We Say Fight Back!

Oakland school strike: Teachers picket, classrooms empty and no end in sight (and no solidarity strikes from NEA or AFT)

www.facebook.com/OaklandEA/videos/1225054274330013/?t=68

Across Oakland, thin trickles of students crossed their striking teachers’ picket lines on Thursday and gathered in libraries, auditoriums and cafeterias, where administrators let them watch public TV and gave them other “enrichment activities.”

“There was no type of structure without the teachers,” said Kimouri Jackson, a senior at Oakland Technical High who watched an animal documentary and said only a few dozen students showed up. The school usually has 2,000 students.

Other students rallied with their teachers or attended hastily arranged “solidarity schools” in churches, libraries and recreation centers.

It was Day One of the Oakland Education Association’s strike for higher pay, smaller classes and more support for thousands of students — with no end in sight. The district enrolls more than 50,000 students, though about 13,000 of them attend charter schools whose teachers are not part of the 3,000-member union and aren’t on strike.

Oakland teachers’ pay begins at $46,500, and the average salary is $63,100. Their contract expired two years ago, and teachers are demanding a 12 percent raise. They also want Oakland Unified to hire more counselors and nurses and to stop closing schools. Administrators say they have no choice, and need to slash $22 million to help close a $30 million budget deficit.

The union on Wednesday rejected the district’s latest proposal of a 7 percent raise over three years plus a retroactive 1.5 percent bonus.  www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-teachers-strike-Thousands-expected-to-13633581.php

I find it hopeful that teachers are learning.

Surely, Oakland is the more radical of the California cities that have gone on strike, and that may be part of the advance, but the rank and filers have clearly related the schools to the imperialist wars, a major step ahead from the flag carrying patriotism of other strikers. The ranks, some members and some not, have also set up Solidarity Schools to offset the food and babysitting roles of many, many schools. So, tactics are coming along.

A short term strategy would be a massive school worker walkout, nationwide, on Mayday–another more radical step ahead that would require explaining Mayday.

Then, farther on, a national week long walk out at the beginning of most schools in the fall of this year. Some of the walkouts could become ongoing wildcat strikes. And solidarity strikes could follow. Teachers, really school workers, have also learned (at least some from experience) that the only illegal strike is a strike that fails.

They have not learned, yet, that the very structures of their unions and their union bosses, will do them no good.  They have not abandoned their patriotism, which is a veneer for backing imperialism. And they have not learned that public schools were never public, but always segregated capitalist schools in service to exploitation and empire. Not “defend public education, but “Rescue education from the ruling classes.”(RG)

www.facebook.com/wvdemocrats/videos/2208024202574863/?t=47

Teachers at Parma’s Summit Academy Community School vote in favor of strike

PARMA, Ohio — Last week, Summit Academy Parma teachers voted overwhelmingly to go on strike after management refused to improve teaching and learning conditions.

“The teachers don’t want to go on strike,” Ohio Federation of Teachers Communications Director Neil Bhaerman said. “The big issues have been around their conditions, which obviously affect the kids’ education.

“These are things like proper staffing and making sure that there’s a safe and healthy environment in the school. There was a scabies outbreak not too long ago there. So there are a lot of concerns about the health and safety of the students.”

One of the complaints is that administrators receive pay raises while teachers receive little or no increases, with average annual salaries in the $30,000 range. Specifically, union members point to Summit Academy Management CEO John Guyer receiving a $31,000 raise.

Guyer previously told cleveland.com that the pay raise was tied to changing positions from executive director of technology to interim CEO.

Bhaerman said a big issue has to do with class size limits, which last year increased from 18 to 25 students.

“When class size increases, the teachers’ time and attention for each student decreases,” Bhaerman said. “Close to 90 percent of our students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). Small class sizes are essential to meeting the goals in those IEPs.”https://www.cleveland.com/parma/index.ssf/2019/02/teachers_at_parmas_summit_acad_1.html?fbclid=IwAR3tw9mtlpGocOhrZTNwpQvGrDhHjBfVcH6jOn0A4_1n2KYeXubdFUTZmPA

 

Everything You Need to Know About General Strikes

A general strike is a labor action in which a significant amount of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action. Organized strikes are generally called by labor union leadership, but they impact more than just those in the union. For example, imagine the scenario if thousands in your town or city — no matter what their job was or whether or not they were in a union — got together and decided to go on strike to protest police brutality, as happened in Oakland, California, in 2011, after Iraq veteran Scott Olsen was critically wounded by local police when they stormed the Occupy Oakland encampment. The community declared a daylong general strike that ultimately saw thousands of people shut down the Port of Oakland (which was more of a symbolic protest, but still it got the job done).

