Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

” As the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organisational and every other advantage, the
superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the centre, as a coherent whole.” Lukacs: History and Class Consciousness p69

Congratulations on the Publication of

The never-before-told full story of the 1971 history-changing break-in of the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists–quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans–that made clear the shocking truth and confirmed what some had long suspected, that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.

In France, Kidnapping the Boss Usually Pays Off  Maurice Taylor, chairman of U.S. tire maker Titan International (TWI), didn’t mince words when he learned that two Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT) executives were being held hostage by workers in France this week. “They’re crazy,” he told French radio station RTL before police intervened to free the executives on Tuesday. “I mean, come on! Get real! There’s no reason to do that!”
In fact, those workers are far from crazy. “Bossnapping” and similar tactics have turned out to be pretty effective negotiating tools for French labor unions. Workers who have participated in past hostage-taking incidents haven’t been prosecuted, and most have won sizable concessions from employers.
After four executives of Caterpillar (CAT) were held hostage in 2009 for 24 hours to protest layoffs in Grenoble, the company upped its total severance package from €48.5 million to €50 million, amounting to an average €80,000 ($108,000) per worker. The same year, appliance maker Ariston (A3E:GR) agreed to severance packages of up to €90,000 for workers at a factory in Brittany who protested planned layoffs by locking the manager out of the building.   www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-07/in-france-kidnapping-the-boss-usually-pays-off

Against Quisling Ravitch

above, Ravitch with NEA top boss, Dennis Van Roekel. After being named “Educator of the Year by NEA tops, Ravitch shouted, “God bless you and God bless America!”

Now comes the vacillating reactionary, Diane Ravitch, one of the high priestesses of the missions for capitalism and empire that are the segregated schools of the USA, declaring San Diego the “best urban school district in the nation.” dianeravitch.net/2014/01/07/is-san-diego-the-best-urban-district-in-the-nation/
Ravitch is wrong. Ravitch lies. (more at richgibson.com/ravitch2014.htm)

www.kgw.com/news/Students-walkout-as-teachers-contract-talks-continue-239656931.html

Free at Last (why not at your local mystic station?)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=grEBLskpDWQ

The Little Red Schoolhouse

A reminder of the nature of the empire’s universities (Ramparts, 1966)  I was coordinator of the Vietnam Project at Michigan State University, and I am no less culpable of the charges I make herein, or those made in the following article, than are any of my former colleagues. Looking back,I am appalled at how supposed intellectuals (aren’t academicians supposed to be intellectuals?) could have been so uncritical about what they were doing. There was little discussion and no protest over the cancellation of the 1956 elections. Nor were any of us significantly troubled by the fact that our Project had become a CIA front. (The University is still denying this in an odd mixture of embarrassment and loyalty.) On the campus a pitiful handful of faculty — usually mavericks and often some of the best teachers — questioned MSU’s role in assisting U.S. foreign policy. (One of these became an enthusiast when the opportunity arose for him to make a leisurely trip to Saigon on behalf of the Project.) From Saigon some professors did write popular and troublesome articles criticizing Diem’s oppressions. Good, but even these bold ventures accepted U.S. policy as given with no questions asked.

above MSU prof and CIA tool Wesley Fishel and fam at the Saigon Airport

The Michigan State professors performed at all levels. They advised on fingerprinting techniques, on bookkeeping, on governmental budgeting and on the very writing of South Vietnam’s Constitution. One was even instrumental in choosing the President of South Vietnam. But in all this they never questioned U.S. foreign policy, which had placed them there and which, thereby, they were supporting.
The following article on MSU’s involvement in Vietnam is merely a case study of two critical failures in American education and intellectual life today. The first and more obvious is the diversion of the university away from its functions (and duties) of scholarship and teaching. The second has to do with the failure of the academic intellectual to serve as critic, conscience, ombudsman. Especially in foreign policy, which hence forth will bear heavily on our very way of life, is this failure serious.  For this failure has left us in a state of drift. We lack historical perspective. We have been conditioned by our social science training not to ask the normative question; we possess neither the inclination nor the means with which to question and judge our foreign policy. We have only the capacity to be experts and technicians to serve that policy. This is the tragedy of the Michigan State professors: we were all automatic cold warriors.
On every university campus, from Harvard to Michigan State, the story is the same. The social science professor, trained (not educated) to avoid the bigger problems, is off campus expertising for his government or industry client whose assumptions he readily adopts. His students are mechanistically led through the same social science materials by a less competent instructor or graduate assistant, and they will be as little exposed to questions of judgment and the application of wisdom as was the professor in the first place.   www.cia-on-campus.org/msu.edu/msu.html

