Rouge Forum Dispatch: Dead Presidents!
Saturday, December 1st, 2018We Say Fight Back!
Oakland teachers, without a contract for more than a year, threaten to strike: NEA won’t coordinate Oakland/UTLA strikes
She teaches English and history at Coliseum College Prep Academy in East Oakland, but Becca Rozo-Marsh knows how to do the math.
She could earn more money by leaving Oakland Unified School District and getting a job in another school district. Even so, Rozo-Marsh wants to continue working in the community where she’s gotten to know the families of her high school students over seven years.
“I know there are a lot of teachers that are being forced to leave,” said Rozo-Marsh, who was raised in El Cerrito and graduated from Berkeley High School. “They want to make the choice to stay, and they can’t afford to live here.” But leaving “destabilizes our schools.”
Oakland pays teachers a starting salary of roughly $46,000, while nearby San Leandro Unified pays $60,000, Hayward Unified pays $61,000 and Fremont Unified pays $65,000, according to the California Department of Education. Differences in the way benefits are offered may mean the amounts can’t be directly compared. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/otisrtaylorjr/article/Oakland-teachers-without-a-contract-for-more-13419865.php?fbclid=IwAR0cCB7mnXVtuas8XcpKHCRetOG1UArY8C3bYAgU6AxasLSR7uR2M5klAXs#photo-15898723
South Africa: NUMSA on Why to Launch an Anti-Capitalist Party
The National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA), the country’s largest union with over 330,000 members launched its own party earlier this Month. Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, NUMSA spokesperson spoke to teleSUR Thursday to explain the need for a workers’ party with an anti-capitalist program.
The union announced its decision to launch the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party after it declared itself in open opposition to the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party in 2013, over what they call anti-worker “World Bank, and (International Monetary Fund) IMF type of economic policies.”
“NUMSA was integral to the national liberation movement to defeat apartheid, they fought side by side, together with the ANC… However, in South Africa, more than two decades after that system has been overthrown, the working class majority continues to live in the same conditions that existed during apartheid. More than half the population languishes in poverty… South Africa is one of the most unequal countries of the world, with the wealth of the country owned by three white billionaires,” she denounced. www.telesurenglish.net/news/South-Africa-NUMSA-on-Why-to-Launch-an-Anti-Capitalist-Party-20181122-0018.html?fbclid=IwAR0JpKCNj9txZ87dSSSZEOQ-ckzJIUxN-8mon6Hij9iP9xFL8Uir5YxJTEk
www.facebook.com/TheCommonSpace/videos/353795531853673/?t=101
The Soldier’s Tale: A Man Who Went to War and Realized His Side Was the Enemy
“I was blindly following orders. I was inflicting violence on the poorest people on earth. How is there any morality in that?”
The troops live under
The cannon’s thunder
From Sind to Cooch Behar
Moving from place to place
When they come face to face
With a different breed of fellow
Whose skins are black or yellow
They quick as winking chop him into
Beefsteak tartar
—“The Cannon Song” from “The Threepenny Opera”
The soldier’s tale is as old as war. It is told and then forgotten. There are always young men and women ardent for glory, seduced by the power to inflict violence and naive enough to die for the merchants of death. The soldier’s tale is the same, war after war, generation after generation. It is Spenser Rapone’s turn now. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers” and thereby had engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Rapone laid bare the lie, although the lie often seems unassailable. We must honor those like him who have the moral courage to speak the truth about war, even if the tidal waves of patriotic propaganda that flood the culture overwhelm the voices of the just.
Rapone enlisted in the Army in 2010. He attended basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. He graduated from airborne school in February 2011 and became an Army Ranger. He watched as those around him swiftly fetishized their weapons.
“The rifle is the reification of what it means to be infantrymen,” he said when I reached him by phone in Watertown, N.Y. “You’re taught that the rifle is an extension of you. It is your life. You have to carry it at all times. The rifle made us warriors dedicated to destroying the enemy in close personal combat. At first, it was almost gleeful. We were a bunch of 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds. We had this instrument of death in our hands. We had power. We could do what 99 percent of our countrymen could not. The weapon changes you. www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/25/soldiers-tale-man-who-went-war-and-realized-his-side-was-enemy?fbclid=IwAR3ImbxuNTeaU3m0KCSuqQzwBjWwk2MTfOsnbjuncLxXHYsHf1KHnEmgXoc
Hundreds of arrests in Paris as ‘gilets jaunes’ protest turns violent
At least 100 people injured in street battles, with cars being torched and shops raided
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has insisted he will “never accept violence” after central Paris saw its worst unrest in a decade on Saturday when thousands of masked protesters fought running battles with police, torched cars, set fires to banks and houses, and burned makeshift barricades on the edges of demonstrations against fuel tax.
Near the Arc de Triomphe, one of Paris’s best-known monuments, masked men burned barricades, set fire to buildings, smashed fences and torched luxury cars on some of the most expensive streets in the city as riot police fired teargas and water cannon.
