Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

You’re Welcome to Join Us for the Rouge Forum Conference and David Barsamian leading the

Adam Renner Education for Social Justice Lecture rougeforumconference.wordpress.com/rf-2014-program-schedule/

Rouge Forum 2014 runs from June 5-7 at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Check out the details here. rougeforumconference.wordpress.com/adam-renner-education-for-social-justice-lecture/

Every year the Rouge Forum honors the life and work of Adam Renner (August 18, 1970 – December 19, 2010) by inviting a critical scholar, educator, or activist to deliver the Adam Renner Education for Social Justice Lecture.

Adam was a teacher, scholar, musician, revolutionary activist, martial artist, and lover of life. His courage took remarkable forms, from being willing to sacrifice to help others, to always learning, and altering his views, on the path to discover what is true in order to make the world a little better. What could be a more powerful legacy?

He received his BA in Mathematics from Thomas More College. While teaching mathematics at Seton High School in Cincinnati, OH, he completed his MEd at Northern Kentucky University. In 2002, Adam received his PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and subsequently worked as a professor at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY.

His scholarship focused on service learning, social difference, social justice, and pedagogy and he published in numerous journals including Educational Studies, EcoJustice Review, High School Journal, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Rethinking Schools and more. (Many of Adam’s publications are available to read here.)

Along with his life partner, Gina Stiens, he created a service partnership with schools and social service organizations in Jamaica and taught an ongoing course, “Education for Liberation or Domination: A Critical Encounter in Jamaica.” He was a key leader and organizer in the Rouge Forum serving as Community Coordinator and as editor of the Rouge Forum News.

In the fall of 2010, Adam left his professorship at Bellarmine University and returned to the school classroom, as a math teacher at June Jordan School for Social Equity in San Francisco.

Restored to Life!  The Rouge Forum News (Editor’s note:
The Rouge Forum News began as a zine in 1999, morphed into a PDF and is now the purveyor of curated online content. The Rouge Forum is an organization of educational activists that focuses on issues of equality, democracy, and social justice. We hold annual conferences that bring together students, teachers, professors, and activists who are striving to overcome racism, national chauvinism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society. Join us!

Insightful and inciting news and comment, since 1999  http://paper.li/RougeForum/1401566358?subscription_id=184b6170-e947-11e3-9a21-002590d6792d

Rouge Keynoter Paul Street: Those who have put out the others’ eyes  “U.S. policy…has nothing to do with democracy, sovereignty, or human rights. It’s about money and power. Who are the big players going to be in the world’s biggest growth center, that’s all that matters…. Washington does not want a peaceful solution. Washington wants a confrontation. Washington wants to draw Moscow into a long-term conflict in Ukraine that will recreate Afghanistan in the 1990s. That’s the goal, to lure Putin into a military quagmire that will discredit him in the eyes of the world, isolate Russia from its allies, put strains on new alliances, undermine the Russian economy, pit Russian troops against U.S.-backed armed mercenaries and Special Ops, destroy Russian relations with business partners in the EU, and create a justification for NATO intervention followed by the deployment of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory” (Mike Whitney, “Is Putin Being Lured into a Trap?” Counterpunch, April 15, 2014).  http://zcomm.org/zmagazine/those-who-have-put-out-the-peoples-eyes/

Congratulations on the publication of

www.amazon.co.uk/Immiseration-Capitalism-Education-Austerity-Resistance/dp/0952204231

The Little Red Schoolhouse

AFT and NEA Bosses Helped Create, and still love, the Common Corpse But teachers unions say that those who are calling for a full rejection of the Common Core are exploiting the broader discontent about the rollout of the standards and new tests.“The Tea Party is using the frustration with the implementation as the guise to eliminate standards in schools and to destabilize public education,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. Its executive council  recently passed a resolution supporting “the promise and potential of the Common Core State Standards.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/education/common-core-standards-face-a-new-wave-of-opposition.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Newark Can’t learn that doing school reform without social and economic reform won’t work: Schooled (New Yorker) The goal was not just to fix the Newark schools but to create a national model for how to turn around an entire school district.  The abysmal performance of schools in the poorest communities has been an escalating national concern for thirty years, with universities, governments, and businesses devoting enormous resources to the problem. In the past decade, a reform movement financed by some of the nation’s wealthiest philanthropists has put forward entrepreneurial approaches: charter schools, business-style accountability for teachers and principals, and merit bonuses for top performers. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan created Race to the Top, a $4.3-billion initiative to induce states to approve more charter schools and to rate teachers based on student performance….lmost four years later, Newark has fifty new principals, four new public high schools, a new teachers’ contract that ties pay to performance, and an agreement by most charter schools to serve their share of the neediest students. But residents only recently learned that the overhaul would require thousands of students to move to other schools, and a thousand teachers and more than eight hundred support staff to be laid off within three http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff?currentPage=all