Pentagon Data on Student Testing Program Rife with Errors and Contradictions  In late December, 2013 the Department of Defense released a database on the military’s controversial Student Testing Program in 11,700 high schools across the country. An examination of the complex and contradictory dataset raises serious issues regarding student privacy and the integrity of the Student Testing Program in America’s schools.
The data was released after a protracted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  The DoD’s Freedom of Information office reports that 678,000 students participated in the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Career Exploration Program (ASVAB-CEP) during the 2012-2013 school year, down nearly 10% from the previous school year. The three-hour test is the linchpin of the Pentagon’s school-based recruiting program and provides the Military Entrance Processing Command (USMEPCOM) an invaluable tool in prescreening candidates for military service.
The ASVAB is the military’s entrance exam that is given to fresh recruits to determine their aptitude for various military occupations. Since 1968 the test has also been used as a recruiting tool in high schools. It’s used by USMEPCOM to gain sensitive, personal information on high school students, the vast majority of whom are under the age of 18. Students typically take the test at school without parental consent and often without parental knowledge.
The Pentagon admits military testing in the nation’s schools is a crucial component of maintaining an “all-volunteer” force. In recent years military recruiting has evolved into an exceptionally sophisticated psychological campaign aimed at enticing high school children to enlist. From a myriad of social websites and a host of other sources, recruiters may know, before first contact, that a young man reads wrestling magazines, weighs 155, can bench press 230, drives a ten year-old truck, listens to “classic rock,” and enjoys fly fishing.   warisacrime.org/content/pentagon-data-student-testing-program-rife-errors-and-contradictions

Walmarting Higher Ed and the “Resistance”  Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.
Now critics are raising the alarm that speeding up college and making it cheaper risks dumbing it down. “We all want to have more students graduate and graduate in a more timely manner,” says Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of the American Association of University Professors. “The question is, do you do this by lowering your standards?”
About 100 university faculty-members from all over the country plan to meet in January in New York under the umbrella of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a national movement that aims to “include the voices of the faculty, staff, students and our communities—not just administrators, politicians, foundations and think tanks—in the process of making change.”    www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/we-are-creating-walmarts-of-higher-education/282619/

Racist FSU “Seminoles” Pay $550 thousand bonus to coach  Florida State’s last-minute defeat of Auburn University in college football’s national title game boosted coach Jimbo Fisher’s total bonus pay to $550,000.
Jameis Winston’s 2-yard scoring pass with 13 seconds left capped Florida State’s comeback from an 18-point deficit as the Seminoles won 34-31 to complete a perfect season.
Fisher’s bonuses add to his $2.75 million salary at Florida State (14-0), which captured its first Bowl Championship Series title since 1999. Auburn coach Gus Malzahn would have collected $1.2 million in bonuses on top of his $2.3 million annual salary with a victory in last night’s game.    www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-06/auburn-title-would-put-extra-1-2-million-in-malzahn-s-pocket.html

UNC Athletics Scandal Deepens and Spreads The corruption of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically eligible to play.,,, The rot in Chapel Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally indicted for fraud.) www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelati

Corruption is Endemic in All Capitalist Schooling  Federal investigators are looking into whether former leaders of the District’s Options Public Charter School committed Medicaid fraud by, among other things, exaggerating the needs of its disabled students and paying students with gift cards to ride school buses, according to several people familiar with the criminal investigation.
Court documents filed in a related civil case, combined with numerous interviews, indicate that city officials and criminal investigators are examining the school’s busing program and other ways it obtained nearly $2 million in Medicaid reimbursements from June 2012 to June 2013. That included a sharp one-year increase in the number of Options students classified by the school as having the most intensive special education needs.    www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/options-dc-charter-schools-medicaid-billing-is-at-center-of-investigation/2013/12/16/614c2dfe-5dcf-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html

Another Southwestern College Boss Pleads to a Felony and gets Sentence Reduced. Huh? A former Southwestern College administrator who got meals and gifts from construction contractors angling for work under school bond projects was sentenced to three years’ probation on Tuesday after having his charge reduced.
John Wilson, who worked at the Chula Vista college for 30 years and rose to the position of senior director of business operations, pleaded guilty last month to a felony charge of being an accessory to a crime.
He’s one of 15 South County education officials and contractors who were indicted a year ago in a wide-ranging probe of gift-giving and possible bribery by construction executives.    www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/jan/07/john-wilson-sentenced-south-county-corruption/

