Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

Susan Ohanian Will be a Keynote Speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference Susan’s advocacy work keeps at its core her 20 years as a teacher. Her more than 300 essays on education issues have appeared in periodicals ranging from Phi Delta Kappan cover stories to The Atlantic, Nation, USA Today, Washington Monthly, Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and numerous education journals. One of her 26 book on education policy and practice introduced the word Standardisto.

Although currently censored at the NCTE online discussion site, Susan’s website received NCTE’s George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contributions to Honest and Clarity in Public Language. She has delivered the annual MacClement Lecture for Excellence in Education, Queens University, Ontario, Canada, the Helen Oakes lecture at Temple University, and the Biber Lecture, Bank Street College, New York.
Susan notes that although she’s been a featured speaker at both the International Symposium for the Educational Welfare in Seoul, Korea, and British Columbia Teachers’ Federation events, her talk to the Progressive Caucus of the AFT was closed down by angry hoots from the audience.

Susan started a website to protest the passage of NCLB. She had hoped to shut it down by now, but things keep getting worse, so she persists.

Call for Proposals
Rouge Forum 2012
OCCUPY EDUCATION! Class Conscious Pedagogies for Social Change
June 22-24, 2012
Miami University
Oxford, OH
Proposals Due April 15, 2012

The Rouge Forum 2012 will be held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The University’s picturesque campus is located 50 minutes northwest of Cincinnati. The conference will be held June 22-24, 2012.
Proposals for papers, panels, performances, workshops, and other multimedia presentations should include title(s) and names and contact information for presenter(s). The deadline for sending proposals is April 15. The Steering Committee will email acceptance notices by May 1. (details rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/rf-2012-call-for-proposals/)

March 1 Student Action Hundreds of students, faculty and staff at four San Diego colleges took part in marches and rallies Thursday as part of what was billed as a nationwide protest against cuts in education funding.
At UC San Diego, approximately 200 students marched from a rally in front of Geisel Library to the administration complex where they entered an unoccupied conference room.
A smaller group of students said they planned to stay there overnight. Thursday night university officials said they had made no attempt to oust them but would continue to monitor the situation.    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/01/sd-college-students-stage-walkout-to-protest-cuts/

The education aganda is a war aganda. It is a class war and empires war aganda. The government is an executive committee and armed weapon of the rich–a coporate state. Schools are not being privatized. They are simply machines for capitalism. To demand to raise taxes, which is what this false flag operation is designed to do, is to demand to increase the power of that state, and its ability to make imperialist and class war. Those taxes will be aimed, assuredly, at poor and working people, deepening existing divisions within the class. Walkouts are great as schools closed by civil strife are better than open schools, but think twice about the real goals of this struggle. Don’t dance on the spider’s web.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6KEUe-fI0k

Britain’s Dave Hill on Capitalist Schooling Schools and universities, echoing Althusser (1971) are ideological state apparatuses whose purpose, for the capitalist class, is to preach and instill pro-capitalist and anti-socialist beliefs and, as Rikowski (for example, 2001, 2004) argues, to re-produce tiered hierarchicalised and socialized /quiescent labour power for the workplace.
The same is true of the media. Those who own the Press, control the Press. Views alternative to capitalism are mocked, vilified, and ignored, if they are fundamental rather than cosmetic alternatives    http://philosophers.posterous.com/

Condemn the Raid on Haiti U Campus We the undersigned, students, professors, teachers, and
other workers, condemn the brutal armed raid on the School of Ethnology campus of
the State University of Haiti (UEH), carried out by the Haitian President
Michel Martelly’s armed supporters, members of his security services, and
pro-Martelly students, on Friday February 17. (See story at Haïti Liberté, www.haiti-liberte.com, 2/26/12.)

The Petition is at  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/condemn-raid-on-haiti-university-campus
BACKGROUND: This attack on the campus tore down fences, smashed
professors’ car windows, trashed the Department of Ethnology office, looted
computers and printers and students’ personal property, and beat up students
and campus workers, sending several to the hospital, while security forces
fired automatic weapons into the air. Martelly has been demonizing the students at this campus since he came to power. They are leaders in fighting for a decent budget and necessities at UEH like courses, library books, a cafeteria, and a dormitory, as well as for radical social change.