Though the concept has its roots in ancient Rome’s secessio plebis, one of the first modern general strikes took place during the Industrial Revolution in Northern England in 1842, a time of great civil and social unrest, as modern capitalism began to take hold and hierarchical class lines began to be drawn between employers and employees. General strikes played pivotal roles in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish Civil War. And in the U.S., general strikes became almost common during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with examples taking hold in Philadelphia (1835), St. Louis (1877), Chicago (1886), New Orleans (1892), and Seattle (1919), and during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. These large-scale actions were instrumental in securing crucial workers’ rights that many of us take for granted today, from basic safety regulations to the eight-hour workday and the end of child labor. But those wins did not come easily.   www.teenvogue.com/story/general-strikes-explained?fbclid=IwAR2164BAMxidNcUEcEzmjb6ovvajOaOl8rWw4_FJtCSqM2frSdR-mM-AKOo

Oregon teachers, students rally at state Capitol for more money for schools

Teachers, students and their families rallied and marched in Salem on Monday to demand more money for schools.

The event, organized by the Oregon Education Association, began with a rally on the Capitol steps, followed by a march.

KGW reporter Tim Gordon estimated about 4,000 people showed up for the event, including people from all over the state.

The message the group sent to state lawmakers was simple: Overcrowded classrooms and understaffed schools are hurting students, and lawmakers need to put more money into education.

Speakers said Oregon ranks near the top for large class sizes, and in the bottom half nationally for funding to fix the problem. Speakers also demanded more support staff to work with teachers.

“Our future is children. And if it’s not funded then we won’t have a future, so it needs to happen,” said Addison Dille, a North Clackamas School District 8th-grader and PTA student representative.

“I’m a teacher and my kid is in public education,” said middle-school teacher Ashley Griffith of Hillsboro. “We want to make sure that we’re fully funded and we have the classrooms that we deserve.”

Oregon is in the bottom half of states for school funding. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has pitched a $1.9 billion fix for improvements, but the state budget is not set yet.  www.kgw.com/article/news/oregon-teachers-students-rally-at-state-capitol-for-more-money-for-schools/283-edbe61c4-1707-436f-b1a4-48a40bc08f8e?fbclid=IwAR2aGnoE3_T0H-U5vXcS2jNFJZfsXs391WcLcFnNhx9awP1xcMYrhFuagQk

www.facebook.com/wsws.org/videos/224764938461115/?t=20

Congratulations on the publication of:

The Little Red Schoolhouse

We’re Suing SDSU for Records to Shed Light on Mission Valley Plans

Voice of San Diego is suing San Diego State University for withholding public records that may show how the university plans to expand its campus into Mission Valley, build a river park and a new stadium – all without raising student tuition and fees.

Last fall, voters handed SDSU the keys to the old Qualcomm Stadium site by approving a measure that essentially forces the city to sell land to the university. The campus expansion may cost the university hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new stadium and begin preparing the land.

Before the election, SDSU officials and allies promised that the university would not have to raise student tuition or fees to pay for the development. They would get money from private partners, donors or the largesse of the California State University system, of which SDSU is a part.

During the weeks leading up to the November election and in the months since, the university declined to provide details showing how it can be so sure it will protect students from any price hikes.

It did let us interview John Kratzer, the CEO of JMI Reality, one of the university’s several consultants. Before the election, Kratzer said his company had run a series of models analyzing the risks to students if the university spends $300 million on the land, river park and site preparation.  www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/were-suing-sdsu-for-records-to-shed-light-on-mission-valley-plans/

The Answer Sheet: Obamagogue’s real education legacy – Common Core, testing, charter schools

President Obama went to a high-performing D.C. high school this week to tout the “progress” his administration has made in public education, America’s most important civic institution. To mark the legacy moment, he brought along the two men who have served as his education secretaries — Arne Duncan and John King Jr., along with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Gen. Colin Powell and his wife Alma.

It’s what he didn’t say that was most revealing. A fuller evaluation of the Obama education legacy would look somewhat different from the one he offered….unitedteachersofnorthport.com/issues/the-answer-sheet-obamas-real-education-legacy-common-core-testing-charter-schools/

‘It keeps you nice and disposable’: The plight of adjunct professors

Collective bargaining has emerged as a path to improving working conditions for adjunct faculty. Higher ed administrators shouldn’t look at this as a threat to their industry–the real threat is a workforce that is seen as “disposable.”  www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/it-keeps-you-nice-and-disposable-the-plight-of-adjunct-professors/2019/02/14/6cd5cbe4-024d-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8ee6f93cb84f

Palomar College president gets $1 million suite in new library

As officials prepare for the Friday grand opening of a $67 million library at Palomar College, crews have already begun demolishing part of the building’s top floor to build President Joi Lin Blake an office suite.

Design of the nearly $1 million remodel started more than a year ago when architectural plans were ordered. The college’s governing board later approved a $797,000 contract to build the presidential project.

The suite will include Blake’s office, space for two staffers, and a conference room, restroom, work/break room and waiting area. The money to pay for it is coming from a $694 million bond measure voters approved in 2006.

A few professors have objected for months to spending taxpayer funds on the project when Blake has been talking about budget problems at the district, which serves about 30,000 full- and part-time students. Two college district board members also opposed approving the suite’s construction contract in December, saying they weren’t given enough details about the project.