So Long Kansas Schools Kansas’ current constitutional crisis has its genesis in a series of cuts to school funding that began in 2009. The cuts were accelerated by a $1.1 billion tax break, which benefited mostly upper-income Kansans, proposed by Governor Brownback and enacted in 2012.
Overall, the Legislature slashed public education funding to 16.5 percent below the 2008 level, triggering significant program reductions in schools across the state. Class sizes have increased, teachers and staff members have been laid off, and essential services for at-risk students were eliminated, even as the state implemented higher academic standards for college and career readiness.  …If the Kansas Supreme Court orders restoration of the funding, legislators are threatening to amend the state’s Constitution by removing the requirement for “suitable” school funding and to strip Kansas courts of jurisdiction to hear school finance cases altogether. And if the amendment fails, they have vowed to defy any court order for increased funding or, at the very least, take the money from higher education.    www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/opinion/whats-the-matter-with-kansas-schools.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Tell me Again. Why Did my Friends Die in Iraq?  The invasion of Iraq was predicated on the notion of ridding the Hussein regime of “weapons of mass destruction” of course. But in 2004, the game was changed to counterinsurgency — ridding the world of “the terrorists.”
And we sure were successful. Until the U.S. pulled out, American soldiers and Marines certainly killed their fair share of terrorists, insurgents, bad guys, and the like. They in turn, killed plenty of us.
Yet for all the blood spilled — of 4,488 military men and women to be precise — there’s no good reason why.
The proof of how pointless the entire endeavour was — if you even needed more — came Friday morning, with a report from Liz Sly in the Washington Post.
“At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,” a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety told Sly. “The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”
Fallujah has fallen, and the same scenario is about to happen in the even-larger city of Ramadi.
It shouldn’t be such a surprise the place my friends fought for is falling back into civil war. I shouldn’t be surprised when the same thing happens in Afghanistan.   Now looking back on his “Last Letter” written Mar. 18, 2013, Tomas Young, a veteran of Iraq who was shot and paralyzed just five days into his deployment, predicted this moment:”The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history,” he wrote. “It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure.” Read more: www.businessinsider.com/iraq-war-reasons-2014-1#ixzz2plbFS1wi            www.businessinsider.com/iraq-war-reasons-2014-1

Kerry to Iraq: You’re on your own (just because the US broke your country doesn’t mean it isn’t your fault) While pledging to help Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government, he made clear there was no question of U.S. troops returning to Iraq. The United States withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2011 after failing to reach agreement with Maliki’s government on a continuing presence.
“This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis,” he said. “We’re not contemplating putting boots on the ground. This is their fight, but we’re going to help them in their fight.”
Kerry declined to provide details on what the United States might do to assist Maliki, whom Washington has repeatedly urged to share power with the Sunni minority – in part to prevent a renewed Sunni insurgency against the central government.
Al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has been steadily tightening its grip in the desert province in recent months in a bid to create a Sunni Muslim state straddling the Syrian frontier.    www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/05/us-iraq-idUSBREA0402P20140105

Gates: Obamagogue Sent Thousands of Troops to Loser War  In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”    www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html?hpid=z1

Military Assaults rise 50%  The number of reported sexual assaults across the military shot up by more than 50 percent this year, an increase that defense officials say may suggest that victims are becoming more willing to come forward after a tumultuous year of scandals that shined a spotlight on the crimes and put pressure on the military to take aggressive action.
A string of high-profile assaults and arrests triggered outrage in Congress and set off months of debate over how to change the military justice system, while military leaders launched a series of new programs intended to beef up accountability and encourage victims to come forward.
According to early data obtained by The Associated Press, there were more than 5,000 reports of sexual assault filed during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, compared to the 3,374 in 2012    www.fdlreporter.com/viewart/20131230/FON06/312300086