Then, by early evening, rioters spread around Paris in a game of cat and mouse with police. Luxury department stores on Boulevard Haussmann were evacuated as cars were set alight and windows smashed. Near the Louvre, metal grilles were ripped down at the Tuileries Garden where fires were started. On the Place Vendôme, a hub of luxury jewellery shops and designer stores, rioters smashed windows and built barricades.
Anti-Macron graffiti was scrawled over the Arc de Triomphe near the tomb of the unknown soldier and protesters burst into the monument smashing up its lower floors before climbing on to the roof.
More than 250 people were arrested and at least 100 injured – including one protester who was in a serious condition on Saturday night – after the violence erupted on the margins of anti-fuel tax demonstrations held by the citizens’ protest movement known as the gilets jaunes (yellow vests). www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/01/paris-france-protests-yellow-vests-gilets-jaunes-champs-elysees
www.facebook.com/onrecht.armoede/videos/270753746975362/?t=49
The Little Red Schoolhouse
End of Semester Bingo
Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications.
Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.
A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”
The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.
“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.
T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep-black-students.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
The Learning Curve: San Diego Unified Ranks ‘High’ in Chronic Absenteeism
The results for California’s system of ranking schools is out for the 2017-2018 school year, and the San Diego Unified School District came in with a “high” rate of chronic absenteeism in its schools.
The era of big data in education is evolving.
It began in the early 2000s with No Child Left Behind and a focus on high-stakes test scores that could shut down a school or earn its teachers bonuses. But now the old-ranking system, known as the Academic Performance Index or API, is out and a new system, known as the California School Dashboard, is in.
The new system is arguably more nuanced and holistic, but also less explicit in its ranking of schools from best to worst. This year, for the first time, the dashboard includes a ranking for how many students in a school are chronically absent, as first reported by Edsource.
San Diego Unified School District fared below average for the state. More than one in 10 students missed school 18 or more days in a year, which is the state’s definition of chronically absent. The district’s chronic absentee rate for 2017-18 remained the same as the previous year: 12.4 percent.
The state average was 11.1 percent last school year. www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/the-learning-curve-san-diego-unified-ranks-high-in-chronic-absenteeism/?utm_source=Voice+of+San+Diego+Master+List&utm_campaign=e4ae02092a-Learning_Curve&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c2357fd0a3-e4ae02092a-81862829&goal=0_c2357fd0a3-e4ae02092a-81862829
India’s Dangerous New Curriculum
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire did much to create modern-day India. It consolidated the country into a sovereign political unit, established a secular tradition in law and administration, and built monuments such as the Taj Mahal. The Mughals were originally from Uzbekistan, but over time they became a symbol of the contribution of Muslims to Indian national history. Their lasting influence is evident in some of India’s most famous dishes, such as biryani, and the settings of several of the most beloved Bollywood movies, including Mughal-e-Azam (1960), by some estimates the highest-grossing film in Indian history.
So it was odd, on a visit this spring to a school in the Indian state of Rajasthan, to hear a Muslim teacher, Sana Khan, ask her entirely Muslim eighth-grade social science class, “Was there anything positive about Mughals?” Khan was teaching at the English-medium Saifee Senior Secondary School, whose students are Dawoodi Bohras, a small Islamic sect that has been based in India since the Mughal era, when its leaders faced persecution in the Middle East. Like Jews, Parsis, and Baha’is, the Bohras are a religious minority that found shelter in India’s unusually tolerant culture.
Yet some of Khan’s students saw only barbarism in the time of their own community’s emergence in India. “In the medieval era, there were wars and all. It was sectarian,” said a bespectacled girl named Rabab Khan. Rabab and another of her classmates, Qutbuddin Cement, told me that the “glorious” period of Indian history occurred before Muslim rule. “In ancient times, India was called ‘the Golden Bird,’” said Qutbuddin. “India was a world leader.”
Since last year, students at the Saifee School have been using new textbooks published by the Rajasthan government, which is run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that dominates India’s parliament and state legislatures. The new textbooks promote the BJP’s political program and ideology. They argue for the veracity of Vedic myths, glorify ancient and medieval Hindu rulers, recast the independence movement as a violent battle led largely by Hindu chauvinists, demand loyalty to the state, and praise the policies of the BJP prime minister, Narendra Modi. One book reduces over five centuries of rule by a diverse array of Muslim emperors to a single “Period of Struggle” and demonizes many of its leading figures. www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/06/indias-dangerous-new-curriculum/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Diversity%20Indian%20textbooks%20Uighurs&utm_content=NYR%20Diversity%20Indian%20textbooks%20Uighurs+CID_d2911d3120047d3acf1d12e8f9e7a376&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Indias%20Dangerous%20New%20Curriculum
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
Don’t be Cannon Fodder
www.facebook.com/VICEAustralia/videos/265831534056228/?t=239
How could China catch up with the West?
It was the autumn of 1984, and on the other side of the world, Ronald Reagan was promising “morning again in America.” China, meanwhile, was just recovering from decades of political and economic turmoil. There had been progress in the countryside, but more than three-quarters of the population still lived in extreme poverty. The state decided where everyone worked, what every factory made and how much everything cost.