Sudan: Cops Attack Student Protestors in Dorms The police arrested hundreds of students in a predawn raid on dormitories in the University of Khartoum on Friday, in a crackdown on a campus that has been at the center of recent antigovernment protests, activists said. The police entered the student housing early Friday, beating and detaining hundreds, a witness said. A member of a committee of student activists said 317 students had been arrested and were being held at 11 police stations. The campus had been closed for about two months since students staged demonstrations over rising prices, unemployment and other issues. The police did not immediately comment on the raid.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/world/africa/sudan-hundreds-of-students-held.html?ref=internationaleducation

New York Times Workers Protest Please join us at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday for a quiet, 10-minute display of unity, around the entrances to the Page One meeting room on the third floor.
The point is to show our common dismay over contract negotiations in which management seems determined to seriously compromise our financial welfare, our access to health care and our security in retirement. We hope that senior editors who witness and understand our mutual resolve will convey the gravity of the situation to management.    http://broadcastunionnews.blogspot.com/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

San Diego Demands More School Worker Concessions The San Diego Unified School District made an eleventh-hour plea to its unions Thursday to accept concessions that would protect class sizes from ballooning and save more than 1,600 teaching positions that have been tapped for elimination next year.
The teacher union president said no discussions should take place until the state produces more solid budget figures this spring.    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/01/sd-unified-again-asks-for-teacher-concessions/

Obamagogue, Gates, And Duncan on the Release of School Worker Ratings Though Bill Gates wrote an oped against the public release of the TDRs last week, it was too little and too late. In fact, he and Arne Duncan supported the LA Times release of similar unreliable ratings in 2010, which named teachers with low ratings, with Duncan saying, “What’s there to hide?”
Indeed, he and Duncan have pushed relentlessly for states to create numerical teacher rating systems based at least in part on value-added student test scores. The feds made this condition for states to be considered for Race to the Top funds and now, in order to obtain a waiver from NCLB.    http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/

Rahm takes Chicago’s Big Lie version of history and reality on the road to a Washington D.C. forum featuring Arne Duncan and the mayors of Los Angeles and New York City  http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3118&section=Article

Mitt Romney attended a Public Elementary School, Walled Lake El, in Bloomfield Hills Michigan, then he went to this private–compare it to your school. Cranbrook’s Motto: “Aim High”

Anne the Librarian and Education in Yosemite

We were lucky in this. Anne Molin, one of Wawona’s librarians, swears that in spite of her thoroughly modern upbringing, at heart she’s an old-fashioned girl. And she proved it to our kids. Wearing the clothing of a Victorian Age visitor to Yosemite — complete with high-neck blouse, strings of pearls and a hat resplendent with feathers, grapes, tulle and bows — Anne took the students through the dos and dont’s of civilized etiquette, circa 1880. “Use only last names as in ‘Miss Molin.’ First names are reserved for family.” “Stand when a woman enters the room.” “Pull out a woman’s chair for her.” “If you want to brag, do it subtly by calling your mother and father by the Latin pater and mater, thereby letting everyone know you are college educated.”
I stand here today, mothers and fathers of Xbox-obsessed children, to tell you that the kids were transfixed by Anne. When she instructed them to never use the word “sweat” because “Horses sweat, men perspire and ladies glow,” I too became a groupie. How does she know these things?    http://sierraclub.typepad.com/explore/2012/02/yosemite-to-manners-born.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

US Confirms its Troops are In South Yeman, as AQ Snickers, their War of the Flea Continues…

Pentagon officials today confirmed that a “security team” of US forces came under attack from Ansar al-Sharia loyalists in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, but denied any injuries as a result of the attack. Ansar al-Sharia claimed one “CIA officer” killed in the exchange.   The difference in versions from the two sides actually misses the much more serious revelation of the report, that US ground troops are operating inside Yemen at all. There has certainly been no announcement to that effect, and indeed, several times the Obama Administration has “ruled out” sending ground troops to Yemen.
With pro-democracy protesters rallying against the US-backed dictator of Yemen virtually throughout 2011, Ansar al-Sharia seized the province of Abyan, and has made inroads in Aden, the former capital city of South Yemen. The US has repeatedly launched drone strikes against Ansar al-Sharia, claiming they are an “al-Qaeda front.”

