Rouge Forum Dispatch: Dogfight in the Ruling Class!
We Say Fight Back!
Hong Kong Braces For Massive Weekend Protests
Hong Kong is bracing for more rallies and unrest this weekend as two important anniversaries loom, sparking fears that anti-government protests might once again boil over into violence on the streets.
Saturday marks five years since the start of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement that unsuccessfully sought free and open elections in Hong Kong, a former British colony that reverted to Chinese control in 1997.
The movement got its name after activists used umbrellas to protect themselves from police who fired tear gas and pepper spray at the protesters. It is also the weekend leading up to Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. www.npr.org/2019/09/27/765016873/hong-kong-braces-for-massive-weekend-protests
Hong Kong protests: brutal undercover police tactics spark outcry
Footage of helmeted protesters suddenly making arrests causes concern after weekend of intense clashes
Chicago Teachers Are Ready To Strike–No Sellout this Time!
The Chicago Teachers Union voted in overwhelming numbers to authorize a strike, union officials announced late Thursday. The union is planning to set a strike date next Wednesday. Teachers likely will walk out in mid-October if no deal is reached by then.
CTU leaders said 94% of members had voted in favor of a strike, surpassing the 75% threshold required by law. Some 90% of the ballots had been counted Thursday night.
The union emphasized it will continue to bargain in hopes of reaching a deal. Members plan to be at the table all day Friday and have bargaining sessions planned for next week.
“We have to deliver better schools,” Chicago Teachers Union President (and failed ISO hack) Jesse Sharkey said Thursday night.
Sharkey has warned that if teachers strike, it could end up being a “massive labor movement” that could have ripple effects throughout the city. The CTU is timing the possible walkout with two other unions, one representing other school staff, such as security guards and custodians, and another representing Chicago Park District workers. Both of those unions already have voted to authorize a strike. www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764918260/chicago-teachers-are-ready-to-strike
Here’s where things stand on the UAW-GM strike
Saturday marks 13th day of ongoing strike
The picket lines will continue at GM U.S. facilities this morning for the 13th day.
The rank and file now just two days away from qualifying for their $250 strike pay. It is looking quite possible they will get to that mile marker unless something dramatic changes inside the negotiating rooms in the Downtown Detroit Renaissance Center.
Clearly, talks have bogged down. The teams have continued to work main-table talks since last Wednesday. Yet all we hear from them is they talk late into the evening, knock off and get some sleep and then return to the table in the morning.
Many wonder ‘what’s taking so long?’ There are many reasons. But let’s take this strike down to its bare bones to gain some insight into what’s going on and why getting over the finish line is proving so elusive.
The national UAW-GM contract is, at its heart, an exercise in the company buying its labor for the next four years.
Understandably, GM wants to get it as inexpensively as it can. Yes, it wants to maintain profitability, yet it also wants to try and stay competitive with the transplant plants; most notably Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
They pay their non-union workforces about $10 an hour less. The company also wants to try and gain some control over healthcare costs, which are skyrocketing each year.
Another massive variable is the bet GM CEO Mary Barra is making by sending the company whole hog into electric vehicles. The capital requirements for this are eye popping.
For its part, the UAW wants to get GM to pony up much more than it budgeted because the union did take concessionary contracts during the bankruptcy and early turn around years. www.clickondetroit.com/news/here-s-where-things-stand-on-the-uaw-gm-strike?utm_content=18181934&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Headlines%20%2820:00%20EST%29%202019-09-28&utm_term=wdiv_2000est
GM’s Electric Ambitions Rattle Below the Surface of the UAW Strike
Wanted: fewer workers, fewer components; the UAW faces a fight to stay central in the auto maker’s shift to electric vehicles.
