Rouge Forum Dispatch: No War But Class War!
May 12th, 2018 / Author: rgibsonWe Say Fight Back!
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Pueblo teachers launch Colorado’s first teachers’ strike in 24 years
Teachers are trying to pressure the district into approving a 2 percent cost-of-living pay increase
PUEBLO — A sea of teachers and their supporters descended on their district’s administration building Monday afternoon, a wave circling around the block while chanting and holding signs.
Pueblo teachers stayed out of school on Monday, launching the first teachers’ strike in Colorado in nearly a quarter-century, as they urged Pueblo City Schools District 60 leaders to agree to a 2 percent pay increase and better benefits.
Teachers from schools across the city said they don’t want the strike to last forever. But they’ll stick it out until the district agrees to the raise recommended by a third-party fact-finder.
“I got into teaching because I understand its value to society,” East High School teacher Michael Lonsberry said. “You can’t have a solid chance at a successful, productive and satisfying life without education.”
Teachers carried signs and chanted “Pueblo schools are under attack. What do we do? Stand up. Fight back,” and “Get up, get down, Pueblo is a union town!” Earlier in the day, pink from the shirts teachers wore dotted the city as groups stood outside of closed schools, next to busy intersections and in front of at least one library.
Meanwhile, school parking lots sat mostly empty. The district closed all schools Monday. Leaders are looking to see which schools they’ll be able to open as the week progresses. www.denverpost.com/2018/05/07/pueblo-teacher-strike/
L.A. Unified school bus drivers and teacher assistants are planning a daylong strike
The union that represents 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District support staff workers is planning a strike on May 15 over what its leaders have called unfair labor practices.
After more than a year of negotiations, the two sides have been unable to agree on a contract for unionized school bus drivers, custodians, special education assistants, teacher assistants, health aides and cafeteria workers. Union leaders said that while negotiations were underway, the district “made unilateral changes to working conditions” outside of collective bargaining www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lausd-worker-strike-20180507-story.html
Puerto Rico Teachers Strike to Protest Deterioration of Public School System
SAN JUAN – Teachers on Thursday staged a 24-hour strike and paralyzed Puerto Rican public education to protest what they say is a general deterioration of the school system.The strike is a protest against the aim of privatizing employee pensions, a shortage of teachers and the degradation of physical plant, the president of the FMPR union, Rafael Feliciano, told Efe on Thursday.“There is an effort on the part of the government to dismantle the public school (system) and discredit it,” Feliciano emphasized after participating in a demonstration in San Juan that concluded in front of the Capitol
The union leader said that the strike is designed to “sensitize” people to the aim of privatizing the system, but he added that that is just one of the problems afflicting Puerto Rico’s schools.
Feliciano said that the government intends to partially privatize the system via Law 7, a measure conceived to reduce the U.S. commonwealth’s serious budget deficit and which already has led to the dismissal of thousands of public employees.
“That law favors the dismissal of public employees from schools to hand over the system to private companies,” he said.
Feliciano emphasized that another of the aims of Gov. Luis Fortuño’s administration is to privatize the retirement system.
He said that another of the serious problems suffered by the system is a lack of teachers, a situation that affected about 100,000 students in at least one required course.
Massive UC workers’ strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services
A massive labor strike across the University of California on Monday forced medical centers to reschedule more than 12,000 surgeries, cancer treatments and appointments, and campuses to cancel some classes and limit dining services.
More than 20,000 members of UC’s largest employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, walked off their jobs on the first day of a three-day strike. They include custodians, gardeners, cooks, truck drivers, lab technicians and nurse aides. www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-workers-strike-20180507-story.html
‘You can feel it when the workers aren’t there.’ Nurses strike with hospital workers
More than 550 nurses and members of the California Nurses Association turned out Wednesday for the second day of the sympathy strike at UC Davis Medical Center.
The nurses, along with other health care workers in University Professional and Technical Employees-CWA union, joined AFSCME 3299 union members on Tuesday and Wednesday in their strike against stalled contract negotiations with the University of California.
After more than a year of negotiations, the patient-care and service workers, represented by AFSCME 3299, rejected the university’s last-and-best offer of 3 percent across-the-board wage increases and a prorated, lump-sum payment of $750. AFSCME 3299 negotiators have sought wage increases of 6 percent, a freeze on health care premiums and job security that eliminates contracting out jobs for which its members are trained. Read more here: www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article210813989.html#storylink=cpy
Who Is Karl Marx: Meet the Anti-Capitalist Scholar (Yes, this is “Teen Vogue”)
You may have come across communist memes on social media. The man, the meme, the legend behind this trend is Karl Marx, who developed the theory of communism, which advocates for workers’ control over their labor (instead of their bosses). The political philosopher turned 200-years-old on May 5, but his ideas can still teach us about the past and present.
