Rouge Forum Dispatch: Indigenous People’s Day Ahead.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 We Say Fight Back!
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. ~Voltaire
JOBS!!!! Simon Fraser www.sfu.ca/education/work-with-us.html
Jobs!!! Lone Star www.lonestar.edu/21568.htm
C. Wright Mills: “Letter to the New Left (1960) They tell us, for example, that ordinary men can’t always be political “heroes.” Who said they could? But keep looking around you and why not search out the conditions of such heroism as men do and might display? They tell us we are too “impatient,” that our “pretentious” theories are not well enough grounded. That is true, but neither are they trivial; why don’t they get to work, refuting or grounding them? They tell us we “don’t really understand” Russia — and China — today. That is true; we don’t; neither do they; we are studying it. They tell us we are “ominous” in our formulations. That is true; we do have enough imagination to be frightened = and we don’t have to hide it: we are not afraid we’ll panic. They tell us we “are grinding axes.” Of course we are: we do have, among other points of view, morally grounded ones; and we are aware of them. They tell us, in their wisdom, we don’t understand that The Struggle is Without End. True: we want to change its form, its focus, its object.
We are frequently accused of being “utopian” — in our criticisms and in our proposals; and along with this, of basing our hopes for a New Left politics “merely on reason,” or more concretely, upon the intelligentsia in its broadest sense.
There is truth in these charges. But must we not ask: what now is really meant by utopian? And: Is not our utopianism a major source of our strength? www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm
Boots Riley Interview: LF: Is there anybody on the 2016 political scene who turns you on?
BR: Nope. Not in the 2012 scene, 2008, or 2004. I think that right now, one of the things that needs to happen is that social movements need to connect—join with labor struggles like the Fight for 15, and have shutdowns around larger social issues.
LF: You were very involved in Occupy Oakland. What do you tell people who ask what came of that?
BR: I think that for those folks that got burned out when they were in Occupy, that has to do with the fact that there was a lot of energy—and instead of combining spectacle with the withholding of labor, we got stuck on spectacle.
LF: Stanley Nelson’s documentary shows how the Black Panthers used spectacle.
BR: The Panthers stopped wearing the berets and the leather jackets in 1968 because they realized that the spectacle was making people feel like, “Wow, that is something [apart from me] to look up to.” We don’t need to bring back the 1960s; we need to bring back the ’20s and ’30s as far as strategy.
LF: What did you make of the confrontation between Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter?
BR: Elections are a dead end. We have taken our energy away from organizing at the workplace and put it into voting for this or that candidate. I’m not going to be naïve and say that there aren’t differences in candidates. There’s a little wiggle room, but the couple things you can get are far outweighed by the decimation of mass movements that happens when any election comes around. www.thenation.com/article/qa-boots-riley/
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OLJSz-wzOHI
The Little Red Schoolhouse
Former Chicago Public Schools chief to plead guilty to bribery scheme
Byrd-Bennett had been the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools less than two months when the man who helped persuade the Emanuel administration to give her the job sent an email allegedly laying out the heart of a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme.
In the December 2012 email, Gary Solomon, the owner of SUPES Academy and a consultant with long ties to the Emanuel administration, assured Byrd-Bennett that trust accounts had been set up in the names of two of her young relatives, each funded with tens of thousands of dollars, federal prosecutors alleged. The cash would be hers once she stepped down from her public post and rejoined his firm.
“It is our assumption that the distribution will serve as a signing bonus upon your return to SUPES,” Solomon wrote, according to prosecutors. “If you only join for the day, you will be the highest paid person on the planet for that day.”
The secret bonus was just one part of a massive scheme outlined in a criminal indictment Thursday charging Byrd-Bennett, 66, with steering no-bid contracts worth more than $23 million to SUPES in return for promises of up to $2.3 million in kickbacks, other perks and a job.