Obamagogue’s New Pals: Iran The enmity that has existed between the U.S. and Iran may be coming to an end.
That may seem like blasphemy to the likes of Senator’s John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government, the American Israeli lobby led by AIPAC and of course Saudi Arabia that bastion of Sunni autocracy, Islamic fundamentalist Wahhabism and financial underwriter of Sunni extremists in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon as well as Sunni extremists in Russia.
But this crowd mentioned above is increasingly being marginalized by facts on the ground which continued demonization of Iran does nothing to quell the fanaticism of Sunni radical jihadists in the Syrian civil war, in the Sunni Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Karbala in Iraq’s Anbar province (adjacent to Syria) and in Lebanon.
Shiite Iran is the primary supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite Shiite sect, the Shiite led government in Iraq and Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon.   The sectarian rift between Sunni Muslims and Shiites is such that the civil war in Syria is threatening to spread to Iraq and Lebanon.
Though Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was the catalyst that unleashed the sectarian hatreds in that country and spread into Syria, it is now in the interests of the U.S. to expand diplomacy with Iran well beyond concern over that countries nuclear program and embrace Iran as a partner in helping to restore stability to the region.
First and foremost Iran wants stability in neighboring Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and exerts great influence in the Shiite led governments of Iraq and Syria as well as Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon. Add in the coming U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of this year and considering Iran’s influence and alignment with Afghans that oppose the Taliban and that groups potential ascendency to again regain power once the Americans leave the country, it seems obvious to be in U.S. interest to work with Iran in support of Afghans who would resist a Taliban takeover.      www.opednews.com/articles/The-U-S-and-Iran-The-Pos-by-Dave-Lefcourt-Diplomacy_Influence_Iran_Iraq-140107-612.html#13891405557271&action=collapse_widget&id=730433

The Special Operations Forces Tentacles (everywhere) A review of open source information reveals that in 2012 and 2013, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) were likely deployed to — or training, advising, or operating with the personnel of — more than 100 foreign countries. And that’s probably an undercount. In 2011, then-SOCOM spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that Special Operations personnel were annually sent to 120 countries around the world. They were in, that is, about 60% of the nations on the planet. “We’re deployed in a number of locations,” was as specific as Bockholt would ever get when I talked to him in the waning days of 2013. And when SOCOM did finally get back to me with an eleventh hour answer, the number offered made almost no sense.
Despite the lack of official cooperation, an analysis by TomDispatch reveals SOCOM to be a command on the make with an already sprawling reach. As Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven put it in SOCOM 2020, his blueprint for the future, it has ambitious aspirations to create “a Global SOF network of like-minded interagency allies and partners.” In other words, in that future now only six years off, it wants to be everywhere….In the post-9/11 era, the command has grown steadily. With about 33,000 personnel in 2001, it is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 in 2014. (About half this number are called, in the jargon of the trade, “badged operators” — SEALs, Rangers, Special Operations Aviators, Green Berets — while the rest are support personnel.) Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as SOCOM’s baseline budget tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.9 billion between 2001 and 2013. If you add in supplemental funding, it had actually more than quadrupled to $10.4 billion.
Not surprisingly, personnel deployments abroad skyrocketed from 4,900 “man-years” — as the command puts it — in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013. About 11,000 special operators are now working abroad at any one time and on any given day they are in 70 to 80 countries, though the New York Times reported that, according to statistics provided to them by SOCOM, during one week in March 2013 that number reached 92.   This year, Special Operations Command has plans to make major inroads into yet another country — the United States. The establishment of SOCNORTH in 2014, according to the command, is intended to help “defend North America by outpacing all threats, maintaining faith with our people, and supporting them in their times of greatest need.” Under the auspices of U.S. Northern Command, SOCNORTH will have responsibility for the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and portions of the Caribbean.
While Congressional pushback has thus far thwarted Admiral McRaven’s efforts to create a SOCOM satellite headquarters for the more than 300 special operators working in Washington, D.C. (at the cost of $10 million annually), the command has nonetheless stationed support teams and liaisons all over the capital in a bid to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway. “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. — from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,”  One unsung SOCOM partner is U.S. AID, the government agency devoted to providing civilian foreign aid to countries around the world whose mandate includes the protection of human rights, the prevention of armed conflicts, the provision of humanitarian assistance, and the fostering of “good will abroad.” At a July 2013 conference, Beth Cole, the director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation at U.S. AID, explained just how her agency was now quietly aiding the military’s secret military.  www.tomdispatch.com/post/175790/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_special_ops_goes_global/#more

