We Say Fight Back!

Prisoners nationwide go on strike to protest ‘modern-day slavery’

The event is spearheaded by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a network of imprisoned prisoner rights advocates based out of Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina and supported by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), a prisoner-led trade group.

Inmates plan to abstain from reporting to their assigned jobs, halt commissary spending, hold peaceful sit-in protests and refuse to eat during the strike.

“Prisoner participation depends on their location and privilege status,” said Amani Sawari, a prison reform activist and spokesperson for the strike. “If inmates are working they can suffocate the prison industrial complex by reducing their spending. In some detention facilities, prisoners may not be working so they might do a sit-in. It all depends.”

The call for action comes as a response to a prison riot that took place in Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina in April of this year, resulting in the death of seven inmates and injuring of over a dozen others. Inmates posted videos on social media showing the aftermath at the budget-strapped prison.

The prisoners released a list of 10 demands on the IWOC website that include, in part, the immediate improvement of prison policies, an increase in prisoner wages and rescinding laws that prevent imprisoned persons from having a chance at parole. The inmates also call for more rehabilitation services and voting rights.

Prisons in at least 17 states are expected to participate in the protests, according to Sawari, with a majority of them located in the South and West Coast.

Highline teachers join list of districts ready to strike–all of Washington State?

It’s going to be an important couple of weeks as teachers unions and school districts statewide go to the negotiating table for new contracts. The crux of the debate is the McCleary decision and new funding.

Back in 2012, the state Supreme Court ruled that Washington was not properly funding public schools, and the court ordered the legislature to come up with a solution. Two years later, the court found the legislature in contempt for failing to establish a plan. Then, this past June, the court found the state satisfied the conditions of the McCleary decision, triggering extra funding for districts.

Highline Education Association said at least $2 billion of the new funding is for educators salaries, and teachers want what is fair and equitable.

Highline Public Schools is scheduled to start on September 5.

“It is a date that we expect to have an agreement, and if we can’t come to an agreement by that date then the membership may take action and that action might be a strike,” said Sue McCabe, Highline Education Association president.  www.king5.com/article/news/local/highline-teachers-join-list-of-districts-ready-to-strike/281-587124929

Nation’s Second-Largest Teacher Union Local Begins Strike Authorization Vote

WHO: United Teachers Los Angeles represents more than 33,000 LAUSD educators, including teachers, librarians, counselors, nurses, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, therapists, substitutes, early childhood and adult teachers. They have been working without a contract for over one year. This strike authorization vote will allow the UTLA Board of Directors to call for a strike if one becomes necessary. Voting results are expected Aug. 31.

WHAT: After 17 months of fruitless bargaining, the California Public Employment Relations Board has declared we are at impasse with LAUSD. As UTLA demands that LAUSD stop stalling and get to mediation immediately, tens of thousands of LAUSD educators begin a strike authorization vote tomorrow that lasts through Aug. 30. UTLA has made it clear to LAUSD that we are ready and willing to meet for mediation on August 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, & 31. However, Supt. Austin Beutner and the district have basically ignored their legal and moral obligation to participate and refused to meet until September 27. Despite a $1.7 billion projected reserve, LAUSD refuses to make progress on key issues, including:

·       Smaller class sizes

·       Fair pay raise

·       More nurses, counselors, psychologists, and librarians

·       Less testing and more teaching

·       Charter and co-location regulation

·       Real support for school safety

·       Community schools and support for families

·       Greater stakeholder input to help magnet school conversions

·       Expanded support for bilingual education

·       Improved working conditions for early education and adult education teachers  www.utla.net/news/tomorrow-nations-second-largest-teacher-union-local-begins-strike-authorization-vote

www.facebook.com/Wecareaboutstudents/videos/1421817331252013/?t=33

 

Marxism and Education: Fragility, Crisis, Critique, Negativity, and Social Form(s)

Glenn Rikowski

Visiting Fellow, College of Social Science, University of Lincoln, UK

Introduction

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote an article (Rikowski, 1997) that advocated a scorched earth policy for Marxist educational theory, and to start again from scratch after the conflagration. This paper begins such a rebuilding; only now do I feel able to begin the process, though my article Education, Capital and the Transhuman (Rikowski, 1999; reprinted as Rikowski, 2002a) can be viewed as a prefigurative effort in this respect. In that article, I tried to condense many of my ideas on Marxism, education and labour-power into a text that provided a summary of critique and analysis of capitalist education that I had worked up over the previous 15 years, but it was not exactly the kind of article I had envisaged as a starting point for my work in 1997. Education, Capital and the Transhuman was partly a reaction to the news, in 1998, that my father had cancer and I experienced a certain vulnerability and feelings of mortality that drove me to attempt to condense what I regarded as my key ideas on Marxism and education into a single article.

Thus, belatedly getting back on track, the following basic questions seemed important to me in 1997 (and indeed many years before that): Why Marxism? Why Marxism and education, or Marxist educational theory? Through addressing these questions, it is proclaimed that the significance of Marxism as a radical science is that it intellectually disrupts and ruptures capitalist society and its educational forms.