The students and researchers attending the Academic Symposium of Middle-Aged and Young Economists wanted to unleash market forces but worried about crashing the economy — and alarming the party bureaucrats and ideologues who controlled it.
Late one night, they reached a consensus: Factories should meet state quotas but sell anything extra they made at any price they chose. It was a clever, quietly radical proposal to undercut the planned economy — and it intrigued a young party official in the room who had no background in economics. “As they were discussing the problem, I didn’t say anything at all,” recalled Xu Jing’an, now 76 and retired. “I was thinking, how do we make this work?” www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-rules.html?tp=i-H43-A3-EN7-2CmY61-1y-2Drab-1c-2CoLeg-16ycLh
China aims to defeat the US Air Force without firing a shot. Here’s how.
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A new study highlights China’s growing air power, and warns that China is looking to build out its Air Force to the point that the U.S. would not be willing to take it on in direct conflict.
The Project Air Force team at Rand Corp. describes an emerging Chinese air force that aims to rival the United States’ own, both technologically and strategically, often by mirroring U.S. military capabilities and doctrine.
“It is important to recognize that many of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] efforts in the military aerospace sector focus on fielding of specific capabilities in sufficient quantities to deter the United States from entering a conflict; the PLA would vastly prefer deterrence over actual combat operations,” the report reads. “In this sense, the capabilities competition can be regarded as aimed at defeating the United States without actually fighting.”
Copying or innovating their own capabilities are both valid pathways to this goal. However, “the lower cost and higher speed of the copying and adapting approach appears to have made it a preferred approach whenever available,” the report reads.
Different services prefer different styles, however. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force, or PLAAF, tends to copy, while China’s missile and space programs are more frequent innovators. www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/11/29/china-aims-to-defeat-the-us-air-force-without-firing-a-shot-heres-how/
A Generation of Widows, Raising Children Who Will Be Forged by Loss
KABUL, Afghanistan — As evening takes over Kabul, daylight fading to gray, 3-year-old Benyamin senses that his father should be coming home from work about now.
But it’s been months since a bombing killed his “Aba,” Sabawoon Kakar, and eight other Afghan journalists. Benyamin cries and nags his mother, Mashal Sadat Kakar: Where is Aba? When is Aba coming home?
How do you explain death to a 3-year-old? Mrs. Kakar, her baby, Sarfarz, in her arms, tries to distract him with toys. But when Benyamin keeps crying, she takes him to the balcony and points to the brightest star shining through Kabul’s polluted sky.
“Aba is there,” she says.
The war in Afghanistan is disproportionately killing young men, and it is leaving behind a generation defined by that loss. Children like Benyamin will have only early memories of their fathers, and the deaths will shape their lives even as true recollections fade. Babies like Sarfarz will have even less, with death taking fathers they will never know.
Carrying it all are the tens of thousands of widows the war has created since 2001. Like Mrs. Kakar, they are left to raise families in a country with a dearth of economic opportunity and plagued by a war that kills 50 people a day. www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/world/asia/afghanistan-widows-war.html
Mattis: Cutting defense will not help deficit
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Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on Saturday threw his weight behind an op-ed from two top Republicans calling for greater funding for the Defense Department — and lining himself against Trump administration guidance to cut fiscal year 2020 defense spending.
“Fiscal solvency and strategic solvency can co-exist,” Mattis said at the Reagan National Defense Forum.
In a Friday Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Don’t cut military spending, Mr. President,” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Calif., and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., warned that a smaller defense budget won’t have a major impact on fixing the national deficit, but would have painful repercussions on military equipment and end strength.
“Our top priority is the troops,” the pair wrote. “Any cut in the defense budget would be a senseless step backward.”
Mattis, in his speech Saturday, explicitly cited that op-ed approvingly, especially the idea put forth from the two members that cutting defense spending will not impact the deficit. Instead, major budget cuts “would be a dangerous disservice to our troops and the American people they serve and protect. We all know that America can afford survival,” he said.
The Pentagon had been preparing for a $733 billion budget for FY20, until a surprise announcement by President Donald Trump cut that to $700 billion. Pentagon planners have been scrambling the last few weeks to find ways to make those numbers work.
Islamic extremists are now using drones in Nigeria, leader says
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Islamic extremists in Nigeria have begun using drones, the country’s president says, opening a worrying new front in the region’s nearly decade-long fight against Boko Haram and an offshoot linked to the Islamic State.
President Muhammadu Buhari announced the development during a meeting on Thursday of countries that contribute troops to a multinational force combatting the extremists.
This appears to be the first confirmed use of drones by an extremist group in Africa, according to the World of Drones project run by the Washington-based New America think tank. Its section on non-state actors notes that Libyan rebels are reported to have used drones for surveillance in that chaotic North African nation.
