We Say Fight Back!

Beware of an NEA/AFT Sellout: Form rank and file committees to wildcat to continue the strike!

LAUSD, San Diego, and Oakland could have easily coordinated contracts and struck simultaneously. Further, the large locals in CA could have set up Multiple Area Bargaining Organizations (MABOs) that would set “bargaining minimums” that no local could undermine, meaning every contract had to meet or exceed those minimums. In the MABO, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” that is, if one local is left hanging unable to meet the minimums, the remaining locals refuse to sign and either roll strikes or strike at the same time. The large locals could have served as examples to the smaller units. Furthermore, UTLA and the rest needed to set up Freedom Schools, all over the city, where the very real babysitting needs (add food, health care) of kids and parents are met. Inside the Freedom Schools, no tests, but meaningful care, and for the older kids, lessons about capital, empire, and racism–where they come from and why we strike.

www.facebook.com/100008330839470/videos/2219381921682814/?t=34

 

www.facebook.com/sandiegoredneckrevolt/videos/2029855550639999/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Teachers are leaving the profession (sic-job)at a record rate; 2 locals explain why

After spending 11 years in the Navy, Emily DaBruzzi started working for the St. Johns County School District more than six years ago. Everything started off fine. DaBruzzi was named Rookie Teacher of the Year at two different schools, she loved the kids she taught and was regularly rated “highly effective,” the highest possible teacher rating.

But in October, just two months into the current school year, she resigned from Palm Valley Academy where she was a fifth-grade language arts and social studies teacher.

“I resigned before I even had another position,” DaBruzzi, 36, said in a phone interview Friday. “It was hard because you don’t want to leave kids in the middle of the school year and I did. But it just got to be so bad. My own family was suffering.”

According to a report published by the Wall Street Journal last month, teachers like DaBruzzi and other public education employees, like community-college faculty and school psychologists, are quitting their jobs at the fastest rate since the data began being tracked in 2001. Public educators quit at an average rate of 83 per 10,000 a month, according to U.S. Department of Labor data published by the Journal.

DaBruzzi said she quit her job in one of the top school districts in the state because she just got burned out.  www.staugustine.com/sports/20190105/teachers-are-leaving-profession-at-record-rate-2-locals-explain-why

Arizona Lawmakers Are Looking to Stifle Teachers’ Political Speech

Less than a year after a statewide teacher walkout, Arizona legislators have filed two bills aimed at limiting the workplace speech rights of public educators. House Bills 2002 and 2015, proposed last month by Republican representatives Mark Finchem and Kelly Townsend, respectively, would allow the state to fire teachers who discuss politics, religion, or racial issues in classroom settings. Finchem’s bill appears especially strict. As reported by the Arizona Republic, it seeks to prohibit teachers from “segregating students ‘according to race’ or blaming one race of students ‘as being responsible for the suffering or inequities experienced by another racial group of students.’” That provision invokes the state’s attempted ban on ethnic studies curriculum in public schools; in 2017, a federal judge ruled that the ban’s enactment reflected “racial animus” and thus violated the constitutional rights of students.

The ethnic studies ban isn’t the only state controversy to which Finchem’s bill appears to respond. According to the Arizona Mirror, it would also ban teachers from “discussing or giving opinions on any bill, legal case or executive action.” Supporters of the Red for Ed movement, which inspired the state’s teacher walkout last April, fear that both Finchem and Townsend seek to penalize teachers for participating in future protests.  nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/arizona-lawmakers-look-to-stifle-teachers-political-speech.html?fbclid=IwAR0PhF3meWIAfIibNZ1BHP3psH-T9ei9ZN9qya1z02dH6Ib-wqoqyK7PUOY

n a joint statement, they said that they were responding to “the diminished utility of AP courses and the desirability of developing our own advanced courses that more effectively address our students’ needs and interests. Collectively, we believe a curriculum oriented toward collaborative, experiential, and interdisciplinary learning will not only better prepare our students for college and their professional futures, but also result in more engaging programs for both students and faculty. We expect this approach will appeal to students’ innate curiosity, increase their motivation, and fuel their love of learning.”