Solomon, 47, and co-owner Thomas Vranas, 34, also were criminally charged in the 23-count indictment, as was SUPES, their Wilmette-based business, and Synesi Associates, another education consulting company the two ran.www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-barbara-byrd-bennett-chicago-public-schools-charged-met-20151008-story.html
Chicago Teacher Union Hack, Lewis’, hug fest with Byrd-Bennett
My sense is that you and Byrd-Bennett bonded and had a close relationship. Is that true?
She and I regularly met so we could go over issues that were problematic. She always got back to me whenever I asked her for help on certain issues. Yes, we had a really good relationship, and I think it moved a lot of things forward that may or may not have moved forward under another administration. www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/August-2015/Karen-Lewis-Response/
The Greatest Threat to Campus Free Speech is Coming From Dianne Feinstein and her Military-Contractor Husband One of the most dangerous threats to campus free speech has been emerging at the highest levels of the University of California system, the sprawling collection of 10 campuses that includes UCLA and UC Berkeley. The university’s governing Board of Regents, with the support of University President Janet Napolitano and egged on by the state’s legislature, has been attempting to adopt new speech codes that — in the name of combating “anti-Semitism” — would formally ban various forms of Israel criticism and anti-Israel activism.
Under the most stringent such regulations, students found to be in violation of these codes would face suspension or expulsion. In July, it appeared that the Regents were poised to enact the most extreme version, but decided instead to push the decision off until September, when they instead would adopt non-binding guidelines to define “hate speech” and “intolerance.”
One of the Regents most vocally advocating for the most stringent version of the speech code is Richard Blum, the multi-millionaire defense contractor who is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. At a Regents meeting last week, reported the Los Angeles Times, Blum expressly threatened that Feinstein would publicly denounce the university if it failed to adopt far more stringent standards than the ones it appeared to be considering, and specifically demanded they be binding and contain punishments for students found to be in violation. theintercept.com/2015/09/25/dianne-feinstein-husband-threaten-univ-calif-demanding-ban-excessive-israel-criticism
Campuses Debate Rising Demands for ‘Comfort Animals’
Rachel Brill and Mary McCarthy are seniors and longtime roommates at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. This year, they share their four-bedroom campus apartment with two other female students. Also, Theo and Carl.
Theo, easygoing and unflappable, is a tawny, 103-pound, longhaired German shepherd. Carl, an energetic charm magnet, is a jet-black, 1.5-pound Netherland Dwarf rabbit.
House rules: Carl must reside in a pen under Ms. McCarthy’s raised bed; Theo snoozes in a crate in Ms. Brill’s bedroom. Carl cannot be let loose in the living room, where Theo likes to hang out. “We’re still very careful because we don’t want there to be an issue with Theo and Carl,” Ms. McCarthy said. “We’re both very anxious people.”
And that is exactly why Theo and Carl have permission to live in campus housing.
Like many schools across the country, St. Mary’s, a small, public liberal arts college, is figuring out how to field increasing requests for animals by students www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/us/four-legged-roommates-help-with-the-stresses-of-campus-life.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
A C130 bombed and strafed the hospital for nearly 30 minutes
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVXBHNvpTcg
U.S. General Says Afghans Requested Airstrike That Hit Kunduz Hospital
The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, on Monday responded publicly to criticism over the American airstrike that destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the city of Kunduz, claiming that Afghan forces had requested the strike while under fire and conceding that the military had incorrectly reported at first that American troops were under direct threat.
But General Campbell’s comments, in a sudden and brief news conference at the Pentagon, did not clarify the military’s initial claims that the strike, which killed 22 people, had been an accident to begin with. Doctors Without Borders has repeatedly said that there had been no fighting around the hospital, and that the building was hit over and over by airstrikes on Saturday morning, even though the group had sent the American military the precise coordinates of its hospital so it could be avoided. In the news conference, General Campbell said that Afghan forces had come under fire near the hospital and then called for help. “An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat and several civilians were accidentally struck. This is different from the initial reports which indicated that U.S. forces were threatened and that the airstrike was called on their behalf,” he said.
