Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

On Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness by Theodore W. Allen1  According to the consensus, the relative absence of manifestations of class conscious American labor is to be ascribed to six peculiar factors of United States historical development: 1) the existence, from the very founding of the state, of the right to vote and other democratic liberties; 2) the heterogeneity of composition of the United States working class, a conglomeration of many tongues and kindreds; 3) the “safety valve” for social discontent provided by the availability of homesteading opportunities in the West; 4) the relatively greater access to social mobility in America; 5) the relative shortage of labor, resulting in a higher level of wages as compared with that prevailing in other countries; 6) the historic precedence of the trade union over the labor party in the United States, as contrasted to continental Europe, a condition facilitating the openly anti-socialist anti-labor party policies of the dominant corrupt “aristocracy of labor” within the working class movement.

10. Whatever incidental insights into our history may be provided by the various arguments advanced in this rationale for the low level of class consciousness of American workers, they are all flawed by the failure to consider this rationale in the context of the historically omnipresent factor of white supremacism in United States history.18 That white blindspot, which is inherent in the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, has historically frustrated the search for an explanation for the degree of class consciousness with which European-American workers have perceived, and still do perceive, their class interests as workers.    http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/allen.html

SDSU students demand help with food, housing   When students go to college, they’re supposed to concentrate on their studies. But some San Diego State University students said Thursday that is difficult when they don’t have enough food to eat and nowhere to live.

Their signs and their chants of “education, not starvation” left no doubt as to why a couple of dozen students and their supporters held a rally on campus Thursday.

“There are no resources for students in poverty,” said SDSU senior Patricia Ruiz. “There’s no plan in place to assist students in need of housing and food.”

Going to SDSU might look affordable compared to some other universities, but the average cost per semester is about $3,400 for undergrads. When you add in food and housing costs, some students said, they were forced to choose between eating and paying their tuition.

“Without the proper nutrients, students are unable to properly physically and mentally comprehend the material that they are learning,” said SDSU senior Sonia Rodriguez.

Holding a package of Top Ramen noodles in her hand, SDSU senior Jeanette Corona said, “We shouldn’t have to be eating salt, sugar, monosodium glutamate, 1 percent of God knows what. There’s no reason we should be eating anything that’s processed,” she said to applause.     www.sandiego6.com/news/local/SDSU-S-280245402.html

Baptist: The Economist’s review of my book reveals how white people still refuse to believe black people about being black.   This is what happens when racism goes viral. This is why, somehow, it still can—

For instance: white people have had numerous opportunities, especially after Ferguson, to hear what African Americans think about how policing takes place when white civilians aren’t around. Yet twice as many white Americans as black Americans still think that police treat African Americans fairly.

Perhaps this is because, according to a recent survey, 75% of white Americans have zero black American friends. Surely if more white people knew more black people on a personal level, some would be more ready to accept the accounts from African Americans about how white privilege affects their own lives.

Instead, we’ve still got white magazine writers refusing to believe first-person accounts of history, which re-enforces white privilege at the very time when we should be revoking it. In the meantime, both historians and advocates of contemporary change often have to turn to the strategy of getting white people to vet black testimony before other white people will believe it.

Back in 1845 on the Cambria, as the attackers surrounded Douglass, threatening to throw him overboard, he told the other white passengers that if they didn’t believe his words, he would speak the words of the enslavers. Straight from the book of state law in the south, Douglas read aloud those punishments allotted to slaves, then – “lashings on the back, the cropping of ears and other revolting disfigurements” – as now: “for the most venial crimes, and even frequently when no crime whatever had been committed”.    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/07/economist-review-my-book-slavery

5 Things About Slavery You Probably Didn’t Learn In Social Studies: A Short Guide To ‘The Half Has Never Been Told  

1) Slavery was a key driver of the formation of American wealth.