More DC Principals Quit–and more to come  The list is sure to grow in coming weeks, with some principals announcing voluntary departures and the school system firing others via letters of “non-reappointment.” Principals work on one-year contracts, and administrators can choose not to renew them without giving a reason.About 20 percent of schools had to replace their principals last year, a somewhat lower percentage than in the previous two years but still much higher than in neighboring suburban school systems. Parents and activists have long said the level of turnover leads to instability and stagnation in too many city schools….Morale among principals suffered this year when more than half were rated less than effective on new evaluations that gave significant weight to students’ standardized test scores. DCPS officials acknowledged that they should have done a better job explaining how the evaluations would work. They have since tweaked them and say they plan to look at further changes in the future.www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dcps-is-losing-at-least-eight-veteran-principals/2014/05/22/ab2eef8e-e1b3-11e3-9743-bb9b59cde7b9_story.html

The college presidents were appalled. Not only had President Obama called for a government rating system for their schools, but now one of his top education officials was actually suggesting it would be as easy as evaluating a kitchen appliance. “It’s like rating a blender,” …“Applying a sledgehammer to the whole system isn’t going to work,” said Robert G. Templin Jr., the president of Northern Virginia Community College. “They think their vision of higher education is the only one.” Many college leaders accuse the president of grasping for a simplistic solution to what they call a crisis of soaring tuition.

The rating system, which the president called for in a speech last year and is under development, would compare schools on factors like how many of their students graduate, how much debt their students accumulate and how much money their students earn after graduating.   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/us/colleges-rattled-as-obama-presses-rating-system.html?hpw&rref=education

472 Teachers take San Diego Buyout as District hunts for cheaper and more-stupid, workers  The wave of retirements will do more than save money. It will trigger the first teacher recruitment effort to fall under new diversity goals to staff classrooms with educators who better reflect changing demographics of students; begin to “right-size” the teaching force in a district that is losing enrollment; and ease the transition to new Common Core academic standards, as less-experienced educators are still developing their formative professional practices.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/may/24/tp-472-take-district-incentive-to-retire/

Dallas Goes Pay For Performance (unlike Banksters, GM and Chrysler bosses, etc  Under the new system, teachers will be paid based on points received in their two most recent evaluations, except in the roll-out year when only first-year ratings will be used. Their pay would not drop below their 2014-15 salary. Classroom performance will make up 50 percent of the evaluation for most teachers. Student test scores will account for 35 percent, and student surveys will make up 15 percent.

Ratings range from “unsatisfactory,” with a $45,000 salary, to “master” at $90,000. Teachers new to the profession will come in at the “novice” level and be paid $47,000; those with experience could come in at higher levels. Teachers currently making below $47,000 will be brought up to the “novice” level. The district has said that 28.5 percent of its 10,000 teachers make under $47,000.

Before teachers reach the “proficient II” level ($59,000), they would have to go through a “distinguished teacher” review. The top level, “master,” requires two years at the “exemplary II” level and at least four years as a “distinguished teacher” in a low-rated school.  http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20140523-new-dallas-isd-teacher-pay-for-performance-plan-is-key-part-of-district-reform-effort.ece

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

When Will US Get out of Afghanistan? 2016? (Psyche! Not.)  U.S. Will Complete Afghan Pullout by End of 2016, Obama Says  –President Obama said on Tuesday that he planned to withdraw the last combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, declaring that “it’s time to turn the page on a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Under the plan, outlined by Mr. Obama in the Rose Garden, the United States would leave 9,800 troops in Afghanistan after 2014, but cut that number by half in 2015. By the end of 2016, it would keep only a vestigial force to protect the embassy in Kabul and help the Afghans with military purchases and other security matters.

Mr. Obama said the withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan would free up military resources for the United States to focus on an emerging set of terrorism threats in the Middle East and North Africa  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/world/asia/us-to-complete-afghan-pullout-by-end-of-2016-obama-to-say.html?hp

Endless War: Top Obama Lawyers Tell Congress the President Can Do Anything In War On Terrorists  President Obama has all the authority he needs to fight terrorists overseas, top lawyers for the Pentagon and State Department told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday, in a contentious hearing over whether Congress’ authorization to use force after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks was still needed—or even relevant.

