Rouge Forum Dispatch: The Empire is #2!!!
November 2nd, 2013 / Author: rgibsonWe Say Fight Back!
Congratulations on the Publication of
us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=bec91aeafbc5b0da135cdfdec&id=12f0f62222
Michigan Test Resisters to the Common Core: “Lets have our kids refuse to put their names on the tests, then shout out the answers” Another cowardly action by state lawmakers. Lansing has just lowered the bar for all Michigan parents and students. For the standardized test, let’s have our kids not put their name on the test and shout out their answer. The MDE and state officials would be screaming because they don’t have any record of how kids our doing. Accountability for kids but not lawmakers that is what Lansing is teaching our kids. www.detroitnews.com/article/20131029/SCHOOLS/310290102/1026/Michigan-House-signs-off-Common-Core-standards-implementation-start
UC Union Authorizes Strike Members of the union that represents 22,000 service workers and patient care employees at UC campuses and hospitals have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a possible strike in the future if a contract agreement is not reached, officials said Friday.
Ninety-six percent of the members of AFSCME 3299 voted to allow union leaders to call a strike if they decide it is necessary. If a strike happens, it would be the second this year and a potentially wider one, possibly affecting the 10 campuses and the five medical centers. In late May, the same union conducted a two-day strike at the UC hospitals. www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-strike-20131101,0,6908828.story#axzz2jWz3NyTi
Students Shut Down Cop Lecture A lecture by New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly scheduled for Tuesday afternoon was canceled after protesters halted Kelly’s speech and would not yield the floor. Controversy preceded the talk — titled, “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City” — due to its speaker’s staunch support for the contentious stop-and-frisk policy. The event was presented by the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions as part of the Noah Krieger ’93 Memorial Lecture series.
Student protest actions leading up to the event included creating a petition and holding a vigil in honor of victims of racial profiling, The Herald previously reported. After administrators rejected demands laid out in the petition, protest efforts expanded, according to a press release distributed by the event’s protesters. www.browndailyherald.com/2013/10/30/ray-kelly-lecture-canceled-amidst-student-community-protest/
The Little Red Schoolhouse
Demolishing the Enlightenment: Speedfaithing in the UC System You have 10 minutes to sell someone on Catholicism, no more than that to distill the teachings of the Koran or the foundations of Mormonism.
It’s speed-dating for religion, and in a burst of faith-driven curiosity, dozens of students at UC Irvine raced from room to room Wednesday to listen to religious students (and two atheists) break down the core tenets of their belief system while on the clock. www.latimes.com/local/la-me-1031-speed-faithing-20131031,0,7886031.story#axzz2jMgYy6xZ
Detroiters Paying for Closed, New, Scrapped, Schools for Decades Over the next 27 years, Detroit property owners will be on the hook to pay more than $437.8 million for renovations made to schools that now sit unused, trashed or demolished, a boon to scrappers and home to vagrants and feral cats.
Voters approved $2.1 billion in bonds in 1994 and 2009 to pay for capital improvements on Detroit Public Schools buildings and still owe $1.5 billion. Today, 110 of those buildings are empty or have been torn down, but Detroiters still have to pay for the $106 million spent on renovations plus interest, according to a Free Press analysis. They’ll be paying off that tab until 2040.
Meanwhile, they also still have to repay $331.8 million, plus interest, that was spent building or renovating schools that DPS is now renting out or has sold — mostly to its competitors. … After closing two-thirds of schools, DPS’s enrollment stands at about 49,000. The number of school buildings in use by DPS has plummeted from 261 to 97.
Detroit Rouger Bill Boyer inside scrapped Detroit school. Painting says, No more homework…ever”
Today, vacant schools pock nearly every neighborhood. Despite costly improvements, they are constantly burglarized.
Securing empty buildings is a burden for DPS and an expense other districts do not face. DPS uses video surveillance, alarms, metal boarding materials and DPS police patrols to try to keep thieves at bay. But it’s not enough to stay ahead of scrappers….Nearly all of the money from the two bonds was spent from 1999 to 2006 and 2009 to 2012:
■ $78.6 million was spent improving 83 of the vacant schools DPS has listed for sale or rent.