For the first time, General Campbell suggested that American Special Forces personnel with the Afghan forces had a role in coordinating the strike.
“The Afghans asked for air support from a Special Forces team that we have on the ground” training and advising Afghan troops in Kunduz, he said.
Asked how close the Americans were to the scene of the fighting when the strike was called in, General Campbell refused to answer, repeating that it would “come out in the investigation.”
After the news conference, Doctors Without Borders, which said Sunday that it was pulling its operation out of Kunduz, released a statement calling for an independent investigation, and criticizing the shifting American accounts.
The American military’s “description of the attack keeps changing — from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government,” said Christopher Stokes, the general director of Doctors Without Borders, in the statement.
“The reality is the U.S. dropped those bombs. The U.S. hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and M.S.F. staff,” his statement continued, referring to the group by the initials of its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières. “The U.S. military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the U.S. and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical.”
Doctors Without Borders airstrike: US alters story for fourth time in four days
US special operations forces – not their Afghan allies – called in the deadly airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, the US commander has conceded.
Shortly before General John Campbell, the commander of the US and Nato war in Afghanistan, testified to a Senate panel, the president of Doctors Without Borders – also known as Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) – said the US and Afghanistan had made an “admission of a war crime”.
Shifting the US account of the Saturday morning airstrike for the fourth time in as many days, Campbell reiterated that Afghan forces had requested US air cover after being engaged in a “tenacious fight” to retake the northern city of Kunduz from the Taliban. But, modifying the account he gave at a press conference on Monday, Campbell said those Afghan forces had not directly communicated with the US pilots of an AC-130 gunship overhead.
“Even though the Afghans request that support, it still has to go through a rigorous US procedure to enable fires to go on the ground. We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires,” Campbell told the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday morning.
The airstrike on the hospital is among the worst and most visible cases of civilian deaths caused by US forces during the 14-year Afghanistan war that Barack Obama has declared all but over. It killed 12 MSF staff and 10 patients, who had sought medical treatment after the Taliban overran Kunduz last weekend. Three children died in the airstrike that came in multiple waves and burned patients alive in their beds.
On Tuesday, MSF denounced Campbell’s press conference as an attempt to shift blame to the Afghans. “The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition,” said its director general, Christopher Stokes. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-without-borders-airstrike-afghanistan-us-account-changes-again?CMP=share_btn_fb
Rashid on the Kunduz Hospital War Crime Doctors and nurses of the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières abandoned its bombed hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz on Sunday after 22 people — including 12 of its staff and three children — were killed and 37 seriously wounded by American missiles early on Saturday morning.
It was the only functioning hospital in a city of 300,000 where the Taliban and Afghan government forces have been fighting for control for a week. MSF has called for an independent international inquiry into the bombing.
The attack has created an international scandal, with the US military in the dock at the same time as President Barack Obama has been trying to persuade Russia to target the Islamic militant group Isis in Syria rather than other anti-regime forces and civilian targets. Just hours before the attack, the US and some of its coalition allies, including Britain, had issued a statement condemning Russia for causing civilian casualties in Syria.
The bombing of a western non-governmental organisation by a western power — even if it was a tragic mistake — and the closure of the hospital is certain to persuade other NGOs in Afghanistan to pull out, just when Afghans are facing a massive Taliban offensive and a collapsing economy.
Moreover, fighting has now spread across northern and western Afghanistan and it is highly unlikely that medical services — local or foreign — will be available to ordinary Afghans in these war zones. Doctors are fleeing their posts, the Taliban have no medical support for their troops while Afghan civilians are heavily dependent on foreign medical NGOs for treating war wounds. www.ahmedrashid.com/publications/afganistan/articles/
Pentagon Blood Money for Hospital Attack The United States will make “condolence payments” to the wounded victims and the families of 22 people killed in the airstrike against a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last week, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook announced Saturday.