The high schools making the announcement are institutions known for educating the children of the powerful of Washington. The schools are Georgetown Day, Holton-Arms, Landon, Maret, National Cathedral, Potomac, St. Albans and Sidwell Friends.   www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/06/19/eight-private-high-schools-washington-area-are-dropping-out-ap-program?fbclid=IwAR0wQm7gS-WOsvJVlf_rC9l6TzEC2-xIOtaC56q0f-vo2FcxNETbc3cKLR0

How 2 Student Reporters Exposed One Of The Internet’s Biggest Neo-Nazis

Late last year, student reporters Shannon Carranco and Jon Milton received an intriguing message from their sources in antifa.

Anti-fascist activists had acquired thousands of messages from a private neo-Nazi chat group on Discord, an encrypted chat service for gamers that became popular with the far-right. They wanted to pass them on to reporters.

Carranco and Milton — undergraduates in their mid-20s at Concordia University in Montreal — weren’t full-time professional journalists. But their work would eventually lead to the downfall of one of the internet’s most prominent neo-Nazis.

After meeting with the anti-fascist activists, Carranco and Milton received expansive chat logs that went back to August 2016 and contained more than 12,000 messages. Members in the Discord chat spouted racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic rhetoric and celebrated far-right violence, including Alexandre Bissonnette’s killing of six Muslim men at a mosque in Quebec City.

But what made the cache of messages especially valuable was its organizer: Zeiger, a pseudonym used by the second-most prolific writer on Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. Zeiger had spent years spreading white nationalist propaganda on far-right podcasts and internet hate forums and promoting the Atomwaffen Division — a violent American extremist group linked to at least five murders in the last 19 months.  news.yahoo.com/2-student-reporters-exposed-one-130003295.html?fbclid=IwAR3fMGv1RVcJ3NRi0UPa9oORA8WXE9LEAiH8Z1Zf2Sk5NHXdA8rwb_hTnPE

Posted Date:

We seek a distinguished scholar at the Associate or Full Professor level who will positively contribute to our innovative urban teacher education and Masters programs as the holder of the Campbell Endowed Chair of Urban Education.

REQUIREMENTS: Candidates should possess an Ed.D. or Ph.D. from an accredited institution and have an established record of research and teaching experience. Applicants’ scholarly focus should address issues of identity, equity, power, and justice in educational contexts including schools and communities. Desired focus areas are critical theories of race, educational justice movements, diversifying the teacher pipeline, and issues of politics and power related to underserved populations in public schools.   We are seeking a colleague who can complement and extend the research interest of a core faculty with excellence in the social, cultural, and political complexities of building partnerships between the College and local schools and community agencies. A pplicants who have demonstrated success with and will engage in partnerships with local schools and agencies is important for this position.  This includes a commitment to networking with relevant College, state, and/or national centers. Please include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and a letter of recommendation from a community partner when applying.

PREFERRED:  K-12 teaching experience (professional or volunteer) and demonstrated success in grant-writing are also preferred.  www.richgibson.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=22452&action=edit&classic-editor

TEACHING AND  PROFESSIONAL  RESPONSIBILITIES:

The workload for the academic year will include teaching, program development, and student advising. The School of Education has new and existing urban education programs in which the candidate may teach: Early Childhood and Elementary Urban Education (P – 6), which has existed since 2009; Urban Secondary Education (6 – 12), which received state approval in 2018; and Special Education, Language, and Literacy, which houses much of the graduate coursework taken by students in each urban program.  The successful applicant in this position will teach no more than three classes each semester in one or multiple of these departments.

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Pompeo Brings Anti-Iran Message to Gulf Arab States

Secretary of State expected to push US goal of ‘Arab NATO’

Visiting Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued to push the Trump Administration’s intensely anti-Iran narrative. This looks to be the focus of his speeches for the rest of his visits across Gulf Arab states.

Echoing the narrative from his big speech in Cairo, in which he set out a US agenda of continued military intervention across the Middle East, Pompeo is placing a broad focus on hostility toward Iran. This message tends to be met very favorably by the governments across the GCC.

But beyond just generally disliking Iran and making a non-specific anti-Iran posture a goal, any sort of practical policy efforts are going to be a harder sell. In particular, Pompeo is expected to continue President Trump’s goal of selling the region on an “Arab NATO” that would be hostile toward Iran.