Deadly attacks against Nigeria’s military are on the rise, with 39 soldiers killed this month alone and another 43 wounded. The extremists’ use of drones for surveillance in the country’s northeast has proven to be a “critical factor” in the resurgence of attacks, the president said.
Nigeria’s military has its own, armed drones, as the United States and others and others increasingly use them in West Africa’s fight against groups linked to al-Qaida and IS. www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/11/30/islamic-extremists-are-now-using-drones-in-nigeria-leader-says/
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
Get well, Bill!
The public service loan forgiveness fix isn’t going well
- Congress authorized a $350 million fund to help fix a popular, but troubled student loan forgiveness program earlier this year.
- However, the remedy isn’t going too well.
- New data shows that fewer than 30 people have been approved for the relief. Some 30,000 have applied.
When Congress authorized a $350 million fund to help fix a popular but troubled student loan forgiveness program earlier this year, Michael Sonn was excited.
Finally, he thought, he might be debt-free.
However, the remedy isn’t going too well.
Nearly 34,000 people have applied for loan forgiveness through the fix-it fund, according to data shared this week at a conference held by the Department of Education.
Just 26 borrowers have been approved.
More than 20,000 applications are still pending because the borrower hasn’t yet been denied public service loan forgiveness, a requirement that has been criticized by consumer advocates as an unnecessary hurdle. www.cnbc.com/2018/10/29/this-public-service-loan-forgiveness-remedy-isnt-reaching-many-people.html?fbclid=IwAR1_TJXTNa5jzX876HYxHy9MirsZFq-VoRNCO-YmQQYZrMe6cVdJtPxbM8U
Payless shoes fools fashion snobs, sells discount shoes at luxury prices
Payless ShoeSource, the “you could pay more, but why” store, finally found a good reason to pay more – punking social media influencers.
The retailer set a up a fake luxury shoe store in Los Angeles called “Palessi” and loaded it with their discount footwear, but at ridiculously high prices.
They then invited prominent social media fashionistas, who waxed poetic about the “sophisticated footwear” made with “high quality materials.”
Then, some of them plunked down $200, $400, even $600 for shoes normally priced between $20 and $40
Eventually, Payless let them in on the joke, refunded their money and even let them keep the shoes.
The company plans on using the footage for a series of upcoming ads. www.njeffersonnews.com/cnhi_network/payless-shoes-fools-fashion-snobs-sells-discount-shoes-at-luxury/article_b7f62a59-7b44-5937-bd0e-c17d5ea79631.html
www.facebook.com/DirectFrom/videos/1688797381234950/?t=9
Deutsche Bank offices raided in money laundering probe
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Police raided six Deutsche Bank offices in and around Frankfurt on Thursday over money laundering allegations linked to the “Panama Papers”, the public prosecutor’s office in Germany’s financial capital said.
Investigators are looking into the activities of two unnamed Deutsche Bank employees alleged to have helped clients set up offshore firms to launder money, the prosecutor’s office said. It focuses on the years 2013 through to 2018, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office said.
Around 170 police officers, prosecutors and tax inspectors searched the offices where written and electronic business documents were seized. www.reuters.com/article/us-deutsche-bank-moneylaundering/deutsche-bank-offices-raided-in-money-laundering-probe-idUSKCN1NY0ZN
December 2, 2001:
The Enron scandal, publicized in October 2001, eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, and the de facto dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in American history at that time, Enron was cited as the biggest audit failure.[1]
Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Several years later, when Jeffrey Skilling was hired, he developed a staff of executives that – by the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting – were able to hide billions of dollars in debt from failed deals and projects. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and other executives not only misled Enron’s Board of Directors and Audit Committee on high-risk accounting practices, but also pressured Arthur Andersen to ignore the issues.
Enron shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit after the company’s stock price, which achieved a high of US$90.75 per share in mid-2000, plummeted to less than $1 by the end of November 2001.
GM bought back $10 billion in stock since 2015, double what job cuts will save
When General Motors announced it was cutting up to 14,000 jobs and idling five automotive plants, it justified the massive cuts by citing long-term savings. The cuts would free up $6 billion in cash, for a net savings of $4.5 billion in cash by 2020.
The move will “make General Motors more agile, resilient and profitable” while the economy’s still revving, CEO Mary Barra told investors Monday. Wall Street seemed to believe her, with GM’s stock rising nearly 5 percent and one analyst on the call congratulating her “on getting in front of the curve here.”
But GM hasn’t exactly been tightfisted in recent years. The company has spent $10.6 billion since 2015 buying back its own shares, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stock buybacks do nothing for a company’s productive capacity. But because buybacks reduce the number of shares on the market and thus make a stock more valuable, they can be popular with many investors as well as senior executives who are paid largely in stock.
GM is far from the only company to spend money goosing its stock price. This year alone, corporations have announced some $955.6 billion in buybacks, according to TrimTabs Investment Research, and the figure for the whole year could exceed $1 trillion. www.cbsnews.com/news/gm-bought-back-10-billion-in-stock-since-2015-double-what-job-cuts-will-save/?fbclid=IwAR35GrnybeX2NV1KhQ29S9dIMyqla3OT5aTtGD82pn7pTMSRbHAYZUgNguM
Detroit and Flint keep relying on private money to solve public problems. Why?