Baptist argues that our narrative of slavery generally goes something like this: it was a terrible thing, but it was an anomaly, a sort of feudal throwback within capitalism whose demise would inevitably come with the rise of wage labor. In fact, he argues, it was at the heart of the development of American capitalism.

Baptist crunches economic data to come up with a “back-of-the-envelope” estimate of how much slavery contributed to the American economy both directly and indirectly. “All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves — 6 percent of the total US population — who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery’s frontier.”

By 1850, he writes, American slaves were worth $1.3 billion, one-fifth of the nation’s wealth.

2) In its heyday, slavery was more efficient than free labor, contrary to the arguments made by some northerners at the time.    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/the-half-has-never-been-told_n_6036840.html?cps=gravity

Dreamers heckle Hillbillary Clinton in Maryland  Hillary Clinton was heckled repeatedly during a rally Thursday in potential 2016 rival Martin O’Malley’s home state of Maryland, when more than a dozen pro-immigrant activists staggered their protests so they lasted throughout most of her speech.

The rolling protests by members of the group United We Dream came during a rally at the University of Maryland for Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown. They also came nearly a week after so-called Dreamers interrupted Clinton’s speech in North Carolina, where she was campaigning for Sen. Kay Hagan; the activists reportedly said they were mishandled by officials at that rally when they were being led out.Read more: www.politico.com/story/2014/10/hillary-clinton-maryland-dreamers-heckle-112363.html

The Little Red Schoolhouse

We Will See How Stupid University Faculty in Capital’s Schools Have Become with the ratification of this sellout  The California State University and the California Faculty Association have made a tentative agreement on a new 3 year contract. The CSU and CFA will vote to ratify the agreement online beginning at 9 a.m. on Nov. 1. Voting will close at 5 p.m. on Nov. 9. The new contract will include a general pay raise of 1.6 percent for all faculty and 3 percent for faculty who are below the Service Salary Increase. Those below the SSI will receive a 4.6 percent total increase in salary. The SSI is a salary increase available to eligible employees on their yearly anniversaries. Some SDSU faculty have not been receiving a pay raise. Religious Studies department lecturer Pam Fox recently told The Daily Aztec she has not had a pay raise in 10 years. In a press release, CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White praised the new agreement. “The multi-year agreement is a tremendous accomplishment, as well as a special opportunity for CFA and the CSU to continue to strengthen communication and collaboration as we work together to advance the mission of the university,” – See more at: www.thedailyaztec.com/58957/news/faculty-csu-to-settle-new-contract/

above, LA’s recently tanked boss, John Deasy of fake degree and Ipad scam fame

LA’s Deasy Redux: Putin’s Friend Profits in Purge of Schoolbooks   The purge began in late winter. One by one, hundreds of textbooks that Russian schoolchildren had relied upon for years were deemed unsuitable for use in the country’s 43,000 schools. The reasons varied, but they shared a certain bureaucratic obstinacy.

One publisher saw all of his company’s English-language textbooks barred because he had failed to include their subtitles on the paperwork required for government approval. More than three dozen books that use a popular creative teaching style were dropped from a list of authorized titles because the publisher had submitted copies of supporting documents, rather than the originals.
Then there was the case of the colorful math textbooks published by a decorated educator, Lyudmila G. Peterson, cashiered for using characters from popular foreign children’s stories. Illustrating math problems with the likes of Snow White, Eeyor  e and Owl, in one expert’s decisive opinion, was “hardly designed to instill a sense of patriotism” in young Russian minds.

By the time the school year began this fall, the number of approved textbooks for Russia’s 14 million schoolchildren had been slashed by more than half. The summary winnowing by the Ministry of Education and Science upset lesson plans, threatened the livelihoods of nearly two-dozen small publishers and left principals, teachers and parents puzzled and angry.

There was, however, one standout winner: A publishing house whose newly appointed chairman was a member of President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner circle, Arkady R. Rotenberg, a judo sparring partner from Mr. Putin’s St. Petersburg youth.