How easily that will be sold as a formal body remains to be seen. This alliance is envisioned as Saudi-led, but generally doing what the US wants. With the US Congress souring of unconditional military backing of the Saudis, getting them to commit to this sort of military alliance may be trickier.  news.antiwar.com/2019/01/11/pompeo-brings-anti-iran-message-to-gulf-arab-states/

Heathens hold religious services rooted in Norse paganism aboard aircraft carrier

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor             

   

If Detroit-Hamtramck plant closes, autoworkers won’t be the only ones hurting

Gamil Aljohaim knows the workers at the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant by the vehicles many of them drive, mostly pickups.

In the days after General Motors announced what has been interpreted as a looming shutdown at the plant and four others in North America, including the Warren Transmission Plant, Aljohaim said he saw fewer of those trucks at his I-94 Gas and Go, and some of those who did come were choosing to put less gas in the tank.

“After they heard this news, they started holding on to their money,” Aljohaim said Thursday. “I feel bad for them.”

Aljohaim, whose service station sits across a highway overpass from the sprawling plant, is also concerned about his own shop, which he said gets as much as 40 percent of its business from the more than 1,540 workers at the factory. While it’s not clear in the short term whether the people who drive to and from work at the plant would be able to continue limiting their fuel purchases, the almost immediate reaction Aljohaim noticed demonstrates that even the threat of potential auto job losses can ripple across the economy.www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2018/12/03/detroit-hamtramck-assembly-gm-plant-closure-ripple-effect/2161490002/?fbclid=IwAR1ipeo2qy6L1fTVp4tH7bGx0pl8lLqjIfNeAXxI-Qg7DtbwU15LWe_OXdI

“If Bernie Runs?” Wrong Question

by Paul Street

Remembering Bernie Sanders at Prairie Lights

In late 2014 Bernie Sanders came out to Iowa City to speak before a large and enthusiastic crowd at that university town’s venerable independent Prairie Lights Bookstore.  It was part of his exploration before finally committing to running for the U.S. presidency as a Democrat.  Iowa City was a key spot – a big campus town bastion of liberal Democrats whose support would be needed in the pivotal first-in-the nation Iowa Caucuses in January of 2016.

Sanders spoke well and angrily against economic inequality and its terrible social and political consequences. He made a compelling case for single-payer health insurance, progressive taxation, the restoration of union organizing and collective bargaining rights, and positive climate action.

It was a good progressive-populist talk with some nice identity politics thrown in for the university crowd. It made important points any leftist could applaud.

There were two things missing from Bernie’s presentation, however – a pair of deletions that made me wonder how serious he really was about fighting for the nation’s working-class majority and against the nation’s unelected dictatorship of capital.  The first omission did not surprise me: any criticism of the American war and empire (“defense”) machine as a barrier to the progressive policies he advocated for “the middle class.”

The second thing missing was any reference to any Democrats being every much part of the American plutocracy as the Republicans.  www.counterpunch.org/2019/01/04/if-bernie-runs-wrong-question/?fbclid=IwAR1Y4A6_JEIzHDVVuYxN173OX_EWe8qD8hCNeYA0nHrzxyhYzfbIDyAetuo

Fed Chairman Powell says he is ‘very worried’ about growing amount of US debt (video within)

www.cnbc.com/2019/01/10/fed-chairman-powell-says-he-is-very-worried-about-growing-amount-of-us-debt.html?__source=sharebar|facebook&par=sharebar

 

Now Trump Is Mad at Fire

The president renewed his attacks on California’s wildfire management practices, threatening to order FEMA to stop sending aid to the state

President Trump took a break from his border wall obsession Wednesday morning to dust off a favorite fixation from yesteryear: federal money being used to help California combat wildfires. “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen,” the president tweeted. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”  www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-fema-fire-776862/?fbclid=IwAR3lGC8o6tuWwHpdH8WyRDw9Lpw4TQ-ZNBBGmelQnRA2KVD3yRMM2fJ3D74

‘They destroyed me.’ Wells Fargo’s mistake forced her to sell her home

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and the War on Reason

Daniel Ellsberg on the US Doomsday Machine

www.pbs.org/video/daniel-ellsberg-reveals-secrets-america-doomsday-machine-sdu/

The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It

 Until recently, the debate over our president’s mental health has focused on questions of psychological pathology: Do Donald Trump’s flamboyant narcissism, hedonism, and self-delusions add up to a malignant personality — or a malignant personality disorder?