The famed German co-authored The Communist Manifesto with fellow scholar Friedrich Engels in 1848, a piece of writing that makes the case for the political theory of socialism — where the community (rather than rich people) have ownership and control over their labor — which later inspired millions of people to resist oppressive political leaders and spark political revolutions all over the world. Although Marx was raised in a middle-class family, he later became a scholar who struggled to make ends meet — a working-class man, he thought, who could take part in a political revolution. www.teenvogue.com/story/who-is-karl-marx
A letter to Karl Marx on his 200th birthday
Dear Karl,
Happy birthday! It’s tempting to say that much has changed in the 200 years since your birth, but as I sit down to describe those changes, I must admit I am more struck by the similarities than the differences between your time and mine.
The big news is, of course, that the kings you fought so hard to unmask as charlatans no longer are divine. Well, there are a few monarchs who still claim tangential ties to a higher power, but most people have cottoned on to the fact that royal power is really just a combination of heredity and tenacity. And, unfortunately, your kings have been replaced by new ones who base their right to rule on an aristocracy of wealth.
Yes, Karl, after you died in 1883, people discovered your writings and some promptly misused them. There are statues of you in capitals around the globe where governments expounded “Marxism” to deprive people of the very freedoms you extolled. They reinterpreted your vision of “the free development of each” being “the condition for the free development of all” as the freedom to be equally miserable. Indeed, the repression and butchery accomplished in your name during the last century would horrify you.
Do you remember your high hopes for democracy? How you believed free speech, universal education and the vote would help usher in a world that created the greatest good for the greatest number? It hasn’t really worked out that way. While so-called Marxists operating under a communist banner expunged rights around the globe, capitalists busily subverted democracy in a long and insidious hostile takeover. www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gabriel-karl-marx-birthday-20180506-story.html
Ollman on Marx and Communism
While it is probably more difficult today to get Marx’s vision of communism taken seriously, there has never been a time when this vision was needed more than now. As the Cheshire Cat tells Alice—if you don’t know where you want to go, then any path will do. Why give priority, we are asked again and again, to any one reform over others?
The first step in reestablishing Marx’s vision and providing the oppressed of this world with a path to take into the future is to break the connection between communism and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, this is how most people continue to think about communism. Instead, communism must be linked, as it was for Marx, to capitalism. Viewed in relation to the Soviet Union, communism cannot help but be sullied by the distortions that disfigured even the modest successes that occurred under that regime. But, perhaps even more important, when communism is viewed in connection with the Soviet experience (whether one approves or disapproves of the result), communism seems to be an alternative available to people anywhere, at any time, and under any conditions. What counts here are various subjective factors ranging from the intelligence and commitments of the leadership to the type of party they create and the strategy they adopt. Viewing communism in and through its ties to capitalism, on the other hand, brings to the fore the objective conditions responsible for the particular problems from which people suffer together with the related conditions—all of which were completely absent in the Soviet Union—that provide a basis for their solution. It is this approach that allowed Marx to treat communism as an unrealized potential within capitalism.
But if this is so, then—like Marx—we must give top priority to the analysis of capitalism, and not of market society, or industrial society, or the information society, or modern society, or post-modern society, or even American society. For our worst problems—crisis, economic exploitation, alienation, unemployment, social and economic inequality, and imperialism—all arise from the natural workings of capitalism, as do the main elements for their solution. Substituting another way or organizing social life for capitalism as the privileged object of study leaves the origins of these problems out of focus or worse, and makes it difficult to see where their solutions might come from.
…In presenting the choice before humanity in the coming period as between communism, barbarism, ecological suicide and nuclear annihilation, I am trying to make two main points: that the continuation of democratic capitalism, whose necessary preconditions are even now disappearing, is not one of the alternatives; and that none of the real alternatives to communism are acceptable to anyone. For people to choose communism, however, still requires that they recognize it as a realistic possibility, no matter how unlikely they believe it to be. For whereas communism will only be achieved if the majority of workers, which includes practically everyone nowadays, set out on this path, the other possible outcomes to human history can come about without anyone actually choosing them. As capitalist decline turns into a full scale rout, all that is required is that people put off choosing communism long enough.
There is still time to awaken people about the real possibility of communism. The preconditions for communism that lie inside capitalism are increasing in size and number and becoming more apparent everywhere. There can be few tasks more important today than to make these preconditions stand out in sharp relief and to publicize them as foreshadowings of communism. www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/marxs_vision.php
March in Oaxaca
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The Little Red Schoolhouse
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North Carolina school districts closing for teacher protest
RALEIGH, N.C. — Three of North Carolina’s largest school districts now plan to shut down for one day next week and some smaller districts plan to do the same, as thousands of teachers are expected to rally for better working conditions and education funding.