“It just seemed that it was a sudden vote, that things had already been put in place before we had a chance to get more information,” board member Nina Deerfield told inewsource.

“Could we have a built new classrooms? Equipped science labs? What did we give up for that (presidential office suite)?” she said.  inewsource.org/2019/02/20/palomar-college-president-million-dollar-office-new-library/?fbclid=IwAR2CtPKYo5aZFFdsVnCGRU5ISiMqxXCEsyX5xj8QD6Hpbw0hXTTuE8sO1RI

Sweetwater school board suddenly evaluates superintendent, keeps quiet about results

The Sweetwater Union High School Board launched a sudden performance evaluation of its superintendent Friday, as the school district grapples with a fiscal crisis and with federal and state investigations related to potential fraud.

The evaluation, which happened during a special, closed-door meeting Friday afternoon and night, raised speculation among community members that the board might fire Karen Janney or force her to resign, although audit agencies have not yet assigned blame to specific people for the district’s financial problems…

Sweetwater is the state’s largest secondary school district with roughly 39,000 students.

The district faces an impending state audit for possible fraud and an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, after a state fiscal agency found reason to believe Sweetwater employees may have been covering up the district’s financial problem.  www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/sd-me-sweetwater-superintendent-evaluation-20190222-story.html

Meet the Obscure School Oversight Agency Making Waves With Its Candor

The state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which has led the investigation of Sweetwater Union High School District’s financial crisis, has turned heads for the candor with which it has discussed the district’s mess.

An unassuming white-haired man in a suit walked up to the podium at a board meeting for Sweetwater Union High School District on Dec. 17. To those in the audience, he looked like any mid-level functionary – probably about to give a drab presentation on some aspect of school workings.

Sweetwater officials were in the middle of a fiscal crisis brought on by $30 million in overspending. They had been insisting it was all the result of innocent bookkeeping errors and dysfunctional software. But Michael Fine, the man in the suit, wanted to tell a different story. Fine, who is the chief executive officer of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, stepped up to the microphone and delivered a scathing indictment of the district’s role in the crisis.

He described suspicious entries in the district’s budget system and – as if the board room had suddenly been delivered into the middle a procedural crime drama – said, “That, my friends and colleagues, is a cover-up.” The public collectively gasped. A board member’s jaw literally dropped.

The fiscal crisis agency, an independent and obscure state organization, was created in 1991 to expose difficult truths like these. Its function is similar to the internal affairs division of a police department.  www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/meet-the-obscure-school-oversight-agency-making-waves-with-its-candor/?utm_source=Voice+of+San+Diego+Master+List&utm_campaign=0662a8a3fb-Morning_Report&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c2357fd0a3-0662a8a3fb-81862829&goal=0_c2357fd0a3-0662a8a3fb-81862829

Florida sixth-grader charged after confrontation with teacher over Pledge of Allegiance

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

War always comes home: Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

When Army Staff Sgt. Samuel Fortune returned from Iraq, his body battered by war, he assumed he’d be safe.

Then the people around him began to get sick. His neighbors, all living near five military bases, complained of tumors, thyroid problems and debilitating fatigue. Soon, the Colorado health department announced an unusually high number of kidney cancers in the region. Then Mr. Fortune’s wife fell ill.

The military, it turned out, had been leaching toxic chemicals into the water for decades.

Mr. Fortune felt “stabbed in the back,” he said. “We give our lives and our bodies for our country, and our government does not live up to their end of the deal.”

That was 2016. Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generations. This exposed tens of thousands of Americans, possibly many more, to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of man-made chemicals known as PFAS that have been linked to cancers, immune suppression and other serious health problems.

Though the presence of the chemicals has been known for years, an announcement last week from the Environmental Protection Agency for the first time promised regulatory action, a significant acknowledgment of the startling scope of the problem that drew outrage from veterans and others living in contaminated communities.

Acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said that the agency would begin the process of potentially limiting the presence of two of the compounds in drinking water, calling this a “pivotal moment in the history of the agency.”

The admission drew some praise, but many said that it was not enough and that millions of people would keep ingesting the substances while a regulatory process plods along.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/military-water-toxic-chemicals.html

Why Elliott Abrams is the Right Man for the Job in Venezuela

Under the subject heading “You can’t make this stuff up!” I got a message from a friend announcing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s appointment of convicted liar, Elliott Abrams, as the new special envoy to engineer the replacement of Venezuela’s elected president Nicolas Maduro.  Abrams is an apt choice for the job, as his career stretches back through some of the most sordid instances of US intervention and brutality. As Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan and later as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, Abrams dismissed allegations of a December 1981 massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador, testifying before a Senate committee that the hundreds of deaths “were not credible.” Subsequent documentation from the Salvadoran Truth Commission revealed that 794 civilians were “deliberately and systematically” executed at the hands of an elite US-trained military battalion.  For his part, Abrams claimed that the long war in El Salvador that took the lives of thousands of civilians—including Archbishop Oscar Romero who was assassinated in broad daylight while saying Mass—was “a fabulous achievement.”