The paper rests substantially on the work of John Holloway, especially his early articles in Common Sense: Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, and Capital & Class. On this foundation, it is argued, firstly, that the importance of Marxism resides in its capacity to pinpoint fragilities and weaknesses in the constitution, development and rule of capital in contemporary society. Understanding these fragilities and weaknesses in the constitution of capital sharpens the critical edge of any movements aimed at social transformation out of the madhouse of capital. It is indicated how Marxist educational theory plays an important role in this enterprise. These points are illustrated through consideration of the following ideas and phenomena: fragility, crisis, critique, negativity and social form(s). It is argued that fragility must be the starting point as Marxism is primarily a theory of capitalist weaknesses, and not the opposite: a theory of capitalist domination. Following Holloway, Marxism is a theory against society, rather than just another theory of society. richgibson.com/RikowskiMarxism.htm

32-year-long Australian study reveals steep decline in student belief that God created humans

Australian university students give far more credit than the previous generation to the science of human evolution and far less to creationism or divine guidance, according to a landmark new study. In an overview of the last 32 years of annually-assessed student opinions, it is clear that belief among students that a god is the ultimate or contributing cause of human origins has steeply declined from being a majority view in 1986 to being a small minority view in 2017. Conversely, conviction that humans evolved without divine involvement of any kind rose steeply over the same period to become the dominant view among students.  www.scimex.org/newsfeed/32-year-long-australian-study-reveals-steep-decline-in-student-belief-that-god-created-humans

Ex-Nazi Guard in U.S., Now 95, Is Deported to Germany

The Nazi guard lived a quiet life in a racially diverse corner of New York City for decades, having lied on his United States immigration papers in 1949 about the type of work he did during World War II. But on Tuesday, he was deported to Germany, ending a 14-year battle to remove him from American soil.

The expulsion of the former guard, Jakiw Palij, rid the United States of the last known surviving Nazi war crimes suspect still residing in the country, bringing to a close a long-vexed effort by the government to deport him. It also handed President Trump, who had pressed strongly for Mr. Palij’s removal, a powerful talking point against critics of his immigration policies, by shifting the focus to the deportation of a man associated with the worst atrocities of the Holocaust instead of thousands of unauthorized immigrants whose stories are far more sympathetic.

Mr. Palij, 95, was first tracked down by investigators in 1993, and stripped of his American citizenship 10 years later when a federal judge found that he had falsely claimed in his visa application that he had worked on his father’s farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis at the Trawniki labor camp in occupied Poland.

In 2004, a federal immigration judge ordered that Mr. Palij be deported. But for years, American officials failed to persuade any country to accept a man born in what was once Poland and is now Ukraine, and who had served a murderous German regime.  On Tuesday, the White House announced that Mr. Trump had secured Mr. Palij’s deportation, dispatching immigration authorities to apprehend him and wheel him on a stretcher from his home in Queens to be taken by air ambulance to Düsseldorf. Mr. Palij, who is frail, arrived at Düsseldorf Airport early Tuesday and was taken by a Red Cross ambulance to a nursing home near Münster, in northwestern Germany.  www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/nazi-guard-deported.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Congratulations on the publication of:

 

The Little Red Schoolhouse

How to Get the Most Out of College

..perhaps the most important relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Most students don’t fully get that. They’re not very good at identifying the professors worth knowing — the ones who aren’t such academic rock stars that they’re inaccessible, the ones with a track record of serious mentoring — and then getting to know them well.  www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/opinion/college-students.html

Advice about colleges and universities

*Get scholarships! Grades suck, but grades matter. What would Kim Philby do?

*Select the best possible school–with the best reputation–schools are Not equal (UC vs CSU vs CC)

*Determine to finish from the outset. Don’t just stick your toe in.
*Find a mentor–fast–get help with right classes and schedule. Visit profs during office hours.
*Stay away from frats/sororities and 7 day a week parties.

*Make an effort to connect with and learn from people from different backgrounds. Make friends!
*Pick classes with care–ask your mentor–other students–don’t count on RateMyProf.
*Read the syllabus! Follow it. Keep up. Check the syllabus and agenda before every class.

*Sit in front if you can stand it. Attend class! Five minutes early–at least!
*Use writing centers. If they suck and always only use formulas, get Ken Macrorie’s I Search Paper online.

*Proofread. Don’t just spell check. Get someone else to proof too.
*Create a disciplined schedule that includes exercise at least 30 minutes a day 4 days a week.

Don’t be discouraged by crappy classes, bad profs. If someone is stealing your education–steal it back. You are responsible for your own education.

Don’t be suckered by bad, for-profit, colleges (Corinthean, etc.) as you will get a worthless degree and lots of debt.

A fine prof who is a friend adds: “eat right and sleep. And become a serious person. That is, some of the best things in life aren’t fun or entertaining. Finally, I would say that even though all colleges aren’t alike, what you get out of them is to a large extent, much larger than an 18 year old would usually expect, up to you. There are many incredibly intelligent people even in crappy schools. Be serious about finding them.” (RG)

Teacher hunt still stymies Vitti: Volunteers wanted for DPS, where corruption and incompetence still run amok…low pay, no job protections, stupid bosses….

