20111021/OPINION03/110210356/#.TqF8KHtPjQ0.mailto

Read Marx. Make Class War 2!

Samir Amin: In our contemporary world “consensus” (its boundaries defined by universal suffrage) is more conservative than ever. In the centers of the world-system the consensus is pro-imperialist. Not in the sense that it implies hatred or contempt for the other peoples who are its victims, but in the everyday sense that the permanence of the flow of imperialist rent is accepted because that is the condition for overall social reproduction, the guarantor of its “opulence” in contrast to the poverty of the others. In the peripheries, the responses of peoples to the challenge (pauperization resulting from the process of capitalist/imperialist accumulation) is still muddled, in the sense that they are fated always to carry with them a dose of retrograde illusions of a return to a better past.
In these conditions, recourse to “elections” is always conceived by the dominant powers as the best possible way to rein in the movement, to end the possibility that the struggles become radicalized. In 1968 some said that “elections are for assholes,” and that view was not unconfirmed by the facts. An elected assembly, right away—as today in Tunisia and Egypt—serves only to put an end to “disorder,” to “restore stability.” To change everything so that nothing changes….A discourse styling itself “postmodernist,” which quite simply refuses to recognize the scope of the democratic farce’s destructive effects, incorporates submission to it. What matter elections, they say, what counts is elsewhere: in “civil society” (a muddled concept to which I shall return) where individuals are what the liberal virus claims them—falsely—to be, the active subjects of history. Antonio Negri’s “philosophy,” which I have criticized elsewhere, is an expression of this desertion.
But the democratic farce, unchallenged in the opulent societies of the imperialist triad, does not work in the system’s peripheries. There, in the storm zone, the established order does not enjoy any legitimacy sufficient to stabilize society   monthlyreview.org/2011/10/01/the-democratic-fraud-and-the-universalist-alternative

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnqSy_DUwAw

Obamagogue Continues to Torture Bradley Manning: Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, confirmed yesterday that the Department of Defense has blocked his requests for an unmonitored meeting with PFC Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks whistleblower. He told reporters gathered at a U.N. General Assembly committee on human rights that he would be issuing a report on Bradley Manning’s case “in the next few weeks.”
Mendez noted that the Obama administration had offered the possibility of a meeting, but only under “conditions in which they could not confirm the confidentiality of my conversations with him.” He said that, according to the rules of his U.N. mandate, “that is a condition that we cannot accept.” Mendez explained further that he nevertheless offered to meet with PFC Manning, but that “he also chose not to waive his right to have a private conversation with me.”
“The Special Rapporteur’s report on Bradley Manning’s conditions of confinement unfortunately won’t be complete so long as the Obama administration prevents them from having a private conversation,” said Kevin Zeese, a legal adviser with the Bradley Manning Support Network. “The administration owes an explanation to the American people why they won’t let a U.N. official investigate evidence of Eighth Amendment violations committed against a U.S. citizen.”  http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/releases/u-n-torture-investigator-confirms-no-unmonitored-access-to-bradley-manning-condemns-solitary-confinement

Building a Barbarous Culture, the San Diego UT Compares Ghadaffi to a Dead Animal

Hillbillary, The Cuckold, Gives a Wow to the Murder of Gadaffi in the Non-War

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRRVzVE4v3A

Did the Cowardly Dishonest Historians vs (sic) War Share this Vile Woman’s Comments?

With 40,000 Dead in the Fake Drug War, Who is Killing the Purported Zetas? Just who is behind the killings of Zetas — another drug gang? Agents acting on behalf of the government or military? An ad hoc group whose presence is being tolerated by authorities as well as the public?
Coastal Veracruz, the gateway to Mexico for centuries of immigrants from Europe and beyond, a laid-back beachfront vacation spot for legions of Mexicans, has in recent months become the latest state to be thoroughly sucked into the deadly and devastating drug war.
On Sept. 20, nearly three dozen half-naked bodies were dumped in broad daylight on a busy highway underpass in a well-to-do tourist area of the city of Veracruz. Fourteen more turned up a few days later — during a convention of the nation’s top state and federal prosecutors. Then, on Oct. 6, barely 48 hours after announcing a major security offensive, military and police found an additional 36 bodies, and 10 more turned up the following day.
In videotaped presentations, a group of masked men with military bearing has claimed responsibility for the spate of killings, portraying it as a cleansing operation. Many of the bodies had a “Z” for Zeta written on the back with ink marker, a witness said. www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-veracruz-killings-20111020,0,3290532,full.story

A Tale of Two Assassinations: With Official Washington abuzz over a bizarre U.S. accusation that Iran’s Quds spy agency plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, it might be worth recalling how American authorities responded to an actual terror bombing in Washington 35 years ago that killed a former Chilean foreign minister and an American co-worker.
Because that 1976 assassination was carried out by an allied intelligence agency, Chile’s DINA, against a perceived “leftist,” Orlando Letelier, the CIA – then run by George H.W. Bush – hid evidence of Chile’s guilt and circulated false cover stories of Chile’s innocence that were picked up by the major U.S. news media.
Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier
Shortly after Letelier and a female co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a bomb planted under his car, Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship, misinformation that was spread through Newsweek magazine, the New York Times and other U.S. news outlets.

The CIA disseminated the exonerating report despite later admissions that the CIA was aware in 1976 that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and despite the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind Letelier’s murder, the first terrorist bombing of its type in Washington D.C.’s history. In a report to Congress in September 2000, the CIA officially admitted for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA. The CIA also acknowledged publicly that it consulted Contreras in October 1976 about the Letelier assassination.
The report added that the CIA was aware of the alleged Chilean government role in the Letelier-Moffitt murders at the time and included that suspicion in an internal cable. “CIA’s first intelligence report containing this allegation was dated 6 October 1976,” a little more than two weeks after the bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, the CIA disclosed.
Nevertheless, the CIA – then under CIA Director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing DINA, which was then run by Contreras.     http://consortiumnews.com/2011/10/14/the-tale-of-two-assassination-plots/

The Magical Mystery Tour

Kidnapped, Raped, Hidden by Catholics, The Brits, and the Aussies. O. Well. Sorry about that: osed shameful national crimes. As recently as 1967, but especially in the 1940s and ’50s, as many as 130,000 children were removed from orphanages and group homes in Britain and deported to various locations in the Commonwealth, particularly western Australia. One deportee, now grown up, recalls being told at the age of 10 that he was being sent to a sunny paradise where he could pick oranges off trees. Instead of lotus land, many found themselves virtually enslaved and forced into hard labor in institutions where they endured physical cruelty and sexual abuse. One of the worst was the remote Bindoon Boys Town, a hellish place presided over by the Catholic Christian Brothers, where many boys were raped. movies.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/movies/oranges-and-sunshine-starring-emily-watson-review.html

Should the Underwear Bomber Vanish (along with your BMW) it was the rapture today!

The Best thing in the History of the World

Revenge is best when Eaten Cold: In the dark early hours of an October morning in 2009, acting on an anonymous tip, police officers in the French city of Mulhouse picked up an elderly German doctor who had been left — bound, beaten and bleeding — in a street near the municipal courthouse. The man, Dieter Krombach, had been kidnapped outside his home in Germany and secreted across the border into France, where there was a warrant for his arrest in connection with the death of a French girl nearly three decades ago.    Earlier that morning, near Toulouse, André Bamberski lifted a ringing telephone. A voice informed him that the doctor was in Mulhouse. Mr. Bamberski gathered his things and left immediately. He took with him the 20,000 euros (then about $29,800) he had promised the abductors.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/europe/for-3-decades-french-father-pursued-justice-for-his-daughter.html