In most U.S. public schools, it’s no big deal when students sip water from a drinking fountain — but it is in Detroit and Flint, Mich. Detroit’s 2018-2019 school year began with the school system’s water shut off because of elevated levels of toxic lead. In Flint, school officials have kept the tap water off since the 2014 lead-in-water crisis; this year, they sought funding for drinking water stations for the 2018-2019 school year.
Americans often look to philanthropy or charities, such as the Red Cross, after natural disasters. That’s happened in both Flint and Detroit — even though their crises were unnatural disasters, caused by public policy decisions.
Philanthropists as saviors
By early October, both school districts had found money from private donors. In Detroit, 13 donors — ranging from United Way to Quicken Loans — committed to funding school hydration stations. For Flint, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla, donated the full cost of water stations and filtration in schools. www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/27/detroit-and-flint-keep-relying-on-private-money-to-solve-public-problems-why/?fbclid=IwAR0MUenAdjumAfvY2UA7_GKRslBosRdnnbGiim_PU9YHUpgjnjOTaCz5N3A&utm_term=.f06402c67416
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason
Social Despair: U.S. Life Expectancy Drops Amid ‘Disturbing’ Rise In Overdoses And Suicides
For the second time in three years, life expectancy in the U.S. has ticked downward. In three reports issued Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out a series of statistics that revealed some troubling trend lines — including rapidly increasing rates of death from drug overdoses and suicide.
CDC Director Robert Redfield described the data as “troubling.”
“Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the Nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” he said in a statement released Thursday.
Redfield tied the drop in overall life expectancy, which averaged 78.6 years in 2017, a decrease of 0.1 from the year before, to the rise in deaths from overdose and suicide.
More than 70,000 people died of drug overdoses last year alone, according to the CDC. That number marks a nearly 10 percent increase from 2016 and the highest ever in the United States for a single year. By comparison, only about 17,000 people died of overdoses in 1999, the earliest year for which the CDC offered data Thursday. www.npr.org/2018/11/29/671844884/u-s-life-expectancy-drops-amid-disturbing-rise-in-overdoses-and-suicides
Before the Caravans: December 2 1980 – Salvadoran Civil War: Four American missionaries are raped and murdered by a death squad.
…four Catholic missionaries from the United States working in El Salvador were raped and murdered by five members of the El Salvador National Guard. They were Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan.
www.facebook.com/jasmin.tobar.31/videos/10213438870425780/?t=49
Outrage as Holocaust scholar and professor at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College finds swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs spray-painted on her office walls
- Professor Elizabeth Midlarksy’s New York City office was vandalized Wednesday
- She teaches psychology, education at Teachers College, Columbia University
- Midlarksy, who is Jewish, is also a prominent Holocaust researcher
- Swastikas and the slur ‘YID’ were spray-painted in red on her walls
- The Nazi symbol had previously been spray-painted on her office walls in 2007
- She blames the rise in Anti-Semitism for this incident, saying it’s ‘the wind now
The office of a Jewish psychology and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University has been vandalized with swastikas and an anti-Semitic slur.
Professor Elizabeth Midlarksy discovered the disturbing Nazi symbol and slur ‘YID’ spray-painted in red on her New York City office walls Wednesday afternoon.
She alerted campus security and the incident is now under investigation by the NYPD. There is no known suspect. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6440903/Columbia-University-professors-finds-swastikas-spray-painted-office-walls.html?fbclid=IwAR0FFwxBW256s4ucJCkPsOeuU9AIyWtPGSn83pGgR6cTJahERUbeygN3gFA
‘It’s still a blast beating people’: St. Louis police indicted in assault of undercover officer posing as protester
When a judge acquitted a white St. Louis police officer in September 2017 for fatally shooting a young black man, the city’s police braced for massive protests. But St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Officer Dustin Boone wasn’t just prepared for the unrest — he was pumped.
“It’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight!!” he texted on Sept. 15, 2017, the day of the verdict. “It’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these s—heads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart!!!!”
Two days later, prosecutors say, that’s exactly what Boone did to one black protester. Boone, 35, and two other officers, Randy Hays, 31, and Christopher Myers, 27, threw a man to the ground and viciously kicked him and beat him with a riot baton, even though he was complying with their instructions.
But the three police officers had no idea that the man was a 22-year police veteran working undercover, whom they beat so badly that he couldn’t eat and lost 20 pounds. On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted the three officers in the assault. They also indicted the men and another officer, Bailey Colletta, 25, for the attack. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/its-still-blast-beating-people-st-louis-police-indicted-assault-undercover-officer-posing-protester/?utm_term=.1fa083b32e43
The Government Is Blacklisting People Based on Predictions of Future Crimes
Imagine: You’ve never been charged with any crime, yet the government blacklists you as a terrorism threat and bans you from flying indefinitely. You’re separated from family members, can’t get to weddings or funerals or religious obligations, and lose jobs because you can’t travel or your employer finds out you’re blacklisted.