Detroit book warehouse…

…Detroit’s longstanding teacher shortage. Given the city’s struggles, the district’s reputation and other shortfalls, DPSCD has struggled to attract enough teachers, leading to overflowing classrooms and long-term substitutes. Vitti has made progress. Last August, the district faced 425 teacher vacancies. After aggressive recruiting, Vitti whittled that number to 200 vacancies at the start of this summer. Now it’s less than 100, and most of those are special education positions.

“We are definitely making progress,” Vitti says. “We are getting to a point of doing what we should be doing, and we are getting closer to our ideal.”

According to a comprehensive staffing plan, the district aims to recruit broadly from teacher programs around the country, including at historically black colleges and universities. And Vitti says the district will soon be announcing a new residency program, with help from philanthropic partners, to establish a more long-term teacher pipeline.

…

Vitti is also open to hiring teachers from alternative certification programs that have been approved by the state, including Teach for America and a new program in Michigan called Teachers of Tomorrow. He says about 10 percent of the district’s hires come from these programs. Yet he’s gotten pushback by the teachers union and some school board members to limit those options.

What should matter is a teaching candidate’s caliber. Texas-based Teachers of Tomorrow is now in seven states. Dave Saba, chief development officer, says more than 2,000 prospective Michigan teachers have applied to the program, and out of the 214 admitted, 80 are now teaching in the state. Saba says Detroit is a focus for the program.  www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/ingrid-jacques/2018/08/26/jacques-teacher-hunt-still-stymies-vitti/1075485002/

Should These Tests Get a Failing Grade? NYTimes Discovers RF objections 20 years late

Twelve revealing findings from the Ohio State investigation into Urban Meyer and Zach Smith (abolish football)

Following its announcement Wednesday that coach Urban Meyer would be suspended for the first three games of the 2018 season, Ohio State released the complete findings of its independent investigation into Meyer and the school’s handling of allegations made against former wide receiver coach Zach Smith by his ex-wife Courtney Smith.

The 23-page document sheds some light on the situation and outlines the events that led to the suspensions of Meyer and Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith, as well as the dismissal of Zach Smith.

• When Gene Smith and Urban Meyer first learned — on the morning of July 23 — of the reports about the domestic violence civil protection order issued against Zach Smith on July 20, Meyer decided to fire Smith. However, before making that decision, Gene Smith thought that having Zach Smith seek counseling would be the best decision but agreed with Meyer when he said he wanted to fire his assistant.
• In a text message, Meyer told a “venerated OSU athlete” that the situation between Zach and Courtney Smith was “he said she said and 2 kids involved.” As Meyer admitted in the press conference, he told investigators that his relationship with mentor Earle Bruce may have affected his impartiality in dealing with Zach Smith, Bruce’s grandson.
• Gene Smith and director of football operations Brian Voltolini were both surprised by Meyer’s comments at Big Ten Media Days. The night before his press conference, Meyer was involved in a group text with Smith, Voltolini, Ohio State assistant AD Jerry Emig and director of player development Ryan Stamper about media reports surrounding Zach Smith that led to his dismissal.  www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/twelve-revealing-findings-from-the-ohio-state-investigation-into-urban-meyer-and-zach-smith/

A Palmdale charter school borrowed nearly $30 million to build a new campus. Then it got shut down

A Detroit charter school network is sharply downsizing after losing its contract with the city’s main district, a long-anticipated development that still seemed to take the network’s leaders by surprise.

More than 700 students at Trix, Stewart, and Murphy academies will be affected by the resulting scramble to consolidate the schools into a new building on Detroit’s east side.

“I’m left in shambles,” said Shevoyn Giles, a hospice worker whose son attended Stewart. “The new school is 11 miles from my home, so I have to find transportation for him to get there.”

The closures have loomed since November, when Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told the Detroit school board that the city’s main district should get out of the charter school business. He argued that the district was wasting resources by providing oversight to Stewart, Trix and Murphy, along with a handful of other schools.

Even as some jumped ship, leaders of those three schools held out, hoping their contract would be renewed. When it wasn’t, they had to act quickly. But they couldn’t prevent the closure of the schools, or a sharp reduction in their student enrollment and staff.

The new building will also be called Trix Academy, but it will effectively be a new K-8 school, staffed by teachers from the three schools who survived a 50 percent staffing cut. Some students will choose to stay — Giles, for one, doubts she can find better special education services anywhere else. chalkbeat.org/posts/detroit/2018/08/23/700-students-face-a-tough-change-as-this-detroit-charter-network-rushes-to-rebuild/

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

 

Alfred McCoy, Will China Be the Next Global Hegemon? (well, like, yes)

Beijing’s Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump
“America First” Versus China’s Strategy of the Four Continents
By Alfred W. McCoy

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century — or bring it all down.