The publisher, Enlightenment, survived the education ministry’s culling almost untouched.    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/world/europe/putins-friend-profits-in-purge-of-schoolbooks.html

above, Putin of the ever social fascist Russia/USSR

Who Will Graduate from San Diego’s Capitalist Schools?  San Diego Unified has a huge problem on its hands.

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Dempsey bio  http://www.defense.gov/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=325

Top General Dempsey calls for US “Advisers” in Iraq Combat Zone  Washington’s top uniformed commander has called for US military “advisers” to be deployed in Iraq’s predominantly Sunni Anbar province, where the Islamist insurgents of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have captured some 80 percent of the territory.

The proposal put forward Thursday by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey would mean sending American troops into combat, despite the repeated assurances from President Barack Obama and other administration officials that the new US war in the Middle East will involve no American “boots on the ground.”

Dempsey, who according to recent media reports played a key role in persuading Obama to launch the war in Iraq and Syria, had previously stated that he would not hesitate in recommending that US special operations troops be sent into action alongside Iraqi government forces if he felt they were needed, regardless of Obama’s assurances to the contrary.

He now seems to be doing just that. Appearing at a joint Pentagon press conference with US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Dempsey was asked about the mass killings of Sunni tribe members in western Anbar province at the hands of ISIS. Some 400 members of the Abu Nimer tribe had reportedly been slaughtered by ISIS over the previous 48 hours. Apparently fearing a revolt against their control of the Iraqi city of Hit, the Islamists rounded up former Iraqi police officers and others believed to have ties to the government.

The tribe had been involved in the so-called “Awakening” or “Sons of Iraq” movement that was initiated in 2005-2006 by the US military occupation. It paid salaries to Sunni tribe members to patrol their neighborhoods and combat Al Qaeda-linked insurgents in Anbar, which was the scene of some of the bloodiest combat in the nearly nine-year US war.

The Shia sectarian government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which was installed by Washington, stopped payments to the militias and ordered that they be disbanded.

Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ – UN  The United Nations has warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism.

A report by the UN security council, obtained by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.

The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”, the report says.

The UN’s numbers bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance dragnets.

“Numbers since 2010 are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010 – and are growing,”    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/foreign-jihadist-iraq-syria-unprecedented-un-isis

Who Lost Afghanistan this time?  China Pledges $327 Million in Aid to Afghanistan  China has pledged two billion yuan ($327 million) in aid to Afghanistan, which is seeking new sources of foreign help amid a drawdown of U.S. troops and increasing worries about regional instability.  http://online.wsj.com/articles/china-pledges-327-million-in-aid-to-afghanistan-1414566221

US relations with Israel have plunged to new depths of bitterness and hostility as senior officials in the Obama administration decried Binyamin Netanyahu as a “chickenshit prime minister”, “coward” and a man more interested in his own political survival than peace.  Speaking to the Israeli parliament – the Knesset – a few hours after the comments were revealed, Netanyahu angrily insisted he was “under attack simply for defending Israel”, adding that he “cherished” Israel’s relationship with the US.

“When there are pressures on Israel to concede its security, the easiest thing to do is to concede,” he said. “You get a round of applause, ceremonies on grassy knolls, and then come the missiles and the tunnels.”

The Obama officials’ comments underline the dismal state of relations between the Obama administration and Netanyahu after a series of damaging announcements by Israel – including again this week – regarding its determination to push ahead with settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/29/binyamin-netanyahu-a-chickenshit-say-us-officials-in-explosive-interview

The Empires Prep for War In Space  Chinese probe flies around the moon and back – first such trip since 1970s

China has completed its first return mission to the moon with the successful re-entry and landing on Earth of an unmanned probe, state media reported.

The probe, Chang’e 5-T1, landed safely in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, state news agency Xinhua said, citing the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre.

Xinhua said the probe, dubbed “Xiaofei” (little flyer) on social media, took “some incredible pictures” of the Earth and the moon. It is the first trip around the moon and back since US and Russian flights of the 1970s, 40 years ago.