HEy Karzai! Remember Diem???! Afghan President Hamid Karzai has long accused the Obama administration of trying to secretly engineer his political downfall. Turns out he may be right. Lost in the political controversy surrounding former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new memoir is a fascinating account of a failed administration attempt to ensure that Karzai was defeated in the 2009 Afghan elections. Gates is harshly critical of the move, which he derides as a “clumsy and failed putsch” that did significant damage to the U.S.-Afghan relationship. – See more at: thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/09/gates_us_tried_to_oust_karzai_in_clumsy_putsch#sthash.HKy78XVI.GjOFSxKm.dpuf

The Saudi’s Strange Bedfellows  The Saudis fear the rise of Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria, and they have not forgotten what happened when Saudi militants who had fought in Afghanistan returned home to wage a domestic insurgency a decade ago. They officially prohibit their citizens from going to Syria for jihad, but the ban is not enforced; at least a thousand have gone, according to Interior Ministry officials, including some from prominent families.
But the Saudis are also bent on ousting Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and his patron, Iran, which they see as a mortal enemy. Their only real means of fighting them is through military and financial support to the Syrian rebels. And the most effective of those rebels are Islamists whose creed — rooted in the puritanical strain of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia — is often scarcely separable from Al Qaeda’s.   www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/world/middleeast/saudis-back-syria-rebels-despite-a-lack-of-control.html?ref=world&_r=0

Military Suicides and Toxic Officers Matsuda looked at the cases of eight soldiers who had recently killed themselves and interviewed friends of the victims.
“I crisscrossed Iraq and interviewed 50 soldiers,” Matusda recalls.
A more complicated story began to emerge, he says. In addition to major problems in their personal lives, the victims also had a leader who made their lives hell — sometimes a couple of leaders — Matsuda says. The officers would “smoke” them, as soldiers call it.
“Oftentimes platoon leaders will take turns seeing who can smoke this guy the worst. Seeing who can dream up the worst torture, seeing who can dream up the worst duties, seeing who can make this guy’s life the most miserable,” says Matusda.
He says the evidence did not show that the soldiers’ leaders caused them to commit suicide. But the soldiers’ friends said leaders had helped push them over the brink.    www.npr.org/2014/01/06/259422776/army-takes-on-its-own-toxic-leaders

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

above, homeless evicted in Fresno

The Financial Collapse is over, over, over, over  During the tail end of the recession and its aftermath, nearly a third of Americans suffered bouts of poverty lasting two months or more, the U.S. Census Bureau found in a newly released report.
It’s little surprise that more Americans endured such episodes than before the economic slump. Spells of poverty also lasted longer after the downturn. (The National Bureau of Economic Research defines the recession as the period from December 2007 to June 2009.)
Among Americans who spent at least two months in poverty between 2009 and 2011, the median spell of poverty lasted more than 6 1/2 months — nearly a month longer than between 2005 and 2007, the report found. Some Americans struggled even longer to shake off poverty, especially African Americans, the elderly and single mothers.
When someone loses their livelihood, “time is of the essence,” said James X. Sullivan, University of Notre Dame associate professor of economics. Middle-class families may run out of assets. Job seekers encounter mounting stigma.
“The longer you’re in poverty, the more dire the situation gets,” Sullivan said.
Between 2009 and 2011, 15% of such bouts of poverty lasted more than two years….Periods of poverty were especially common among the young between 2009 and 2011: More than 40% of children had been through a bout of poverty, compared with nearly 16% of the elderly and 31% of younger adults, the report found. Experts said the toll on children was especially worrisome in light of burgeoning research on how economic stress shapes growing brains.
While the elderly were less likely than children or younger adults to slip into poverty, they endured it longer when they did become poor. Blacks also suffered longer spells of poverty than whites or Latinos. And households led by unmarried women were also at higher risk. While they made up less than 15% of the population, they accounted for nearly 43% of the chronically poor.
www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-poverty-recession-20140107,0,7583944.story#ixzz2pxJL8z92

Half of Congress Members Are Millionaires  For the first time in history, more than half the members of the House and Senate are now millionaires, according to a new analysis of financial disclosure reports filed last year.
The median net worth for lawmakers in the House and Senate was $1,008,767 — up 4.4 percent, according to the analysis, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, which examines the influence of money on politics in Washington.
Over all, at least 268 of the 534 current members of Congress had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012…Democrats and Republicans in Congress were about equally wealthy, with Democrats boasting a median net worth of $1.04 million, compared to $1 million for congressional Republicans.   www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/us/politics/more-than-half-the-members-of-congress-are-millionaires-analysis-finds.html?hp&hp&_r=1

