Rouge Forum Dispatch: No Gods. No Masters.
April 4th, 2015 / Author: rgibsonWe Say Fight Back!
(January 15)
In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary, was murdered in Berlin.Her killers bludgeoned her with rifle blows and tossed her into the waters of a canal.Along the way, she lost a shoe.Some hand picked it up, that shoe dropped in the mud.Rosa longed for a world where justice would not be sacrificed in the name of freedom, nor freedom sacrificed in the name of justice.Every day, some hand picks up that banner.Dropped in the mud, like the shoe. www.tomdispatch.com/post/175974/tomgram%3A_eduardo_galeano%2C_sacrilegious_women/Student Debt Strike is ON Just over a month ago, Waging Nonviolence reported that 15 former students of Corinthian Colleges — the beleaguered, notorious for-profit higher education system — were going on strike; not from their jobs, or from class, but from their debt. Today, there are over 100 debt strikers. Their goal is to ramp up pressure on the Department of Education to relieve not just the debt they incurred, but all Corinthian students’ loans and declare that for-profit colleges are not, in fact, too big to fail.“We had hundreds and hundreds of requests to join the strike,” said Debt Collective organizer Ann Larson. With the initial announcement, the group invited potential strikers to sign up on their website to become part of the Corinthian Collective. A team of dozens of volunteers then sorted through strike requests in a “rigorous process,” informing debtors about the consequences of striking, reading over bills from their lenders and asking them to write up brief biographies and statements about why they were striking. wagingnonviolence.org/2015/03/student-debt-strikers-grow-number-power/
1924 It is the thesis of the business men who run our educational system that the schools are factories, and the children raw material, to be turned out thoroughly standardized, of the same size and shape, like biscuits or sausages. To these business men the teachers are servants, or ‘hands,’ whose duty is the same as in any other factory—to obey orders, and mind their own business, and be respectful to their superiors. Whenever by any chance teachers dare to have ideas of their own, or especially to ask for higher wages, these teachers are treated precisely as we have seen labor unions treated by the Black Hand of Southern California. www.amazon.com/Goslings-Study-American-Schools/dp/1162796359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428126994&sr=8-1&keywords=sinclair+goslings
Ross: Taylorism and its influence on education www.academia.edu/4778995/Clockwork_Taylorism_and_its_Continuing_Influence_on_Work_and_SchoolingThe Little Red Schoolhouse
Az pols to Ed Workers: Shut Up SB 1172, which passed the House this week, doesn’t do a damn thing to help schools, but it does make it illegal for education officials, including superintendents, principals and teachers, to speak for or against bills, plans or citizen referenda that affect their funding, that affect their ability to do their job. Will politicians put the same limits on police and firefighters? No, but
The House gave initial approval Thursday to a bill with a provision blocking school or charter school employees from speaking or distributing information in an official capacity to influence an election. It now awaits a formal vote.
Proponents of the bill say they don’t want school employees, on the taxpayer’s dime, trying to influence elections and other funding decisions. The letter that 233 superintendents sent to the legislature would be illegal if the bill passes, since they wrote it in their “official capacity.” Hmm, last time I checked legislators are not prohibited from lobbying for their pet programs, also on the taxpayer’s dime. Beyond direct advocacy, education officials point out that the bill is written so broadly that it would even prevent a superintendent from distributing “factual information” to parents about topics that affect their children’s education.
“This bill is basically putting a gag order on school officials when it comes to providing any kind of information that is factual to stakeholders.” … The provision would prevent school officials from speaking about issues even when they directly affect school funding, [school board representative] Vega said. “We wouldn’t be able to provide information on what programs would be cut.” www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/28/1374000/-Arizona-school-officials-protest-education-cuts-so-the-legislature-makes-their-protests-illegal?detail=facebook_sf#
Students, each representing precious $s, flee Detroit’s Broken schools Detroit can’t keep its schoolchildren: Each day, an estimated 25,000 school-age children go to suburban districts, leaving seats empty in classrooms citywide.
More than 8,000 attend traditional districts in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties, while 17,000 are in suburban charters, state data from 2013-14 show.
Some suburban districts, especially those in financial distress, now rely on Detroit’s children — and the state aid they bring with them — to survive.