AUMF—the Authorization To Use Military Force passed by Congress three days after the 9/11 attacks—gave then-President George W. Bush unlimited authority to go after foreign terrorists. Candidate Obama criticized that power as excessive in 2008, and has frequently said during his tenure that it was time to move on from that wartime footing. But when top lawyers at the Departments of Defense and State were asked about AUMF and the president’s war-making authorities on Wednesday, they did not budge, refusing to declare that AUMF should be repealed.  Moreover, under pointed questioning by Democrats and Republicans, they said even if AUMF were repealed the president still had legal authority to go after anyone he deems to be a terrorist threat. It might be that other laws would be cited to justify that operation, said Department of Defense General Counsel Stephen Preston and State Department Deputy Legal Advisor Mary McLeod. Both left no doubt that the president could do whatever he wants.  http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/endless-war-top-obama-lawyers-tell-congress-president-can-do-anything-war-terrorists?akid=11836.4337.nc0b5O&rd=1&src=newsletter995098&t=4

Lots of Blood For Iraqi Oil  “Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil market. But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973.”– Antonia Juhasz, oil industry analyst, Al Jazeera.

These are the ‘best of times’ for the oil giants in Iraq. Production is up, profits are soaring, and big oil is rolling in dough. Here’s the story from the Wall Street Journal: “Iraq’s oil production surged to its highest level in over 30 years last month, surprising skeptics of the country’s efforts to restore its oil industry after decades of war and neglect.” (Wall Street Journal)

Mission accomplished? You bet. But for those who still cling to the idea that the US was serious about promoting democracy or removing a vicious dictator or eliminating WMD or any of the other kooky excuses, consider what we’ve learned in the last couple weeks. Here’s the story from Aljazeera:

“While the US military has formally ended its occupation of Iraq, some of the largest western oil companies, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, remain. On November 27, 38 months after Royal Dutch Shell announced its pursuit of a massive gas deal in southern Iraq, the oil giant had its contract signed for a $17bn flared gas deal. Three days later, the US-based energy firm Emerson submitted a bid for a contract to operate at Iraq’s giant Zubair oil field, which reportedly holds some eight million barrels of oil.

Earlier this year, Emerson was awarded a contract to provide crude oil metering systems and other technology for a new oil terminal in Basra, currently under construction in the Persian Gulf, and the company is installing control systems in the power stations in Hilla and Kerbala. Iraq’s supergiant Rumaila oil field is already being developed by BP, and the other supergiant reserve, Majnoon oil field, is being developed by Royal Dutch Shell. Both fields are in southern Iraq.” (“Western oil firms remain as US exits Iraq”, Dahr Jamail, Aljazeera.)

If it sounds like the big boys are dividing the spoils among themselves; it’s because they are. Exxon, BP, Shell; they’re all here.  http://www.counterpunch.org/

Amid Drawdown, Fears of Taliban Resurgence and Economic Collapse  (who wants to be the last soldier to die in Afghanistan?)  In recent years, the growing resentment in Afghanistan toward American forces’ raids and airstrikes has been balanced, in part, by concerns about what might happen after foreign troops leave.

That ambivalence about the American presence here was again illustrated on Wednesday in reactions to President Obama’s announcement that the United States would leave 9,800 troops in Afghanistan after the NATO-led combat mission here ends this year, and that nearly all troops would be gone by the end of 2016.

In interviews with officials and business leaders, one common reaction to the decision was the belief that too few American troops were being left behind for too few years.

Some worried that announcing such a short deadline would allow the Taliban to easily wait out the American presence, or that the quick drawdown would put Afghanistan’s weak economy at greater risk of failure.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/world/asia/amid-drawdown-fears-of-taliban-resurgence-and-economic-collapse.html?hp&_r=2

Britons make up most of the foreign members in Syria’s most violent terror group, a senior rebel leader says. In a letter to The Times, Brig-Gen Abdulellah al-Basheer of the Free Syrian Army asks for help in curbing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.He claims the group attacks opposition forces, not the Assad regimeUK fighters are involved in activities including beheadings, crucifixions and ill-treatment of women, he adds.In his letter, General al-Basheer writes that ignoring the problem could lead to British extremists returning home to “continue on their pernicious path of destruction”.   www.bbc.com/news/uk-27573376

WWI Vets got Screwed 

Vietnam Vets Got Screwed 

Iraq/Afghan Vets Screwed Again

Thank You for Being Expendable  YEARS after I first returned from Iraq and started having thoughts and visions of killing myself, I’d call the Department of Veterans Affairs. They always put me on hold.