Scores of psychiatric professionals say the latter. Some of their peers — and a large number of laymen — have insisted that the matter can only be settled by a psychiatrist who has personally, privately evaluated the president. That argument has always struck me as nuts.

There is no diagnostic blood test or brain scan for narcissistic personality disorder; there’s just a list of observable traits. A mental-health professional simply studies a patient’s modes of reasoning and patterns of behavior, and assesses whether they fit the checklist of symptoms for NPD. It’s absurd to believe that a psychiatrist who has spent a couple of hours talking to a patient in an office is qualified to make this diagnosis — but one with access to hundreds of hours of a patient’s interviews and improvisatory remarks, along with a small library’s worth of biographical information and testimonials from his closest confidants — is not. To insist otherwise is to mystify psychiatric practice; it’s to pretend that there is some shamanistic knowledge that mental-health professionals can only access once you provide them with a co-pay.    nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/trump-is-mentally-unwell-and-everyone-around-him-knows-it.html?fbclid=IwAR1stmIIAkZUxNBkJU415LeUZNZ2uMfVSv-H8dODIDlzoJR2dwzPn-pbE08

Hundreds more active-duty troops may be sent to US-Mexico border

 

Solidarity for Never

Our Idol Mao Zedong (video within)

Mao Zedong, founding father and dictator of communist China, shaped his country like no other 20th century leader. In the 1960s, he plunged his country into the Cultural Revolution, a violent campaign of mass incitement, the bitter repercussions of which can still be felt today. This documentary tells the stories of contemporary European witnesses whose lives became inextricably linked to Mao’s.  www.dw.com/en/our-idol-mao-zedong/av-46865074?fbclid=IwAR2OYUQhNslaUbInL_EPOYhv5KosGIXGvbPexM3bXKtA6WZau_z1arRatYE

 

Spy versus Spy

The National Endowment for Democracy» and China

In 2017 the American government funded 48 anti-China groups and organizations through its «National Endowment for Democracy» (NED), – in order oppose and harm China and to create social and ethnic tensions and conflicts inside China.

Recently NED has been focusing on Xinjiang, and as a consequence there has been negative reports about the situation there in many Western newspapers and on global TV.

Here are some examples showing how NED is working and using its contacts, to harm China:

One of their assets is Marco Rubio, republican senator for Florida and leader of the «U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China». On August 10, 2018 he writes on his website: «Xinjiang today is ‘a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid,” wrote one expert. Its residents make up only 1.5% of China’s population – but accounted for 21% of arrests in 2017. This massive increase over the previous year doesn’t include detainees in re-education centers.» www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=BCBC38EA-1748-4D40-AA04-9CC1DDC1A728

Senator Rubio also actively participates in meetings at the headquarters of the «National Endowment for Democracy» in Washington DC, like at the «2017 award ceremony» – were he congratulated the NED-activists, it shows that he has close relations with NED: www.ned.org/sen-marco-rubio-r-fl-message-to-neds-2017-democracy-awardees-and.

«Radio Free Asia» (Washington, D.C.) has also been focusing on Xinjiang, like in this article from 3/8-2018: «Advocacy group China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) and a partner NGO, Equal Rights Initiative, said Friday that in the southern XUAR alone some 660,000 rural residents of Uyghur ethnicity may have been detained in the camps, while another up to 1.3 million may have been forced to attend mandatory day or evening re-education sessions in their villages or town centers.»
www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/millions-08032018142025.html       blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2018/09/03/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-and-china/?fbclid=IwAR0GrmpehG4M6LfA63EMQnojaSgWAP6tvI5Q4gSRoTwdGbs2XnULc_BiRzE

The Magical Mystery Tour

50 State AG Call for Grand Jury

Write a letter to the attorney general of your state. Demand, request, and beg them to impanel a grand jury.

Any investigation must be:

• independent of and separate from the church
• must have subpoena powers and ability to compel testimony under oath

Anything short of these criteria is a sham and whitewash.

In addition, write letters to the editor, make phone calls to politicians as they can apply pressure to keep them responsive to our demand. We need to make efforts to ensure that they follow up on what the state is doing to investigate these crimes.

The Attorneys General of forty states have inquired about the grand jury process in Pennsylvania. Let’s get statewide investigations going in fifty states.