Abrams was a key operative in the Iran-Contra scandal, a clandestine scheme during the Reagan Administration to supply backers of the former dictator in their quest to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.  After Congress cut off support for the Contras in response to proof of the group’s widespread human rights violations, Abrams helped out by flying to London in August 1986 where he met secretly with an emissary from the fabulously rich Sultan of Brunei to ask for $10 million to fund the Contras.

The Sultan gave the money, but through a clerical error it was deposited in the wrong Swiss bank account.)

Pardoned by President H.W. Bush, Abrams went to work in the administrations of both George H.W. and George W. Bush, promoting the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and undermining Iran in whatever way possible. Along with other neocon cheerleaders for regime change in the Middle East—a project that was supposed to be a “cake walk”—Abrams created a mess.  https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171125?fbclid=IwAR2sUnJ-SWfmGigtfL_4sCVcS4JoFtINBFAJpSgzrMmROdyZea3zMfh5DcE

After the Trade War, a Real War with China?

I’m here at your kind invitation to discuss China, how bad our relations with it may get, and how the contest we’ve initiated with China is likely to play out. Let me take a minute or two to set the context for this discussion.

Five hundred years ago this month, Hernán Cortés began the European annihilation of the Mayan, Aztec, and other indigenous civilizations in the Western Hemisphere. Six months later, in August 1519, Magellan [Fernão de Magalhães] launched his circumnavigation of the globe. For five centuries thereafter, a series of Western powers – Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and, finally, the United States – overturned preexisting regional orders as they imposed their own on the world. That era has now come to an end.

In the final phases of the age of Western dominance, we Americans made and enforced the rules. We were empowered to do so in two phases. First, around 1880, the United States became the world’s largest economy. Then, in 1945, having liberated Western Europe from Germany and overthrown Japanese hegemony in East Asia, Americans achieved primacy in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union and its then-apparently-faithful Asian companion, Communist China, challenged our new sphere of influence. In response, we placed our defeated enemies (Germany, Italy, Japan), our wartime allies, and most countries previously occupied by our enemies under American protection. With our help, these countries – which we called “allies” – soon returned to wealth and power but remained our protectorates. Now other countries, like China and India, are rising to challenge our global supremacy.   chasfreeman.net/after-the-trade-war-a-real-war-with-china/

Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Long War of Attrition

War With China?
It’s Already Under Way

In his highly acclaimed 2017 book, Destined for War, Harvard professor Graham Allison assessed the likelihood that the United States and China would one day find themselves at war. Comparing the U.S.-Chinese relationship to great-power rivalries all the way back to the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BC, he concluded that the future risk of a conflagration was substantial. Like much current analysis of U.S.-Chinese relations, however, he missed a crucial point: for all intents and purposes, the United States and China are already at war with one another. Even if their present slow-burn conflict may not produce the immediate devastation of a conventional hot war, its long-term consequences could prove no less dire.

To suggest this means reassessing our understanding of what constitutes war. From Allison’s perspective (and that of so many others in Washington and elsewhere), “peace” and “war” stand as polar opposites. One day, our soldiers are in their garrisons being trained and cleaning their weapons; the next, they are called into action and sent onto a battlefield. War, in this model, begins when the first shots are fired.

Well, think again in this new era of growing great-power struggle and competition. Today, war means so much more than military combat and can take place even as the leaders of the warring powers meet to negotiate and share dry-aged steak and whipped potatoes (as Donald Trump and Xi Jinping did at Mar-a-Lago in 2017). That is exactly where we are when it comes to Sino-American relations. Consider it war by another name, or perhaps, to bring back a long-retired term, a burning new version of a cold war.

www.tomdispatch.com/post/176528/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_a_long_war_of_attrition/flint%20water%203

Amid Afghan Peace Talks, U.N. Reports Record Civilian Deaths in 2018

Even with peace talks underway, the war in Afghanistan killed almost 4,000 civilians last year, including a record number of children, officials said Sunday, as both sides pursued aggressive combat operations.

It made 2018 the single deadliest year for Afghan civilians since the United Nations began documenting casualties a decade ago.

The United Nations attributed roughly two-thirds of civilian casualties — 63 percent — to insurgent groups, primarily the Taliban and the Islamic State. Afghan and American forces were responsible for 24 percent — 14 percent by Afghan national security forces, 6 percent by American forces and 4 percent by government-backed armed groups. Responsibility for the remaining casualties could not be established.

The single biggest cause of civilian casualties — 42 percent — was suicide bombings and related attacks by insurgents, the report found. The numbers of civilian casualties caused by suicide bombings and by American and Afghan government airstrikes were each the highest recorded since the United Nations issued its first report in 2009.

he numbers reflected a surge in fighting, especially last fall, when both sides in the conflict, which is in its 18th year, stepped up attacks as they sought leverage in peace talks between the United States and the Taliban.

On the insurgent side, Islamic State attacks on civilians rose 118 percent for the year, the United Nations found, while Taliban attacks on nearly doubled compared with 2017.