The Wake County Public School System said Monday it will close on May 16 after about a quarter of the 10,000 teachers employed in and around the state’s capital city asked for the day off to participate in the rally. The 160,000 students in the state’s largest school district won’t have to make up the class time.
Also Monday, Guilford County Schools announced its classrooms will be closed for 72,000 students after nearly 2,000 teachers planned absences, twice the number of available substitutes.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the second-largest district with 150,000 students, announced Friday it would cancel classes because of the rally. Durham County, with 33,000 students, and Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools, with 12,000, also will close.
The rally is scheduled for the same day that state lawmakers assemble in Raleigh for their annual legislative session. www.washingtonpost.com/national/north-carolina-school-districts-closing-for-teacher-protest/2018/05/07/dbef486a-523b-11e8-a6d4-ca1d035642ce_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1f983424b575
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Some Miami-Dade teachers say speaking out comes at a price
Not long after speaking up at a school board meeting about overcrowded classes, high school teacher Richard Ocampo says he has gone from earning top marks on performance reviews to possibly losing his job.
Ocampo sees his treatment as a message from school district management: If you rock the boat, you might get tossed overboard.
“It all really started after I spoke at the school board meeting,” said Ocampo, a social studies teacher at North Miami Senior High. “I guess they don’t like teachers like us.”
He and other teachers, who form a small but vocal core of internal critics, say district leadership routinely discourages public dissent. The disenchantment is strong enough that emails circulated at the beginning of April calling for teachers to protest at Wednesday’s Miami-Dade school board meeting.
Teachers and parents say some of the district’s tactics can be subtle. To speak at board meetings, for example, the district asks people to sign up days in advance and list their topic. Those who do usually get a call from the district ahead of time. Some describe the calls as an attempt to talk speakers out of airing complaints as cameras roll.
Other teachers also have reported what they view as pressure from higher ups, including Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, after speaking up. Read more here: www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article18527573.html#storylink=cpy
Did discipline diversion program fail Parkland? Superintendent vows improved policies.
Broward County is taking a closer look at how schools address punishment amid criticism that its controversial PROMISE program encouraged a culture of lax discipline throughout the district.
Some critics, including the family of a student wounded in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, blame the program for failing to intercept mass shooter Nikolas Cruz before he killed 17 people on Valentine’s Day. Miami Herald news partner WLRN revealed Sunday that Cruz was assigned to the PROMISE diversion program in 2013 but never showed up — contrary to previous statements from the district that he had “no affiliation” with the program.
The PROMISE program — an acronym for Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports & Education — was a diversion program that sent students who committed specific misdemeanors to counseling at an alternative school instead of the criminal justice system.
…A former teacher at Silver Lakes Elementary School told the board that when she was faced with a student who got into fights, cursed and threw desks, an administrator returned the second referral she wrote for the offending student.“I was told ‘don’t write referrals on the same student, it makes our school look bad’,” said Julie Ganas. Read more here: www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article210619574.html#storylink=cpy
Faculty union condemns Racist SDSU Aztec mascot
The union representing most California State University faculty voted last week to condemn San Diego State’s mascot, as well as those of two other CSU campuses.
In a vote at the California Faculty Association 87th annual assembly in Los Angeles on April 14 and 15, members denounced the Aztecs moniker, the mascot’s human representation and “the usage of spears or weapons that connote violent and barbaric representations of Indigenous cultures.”
The resolution states SDSU is “on Kumeyaay land and the Kumeyaay were not consulted to create a culturally appropriate mascot.”
The CFA also condemned two other CSU mascots — the CSU East Bay Pioneers and the CSU Long Beach 49ers — as being representative of “a genocidal history against Indigenous peoples in California,” though it says CSU Long Beach “has worked to address their problematic mascot ‘Prospector Pete’ with truth-telling, fostered healing, and collective unity with the local Indigenous peoples.”
CSU San Marcos and CSU Channel Islands were both referenced for having “proactively worked with the local Indigenous community on whose land they reside to establish a campus identity that is rooted in place” and having “worked with the Chumash to create a culturally appropriate mascot,” respectively.
Faculty Association Vice President Charles Toombs, who is a professor of Africana Studies at SDSU as well as the campus’ CFA chapter president, said the resolution was initiated by the organization’s Indigenous People’s caucus of the Council for Affirmative Action within the CFA before passing with support from the whole assembly. thedailyaztec.com/89604/news/faculty-union-condemns-aztec-mascot/
Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone
I would like to write about the bullshitization of academic life: that is, the degree to which those involved in teaching and academic management spend more and more of their time involved in tasks which they secretly — or not so secretly —…www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318/#.WvBbWyi6OR8.twitter
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
The US Navy’s new command puts Russia in the crosshairs
ABOARD THE USS GEORGE H. W. BUSH, NORFOLK, Va. — A sharp increase in Russian naval activity in the Arctic and north Atlantic in the years since its invasion of eastern Ukraine has prompted the U.S. Navy to resurrect a command it disestablished seven years ago.