Check here for an up-to-date list of active investigations as well as the associated hotlines, websites, and email addresses that survivors can use to report their experiences.

---

Note to Letter Writers

Use your own words and style of writing. Cut and paste from the templates as you wish. Include your experiences, whether as a survivor or as a member of the community. And relate your letter to the state you were abused in or state now living in.  www.snapnetwork.org/

Two police officers, a rabbi, a registered nurse, a nanny and a Boy Scout den leader are among 70 men and one woman arrested on charges of trading child pornography in what federal officials say is one of the largest-ever roundups in the New York City area.

The arrests included a woman charged with producing and distributing child pornography involving her own child and a man who used hidden cameras to secretly film his naked stepdaughter.

Still another defendant was already on bail following his arrest last year on charges that he used the Internet to direct women to record sex acts with young children. Court papers allege he “indicated the last video he had downloaded and viewed depicted a mother sexually abusing her 3- or 4-year-old child.”

One had been convicted and sentenced for raping someone younger than 11 years old.   www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/21/child-porn-nyc-internet/9367471/?fbclid=IwAR1s5BMfHKq8FXSC-z6QdaZy-4DleaJtqQbCNTYlUEJjG_i2rsvnCqpzZXI

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Donald Trump Called a ‘Motherf***er’ for Second Time in 3 Days, This Time by Canada’s First Woman Prime Minister

A former Canadian prime minister has sparked a debate about diplomatic language after she described President Donald Trump as a “motherf***er” in a tweet.

Kim Campbell, who was Canada’s head of government in 1993, reacted strongly on social media to Trump being asked by a reporter what safety net there was for the workers who would not be paid due to a partial shutdown by government.

When Trump said the safety net would be the physical southern border wall with Mexico, Campbell tweeted Saturday, “He really IS a motherf**ker,” CBC reported.   www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-called-motherfer-second-time-3-days-time-canadas-first-woman-1281336?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=NewsweekFacebookSF&fbclid=IwAR2YgVq3jrtF5_K18TIBKwdR4kLLhvj4PnKqt390qg1EtzUd-ikLlitg_AQ

School principal throws ‘mock funeral’ with ‘dead’ baby to motivate teachers: ‘Something is wrong with you’

A school principal organized a pseudo-funeral in what some saw as a misguided attempt to motivate teachers, causing some educators who had suffered childbirth problems to flee the room.

The principal of Getwell Elementary School in Memphis reportedly wanted to motivate teachers to work harder after 2015 data by Public School Review showed the school scored in the bottom 50 percent for math and reading in the state, according to Fox 13, which broke the story.

The principal, Tina Smith, decided that a meeting with a funeral motif would show teachers they were “burying” the data and would demonstrate the wasted potential of students. At the Friday meeting, while a song played with the lyric “Children are our future,” teachers were told to act as though they were in mourning, reported Fox 13.

There was a tiny “casket” in the middle of the room — with a “dead” baby doll inside — surrounded by flowers and pamphlets that read, “In loving memory of Madam 2 to 3 years behind.”

Keith Williams, the interim director of the Memphis-Shelby County Education Association, told Fox 13 that the meeting was offensive. “She has insulted those people. That is an insult — to invite me back to school the first day for a funeral,” Williams said. “Some of the teachers who had recently had challenges with childbirth were overwhelmed and just left the room. Some of them are off today because of it.”

Williams did not return Yahoo Lifestyle’s request for comment.

Police: Ohio substitute teacher arrested after masturbating in front of students

Police say a substitute teacher in Ohio was arrested after he was caught masturbating in front of students in a classroom.

According to the Fairfield Police Department, 41-year-old Tracey J. Abraham was arrested on Tuesday after a school resource officer at Creekside Middle School received several complaints of a substitute teacher masturbating in a classroom while students were present.

The SRO immediately responded to the classroom and removed Abraham. Police then charged Abraham with one count of indecency.

Abraham was booked into jail and arraigned in court on the same day.

The school district released the following statement on the incident:  www.fox26houston.com/news/police-ohio-substitute-teacher-arrested-after-masturbating-in-front-of-students?fbclid=IwAR2bXKt8QgznAOLkKimPfQcfFcgV2YSjxbv-AbEktIr5EIc6fuLEvn3ut-Q

www.facebook.com/100012168751467/videos/639171996498420/?t=6