The amount of the payments has not been determined, Cook said.
“If necessary and appropriate, the administration will seek additional authority from the Congress,” he said, adding that the payments will go to “civilian non-combatants injured and the families of civilian non-combatants killed as a result of U.S. military operations.”
Earlier this week, U.S. President Barack Obama called and apologized to the head of Doctors Without Borders, whose staff and patients were killed and injured. The attack in the embattled city October 3 killed 12 medical staff members and at least 10 patients, three of them children.
Another 37 people were wounded, according to the global charity group, which works in conflict zones to help victims of war and other tragedies.
Gen. John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has said the hospital was hit accidentally during an American airstrike. The Pentagon is carrying out an investigation, as are NATO and Afghanistan.
The charity group — which is also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, and provides medical care in some of the world’s most dangerous places — is calling the strike an “attack on the Geneva Conventions.” www.cnn.com/2015/10/10/politics/pentagon-condolence-payments-kunduz/
Taliban seizes 2 more districts in Afghan north The Taliban overran two more districts in northern Afghanistan, this time in the province of Faryab, where the jihadist group made a push to seize the capital just last weekend.
The Taliban said it seized control of the districts of Garziwan and Pashtun Kot in two separate statements that were released on Voice of Jihad, the group’s official propaganda outlet.
“Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate have managed to completely liberated [sic] Khwaja Musa district [Pashtun Kot] administration center, police HQ building and all the surrounding areas during a large scale operation,” the first statement said. “14 enemy check posts were overrun, forcing the enemy to flee while leaving behind 4 dead bodies and 2 APC wreckages.”
The Taliban later stated that it “liberated [the] Garzewan administration center, police HQ building and all the surrounding buildings around 05:30 pm local time today” after launching an offensive yesterday.
The Taliban’s claims were largely confirmed in Afghan press reports. www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/10/taliban-seize-two-more-districts-in-afghan-north.php?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Obama Administration Ends Effort to Train Syrians to Combat ISIS ($500 million for 5 recruits)
The Obama administration on Friday abandoned its efforts to build up a new rebel force inside Syria to combat the Islamic State, acknowledging the failure of its $500 million campaign to train thousands of fighters and announcing that it will instead use the money to provide ammunition and some weapons for groups already engaged in the battle.
Defense Department training sites across the Middle East, including ones in Turkey and Jordan, will soon suspend almost all operations, officials said, in favor of a revamped program that briefly screens Arab rebel commanders of existing Syrian units before equipping them with much-needed ammunition and, potentially, small arms. Initial airdrops of equipment could begin as early as this weekend, officials said. The decision to scuttle a central piece of President Obama’s strategy for confronting extremists in Syria was made after mounting evidence that the training mission had resulted in no more than a handful of American-coached fighters. And it comes amid Russia’s forceful entry into the Syrian conflict, a move by President Vladimir V. Putin that has highlighted the lack of progress by the United States and its coalition. www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/world/middleeast/pentagon-program-islamic-state-syria.html
In Putin’s military escalation in Syria, one clear loser: Obama The outcome of Vladimir Putin’s bold military gamble in Syria is far from clear, but in the short term, one loser seems certain: President Obama.
The Kremlin raised the stakes Wednesday by firing cruise missiles into Syria from warships nearly 1,000 miles away as Obama’s critics at home and abroad said Putin’s escalating attempt to bolster Syrian President Bashar Assad already has made the White House look weak and wavering.
The White House has been poised for weeks to quietly shift more U.S. military support to seasoned Kurdish militias and other rebel fighters in northern Syria. But at this point, any change in policy will appear to be in response to Putin’s muscular moves, not a new initiative to help solve the multi-sided conflict.