Still Too Big To Jail–JP Morgan Pays another fine, but will set record profits again Before Bernard L. Madoff was charged with stealing billions of dollars from his clients, and before he received a 150-year prison sentence for those crimes, JPMorgan Chase missed its chance to warn federal authorities about his Ponzi scheme.
On Tuesday, five years after Mr. Madoff’s arrest set off a panic on Wall Street and in Washington, Mr. Madoff’s primary bank received a punishment of its own.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan imposed a $1.7 billion penalty on JPMorgan for two felony violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, a record payout under that 1970 law, which requires banks to alert authorities to suspicious activity. The prosecutors, essentially accusing the nation’s biggest bank of turning a blind eye to Mr. Madoff’s fraud, will require JPMorgan to pay the $1.7 billion to his victims. The bank cannot write off the sum as a tax deduction.
Federal regulators announced their own rebuke of the bank, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency striking a $350 million settlement, citing the Madoff case and broader breakdowns in safeguards against anti-money laundering. All told, after paying these settlements, JPMorgan will have doled out some $20 billion to resolve government investigations over the last 12 months.    dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/jpmorgan-settles-with-federal-authorities-in-madoff-case/?hp&_r=0

NYTimes Interactive Map of Poverty in America www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/?hp

Obamagogue’s Counterfeit Promise Zones A new flow of money to a handful of low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods could cause the areas to gentrify and squeeze out the poor who live there, according to experts reacting to news that the city has been included in a special federal anti-poverty program.

The White House announced this week — marking the 50th anniversary of the launch of President Johnson’s War on Poverty — that five areas in the country would be designated “Promise Zones,” pushing them to the top of the list for federal grants and making them test sites for President Obama’s new poverty reduction initiative. The 10-year designation went to sections San Antonio, Philadelphia, southeastern Kentucky, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, the area designated a “Promise Zone” covers a portion of the city, stretching through Pico-Union, Westlake, Koreatown, East Hollywood and Hollywood.
That distinction has raised questions about what will happen to the areas where money would be concentrated and to the rest of Los Angeles that won’t be a beneficiary. (There is no new funding coming from the federal government. Instead, the program is intended to help cities cut through red tape to win existing grants from a variety of federal departments and then focus them in needy areas. At most, L.A. could get $500 million over 10 years.)
Chris Tilly, professor of urban planning at UCLA, said the extra money in the L.A. neighborhoods could definitely help people in poverty. However, he said that the growth of commercial centers could attract tourists and make prices rise, thereby displacing the people who live there now.
“It may end up hurting the poor,” he said.    www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ln-promise-zone-poor-20140110,0,2739898.story#ixzz2q479ll00

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Even the sheriff’s department, which is the proud owner of the MRAP tank, says it doesn’t have a specific use for the machine, but “It’s here if we need it.”    www.nationofchange.org/mrap-maxx-and-militarization-our-local-police-forces-1389194232

Slaves Build World Cup facilities for Monarcho-Fascists of Qatar  Qatar will be spending an estimated $100 billion on infrastructure projects and $20 billion on new roads, and will be constructing nine stadiums and 55,000 hotel rooms. Beyond the grand ambitions, though, lies a darker side to Qatar’s World Cup bid: the institutionalized exploitation of workers from South Asia. The facilities under construction are, in many cases, being built by workers who are virtual slaves. Of Qatar’s two million inhabitants, only 225,000 are nationals; the rest are migrant workers, mostly from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, brought in to do manual labor.  There have been widespread reports that thousands of workers are being abused and hundreds have quietly perished. The International Trade Union Confederation has estimated that, without urgent action to remedy conditions, 4,000 migrant workers will have died before a single ball is kicked in Doha.    www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/opinion/qatars-showcase-of-shame.html?hp&rref=opinion/international&_r=0

The Surveillance State Ever since Edward Snowden stole 1.7 million classified files from the NSA last summer, the Obama administration has been under siege and looking for a way out.
The behind-the-scenes effort to manage the fallout from the Snowden leaks has been so wide-ranging and time-consuming that officials from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations compare it to White House deliberations over the 9/11 and Iraq intelligence commissions reports, the U.S. military surge in Afghanistan and the WikiLeaks disclosures.
The challenge is, in some ways, even more complicated this time. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/behind-the-scenes-white-house-preoccupied-by-nsa-surveillance-controversy/2014/01/09/2d6ee2ba-789b-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html?hpid=z4