You know what the government has done violates your constitutionally protected ability to travel and to be free from false stigma. You have rights — the Constitution guarantees due process. So you ask the government for its reasons and evidence, as well as a live hearing to establish your credibility and innocence. In response, the government says it put you on the No Fly List because it predicts that you might commit a violent terrorism act in the future, but it won’t tell you all the reasons why or give you any evidence or the hearing you seek.
Mexico awards the Order of the Aztec (among the worst people in the history of the world–and pushovers) Eagle, its highest honor, to Jared Kushner
Mexico’s government on Friday gave President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner the highest honor America’s southern neighbor grants to foreigners.
The award has caused an uproar in Mexico, where many are angry over Trump’s insulting comments about Mexicans and his promises to build a border wall between the countries. The Order of the Aztec Eagle award has been bestowed before on figures such as Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the late South African President Nelson Mandela.
Trump attended the award ceremony on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Argentina. Mexican officials said Kushner earned the award for his work on negotiating a new trade agreement signed Friday by Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. The deal replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
Kushner said U.S.-Mexico relations have improved because the countries decided to craft “win-win” solutions to migration, drug trafficking and other issues plaguing relations.
Trump has railed about factory jobs lost to Mexico and the U.S. trade deficit with its southern neighbor – two issues that soured relations with outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto. On Friday, however, Trump lauded Pena Nieto as a “special man,” and congratulated him on ending his presidency by signing the new trade deal. Pena Nieto leaves office on Saturday. abc7.com/politics/mexico-bestows-highest-honor-on-trump-son-in-law-kushner/4805988/
In Latest Racist Remarks, Rep. David Stringer Says Black People Don’t ‘Blend In’
Republican State Representative David Stringer, who was abandoned by Republican leadership this summer after he made racist comments, made more racist comments this month while speaking with Arizona State University students.
In audio obtained by Phoenix New Times, Stringer can be heard saying African-Americans “don’t blend in,” calling non-native English speaking students a “burden,” and remarking that Somali-Americans, comparing them with Polish-Americans, don’t look like “every other kid.”
Stringer, who represents Prescott, made national headlines in June after he was heard in a viral video saying “there aren’t enough white kids to go around” in Arizona public schools. Governor Doug Ducey and Arizona Republican chair Jonathan Lines both called for Stringer’s resignation after New Times reported on his comments.
Stringer was re-elected earlier this month. He did not respond to requests to comment. www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-lawmakers-latest-racist-remarks-caught-on-tape-at-asu-11056567?fbclid=IwAR206drJh2ZPvszdz8k_OVfmXuf0VIUctjTVfXdV3daM9_2R7r-XwMuM7ng
Michigan GOP wants to let rich people set up their own police forces
If a big-money conservative donor gets his way during the lame-duck session, Michigan could create a two-tier police system — one for the rich, and one for everyone else.
During the 2017-2018 session of the Michigan legislature, GOP Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof introduced a bill that would have allowed the creation of “special police agencies” — private police forces run by for-profit corporations.
It’s a bill so poorly thought out that even law enforcement officials in Michigan oppose it. The head of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police noted that under the law, even the KKK could create its own private police force. The past president of the association called it “a mercenary force to police in some of our communities.”
The measure died in committee. But now, law enforcement officials are worried that the GOP majority may try to get it passed before December 31 in the lame-duck session.
Supporters of the bill have argued that it would give greater security options to business groups, but that’s actually part of the problem. It creates a two-tier police system in the state — one for the rich, and one for everyone else.
Private police would enjoy key privileges like governmental immunity, but wouldn’t have to follow the same rules as regular police. For instance, private police wouldn’t have to provide information under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, and they wouldn’t necessarily have to meet the same training standards as municipal forces do. shareblue.com/michigan-gop-legislature-rich-special-private-police-force/?fbclid=IwAR3ocsq1CczJGgjo2Czn8aVYIB39KlVb6HayCx4HNR
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High Tech Racists: Menial Tasks, Slurs and Swastikas: Many Black Workers at Tesla Say They Faced Racism
African-American workers have reported threats, humiliation and barriers to promotion at the plant. The automaker says there is no pattern of bias.
Owen Diaz had seen swastikas in the bathrooms at Tesla’s electric-car plant, and he had tried to ignore racist taunts around the factory.
“You hear, ‘Hey, boy, come here,’ ‘N-i-g-g-e-r,’ you know, all this,” said Mr. Diaz, who is African-American. Then, a few hours into his shift running the elevators, he noticed a drawing on a bale of cardboard. It had an oversize mouth, big eyes and a bone stuck in the patch of hair scribbled over a long face, with “Booo” written underneath.
On that winter night in the factory, when, he said, a supervisor admitted drawing the figure as a joke, Mr. Diaz had had enough. He typed a complaint to a Tesla manager on his phone. “Racist effigy & drawing” was the subject.