Admiral Willard: US Troops in India  US Embassy Denies Report From Pacific Commander US Pacific Command head Admiral Robert Willard announced today that US special forces have been deployed to India, along with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives, as an effort to fight the Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT), a militant faction mostly active in Kashmir…Admiral Willard’s admission is particularly interesting because none of the five nations he mentioned was known to have ground troops in it. With the Yemen deployment coming out today, and that only because there happened to be an attack, it seems increasingly the US is making deployments which, if not actually a “secret” they are likewise not being made public in a timely fashion.  http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/02/admiral-willard-us-troops-in-india/

Exactly WHO are the Syrian “Rebels?” Over a hundred foreign mercenaries have reportedly been captured by Syrian government troops after regaining control of rebel-held areas in the city of Homs.
Sources say the majority of them are French , with the rest from several Arab countries.   forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=nebd454gn0boql97ndmj9qtc25&topic=229344.msg1346053#msg1346053

How to Start a War by Forging War Fevor–A Historical Outline Military plotters know that the majority would never support their wars, if it were generally known why they were really being fought. Over the millennia, a special martial art has been deliberately developed to weave elaborate webs of deceit to create the appearance that wars are fought for “just” or “humanitarian” reasons.
If asked to support a war so a small, wealthy elite could shamelessly profit by ruthlessly exploiting and plundering the natural and human resources in far away lands, people would ‘just say no.’
We now face another broad thematic pretext for war, the so-called “War Against Terrorism.” We are told it will be waged in many countries and may continue for generations. It is vitally important to expose this latest attempt to fraudulently conceal the largely economic and geostrategic purposes of war. By asking who benefits from war, we can unmask its pretense and expose the true grounds for instigating it. By throwing light on repeated historical patterns of deception, we can promote skepticism about the government and media yarns that have been spun to encourage this war.
The historical knowledge of how war planners have tricked people into supporting past wars, is like a vaccine. We can use this understanding of history to inoculate the public with healthy doses of distrust for official war pretext narratives and other deceptive stratagems. Through such immunization programs we may help to counter our society’s susceptibility to “war fever.”    http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28554

AFPak: The US Cannot Leave, and the US cannot Stay American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests.   But behind the public pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.
Despite an American-led training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars, the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously unreliable soldiers and police officers.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/world/asia/burning-of-korans-complicates-us-pullout-plan-in-afghanistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

US WIll Punish Grunts for Koran buring. What of the War Criminals who Sent them to the Graveyard of Empires? Military investigators have concluded that five U.S. service members were involved in the incineration of a pile of Korans in Afghanistan last week, according to U.S. military officials who have been briefed on the inquiry.
The burning of the Muslim holy books — which U.S. officials say was accidental — incited a week of protests that left 30 Afghans dead. The burnings also were cited as motivation for at least some of the six fatal attacks on U.S. military personnel that have occurred in Afghanistan in the past eight days.    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-probe-of-koran-burning-finds-5-soldiers-responsible-afghan-clerics-demand-public-trial/2012/03/02/gIQAwJqYmR_story.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAz_msoBAR0