Military spending: 20 companies profiting the most from war

There was a 1.1 percent increase in global military spending in 2017, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The global rise was driven partially by a $9.6 billion hike in U.S. arms expenditure – the United States is the world’s largest defense spender by a wide margin. Though it is yet unclear what the growing arms investments will mean for international relations, major defense contractors around the world stand to benefit.

Total arms sales among the world’s 100 largest defense contractors topped $398 billion in 2017 after climbing for the third consecutive year. Notably, Russia, one of the countries with the fastest growing militaries over the last decade, became the second largest arms-producing country, overtaking the United Kingdom for the first time since 2002. The United States’ position as the top arms-producing nation in the world remains unchanged, and for now unchallenged.

The United States is home to five of the world’s 10 largest defense contractors, and American companies account for 57 percent of total arms sales by the world’s 100 largest defense contractors, based on SIPRI data.

Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world, is estimated to have had $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017 through deals with governments all over the world. The company drew public scrutiny after a bomb it sold to Saudi Arabia was dropped on a school bus in Yemen, killing 40 boys and 11 adults. Lockheed’s revenue from the U.S. government alone is well more than the total annual budgets of the IRS and the Environmental Protection Agency, combined.  www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/21/military-spending-defense-contractors-profiting-from-war-weapons-sales/39092315/

CNO defends hiding scathing internal report on Fitzgerald collision from public

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor          

Jed Shafer thought his work navigating the troubled public service loan forgiveness program was finished. He found out he was wrong when Lowe’s turned him away at the register.

State of Working America Wages 2018Wage inequality marches on—and is even threatening data reliability

Rising wage inequality and sluggish hourly wage growth for the vast majority of workers have been defining features of the American labor market for nearly four decades, despite steady productivity growth. The U.S. economy of the last several years has been no exception. Although the unemployment rate continued to fall and participation in the labor market continued to grow over the last year, most workers are experiencing moderate wage growth and even workers who have seen more significant gains are just making up ground lost during the Great Recession and slow recovery rather than getting ahead.

This report analyzes data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and details the most up-to-date hourly wage trends through 2018 across the wage distribution and education categories, highlighting important differences by race and gender. By looking at real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) hourly wages by percentile, we can compare what is happening over time for the lowest-wage workers (those at the 10th and 20th percentiles) and for middle-wage workers (those at or near the 50th percentile) with wage trends for the highest-wage workers (those at the 90th and 95th percentiles).

The data show not only rising inequality in general, but also the persistence, and in some cases worsening, of wage gaps by gender and race. What also stands out in this last year of data is that, while wages are growing for most workers, wage growth continues to be slower than would be expected in an economy with relatively low unemployment.   www.epi.org/publication/state-of-american-wages-2018/?utm_source=Economic+Policy+Institute&utm_campaign=252b85c176-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_22_11_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e7c5826c50-252b85c176-58180353&mc_cid=252b85c176&mc_eid=3fabdb3ba2

www.facebook.com/senatorsanders/videos/2369312506642151/?t=18

Income inequality is rising so fast, data can’t keep up

Health Care and Insurance Industries Mobilize to Kill ‘Medicare for All’

Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness.

Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling Medicare for all before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item. They have hired a top lieutenant in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to spearhead the effort. And their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care.

They also demonstrate how entrenched the Democrats’ last big health care victory, the Affordable Care Act, has become in the nation’s health care system.

The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/politics/medicare-for-all-lobbyists.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

    

Estonia Orders Danske Bank Out After Money-Laundering Scandal

An internal report by Danske revealed in September that the bank had failed for years to prevent suspected money laundering involving thousands of customers at its branch in Tallinn, Estonia. The report prompted Danske’s chief executive and chairman to step down. In December, the police in Estonia arrested 10 former Danske employees on charges that they had been involved in a network of money launderers.

The scandal “has dealt a serious blow to the transparency, credibility and reputation of the Estonian financial market,” Kilvar Kessler, the chairman of the management board of the Estonian financial regulator, said in a written statement on Tuesday.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/business/danske-bank-estonia-money-laundering.html

Ex-Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling released from federal custody

 The 65-year-old was initially sentenced in 2006 to 24 years in prison and fined $45 million for multiple counts of securities fraud, conspiracy and other crimes. In 2013, the sentence was reduced to 14 years.    https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jeffrey-skilling-enron-20190221-story.html

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the room–full video

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

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

The Cover-up continues: The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t

The Obama Presidential Center promises to be a presidential library like no other.

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.

And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/arts/obama-presidential-center-library-national-archives-and-records-administration.html

Neo-Nazi coast guard officer accused of domestic terror plot denied bail

Government says Christopher Hasson was plotting ‘to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country’

A federal judge on Thursday denied bail for Lt Christopher Hasson, a neo-Nazi member of the US coast guard who the government says was plotting “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country”.

Law enforcement officers seized 15 guns and 1,000 rounds of ammunition from Hasson’s Silver Spring, Maryland, home earlier this week. Court documents quoted an email in which Hasson wrote he was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth”. He was arrested this week on drug and gun charges.