These reciprocal ties played out publicly this past week when East Detroit Public Schools, just north of Detroit’s Eight Mile border, reversed its decision to end participation in the state Schools of Choice program for students outside Macomb County.
The district, in Schools of Choice since 2012, expects by June to eliminate a deficit that once was $8 million.
Unionized teachers protested the plan to limit choice, saying the Macomb County district would lose up to $2 million in state aid if it refused students from Detroit and elsewhere in Wayne County. If the district could afford that, the union reasoned, it could return millions of dollars in concessions the union took in the last three years.
The school board buckled. www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2015/03/30/student-exodus-saps-detroit-school-finances/70652450/
Then-Atlanta superintendent of public schools Beverly Hall smiles after she was named the 2009 Superintendent of the Year at the American Association of School Administrators’ National Conference on Education in San Francisco. Hall died in March, and on April 1, 11 teachers were found guilty of racketeering and other charges. (Paul Sakuma/AP)
11 Atlanta School Worker Test Cheats Guilty as Charged under RICO “Guilty,” Judge Jerry Baxter read the jury’s verdicts for conspiracy for 11 of the 12 defendants in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial. (All told, the state concluded that 178 teachers and principals throughout the Atlanta school system cheated.)
The conspiracy charge was the most serious and could bring sentences up to 20 years.
Only one defendant, Dessa Curb, walked away with no conviction on any charge.
The 11 convicted former teachers and administrators – 21 others had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges – were led out in handcuffs and face long sentences. The other felony charges could each bring five to 10 years in prison for each count.
See charges and photos of the convicted teachers here. www.ajc.com/news/APS-trial-verdicts/
As the first guilty verdicts were read the defendants and defense attorneys stood. Their faces fell as they heard the “guilty” verdicts roll.
The convictions close a long, troubling period that tarnished the image of the school system and the city as educators and administrators chose their careers and bonuses over doing right by the children they taught.
Investigators said the educators worked together, sometimes holding erasure parties or dinners, sometimes working alone, to correct answers on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. The cheating robbed students, who were passed up to the next grade without being prepared to succeed, and caused the schools to miss out on grants that could have provided tutoring or other help for those who were failing .www.ajc.com/news/news/eleven-former-teachers-and-administrators-guilty-i/nkkFX/
Letter to Editor re: Atlanta Test Cheats and Unequal Justice: While appalled by the nation-wide test cheating scandals, it is impossible not to note that classroom teachers, who rightly feared for their jobs, face 35 years in prison on conspiracy charges while grifting bankers laundered money for terrorists and drug cartels were never criminally charged. Instead their banks were fined, big wrist-slaps, and nobody went to jail. Perhaps the greater guilt lies with the likes of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and others, who promulgate the test score fetishes, measuring little more than parental income and home language, as gate-keepers to employment and promotion for students and teachers alike. If we consider the teachers to be little more than bank robo-signers, we see the issue in the proper perspective. First graders know what, “No Fair!” is. Dr Rich Gibson, San Diego State University, emeritus.
Ohanian Background on the Test Cheaters susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=1884
Suburbs Prepare to Riot. Secret Commission with Romanian Counsel in Lead, says, “forgive Detroit Schools’ debt, and more The community-led coalition that’s been working on Detroit education reform proposals for the last three months released their ideas for Gov. Rick Snyder on Monday, with the state assuming Detroit Public Schools’ debt among them.,..
One of the main points in the document is that the state of Michigan is responsible for, and should pay, the $53 million annual debt payments made by Detroit Public Schools, amounting to about $1,200 per student.
John Rakolta (married to Ronna Romney’s sister and Romanian Counsel), chief executive of Walbridge and another co-chair of the coalition, said Detroit Public Schools operated with a surplus in 1999, before the state took over the district. Its operational deficit is now $170 million and it has about $2.1 billion in accumulated debt, according to the report.
Rakolta placed the cause of this operation deficit at the feet of state government and state policies, saying it has been accumulated under the state’s watch. www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2015/03/coalition_recommends_state_tak.html
One of the last superintendents of the democratically elected DPS Board, the notorious illiterate Otis Mathis, who had another problem….
–Otis Mathis, Detroit Public Schools board president, is fighting for his job and is under investigation after being accused by the superintendent of fondling himself in front of her.