The countries, like their leaders, are a study in contrasts. China is an ascending superpower, riding a wave of rapid economic expansion with a burgeoning industrial and technological infrastructure, a growing share of world trade, and surging self-confidence. The United States is a declining hegemon, with a crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, a shrinking slice of the global economy, and a deeply polarized, divided citizenry. After a lifetime as the ultimate political insider, Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013, bringing with him a bold internationalist vision for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe through monumental investment in infrastructure that could ultimately expand and extend the current global economy. After a short political apprenticeship as a conspiracy advocate, Donald Trump took office in 2017 as an ardent America First nationalist determined to disrupt or even dismantle an American-built-and-dominated international order he disdained for supposedly constraining his country’s strength.  www.tomdispatch.com/

The War Piece to End All War Pieces

Or How to Fight a War of Ultimate Repetitiousness
By Tom Engelhardt

Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That was how I inadvertently launched the unnamed listserv that would, a year later, become TomDispatch. Given the website’s continuing focus on America’s forever wars (a phrase I first used in 2010), what choice have I had but to write about Afghanistan ever since?

So think of this as the war piece to end all war pieces. And let the repetition begin!

Here, for instance, is what I wrote about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when the U.S. Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself and at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding. And that would be just one of eight U.S. wedding strikes I toted up by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, that killed almost 300 potential revelers. “We have become a nation of wedding crashers,” I wrote, “the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home.”

Here’s what I wrote about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of “a war gone to hell”: “While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we’ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2010, thinking about how “forever war” had entered the bloodstream of the twenty-first-century U.S. military (in a passage in which you’ll notice a name that became more familiar in the Trump era): “And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, ‘Operating Concept, 2016-2028,’ overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus. It opts to ditch ‘Buck Rogers’ visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as ‘wars of exhaustion,’ in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2012, when Afghanistan had superseded Vietnam as the longest war in American history: “Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn’t noticed — and weirdly enough no one has — that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2015, thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in the preceding years, gone into Afghan “roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and a $43 million gas station” built in the middle of nowhere, rather than into this country: “Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today’s dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles.”

And here’s what I wrote last year thinking about the nature of our never-ending war there: “Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians, who exactly will ride to our rescue? Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.”

And that’s just to dip a toe into my writings on America’s all-time most never-ending war.

What Happened After History Ended

If, at this point, you’re still reading, I consider it a miracle. After all, most Americans hardly seem to notice that the war in Afghanistan is still going on. To the extent that they’re paying attention at all, the public would, it seems, like U.S. troops to come home and the war to end.  www.tomdispatch.com/post/176458

U.S. Nuclear War Plan Option Sought Destruction of China and Soviet Union as “Viable” Societies

U.S. nuclear war plans during the Johnson administration included the option of a retaliatory strike against nuclear, conventional military, and urban-industrial targets with the purpose of removing the Soviet Union “from the category of a major industrial power” and destroying it as a “viable” society.  This is one disclosure from a Joint Staff review of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) obtained via a Mandatory Declassification Review request by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive and posted on our site today.

The document, the Joint Staff’s review of SIOP guidance in June 1964, showed continued acceptance by policymakers of the cataclysmic nuclear strike options that had been integral to the plan since its inception. Accordingly, the SIOP set high damage requirements—95 percent for the top priority nuclear targets—ensuring that it remained an “overkill” plan, referring to its massively destructive effects.  Prepared and continually updated by the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, the SIOP has been characterized by some as a “doomsday machine.”[1]

U.S. nuclear war planning drew on Cold War assumptions about the danger of a Soviet surprise attack against the United States.[2] The possibility that deterrence could fail and that U.S.-Soviet conflict could break out made U.S. defense officials seek attack options “capable of execution under all reasonably foreseeable conditions under which hostilities may begin.”[3]  For such purposes, the SIOP included a retaliatory option in the event of a Soviet surprise attack and a preemptive option in the case of intelligence warning of an imminent Soviet attack

The U.S. government has never declassified any version of the SIOP, forcing researchers to rely on ancillary documentation to shed useful light on elements of the plan.  The Joint Staff review posted today is the latest such evidence.  Base-line declassified knowledge about earlier versions of the SIOP includes:

• SIOP-62 and its successors involved massive nuclear strikes against Sino-Soviet targets, with thousands of weapons aimed at over a thousand targets, with “Alpha” category nuclear weapons and delivery systems – nuclear-tipped missiles and bombers loaded with nuclear weapons – the top priority.
•  To satisfy policymakers who wanted the president to have a wider range of choices, by late 1962 the SIOP included two preemptive and three retaliatory options. Included in the Football  briefing material for the President, the SIOP options were strikes, sometimes in combination, on nuclear weapons and delivery systems (Task Alpha), on non-nuclear military targets (Task Bravo), and on urban-industrial targets (Task Charlie).
• SIOP-63 established a high damage expectancy of 90 percent probability of severe damage to targets, a requirement that made the SIOP an instrument of “overkill” because multiple nuclear weapons would strike high priority targets  nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2018-08-15/us-nuclear-war-plan-option-sought-destruction-china-soviet-union-viable-societies

 

General Dynamics-NASSCO plans to lay off 300 to 350 workers in San Diego (More War=More Work!)