Even as General Motors Co. and the United Auto Workers union come closer to resolving their biggest work confrontation in decades, a larger, unsettled issue is the inevitable pain for U.S. workers from GM’s long-range bet on electric cars. www.wsj.com/articles/gms-electric-ambitions-rattle-below-the-surface-of-the-uaw-strike-11569582003
www.facebook.com/SputnikNews/videos/559647021451632/
Vets for peace won the end of the NAPALM wall of flame celebration in 2017
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EHGVBXf57M
www.facebook.com/ryanne.marshall/videos/10219050094299734/?t=42
The Little Red Schoolhouse
Is Meritocracy Making Everyone Miserable? (NYorker discovers Capitalist Schooling in the Empire)
If the educational system is reproducing existing class and status hierarchies—if most of the benefits are going to students who are privileged already—then either meritocracy isn’t working properly or it wasn’t the right approach in the first place…. Grade inflation has been consistent across racial and socioeconomic groups. What have not been consistent are SAT scores. Since 1998, the average score of students whose parents are well educated has increased by five points, while the average score of students whose parents have only an associate’s (two-year college) degree has dropped by twenty-seven points. It turns out that the SAT is, in fact, the friend of privilege. ...
College does enable social mobility, but it’s not happening at the most selective schools. According to the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children whose parents are in the top one per cent of the income distribution—roughly 1.6 million households—are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children whose parents are in the bottom income quintile (about twenty-five million households).
At what are called the Ivy Plus colleges—the eight Ivies plus schools such as the University of Chicago, M.I.T., and Stanford—more than two-thirds of the students are from the top quintile and less than four per cent are from the bottom. The most extreme case, according to Tough, is Princeton, where seventy-two per cent are from the top quintile and 2.2 per cent are from the bottom.
Such data suggest that higher education is not doing much to close the income gap, and that it may be helping to reproduce a class system that has grown dangerously fractured.
“Merit itself is not a genuine excellence but rather—like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime—a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” The successful have sold their souls to Mammon: “Meritocrats gain their immense labor incomes at the cost of exploiting themselves and deforming their personalities.”
….like Marx, Markovits thinks that the whole system is a Frankenstein’s monster. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/is-meritocracy-making-everyone-miserable
The Fascist Origins of the SAT Test
The frantic rush to high-stakes standardized testing in the US costs one-half billion dollars annually in direct expenditures, probably double that in indirect costs. The chief fetish of the testing movement is the SAT, long known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test but now known, on the insistence of the test’s owners, the Educational Testing Service, as just “The SAT.”
The SAT measures, above all else, class, sex, and race. (Fairtest, Roney). The SAT, like every similar test, is designed to divide people with razor sharp precision, to enumerate human value and to track people’s futures under a veil of objective science. The SAT is a commodity itself, for sale to every student, school, and college in the world. It also commodifies people, attaching worth to individuals, but more pointedly drawing the lines of what can only be called class warfare. The impact of the SAT is to create the logic for a more deeply stratified society, divided primarily by issues of inherited income, sexism, and racism. The fraudulent claims of the SAT to promote a more equitable and meritorious society have been thoroughly revealed elsewhere. (Lemann, Fairtest, Roney). This analysis is a brief history of the SAT, unmasking the politics of the people who designed it, and those who promote the SAT and similar exams today .
The genealogy of the SAT is far more authentic than the importance attached to the test’s scores. The SAT was born from the initial IQ tests, written by French psychologist Alfred Binet. In the US, Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes promoted the IQ test and made it a popular instrument to determine who should be an officer, in a segregated military, during WWI . Their IQ test was designed to prove the genetic advantage of races they had already identified as superior. Terman and Yerkes were executives in the American Eugenics Society (Mehler). richgibson.com/SATFascistOrigins.htm
Child’s death after assault at Moreno Valley school sparks outrage — and ugly memories
The death of a 13-year-old Moreno Valley boy who was assaulted at school has exposed deep wounds in the Inland Empire community, where parents say school officials have not addressed long-simmering issues of campus bullying.
The student, identified publicly only as Diego, died Tuesday night of injuries he suffered in the Sept. 16 attack, which was recorded on video and posted to Facebook.
Two 13-year-old boys from Landmark Middle School, about 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, have been arrested, their identities not released because of their age. Authorities are investigating whether Diego had been the target of bullying before he was attacked.
In the aftermath of his death, multiple members of the school community have come forward to share their own experiences involving campus bullying and to criticize the school’s handling of the attack on Diego. www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-26/landmark-middle-school-diego-bullying
For example, Cruz was so dangerous he required extra security while in middle school.
“They had to frisk him before he entered the school…He threatened students’ lives, he wasn’t arrested,” he added. At one point, those looking after him were concerned about a missing hatchet from his garage. They were concerned he was going to harm others with that hatchet.