After submitting his resignation Thursday, Mathis sent a letter to colleagues Friday saying he wants to stay on the board and blaming “ongoing health problems” for his “poor judgment.”
The letter came the same day The Detroit News published online a two-page complaint from Superintendent Teresa Gueyser that accused Mathis of touching himself during a private meeting this week. She called it his “usual habit” and wrote she’s documented his “inappropriate behavior for months.”
“On many occasions, I have asked him not to touch himself,” she wrote in the Wednesday letter to Anthony Adams, board vice president. From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20100619/SCHOOLS/6190351#ixzz3W8FtEV3P
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
Sy Hersh: Back To My Lai The names and ages of the dead are engraved on a marble plaque that dominates one of the exhibit rooms. The museum’s count, no longer in dispute, is five hundred and four victims, from two hundred and forty-seven families. Twenty-four families were obliterated—–three generations murdered, with no survivors. Among the dead were a hundred and eighty-two women, seventeen of them pregnant. A hundred and seventy-three children were executed, including fifty-six infants. Sixty older men died. The museum’s accounting included another important fact: the victims of the massacre that day were not only in My Lai (also known as My Lai 4) but also in a sister settlement known to the Americans as My Khe 4. This settlement, a mile or so to the east, on the South China Sea, was assaulted by another contingent of U.S. soldiers, Bravo Company. The museum lists four hundred and seven victims in My Lai 4 and ninety-seven in My Khe 4.
Ahmed Rashid on IS The greatest possible threat to stability in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world in the modern era has been the unrelenting conquests and destruction of borders by the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS), later declared as the Islamic State (IS). As an inspirational force it has been equally successful in mobilizing young Muslims worldwide.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHLqaSZPe98
Why Should Bergdahl Suffer more than Bush, Cheney, Obama, Sanchez, Franks, Petraeus, Mcraven….?What punishment should Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl receive for allegedly deserting his post in Afghanistan? The answer comes by asking another question: What punishment has been handed out to American generals and politicians whose incompetence caused far more bloodshed and grief than anything Bergdahl did?
A key thing about justice is that it should be fair — people should be punished no matter their rank or title. The problem with the bloodlust for more action against Bergdahl — beyond his five years of horrific suffering as a Taliban prisoner — is that inept generals, rather than being court-martialed or demoted or reprimanded, have been rewarded and celebrated despite their dereliction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This duality is crystallized in a now-famous article written by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling in 2007 for Armed Forces Journal. After describing the failures of general officers after 9/11 as well as in the Vietnam war, Yingling, who served three tours in Iraq and is now a teacher in Colorado, wrote a stinging sentence about justice and responsibility in the military: “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
General P partied on and soldiers died and the war was more than lost.
Let’s be clear about what it means to lose a war in the context of Iraq. It does not only mean that America failed to achieve its political or military goals. It means that more Americans and Iraqis lost their lives than needed to, and it means that war crimes were committed for which general officers bear command responsibility. Due to failures that Yingling and many others have noted — not anticipating the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, not recognizing the emergence of an insurgency, not figuring out the right strategy to respond to it — the war in Iraq ground on and the bloodshed has been enormous on all sides. Afghanistan is yet another graveyard of failures by general officers.
Two generals, in particular, have been criticized but not punished for serious mistakes that they and their subordinates made — Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and Ricardo Sanchez, who led U.S. forces in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The military writer Tom Ricks has done the best job so far of exposing their battlefield failures and the failure of our political and military leaders to do anything about it. Sanchez oversaw, among other disasters, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, for which low-ranking soldiers were sternly punished, such as Specialist Lynndie England, who served a year and a half in prison for her role in abusing Iraqi detainees. Ricks has noted, in a startling case of military chutzpah, that Sanchez was indignant he didn’t receive an extra star for his Iraq service. firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/27/why-should-bergdahl-suffer-more/
Thousands of Michigan Vets Lose out on Benefits Hundreds of thousands of Michiganians who qualify for veteran benefits aren’t using them, and many vets don’t know they’re eligible.
As a result, Michigan ranks among the bottom five states for federal spending per veteran. Veterans’ benefits can include health care, monthly disability checks, life insurance, home loans and education through the GI bill. Benefits at the state and local levels include vocational training and the Michigan Veterans Trust Fund.