Solidarity for Never

Meet the New Broward Teachers Union New Staff Person (one of the last staff people is in jail for child molestation and toss in Former BTU boss Santeramo www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/10/2889462/ex-broward-teachers-union-chief.html)  Jasonek was union executive director from 1998 to 2010. In the beginning, he collected one paycheck for his position as a union leader. That paycheck increased an average 2 percent every year to $175,680 in 2009, according to IRS reports.
In 2000, however, he started the foundation under the union’s name and using union staff. He then opened the Center for Teaching Excellence in 2006, using district money. How much district money went to the center remains uncertain.
The additional executive director roles he took on at the newly created entities more than tripled Jasonek’s union earnings from 2003-09. His income climbed to $632,546 from the union and related organizations in 2009, the last year for which IRS reports are available. Jasonek’s main duty was union executive director, but he earned almost twice as much in his secondary capacities at the foundation and center.    m.reviewjournal.com/news/education/school-district-demands-24-million-accounting

SDEA Rep. Council Votes NOT to Push Harder for Our Raises. No Joke.  At the Dec. 11, 2013 Rep. Council, I put forth a motion to have the leadership of SDEA push SDUSD harder to fund the salary restorations which we still have not received. These are the 2% raise we were to have received on January 1, 2013 (almost a year ago), and the 3% raise we were to have received on July 1, 2013 (almost 6 months ago). I thought this would be a somewhat non-controversial motion. Isn’t that what unions do — push the employer harder to give the employees a bigger share of the pie?
Well, I was wrong. In an effort to see my motion defeated, SDEA President Bill Freeman actually turned the meeting over to SDEA Vice President Lindsay Burningham so he could speak against my motion from the Rep. Council floor. He said he believes that the people at the District are good people who are honest with us and if they say they don’t have the money to pay us, then they don’t have it. After he spoke, the Rep. Council voted against my motion (roughly 60% voting against). I was floored, and so were a lot of other people there.   thebreakfastclubsandiego.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/sdea-rep-council-votes-not-to-push-harder-for-our-raises-no-joke/

The Detroit Federation of Teachers, having allowed the firing of every school worker, then suing to win the forced collection of dues, is teaching the ranks to “Do the Hustle.”    dft231.mi.aft.org/files/dft_hustle_5_more_weeks.pdf

Michigan Union Bosses and School Bosses (plus the suckers) agree to 10 years of forced dues  An unusual 10-year agreement that protects union dues in a Detroit-area school district should stand, a state labor judge said.
The deal was made early last year, just weeks before Michigan’s so-called right-to-work law took effect in March. The law prohibits forcing public and private workers to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.
The Taylor school district and Taylor Federation of Teachers agreed to a 10-year side contract that forces teachers to pay dues or a service fee. The deal was challenged by three teachers, who pay roughly $900 a year, on many grounds. They want it thrown out or shortened to three years.
An administrative law judge, Julia Stern, recommended the Michigan Employment Relations Commission dismiss the complaint. She said there’s nothing illegal about Taylor and the union reaching a deal before the new law began in late March.
Stern, quoting the contract, said the agreement was made to maintain “peace” between the union and the district. Separately, teachers agreed to a 10 percent pay cut and other concessions.
“It is not the Commission’s role to modify the terms of a lawful contract on public policy grounds,” Stern said in her Dec. 27 decision.
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, which is representing the three teachers, opposes the recommendation.
“If 10 years is acceptable, why not 50? Why not 99?” attorney Derk Wilcox said. “The logic of this ruling means that local governments, by enacting specific agreements for long periods of time, could sidestep state laws they disagree with.”
David Hecker, statewide union president of AFT Michigan, said Stern made the right call.
The contract was “ratified by a democratically elected school board and by members of the union. … There’s no issue here,” Hecker said Tuesday.
More than 140 school districts agreed to contract extensions before the right-to-work law kicked in, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which describes itself as a free-market think tank in Midland. Any school employee who wants to stop supporting a union must wait until the contract expires.
Wayne State University in Detroit approved an eight-year contract with union-represented faculty eight days before the law took effect.  From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140107/SCHOOLS/301070048#ixzz2plbzf4oV