“When you really just look at it, you ask yourself at some point, ‘Where is my line?’” said Mr. Diaz, 50, who worked at the factory as a contractor for 11 months before he quit in May 2016. www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/business/tesla-factory-racism.html
The Costs of the Confederacy
In the last decade alone, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology
…the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library is a marvelously peaceful, green oasis amid the garish casinos, T-shirt shops and other tourist traps on Highway 90 in Biloxi, Mississippi.
One gray October morning, about 650 local schoolchildren on a field trip to Beauvoir, as the home is called, poured out of buses in the parking lot. A few ran to the yard in front of the main building to explore the sprawling live oak whose lower limbs reach across the lawn like massive arms. In the gift shop they perused Confederate memorabilia—mugs, shirts, caps and sundry items, many emblazoned with the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.
It was a big annual event called Fall Muster, so the field behind the library was teeming with re-enactors cast as Confederate soldiers, sutlers and camp followers. A group of fourth graders from D’Iberville, a quarter of them black, crowded around a table heaped with 19th-century military gear. Binoculars. Satchels. Bayonets. Rifles. A portly white man, sweating profusely in his Confederate uniform, loaded a musket and fired, to oohs and aahs.
A woman in a white floor-length dress decorated with purple flowers gathered a group of older tourists on the porch of the “library cottage,” where Davis, by then a living symbol of defiance, retreated in 1877 to write his memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. After a discussion of the window treatments and oil paintings, the other visitors left, and we asked the guide what she could tell us about slavery.
Read more: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/costs-confederacy-special-report-180970731/#Whzb3053XRdT6BCb.99
Solidarity for Never
Columbia GRAD students Almost Learn the UAW exists to collect their $ and sell them out.
Why Grace Boggs’ idiot ideas about community farms and coops always fail
Residents of one Detroit historic neighborhood have been looking forward to next year’s opening of a food co-op. It will help bring to market produce from a community farm and is part of a larger community development project that will include a health food cafe, an incubator kitchen for food entrepreneurs, and space for events. The project expects to employ 20 people from the mostly low- to moderate-income area.
Twenty jobs may not seem like a lot when unemployment in the approximately 80 percent Black city is 8.7 percent, twice that of state and national rates. But this is what economic progress generally looks like in many Black communities: cooperative ventures such as grocery stores and community farms. More than 150 years ago, Black people emerging from slavery formed cooperatives to grow, sell, and distribute food together because their very survival depended on it.
“Black people have a long history of using co-ops as a way of navigating through an economic system that has been intentionally aimed to disinvest in our communities and prevent any kind of parity,” says Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which is spearheading the project. “So, this is us latching onto a historical strategy that Black people have used in this country to try to build collective wealth.” blackagendareport.com/why-co-ops-and-community-farms-cant-close-racial-wealth-gap
Spy versus Spy
The Dirty Secrets of George Bush
During the most violent years of the war in Nicaragua, a retired CIA agent – a man of many talents and pseudonyms whose given name is Felix Rodriguez – was the logistics officer for airlifts of weapons and supplies from the Ilopango air base, in El Salvador, to the jungle hide-outs of the Nicaraguan rebels known as contras. On October 5th, 1986, one of Rodriguez’s cargo planes, a Southern Air Transport C-123K, loaded with 10,000 pounds of ammunition, failed to return from a scheduled drop in Nicaragua. Fearing the worst, Rodriguez made a series of phone calls to Washington that evening. What was unusual was that Rodriguez did not notify anyone at the Defense Department or the CIA but rather attempted to get word about the missing plane to Donald Gregg, the national-security adviser for Vice President George Bush.
When Rodriguez failed to reach Gregg, he telephoned Gregg’s deputy, army colonel Samuel Watson. Watson relayed the information to the White House Situation Room, and an order was given to send U.S. aircraft toward the Nicaraguan border on a search-and-rescue mission. The following morning Rodriguez learned that Sandinista-government artillerymen had knocked the Southern Air plane out of the sky, killing the pilot and copilot. The third crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, had been captured. Again Rodriguez called Vice President Bush’s office with the news, and the search-and-rescue mission was called off.
The subsequent investigation of the downed cargo plane revealed for the first rime a connection between the office of George Bush and a clandestine campaign to arm the contras – during the 1984-86 period when the U.S. Congress had ordered a halt to CIA and Pentagon aid. In response to reporters’ queries, however, Bush’s press officers issued statements claiming that the phone calls from Rodriguez represented the only time that the vice-president’s office had played any role in the arms-supply campaign. Later Gregg expanded on the official denials in a deposition to the joint select committee investigating the Iran-contra affair. “We [Bush and Gregg] never discussed the contras,” Gregg testified. “We had no responsibility for it; we had no expertise in it.”