At a ceremony marking Adm. Phil Davidson’s change of command with Adm. Chris Grady as the head of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson announced the Navy was set to re-establish the 2nd Fleet.
The command was merged into Fleet Forces Command in 2011, but the Navy has been talking about bringing it back since it appeared as a recommendation in the Strategic Readiness Review into last year’s 7th Fleet collisions.
The move is the latest sign that the Navy is focusing its attention away from the war on terrorism and toward its major competitors China and Russia. www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/05/04/the-us-navys-new-command-puts-russia-in-the-crosshairs/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ebb%2007.05.18&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Military%20-%20Early%20Bird%20Brief
The First Saudi-Iranian War Will Be an Even Fight
What happens when the Saudi military’s massive budget meets Iran’s mastery of asymmetric warfare? Here’s a preview.
…The two countries differ markedly in the size and capabilities of their forces. Iran has the larger military, with two forces — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Artesh regular military — composed of complementary air, naval, and land branches. The Artesh has an estimated 350,000 active-duty soldiers and controls most of Iran’s more sophisticated conventional capabilities, especially in the air and maritime domains. By comparison, the IRGC, with an estimated force of 125,000, has maintained a focus on asymmetric warfare but also oversees Iran’s growing unmanned aerial vehicle fleet and strategic ballistic missile programs. Additionally, through its special forces division, known as the Quds Force, the IRGC commands Iran’s foreign military operations and relations with client allies, such as in Syria and Iraq.
Since the 1980s, intermittent sanctions and political pressure from the United States have severely degraded Iran’s ability to procure military technology and weapons from other countries, which has made some of its military capabilities relatively outmoded and weak. Iran’s defense spending (around $12.3 billion in 2016) is modest compared with Saudi Arabia’s as one of the top defense budgets in the world ($63.7 billion in 2016 and $69.4 billion in 2017), and its defense technology generally falls well below that of other regional states. Iran’s air forces fly dated platforms, such as F-5 and F-14 Tomcat variants, which have been updated domestically from aircraft inherited from the pre-revolution Pahlavi state, but struggle with intermittent inoperability. Similarly, Iran’s mechanized armor is mostly a hodgepodge of pre-1979 U.S. stock (such as the M60A1) and older Soviet tanks (such as the T-72S) procured from Russia during the 1990s.
Unable to update its military capabilities, Iran has instead invested in other areas, especially ballistic missiles, to provide a competitive edge with its neighbors. foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/07/the-first-saudi-iranian-war-will-be-an-even-fight/
Taliban overruns another district in the Afghan north
The Taliban successfully overran the district of Tala Wa Barfak in the northern Afghan province of Baghlan today. Two other Afghan districts have been seized by the Taliban in the past two weeks, and several more have been threatened. All of that occurred as a Department of Defense spokesperson claimed last week that the Taliban is “desperate” and “losing ground.”
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that the “Talaw Barfak [sic] district center and police HQ” in Baghlan province was overrun “by Mujahidin at 3pm today, multiple gunmen killed, large quantities of weapons, equipment and vehicles seized.”
The Afghan press has not yet confirmed Mujahid’s claim, however similar Taliban reports have been highly accurate in the past. A report at TOLONews indicated that the Taliban had surrounded the district center and cut off all roads leading to it, which blocked government reinforcements from reaching the center. www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/05/taliban-overruns-another-district-in-the-afghan-north.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LongWarJournalSiteWide+%28FDD%27s+Long+War+Journal+Update%29
Iranian Scientist Annoyed He Has To Go Back To Shitty Old Job Building Nuclear Weapons
In the wake of President Trump’s announcement Tuesday that the United States would pull out of the international agreement to limit the Middle Eastern country’s program, Iranian nuclear scientist Ali Khatami was reportedly annoyed that he would have to return to his shitty old job building nuclear weapons. “Great, just what I wanted to do—go back to converting yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride all fucking day,” said a visibly irritated Khatami, adding that he wasn’t looking forward to being holed up in a newly reopened underground bunker, working overtime on the development of long-range ballistic missiles the way he always was before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was ratified. “This totally sucks. I hate the work, and the hours are fucking awful. And I’ll bet they’re bringing back my old dickhead boss who’s never satisfied no matter how much weapons-grade U-235 we crank out. I had just found a nice new position at a small research lab closer to my family, too. Oh, well, it’s got to get done, so back to the goddamn grind.” In related news, American nuclear scientist David Ebeling reported feeling pretty irritated that his weapons-production facility’s output goals had been raised yet again. www.theonion.com/iranian-scientist-annoyed-he-has-to-go-back-to-shitty-o-1825867350?utm_source=Facebook&utm_content=Main&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=SF
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
Billionaire Soros pumps $400K into DA’s race to get Jones-Wright elected
A political action committee funded by billionaire investor George Soros has spent $402,000 to support San Diego County district attorney candidate Geneviéve Jones-Wright. That’s more than double what the deputy public defender has fundraised for her own campaign.