Only 22 percent of Michigan’s estimated 660,800 veterans used their health benefits from the U.S. Veterans Administration in 2013 — the most recent year for which data is available. Roughly 13 percent of Michigan veterans received disability checks, according to federal data.
Officials are trying to reverse the trend by raising awareness of how and where veterans and their families can access the benefits they earned. Advocates have seen progress, they say, but funding, misinformation and reticence by veterans can be a challenge.
“I never really took the time to look into it because I was told you had to be a dismembered person in order to get these benefits,” said Thomas Kline, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran in Wayland, who recently began receiving compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder. www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/31/thousands-michigan-veterans-miss-benefits/70752468/
AQAP Storms Yemeni Prison, Frees Jihadists Early this morning, jihadists with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) stormed a prison in Mukallah, an important coastal city and capital of Hadramout province in southeastern Yemen. AQAP fighters reportedly freed 300 inmates from the Central Prison, including a known AQAP leader named Khaled al-Batarfi.
Attackers stormed the prison from several directions, battling with prison guards and reportedly killing two and wounding others. Following the clashes with Yemeni prison guards, which facilitated the escape of 300 inmates, AQAP staged a coordinated attack on a number of military and government targets in the city. The assaults targeted Hadramout province’s security headquarters, the local police station, the Hadramout province administrative offices, and a branch of the central bank, among other locations. The Yemeni state media outlet, Saba, reported that security forces managed to repel an AQAP attempt to raid several banks and money exchange centers.
Other Arabic media outlets reported that AQAP fighters also attacked the Republican Palace and staged several ambushes in various sections of the city. www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/04/aqap-storms-yemeni-prison-frees-al-qaeda-leader.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LongWarJournalSiteWide+%28The+Long+War+Journal+%28Site-Wide%29%29
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wykx0iarq9g
The Pentagon’s $2.2 Billion + Flop Leaders of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency were effusive about the new technology.
It was the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, they told Congress. So powerful it could detect a baseball over San Francisco from the other side of the country.
If North Korea launched a sneak attack, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar — SBX for short — would spot the incoming missiles, track them through space and guide U.S. rocket-interceptors to destroy them.
Crucially, the system would be able to distinguish between actual missiles and decoys.
SBX “represents a capability that is unmatched,” the director of the Missile Defense Agency told a Senate subcommittee in 2007.
In reality, the giant floating radar has been a $2.2-billion flop, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.
Although it can powerfully magnify distant objects, its field of vision is so narrow that it would be of little use against what experts consider the likeliest attack: a stream of missiles interspersed with decoys.
SBX was supposed to be operational by 2005. Instead, it spends most of the year mothballed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
The project not only wasted taxpayer money but left a hole in the nation’s defenses. The money spent on it could have gone toward land-based radars with a greater capability to track long-range missiles, according to experts who studied the issue.
Expensive missteps have become a trademark of the Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon charged with protecting U.S. troops and ships and the American homeland.
Over the last decade, the agency has sunk nearly $10 billion into SBX and three other programs that had to be killed or sidelined after they proved unworkable, The Times found. graphics.latimes.com/missile-defense/
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
China vs USA–the AIIB Fiasco and the US’ colossal loss of face It is very worrying for the world that American policy makers should be capable of making such outrageous errors, scoring own-goals, as the decision to play poker against China over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and losing so spectacularly and humiliatingly. …China is a fragile rising great power. In contrast to the US, it is highly dependent on access to global resources (energy, minerals, food) and to global markets. The New Silk Road serves its national purpose in an enlightened way by also serving extensive global interests.
There is as Beijing and every other capital in Asia are acutely conscious a huge need for improved infrastructure – measured in the trillions of dollars. Having been rebuffed by the established powers in its request for an enhanced role in existing US dominated international organizations, the IMF, the World Bank and its regional affiliates, Beijing has proposed to set up a new China driven global multilateral institution: the AIIB. (This is in addition to the New Development (so-called BRICS) Bank.)…Washington urged and pressured its allies not to join the AIIB.