Hoschild on WWI Glorified, again, In US Pop Culture and the Those who Resisted then–and now? Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.
In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.
In truth, there’s nothing new in this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.
After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians…. for all the spectacle of boy and horse, thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches, and wartime love and loss, the makers of War Horse, Downton Abbey and — I have no doubt — the similar productions we’ll soon be watching largely skip over the greatest moral drama of those years of conflict, one that continues to echo in our own time of costly and needless wars. They do so by leaving out part of the cast of characters of that moment. The First World War was not just a battle between rival armies, but also a powerful, if one-sided, battle between those who assumed the war was a noble crusade and those who thought it absolute madness.
The war’s opponents went to jail in many countries. There were more than 500 conscientious objectors imprisoned in the United States in those years, for example, plus others jailed for speaking out against joining the conflict. Eugene V. Debs had known prison from his time as a railway union leader, but he spent far longer behind bars — more than two years — for urging American men to resist the draft. Convicted of sedition, he was still in his cell at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in November 1920 when, long after the war ended, he received nearly a million votes as the Socialist candidate for President.    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175508/tomgram%3A_adam_hochschild%2C_antiwar_critics_forgotten_on_oscar_night/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Corporate Profits Up, Worker Wages Down (ahem, crisis of overproduction in industry and finance?) As we’ve been noting, corporate profits have made it back to their pre-recession heights (even if corporate tax revenue hasn’t followed suit). In fact, in 2011, corporate profits hit their highest level since 1950. But as Bloomberg News noted today, this hasn’t translated into wage growth or more purchasing power for workers:
Companies are improving margins and generating profits as wage growth for the American worker lags behind the prices of goods and services…While benefiting the bottom line for businesses, the decline in inflation-adjusted wages bodes ill for the sustainability of economic growth as consumers may eventually be forced to cut back. […]
Of the 394 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index that have reported since Jan. 9, earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31 increased 5.1 percent on average and beat analyst estimates by 3.2 percent. Some 70 percent of the companies have posted better-than-projected results.
This pattern has become all too familiar during the slow economic recovery. In fact, real wages fell in 2011, despite record corporate profits. “There’s never been a postwar era in which unemployment has been this high for this long,” explained labor economist Gary Burtless. “Workers are in a very weak bargaining position.”
Between 2009 and 2011, 88 percent of national income growth went to corporate profits, while just 1 percent went to wages, a stat that is “historically unprecedented.”   thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/22/430190/corporate-profits-wages-2012/?mobile=nc

Foreclosure Funds from Obamagogue’s Fake Program Untapped A $7.6-billion federal program
to help unemployed homeowners stave off foreclosure has provided little relief two years after being unveiled, with less than $218 million of the money paid out to needy borrowers as of Jan. 1. California, which was allocated nearly $2 billion from the Hardest Hit Fund, provided less than $38.6 million in assistance for 4,357 borrowers by the end of last  year, according to the state’s latest report to the Treasury Department. That amounted to less than 2% of the federal funds available to the state’s Keep Your Home California program.  “It’s about helping the  homeowner, and that’s nothappening,”  http://www.latimes.com/includes/sectionfronts/A1.pdf

Personifications of the corporate state, Obama, Dimon, Geithner

Jamie Dimon (Morgan-Chase) after supping on the $12.9 trillion bailout, how nice it is to be back in the big bucks again Dimon’s remarks weren’t so much a presentation as a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness speech on, among other things, why he thinks J.P. Morgan rocks, why its bankers deserve to be paid top bucks, why the institution will meet all those pesky regulatory requirements, and why the bank’s low stock isn’t really something to worry about right now.
Praising the bank’s recent performance, Dimon said that trend will continue: “I’ll be damned if we don’t have record profits in the next year or two.”
J.P. Morgan, he said, is going to pay competitively. “We need top talent. You cannot run these businesses with second-rate talent.”  http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2012/02/28/j-p-morgans-dimon-rapid-fire-take-on-profits-record-breakups-and-the-press/

If you Don’t Have an $100,000 Account, JP Morgan Doesn’t Want you (but they will set up special branches for those desireable rich people most customers with less than $100,000 in investments and deposits are no longer “profitable” for JPMorgan Chase. The firm generates the bulk of its retail banking revenues — about 55 percent — from affluent customers that boast more than that.  http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/chase_them_away_NfNWot1se50BuFX35ZFPdP

Jamie Dimon, begged by Hank Paulson to help With the Bank Collapse of 2008, on Patriotism: “Hank, I would do anything to help the United States, but not at the expense of JP Morgan.”