Prior to re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere the unnamed probe had been travelling at 11.2 kilometres per second (25,000 miles per hour), a speed that can generate temperatures of more than 1,500C (2,700F), the news agency reported.

To slow it down scientists let the craft “bounce” off Earth’s atmosphere before re-entering again and landing.    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/02/chinese-probe-flies-around-the-moon-and-back-first-such-trip-since-1970s

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Obamagogue and Michigan pols Laugh at the Suckers at Wayne State in Detroit. They are not saying: Hands up don’t shoot.

Applause For Obamagogue in Detroit (millions to Karzai, Trillions to Banksters, Billions to Pakistani/Syrian Jihadists and NOT a PENNY to HALT Detroit WATER SHUTOFFS and Foreclosures)–and people still think with their skin  

President Barack Obama told a crowd of more than 6,000 Saturday night that Michigan voters have a chance in Tuesday’s election to choose Democratic leaders “who put you first.”

“Three days, Michigan, three days until you elect a new governor and a new senator,” said Obama, wearing a white shirt with the top button undone and his shirt sleeves rolled up.

Obama implored Democratic Party loyalists to get their friends, co-workers and neighbors to the polls Tuesday to help gubernatorial candidate Mark Schauer unseat Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and promote U.S. Rep. Gary Peters to the Senate.

“Tell them to vote. Tell them to vote.”                                  http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/2014/11/01/obama-detroit-wayne-state-democrats/18338045/

Detroit: The Dispersal (better put, re-colonization) of Urban Black America Begins  High water bills and cascading shut-offs have added to the flood of forced evictions. “Our conclusion is that you have here in Detroit a man-made perfect storm,” said the UN officials.

More precisely, a corporate-made vortex of ethnic and class cleansing, to make way for a new, gentrified city. Just as the water shut-offs are “unprecedented,” so too is the pace of county home foreclosures, which have now targeted one of every five properties in Detroit. Wayne County is notifying 70,000 Detroit households that they have been caught up in the foreclosure frenzy. “We have decided to foreclose on everything,” said Wayne County chief deputy treasurer David Szymanski. He claims the foreclosure proceedings are for the occupants own good, since they might then be eligible for federal housing aid.    http://blackagendareport.com/node/14482

Nearly One Quarter of American Children in Poverty. Anti-Poverty Measures Scrapped under Obama’s “Sequester Budget”  Nearly one in four children in the United States lives in a family below the federal poverty line, according to figures presented in a new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

A total of 16.3 million children live in poverty, and 45 percent of children in the US live in households whose incomes fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty line.

The annual report, tilted the Kids Count Data Book, compiles data on children’s economic well-being, education, health, and family support. It concludes that, “inequities among children remain deep and stubbornly persistent.”

The report is an indictment of the state of American society nearly six years after the onset of the financial crisis in 2008. While the Obama administration and the media have proclaimed an economic “recovery,” conditions of life for the vast majority of the population continue to deteriorate.    http://www.globalresearch.ca/nearly-one-quarter-of-american-children-in-poverty-anti-poverty-measures-scrapped-under-obamas-sequester-budget/5392809

Up to 100,000 Detroiters could lose homes to tax foreclosure in 2015  A crippling wave of tax foreclosures is about to bore down on Detroit.

Nearly 15% of Detoit’s population – as many as 100,000 people – could lose their properties if they don’t soon pay delinquent taxes, according to an analysis by Loveland Technologies.

“Many are living in homes where their landlord should be paying taxes, but is not, and the homeowner may have no idea,” said Alex Alsup, chief product officer for Loveland.    http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2014/10/30/up-to-100000-detroiters-could-lose-homes-to-tax-foreclosure-in-2015/

Tens of thousands of Detroit homes look like the above–and worse.

Suckers’ game–picking the nice head of a two-headed snake—vote your way out of this? 