Soros has been the sole donor to the PAC, called California Justice & Public Safety, since at least January. On Thursday, Soros gave the PAC $1.5 million, and on that same day, the PAC spent almost $195,000 on television airtime and video production costs to support Jones-Wright in her bid to unseat interim District Attorney Summer Stephan. The next day, it spent $100,000 on digital advertising and another $107,000 on mailings for Jones-Wright.
“This much money is very unusual for a local race like this, particularly out-of-district money,” Carl Luna, a San Diego Mesa College political science professor, said Monday. “Outside of Congress, you don’t see races like this attracting that much money.”
The expenditures far exceed any other money in the district attorney’s race so far, and more money is expected to flow into the race over the next month. County voters started casting mail-in ballots on Monday for the June 5 election. Because there are only two district attorney candidates, the winner will be decided in June. inewsource.org/2018/05/07/billionaire-soros-pumps-400k-into-das-race-to-get-jones-wright-elected/
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…(Roy) Cohn thrived throughout a New York second act rife with indictments and scandals that included accusations of multiple bank- and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion, bribery, extortion, theft, and even precipitating the death of a young man in a suspicious fire. Trump may never have been suspected of manslaughter, but he also flourished for decades despite being a shameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist, bankruptcy aficionado, and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactional sexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets — legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty. (The putz-cum-fixer Michael Cohen, who is to Cohn what Dan Quayle was to Jack Kennedy, boasts none of these attributes either.) And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensibly pitiless magnifying glass of New York. Much as one hates to concede it, it’s no small achievement that he succeeded where so many of his betters failed in becoming the first New Yorker to catapult himself to the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt. nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html
Student debt just hit $1.5 trillion
America’s student loan problem just surpassed a depressing milestone.
Outstanding student debt reached $1.521 trillion in the first quarter of 2018, according to the Federal Reserve, hitting $1.5 trillion for the first time. Though the marker is somewhat arbitrary, it offers a reminder of how quickly student debt has grown—jumping from about $600 billion 10 years ago to more than $1.5 trillion today—and that the factors fueling the increase aren’t likely to disappear any time soon.
“People pay attention to milestones,” said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert. When student debt surpassed $1 trillion in 2012, “it definitely caused a shift in coverage of student loans in the news media,” he said. In theory, that helps raise awareness of the issue for student advocates, lawmakers and, in particular, borrowers when considering what college to attend. But Kantrowitz added, “What’s more important is the impact on individual borrowers.”
One in six graduates have debt that exceeds their income
And they are feeling it. College graduates leave school with about $37,000 in debt on average, according to Kantrowitz’s data, a sum that can be bearable for many, given that the average starting salary for a new college graduate last year hovered around $50,000. But a large share—as many as one in six college graduates, Kantrowitz estimates—will leave school with debt that exceeds their income. That will make it challenging for those borrowers to pay off their loans on a standard 10-year repayment plan, he said. www.marketwatch.com/story/student-debt-just-hit-15-trillion-2018-05-08
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAZy75RKb84
The black-white wealth gap is fueled by student debt
Student debt is becoming a nearly-universal American experience, but the particulars of that experience can vary widely depending on the color of your skin.
It’s become increasingly clear over the past several years that black student-loan borrowers take on more debt than their white counterparts and struggle to repay it. But new research sheds light on the different trajectories of black and white students during the college-going and student-loan borrowing experience, and the disparate impacts it has on their financial well-being.
“Student debt is going to contribute to the ongoing persistence of the racial wealth gap,” said Fenaba Addo, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the working paper. “These disparities are large and then they grow over time.”
Indeed, the study finds that the gap in student debt held by black and white borrowers grows by 6.8% each year. As a result, black young adults hold 10.4% less wealth on average than their white counterparts due to differences in student-loan debt. www.marketwatch.com/story/how-student-debt-is-fueling-the-racial-wealth-gap-2018-05-03?mod=mw_share_facebook
Melania Trump’s bullying handbook identical to Obama administration pamphlet
A pamphlet released by Melania Trump and the White House about internet safety for children is almost identical to one released by the Obama administration five years ago.