In arguing against bail, the federal prosecutor Jennifer Sykes said Hasson would log on to his government computer during work and spend hours searching for information on such people as the Unabomber, the Virginia Tech gunman and the anti-abortion bomber Eric Rudolph.

Sykes said the charges so far were just the “tip of the iceberg” and called Hasson a “domestic terrorist” who appeared to be planning attacks inspired by the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian rightwing extremist who killed 77 people in a 2011 bomb-and-shooting rampage.  www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/21/christopher-hasson-terror-plot-coast-guard-officer-denied-bail

Sarah Sanders’s Latest Lie Is Somehow Her Worst

When a US Coast Guard lieutenant and former Marine was arrested and charged with gun and drug crimes, it quickly became clear that the officer, Christopher Hasson, was allegedly plotting the mass murder of Democrats and journalists and subscribed to white nationalism. Trump has not weighed in on the case, though he had time to tweet about actor Jussie Smollett allegedly faking a hate crime. When his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked about it Friday, her response was brazen even by the standards of the administration

twitter.com/i/status/1098956674042335232

Obviously, Sanders is lying here—this is not a case where she might have incomplete information or have been deceived by her superiors. This is a conscious falsehood being uttered by a key voice atop the United States government. Anyone who knows anything about Trump knows that he has routinely praised violence, especially against the media.   www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbzpxq/sarah-sanderss-latest-lie-is-somehow-her-worst?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=VICE%20WEEKEND%20NEWSLETTER%20223&utm_content=VICE%20WEEKEND%20NEWSLETTER%20223+CID_db7ed775f21389dbca9ced8fd0ce5fad&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor&utm_term=Sarah%20Sanderss%20Latest%20Lie%20Is%20Somehow%20Her%20Worst

The old yearbook photos capture the lighthearted moments from college worth remembering – smiling faces, pep rallies and cans of cheap beer.

But tucked in and among those same pages are pictures of students dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and blackface, nooses and mock lynchings, displays of racism not hidden but memorialized as jokes to laugh about later.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a stunning number of colleges and university yearbooks published images of blatant racism on campus, the USA TODAY Network found in a review of 900 publications at 120 schools across the country.

At Cornell University in New York, three fraternity members are listed in the 1980 yearbook as “Ku,” “Klux” and “Klan.” For their 1971 yearbook picture, a dozen University of Virginia fraternity members, some armed, wore dark cloaks and hoods while peering up at a lynched mannequin in blackface. In one of the most striking images – from the 1981 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign yearbook – a black man is smiling and holding a beer while posing with three people in full KKK regalia.

Reporters collected more than 200 examples of offensive or racist material at colleges in 25 states, from large public universities in the South, to Ivy League schools in the Northeast, liberal arts boutiques and Division I powerhouses. www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/02/20/blackface-racist-photos-yearbooks-colleges-kkk-lynching-mockery-fraternities-black-70-s-80-s/2858921002/

‘I don’t care what they say’: Alabama editor who called for KKK to ‘ride again,’ lynch won’t back down

The editor of a small-town Alabama newspaper — who this week called for the extrajudicial killings of “socialist communists” after his history of racist and anti-Semitic editorials came to light — declined to back down, apologize or even acknowledge that his call for violence advocated for the lynching of his fellow Americans.

“I don’t care what they say,” said Goodloe Sutton, the editor of the Democrat-Reporter newspaper. “They have a right to say whatever they want. They’re not important to me.”

Sutton, who is also the publisher and owner of the newspaper in Marengo County, published an editorial last week calling for “the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again” to clean up Washington, D.C., from “Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats (who) are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama.”  www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2019/02/21/goodloe-sutton-alabama-kkk-editorial-wont-back-down-ku-klux-klan-linden-alabama-racist-editor/2938252002/

Reminder from Vietnam–war is barbaric hell

Solidarity for Never

NEA Still Employing the Electoral Dodge: Massachusetts Teacher Unions Pledge $2 Million to “Fund Our Future”

 While everyone is focused on strikes and job actions, teacher unions aren’t neglecting their traditional methods of activism. Last week I reported that the California Teachers Association will support a split-roll property tax initiative scheduled for the 2020 ballot.

www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2019/02/22/massachusetts-teacher-unions-pledge-2-million-to-fund-our-future/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Intercepts+%28Intercepts%29

Corporations see a different kind of “green” in Ocasio-Cortez’s “green new deal”

For someone who has campaigned on upending the status quo and challenging the establishment, Ocasio-Cortez and the “Green New Deal” tied so closely to her name sure have won a lot of support from the establishment, and quickly too. While that phenomenon has been touted as evidence that progressive agendas are finally “winning” on Capitol Hill, one need look no further than the text of the Green New Deal on Ocasio-Cortez’s own website to realize that the real reason this plan has gained so much establishment support so quickly is that it is an oligarch-driven corporate answer to climate change and inequality and a wishlist for the neoliberals who still control the core of the Democratic Party…

According to a draft of the plan that was recently on Ocasio-Cortez’s website, the proposed House committee “shall be composed of 15 members appointed by the Speaker, of whom six may be appointed on the recommendation of the Minority Leader.” By all indications, the next speaker of the House is set to be Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), meaning that every member of the committee will be appointed by her, with six of those members potentially being appointed on the “recommendation” of the House’s top Republican. Notably, Ocasio-Cortez herself has recently backed Pelosi as House speaker.