A ROLLING STONE investigation, however, has found that the denials of Bush and Gregg are part of a continuing cover-up intended to hide their true role in the Reagan administration’s secret war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
The Magical Mystery Tour
The Torture Museum of the CATHOLIC Inquisition
It’s all here. All the instruments of torture and death invented by the Ideology of Death torturemuseum.net/en/the-rack/
Immigrant Communities Were The ‘Geographic Solution’ To Predator Priests
Catholic Church leaders in Los Angeles for years shuffled predator priests into non-English-speaking immigrant communities. That pattern was revealed in personnel documents released in a decades-old legal settlement between victims of child sex abuse by Catholic priests and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Now clergy sex abuse victims throughout California are calling on the state’s attorney general to investigate clergy abuse and force church officials to release more information about their role covering it up. The goal is to discover how wide-spread the practice of hiding abusers in immigrant communities really was.
Manuel Barragan was one of those victims.
After Father Carlos Rodriguez abused a child in south Los Angeles, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles sent him into an out-of-state treatment program for pedophile priests. Then, local officials brought him back to minister to Spanish speakers in the Office of Family Life.
Barragan first met Rodriguez three decades ago.
“He put on that suit to portray himself as a man of God, and he was an imposter,” says Barragan. “He was a fake dude trying to get into little boys and little girls pants, and that’s what he did. www.snapnetwork.org/npr_immigrant_communities_predator_priests_nov18
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
G-20 Leaders Vote Unanimously Not to Give Trump Asylum
BUENOS AIRES (The Borowitz Report)—In an unusual display of unity by an often fractious organization, the leaders of the G-20 nations voted unanimously on Saturday to deny Donald J. Trump’s urgent request for asylum.
Prior to the vote, Trump had been heard asking colleagues ranging from Angela Merkel to Xi Jinping for safe harbor in their countries, sweetening his request with offers of free luxury penthouses in Trump buildings around the globe.
In the most stunning insult to Trump, his closest allies, Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, responded to his asylum request by laughing uproariously in his face and high-fiving each other.
After the resolution to deny Trump asylum passed by a 19–0 vote, international observers said that they had never seen the G-20 act with such enthusiastic solidarity. “Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron were practically peeing themselves,” one observer said. www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/g-20-leaders-vote-unanimously-not-to-give-trump-asylum?utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_facebook&utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned&fbclid=IwAR3oqamBMB4i-uB_dfwpQaNGdzn8Z9noP9aoAVj_mk4-2HYR6qGfK-wLvGU
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/9b/0a/9b0af105-afb0-4361-8f44-5f0c34234e5d/smithsonian-book-list-history-2018psd.jpg)
The Best History Books of 2018
From the political violence of 19th-century America to the untold stories of African-American pioneers, these books help shape our understanding of today: Read more: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/best-history-books-2018-180970864
www.facebook.com/horseplanet.site/videos/575634702885260/?t=0
www.facebook.com/PositiveGuitar/videos/243622669516425/?t=20
www.facebook.com/NappyFu/videos/1161975517201948/?t=48
Saudi Floods
www.facebook.com/joseph.dumond.3/videos/10215596259038199/?t=50
So Long
George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State-Sponsored Terrorism
Forty-two years ago, a car-bomb exploded in Washington killing Chile’s ex-Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, an act of state terrorism that the CIA and its director George H.W. Bush tried to cover up, Robert Parry reported on Sept. 23, 2000.
In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.
The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.
In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.
The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.
In the report, the CIA also acknowledged publicly for the first time that it consulted Contreras in October 1976 about the Letelier assassination. The report added that the CIA was aware of the alleged Chilean government role in the murders and included that suspicion in an internal cable the same month.
“CIA’s first intelligence report containing this allegation was dated 6 October 1976,” a little more than two weeks after the bombing, the CIA disclosed. consortiumnews.com/2018/12/01/george-h-w-bush-the-cia-and-a-case-of-state-sponsored-terrorism/?fbclid=IwAR1IsnzSEzvEO-tUhssxrHwXngbvNVWLBV8azW0n0cnPQSqVyIHsc79PGNQ
Randolph Braham, 95, Holocaust Scholar Who Saw a Whitewash, Dies
Randolph L. Braham, who as the foremost American scholar of the Holocaust in Hungary, his homeland, rejected that country’s highest award to protest what he denounced as an official whitewash of its collusion in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews during World War II, died on Sunday at his home in Forest Hills, Queens. He was 95.
His son Robert said the cause was heart failure.
Professor Braham (pronounced BRAY-ham) had felt too weak on the eve of a farewell speech he was scheduled to deliver on Nov. 14 at the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, which he founded at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in Manhattan. He canceled the lecture and was hospitalized the next day.
The title of the speech, “The Struggle Between the History and Collective Memory of the 20th Century: The Holocaust vs. Communism,” encapsulated the competing visions that Professor Braham, a Holocaust survivor himself, sought to reconcile in the more than 60 books he wrote or edited.
His monumental “The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary” (1981) and his three-volume “The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary” (2013) provided the basis for what Prof. Maria M. Kovacs of Central European University, in welcoming him to Budapest last year, described as “an immensely precise, panoramic and microscopic study of the Hungarian Holocaust.” www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/obituaries/randolph-braham-dead.html