■ $27.4 million was spent on 26 schools that have been demolished.
■ $295.4 million was invested in 28 buildings that DPS is now leasing to charter schools, community organizations or the state reform district, created to take control of the bottom 5% of schools.
■ $36.4 million was invested in buildings that have been sold. www.freep.com/article/20131027/NEWS01/310270101/
Detroit Public Schools Inflate Enrollment Numbers, then Overstuff Classes DPS student Kendall Smith said he is among 43 students in one of his classes as a freshman at East English Village.
“It get noisy in the classrooms and it’s really hard to learn stuff,” the 15-year-old ROTC student said. “I try to move up to the front and hear the teacher better.”
Twelfth-grader Alisha Harper said some of her classes are crowded and loud.
“There is only suppose to be only 35 in a class. There is probably 40, 45 or 50,” she said. “If you want to learn you have to take everything up and keep up with your teacher.” From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20131101/SCHOOLS/311010051#ixzz2jWwJa8q8
NEA and AFT Join Walmart To Sucker Coloradans Amendment 66 has the support of many fervent advocates of charter schools, which the overhaul would fund at nearly the same level as other schools for the first time. In fact one prominent donor to the campaign for Amendment 66 is Ben Walton, whose family’s philanthropy, the Walton Family Foundation, champions school choice and is loathed by teachers’ unions.
And yet the two most powerful of those unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have endorsed Amendment 66. The N.E.A. and its state arm, the Colorado Education Association, have together donated $4 million toward the amendment’s passage. www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/opinion/bruni-a-bold-bid-for-better-schools.html?_r=2&
videos below for those who believe the common core will not make everybody even more stupid
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwMaZ45trSI
Penn State Rapes Bring $57 Million Payout and Charges Still pending Twenty-six men will share a $59.7-million payout from Penn State University to settle claims that they were sexually abused as children by former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky.
The university announced that agreements were reached after nearly a year of negotiations. Twenty-three have completed the legal paperwork; three have agreements in principle with the school. Individual amounts were not disclosed because of confidentiality agreements, according to Pennlive.com. Six other claims remain unresolved.
Sandusky is appealing his June 2012 conviction on 45 counts of abuse and is serving a 30-to-60-year sentence. Three former administrators (president Graham Spanier, vice-president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley) await trial on charges that they concealed the scandal. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2013/10/28/penn-state-to-pay-59-7-million-to-26-sandusky-victims/
Deasy in LA Clings on With Broad/Gates/Apple Money, Despite failures and fake degree Deasy set ambitious and specific targets to measure progress in the nation’s second-largest school system — and in category after category, he failed to hit his marks, even though L.A. Unified maintained a long trend of gradual improvement.
He didn’t reach goals in eight of nine academic categories measured by test scores. He also slipped behind in his targets for boosting the graduation rate and in attendance for students and teachers. He shined, however, in two categories: reducing the number of instructional days lost to suspensions and in the percentage of students who feel safe at school. www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lausd-deasy-20131029,0,448173.story#axzz2j5h3UeP6
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.” T. E. Lawrence (blame him)
Pakistan: US Drone Killed Peace Talks (after Sharif asked Obamagogue to cut it out) U.S. drone strike killed the chief of the Pakistani Taliban on Friday, local intelligence officials said, in an attack that could cripple the group but undermine an effort by Pakistan’s government to engage militants in peace talks.
If verified, the death of Hakimullah Mehsud would be a victory for U.S. officials who have spent years hunting down a leader implicated in a 2009 attack that killed seven Americans at a CIA outpost in eastern Afghanistan. But the drone strike also threatened to add to strains between the United States and Pakistan, whose new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, had announced earlier in the day that his government would begin talks aimed at reaching a negotiated settlement with the group.
With that plan called off after the strike, Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan issued a statement accusing the United States of carrying out “a conspiracy to sabotage the peace talks.’’
On Saturday, Pakistan filed a formal protest with the U.S. ambassador and plans to protest to all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, as well, according to the Foreign Ministry. Khan said that the government intends to review the “entire perspective of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship” at the highest levels.
“Our efforts have been ambushed, and it was not an ambush from the front,” he said.
