Mr Wilkins Micawber’s famous, and oft-quoted, recipe for happiness: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

We Say Fight Back!

Diego Rivera: Arsenal

Riaing political consciousness in Iraq  For five Fridays now, thousands of mostly, but not entirely, youthful and secular Iraqis have gathered in central Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to demand change. At first, the demands were small, like improving electricity amid a summer heat wave. But the list has grown longer and more complex: Fix the judiciary, hold corrupt officials accountable, get religion out of politics.

The protests have come to overshadow the fight against the Islamic State, Iraq’s main preoccupation over the past year. Change, at least on paper, came quickly. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced a set of sweeping measures to placate the protesters. He called for the elimination of several senior government positions, including the three vice presidencies; the end of sectarian quotas in politics; the reduction of ministries; and a new drive to eliminate corruption.

Several weeks later, few of the measures, aside from the firing of three deputy prime ministers and a few ministers, have been carried out, and many protesters now say they are pessimistic about real change.

“We haven’t noticed anything yet,” said Ali Farras, 25, who joined the protests on Friday. “It is just ink on paper.”

Away from the agitation of the streets are the political intrigues of the Green Zone, the cloistered and fortified enclave here for politicians and ambassadors. There officials say Mr. Abadi may have made promises that will prove impossible to keep, given the entrenched sectarianism and corruption in the political system. There, officials say, the entrenched sectarianism and corruption in the political system may make it impossible for Mr. Abadi to keep his promises.

“He can make all the directives on earth, but who will implement them?” www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/world/middleeast/protests-in-iraq-bring-fast-promises-but-slower-changes.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Video Embedded: A video documenting a violent scuffle between an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian child and his family in the West Bank went viral over the weekend, becoming a sort of Rorschach test of the passions and perspectives of the Middle East conflict.

Shot on Friday by Palestinians in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, site of weekly demonstrations since 2009, the footage shows an Israeli soldier wrestling 11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi down to the ground in rocky terrain and pinning him as the child’s mother, aunt and sister thrash at the soldier and bite him to pry the child from the soldier’s grip.

The scene appears to continue for about a minute before the soldier’s commander appears on the scene and intervenes to release the boy.

Besides the boy’s young age and the presence of cameras, the incident was not unlike many other encounters between Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers at this location and others.

Capturing an almost random incident from one physical angle, the video became open to widely differing interpretations.

A statement from Israel’s military described the demonstration as a “violent riot” during which crowds threw rocks at the soldiers in an “ongoing assault.” www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-a-child-detention-israeli-soldier-20150830-story.html

Best labor day video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9oY4rmDaWw

Next best Labor Day Video if you can find it:

Students were holding a peaceful protest in the administration building of Howard University on Friday, writing concerns about financial aid, housing, unreliable wifi and a host of other issues on sticky notes that they plastered onto columns.  Frustration with delays in financial aid, problems with registration and other issues boiled over Wednesday when students made the #takebackHU slogan go viral on Twitter. The private, historically black university is deeply loved for its legacy, but alumni were also quick to say that they understood the complaints and had experienced similar problems in years past.

President Wayne A. I. Frederick and other university leaders met with a group of students Thursday night and told them they were working to address their concerns.

On Friday morning, officials were working to expedite financial aid processing to get money back to students, as protesters were gathering.

Home

Resistance can be fun

new publication suggested by an avid reading rouger

Halfway through a public budget hearing, protesters began chanting and then a handful jumped up on the stage with Emanuel, according to The Chicago Tribune. Emanuel’s security quickly surrounded him and then escorted him backstage. They later canceled the hearing.

Protesters have been on a hunger strike for 17 days trying to keep open Dyett High School in Chicago.

Tribune City Hall reporter Bill Ruthhart tweeted the scene from the room Wednesday night, “Demonstrators continue to take over the room at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget hearing. Emanuel remains backstage.”http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/02/politics/rahm-emanuel-protesters-school-closings/

 

 

The Little Red Schoolhouse

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngaepvpAu2M

Why have School? Part One Schools are the centripetal organizing point of de-industrialized North American life, and much of life elsewhere. Evidence: School workers, not industrialized workers, are by far the most unionized people in the USA, more than 3.5 million union members. School unions are growing, if slowly, while industrial unions collapse, evaporate, because, in part, industry evaporates, and because industrial union leaders abandoned the heart of unionism—the contradictory interests of workers and employers. Nearly one-half of the youth in high school today will be draft-eligible in the next seven years. What is going on in schools?    www.counterpunch.org/2010/09/07/why-have-school/

Human out of state Dollar signs spike in UC system The University of California has admitted a record number of freshmen to its nine undergraduate campuses for fall of this year, with a particularly striking spike in the number of out-of-state admissions.