While at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, “the first class they put him in was JROTC where they taught him how to shoot and gave him an air rifle.”
Inspire charter schools CEO goes on leave of absence
Inspire Charter Schools’ founder and executive director, Herbert “Nick” Nichols, is on temporary leave, Inspire announced this week.
An Inspire official said the charter school network will not say why, to protect Nichols’ privacy.
The announcement comes as multiple school districts and county offices of education are looking to investigate the statewide Inspire home charter school network for questionable financial and organizational practices.
Inspire gives $2,600 or more to students’ families to spend on their education, using a list of thousands of vendors. In the past it had allowed families to buy Disneyland annual passes, dinner theater tickets and more, using public education dollars.
…Nichols’ annual salary is $380,000, Inspire’s spokesman Chris Bertelli said. In 2016, Nichols was paid $514,197. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/story/2019-09-26/inspire-charter-ceo-leave-of-absence
Vista superintendent placed on administrative leave
Linda Kimble, superintendent of the Vista Unified School District for less than two years, has been placed on administrative leave, school board President Rosemary Smithfield said Wednesday.
Smithfield announced the change in a letter e-mailed to parents Wednesday morning.
“On behalf of the Board of Education, I share with you the news that Dr. Linda Kimble, Superintendent, is on leave from the district, effective immediately,” Smithfield wrote. “We expect to announce a long-term solution to the district’s leadership transition in mid October.”
During that time, Assistant Superintendent Matt Doyle will serve as interim superintendent, she wrote. Doyle, who is currently leader of the district’s innovation department, also stepped in as interim superintendent after the resignation of former Superintendent Devin Vodicka in 2017. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/north-county/story/2019-09-25/vista-superintendent-placed-on-administrative-leave
Good Schools for All: The Problems Plaguing Porter Podcast
VOSD’s Scott Lewis and Will Huntsberry take a close look at recent events at Porter Elementary after it was put on a list of the state’s lowest-performing schools and parents and school employees offered troubling accounts of students whose needs were not being met. www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/vosd-podcast-the-problem-with-the-plan-for-porter/
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
Tanks, Missiles and No Pigeons: China to Celebrate 70th Birthday of the Social Fascist People’s Republic
As the Communist Party of China prepares to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its rule, the state is choreographing the pomp and pageantry to exalt President Xi as the unassailable leader of a rising nation and the indispensable bulwark against an array of challenges that threaten to erode its iron grip on power.
On Tuesday, the country’s National Day, he will preside over a military parade through Tiananmen Square whose preparations appear as ambitious and, arguably, as grandiose as the leader himself. It will involve 15,000 soldiers and sailors, 160 fighter jets, bombers and other aircraft, and 580 tanks and other weapons — some of them, military commanders hinted coyly, never before seen in public.
For Mr. Xi, the anniversary has come at an opportune, and much-needed, moment. It has given him a chance to bask in the party’s achievements at a time when it is coming under increasing strain, especially from the economic drag of the trade war with the United States. It is also fending off condemnation of the government’s mass detentions of Muslims in Xinjiang; battling an epidemic of African swine fever that has driven up prices for that Chinese staple, pork; and trying to contain months of protests in Hong Kong that have surged into an open defiance of Beijing’s rule. www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/world/asia/china-national-day-70th-anniversary.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Low turnout, technical glitches mark Afghan puppet presidential election
…Saturday’s polls saw the incumbent, President Ashraf Ghani, make a bid for a second and final five-year term in a crowded pool of more than a dozen other candidates weeks after peace talks between the Taliban and the United States over ending the 18-year war broke down.
Though the voters were once again commended for their willingness to head to the polls amid violence – including bombings and rocket attacks – in the provinces of Helmand, Nangarhar, Ghor, Kandahar and Maidan Wardak, the process seemed to be plagued with logistical problems. ..”They keep saying ‘fraud, fraud fraud’, but if this isn’t systematic, planned fraud, I don’t know what is. It seems like the commission itself is the one trying to make fraud,” said Mohammad, trailed by several others allegedly facing the same issue. www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/turnout-technical-glitches-mark-afghan-presidential-election-190928134625155.html
Alarming VA Report Totals Decade of Veteran Suicides
The Department of Veterans Affairs released an alarming report Friday showing that at least 60,000 veterans died by suicide between 2008 and 2017, with little sign that the crisis is abating despite suicide prevention being the VA’s top priority.