General Dynamics-NASSCO, the last major shipbuilder on the West Coast, said it plans to lay off 300 to 350 workers in San Diego over the next several months.

A fixture in city’s industrial corridor for nearly 60 years, the company said the layoffs are tied to a flood at a graving dock July 11 involving the construction of a Navy expeditionary sea base. The accident led to the ship, the Miguel Keith, floating off the docking blocks and taking on water.

In a notice filed with the state, NASSCO listed 1,493 jobs that could be affected. But in a statement sent to the California Employment Division Department, company president Kevin Graney said he anticipated that only about one-fifth of those potential layoffs could occur between late September and early October.

NASSCO does not know how long the layoffs could last but said they may extend through the rest of this year.

“We are pursuing all available options to avoid or lessen the impact of these reductions and hope to increase our workforce as soon as a possible to support work expected in 2019,” Graney told the state.

NASSCO employees have been notified of the layoffs. In its filing with the state, NASSCO estimated 129 welders, 93 ship fitters, 90 pipe welders and 85 electricians could lose their jobs.  www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/sd-fi-nassco-layoffs-20180814-story.html#nt=oft12aH-2gp2

In Happily militarized US, Washington Redskins (sic) take practice to Air Force base, spend the day with troops

Boot maker jailed for selling the military Chinese-made boots with ‘Made in the USA’ labels

 

On Sundays, the Padres (sic) play in camo.

Why Can’t We Just Play Ball?
The Militarization of Sports and the Redefinition of Patriotism
By William J. Astore

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a sports fan. As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the military. Until recently, I experienced those as two separate and distinct worlds. While I was in the military — I served for 20 years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force — I did, of course, play sports. As a young lieutenant, I was in a racquetball tournament at my base in Colorado. At Squadron Officer School in Alabama, I took part in volleyball and flickerball (a bizarre Air Force sport). At the Air Force Academy, I was on a softball team and when we finally won a game, all of us signed the ball. I also enjoyed being in a military bowling league. I even had my own ball with my name engraved on it.

Don’t misunderstand me. I was never particularly skilled at any sport, but I did thoroughly enjoy playing partly because it was such a welcome break from work — a reprieve from wearing a uniform, saluting, following orders, and all the rest. Sports were sports. Military service was military service. And never the twain shall meet.

Since 9/11, however, sports and the military have become increasingly fused in this country. Professional athletes now consider it perfectly natural to don uniforms that feature camouflage patterns. (They do this, teams say, as a form of “military appreciation.”) Indeed, for only $39.99 you, too, can buy your own Major League Baseball-sanctioned camo cap at MLB’s official site. And then, of course, you can use that cap in any stadium to shade your eyes as you watch flyovers, parades, reunions of service members returning from our country’s war zones and their families, and a multitude of other increasingly militarized ceremonies that celebrate both veterans and troops in uniform at sports stadiums across what, in the post-9/11 years, has come to be known as “the homeland.”   www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176459/

The latest effort (2013) to measure the death toll is a paper published recently by a large team of researchers in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOS Medicine. Media reports have described the paper as finding that half a million deaths were caused by the war. Of the 405,000 estimated deaths, 60 percent (240,000) were caused by violence. The rest were “associated with the collapse of infrastructure and other indirect, but war-related, causes.” Living in the middle of a warzone isn’t all that good for your health.  www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/10/18/new_study_estimates_half_a_million_casualties_from_iraq_war_but_how_reliable.html

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

How to solve this dilemma above? Finance. Advertising. More finance–a house of cards of different forms of loans (unpaid)—war (See next category for perpetual war).

A Shrinking Slice of the American Economic Pie

Workers’ share of non-farm business income is near a record low

Workers are getting a thinner slice of the American economic pie even with strong growth, robust hiring, rising corporate profits and the Trump administration’s tax cuts. Labor’s share of income of U.S. non-farm businesses — reflecting salary and other employee compensation — fell to 56.5 percent in the second quarter, down from the prior three months and below a year earlier, government data show. Some reasons why the share is still near a post-World War II low: technological advances, globalization, workers’ waning bargaining power and the rise of superstar firms, the theme of the Federal Reserve’s annual policy summit in Jackson Hole this week.  www.bloomberg.com/businessweek

Ten Years After the Crash: Without Mentioning Capitalism and Empire

The financial crisis of 2008 was years in the making and has had a lasting impact on American political life.

..The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into debt.

You could pick up early warning signs in 2006, in states such as Florida, where the high-flying housing market, suspended in midair by irrational faith, suddenly looked down and fell to earth. Then American homeowners learned that their most valuable and tangible asset had become tangled up in obscure entities called derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and collateralized debt obligations—financial instruments that spread around the world and, once gone bad, threatened to kill off whole banks, and to cripple countries. If a defaulted loan on a house in Tampa was used to make bonds owned by investors in Japan, the house infected the global economy.

When the crash came here, it wiped out nine million jobs, took away nine million homes, erased retirement accounts, and pushed large numbers of Americans out of the middle class….