First, an automated message would greet me to let me know there was an unusually long wait because of the large number of incoming calls. Then a recorded message played on a constant loop: “Welcome to the Department of Veterans Affairs … The V.A. is here to serve you … If this is a mental health emergency or you are thinking about committing suicide, please hang up and call 911 … If you are having thoughts of hurting others or want to talk to a mental health professional hang up and dial the Veterans Crisis Line … ”

I wasn’t about to pull the trigger just then, I just wanted help, so I held on. The wait was long — sometimes 45 minutes to an hour — at which point someone would pick up and either put me on hold again or transfer me over to someone else to schedule an appointment to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. In my experience, the wait for an appointment was typically eight to 10 weeks, but sometimes as long as three to four months.

Keep this in mind: If I’m calling the V.A., it’s because I’m in really bad shape. But when I’d tell them I really needed to see somebody ASAP, sooner than that, they’d always tell me the same exact thing: “Sorry. But that’s the earliest we can see you.” I’ve since learned that when things are really bad, it’s better to just show up at the V.A. emergency room.

Before, I thought it was a miracle that I survived the Iraq war. Now I’m thinking it’s a miracle I’m still alive after dealing with the V.A. for so long.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/opinion/thank-you-for-being-expendable.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L6NUDZyHvk

News From 2012, “VA Sucks…” but Obamagogue is simply shocked! Schocked! For Dennis Selsky, a Vietnam-era veteran with multiple sclerosis, it was lost documents. It seemed that every time he sent records to the Department of Veterans Affairs, they disappeared into the ether.

For Mickel Withers, an Iraq war veteran with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, it was a bureaucratic foul-up. The department said he received National Guard pay in 2009, though he had left the Guard the previous year, and cut his disability compensation by $3,000. He filed for bankruptcy to protect himself from creditors.

For Doris Hink, the widow of a World War II veteran, it was the waiting. The department took nearly two years to process her claim for a survivor’s pension, forcing her daughter to take $12,000 from savings to pay nursing home bills.

These are the faces of what has become known as “the backlog”: the crushing inventory of claims for disability, pension and educational benefits that has overwhelmed the Department of Veterans Affairs. For hundreds of thousands of veterans, the result has been long waits for decisions, mishandled documents, confusing communications and infuriating mistakes in their claims.

Numbers tell the story. Last year, veterans filed more than 1.3 million claims, double the number in 2001. Despite having added nearly 4,000 new workers since 2008, the agency did not keep pace, completing less than 80 percent of its inventory. This year, the agency has already completed more than one million claims for the third consecutive year. Yet it is still taking about eight months to process the average claim, two months longer than a decade ago. As of Monday, 890,000 pension and compensation claims were pending.   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/us/veterans-wait-for-us-aid-amid-growing-backlog-of-claims.html?pagewanted=all&action=click&module=Search&region=searchResults&mabReward=relbias%3Aw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry291%23%2Fveterans+administration

www.youtube.com/watch?v=opZYpBvb7V8

Obamagogue: The US does not negotiate with terrorists. Except the tops of the Taliban, trading them for a single prisoner– Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa, 47, was once the Taliban’s interior minister. He helped create the Taliban movement in 1994. He was a “hard-liner in his support of the Taliban philosophy” and “was known to have close ties to Osama bin Laden,” according to his Guantanamo case file, released by WikiLeaks.

Mullah Mohammad Fazl was a senior commander in the Taliban army in the 1990s, rising to become its chief of staff. He is thought by many to have supervised the killing of thousands of Shiite Muslims near Kabul between 1998 and 2001. According to WikiLeaks documents, he was also present at the 2001 prison riot that killed CIA operative Johnny Micheal Spann, the first U.S. citizen killed in the Afghan war.

Mullah Norullah Noori, another of the detainees, was also present during Spann’s killing. He was a provincial governor in several key areas during the Taliban regime. He is also suspected of involvement in the Shiite massacre.