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2012: 61.8 million (program kept 15.3 million people out of poverty)

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half

Gender gap, 2012: Women 32 percent more likely to be poor than men

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers

Percentage of individuals and family members in poverty who either worked or lived with a working family member, 2011: 57 percent

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty

Families receiving cash assistance, 2011: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty

Number of homeless children in US public schools: 1,168,354    http://billmoyers.com/2013/05/29/u-s-poverty-by-the-numbers/

Spy to bankster to war pipeline   The board of Morgan Stanley includes directors with backgrounds in finance, accounting and industry.  And now, spying.

Morgan Stanley said on Friday that it had elected Jami Miscik, the president and vice chairman of Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm, to its board. Ms. Miscik formerly spent 20 years working in intelligence, including serving as deputy director for intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency.

She joins the board upon the retirement of O. Griffith Sexton, who has been a Morgan Stanley director since 2005. Mr. Sexton, who spent more than two decades as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, more recently worked as a professor at Columbia Business School and a visiting lecturer at Princeton.

“Griff brought deep and substantive knowledge of our firm and the financial services industry to the board, as well as honed analytical abilities,” James P. Gorman, the chief executive and chairman of Morgan Stanley, said in a statement. “He always focused on what was best for shareholders.”

In addition to her tenure at the C.I.A., Ms. Miscik has previously worked on Wall Street. She was the global head of sovereign risk at Lehman Brothers before that firm went under in the 2008 financial crisis. A Fortune magazine profile in 2007 described her as “both über-analyst and seer” at Lehman, while noting that at the C.I.A. she was partially responsible for the erroneous conclusion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.  

After Lehman went bankrupt, Ms. Miscik worked as a senior adviser to Barclays, which bought part of the failed firm. Kissinger Associates was founded by Henry A. Kissinger, the former Secretary of State.

Of Ms. Miscik, Mr. Gorman said in a statement: “Her leadership in navigating geopolitical and macroeconomic risks will provide valuable guidance to the board on matters of critical importance to our businesses, our clients and our shareholders.”

James W. Owens, chairman of the board’s nominating and governance committee, added, in a statement: “We will all benefit from her unique insights and perspectives.”  http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/morgan-stanley-adds-former-c-i-a-official-to-its-board/

The US Has A Staggering Gap Between Black And White Life Expectancy   The black-white life expectancy gap has been shrinking over the past 20 years; on a national level, the gap is 5.4 years for males and 3.8 years for females. However, some states are seriously lagging behind…

At 3.1 million people, New York State has the largest population of black Americans. And, at the same time, New York has seen an incredible drop in the life expectancy gap over the last 20 years. In 1990, the life expectancy of a black male in New York was 63.9 years. It shot up to 75.4 years by 2009.

Other states that helped reduce the black-white life expectancy gap included Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey, according to the study.

That’s the good. Now for the bad: Washington, DC was dead last. In the nation’s capitol, life expectancy for black Americans over the past 20 years has remained “dramatically more unequal than every other state.” In 1990, the gap was 14.4 years for males and 10.4 years for females and has not seen any significant change since then.

Other states that kept the black-white gap from falling included: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Read more:   www.businessinsider.com/huge-black-white-gap-in-life-expectancy-in-us-2014-8

 

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/28/ferguson-police-spending-thousands-riot-gear-protests?CMP=ema_565

Ferguson police brace for new protests by spending thousands on riot gear  St Louis County police has spent $172,669 since August on teargas, grenades, pepper balls and other civil disobedience equipment…

St Louis County police made the purchases amid concerns that hundreds of demonstrators will return to the streets if Darren Wilson, the officer who shot dead Michael Brown in August, is not indicted on criminal charges by a grand jury currently considering the case.

A breakdown of the department’s spending since August on equipment intended for the policing of crowds and civil disobedience, which totals $172,669, was obtained by the Guardian from the county force.