The system in general, and UC San Diego in particular, continued the trend of admitting more nonresidents — who are required to pay nearly three times as much in tuition as the approximately $12,000 annual tab for in-state students.

UC accepted 18,846 nonresident students for fall of this year, a 43 percent increase over fall 2011, according to figures released Tuesday. UC San Diego accepted 7,425 nonresidents, up 75 percent from fall 2011.

“We have the capacity to educate many more students at our campuses,” said Kate Jeffrey, UC’s interim director of undergraduate admissions. “What we don’t have is the funding to admit more California students. Nonetheless, we continue to honor the California Master Plan, finding space at one of our campuses for all students who qualify for guaranteed admission.”

The system’s Board of Regents has formally endorsed increasing the number of out-of-state students enrolled, primarily to capture that extra tuition, up to a maximum of 10 percent of the undergraduate population. For 2011-12, 7 percent of all undergraduates are nonresidents. Such students make up 12.3 percent of UC’s current freshman class, officials said.

The fall 2012 class will have an unspecified higher number of nonresidents, they said, but the overall 10 percent cap will not be met this year.

UC officials note that even when the cap is reached, nonresident enrollment will be well below the approximately 30 percent levels at some prominent public universities, including Michigan and Virginia. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2012/apr/17/uc-ucsd-out-of-state-admissions-spike/

So long Friends School By the time I started kindergarten in 1975, the school had developed a fine reputation for broad-mindedness and tolerance, along with high educational standards.

And it wasn’t just about diversity in the sense we know it now. Yes, the school was populated by kids of all races and religions, and it taught them the respect for exception that’s a fundamental part of Quaker values.

But there was also a celebration of singularity and incongruity, and the quirkiness that kids thrive on when allowed. Spontaneity, the king quality of youth, was never really squelched in the name of order or discipline.

This was the ideal of an educational philosophy that dates back to before the industrial revolution, when schooling was for betterment, and not just training.

It’s all but absent in current debates about education reform, which have been narrowed only to career and college-readiness.

I sat out of school (for about a week) because I read that Abraham Lincoln did it and went on to great things. Who was harmed because of it?

I remember my sister and a friend deciding, sua sponte one day, that they’d crawl, backward, through the halls of the school, rather than walking. What was the big deal?

We called our teachers by their first names. We sometimes came and went from class as we pleased. There was a lot of self-directed study — even for kids in the earliest grades.

The idea was that there was plenty of time in life for conformity and rigidity. We all spend our adult lives doing what needs to be done.

But a childhood opened up to exploring and pushing the bounds of rule and regulation can build to an adulthood less constrained by the rigors of the norm, and maybe one with less fealty to authority.

Eventually, the Friends philosophy was, most kids come to terms with life’s limits on their own.

They turn it around. www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/stephen-henderson/2015/09/04/friends-school-detroit/71724962/

Credit crisis in Michigan’s capitalist schools The credit ratings of 43 school districts in Michigan have been downgraded so far this year by Moody’s Investors Service as they struggle with falling revenue and rising costs.

It’s no wonder, say financial experts. Districts are grappling with declining enrollment, and they can’t generate enough revenue because state law bars them from raising local property taxes for operating funds above 18 mills on non-homestead properties.

A credit downgrade, which can raise a district’s cost to borrow money, hits hardest the districts that have to borrow large amounts.

There have been so many downgrades “because Michigan school districts don’t have revenue-raising flexibility and many are losing enrollment, which has a direct impact on revenues,” said David Jacobson, a spokesman for Moody’s Investors Service.

“Many have made significant expenditure cuts in recent years, including layoffs, keeping wages flat, or even cutting wages, and cuts to programs/increase in pay-to-play fees for extracurriculars. This has led to declines in financial operations — reserve levels in particular.”http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2015/08/30/school-credit/71442824/

Control+ on tne image above)

New Yorker discovers capitalist schools in the empire without mentioning capitalism and perpetual war (rather like DSA)  If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t. In 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute*, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. “Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate’s degree declined 11.1 percent,” the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5 per cent of college graduates under the age of twenty-five were out of work. Today, the figure is close to nine per cent. If getting a bachelor’s degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful and wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.

And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than nongraduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. “The four-year-degree premium has remained flat over the past decade,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn’t that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of nongraduates were falling….

Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state and federal benefits equivalent to roughly fifty thousand dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just two thousand dollars per student. There are sound reasons for rewarding excellence and sponsoring institutions that do important scientific research. But is a twenty-five-to-one difference in government support really justified?

Michigan Kids. each a dollar sign in schools, evaporate Michigan’s shrinking student population is squeezing school districts statewide, forcing many to close classroom buildings and make other painful cuts as enrollment-based revenue dries up.

Over the past decade, K-12 enrollment in public schools is down 11.1 percent statewide, falling from just under 1.7 million in 2003-04 to below 1.5 million this past school year.

The factors causing the decline include the rise of charter schools, tight state funding and a societal trend toward smaller families. Public school districts are losing students but remain saddled with fixed costs for buildings, employees and pensions that can’t be shed easily.

Education experts and demographers say districts need to prepare for even fewer students in the years ahead.

“The question is whether school districts can handle the truth,” said Kurt Metzger, founder of Data Driven Detroit, a public policy and data analysis organization. “Declining enrollment, combined with lowered state funding and high teacher pension costs, have resulted in a perfect storm for many districts. This is especially true for districts that have refused to recognize and acknowledge the trends that have been there for a number of years now.”  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2015/08/16/michigan-enrollment/31834901/

WaPo: SAT scores down (not you, rich kids) In the nation’s capital, which has offered the SAT for free for juniors and seniors since 2013, about 4,700 students from the 2015 class took the exam. Those from private schools, with many educational advantages, reached an average score above 1800. Those from public schools in the District reached an average score of 1139, a 24-point gain from the previous class. The public-private gap illustrates how scores correlate with wealth. www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/sat-scores-at-lowest-level-in-10-years-fueling-worries-about-high-schools/2015/09/02/6b73ec66-5190-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html

Rich Poway California’s Rot at the top, and the cover-up  When Poway Unified hired a consultant in November 2014, it was hoping to get an outside expert to weigh in on the district’s education technology program.

What it got was a scathing indictment of the district as a whole – IT issues couldn’t be fixed until Poway Unified acknowledged and addressed problems with staff distrust and dysfunction and a culture resistant to change, according to the report.

The deficiencies also appear to have sidelined the district’s technology chief, Robert Gravina, who has been placed on special assignment for a year or more.

The consultant’s report – which the district released late last week after threatened with a lawsuit by Voice of San Diego – cost $40,000 and was supposed to provide a three- to five-year plan for improving the effectiveness of tech services, operations, staffing and infrastructure.

But the state of affairs within the district was so toxic, the report says, the effort morphed into something else entirely.

“PUSD staff are so mired in the current state that they are unable to envision a desirable future state other than to fix what is broken,”http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/damning-report-slams-dysfunction-at-poway-unified/?utm_source=Voice+of+San+Diego+Master+List&utm_campaign=b37279cf5c-Morning_Report&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c2357fd0a3-b37279cf5c-81862829&goal=0_c2357fd0a3-b37279cf5c-81862829

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

The Pentagon’s new Law of War Manual – a 1,200-plus page document issued in June by the Defense Department’s Office of the General Counsel – is barbaric.

The Manual is so bad that one of the leading experts on the law of war (Dr. Francis Boyle) – who wrote the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, and teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign – says :

This Law of War Manual reduces us to the level of Nazis. There’s no other word for it.

Boyle also says the Manual:

Reads like it was written by Hitler’s Ministry of War.

Why is the Manual so bad?

Manual Authorizes Slaughter of Innocent Civilians

Because – according to Boyle – the Manual allows massacres of civilian populations. The most comprehensive previous such document – the 1956 Pentagon field manual – assumed that any deliberate targeting of civilians was illegal and a war crime.

Reporters Can Be Assassinated

And the Manual treats allows reporters to be treated as “unprivileged combatants”, who can be assassinated.

Boyle points out that this retroactively legalizes assassination of reporters, such as Al Jazeera reporters during Iraq war. Boyle notes that even a SPY would be treated better, and given a trial.

(As we’ve previously noted, the U.S. government treats real reporters as terrorists. Because the core things which reporters do could be considered terrorism, in modern America, journalists are sometimes targeted under counter-terrorism laws.)

Manual Authorizes Barbarous War Crimes

Boyle also says the Manual authorizes the following barbarous war crimes:

(1) Warfare with nuclear weapons. Specifically, the manual states:

There is no general prohibition in treaty or customary international law on the use of nuclear weapons.