Abdul Haq Wasiq, 43, was deputy chief of intelligence for the Taliban. According to his Guantanamo case file, he “utilized his office to support al Qaeda” and was “central to the Taliban’s effort to form alliances with other Islamic fundamentalist groups.” His case file, like Khairkhwa’s, calls him a “high risk,” saying that he is likely to “pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.”

Mohammad Nabi Omari, 46, was a member of a joint al-Qaeda-Taliban cell in eastern Khost province, according to his case file, and “one of the most significant former Taliban leaders detained” at Guantanamo. He has ties to the Haqqani network, the group that was believed to be holding Bergdahl.

Over and over, each detainee received a “recommendation for continued detention” by a military board at Guantanamo. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/freed-prisoners-were-battle-hardened-taliban-commanders/2014/05/31/d52b3005-636e-4c65-a1da-2b9ace667e4d_story.html?hpid=z1

Long Time NSA Boss Alexander on the differences–Obama and Bush:  AFR: What were the key differences for you as director of NSA serving under presidents Bush and Obama? Did you have a preferred commander in chief?

Gen. Alexander: Obviously they come from different parties, they view things differently, but when it comes to the security of the nation and making those decisions about how to protect our nation, what we need to do to defend it, they are, ironically, very close to the same point. You would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions about how to defend our nation from terrorists and other threats.  https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/05/08/keith-alexander-unplugged-bushobama-matters/

Thanks Obamagogue! Libya Collapsing into Barbarized Chaos The Benghazi militant group Ansar al-Shariah is under attack by a renegade former general trying to rid Libya of political Islam. But in response, the militia has taken aim squarely at Washington.

“We remind America of their defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia,” Mohammed Ali al-Zahawi, the leader of Ansar al-Shariah, declared this week in a videotaped statement, warning that the United States would face “much worse” if it tried to intervene in Libya. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/world/middleeast/terrors-face-local-groups-eyes-on-west.html?hp&_r=3

Audio of Redeployment —
Phil Klay, live at Politics & Prose, discusses his new book of harrowing short stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/live_at_politics/2014/04/phil_klay_discusses_his_new_book_redeployment_short_stories_about_the_wars.html

Two Hour Video Embedded: Cuba, an African Odyssey (the untold story of Cuba’s support for Africn Revolutions)  http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/cuba_an_african_odyssey

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy, in Ruins.  A task force charged with tackling blight released a sobering, unprecedented report today detailing the scope of decay in Detroit. “No city in the country has taken on the scale of blight that Detroit faces, nor have they proposed eradication timelines as aggressive as ours,” the report reads. The findings are based on eight months of painstaking research and data collection by the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force and Motor City Mapping. The task force was created by the Obama administration to develop a plan to remove blight in the city.  Here are nine eye-opening highlights from nearly 350 pages of data:

1. A third of the city’s 264,000 houses, apartments and commercial buildings are blighted.

5. The cost to remove the blight will cost a whopping $1.7 billion to $2 billion, funds that could come from a variety of private and public sources. “The most significant challenge by far is funding,” the report concludes.  http://motorcitymuckraker.com/blog/2014/05/27/9-highlights-from-unprecedented-study-of-detroits-blighted-landscape/

Detroit Cuts Off Water To Thousands Unable To Pay Their Bills Thousands of the some 700,000 people who call Detroit home are currently living without access to water after the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department turned off their water because they hadn’t paid their bills.

As the shut-offs occur without warning from the department, residents don’t have time to fill buckets, sinks and tubs with water. This concerns human rights activists, who point out that as a result, “Sick people are left without running water and running toilets. People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook.”

It’s a practice that has been in place in Detroit for years, even though residents of the city plagued by high unemployment and a poverty rate of around 40 percent have struggled to keep up with water rates that have increased about 119 percent over the past decade.

The average monthly water bill in the city is currently around $75 per household.  http://www.popularresistance.org/detroit-cuts-off-water-to-thousands-unable-to-pay-their-bills/

You Cannot Make Detroit Up—Detroit spends $8.7 million to flip 30 homes that bring in $2 million  

The Detroit Land Bank spent nearly $483,000 on a 3,800 square-foot, five-bedroom home on Chicago. The house sold for $100,000 to a buyer who got $25,000 in forgivable down payment assistance.
Here are some of the expenses:
$26,642 purchase price and holding costs
$38,800 wood windows
$15,000 repair and finish wood floors
$14,192 paint
$14,000 kitchen cabinets and countertops
$10,500 ceramic tile
$10,000 waterproofing
$10,000 lead abatement
$9,400 insulation
$5,000 appliances
$4,000 exterior doors  From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140529/METRO01/305290038#ixzz33MsCqlgt

The Free Market at Work–State of Mich Pays nearly 2 Million to get an owner to open a Detroit Grocery More than $1.2 million in grants and loans have been awarded to the owners of the grocery and retail center it anchors. The strip is called the Shops at Jefferson Village, 11250 East Jefferson Ave. The retail center is mainly empty now but Parkway Foods is expected to revive the development.