Syria’s ‘moderates’ have disappeared… and there are no good guys: Fisk
The Russian air force in Syria has flown straight into the West’s fantasy air space. The Russians, we are now informed, are bombing the “moderates” in Syria – “moderates” whom even the Americans admitted two months ago, no longer existed.
It’s rather like the Isis fighters who left Europe to fight for the “Caliphate”.Remember them? Scarcely two months ago, our political leaders – and leader writers – were warning us all of the enormous danger posed by “home-grown” Islamists who were leaving Britain and other European countries and America to fight for the monsters of Isis. Then the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees began trekking up the Balkans towards Europe after risking death in the Mediterranean – and we were all told by the same political leaders to be fearful that Isis killers were among them.
It’s amazing how European Muslim fighters fly to Turkey to join Isis, and a few weeks later, they’re drowning in leaky boats or tramping back again and taking trains from Hungary to Germany. But if this nonsense was true, where did they get the time for all the terrorist training they need in order to attack us when they get back to Europe?
It is possible, of course, that this was mere storytelling. By contrast, the chorus of horror that has accompanied Russia’s cruel air strikes this past week has gone beyond sanity.
Let’s start with a reality check. The Russian military are killers who go for the jugular. They slaughtered the innocent of Chechnya to crush the Islamist uprising there, and they will cut down the innocent of Syria as they try to crush a new army of Islamists and save the ruthless regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian army, some of whose members are war criminals, have struggled ferociously to preserve the state – and used barrel bombs to do it. They have also fought to the death.
“American officials” – those creatures beloved of The New York Times – claim that the Syrian army does not fight Isis. If true, who on earth killed the 56,000 Syrian soldiers – the statistic an official secret, but nonetheless true – who have so far died in the Syrian war? The preposterous Free Syrian Army (FSA)?
This rubbish has reached its crescendo in the on-again off-again saga of the Syrian “moderates”. These men were originally military defectors to the FSA, which America and European countries regarded as a possible pro-Western force to be used against the Syrian government army. But the FSA fell to pieces, corrupted, and the “moderates” defected all over again, this time to the Islamist Nusrah Front or to Isis, selling their American-supplied weapons to the highest bidder or merely retiring quietly – and wisely – to the countryside where they maintained a few scattered checkpoints.
US naval manoeuvres in South China Sea risk clash with Beijing Officials in Beijing have expressed concern after the United States signalled it was poised to up the ante in the South China Sea by sending warships through waters claimed by China.
American navy vessels are preparing to sail through a 12-nautical mile zone around the disputed Spratly islands that China claims as its own territory, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing a senior US official.
Those manoeuvres are expected to begin over the next two weeks, the newspaper added.
Hua Chunying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, said: “We hope the United States can look upon the current situation of the South China Sea from an objective and fair perspective and play a constructive role together with China in keeping the peace and stability in the South China Sea.”
“I believe the US side is extremely clear about China’s relevant principled stance,” Hua added.
An earlier report in Foreign Policy, which cited an anonymous defence official, claimed Washington was now determined to put on a “show of military might” in the South China Sea. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/09/us-naval-manoeuvres-in-south-china-sea-risk-clash-with-beijing
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
Rouge Keynoter Paul Street:
Yes, There is an Imperialist Ruling Class
Contemporary history is neither a series of random occurrences nor the predetermined plaything of a small cabal of super-empowered conspirators. The truth is somewhere in-between. A sizeable cadre of class- and system-conscious deep-state and imperial planners from the heights of concentrated private and governmental power join together to shape the outlines of much of recent history. Along with professional class “experts” agreeable to their basic aims, they do so in accord with their shared interests in the endless upward accumulation of wealth and power. They serve the profits system that is still headquartered primarily in the United States even as it develops ever more and varied outposts across a globalizing world.
They exercise vastly disproportionate influence on the course of events and policy largely behind the scenes, in the darkly deceptive name of democracy. But it isn’t about conspiracy. The planners in question are numerous. Their names, activities, and backgrounds and the record of their influence are all open to investigation by those with the time, skill, energy, and willingness to make the connections.