For Murder of 29 Workers, a Sweet 36 Months in Jail Last June, Alpha Natural Resources Inc. acquired Massey Energy Co. and liabilities related to the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 men in Montcoal, WV. Recently, Alpha has settled all claims with the families of those killed. Today, another chapter closed in this sad story when mine security chief, Hughie Elbert Stover, was sentenced to 36 months in prison. Stover was found guilty in a short trial in October 2011 and U.S. attorney Booth Goodwin had asked for a 25 year sentence.    http://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2012/02/29/former-massey-energy-security-chief-sentenced-to-36-months-in-prison/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa4_ihxT9rI

One in Seven USers Hounded by Debt Collectors the number of people subject to third party collections has doubled since 2000, from a little less than 7% to a little over 14% of consumers. Ten years ago, one in fourteen American consumers were pursued by debt collectors. Today it’s one in seven.  http://www.alternet.org/economy/154329/towards_a_creditor_state:_1_in_7_americans_pursued_by_debt_collectors?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet

The Return of Debtors’ Prisons The experience of debt collection can be chilling, as this 2007 ABC News report suggests.Consumers around the country have taped threatening phone calls from collectors who have called in the middle of the night, used abusive language and have threatened to have people fired from work or thrown in jail. All of these tactics are illegal under federal law.
One of the characteristics of the new social contract ushered in by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the increasing power of creditors to govern outright, from tax farming by banks to the use of credit checks to access employment opportunities.
There are now thousands of people legally jailed because they aren’t paying their bills, ie. debtor’s prisons have returned. Occasionally elites let it slip that this is not an accident, but is their goa    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/matt-stoller-towards-a-creditor-state-–-one-in-seven-americans-pursued-by-debt-collectors.html

US  Official Poverty Rate Is Wrong According to experts from the National Center for Children in Poverty and the Economic Policy Institute, the poverty threshold should be at least twice that, published by the federal government. This puts the actual threshold of an annual income over $40,000 for a family of four.    http://www.mndaily.com/2012/02/29/poverty-line-threshold

The BP Deal and its History of Violence Even if this is legally correct, or even normal, it’s still a shame that BP’s mammoth disaster gets the privilege of being viewed in isolation. One would hope that a history of accidents could be visited if only to reveal a cycle of abuse to the environment. PBS Frontline and ProPublica did an excellent job of revealing BP’s cycle of “deadly accidents, disastrous spills and countless safety problems,” all of which tell the narrative of a culture at BP that placed little priority on safety.
But what if, hypothetically, BP’s disaster in the Gulf was viewed as an act of domestic violence, as opposed to just a problem of pollution and corporate irresponsibility? After all, corporations are treated as people for political campaigning and lobbying, and so many of BP’s disasters have reached far into our homes, leaving devastating impacts on families and workers.    http://www.bridgethegulfproject.com/node/566

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YziOCqFb81Q

Having Risen every day for 37 Days, Average San Diego Gas Price $4.37.

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass 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

Stalin, Godfather of Social Fascism, Improved the World and Died, March 5th, 1953. Now, Russians Get to “choose” again

NDAA Extension of Fascist Rule Went into Effect March 1 And now President Obama’s advisers are saying he is withdrawing his veto threat against NDAA, so it will become law.
As will SOPA, since it is becoming ever more apparent that our “elected officials” in Congress are not satisfied with their 9% approval rating. They want a 0% approval rating.
I have no idea why Congress is pushing through anti-American legislation that is not only incompetent, but openly belligerent.
I have no idea why an American media blackout on NDAA is still in effect — Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly and the other broadcast “journalists” have been disgustingly silent on what is undoubtedly the most important news story of the past decade. The single most important news story since September 11th, 2001.
Combined, NDAA and SOPA simply destroy American democracy. That isn’t hype. That isn’t exaggeration. Within a few days, your freedom of speech will be gone — post something controversial online, and the government can legally “disappear” it.     www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-set-to-become-law-the-terror-is-nearer-than-ever-2011-12

In Militarized USA, Act of Valor Tops Box Office and Lying Recruiters Cheer The action film “Act of Valor” — which stars active-duty Navy Seals in a covert mission to rescue a kidnapped CIA officer — came out on top at the box office over Oscars weekend. The film made $24.7 million, handily beating out “Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds” and “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” for the top slot. films in the weekend’s top 10 include “The Vow” and the Ryan Reynolds/Denzel Washington flick “Safe House.”