…Economically, the country has changed surprisingly little since 2008. The big banks have returned to risky practices, and Republicans are trying to undo the Dodd-Frank reform law, which was enacted to prevent another collapse. The distribution of income and wealth in America is as lopsided as ever. Despite almost ten years of economic growth, real wages are stuck at their pre-crisis level, while corporate profits are soaring and stock prices have reached record highs. All the misshapen economic trends of the previous decade are still with us.  www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/ten-years-after-the-crash

Bull Market Hits a Milestone: 3,453 Days. Most Americans Aren’t at the Party.

At 3,453 days, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has reached a milestone: It is the longest bull market on record if you count a 19.9 percent decline in 1990 as the start of its rival. Bear markets are often marked by declines of 20 percent or more.

But the gains haven’t been spread among the masses. Stock market wealth is heavily concentrated among the richest families.

As the stock market surged, prices for homes — the most important source and store of wealth for the American middle class — recovered much more slowly from the Great Recession and housing bust. Incomes, too, have only recently surpassed pre-crisis levels, despite steady economic growth in recent years.

“This is the decade in which wealth inequality has increased the most in U.S. history,” said Moritz Schularick, a professor of economics at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics in Germany who has written about the distribution of wealth in the United States. “The driver has been the very unequal gains in the very sharp performance of the stock market relative to the sharp drop of the housing market.”  www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/business/bull-market-stocks.html

Verizon Throttled California Firefighters’ Internet Speeds Amid Blaze (They Were Out of Data)

As the largest fire on record in California continued to carve its destructive path through the northern part of the state, firefighters sent a mobile command center to the scene. With thousands of personnel, multiple aircraft and hundreds of fire engines battling the blaze, officials needed the “incident support unit” to help them track and organize all those resources.

But in the midst of the response efforts, fire officials discovered a problem: The data connection for their support unit had been slowed to about one two-hundredth of the speed it had previously enjoyed. Like a teenager who streamed too many YouTube videos and pushed his family’s usage above the limits of its data plan, the Santa Clara County Central Fire Protection District was being throttled by its internet service provider, Verizon. But in this case, officials have emphasized, homes and even lives were at stake.

The county fire district had no choice but to to use other agencies’ internet, rely on personal devices to transfer data and ultimately subscribe to a new, more expensive data plan, as Verizon officials urged them to do, according to court documents filed this week.

“In light of our experience, County Fire believes it is likely that Verizon will continue to use the exigent nature of public safety emergencies and catastrophic events to coerce public agencies into higher-cost plans ultimately paying significantly more for mission critical service — even if that means risking harm to public safety during negotiations,” Chief Anthony Bowden said in a sworn declaration.  www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/us/verizon-throttling-california-fire-net-neutrality.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Report: Detroit Land Bank

is hoarding houses

Detroit’s Land Bank was established in 2011 to sell Detroit’s blighted homes, which have ballooned in number following the last decade’s subprime housing and tax-foreclosure crises. So far, the organization has accomplished one part of its mission, amassing tens of thousands of vacant homes. The only problem is — the quasi-governmental agency doesn’t seem to really be doing anything with them.

So says a new report from Bridge Magazine, which takes a look at the Land Bank’s numbers. The city has at least 43,500 vacant homes, and the land bank owns nearly 30,000 of them. Many of the homes were acquired through tax foreclosures, with more than 1 in 3 Detroit homes having gone into foreclosure in the past 15 years. According to Bridge, of the Land Bank’s stock, only 3 percent are listed for sale, and the Land Bank owns about 20 percent of the single-family homes in the city. That’s a lot of houses going nowhere.

…”I wouldn’t recommend for anybody else to buy through the Land Bank,” one struggling homeowner told the publication. “Not at all.”

Michigan’s rates of black homeownership have plummeted since 2000, according to one study. This has been felt particularly strong in majority black Detroit, where 54 percent of residents rented in 2016, compared to 45 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, the city has ramped up petty blight enforcement against citizens, while Land Bank-owned houses rot without consequence.  https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2018/08/22/report-detroit-land-bank-is-hoarding-houses

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

U.S. Announces Its Withdrawal From U.N. Human Rights Council

After more than a year of complaints and warnings — some subtle and others a little less so — the Trump administration has announced that the United States is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley announced the decision in a joint statement Tuesday.

“I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from human rights commitments,” Haley told the media. “On the contrary, we take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”

The move comes as little surprise from an administration that frequently has lambasted the 47-member body for a gamut of perceived failures — particularly the dubious rights records of many of its member countries, as well as what Haley has repeatedly called the council’s “chronic bias against Israel.”

Haley harked back to a speech she delivered to the council one year ago this month, in which she laid down something of an ultimatum. At that point, she told members that they must stop singling out Israel for condemnation and must clean up their roster — which includes Venezuela, China and Saudi Arabia, among others — or the council could bid the U.S. farewell.  www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621435225/u-s-announces-its-withdrawal-from-u-n-s-human-rights-council?utm_campaign=storyshare

Sociologists, Social Scientists Condemn Assault on Bihar Professor

Solidarity for Never

Reminder to those wistful for Hillbillary

Feds on auto scandal: Fiat Chrysler sought to corrupt talks with UAW

Federal prosecutors say Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, through a key defendant in the wide-ranging training center scandal, “sought to corrupt and warp the labor-management relationship” with senior UAW officials.