The First Lady launched a new campaign overnight intent on protecting kids from the risks of using the internet.
The problem is, save for a five-paragraph introduction by Mrs Trump, the handbook is exactly the same as one issued by the Federal Trade Commission in 2014.
“The lessons in this booklet can help kids act thoughtfully and kindly,” the introduction reads.
“I hope you will use it to have conversations with children about appropriate conduct online and about using social media responsibly.”
The White House website describes the handbook as “a booklet by First Lady Melania Trump and the Federal Trade Commission”. pickle.nine.com.au/2018/05/08/10/39/melania-trump-bullying-handbook-identical-to-obama-administration-pamphlet
Laughing at Cuckette’s kiddie joke, Trump proposes $15 billion spending cuts, targets children’s health program
U.S. President Donald Trump will request a package of $15 billion in spending cuts from Congress on Tuesday, including some $7 billion from the Children’s Health Insurance Program championed by Democrats, senior administration officials said on Monday www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fiscal-republicans/trump-proposes-15-billion-spending-cuts-targets-childrens-health-program-idUSKBN1I829L
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason
The United States Is a Country That Tortures People
We will do it again if you scare us enough.
The children of the Senate Intelligence Committee certainly were treated to some ripping yarns on Wednesday, when Gina Haspel came to tell them the scary bedtime stories that qualify her to run the CIA. We had shadow warriors, and far-flung outposts, brush passes, dead drops, and dusty alleys, and dark moonless nights. If the hearing had gone on 10 minutes longer, John le Carré’s attorneys might have dropped in with an intellectual property action. Then, of course, they all went into executive session, where they could all talk about the really cool, really super-secret spy stuff that the rest of us can’t know about, but are obligated to pay for. And, ultimately, there was one basic message to come out of this hearing to the world.
The United States is a country that tortures people. It is also a country that arranges for other countries to torture people. We did in back in the Bush administration and we’ll do it again, if you scare us deeply enough and there are enough hack lawyers in the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel’s office to draft memos to cover our asses. The United States is a country that tortures people, and we’ll do it again, under the right circumstances. We’d just rather it not make the papers, is all.
Haspel, it is said by the very serious people who think serious thoughts on television, did very well. She pledged that the CIA would never “go back” to torturing people again, a worthless promise under any president, but particularly under this one. Who is going to stop them next time? The same people who failed to stop them the last time? It is to laugh. The statement was also stunningly beside the point. The question was about torture that we’ve already inflicted, and that she was intimately involved in.
She made sure we all knew the Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was a very bad man who killed “a Wall Street Journal reporter who was an American.” (Curiously, she never mentioned Daniel Pearl’s name.) KSM came up every time the questions about torture came too close to being about actual torture, the subtext being, of course, that there are people who deserve to be tortured, even though we don’t torture anyone anymore, and we never will, and we can depend on Gina Haspel and Donald Trump for that. I’m convinced. www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20637327/haspel-torture-cia/?src=socialflowFBESQ
Why the Islamic State Could Be Good for the Arabs (by racist Asst Sec of State)
It is baffling, and unfortunately important, that the Arabs cannot build a modern state. The ones they have built are monsters, rattletrap Frankensteins whose efficiency only extends to their secret police. None provide for even the most basic social and political freedom of their citizens, and in every indicator of healthy modern life tracked by the World Bank, the Arab states rank near the bottom. Something has gone wrong. And it is possible that the Islamic State’s moment – terrible in other ways – offers them a chance to fix it.
One of the basic problems is that most of the Arab societies have never had a real social upheaval, which would have been a shove into the modern world. They have had dozens of coups, countless military strongmen, and the sort of hereditary monarchies that fell out of fashion in Europe two centuries ago; but no total upheavals like 1917 in Russia or 1979 in Iran. Their latest bid for modernity was an Arab Spring that ended everywhere in dictatorship or civil war; but no popular revolutions that successfully remade their societies in different image. www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2015/04/13/Why-Islamic-State-Could-Be-Good-Arabs
Andrew Peek
Congressman wants answers on extremist activity in the military
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White nationalist demonstrators use shields as they guard the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Va., during a Aug. 12, 2017, protest. A Minnesota congressman is asking the Defense Department to detail what they are doing to counter those group’s influence in the military after recent reports of troops participating in white nationalist activities. (Steve Helber/AP)
A Minnesota congressman wants full details on what the military knows about extremist activity within its own ranks following news reports detailing at least three service members with ties to a white supremacist group.
Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat who was the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, set a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis late last week asking for information on any investigations into troops’ extremist activities and “steps currently being taken to screen recruits for extremist ties” by the end of the month. He calls the problem an urgent threat to the armed forces.