Fortunately Washington was ignored by over forty capitals, including by its closest ally, the UK, for which London was severely publicly admonished. In Europe, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Luxembourg, The Hague, Brussels, Stockholm, Bern, Oslo, etc, quickly followed, as Asian capitals also rapidly signed up (with still the exception of Tokyo, but that may come), and indeed with both Hong Kong and Taipei keen to get a piece of the action, and even Israel expressing interest. The AIIB express train is taking off and a peeved US stands embarrassingly on the platform…
Washington’s colossal imbecility in opposing the bank has resulted in a colossal loss of face. It is, as suggested above, a spectacular own goal. It has eroded not only the US’ hard (financial) power, but also its soft power, leadership and prestige.
Readers of Forbes, especially members of the American business community, should seek to ensure that these kinds of errors are not repeated. The world is in a period of flux, characterized by great uncertainty and volatility. To accommodate constructively the rising power of China – emerging from a long period of subjugation to Western imperialism and ostracism – the existing hegemon must display qualities of responsible and enlightened leadership. The AIIB saga was a fiasco in every sense, demeaning the status of the US. Let us hope the appropriate lessons are learned. Pax Americana is still needed. www.forbes.com/sites/jplehmann/2015/04/02/china-and-the-us-the-aiib-fiasco-americas-colossal-loss-of-face/3/
Near Halt in Job Growth The yearlong streak of robust monthly job creation was broken on Friday with the Labor Department’s report that employers added just 126,000 workers in March, a marked slowdown in hiring that echoed earlier signs that sluggish business investment and punishing weather were exacting a toll on the economy.
Analysts blamed the plunge in oil prices as well as the pall cast by a difficult winter across the Northeast and Midwest, a combination that put a crimp on spending in the energy patch and held back consumer spending and construction.
Still, this new report presents only a limited snapshot, and many said they expected the economy to regain at least some of its momentum later this year.
“The American energy industry is adjusting very quickly to low oil prices, and we’ve seen this in the counts of the number of rigs that are active,” said Carl R. Tannenbaum, chief economist at the Northern Trust Company. “The bad news is we’re losing some jobs. The good news is, we hope, that the average consumer is saving a tremendous amount of money in lower gasoline prices.”
The unemployment rate held steady at 5.5 percent. Hourly wages, in one of the few bright spots in the report, rose 0.3 percent for private sector workers in March, after a meager 0.1 percent rise in February. But hours worked were down slightly, so overall paychecks were left essentially flat.
The slowdown in job creation reinvigorated the debate about when the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates above their near-zero level, where they have remained since 2008. Many Wall Street analysts said the murky jobs picture was likely to reinforce the view among the Fed’s more dovish policy makers that rates should stay put at least until the end of the summer because the economy may not be strong enough to stand on its own. www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/business/economy/jobs-report-unemployment-march.html?_r=0
Iceland’s Banksters to Jail The Supreme Court of Iceland today upheld prison sentences issued by Reykjavík District Court in December 2013 on four former key executives and majority owners of Kaupþing Bank in the so-called Al-Thani case in what is the heaviest sentence ever given in Iceland for economic fraud, ruv.is reports. The four were charged with market manipulation in relation to Sheik Mohammed Bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar’s acquisition of more than five percent of shares (worth ISK 25.7 billion) in Kaupþing Bank shortly before it collapsed in autumn 2008.
The case was taken to the Supreme Court after the defendants appealed the Reykjavík District Court’s ruling.
Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, former CEO of the bank, got the longest sentence at five and a half years, unchanged from the Reykjavík District Court’s ruling. Sigurður Einarsson, former chairman of the board, had his sentence reduced from five years to four while investor, and one of the bank’s biggest shareholders, Ólafur Ólafsson, had his sentence lengthened from 3.5 years to 4.5 years and Magnús Guðmundsson, director of Kaupþing Luxembourg, got 4.5 years instead of 3 years.
Hreiðar must also pay ISK 25 million (USD 190,000, EUR 167,000) in Supreme Court defense fees and 33.4 million in District Court defense fees, Sigurður ISK 14 million in each, Ólafur ISK 18 and 20 million respectively and Magnús ISK 20 million in each, ruv.is reports. icelandreview.com/news/2015/02/12/icelandic-bankers-sentenced-prison
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl03dfAHHGI
Solidarity for Never
70 Local Unions Endorse Rahm—proof unions do not unite, but divide, people Mayor Rahm Emanuel today proudly accepted a tremendous level of support from labor groups, who stood with the mayor to show their appreciation for his straightforward approach, focus on strengthening their relationship and focus on creating good jobs.