It’s about class power and the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, wealth, and empire that rule beneath and beyond the pretense of popular governance. (“We must make our choice,” the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1941: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.”) It’s about capitalism and its evil twin imperialism, with strong doses of racism, patriarchy, nationalism, police-statism, and eco-cide thrown in. It’s about what Karl Marx called “the bourgeoisie’s…need of a constantly expanding market …over the whole surface of the globe.” “Capital,” the German left Marxist Rosa Luxemburg once observed, “needs the means of production and the labor power of the whole world for untrammeled accumulation.” www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/06/yes-there-is-an-imperialist-ruling-class/print/
Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House. They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.
Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.
These donors’ fortunes reflect the shifting composition of the country’s economic elite. Relatively few work in the traditional ranks of corporate America, or hail from dynasties of inherited wealth. Most built their own businesses, parlaying talent and an appetite for risk into huge wealth: They founded hedge funds in New York, bought up undervalued oil leases in Texas, made blockbusters in Hollywood. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and Israel. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html?emc=edit_na_20151010&nlid=5100421&ref=cta&_r=0
Companion pieces on the Depression, 1929
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EPTCm9RVRM
Lewis Corey’s book, “Decline of American Capitalism” is free online “..One aspect of the American crisis arose out of the depression and the efforts to overcome it. While ballyhoo promises a new and everlasting prosperity, a new world, millions hope merely for a job, any sort of job; for an income, any sort of income to ward off charity. Millions must accept charity, whether direct or in the form of “relief work.” The mobilization of government to “war upon depression” aroused hopes which were meagrely realized.
Another and more fundamental aspect of the crisis involves the decline of American capitalism. It is a crisis of the economic order itself. This is evident in the inability to restore prosperity on any substantial scale. The future is one of incomplete recovery: of economic decline, mass disemployment (including millions in clerical and professional occupations), lower standards of living, and war. Every depression is in a sense a crisis of capitalism. But this depression represents the development of a fundamental, permanent crisis in the economic and social relations of American capitalism. Only a deep-going crisis could force government and industry to adopt measures which were formerly condemned as opposed to economic progress. The intervention of government in industry is, of course, nothing new: the development of capitalism has been accompanied by growing government aid to industry. But such aid was limited in scope. It was, economically, an expression of the upswing of capitalism, of the necessity of government action to “regulate” the developing relations of trustified capitalism. But to-day government intervention is on an unprecedented scale. www.marxists.org/archive/corey/1934/decline/intro1.html
PBS Video focuses on Detroit in the Depression (link below won’t fire)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ_lizW5zSI
Pension checks to be cut in half for Teamsters retirees
Retired truck driver Jerry Deaton, 69, says every time he received his monthly Teamsters pension check, he would get the chills and worry how much money he could lose in the future given all the rumors.
On Monday, he got the answer he dreaded: His pension could be slashed by roughly half.
His $2,700 a month pension is targeted to be cut to around $1,317 a month as of July 1, 2016, as part of a massive proposed rescue of the troubled Teamsters Central States Pension Fund.
“It doesn’t leave you with much options,” said Deaton, who lives in Osseo in Hillsdale County. “I’ll be 70 years old in December. Who’s going to hire a 70-year-old truck driver?” www.freep.com/story/money/personal-finance/susan-tompor/2015/10/07/teamsters-pension-cuts-central-states/73515432/
The sobering numbers come from the Google Consumer Survey commissioned by GoBankingRates, conducted in September from a representative sample of 5,006 respondents.