Although the total population of veterans declined by 18% during that span of years, more than 6,000 veterans died by suicide annually, according to the VA’s 2019 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. www.military.com/daily-news/2019/09/23/alarming-va-report-totals-decade-veteran-suicides.html
3 sailors assigned to the USS George H.W. Bush died by suicide last week
Chief Electronics Technician Nuclear James Shelton and Airman Ethan Stuart were found deceased in separate incidents at off-base locations on Sept. 19, Cmdr. Jennifer Cragg, a spokeswoman with Norfolk Naval Station, told Task & Purpose.
The two deaths came just five days after Aviation Ordnanceman First Class Vincent Forline, another sailor assigned to the USS George H. W. Bush, died by suicide.
“Every death of a Sailor is devastating and affects our entire Navy Family,” Cragg said. “Our thoughts and condolences are with the family, friends, and shipmates of the Sailors.”
A Facebook post on Monday evening from Capt. Sean Bailey, commanding officer of the USS George H. W. Bush, confirmed that the recent deaths mark the “third, fourth, and fifth crew member suicides in the last two years.”
None of the deaths occurred aboard the aircraft carrier, which is dry-docked in Norfolk, Cragg told Task & Purpose. taskandpurpose.com/uss-george-hw-bush-suicides?utm_campaign=RebelAlerts&utm_medium=email&utm_source=RebelAlerts-taskandpurpose&utm_source=Task+%26+Purpose+Daily&utm_campaign=2fae754433-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_09_24_07_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_67edd998fe-2fae754433-76834115&mc_cid=2fae754433&mc_eid=7e099a64db
Marine Corps Details Human Smuggling Charges Against 13 Pendleton Lance Corporals
The Marine Corps officially announced charges Friday against 13 Marines for alleged misconduct, including accusations they smuggled undocumented immigrants and committed drug-related offenses.
The Marines — detained in July — will face military court proceedings for alleged transportation of humans, as well as failure to obey an order, drunkenness, endangerment, larceny and perjury, according to a Marine Corps statement.
Two of the Marines, Lance Cpl. Byron D. Law and Lance Cpl. David J. Salazar-Quintero, were named in the release, but the other 11 defendants’ names were withheld. Law and Salazar-Quintero’s names were released because they have been publicly named by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which charged the men federally for alleged transportation of undocumented immigrants for financial gain. They were taken into custody on July 3.
Seven of the unidentified lance corporals have been charged with Article 134 violations, which refer to alleged transportation and/or conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants. One of those Marines is also charged with larceny and failure to obey an order, while another is also charged with endangerment and failure to obey an order. timesofsandiego.com/military/2019/09/20/marine-corps-details-human-smuggling-charges-against-13-pendleton-lance-corporals/
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
Which 2020 Democrats get the most campaign cash from wealthy donors?
This is the second of two stories about the top donor occupations to 2020 Democrats. The first story examines the candidates getting support from working-class donors. Wealthy donors have an abundance of options to choose from in the loaded Democratic presidential primary. But for the most part, they’re sticking with a small handful of White House hopefuls.
Three candidates consistently rank among the top recipients from those in typically high-paying jobs, according to an OpenSecrets review of campaign contributions including small amounts given through the fundraising service ActBlue. South Bend, Ind., Mayor and top-tier fundraiser Pete Buttigieg is the most popular among CEOs, consultants, realtors, accountants and physicians, among others. Former Vice President Joe Biden gets the most from investors, presidents, attorneys and chiropractors. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) wins with executives and entrepreneurs. www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/09/which-2020-democrats-get-the-most-campaign-cash-from-wealthy-donors/?utm_source=CRP+Mail+List&utm_campaign=bb88d3fed2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_11_12_56_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9df8578d78-bb88d3fed2-210801521
![LORDS OF THE RIM: How Offshore Chinese Networks became the world's richest people over two thousand years by [Seagrave, Sterling]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41uHuPpzPzL.jpg)
126 Countries have joined China’s imperialist ‘Belt & Road’
Nicknamed the “New Silk Road,” 126 nations have signed up to the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative, first proposed by China in 2013 in a bid to mobilize huge sums of capital towards boosting the infrastructure and economic connectivity of what are, in the main, fairly low-income countries. A huge number of projects have been earmarked in countries spanning Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America. www.greenbiz.com/article/how-chinas-belt-road-initiative-could-make-or-break-paris-agreement
‘The New Berlin Wall’: Why Ukraine Is Central to the Scandal
His voice crackling over what he complained was a “terrible” sound system, Donald J. Trump in September 2015 heaped praise on the oligarch who had invited him to speak by video link from New York to a conference in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, had secured 20 minutes of Mr. Trump’s time — and a heap of flattery from the future president, who described him as “a very, very special man” — with a donation of $150,000 to Mr. Trump’s now defunct foundation.