This week the project was awarded a $830,000 grant by the state of Michigan’s economic development agency. That’s on top of Detroit Economic Growth Corp. providing a $200,000 loan and a $225,000 loan through Invest Detroit, which funds city development projects.  From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140530/BIZ02/305300034#ixzz33Mql74rQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXs5gDtwZ-o

Median CEO Pay tops Ten Million $  
They’re the $10 million men and women.

Propelled by a soaring stock market, the median pay package for a CEO rose above eight figures for the first time last year. The head of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study. Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch. A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker’s salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.

The best paid CEO last year led an oilfield-services company. The highest paid female CEO was Carol Meyrowitz of discount retail giant TJX, owner of TJ Maxx and Marshall’s. And the head of Monster Beverage got a monster of a raise. Over the last several years, companies’ boards of directors have tweaked executive compensation to answer critics’ calls for CEO pay to be more attuned to performance. They’ve cut back on stock options and cash bonuses, which were criticized for rewarding executives even when a company did poorly. Boards of directors have placed more emphasis on paying CEOs in stock instead of cash and stock options.

The change became a boon for CEOs last year because of a surge in stocks that drove the S&P 500 index up 30 percent. The stock component of pay packages rose 17 percent to $4.5 million. “Companies have been happy with their CEOs’ performance and the stock market has provided a big boost,” says Gary Hewitt, director of research at GMI Ratings, a corporate governance research firm. “But we are still dealing with a situation where CEO compensation has spun out of control and CEOs are being paid extraordinary levels for their work.”

The highest paid CEO was Anthony Petrello of oilfield-services company Nabors Industries, who made $68.3 million in 2013. Petrello’s pay ballooned as a result of a $60 million lump sum that the company paid him to buy out his old contract. Nabors Industries did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Petrello was one of a handful of chief executives who received a one-time boost in pay because boards of directors decided to re-negotiate CEO contracts under pressure from shareholders. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold CEO Richard Adkerson also received a one-time payment of $36.7 million to renegotiate his contract. His total pay, $55.3 million, made him the third-highest paid CEO last year.

The second-highest paid CEO among companies in the S&P 500 was Leslie Moonves of CBS. Moonves’ total compensation rose 9 percent to $65.6 million in 2013, a year when the company’s stock rose nearly 70 percent.  “CBS’s share appreciation was not only the highest among major media companies, it was near the top of the entire S&P 500,” CBS said in a statement. “Mr. Moonves’ compensation is reflective of his continued strong leadership.”

Media industry CEOs were, once again, paid handsomely. Viacom’s Philippe Dauman made $37.2 million while Walt Disney’s Robert Iger made $34.3 million. Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes earned $32.5 million. The industry with the biggest pay bump was banking. The median pay of a Wall Street CEO rose by 22 percent last year, on top of a 22 percent increase the year before. BlackRock chief Larry Fink made the most, $22.9 million. Kenneth Chenault of American Express ranked second with earnings of $21.7 million.  http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/median-ceo-pay-crosses-10-million-2013-23877772

Monarchist Idiot Prince Charles Hits on a Rothchild and the HEAD of the IMF, Legarde

World’s Richest People Meet, Muse On How To Spread The Wealth  (and worry about the inequalty=revolution equation)  Talk of economic mobility and the wealth gap is hardly new. From the Occupy movement to President Obama’s re-election campaign, income inequality has been in the spotlight for years.Even so, the “inclusive capitalism” conference in London on Tuesday broke new ground. Not because of the conversation, but because of the people having it.

The 250 people from around the world invited to attend this one-day conference do not represent “the 99 percent,” or even the 1 percent. It’s more like a tiny fraction of the 1 percent.“We have $30 trillion of assets under management in the room,” says conference organizer Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who runs E.L. Rothschild, a major investment firm she and her husband, of the storied Rothschild banking family, founded in 2003. That amount — $30 trillion — is roughly one-third of the total investable wealth in the world. If money is power, then this is the most powerful group of people ever to focus on income inequality.