The statement in a sentencing memorandum for Alphons Iacobelli, a former vice president of employee relations for FCA, is part of what appears to be a dramatic uptick in the rhetoric directed toward the automaker. The company, for its part, insisted in a response to the allegations that wrongdoing was limited to certain bad actors and did not affect contract bargaining.

Prosecutors, however, said the automaker wanted to influence labor contracts and that union officials failed in their duties to represent union members.

“FCA sought to obtain benefits, concessions and advantages in the negotiation and administration of collective bargaining agreements with the UAW in an effort to buy labor peace. High-level officials of the UAW sought to enrich themselves and live lavish lifestyles rather than zealously work on behalf of the best interests of tens of thousands of rank and file members of their union,” according to the 14-page document filed Monday.

The paperwork also says Fiat Chrysler provided more than $9 million in illegal chargebacks — money from FCA used to pay the salaries of UAW officials at the training center, a place that was supposed to provide for autoworker training — between June 2009 and July 2017. The government said Iacobelli and FCA viewed the chargebacks as a political gift to the UAW and that high-level UAW officials assigned union officials to the training center “with no intention that they would perform any real work at the NTC.”

The dollar figure suggests the government believes it was an even more pricey scheme than previously reported. Earlier stories had focused on allegations that $4.5 million had been misused, in part, on expensive clothing, jewelry and travel.  www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2018/08/20/fiat-chrysler-iacobelli-uaw-scandal/1045019002/

Hey NEA Bosses (that would be you Lily Garcia, I know you read the Dispatch)–

Your Orange County Fla. Unit is falling apart. All the staff has been fired. Members are quitting in droves. That unit would not exist without five key people, including me. Are you so stupid that you do not know how to keep this huge local together? Well, you probably are, but you are warned.

Spy versus Spy

Gina Haspel CIA Torture Cables Declassified

Current CIA director Gina Haspel described graphic acts of deliberate physical torture including the waterboarding of a suspected Al-Qa’ida terrorist under her supervision when she was chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, according to declassified CIA cables – most of which she wrote or authorized – obtained by the National Security Archive through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and posted on the Web today.

The Haspel cables detail conditions the public has only seen in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs from Iraq of detainees hooded and shackled, forced nudity, wall slamming, and box confinement, as well as “enhanced techniques” never photographed such as the simulated drowning of suspects on the waterboard. Waterboarding is a war crime under both U.S. and international law, dating back to U.S. prosecution of Japanese solders for torturing U.S. POWs during World War II.[1]

Although the CIA redacted Haspel’s name and those of the CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who administered the waterboard, other declassified documents (including the 2004 CIA Inspector General report) and public statements confirm their leadership of the torture of alleged terrorist Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri at the black site between November 15 and December 4, 2002.

“Release of Gina Haspel’s torture cables shows the power of the Freedom of Information Act to bring accountability even to the highest levels of the CIA,” said Archive director Tom Blanton, who first identified the Haspel cables from a footnote (336 on p. 67) in the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report declassified in 2014.  nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/foia-intelligence-torture-archive/2018-08-10/gina-haspel-cia-torture-cables-declassified

“We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”  archive.org/details/CIA-RDP75-00149R000700560051-1

US woman gets five years in prison for leaking NSA document

A former US government contractor who pleaded guilty to mailing a classified report to a news organisation has been sentenced to more than five years in prison as part of a deal with prosecutors.

Reality Winner, 26, pleaded guilty in June to a single count of transmitting national security information.

The former Air Force translator worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency (NSA) office in Augusta, Georgia, when she printed a classified report and left the building with it. Winner told the FBI she mailed the document to an online news outlet. (The Intercept–RG)

The judge’s sentence was in line with a plea agreement between Winner’s defence team and prosecutors, who recommended she serve five years and three months behind bars.

Prosecutors said in a court filing that punishment would amount to “the longest sentence served by a federal defendant for an unauthorised disclosure to the media”.

Among other leak cases cited by prosecutors in court documents, the stiffest prior sentence was three years and seven months in prison given to former FBI explosives expert Donald Sachtleben.

Secret information he leaked included intelligence he gave to The Associated Press news agency for a story about a US operation in Yemen in 2012.

Winner spent a year in jail before reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.

Her lawyers had argued for Winner to be released on bond, noting she had no criminal record and had served honourably in the military. www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2018/08/woman-years-prison-leaking-nsa-document-180823153915686.html

Maria Butina Did Not Use Sex in Covert Russian Plan, Her Lawyers Say

A Great Place to Have a War

In his book A Great Place to Have a War, Joshua Kurlantzick tells the story of the CIA’s covert war in Laos during the Vietnam War. He examines how the country became, surprisingly, a U.S. policy priority, and analyzes why and how the CIA was able to build the war into one of the biggest covert operations in U.S. history. He further uses the Laos war as a prism to examine the CIA’s operations in the global war on terror today.