Since the height of the protests, the department has spent almost $25,000 buying 650 teargas grenades, smoke-and-gas grenades, smoke canisters and “hornets nest” CS sting grenades, which shoot out dozens of rubber bullets and a powdered chemical agent upon detonation.

It has spent a further $18,000 on 1,500 “beanbag rounds” and 6,000 pepper balls, paintball-style projectiles that explode with a chemical irritant when they strike a protester. The department uses LiveX branded pepper balls, which are billed as ten times hotter than standard pepper rounds.

Another $77,500 has been spent on 235 riot gear helmets, 135 shields, 25 batons and 60 sets of shin guards, and other “uniform items”. A further $2,300 was used to buy another 2,000 sets of the plastic handcuffs that have been used to detain dozens of demonstrators plucked from crowds on West Florissant Avenue.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye2rzEKbz8I&feature=youtu.be

Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Arrested While Trying to Attend David Petraeus Event in New York  Former CIA analyst and activist Ray McGovern was arrested as he attempted to attend an event in New York City featuring former CIA director and retired military general, David Petraeus. He was charged with resisting arrest, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

At 92nd Street Y, which describes itself as a “world-class cultural and community center,” Petraeus was to appear with John Nagl, who recently wrote a book, Knife Fights about being an army tank commander in the Gulf War of 1991. Neoconservative commentator Max Boot was to join them as well.

Activists from World Can’t Wait, the Granny Peace Brigade, Brooklyn for Peace and a chapter of Veterans for Peace called on people to protest. Some tickets, which cost $45 each, were bought so people could attend the event and potentially participate in a question and answer portion of the event.

World Can’t Wait activist Stephanie Rugoff said a guard stopped McGovern. “Ray, you’re not going in,” the guard said.

McGovern, who is 74 years-old, told the guards something to the effect that the Bill of Rights gave him the right to go into the event. McGovern had a ticket too. But the guards would not let him pass and soon New York police officers surrounded him.      http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/10/31/former-cia-analyst-ray-mcgovern-arrested-while-trying-to-attend-david-petraeus-event-in-new-york/

Solidarity for Never

 

NEA will Spend $10 milion on the CA election alone (and not a dime for a nationwide Mayday school strike) and the $465000 a year NEA Boss is still mobilizing schooled lemmings (forget the wars) : NEA president, educators encourage voters to #Vote4Ed he 2014 election cycle is proving once again that educators are effective and credible messengers when it comes to pointing out to voters and entire communities those candidates who are going to fight for students and public schools.    http://educationvotes.nea.org/2014/10/29/nea-president-educators-encourage-voters-to-vote4ed/

South African Union Breaks From A.N.C. as Alliance Frays Further   A simmering dispute within South Africa’s political establishment moved closer to a showdown on Monday when the country’s biggest labor union announced that it would break with the governing African Nation Congress and form a new socialist political party.

The move by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, known as Numsa, dealt a significant blow to the coalition of labor and political forces that has dominated the country since the formal end of apartheid in 1994. It threatened to speed the realignment of political forces in South Africa and strengthen the government’s adversaries on the left.

But, as the country’s leaders and factions maneuvered on Monday, the full impact of Numsa’s step remained unclear.

“We decided to break with the alliance, and we resolved to form a united front and explore the possibility for socialism in South Africa,” Numsa said in a statement, quoted in news reports, that gave no further details.
South African politics has been dominated for two decades by a three-way alliance among the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, of which Numsa is a member. The alliance, which grew from shared opposition to apartheid, has begun to fray.

Though Numsa withheld support from the A.N.C. in the general election in May, the party, led by President Jacob G. Zuma, won comfortably with 62 percent of the vote. Even so, it faces challenges, including charges of corruption and mismanagement that have fed popular disillusionment and provoked widespread complaints that the party has strayed from the masses it says it represents.      http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/africa/union-breaks-from-anc-as-south-africa-alliance-frays-further.html

Spy versus Spy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3mgnnhIYWI

Former U.S. Envoy to Moscow Says Russians Are Still Spying on Him   During two years as ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul was constantly followed, harassed and demonized on state television. But though Mr. McFaul has left government service and returned home, the spying on him doesn’t seem to have stopped.