Mr. Pinchuk, a steel magnate long enmeshed with Ukraine’s business and political elite, had earlier donated more than $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and been invited to dine at the Washington home of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
The equal opportunity largess of powerful Ukrainians like Mr. Pinchuk helps explain why so many of the most dimly lit and hazardous roads of American politics keep leading back to Ukraine, a poor, dysfunctional country on Europe’s eastern fringe….
Paul Manafort, Rudolph Giuliani, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter and Hillary Clinton have all, at one time or another, found their way there, escorted by Ukrainian guides with deep pockets and a keen sense of how to appeal to their vanities, ambitions and greed www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-cold-war-trump-giuliani.html
Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption
How did this get to be standard practice?
The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych. The renewed focus on Ukraine raises jangling questions: How did dealing in influence to burnish the fortunes of repugnant world leaders for large payoffs become a business model? How could America’s leading lights convince themselves—and us—that this is acceptable? …
Let’s start with Hunter Biden. In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally. Weeks before Biden came on, Ukraine’s government had collapsed…
And Hunter Biden was hardly the only prominent American who did well for himself during Ukraine’s transition. Another Burisma director was Cofer Black, George W. Bush’s CIA counterterrorism chief. The Republican operative and future Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort worked for Yanukovych. So did Obama White House Counsel Gregory Craig. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/hunter-bidens-legal-socially-acceptable-corruption/598804/?utm_term=2019-09-27T14%3A11%3A00&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0VjDU8ADglU_2z5M5q2jsCWW45XlOXZkiIepdeImG9mECvz4H1k_HnQIk
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason
Chelsea Manning Imprisoned Without Charge For Six Months
The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning has now been held in a federal detention center in Alexandria, Virginia for more than six months. Manning has not been charged with or committed any crime. She was sent to jail on March 8, 2019 for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury that has indicted persecuted WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who published the information she leaked exposing rampant US imperialist criminality.
As President Donald Trump threatened Friday to launch a catastrophic war against Iran, including an implicit threat to use nuclear weapons, the historic significance of what Manning and Assange did is clear. And it is also clear why every genuine defender of democratic rights and opponent of imperialism will be energetically fighting for the freedom of Manning and Assange.
Among the information that Manning provided to WikiLeaks in 2009-2010 was the infamous “Collateral Murder” video—which documented the indiscriminate killing of civilians and Reuters journalists in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. She leaked a trove of 400,000 documents that became known as the “Iraq War Logs” and another 91,000 documents that became part of the “Afghan War Logs.” Over 250,000 US diplomatic cables were also published, revealing the daily intrigue and conspiracies engaged in by American embassies and consulates around the world. The revelations played a role in inspiring ordinary people in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere to rise up in revolution against dictatorship and oppression. popularresistance.org/chelsea-manning-imprisoned-without-charge-for-six-months-for-refusing-to-testify-against-julian-assange/?fbclid=IwAR2cmY4sYJapiRuibqtPDgyGXwLWjWWdJq3w4b_qgUVNHXQ0E2g7miWssbc
Julian Assange ‘subjected to every kind of torment’ in Belmarsh prison as he awaits extradition
The father of Julian Assange has said the WikiLeaks founder is “being subjected to every sort of torment” at Belmarsh prison as he awaits the hearing that could see him extradited to the US.
The whistleblower, who is being held alongside some of the UK’s most infamous criminals ahead of his extradition hearing in February, could face a maximum prison sentence of 175 years under charges laid down by Washington.