UAW Boss Shot his Wife–to be arraigned An arrest warrant has been issued for UAW Vice President General Holiefield after his wife was shot at their home in Harrison Township last month in an incident authorities initially believed to be an accident.
Sheriff’s officials brought the case forward to the Macomb County Prosecutor’s office on Tuesday. The warrant was signed Thursday, according to Lt. John Michalke, spokesman for the sheriff’s department. Holiefield, who was not in police custody Friday, faces a charge of reckless use of a firearm. The crime is a misdemeanor and carries up to 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. Holiefield is scheduled to be arraigned at 8:30 a.m. Jan. 22 at the 41-B District Court in Clinton Township. From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140110/METRO03/301100076#ixzz2q3vGQoED

Union Thief   The vice principal at Woodlands High School was arrested Tuesday on an accusation he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in union funds over a period of several years, a law enforcement source said.
Frank Gluberman, 66, of Congers, the treasurer and welfare-fund administrator for the Greenburgh Teachers Federation, was charged with second-degree grand larceny, a felony. Greenburgh police, who made the arrest, declined comment but said they will reveal details Wednesday in a joint statement with the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office.    www.lohud.com/article/20140107/NEWS/301070061/Greenburgh-vice-principal-charged-theft-hundreds-thousands-dollars-from-union

Union Thief Part 2 A former Middletown High School math teacher has been formally charged with stealing more than $45,000 from the local teachers’ union during her four-year tenure as its treasurer.
Carol R. Morris turned herself in to police Thursday to face multiple criminal charges, including theft, forgery, unlawful use of a credit card and falsifying business records, according to Delaware State Police spokesman Sgt. Paul Shavack.
She later was released on an $8,000 unsecured bond.
The 63-year-old retired teacher declined to comment when contacted at her Townsend-area home Friday afternoon.
Morris is accused of stealing a total of $45,999.59 while serving as treasurer for the Appoquinimink Education Association (AEA) from September 2009 to June 2013. Read more: www.middletowntranscript.com/article/20140103/NEWS/140109932/10058/NEWS#ixzz2pqkrjaVb

South Africa Miners’ Union Limited, but interesting, Analysis of the Failures of the ANC www.numsa.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Secretariat-Report-as-in-.pdf

Spy versus Spy

The Media PA Gang (who led us to Cointelpro) comes out (with video from NYT)  One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.

Next? Wapo jumps to head of line embracing (after denouncing) Snowden  Now I, too, must open myself up to vilification. I have already written that Snowden is not much of a traitor. He hardly fits the category — Benedict Arnold, Julius Rosenberg (I hesitate when it comes to his wife, Ethel) or, more recently, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. My list is not nearly complete, but to add Snowden to it would create a mismatch, one of those tests in which you are asked to find the example that does not fit the category. No matter. The epithet “traitor” has been hurled at Snowden by a host of honorables — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Peter King and that emeritus one from administrations past, Dick Cheney.    www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-make-a-deal-with-snowden/2014/01/06/33fb8e2c-770a-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html?hpid=z3

The Magical Mystery Tour

Today, there’s yet another clear sign ththat nothing’s changing in the Catholic hierarchy: Vatican officials are refusing to extradite a credibly accused child molesting church official.
www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/158234,Vatican-refuses-to-extradite-Polish-archbishop-accused-of-child-sex-abuse
Pope Francis can ride buses, carry luggage, charm reporters and be humble all he wants. If he wants to stop kids from being raped and sodomized, however, he must act. He must reverse the centuries-old practice of Vatican officials protecting other Catholic officials from law enforcement. And he’s not a young man. He should start now.
We call on Pope Francis to stop harboring Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski and send him to Poland immediately. If Wesolowski refuses, Pope Francis should kick him out of the Vatican, stop paying him, and harshly denounce him in public.
Next week, Vatican officials will be questioned in Geneva by a United Nations panel on how the church hierarchy handles child sex abuse cases. That session will be live and on line, so anyone can watch it. We can’t imagine how top Catholic officials will defend this indefensible move.      www.snapnetwork.org/rome_vatican_again_protects_a_predator

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Ten Things you MUST LEARN about Vernors

www.thrillist.com/drink/detroit/10-things-you-didn-t-know-about-vernors-thrillist-detroit

So Long

below, second from left, Frankin McCain and the Woolworth’s sit in in 1960, when he was 19. “Never ask permission to start a revolution.” www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-franklin-mccain-20140111,0,3228562.story#axzz2q46qphAX

Monday in B-Flat

I can pray
all day
& God
wont come.

But if I call
911
The Devil
Be here

in a minute!