This flies in the face of the United Nations Charter…www.globalresearch.ca/pentagons-new-law-of-war-manual-reduces-us-to-the-level-of-nazis/5472442

Reminder  www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1969/xx/state.htm

Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS
To take down the so-called Islamic State in Syria, the influential former head of the CIA wants to co-opt jihadists from America’s arch foe.
Members of al Qaeda’s branch in Syria have a surprising advocate in the corridors of American power: retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus.

The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.

The heart of the idea stems from Petraeus’s experience in Iraq in 2007, when as part of a broader strategy to defeat an Islamist insurgency the U.S. persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with al Qaeda and to work with the American military.

The tactic worked, at least temporarily. But al Qaeda in Iraq was later reborn as ISIS, and has become the sworn enemy of its parent organization. Now, Petraeus is returning to his old play, advocating a strategy of co-opting rank-and-file members of al Nusra, particularly those who don’t necessarily share all of core al Qaeda’s Islamist philosophy.  www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/31/petraeus-use-al-qaeda-fighters-to-beat-isis.html

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Overall, about 4 in 10 California residents are living in or near poverty.
About one in five (20.1%) of Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line. All told, 41.8% of state residents were poor or near poor. But the share of Californians in families with less than half the resources needed to meet basic needs was 5.9%, smaller than official poverty statistics indicate.

• Minorities and less-educated Californians have higher poverty rates.
  Latinos (31.7%) and African Americans (20.8%) had much higher poverty rates than whites (13.7%) in 2012. Asians (18.4%) fell in between. More education is generally associated with lower poverty rates: the rate for adults age 25–64 with college degrees was 8.1%, compared with 39.9% for those without high school diplomas.
• Most poor families in California are working.
  In 2012, 78.3% of poor Californians lived in families with at least one adult working, excluding families made up only of adults age 65 and older. For 54.9% of those in poverty, at least one family member reported working full time. For another 23.4%, at least one adult was working part time. www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=261

Sony self-censored In the end even Sony, which unlike most other major studios in Hollywood has no significant business ties to the N.F.L., found itself softening some points it might have made against the multibillion-dollar sports enterprise that controls the nation’s most-watched game.   www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/sports/football/makers-of-sonys-concussion-film-tried-to-avoid-angering-nfl-emails-show.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1

Really Stupid NYTimes Piece on “rethinking work” HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?

Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.

Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he can.”

This idea has been enormously influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement, which created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.

Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity.

I think that this cynical and pessimistic approach to work is entirely backward. It is making us dissatisfied with our jobs — and it is also making us worse at them. For our sakes, and for the sakes of those who employ us, things need to change.

To start with, I don’t think most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith’s description of wage-driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn’t work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way. www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/sunday/rethinking-work.html?_r=0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYwPimYdCK8

 

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Murder rates rising in USA Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

Law enforcement experts say disparate factors are at play in different cities, though no one is claiming to know for sure why murder rates are climbing. “Everybody’s struggling out here, trying to stay afloat, with no jobs, no opportunities,” said Bethann Maclin, whose 13-year-old daughter stays mostly inside these days. “The violence won’t end. Where do you start?” www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/murder-rates-rising-sharply-in-many-us-cities.html?emc=edit_th_20150901&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=2254121&_r=0

US judge receives 28-year jail term for his role in kids-for-cash kickbacks   An American judge known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom manner was jailed for 28 years for conspiring with private prisons to hand young offenders maximum sentences in return for kickbacks amounting to millions of dollars.

Mark Ciavarella Jnr was ordered to pay $1.2m (£770,000) in restitution after he was found to be a “figurehead” in the conspiracy that saw thousands of children unjustly punished in the name of profit in the case that became known as “kids for cash”.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned some 4,000 convictions issued by the former Luzerne County judge between 2003 and 2008, claiming he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles – including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. Ciavarella Jnr, 61, was tried and convicted of racketeering charges earlier this year but his lawyers had asked for a “reasonable” sentence, claiming that he had already been punished enough.

Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella Jnr and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2m in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centres and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities’ co-owner. Ciavarella Jnr filled the beds of the private prisons with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted minor crimes.www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-judge-receives-28year-jail-term-for-his-role-in–kidsforcash-kickbacks-8598147.html

 

Nation with Crumbling Bridges and Roads Excited to Build Giant Wall

As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall.

Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top priority.

Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of a Washington-based think tank called the Center for Responsible Immigration, believes that most Americans favor the building of border walls over extravagant pet projects like structurally sound freeway overpasses.