Now his father John Shipton has warned his son is suffering mentally and physically in prison. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assange-latest-extradition-hearing-belmarsh-prison-father-john-shipton-award-un-a9124586.html
Democratic candidates back impeachment inquiry — and a GOP challenger accuses Trump of treason
“It’s treason pure and simple, and the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death,” Weld told MSNBC. If the Senate convicts a president after impeachment by the House, he said, the penalty “is removal from office, and that might look like a pretty good alternative to the president if he could work out a plea deal.” www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-09-24/2020-democratic-presidential-candidates-trump-impeachment
Solidarity for Never
Backgrounder: The Torment and Demise of the United Auto Workers Union as Performed by the Auto Bosses, the Labor Leaders, Counterfeit Radicals, Fictional Revolutionaries, and All Those Who Know They Are Not Innocent Either
…On June 22, 2006, (TWO YEARS PRE-BAILOUT) the New York Times national editions, delivered to most subscribers’ homes by 5:00 a.m. all over the US (a feat in itself, demonstrating the potential of our era), featured a 32-page distinct color section devoted to “Luxury, the New Gilded Age of Autos.” In this section, which offers extravagance in the form of the old stand-by of chrome, metal, and wheels, there are exactly three clearly visible human beings, all men; the only one with a noticeable face being James Giordano, an aging BMW car salesman: “I came to the US 47 years ago in search of the best life quality the world had to offer.” Remarkably, the traditional slinky women who once graced car ads with the fantasy that the car would get you one, are not offered. Instead, it is just page after page of Jaguars, Hondas, Lamborghinis, with some declasse Dodge Vipers, GM and Ford SUV’s tossed in. No fantasy; no more. Buy the Beast. Rule alone.
On June 26, 2006, GM announced that 33% of its workforce, 35,000 workers, had taken the bait for employment buyouts. Delphi, once a part of GM, spun off as a feeder industry, said 12,600 workers accepted buyouts, about half the work force, with many more expected to follow before a July “deadline.” And Ford happily announced that at least 10,000 workers would leave their employ. The three companies announced simultaneous management cuts. GM lost market share in the US, down from what was once 50% of the market, to about 20% and falling www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=2ahUKEwjnx-Gqn_XkAhVWs54KHXsQBgQQFjACegQIAxAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fojs.library.ubc.ca%2Findex.php%2Fclogic%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F191776%2F188771&usg=AOvVaw08tEgv2TDLiT5pR5PRSIcx
Spy versus Spy
China’s Spies Are on the Offensive
China’s spies are waging an intensifying espionage offensive against the United States. Does America have what it takes to stop them? (and who is Mitch McConnel’s wife anyway?)
In early 2017, Kevin Mallory was struggling financially. After years of drawing a government salary as a member of the military and as a CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officer, he was behind on his mortgage and $230,000 in debt. Though he had, like many veteran intelligence officials, ventured into the private sector, where the pay can be considerably better, things still weren’t going well; his consulting business was floundering.
Then, prosecutors said, he received a message on LinkedIn, where he had more than 500 connections. It had come from a Chinese recruiter with whom Mallory had five mutual connections. The recruiter, according to the message, worked for a think tank in China, where Mallory, who spoke fluent Mandarin, had been based for part of his career. The think tank, the recruiter said, was interested in Mallory’s foreign-policy expertise. The LinkedIn message led to a phone call with a man who called himself Michael Yang. According to the FBI, the initial conversations that would lead Mallory down a path of betrayal were conducted in the bland language of professional courtesy. That February, according to a search warrant, Yang sent Mallory an email requesting “another short phone call with you to address several points.” Mallory replied, “So I can be prepared, will we be speaking via Skype or will you be calling my mobile device?”
Soon after, Mallory was on a plane to meet Yang in Shanghai. He would later tell the FBI he suspected that Yang was not a think-tank employee, but a Chinese intelligence officer, which apparently was okay by him. Mallory’s trip to China began an espionage relationship that saw him receive $25,000 over two months in exchange for handing over government secrets www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/inside-us-china-espionage-war/595747/
U.S. Intelligence Officer Who Tried to Share Secrets With China Is Sentenced to 10 Years
He was expected to receive a harsher sentence. But a federal judge said he had cooperated with investigators.