While Pelosi’s status as an establishment, corporate Democrat is enough to create concern that those she would appoint to the committee would be just as beholden to corporate interests as she is, the version of the plan currently on Ocasio-Cortez’s website offers many more reasons for concern.  mronline.org/2019/02/14/corporations-see-a-different-kind-of-green-in-ocasio-cortezs-green-new-deal/?fbclid=IwAR0wdllcyR0F5RiV9t23tZuChEOd8Ql1jMjiTYSLeQdTJLF4SQzrcQsxhms

Spy versus Spy

Venezuela’s Ex-Spy Chief Rejects Maduro, Accusing Leader’s Inner Circle of Corruption

A former intelligence chief in Venezuela who is one of the government’s most prominent figures turned against President Nicolás Maduro on Thursday, calling him a dictator with a corrupt inner circle that has engaged in drug trafficking and courted the militant group Hezbollah.

In interviews with The New York Times, the former intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, 58, who is a congressman in the governing Socialist Party, urged the military to break with the president ahead of a showdown with the opposition on Saturday over Mr. Maduro’s blockade of aid shipments on the country’s borders.

“It has been more than enough,” Mr. Carvajal said in a statement, which was also released in a video online on Thursday and addressed to Mr. Maduro. “You have killed hundreds of young people in the streets for trying to claim the rights you stole. This without even counting the dead for lack of medicines and security.”  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/world/americas/hugo-carvajal-maduro-venezuela.html

Russian Spy or Hustling Political Operative? The Enigmatic Figure at the Heart of Mueller’s Inquiry

In the nearly two years that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has been investigating whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, few figures seem to have offered more tantalizing leads than Konstantin V. Kilimnik.

A diminutive, multilingual political operative who was born in Ukraine while it was still part of the Soviet Union, Mr. Kilimnik has continued to attract intense interest from prosecutors for his interactions with his longtime boss and mentor, Paul Manafort, and his suspected ties to Russian intelligence, even as Mr. Mueller prepares to wrap up his investigation.

The full story of what Mr. Mueller has found about cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election is not known. But Mr. Kilimnik pops up repeatedly as a possible connection, with ties to both sides that are as enigmatic as they are deep.

And his dealings with Mr. Manafort, who in 2016 served as Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, encompass two of the most intriguing elements of the special counsel’s inquiry to surface publicly: the sharing of polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, and the work he and Mr. Manafort did on behalf of Kremlin-aligned Ukrainian interests that were pushing plans that could have eased economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and its allies.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/politics/konstantin-kilimnik-russia.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Family of American Imprisoned on Spy Charge in China Appeals for Help

Kai Li, an American businessman born in China, had stepped off a plane in Shanghai, preparing to visit his mother’s grave. Instead, Chinese state security officers grabbed him and accused him of spying, and a court later sentenced him to 10 years in prison after a short, secretive trial.

Now, two and a half years after Mr. Li was detained, his family in New York has broken its silence, saying that the espionage conviction against Mr. Li, an exporter of aircraft parts, was groundless and driven by political motives.

In recent years, relations between the United States and China have been tested by trade and technology disputes. The United States has accused China of hacking companies and inducing or bribing scientists to hand over commercial secrets. China has also stepped up warnings against foreign spies and publicized convictions of foreigners on espionage charges.

Harrison Li, Mr. Li’s son, said the Chinese authorities had charged his father with providing state secrets to the F.B.I. He says he is sure that his father was not a spy, and that his conviction showed the risks that American visitors to China face as tensions with the United States have festered. www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/world/asia/china-american-spying-kai-li.html

The Magical Mystery Tour

Survivors of Sexual Abuse Want Church Reform. Here’s Why It Might Not Happen (because, after all, it’s a world-wide conspiracy of degenerates able to sell rape, pedophilia, usury, by wearing funny outfits and selling hell)

In parts of the vast Catholic world, some bishops view clerical sexual abuse as more of a sin than a crime. Others attribute it to homosexuality or question that it exists at all. Where Catholics are a minority, as in the Middle East, reporting a pedophile priest to the civil authorities is tantamount to sentencing him to death.

As Pope Francis convenes church leaders for a meeting at the Vatican starting on Thursday to address the scourge of clerical sexual abuse, victims’ advocates are demanding urgent and uniform church laws to impose zero tolerance for priests who abuse minors and for the bishops who cover up for them, regardless of the culture in which they operate.

But Vatican officials say such a demand reflects a misconception that change in a global and ancient institution can be made with the wave of a papal wand.