“It’s worrisome that such a large percentage of Americans have so little set aside in a savings account,” says Cameron Huddleston, a personal finance columnist for GoBankingRates. “They likely don’t have cash reserves to cover an emergency and will have to rely on credit, friends and family, or even their retirement accounts to cover unexpected expenses.” www.rt.com/usa/318027-us-savings-low-nonexistent/
Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, 1 in 5 have none – survey
VA spent $6.3 million on sculptures and fountains for their hospitals
There’s a $483,000 rock sculpture that’s layered into cubes outside the mental health center at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., that’s meant to evoke “a sense of transformation, rebuilding and self-investigation,” according to designers. It’s part of a renovated $1.3 million courtyard.
There’s an art installation on the side of a parking garage that displays quotes by Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt in Morse code, at a cost of $285,000. It lights up. Altogether, VA Palo Alto Health Care System has spent at least $6.3 million on art and consulting services. The costs come to $4,190,356 at the Palo Alto Medical Center, $1,879,521 at the Monterey Health Care Center and $280,000 in other budgeted projects.www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/10/09/the-va-spent-6-3-million-on-sculptures-and-fountains-for-their-hospitals-should-they-have/
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement
above, Nazi and ISIS death squads
Israeli Soldiers Kill 6 Palestinians in Gaza as West Bank Unrest Grows
Israeli soldiers killed six young Palestinians on Friday in the Gaza Strip, including a 15-year-old boy, as they opened fire to quell crowds that hurled rocks and rolled burning tires close to the fence separating Gaza from Israel, Israeli military and Gaza health officials said.
The deadly clash came as the roiling violence and unrest of the past week continued across Israel and the occupied West Bank; there were four more stabbing attacks, including the first by a Jewish Israeli against Arabs, and unruly demonstrations that raged into the night. www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/world/middleeast/israeli-soldiers-kill-6-palestinians-in-gaza-as-west-bank-unrest-grows.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB-pz-aFbgw
As leftists began to march against Turkey’s regime
Solidarity for Never
NEA boss who rammed through NEA’s support for Hillbillary had different ideas back in the day A few days ago, Eskelsen responded to a question about Clinton from a Salt Lake Tribune reporter by saying that “the president should resign. How can this man ever be believed again? This goes beyond party politics.”
Eskelsen is challenging first-term incumbent Merrill Cook, who is believed to be one of the GOP’s most vulnerable House members. Eskelsen’s press secretary, Megan Sather, said this week that Eskelsen felt strongly that as a mother and a teacher who believes part of her job is to teach “respect, responsibility and reason,” she had to call on the president to resign.
On October 25, the Deseret News asked her if the President should resign, and she replied: “If the president truly wants to put this situation behind the country and move on, he should resign.”
Three days later, a reporter from Brigham Young University described the opening of the final debate between Eskelsen and Cook:
Cook began the debate reaffirming his position on the possibility of an impeachment hearing against President Clinton.
“What our president has done is indefensible,” he said. “His actions have been against the constitution and he should be punished accordingly.”
Eskelsen agreed, reminding voters that she was the first Democrat to ask President Clinton to resign.
“I won’t pre-judge President Clinton without seeing the evidence, but I think it would be honorable for him to step down,” Eskelsen said. www.eiaonline.com/2015/10/05/lilys-mea-culpa/
NEA members $ to Hillbillary If you want to entertain yourself with even more reactions to NEA’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, head over to its Facebook page, which at last count had 874 comments – almost all of them negative.
It’s important to clarify what the union is intent on obfuscating. Even NEA directors are telling members, “Your dues do not support this. All campaign expenditures come out of the NEA Fund, not membership dues, two separate entities.”
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
PAC funds are collected through voluntary donations, the bulk of which are made by NEA delegates during the four-day annual convention. That money is separate from the union’s general fund and is spent on direct contributions to federal candidates. Because of the votes this weekend, during the primaries money from this fund will go to Clinton’s campaign and no other. If you made no PAC donation, no money of yours goes directly to the Clinton campaign treasury.
HOWEVER, anyone with even the smallest knowledge of campaign finance knows that direct contributions to candidates are only a very small portion of campaign expenditures. NEA’s SuperPAC, member communications, independent expenditures and media buys that are not coordinated with the Clinton campaign ALL COME FROM MEMBERSHIP DUES MONEY.