After the Inquisition, After the Nazis, After the Gulags–psychologists and the CIA torture Mills History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the ” tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The 1963 KUBARK Manual and its later iterations were used widely by U.S. intelligence and disseminated to other governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
The “farce” was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators. Although some of the material in KUBARK remained in use, psychologists augmented already- existing material with newer techniques, some of which had been developed from torture resistance protocols used to train U.S. military personnel to survive capture and interrogation themselves.   …  Psychologists were complicit in designing and using techniques to break subjects rather than aid them, and in so doing they made a mockery of their ethical obligation to “do no harm.”    http://www.fpif.org/articles/psychologists_and_torture_then_and_now

Solidarity Fornever

School worker unions all over the US, particularly NEA locals but AFT too, are facing yet another round of demands for concessions. The last 40 years of the labor “movement” in the US demonstrates that concessions do not save jobs. Like giving blood to sharks, concessions only make bosses want more. The US printed $12.9 trillion and gave that to the banks. Let them print the money and give it to school workers — or do that and give the jobless jobs, and for those who have jobs, a 30 hour week with no cut in pay, and in classrooms, real caps on class sive at 15. What gets people from here to there — strikes, general strikes and civil strife which is far more educative than the test frenzy that goes on in schools now. Meanwhile, NEA has a series of dilemmas: how to pour money and volunteers into the demagogue, Obama’s campaign when his education agenda is simply a war agenda — class and empire’s war? How to beat back the AFT’s millionaire’s tax which makes sense, and replace it with the NEA/Brown tax which taxes poor and working people? How to affiliate with the bankrupt and corrupt AFL-CIO which is only good at beating up its own members? And how to stop job actions which would disrupt the Obama campaign when exactly what is needed is job actions…..should be an interesting summer.

Half-Witted Boss of Las Vegas Teacher Union Boss Made some Big, Big Bucks for Selling Labor Peace Leaders of the local teachers union are lashing out at their former executive director and the Clark County School District superintendent in response to Sunday’s Review-Journal stories about the huge salaries drawn by union officials and the questionable spending of $2.4 million in taxpayer funds.
“We have no justification for the fact that former Executive Director (John) Jasonek was able to triple dip, earning additional and excessive salaries,” Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association, wrote on the union’s website Monday.
Phone calls to Murillo on Monday and Tuesday were not returned.
Murillo’s statement that Jasonek’s $632,546 in compensation was “excessive” is something new. He and current union Executive Director John Vellardita claimed the opposite when interviewed in early February. At the time, they defended Jasonek’s compensation of $632,546 for running the union and two related organizations in 2009, the last year for which a required Internal Revenue Service report is available.  ..The figures for 2009 show the teachers union spent 36.3 percent of its $4.1 million budget on nine leaders. Such salaries, ranging from $139,785 to $208,683, aren’t business as usual.     www.lvrj.com/news/teachers-union-leaders-criticize-ex-director-s-excessive-salaries-140820203.html

CA Gov Brown Backs NEA Sellout Tax the Workers Plan, Seeks to Crush “tax the millionaires” Many analysts say that more than one tax measure on the ballot could cause an overwhelmed public to reject them all.
So on Feb. 16, the governor spent two hours nibbling on cheese and crackers, sipping sparkling apple juice and asking Pechthalt to drop his union’s proposal, an income-tax hike on millionaires that would help fund public education, state universities and public works.    http://www.pennlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/analysis-brown-tries-to-quell-the-threat/24728f440d905a397cf0b8a117c21834

Detroit Fed of Teachers Declares an Orwellian Victory as Deal Cuts Member pay and benefits The settlement, announced by the district late Wednesday morning and approved by U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh, includes a lump-sum payment equal to 2.5 percent of employees’ 2011-12 earnings and limited reinstatement of step increases.
The deal also provides partial payment of accumulated sick days for employees who submit a notice of retirement by March 19.
Last July, Roberts reduced district employees’ pay by 10 percent and required them to pay 20 percent of health care costs.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20120229/SCHOOLS/202290411/1026/schools/DPS-teachers-get-money-back-pay-cut-settlement

UAW AFL-CIO and NEA’s Fake Spring Offensive to elect the Demagogue Imperialist Obama Now we know how United Auto Workers President Bob King will repay Barack Obama for holding the union harmless from the Detroit automakers’ bankruptcy: He’ll provide the ground troops for the president’s class war.
The Daily Caller blog says it found evidence that King and the UAW are behind the “99 Percent Spring,” which aims to train and deploy 100,000 Americans for “non-violent direct action” in the months leading up to November’s presidential election. The Daily Caller says files on the group’s website, which have since disappeared, indicate the UAW is providing the organizational support for protests designed to support the president’s narrative that America is divided into two camps — the wealthy 1 percent and the struggling 99 percent.    http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120304/OPINION03/203040311/Column-UAW-troops-will-man-class-war?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