“Although Department of Defense guidance clearly prohibits discrimination and extremist behavior, it appears that some service members are still able to join and actively participate in extremist organizations,” the letter stated, adding he sees evidence that “volunteers with seemingly credible ties to the white supremacist movement are being allowed to enter the military.”
The move stems from a recent ProPublica and Frontline PBS report which found evidence at least three current service members and three other veterans who belong to the white supremacist group Atomawaffen, which has been tied to the murders of at least five people in the last year alone. www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/05/07/congressman-wants-answers-on-extremist-activity-in-the-military/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Socialflow
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Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy?
The idea that authoritarianism attracts workers harmed by the free market, which emerged when the Nazis were in power, has been making a comeback.
……In his own contribution to the book, he argued that fascism strips democratic politics away from human society so that “only economic life remains,” a skeleton without flesh….
…he decided that it was no accident that fascism was infecting countries as disparate as Japan, Croatia, and Portugal. Fascism shouldn’t be “ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds,” he came to believe. It shouldn’t even be thought of as a political movement. It was, rather, an “ever-given political possibility”…
Basically there are two solutions,” Polanyi wrote in 1935. “The extension of the democratic principle from politics to economics, or the abolition of the democratic ‘political sphere’ altogether.” In other words, socialism or fascism….www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/is-capitalism-a-threat-to-democracy
www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/10155807729247217/
CNN poll: Wall Street’s Democrats’ 2018 advantage is nearly gone
The generic congressional ballot has continued to tighten, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, with the Democrats’ edge over Republicans within the poll’s margin of sampling error for the first time this cycle.
Putin sworn in as president for fourth term at lavish Czar’s Kremlin ceremony
Vladimir Putin on Monday was sworn in for a fourth term as Russia’s president in an elaborate ceremony at the Kremlin, opening another six years ruling the country where he has already been in power for almost two decades.
Putin took the oath of office in the gold-encrusted St. Andrew’s hall, where Russia’s tsars were once crowned. The televised ceremony on Monday began with a staged scene in which cameras appeared to come upon Putin in his shirt-sleeves in his Kremlin office, as though he was interrupted during his ordinary workday.
Putin, who has tried to cultivate an image as a tireless servant of Russia, then put on his jacket and walked silently for several minutes down the building’s long, empty corridors, seeming to pause at one point as though inspecting some paintings hanging on a wall.
He then rode a few hundred yards across the Kremlin grounds in a phalanx of police bikes, seated in a new Russian-built limousine unveiled especially for the inauguration. abcnews.go.com/International/putin-sworn-president-fourth-term-lavish-kremlin-ceremony/story?id=54984803
Thank Stalin
Solidarity for Never
Weingarten owns a home in East Hampton, New York, near the easternmost edge of Long Island. The median house value there is more than $1 million. The community is 86 percent white and 0.7 percent African-American. ..
Weingarten also owns a co-op in New York City’s Inwood neighborhood on the northern tip of Manhattan. The area was profiled in an article last year headlined “Inwood Is Actually Two Neighborhoods Divided by Race, Class and Broadway.” The author notes that while “both sides of the neighborhood are predominantly Latino, close to 90 percent of the area’s white population lives in West Inwood.” The locals refer to West Inwood as “Little Connecticut.”
“Residents east of Broadway have said for years that they face serious impediments when it comes to accessing information, police attention and other resources — which they blame on race, language and class differences with their western counterparts,” the article states.
Weingarten’s co-op is in West Inwood. www.the74million.org/article/analysis-which-bothers-randi-weingarten-more-segregation-or-school-choice/
Spy versus Spy
Full Report Declassified Torture Doc
WAPO “Fact” check CIA director nominee Haspel and the destruction of interrogation tapes: Contradictions and questions
A key issue in Gina Haspel’s nomination to be CIA director is her role in the CIA’s 2005 destruction of videotapes documenting interrogation sessions with al-Qaeda detainees using brutal techniques, including waterboarding. In preparation for her hearing, the CIA declassified a 2011 internal disciplinary review, written by then-deputy CIA director Michael Morell, that Haspel and her allies have said exonerated her.
“I have found no fault with the performance of Ms. Haspel,” Morell wrote. He essentially said she was a “good soldier” who followed orders, including an order to draft the cable to destroy the tapes. www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/11/cia-director-nominee-haspel-and-destruction-of-interrogation-tapes-contradictions-and-questions/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.55dccea6b9bb
Elderly Retired CIA Analyst Dragged from Senate Hearing for Exposing Gina Haspel’s War Crimes
A highly decorated retired CIA analyst was forcibly removed by a half dozen cops as he attempted to expose the crimes of the nominee for Director of the CIA, Gina Haspel.