More than 70 locals, representing 15 unions, attended an event at the IBEW Local 134 to showcase their support. The outpouring of support represents a strong move from 2011, when many of the unions supported other candidates.
“We’re glad to have our brothers and sisters in labor here today, and to join together to announce our endorsements for our mayor, Rahm Emanuel,” said Don Finn, the business manager for IBEW Local 134. “I call him ‘the construction mayor.’http://www.chicagotogether.org/blog/campaign-updates/press-release-70-local-unions-endorse-mayor-rahm-emanuels-re-election/
UNITE-Here Loves Rahm! UNITE HERE Local 1 is proud to endorse Rahm Emanuel for Mayor of Chicago, along with the following McCormick Place/Navy Pier unions: IUOE Local 399, IBEW Local 134, Carpenters, Decorators 17u, Riggers Local 136, Plumbers 130, IATSE Local 110, and Pipefitters 547.
Rahm to the CTU Electoral Shell Game…..
Bosses announce 116 Layoffs and more in wage cuts. Union: “Okay by Us.” Hazel Park Schools will eliminate at least 116 positions, including 27 teachers, and cut wages by July as part of a five-year deficit elimination plan to save $6 million, officials said Monday.
The school district revised and resubmitted the plan Monday to the Michigan Department of Education, according a summary posted on the district’s website.
Among the 116 positions slated for cuts, 27 will be teaching positions and 50 will be paraprofessionals and para-educators, according to the plan. The overall staff reduction would result in a savings of about $4 million for the district.
“The layoffs will be certainly hard on our unit but we understand the necessity of these cuts,” said Amy Zitzelberger, president of the Hazel Park Education Association, which represents 199 teachers, social workers, counselors and psychologists in the district.
“We are working together to address our financial issues,” Zitzelberger said. “The teachers and staff are dedicated and highly skilled and professional. We’ll continue to provide quality education.” www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2015/03/31/hazel-park-schools-cut-staff-wages-save/70756578/
Weingarten of AFT sucking up to COKE officials Ed Poter and Alexis Herman
AFT Snorts COKE ( it’s poison) In October, 2014, the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution to boycott all Coca-Cola products.
The resolution — “Stop Coca-Cola’s Abuse of Children and Violation of Human Rights” — called for a boycott of Coca-Cola products based upon a litany of violations of workers’ rights and child labor laws on the part of the company.
Now, just four months after that resolution was passed, the AFT executive committee, has reversed course and passed a resolution ending the boycott.
AFT officials said that the passage of the boycott resolution last year “drew an immediate reaction from the Coca-Cola Company, whose national leadership sought an opportunity to provide the American Federation of Teachers with information on actions taken in recent years to address these concerns.”
As a result of these meetings, the AFT “will collaborate with the Coca-Cola Company in areas where we have a strong mutual interest, such as the elimination of hazardous child labor and advocating for increased educational opportunities for children as the best way to eliminate the poverty that is the root cause of child labor.”
The partnership agreement between AFT and Coca-Cola was signed March 23 by AFT President Randi Weingarten and Ed Potter, Coke’s director of global workplace rights….“Her actions have helped Coca-Cola promote yet another display of phony compassion for children, while obliterating the hard work of AFT members and local leaders to pass a resolution aimed at holding the company accountable for the use of illegal child labor in the dangerous fields of sugar cane harvesting, and Coke’s well-documented complicity in violence against union leaders in Colombia and Guatemala and the outsourcing of thousands of jobs to low-wage subcontractors,” Rogers said. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/01/why-did-the-aft-end-its-coca-cola-boycott/
Thanks, Suckers! from the NEA Prezzie (whose predecessor made $686,949 in one year)
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Capital’s teachers’ unions are riddled with corruption: Union Boss off to jail former Wyoming Area Teachers Union president will report to a federal women’s prison in Connecticut on Thursday to begin serving time for embezzling from the group. Lisa Barrett, of Shavertown, has been assigned to Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, her lawyer, Scranton attorney Christopher Powell, said Tuesday.
According to its website, FCI Danbury is described as “a low security federal correctional institution with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp,” having a population of 174 inmates.