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Fascists Rise in Europe After four days of voting in a sprawling election with nearly 400 million eligible voters spread across 28 countries, fringe political groups pugnaciously hostile to the European Union scored dramatic gains in voting for the European Parliament and delivered a blow to the bruised but still dominant mainstream parties.

Preliminary results indicated that parties strongly opposed to the European Union performed well in several countries, including France, Greece, Britain and Denmark, presenting a stark challenge to champions of greater European integration.
In France, according to official figures announced early Monday, the National Front, the country’s largest far-right party, won 26 percent of the vote to defeat both the governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement, a center-right party. Greece’s radical left-wing Syriza coalition looked set to beat the party of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, while Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi outfit that Greek authorities tried in vain to outlaw, also picked up seats.

France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, a Socialist, likened the results to an earthquake while Jean-Pierre Bel, the president of the French Senate, denounced them as a “real trauma.” Henri Malosse, the president of the European Economic and Social Committee, a Brussels grouping of trade unions and employers, warned that “this may be the last European election if Europe does not change.”

But Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, cheered the outcome and said it would help those in Britain and elsewhere who want to slash the European Union’s powers and return decision-making to individual states.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/world/europe/turnout-in-european-parliament-election-hits-record-low.html?hp&_r=0

Solidarity for Never

NEA Sets Aside TEN MILLION DOLARS for Elections www.eiaonline.com/2014/05/27/nea-sets-aside-10-million-for-2014-elections/

On the Heels of Bob King’s Failed UAW Presidency, the Counterfeit Union seeks another boss firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/05/08/keith-alexander-unplugged-bushobama-matters/

The UAW Has not been what most people think of as a union for decades: It’s an imperial extortion racket The Torment and Demise of the United Auto Workers Union as Performed by
the Auto Bosses, the Labor Leaders, Counterfeit Radicals, Fictional Revolutionaries,
and All Those Who Know They Are Not Innocent Either  http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

Spy versus Spy

Hey Selfie-ites! N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images  The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0

Nationalist Snowded Says He is a Patriot   Edward J. Snowden said that he still considered himself to be an American patriot even after leaking thousands of classified documents, and that he was frustrated to be “stuck in a place” — Russia — that did so little to protect individual rights when he was trying to help protect American freedoms.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/us/politics/snowden-says-he-was-a-spy-not-just-an-analyst.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140529&nlid=2254121&tntemail0=y

The Magical Mystery Tour

People make gods. Gods do not make people. Religion is the ideology of death. If you must worship something, try the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM doesn’t wear funny clothes, has no building for you to fund, doesn’t interpret him/her/itself for you at a fee, won’t rape your kids, has no history of alliances with Nazis, doesn’t have a secretive bank, won’t demand that you whip yourself, won’t insist that you worship torture symbols, won’t tell you sex is evil, nor deny you contraceptives, won’t deprecate women, and Plus–the FSM has PIRATES!

Superstitious Killer Fanatics Talk Peace and Plan War  Pope Francis inserted himself directly into the collapsed Middle East peace process on Sunday, issuing an invitation to host the Israeli and Palestinian presidents for a prayer summit meeting at his apartment in the Vatican, in an overture that has again underscored the broad ambitions of his papacy.  Francis took the unexpected step in Bethlehem, where he became the first pontiff ever to fly directly into the West Bank and to refer to the Israeli-occupied territory as the “State of Palestine.”   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/world/middleeast/pope-francis-west-bank.html?hp

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Detroit PD Seems to have Misplaced the Drug Evidence (like all the rape kits)  The Police Department is auditing its Narcotics Section after uncovering a significant amount of unprocessed drugs and other evidence scattered haphazardly throughout a facility on Dexter, a police source familiar with the probe told The Detroit News. Police Chief James Craig, citing an open investigation into the discovery, declined Sunday to discuss details. But a police source said Internal Affairs officers visited the west-side facility Saturday and found several pieces of evidence including narcotics, scales and other property that hadn’t been tagged. Some bags of drugs that hadn’t been logged were even found in desk drawers, the source said.
From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140526/METRO01/305260030#ixzz32rNMBzB4

So Long

I know why the caged bird builds its own cage and sings for Presidents.

So long Lake Powell  http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/25589504/lake-powell-less-than-half-full