UAW, Expert at Concessions, Manages to Give up More at Fairfax, KC, Plant The first negotiated package was voted down last month by Local 31 members, which triggered another round of talks. Another local contract was approved early Friday morning with 57 percent of production workers and 70 percent of skilled trade employees approving the deal.
“We have a new local contract at Fairfax,” said George Ruiz, president of Local 31. “It was a decent package for the times we live in.”
The issue that proved most troublesome involved work teams at the plant. GM sought a change that would allow it to reassign an employee to another team when returning from a leave of absence.
The teams, often made up of five to 10 employees, typically have better jobs the longer they exist, so a returning employee risked getting a worse job.
Union negotiators were able to stop the change that would have allowed the reassignment but had to give some other things back. Two concessions were a cut in the work clothing allowance, and no longer requiring the automaker to replace clothing damaged on the job.
“If you want something, you have to give something up,” Ruiz said.     www.kansascity.com/2012/03/02/3463828/local-contract-approved-at-gm.html

The Continuing Ghost Dance Farce at Occupy San Diego and Activist San Diego Approved a proposal to separate finance committee work from ActivistSanDiego, as apparently Pat Barnes is no longer working for ASD, and there is some $7,000 discrepancy in the books, according to ASD.   www.copswiki.org/Occupy/OccupySanDiegoEmailBlast2012Feb29?cover=print

Spy Versus Spy

Wikileaks and Anon: Israel Hit Iran Lsst Year The mega-leaks website, WikiLeaks, has partnered with the hackers cooperative Anonymous, to publish internal emails of the American strategic intelligence company Stratfor. In one of the hacked emails, Stratfor officials discuss information obtained from one of their sources who reports that Israeli commandos, in cooperation with Kurdish fighters, have destroyed Iranian nuclear installations.    http://www.forward.com/articles/152048/

Wikileaks Begins Publishing 5 Million Emails From Stratfor oday WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example:   pastebin.com/D7sR4zhT

Anon Versus Vatican The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican.   www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/technology/attack-on-vatican-web-site-offers-view-of-hacker-groups-tactics.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=all

Employment Vacancy: Head of Pakistan’s ISI The race has begun for the coveted slot of director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership has decided against retaining ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Especially in the aftermath of the “Memogate” scandal, he has fallen out of favor not only with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani but also with Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani.
Memogate involved Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz claiming that the Pakistan government had sought the Barack Obama administration’s help to stave off a military coup following al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s May 2, 2011, killed in a covert US commando operation   www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NB24Df02.html

Egypt Releases National Endowment for Democracy Agents, people riot Egypt’s military-backed government faced criticism Thursday for appearing to bow to U.S. pressure by allowing seven Americans accused of fomenting political unrest to leave the country despite months of Cairo casting them as spies and enemies of “foreign hands.”   latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/03/egypt-backlash-travel-ban-american-activists.html

Magical Mystery Tour

Philly Cardinal Protects his Local Rapists

Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua ordered aides to shred a 1994 memo that identified 35 Archdiocese of Philadelphia priests suspected of sexually abusing children, according to a new court filing.
The order, outlined in a handwritten note locked away for years at the archdiocese’s Center City offices, was disclosed Friday by lawyers for Msgr. William J. Lynn, the former church administrator facing trial next month.
They say the shredding directive proves what Lynn has long claimed: that a church conspiracy to conceal clergy sex abuse was orchestrated at levels far above him.

Secretive Agents of Angel Maroni just Cannot Stop Baptizing the Dead Members of the Mormon Church last year posthumously baptized Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was captured and killed by terrorists in Pakistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to records uncovered by a researcher in Utah.    http://articles.boston.com/2012-02-29/news/31111583_1_baptizing-holocaust-victims-mormon-temple-baptism

The Best and Worst things in the History of the World

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2105862/Baby-alligator-grins-ear-ear-sits-mothers-head.html