NEA isn’t worried about whether you are a Sanders supporter, or how you will vote in the primaries, or even if you are a Republican, Green, Libertarian or Communist. The votes over the weekend authorize the union to spend the money from ALL MEMBERS to promote Clinton’s candidacy.
You don’t have to take my word for it. OpenSecrets.org has NEA’s PAC finances by two-year cycle since 1990. The most the PAC has ever raised through voluntary contributions in a cycle is about $7 million. In the 2014 cycle, NEA’s SuperPAC alone raised and spent about $21 million. www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2015/10/05/why-the-long-facebook/
Spy versus Spy
US spy agencies were ‘caught off-guard’ by Putin’s sudden dramatic escalation in Syria Senior US lawmakers have begun probing possible intelligence lapses over Moscow’s intervention in Syria, concerned that American spy agencies were slow to grasp the scope and intention of Russia’s dramatic military offensive there, US congressional sources and other officials told Reuters.
A week after Russia plunged directly into Syria’s civil war by launching a campaign of air strikes, the intelligence committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives want to examine the extent to which the spy community overlooked or misjudged critical warning signs, the sources said.
Findings of major blind spots would mark the latest of several US intelligence misses in recent years, including Moscow’s surprise takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region last year and China’s rapid expansion of island-building activities in the South China Sea. www.businessinsider.com/russia-syria-us-intelligence-off-guard-putin-obama-2015-10
The Magical Mystery Tour
Pope Francis Clarifies That God Just One Of Many Immortal Beings Who Speak To Him Every Day
Explaining how he rarely goes more than an hour or two without hearing from one of them or another, Pope Francis revealed to reporters Tuesday that God is just one of many immortal beings who speak to him on a daily basis. “God is always there to listen to my prayers and provide spiritual guidance, but on any given day, there are maybe 15 or 20 other undying entities from beyond our world—Anubis, Quetzalcoatl, Freyja, you name it—who get in touch with me,” said the bishop of Rome, adding that, over the course of a month, he communicates with hundreds of various deities, spirits, numina, naiads, dryads, and wraiths who come bearing some kind of important message or just check in to see how he’s doing. “Sure, in my day-to-day job I serve as an earthly liaison for the Lord Our God. But to be honest, I don’t talk to Him nearly as much as I do Hanuman or Nerrivik the Sea-Mother.
St. Thomas More ex-parish manager pleads guilty to theft
Janice Verschuren, the former manager of St. Thomas More parish who was embroiled in a theft scandal with its Catholic pastor, pleaded guilty Tuesday to stealing $25,982 from the Troy parish by illegally including her ex-husband on the parish’s health insurance plan.
Verschuren also will be required to repay that amount to St. Thomas More as part of a plea deal she made Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Arthur Tarnow.
From about 2007 to 2010, Verschuren said she “knowingly failed to disclose or notify St. Thomas More” that her divorced husband was ineligible to be included on her health insurance “which was subsidized by the parish.”
“You know it was illegal?” Tarnow asked Verschuren.
“Yes,” said Verschuren, “I accept responsibility.”
She pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of theft in connection with health care, which could carry a maximum 1 year prison sentence. But Tarnow told her sentencing guidelines in her case means she could spend no time in prison or up to 6 months. Sentencing was scheduled for Oct. 26.
Verschuren and the church’s onetime pastor, the Rev. Edward Belczak, originally had been charged with several counts related to theft and fraud involving several thousands of dollars from St. Thomas More parish. The financial irregularities came to light in January 2013, when the Archdiocese of Detroit removed Belczak as the parish’s pastor. www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015/10/06/st-thomas-more-ex-parish-manager-pleads-guilty-theft/73440240/
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljVVFKjN0Dc
So Long
October 9th, 1967