Intelligence officials in northwestern Pakistan said Friday that Mehsud had been killed after he met with other senior Taliban leaders to discuss the peace initiative, www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pakistani-official-accuses-us-of-sabotage-as-drone-targets-taliban-leaders-in-northwest/2013/11/01/1463d0c2-431d-11e3-b028-de922d7a3f47_story.html
Obamagogue–naked and holding his bomb–while Putin smiles on the end of Syrian Chemwar Syria has destroyed all of its declared chemical weapons production and mixing facilities, meeting a key deadline in an ambitious disarmament programme, the international chemical weapons watchdog said in a document seen by Reuters.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said its teams had inspected 21 out of 23 chemical weapons sites across the country. The other two were too dangerous to inspect but the chemical equipment had already been moved to other sites which experts had visited, it said.
“The OPCW is satisfied it has verified, and seen destroyed, all declared critical production/mixing/filling equipment from all 23 sites,” the document said. www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/31/syria-chemical-weapons-factories-destroyed-opcw
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
A 140 Acre Forrest to Appear in Detroit After nearly five years of planning, a large-scale attempt to turn a big chunk of Detroit into an urban forest is now underway. The purchase of more than 1,500 vacant city-owned lots on the city’s lower east side – a total of more than 140 acres – got final approval from Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder last week. www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/10/140-acre-forest-about-materialize-middle-detroit/7371/
Food Stamps Cut for 47 Million Some 47 million poor Americans who rely on food stamps for their meals will have to get by on less, after their benefits were cut Friday.
In California, which struggles with nearly 9% unemployment, local officials are girding for the fallout after the benefit for a family of four receiving food stamps was lowered by $36 a month.
About 4.2 million Californians are affected by the drop in benefits, including more than 1.1 million residents of Los Angeles County. And many local businesses will be hurt as well, because California’s food stamp recipients will be spending $46million less per month in local stores.
“The impoverished are forced to eat junk if we want to eat,” said 32-year-old Tabitha, a mother of a 2-year-old and a 7-year-old staying at a Culver City shelter, who asked that her last name not be used because she said she was embarrassed. “It’s going to be difficult, as it already has been.” www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-food-stamps-20131102,0,2890306.story#axzz2jWsgdpAP
Worse Than Apartheid South Africa: Black in Obamagogue’s America The U.S. Black-white wealth gap is larger than in South Africa at the height of apartheid. The statistic is all the more remarkable when considering that South Africa virtually mandated gross inequality by law, while in the U.S. the great chasm exists “within a political economy that is at least nominally democratic” and packed with Black elected officials, including “the sitting head of state.” “The wealth gap narrowed to a ratio of 7 to 1 in 1995 before ballooning to 22 to 1 following a housing market collapse five years ago.”
For every dollar in assets owned by whites in the United States, blacks own less than a nickel, a racial divide that is wider than South Africa’s at any point during the apartheid era.
The median net worth for black households is $4,955, or about 4.5 percent of whites’ median household wealth, which was $110, 729 in 2010, according to Census data. Racial inequality in apartheid South Africa reached its zenith in 1970 when black households’ median net worth represented 6.8 percent of whites’, according to an analysis of government data by Sampie Terreblanche, professor emeritus of economics at Stellenbosch University.
Widely recognized as an expert on inequality, Terreblanche described the racial wealth gap in the U.S. as “shocking,” in an email, and noted that it would exceed apartheid’s by an even larger margin had the white-minority not categorized mixed-race South Africans as “coloured” during the white-minority’s 46-year rule. blackagendareport.com/content/worse-apartheid-black-obama’s-america
Empire Sinking: Obamagogue is #2 to Putin in Forbes This year the vote for the world’s most powerful man went to Vladimir Putin www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2013/10/30/the-worlds-most-powerful-people-2013/
European Unemployment at All Time High The unemployment rate in the eurozone is higher than it has ever been before. This week we learned that eurozone unemployment came in at an all-time high of 12.2 percent for September. Back in January 2012, it was sitting at just 10.4 percent. So anyone that believes that “things are getting better” in Europe is just being delusional. In fact, the economic depression in Europe just keeps getting deeper. www.infowars.com/all-time-high-unemployment-the-economic-depression-in-europe-just-keeps-getting-deeper/
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYkXHFmQ7ls
Solidarity for Never
NEA and AFT Run Ads For the Common Core www.teachingchannel.org/challenge
Spy versus Spy
www.youtube.com/watch?v=j24Jlj4NiK8
Greenwald on the NSA s there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™? Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.