Mr. McFaul, who finished his tour as President Obama’s envoy in Moscow in February just as the clash over Ukraine was escalating, told an audience here on Friday that he believed that Russian agents were tapping his telephone as well as that of his wife, Donna Norton. He said his suspicions were confirmed recently when Ms. Norton’s boss at her nonprofit advocacy group, MomsRising, tried to reach her. “She called my wife’s cellphone and a Russian answered it,” said Mr. McFaul, who has returned to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where he is a professor.    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/01/us/politics/former-us-envoy-to-moscow-says-russians-are-still-spying-on-him.html

Of Course, McFaul Never did work for the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy  Michael McFaul
International Forum for Democratic Studies Research Council Member    http://www.ned.org/research/research-council/michael-mcfaul

‘The Nazis Next Door,’ by Eric Lichtblau  In the wake of World War II, America recruited a few leading German scientists in order to advance our space and military programs and to keep these valuable assets from falling into Soviet hands. This is the broadly accepted script about Nazis in America. In fact, as Eric Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, relates in “The Nazis Next Door,” we welcomed approximately 10,000 Nazis, some of whom had played pivotal roles in the genocide….

America began reaching out to leading Nazis months before the Germans surrendered. In March 1945, while the war still raged, the American spy chief Allen Dulles conducted a friendly fireside chat in the library of a Zurich apartment with the Nazi general Karl Wolff, the closest associate of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler for much of the war. The Scotch-lubricated conversation convinced Dulles that Wolff, despite his ties to Himmler and his role as a leader of the Waffen SS, was a moderate who deserved protection. When prosecutors sought to try Wolff, one of the highest-ranking SS leaders to survive, at Nuremberg, Dulles worked to have his name removed from the list of defendants. While Wolff was in Allied custody, he was permitted to take a yacht trip, spend time with his family and carry a gun. Nonetheless, he complained that what he endured was “much more inhumane than the extermination of the Jews.” He said the Jews had been gassed in a few seconds, while he did not know how long he would be held. (His imprisonment lasted four years.)

While Jews languished in the camps after Germany’s defeat (“We felt like so much surplus junk,” one survivor said), the United States gathered up Nazi scientists. Had only leading scientists been enlisted, it would have been distasteful if understandable. But of the more than 1,600 scientists brought over, some had pedestrian skills.    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/books/review/the-nazis-next-door-by-eric-lichtblau.html

Former Navy SEAL Team Member Investigated for Bin Laden Disclosures  A former member of the Navy SEALs who wrote a best seller about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden is under criminal investigation for possibly disclosing classified material, according to federal officials and his lawyer.

The lawyer for the former SEALs member, Matt Bissonnette, said the investigation was focused on whether Mr. Bissonnette had disclosed classified information in the book “No Easy Day,” published under a pseudonym in 2012. But other people familiar with the inquiry said investigators seemed more interested in paid speeches that Mr. Bissonnette, who says he was one of the members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 who shot Bin Laden, gave at corporate events.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/us/former-navy-seal-matt-bissonnette-investigated-for-bin-laden-book.html

Daily Censored on Dark Alliance by Gary Webb  The newly released Hollywood film “Kill the Messenger,” now showing in theaters across the United States, takes on a subject that some of the mightiest media corporations in the USA no doubt thought they had killed, buried, and delivered the eulogy for a long time ago — the “Dark Alliance” investigation by newspaper reporter Gary Webb.

A groundbreaking investigation at the dawn of the Internet age in 1996, the “Dark Alliance” series, like no other newspaper reportage had done before, documented the firm links between the United States government, Central American cocaine traffickers and a domestic U.S. cocaine epidemic that had ravaged entire American communities. It was a news story that shined the spotlight on U.S. government complicity in international drug trafficking and revealed the U.S. government’s much-vaunted “war on drugs” to be a sham.