The diversity of legal and cultural barriers to identifying abusers and assisting victims, as well as entrenched denial, makes putting in place one world standard virtually impossible, they say.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/europe/vatican-catholic-sex-abuse.html?emc=edit_ne_20190221&nl=evening-briefing&nlid=6827316320190221&te=1&fbclid=IwAR0xuYB-8qLWedOrFsvdZVuBpS1_u4W_LiDNugNR8t0Hh0iOUYnHfX8_b-A

Vatican’s Secret Rules for Catholic Priests Who Have Children

Vincent Doyle, a psychotherapist in Ireland, was 28 when he learned from his mother that the Roman Catholic priest he had always known as his godfather was in truth his biological father.

The discovery led him to create a global support group to help other children of priests, like him, suffering from the internalized shame that comes with being born from church scandal. When he pressed bishops to acknowledge these children, some church leaders told him that he was the product of the rarest of transgressions.

But one archbishop finally showed him what he was looking for: a document of Vatican guidelines for how to deal with priests who father children, proof that he was hardly alone.

“Oh my God. This is the answer,” Mr. Doyle recalled having said as he held the document. He asked if he could have a copy, but the archbishop said no — it was secret.

Now, the Vatican has confirmed, apparently for the first time, that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and father children.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/world/europe/priests-children-vatican-rules-celibacy.html

The English Voice of ISIS Comes Out of the Shadows

More than four years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation appealed to the public to help identify the narrator in one of the Islamic State’s best-known videos, showing captured Syrian soldiers digging their own graves and then being shot in the head.

Speaking fluent English with a North American accent, the man would go on to narrate countless other videos and radio broadcasts by the Islamic State, serving as the terrorist group’s faceless evangelist to Americans and other English speakers seeking to learn about its toxic ideology.

Now a 35-year-old Canadian citizen, who studied at a college in Toronto and once worked in information technology at a company contracted by IBM, says he is the anonymous narrator.

That man, Mohammed Khalifa, captured in Syria last month by an American-backed militia, spoke in his first interview about being the voice of the 2014 video, known as “Flames of War.” He described himself as a rank-and-file employee of the Islamic State’s Ministry of Media, the unit responsible for publicizing such brutal footage as the beheading of the American journalist James Foley and the burning of a Jordanian pilot.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/world/middleeast/isis-islamic-state-narrator.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Posted by Ted Rall

I have written extensively about my lawsuit against the LA Times. As I prepare for the next, do-or-die, stage of my case, it’s time to explain why Rall v. Los Angeles Times et al. has broad implications beyond me personally.

Freedom of the press is at stake.

The subtle yet fundamental question here is: who needs freedom of the press? The obvious answer is journalists: reporters and pundits. But journalists’ freedom to report and editorialize is in grave danger from a surprising enemy: their employers.
Once was, reporters like Woodward and Bernstein were on the same side as their employers. In this age of corporate aggregation of newspapers and other media outlets by publicly-traded media corporations and individual billionaires, however, newspapers and other media outlets are often compromised by their quest for profits, as the LA Times’ parent company was when it allowed its stock to be sold to the LAPD pension fund.

In this struggle the media companies have framed themselves as guardians of press freedom at the expense of journalists, ironically securing the power to screw journalists in the guise of First Amendment protections.
If the California Supreme Court refuses to hear my case — which is probably what will happen — or hears it and rules for the Times’ anti-SLAPP motion against me, the court will send a chilling message to journalists and pundits across the country. Most Americans, and most reporters, live in states with anti-SLAPP statutes modeled on California’s.
The threat to journalists is unmistakable: rock the boat and you risk being destroyed.
Write an article critical of a powerful institution like the LAPD, the nation’s highly militarized, largest and most brutal police forces, controlling a $16 billion pension fund, and they can pull strings to get you fired. It can also happen in a tiny town like Baker City, Oregon.
Even worse, you can’t find another job because they use falsified “evidence” to smear your reputation for honesty. www.gofundme.com/tedrall?viewupdates=1&rcid=r01-155053194203-2b1cdc4f6b3b422d&utm_medium=email&utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_email%2B1137-update-supporters-v5b

above, moon to the ocean, San Diego (SD Reader)

www.facebook.com/IncredibleNaturePresent/videos/402209033679874/?t=2

www.facebook.com/DiscoveryourEarth/videos/256666558592750/?t=14

So Long

A. Ernest Fitzgerald, Exposer of Pentagon Waste, Dies at 92

A government whistle-blower who preferred to be labeled a truth-teller, Mr. Fitzgerald testified more than 50 times on Capitol Hill about fraud, pork and cost overruns. His blunt and often public assessments, delivered in an Alabamian drawl, led him to be treated as an outcast inside the Pentagon for many years.

In the 1980s, Verne Orr, the secretary of the Air Force, called him “the most hated person in the Air Force.”

But he remained undeterred. He plowed through internal documents to bare boondoggles like Boeing’s vastly overcharging the Pentagon for its work on cruise missiles, and the Air Force’s paying $916.55 each for plastic caps for stool legs that had really cost 34 cents.  www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/obituaries/a-ernest-fitzgerald-dead.html

We remember:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUzs5dlLrm0