Barrett must serve one year in custody under a January sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge James M. Munley against the 48-year-old. Barrett pleaded guilty on Oct. 2 to embezzling nearly $60,000 using union debit and credit cards. www.timesleader.com/news/local-news-news/1279593/Lawyer:-Barrett-bound-for-Connecticut-prison (Barrett is below)
Unable to Learn from Ron Carey, TDU runs it’s same old same old Are the chickens finally coming home to roost for Teamsters brass?
After a wave of anger at concessions the union forced onto unwilling members in its national contracts, some of President James Hoffa’s biggest opponents are teaming up to challenge him in the 2016 race.
Running on a slate called Teamsters United, Tim Sylvester and Fred Zuckerman kicked off their campaign March 14-15 with packed rallies in Queens, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts.
“I feel good about it,” says Abel Garcia, a UPS feeder driver and second-generation Teamster in Oxnard, California. “There’s a new movement, a fresh breath of air across the country.”
Sylvester tops the ticket. He’s president of Local 804, based in Queens, which drew national attention for its militancy last year – See more at: www.labornotes.org/2015/03/angry-givebacks-teamsters-unite-challenge-hoffa#sthash.tVHsekv4.dpuf
Spy versus Spy
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6vizotJoI8
Documents released by the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden claim that Britain spied for several years on the Argentine government. According to reports in the Argentine media, Britain was concerned that Argentina could launch another attempt to reclaim the Falkland Islands.
The two nations fought a war over the islands in 1982.
Last month the British government announced it was upgrading its military presence on the islands.
Mr Snowden says British agents were actively spying on Argentina between 2006 and 2011.
The former CIA worker, who now lives in Russia, has previously leaked sensitive information about US surveillance programmes.
Wiretaps Catch Frezno Top Cop in Oxy Scam Federal investigators increasingly rely on wiretaps like those that allegedly ensnared Fresno Deputy Police Chief Keith Foster in a drug investigation.
With portable phones proliferating, the number of court-authorized federal wiretaps nearly tripled over the past decade, Justice Department records show. California-based narcotics cases, in particular, have been fueled by the dialing up of electronic intercepts.,,,
In a similarly cloaked vein, an intercepted January telephone call in which Foster was allegedly overheard saying he had “100 of those things” was interpreted by Reynolds as coded reference to 100 oxycodone pills.
The use of wiretaps in the Foster investigation was revealed in the criminal complaint made public following his March 26 arrest on charges of conspiracy to distribute or possess marijuana, heroin and the powerful anti-pain medication oxycodone. Five other individuals have been charged as a result of the year-long federal investigation.
Foster, 51, has pleaded not guilty. Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/03/31/261635/fresno-cops-drug-arrest-shows.html#emlnl=Morning_Newsletter#storylink=cpy
The Magical Mystery Tour
Pope Schmope A fortnight ago, angry Catholics protested inside the cathedral at Osorno, a town of 150,000 in southern Chile, when Juan Barros, 58, was installed as bishop. Thirty priests, 1300 parishioners and 51 members of Chile’s 120-member congress had written to the Pope urging him to quash the appointment, but to no avail.
This is a tricky test case for Francis’s “zero tolerance’’ of child abuse by priests, a crime he has described as akin to “celebrating a black mass’’ and betraying “the Lord’s body’’.
Barros’s critics accuse him of witnessing and covering up the abuse of boys by one of his former mentors, the now notorious Father Fernando Karadima, in the 1980s and 90s. In 2011, the Vatican barred Karadima from saying mass in public and sentenced him to a life of “prayer and penance’’ after an investigation.
Pope Francis, as archbishop of Buenos Aires in neighbouring Argentina, would have been familiar with the controversy.
Recently, two of Karadima’s victims told CNN that Barros was in the room when they were abused, a claim the bishop denies emphatically: “I never had knowledge or imagined the serious abuses that this priest (Karadima) committed with his victims.’’
He is entitled to his good name and, arguably, career advancement. But a problem for the Pope was revealed this week when three of his hand-picked advisers on sex abuse, including two female psychiatrists, expressed “concern and incredulity’’ over the appointment. Yet again, they say, victims’ have been swept aside. www.snapnetwork.org/pope_francis_faces_serious_tests_of_his_leadership
A Holy Thursday in Late March/Early April,
0033 CE, 6:46 PM
Members Present:
Jesus
God
Holy Spirit
The Apostles
This dude Romaine
Agenda:
Set a course for the saving of all humanity.