But while the U.S. government agencies involved in those illegal activities — the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in particular — had plenty of reasons for wanting this story to go away, in the end it was elements of Webb’s own profession, the press, that had been offended most by “Dark Alliance” and worked hardest to not only debunk the findings reported in “Dark Alliance” but also to discredit and destroy the journalistic credibility of Webb himself.    http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e8526bc09be7b03c98231efd7&id=76c9f5d852&e=bec289d06d

The Magical Mystery Tour

Joan Quigley, Astrologer to a First Lady, Is Dead at 87  In his 1988 memoir, Donald T. Regan, a former chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, revealed what he called the administration’s “most closely guarded secret.”

He said an astrologer had set the time for summit meetings, presidential debates, Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, State of the Union addresses and much more. Without an O.K. from the astrologer, he said, Air Force One did not take off.

The astrologer, whose name Mr. Regan did not know when he wrote the book, was Joan Quigley. She died on Tuesday at 87 at her home in San Francisco, her sister and only immediate survivor, Ruth Quigley, said.

Mr. Regan said that Miss Quigley — a Vassar-educated socialite who preferred the honorific Miss to Ms. (she never married) — had made her celestial recommendations through phone calls to the first lady, Nancy Reagan, often two or three a day. Mrs. Reagan, he said, set up private lines for her at the White House and at the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Further, Mrs. Reagan paid the astrologer a retainer of $3,000 a month, wrote Mr. Regan, who had also been a Treasury secretary under Reagan and the chief executive of Merrill Lynch.  “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote in the memoir, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.     www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/us/joan-quigley-astrologer-to-a-first-lady-is-dead-at-87.html

What Is the Difference Between Sunni and Shiite Muslims–and Why Does It Matter? – History News Net  The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs–Mohammed’s successors–rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War.Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed.

In 931 the Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame,”Shiite Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, [believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political leadership” at the time of the Imam’s disappearance. Not”until the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978″ did they believe that they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious figure.

Another difference between Sunnis and Shiites has to do with the Mahdi, “the rightly-guided one” whose role is to bring a just global caliphate into being. As historian Timothy Furnish has written,”The major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a coming out, if you will.”In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni’s, a difference that is highly significant:… for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate … as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by”the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt” following World War I. – See more at: historynewsnetwork.org/article/934#sthash.ol2jJZvY.dpuf

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Citation on “If voting mattered they wouldn’t let us do it.” That was the head of the NEA Political Action Committee in the south. He was right. Where can you NOT vote? At work. There, it would matter. Capitalism was never, ever, overwhelmed by democracy. Now, whatever democracy may be, it’s fully defeated by finance/industrial capital and war. 

Job! Cory Wright-Maley
October 27 at 9:02am

Hi All,
Just a reminder that we have two positions open for elementary educators in our growing and well-respected program. We are looking for qualified candidates with any one of a variety of disciplines. Please consider applying. Calgary is a wonderful, family friendly city. It was rated the world’s cleanest city recently and is close to the mountains. By comparison to most U.S. colleges, Canadian Universities pay quite well.
www.stmu.ab.ca/aboutus/career_pdfs/STMU-Tenure-Track-Position-in-Education.pdf

So Long

Matt Taibbi Bugs Out of First Look Intercepts (it’s capitalism, Matt–that’s how it works) Taibbi and other journalists who came to First Look believed they were joining a free-wheeling, autonomous, and unstructured institution. What they found instead was a confounding array of rules, structures, and systems imposed by Omidyar and other First Look managers on matters both trivial—which computer program to use to internally communicate, mandatory regular company-wide meetings, mandated use of a “responsibility assignment matrix” called a “RASCI,” popular in business-school circles for managing projects—as well as more substantive issues.    https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/30/inside-story-matt-taibbis-departure-first-look-media/