Can even President Obama and his most devoted loyalists continue to maintain, with a straight face, that this is all about Terrorism? That is what this superb new Foreign Affairs essay by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore means when it argues that the Manning and Snowden leaks are putting an end to the ability of the US to use hypocrisy as a key weapon in its soft power.
Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA’s director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/25/europe-erupts-nsa-spying-chief-government
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kc5Xvr24Aw
White House Approved Spying on Allies The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.
Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies. www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-spying-phones-20131029,0,3235295.story#axzz2j5gbwnMU
NSA Sucking up Yahoo, Google T he key role private companies play in National Security Agency surveillance programs is detailed in a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published for the first time on Friday.
One slide in the undated PowerPoint presentation, published as part of the Guardian’s NSA Files: Decoded project, illustrates the number of intelligence reports being generated from data collected from the companies.
In the five weeks from June 5 2010, the period covered by the document, data from Yahoo generated by far the most reports, followed by Microsoft and then Google.
Between them, the three companies accounted for more than 2,000 reports in that period – all but a tiny fraction of the total produced under one of the NSA’s main foreign intelligence authorities, the Fisa Amendents Act (FAA). www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/01/nsa-data-collection-tech-firms
Hacking Its Way Around the World rom thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries. www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-minuscule-for-all-consuming-nsa.html?ref=international-home&_r=0
Senate Bill Would Make NSA’s Illegalities Legal Privacy advocates and at least one U.S. senator are expressing concern that legislation introduced Thursday would not only endorse the National Security Agency’s collection of all Americans’ phone records, but also give the agency permission to collect massive amounts of their e-mail records.
The bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which advanced out of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would codify limits that a special court has placed on NSA’s use of the records. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-bill-would-validate-nsas-harvesting-of-phone-e-mail-records-privacy-advocates-say/2013/11/02/aa24932e-4310-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html?hpid=z1
The Magical Mystery Tour
Snap protests new Archbishop The morning after Toledo Bishop Leonard P. Blair was named to take over the Hartford Archdiocese, a Connecticut representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests was on the front steps of the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Hartford to air the organization’s concerns about the appointment.
The SNAP member, Gail Howard of Redding, said she was there with her husband Wednesday in part to draw attention to Blair’s behavior regarding the nationally publicized case of the Rev. Gerald Robinson, a Toledo diocesan priest, who ultimately was convicted in 2006 of killing a nun 26 years earlier.
SNAP has asked why Blair, bishop at the time of the trial, wasn’t more forthcoming… www.snapnetwork.org/snap_takes_issue_with_selection_of_new_archbishop
So Long
Gérard de Villiers, a French popular novelist whose raffish, long-running spy-thriller series, S.A.S., sold more than 100 million copies and became a kind of drop box for real-world secrets from intelligence agencies around the world, died on Thursday in Paris. He was 83. …For all the kinky sex and gunplay that fueled his plots, Mr. de Villiers remained a journalist at heart, and his books were based on constant travel and reporting in dozens of countries. He cultivated spies and diplomats, and he insinuated himself so thoroughly into their world that many sought him out and were then delighted to see themselves appear — always under different names — in his novels.
A string of French presidents and foreign ministers read him regularly and praised his geopolitical acumen, though rarely in public. In between the sex scenes, his books often contained details of terrorist attacks, espionage and war that had not appeared anywhere else.
On several famous occasions he was even ahead of the news: In 1980 he wrote a novel in which Islamist militants kill President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt a year before the actual assassination took place. And after the Arab uprisings broke out in 2011, he wrote books about the civil wars in Syria and Libya that eerily prefigured some of the worst violence there. www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/europe/gerard-de-villiers-83-french-spy-writer-dies.html?hpw&_r=0