“The estimated cost of a border wall with Mexico is five billion dollars,” he said. “We could easily blow the same amount of money on infrastructure repairs and have nothing to show for it but functioning highways.”

Congress has dragged its feet on infrastructure spending in recent years, but Dorrinson senses growing support in Washington for building a giant border wall. “Even if for some reason we don’t get the Mexicans to pay for it, five billion is a steal,” he said.

While some think that America’s declining infrastructure is a national-security threat, Dorrinson strongly disagrees. “If immigrants somehow get over the wall, the condition of our bridges and roads will keep them from getting very far,” he said.www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/nation-with-crumbling-bridges-and-roads-excited-to-build-giant-wall

Here Are The Most Horrific Details From The Senate Torture Report

Detainees were subjected to “rectal feeding,” a process by which food or nutrients are pumped in through the anus…

Detainees were told they would never leave these “black sites” and that their families would be sexually assaulted or murdered.

Detainees were waterboarded until they turned blue.

After this brutal regimen of torture, detainees often gave false information, which the U.S. acted on.  www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report-details_n_6295396.html

Arkansas Bloodsuckers: the Clintons, Prisoners and the Blood Trade

The year Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas, that state’s prison board awarded a fat contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates, or HMA. The company was paid $3 million a year to run medical services for the state’s prison system, which had been blasted in a ruling by the US Supreme Court as an “evil place run by some evil men.”

HMA not only made money from providing medical care to prisoners, but it also started a profitable side venture: blood mining. The company paid prisoners $7 per pint of their blood. HMA then sold the blood on the international plasma market for $50 a pint, splitting the proceeds 50/50 with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Since Arkansas is one of the few states that does not pay prisoners for their labor, inmates were frequent donors at the so-called “blood clinic.” Hundreds of prisoners sold as much as two pints a week to HMA. The blood was then sold to pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer and Baxter International; blood banks, such as the Red Cross; and so-called blood fractionizers, who transformed the blood into medicines for hemophiliacs. www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas-bloodsuckers-the-clintons-prisoners-and-the-blood-trade/

Solidarity for Never

The Torment and Demise of the United Auto Workers Union as Performed by
the Auto Bosses, the Labor Leaders, Counterfeit Radicals, Fictional Revolutionaries,
and All Those Who Know They Are Not Innocent Either

1. In closed sessions of the United Auto Workers’ convention the carefully culled leaders of the UAW’s Administration Caucus, the sole party in the UAW’s single party state, painstakingly maneuvered through scripted spontaneous demonstrations as one under-boss after another was elected, nearly unanimously, and one program after the next was adopted as the next breakthrough strategy. One of the few dissident delegates who made it inside called the convention “an excruciating performance of untalented vampires doing a ritual dance on the graves of the members.” The UAW lost almost one million members in the last 30 years, down now to 598,648,1 and falling fast (down from a 1969 peak of 1,530,870 members) as the union continued to organize a retreat that began in the 1970’s, urging thousands of GM and Delphi workers to take retirement buyouts, to save the companies once again.

2. There were rank and file factory workers in the June, 2006, convention. Elected by other workers, they use the convention as an all-expenses paid vacation. Years earlier the US Supreme Court ruled that it is permissible for the UAW, and other unions, to use a caucus system (loyalty the key to membership) to restrict members from participating in the union. The union, though, legally extracts dues from workers who must pay in order to keep their jobs, check-off, a return for the union leaders’ no-strike pledges dating back to World War II. The only sign of dissent was a motion from Gary Walkowitz, who proposed that the union allow retirees to vote on contracts that would cut their pay or benefits. The motion never got enough support to reach the floor.2

3. Those UAW members who remain at work are under a continued assault from Fords (it is always, “Fords,” not, “Ford”), General Motors, and Chrysler, a frontal attack the UAW leadership never countered. Concession followed concession on the promise from the union and the companies that concessions would save jobs. Concessions never saved jobs. The endless retreats only made the companies hungry for more. UAW members who have been laid off in that period have vanished from the public eye, but they will never regain the economic benefits they once had.

4. Labor Day was once a big deal in Detroit. Tens of thousands of union members would march down Woodward Avenue from the Ford Highland Park plant to what became Kennedy Square, singing “Solidarity Forever” (“. . . They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, but without our brains and muscle not a single wheel can turn, we can break their haughty power, win our freedom when we learn, that the union makes us strong. . . .”) over and over again. People would picnic along the route, making it a day for the entire community.