Washington, D.C. — Retired CIA analyst and outspoken antiwar activist, Ray McGovern, who chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief, was forcibly removed from the United States Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday as Gina Haspel, the nominee for director of the CIA, was answering questions about her record of torture.
McGovern is a highly decorated CIA analyst who received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement. He has since become an outspoken antiwar and anti-police state activist and returned the medal in 2006 in protest to the CIA’s involvement in torture.
McGovern is also a veteran of the Vietnam war which adds to his already high level of credibility in speaking out against the system.
During the hearing, McGovern demanded that Haspel answer the questions asked of her about the torture of terrorism suspects at a CIA black site in Thailand. In response to the interruption, the capitol police were called in to drag McGovern out. thefreethoughtproject.com/elderly-ex-cia-agent-dragged-from-senate-hearing-for-exposing-gina-haspels-war-crimes/
www.facebook.com/allimccrack/videos/10211044353839919/
CIA Diary
Inside the Company
by Philip Agee
Penguin Books, 1975
p37
… what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President.
… the question of Congressional monitoring of intelligence activities and of the Agency in particular. The problem resides in the National Security Act of 1947 and also in its amendment, the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949. These laws charged the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] with protecting the ‘sources and methods’ of the US intelligence effort and also exempted the DCI and the Bureau of the Budget from reporting to Congress on the organization, function, personnel and expenditures of the CIA – whose budget is hidden in the budgets of other executive agencies. The DCI, in fact, can secretly spend whatever portion of the CIA budget he determines necessary, with no other accounting than his own signature. Such expenditures, free from review by Congress or the General Accounting Office or, in theory, by anyone outside the executive-branch, are called ‘unvouchered funds’.
By passage of these laws Congress has sealed itself off from CIA activities, although four small sub-committees are informed periodically on important matters by the DCI. These are the Senate and House sub-committees of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, and the speeches of their principal spokesman, Senator Richard Russell, are required reading for the JOT’S.
There have been several times when ClA autonomy was threatened. The Hoover Commission Task Force on Intelligence Activities headed by General Mark Clark recommended in 1955 that a Congressional Watchdog Committee be established to oversee the CIA much as the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy watches over the AEC. The Clark Committee, in fact, did not believe the sub-committees of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees were able to exercise effectively the Congressional monitoring function. However, the problem was corrected, according to the Agency position, when President Eisenhower, early in 1956, established his own appointative committee to oversee the Agency. This is the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, whose chairman is James R. Killian, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It can provide the kind of ‘private citizen’ monitoring of the Agency that Congress didn’t want. Moreover … the more Congress gets into the act the greater the danger of accidental revelation of secrets by indiscreet politicians. Established relationships with intelligence services of other countries, like Great Britain, might be complicated. The Congress was quite right at the beginning in giving up control – so much for them, their job is to appropriate the money. www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_Diary_Agee.html
The Magical Mystery Tour
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
Millions Are Still Suffering from the Vietnam War
More than forty years after the Vietnam War, death and devastation continue to follow in its wake, and the misery index rises even though the shooting has long stopped. Richard Nixon once stated that no other American war was more “misunderstood, misreported or misremembered.” This may be true, but it is far more likely the men responsible for America’s years-long bloodbath in Vietnam would gladly have their miscalculations, failures in judgment and carelessness of deed attributed to misunderstanding, misreporting or, most laughable, misremembering. Historians, scholars, political scientists and high-level government officials have written volumes about the Vietnam experience. Careful examination of a representative sample of this material reveals a wealth of understanding, faithful reporting and documented recounting of events.
However interpreted, certain facts remain irrefutable and speak for themselves: 211,000 American men and women were killed or wounded on the battlefields of Vietnam, and 1,600 remain missing. Incredibly, estimates today range as high as 3,000,000 Vietnamese men, women and children and an additional 1,000,000 Cambodian/Lao killed or wounded.
Even today, at the onset of a new century, vast expanses of once productive Southeast Asian land continue to threaten the native population. Death, disease and disfigurement are embedded in the very soil under their feet. Records show between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. sprayed approximately 76,000,000 liters – 8,800 tons – of herbicide(Agents Orange, Green, Pink, Purple and White) over an area of 6,000,000 square acres – 14% of Vietnam’s land mass. Dioxins, the active family of chemicals in Agent Orange, are known health risks to humans. Sampling studies undertaken in the 1990’s revealed dangerously high levels of contaminant in Vietnamese forests, soil, fishpond sediment, fish and fowl tissue and human blood. Agent Orange Dioxin in human blood samples taken from Vietnamese men and women ranging from twelve to twenty-five years old clearly show the contaminant chemicals have moved up through the food chain into humans. historynewsnetwork.org/article/168886