Between 1961 and 1973, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out one its biggest covert operations in one of Southeast Asia’s smallest states. In A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia Joshua Kurlantzick tells the story of Operation Momentum, the CIA’s covert plan, and four individuals who were instrumental in creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces in Laos . The battle wound up devastating the country, leaving Laos one of the most bombarded places on earth.

The book also recounts how the war in Laos transformed the CIA from an organization primarily devoted to intelligence gathering to one increasingly focused on paramilitary operations. Kurlantzick notes that Laos was a transformative experience for the agency, “ … afterward, its leadership would see paramilitary operations as an essential part of the agency’s mission, and many other U.S. policymakers would come to accept that the CIA was now as much a part of waging war as the traditional branches of the armed forces.

After the Vietnam War, the CIA reduced its paramilitary branch, but continued to be involved in paramilitary operations. In the post-9/11 global war on terrorism era, the agency has again become primarily focused on low-intensity conflict rather than spying. A Great Place to Have a War poses questions for policymakers today about the proper role of the Central Intelligence Agency in U.S. foreign policy–making. It also touches on other questions such as whether a proxy war fought by local armies working with CIA operatives can be curtailed, and what happens to the entire idea of war when an attack can be launched remotely, with minimal U.S. manpower on the ground at sites of battles.  www.cfr.org/teaching-notes/great-place-have-war?utm_medium=email&utm_source=educators&utm_content=081318&sp_mid=57236576&sp_rid=cmdAcmljaGdpYnNvbi5jb20S1

www.facebook.com/teleSUREnglish/videos/2046973978698326/?t=73%20%20%20%20Aug%2019%201953

The Magical Mystery Tour

Scurvy fascist rat, “voice of god,” Hirohito learns to grovel to Fat Man, Little Boy, and the reds.

EXCLUSIVE: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Hero Duncan Hunter says “whatever” his wife did will be reviewed, but “I didn’t do it”

Indicted Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter pointed to his also-indicted wife during an interview on Fox News Thursday, claiming “whatever she did, that’ll be looked at, too.” Hunter and his wife, Margaret, are accused of illegally using $250,000 in campaign funds for personal use.

They pleaded not guilty in federal court in San Diego Thursday afternoon. Hunter blames “pure politics” and the “Democrats’ arm of law enforcement” of the Justice Department for the charges against him. In the Fox interview, Hunter said his wife has long handled the finances, and worked as his campaign manager.

“When I went away to Iraq in 2003, the first time, I gave her power of attorney,” Hunter told Fox News. “She handled my finances throughout my entire military career and that continued on when I got into Congress. … She was also the campaign manager so whatever she did, that’ll be looked at too, I’m sure, but I didn’t do it.”  www.cbsnews.com/news/indicted-duncan-hunter-claims-innocence-says-his-wife-ran-the-finances/

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www.facebook.com/ILoveGoldenRetrievers1/videos/1463592083740245/?t=47

 

So Long

Below, Last Dance

Dear Friend Thatcher (1945-2018), murdered by the US Government and Agent Orange. Who Gained?

Brown and Root Construction did well. It became Brown Root Haliburton which is now Haliburton, once chaired by Dick Cheney. It is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY. A lot of lying officers got promoted. Lies did very well: Light at the end of the tunnel. Red menace. Falsified body counts. Perhaps the biggest lie: “we won every battle but were stabbed in the back.”

The US was defeated by the superior strategies and tactics of the other side.

Another lie: Counterinsurgency works. That lie, promoted by disgraced General Petraeus now, isn’t going so well in Afghanistan, Heroin boomed, run by the CIA. Racism flourished—skip the words used to describe Vietnamese.

Poor and working people on both sides did not do well. More than 58 thousand US dead and untold numbers, dead later, from Agent Orange. Perhaps more than two million Vietnamese dead. Laos covered with anti-personal mines still blowing children up.

Dow Chemical did well–napalm. But, at the end, US troops refused to fight (see the video “Sir No Sir”) and the Americans ran away on April 28, 1975, leaving their Vietnamese allies behind. During the war, the war came home to American cities, like Detroit in 1967. Empires always turn on their own.

The war in Vietnam destroyed the US economy, the presidency, the schools were in the wind, any trust in the “System,” the military would not fight. All that–the Vietnam Syndrome”– had to be reversed. And it was. For years and years, the VA denied that Agent Orange, designed to wipe out the Vietnamese’ food supply, hurt our own troops. Finally, they admitted it, but the current VA continues its horrific treatment of the men and women who have fought for the last 17 years.

I know. I spent over 100 hours at the VA two years ago, struggling for vets against the VA bureaucracy .One of the nicest, kindest, most generous, most innocent, men I have ever known died from this rotten war, today, August 23. He leaves a wonderful wife and three really cool kids.

The opposite of love is not hate–it is indifference. I hate the system of empire and capital, and its representatives, in the military and out, who did this to him. So long, TC. (RG)