Minutes are being taken by Billy McCann, Matthew’s work-study intern.
Proceedings:
The meeting is called to order. Jesus asks Romaine who he is and what he’s doing here.
Romaine asks if this is the meeting for Creative.
Jesus sayeth upon him no. That’s tomorrow.
Romaine thanks Jesus and announces he’s going to a club called Wicker Baskets tonight. He exits the conference room.
Jesus puts forward that he wants to sit in the middle of the table, and everyone should sit facing the same way.
The motion fails 7-6. But then Andrew changes his vote because Jesus has an ominous look on his face. Everyone now sits facing the same way.
Jesus begins by predicting that Peter will deny knowing him three times before rooster crows the next morning.
Peter looks up from his BlackBerry and says, “Sorry, what?”
Jesus passes out snacks and refreshments.
Bartholomew hesitantly eats a lot.
Jesus says that the snacks and refreshments are actually his body and blood.
Judas asks how that is possible.
Discussion follows. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/official-meeting-minutes-from-the-last-supper
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
Eric Foner: Why Reconstruction Matters The Reconstruction Acts inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction, when a politically mobilized black community, with its white allies, brought the Republican Party to power throughout the South. For the first time, African-Americans voted in large numbers and held public office at every level of government. It was a remarkable, unprecedented effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery.
Most offices remained in the hands of white Republicans. But the advent of African-Americans in positions of political power aroused bitter hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents. They spread another myth — that the new officials were propertyless, illiterate and incompetent. As late as 1947, the Southern historian E. Merton Coulter wrote that of the various aspects of Reconstruction, black officeholding was “longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.”
There was corruption in the postwar South, although given the scandals of New York’s Tweed Ring and President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, black suffrage could hardly be blamed. In fact, the new governments had a solid record of accomplishment. They established the South’s first state-funded public school systems, sought to strengthen the bargaining power of plantation laborers, made taxation more equitable and outlawed racial discrimination in transportation and public accommodations. They offered aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a New South whose economic expansion would benefit black and white alike.
Reconstruction also made possible the consolidation of black families, so often divided by sale during slavery, and the establishment of the independent black church as the core institution of the emerging black community. But the failure to respond to the former slaves’ desire for land left most with no choice but to work for their former owners.
It was not economic dependency, however, but widespread violence, coupled with a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality, that doomed Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups began a campaign of murder, assault and arson that can only be described as homegrown American terrorism. Meanwhile, as the Northern Republican Party became more conservative, Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society.
One by one, the Reconstruction governments fell. As a result of a bargain after the disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the Oval Office and disavowed further national efforts to enforce the rights of black citizens, while white Democrats controlled the South.
By the turn of the century, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, a comprehensive system of racial, political and economic inequality, summarized in the phrase Jim Crow, had come into being across the South. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/opinion/sunday/why-reconstruction-matters.html
Detroit: Body Hustlers Chase the children found frozen in their mother’s freezer “In the business it’s called ‘body hustlers,’ ” David Ellis said. “They are out hustling bodies so they can say I did 10 funerals this week, and they are not even licensed,” he said. Or they make promises they can’t keep, “like saying there will be no cost to the family,” he said. “But it’s OK, we are an honest, family-run firm. We offered our help and if they don’t want it, that’s fine. We will just move on to the next family. “ www.detroitnews.com/story/life/columnists/marney-rich-keenan/2015/04/01/marney-rich-keenan-funeral-home-gives-children-dignified-farewell/70757142/
JD Wanted Last July, auditors for the University of California dropped a bombshell on the San Diego campus. Following the May death of undergraduate computer science student Ricardo “Ricky” Ambriz after a Sun God Festival drug overdose, state investigators called out the school for violating the federal Clery Act, which governs crime reporting at the nation’s universities. The audit found that, even as the school’s crime rate soared, only 35 percent of the work of a single employee was spent on Clery duties.
“While the UCSD Police Department has made effective use of its limited resources, the proliferation of mandated compliance requirements, growth in campus population, and increase in reportable incidents have created a need to increase the resources and scope of the Clery Coordinator,” the audit concluded.
It took awhile, but the university is now advertising for a “Clery Compliance Officer,” salary to be “commensurate with experience.” Desired qualifications include “A Law Degree (JD) from an accredited law school, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.”