5. On Labor Day 2005, officials of the AFL-CIO and its Detroit spearhead, the UAW, rode in Cadillac, Ford, and Chrysler SUV’s provided by the auto companies down Woodward Avenue along a shortened route since the street is now mostly a boarded up ruin, a virtual tunnel of wreckage of industrialism, the Highland Park plant an empty hulk. It was a lonely hollow ride. Virtually no workers showed up to return regal waves from the union officials. clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

Spy versus Spy

above, police agent Tommy the Traveler

Bill AYERS: AGENT PROVOCATEUR  The following is a series of articles by Jared Israel. Jared was co-leader of the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus, the force within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that opposed the Dohrn/Ayers/Mike Klonsky alliance of Weathermen and the like-minded. I thought this may be interesting territory for some here to explore. The role of the media in reporting student politics, managing disent and rehabilitating terrorists for one. Other paths it may lead to are the Sybionese Liberation Army and Ted Kaczynski. The possibilities are endless :eek:.
Obama and Ayers: The Provocateur Exhumed

deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?391-Obama-Ayers-Dohrn-the-SDS-the-Weather-Underground-the-media-and-more#.VeTpKpeTw9Z

Outed Spy Hugs Hillbillary Hillary Rodham Clinton will make a two-day swing across the West Coast to raise money next month, including the holding of a fund-raiser with the exposed former C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame.

A Clinton campaign supporter described the event in an email as a “briefing in the post-Snowden world.

Ms. Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, will take part in a lower-dollar fund-raising event at the Palo Alto, Calif., home of Mike McNerney, a cybersecurity expert, and his wife, Jillian, according to an email sent to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters detailing her events in September.

Michelle Kraus, who is also a cybersecurity expert as well as a former fund-raiser for President Obama and now a “Hillblazer” bundler for Mrs. Clinton, described the “conversation” with Ms. Plame and Mr. Wilson as part of life in the era since Edward J. Snowden, a former government contractor, leaked secret government files that exposed the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations, ranging from private citizens to foreign leaders.

Ms. Plame, once a covert C.I.A. officer, had her identity exposed by President George W. Bush’s administration after Mr. Wilson criticized the White House and the war in Iraq that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Ms. Plame and Mr. Wilson are longtime supporters of Mrs. Clinton.

”http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/08/31/valerie-plame-is-among-hillary-clintons-september-fund-raisers/

Foreign spy services, especially in China and Russia, are aggressively aggregating and cross-indexing hacked U.S. computer databases — including security clearance applications, airline records and medical insurance forms — to identify U.S. intelligence officers and agents, U.S. officials said.

At least one clandestine network of American engineers and scientists who provide technical assistance to U.S. undercover operatives and agents overseas has been compromised as a result, according to two U.S. officials.

The Obama administration has scrambled to boost cyberdefenses for federal agencies and crucial infrastructure as foreign-based attacks have penetrated government websites and email systems, social media accounts and, most important, vast data troves containing Social Security numbers, financial information, medical records and other personal data on millions of Americans.  www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-cyber-spy-20150831-story.html

The Magical Mystery Tour

Psycho West Pointer (with funny underwear) off on her mission (no wonder they’re called “Crusaders”) Many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been honored to attend The United States Military Academy at West Point. But only after a policy change in the 1970s could cadets leave school, usually after their “Yearling” or sophomore year, to serve full-time missions for their church.

Since enrollment was opened to women in 1976, dozens of LDS women have also graduated from this challenging college experience. To date, approximately 200 cadets have joined the distinguished family of missionaries. But every single one has entered the mission field with the title of “Elder”.

Soon, one cadet will make history with something else printed on the iconic black name tag — “Sister.”

On Sept. 2, 2015, Niquelle Cassador of Gig Harbor, Washington, will enter the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, and become the first female cadet to depart the prestigious program for a mission.

The lack of sister missionaries from West Point hasn’t been about desire, but timing. Church member Sherman Fleek, a retired lieutenant colonel and the current command historian at West Point, describes the predicament Cassador’s predecessors faced.  www.deseretnews.com/article/865635273/Mormon-woman-will-be-first-female-West-Point-cadet-to-serve-LDS-mission.html?pg=all

“Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome speech.”

— April 16, 2008, at a ceremony welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to the White House. (GWB)

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Happy 70, John Carlos

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on _ shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Miss him?

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

September 4th–100 years since execution of Joe Hill.

MY ERROR: JOE HILL MURDERED ON NOV 19, 1915

So Long