A former United States intelligence officer who tried to pass secret military information to the Chinese government was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison — a term that was five years less than expected because he provided information that could help prevent foreign agents from targeting other Americans, the authorities said.
The former officer, Ron Rockwell Hansen, 60, pleaded guilty in March to one count of attempting to gather or deliver defense information.
Mr. Hansen said he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for information he shared with the Chinese government. He was part of what prosecutors called a “troubling trend” of American intelligence officers being recruited by China for espionage.
As part of his plea agreement, Mr. Hansen was to receive a 15-year sentence. But Judge Dee Benson of the United States District Court in Salt Lake City gave him a sentence of 10 years on Tuesday after he said Mr. Hansen cooperated with federal investigators. www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/china-intelligence-sentence.html
The Magical Mystery Tour
He Sued Over a Priest’s Abuse. Then the Diocese Filed for Bankruptcy.
The Rochester diocese’s move has left many who were promised justice under New York’s Child Victims Act feeling betrayed.
Peter Saracino was in elementary school when, he said, a priest lured him away from a swimming pool and sexually abused him inside a seminary.
He kept the secret for decades, even as his life fell apart.
“We were raised to view the priest as another Christ,” Mr. Saracino said, “so when you get raped by a priest, it’s like being raped by God himself.”
Last month, at 67 years old, Mr. Saracino filed a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester under a new law in New York that allows victims to seek justice over sexual abuse from long ago.
He expected revelations. Instead, he said, came another betrayal.
His lawsuit and dozens of others against the diocese were supposed to play out in civil court, with the expectation that victims would learn what church knew and did. But the diocese sidestepped all of that by declaring bankruptcy.
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
How we think about the term ‘enslaved’ matters
400 years ago, the first Africans who came to America were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured – and this makes a crucial difference when we think about the meanings of our past
The year 1619 is momentous in American history, as a recent visit by the current US president attests. In July, Donald Trump visited Jamestown, Virginia, to commemorate two events in 1619: the July creation of the colony’s representative government, the House of Burgesses, and the August arrival of people he termed “enslaved Africans”.
This phrase improves upon a commonplace in American discourse, the one-word “slaves”. But the term “enslaved”, in and of itself, merits further comment, as history and as ideology. How we use these words makes a crucial difference when we think about the meanings of our past.
People were not enslaved in Virginia in 1619, they were indentured. The 20 or so Africans were sold and bought as “servants” for a term of years, and they joined a population consisting largely of European indentured servants, mainly poor people from the British Isles whom the Virginia Company of London had transported and sold into servitude.
Enslavement was a process that took place step by step, after the mid-17th century. This process of turning “servants” from Africa into racialized workers enslaved for life occurred in the 1660s to 1680s through a succession of Virginia laws that decreed that a child’s status followed that of its mother and that baptism did not automatically confer emancipation. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans had indeed been marked off by race in law as chattel to be bought, sold, traded, inherited and serve as collateral for business and debt services. This was not already the case in 1619.
Even in 1700, Africans were hardly the only unfree colonists, for a majority of those laboring in Virginia were people bound to service. They were indentured whites. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/14/slavery-in-america-1619-first-ships-jamestown?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR39T8Bl5Jwtz5zZ7WUjjGUbG2NSGb0XNkF_Z15SgwmOmqFSBb-UR5ZQRVo
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So Long
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Bush said.
The U.S. invaded Iraq seven weeks later.
But in an op-ed titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” published in The New York Times, Wilson directly contradicted those 16 words. He claimed that the Bush administration was manipulating intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion.
“Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,” Wilson wrote….
That op-ed set off a firestorm in Washington, D.C., as the Bush administration scrambled to justify Bush’s State of the Union claim. A week after the article was published, Wilson’s then-wife Valerie Plame’s covert identity as a CIA operative was leaked to the press and then exposed by columnist Robert Novak. Plame had been undercover for most of her career.
“It just felt like I got a sucker punch to the gut,” Plame told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2007. “And I knew, of course, my career as I knew it was over.”
She was forced to resign from the CIA. www.npr.org/2019/09/28/765340826/joseph-wilson-former-diplomat-who-challenged-basis-of-the-iraq-war-dies-at-69