Why Are Things As They Are?

 

We Say Fight Back!

“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.” —Karl Marx, final editorial in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGxFJ5nL9gg

Parents Halt Test  A Washington Heights elementary school has canceled the new standardized multiple-choice tests for the youngest public school students — after more than 80% of parents opted to have their kids sit out the exam.
In an apparently unprecedented move, Castle Bridge School parents — representing 83 of the 97 students — rejected the new city requirement that affects 36 schools that serve only K through second grade.
“My feeling about testing kids as young as 4 is it’s inhumane,” said PTA co-chairwoman Dao Tran, mother of first-grader Quyen Lamphere, 5. “I can only see it causing stress.”
The state now requires schools to factor test scores — in one form or another — into their teacher evaluations, which are new this year in the city.  Read more: www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/parents-opt-city-test-article-1.1492127#ixzz2ihzZzd2L

Bertell Ollman’s Cartoons Entre to Marxism www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/humor4.htm

Thousands have marched on the National Mall in Washington, DC to protest covert NSA surveillance operations on the anniversary of the Patriot Act. The organizers have presented Congress with a petition which has acquired over 580,000 signatures.

The Little Red Schoolhouse

“The harsh fact is that the U.S. need for the highest quality human capital in science, mathematics, and engineering is not being met.”
– U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century   http://www.aip.org/enews/fyi/2001/023.html

Deasy, whose fake degree was exposed by RFers, Bugs Out Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy has told Board of Education members that he plans to resign in February, according to high-level district officials, including some who asked not to be named.The reaction from the office of board President Richard Vladovic left little doubt. “We are shocked,” said Mike Trujillo, a spokesman. “Dr. Vladovic is shocked, saddened and surprised.” www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-la-schools-supt-john-deasy-20131024,0,3579257.story#axzz2ihl9r03m

Part of what finished Deasy  Deasy claims to have earned his PhD at the University of Louisville (UL) in the College of Education. The Dean of the College at the time was one Robert Felner, now serving a jail term of 63 months for a variety of frauds committed against UL and other universities.    www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1896

LAUSD Moves to Deepen Segregation  “Kids with little or no English are going to be segregated and told they’re not good enough for the mainstream,” said Cindy Aranda-Lechuga, a Granada mother of a kindergartner who gathered 162 parent signatures seeking a postponement and spoke against the policy at an L.A. Board of Education meeting last week. “Kids learn from their peers, and they’re not going to be able to do that anymore.”    www.latimes.com/local/la-me-adv-english-learners-20131020,0,1836196.story#axzz2iUK9usJ0

LAUSD Pays Way Above Retail for 500,000+ Ipads  Providing Apple iPads to Los Angeles students will cost nearly $100 more apiece — or $770 per tablet, a new school district budget shows.
This potential sticker shock can be avoided, but only after the L.A. Unified School District has spent at least $400 million for the devices. In other words, the district would have to buy nearly 520,000 iPads before getting lower prices. Officials did not answer questions Monday about how much the district would then spend on the remaining tablets.
The newly disclosed price, a 14% increase per iPad, appeared in a revised budget released in advance of a public meeting Tuesday on the $1-billion project.    www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ipads-cost-20131022,0,6559073.story#axzz2iUJoY233

Youth Homelessness at All Time High An annual report from the National Center for Homeless Education, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, found that 1.2 million students enrolled in schools across the U.S. were homeless between 2011 and 2012, a 10 percent increase from the 2010-11 school year.
The number is an all-time high for the survey, and a 72 percent increase since 2007, when the global recession began.
The data also contained some troubling facts about individual states.
In Maine and North Carolina, the number of homeless kids in K through 12th grade increased by more than 50 percent. Ten states saw increases of 20 percent or more. And only eight states saw decreases. america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/25/report-number-ofhomelessyouthatalltimehigh.html

The Education Shell Game: Big/Small schools, Drive By Superintendents, Shifty Tests/Curricula–inside the corporate state        When Lincoln started the 2007 academic year with a new, $129 million campus, it opened with four separate academies: a center for social justice, arts, science and engineering and public safety.
Test scores — to the degree to which they can — tell the story of a school that has sputtered academically since it opened. In 2012, Lincoln ranked last in the district in its Academic Performance Index, a number derived from statewide assessment scores.
Stacked up against high schools statewide, Lincoln ranks well below average.    voiceofsandiego.org/2013/10/25/cindy-marten-were-having-the-wrong-conversation-about-lincoln-high/

From the Hart Rudman (war prep) Act of 1999 Recapitalizing America’s strengths in science and education
The Commission finds that the scientific and educational systems of the US are in “serious crisis”. It notes how the US is in danger of lagging behind other countries in this arena. “In the next quarter century, we will likely see ourselves surpassed, and in relative decline, unless we make a conscious national commitment to maintain our edge”.[7] The report further highlights the Commission’s belief that this decline in emphasis on science and education is the gravest threat to US national security, even over weapons proliferation and terrorism. The Commission recommends:
“doubling the federal research and development budget by 2010, and instituting a more competitive environment for the allotment of those funds”[7]
“that the role of the President’s Science Advisor be elevated to oversee these and other critical tasks, such as the resuscitation of the national laboratory system and the institution of better inventory stewardship over the nation’s science and technology assets”[7]
“a new National Security Science and Technology Education Act to fund a comprehensive program to produce the needed numbers of science and engineering professionals as well as qualified teachers in science and math”[7] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Commission_on_National_Security/21st_Century

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6V6wnFof7E

Cops Kick Public out of Sweetwater Board Meeting  The double doors that serve as an entrance to the board room were ordered closed. Tom Calhoun, the chief facilities executive, blocked the double doors from the inside (people could exit through an exit door); two private security officers were directed to block the doors from the outside so no one could enter — even though it was a public meeting and some seats were still empty.
This reporter was not allowed to leave through the rear double doors, the normal exit. The only way out for the crowd in the board room was through a maze of desks that led to a single door propped open by a chair.
Read more: www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2013/oct/22/stringers-cops-kick-out-public-sweetwater-/?utm_source=San+Diego+Reader+Newsletters&utm_campaign=5ec5f18d6f-News_Stories_2013102410_21_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8142a24857-5ec5f18d6f-408112185#ixzz2ihvCx6g7

Fix Your Kid at Military School?   Child molestation allegations against the former head of a Carlsbad military boarding school date back as far as the 1980s and involve schools in two other states where he worked, a prosecutor said in court Wednesday.    www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/oct/23/military-academy-molestation-case-plea/

NYTimes and the Ed School Industry of Mediocrity  How America prepares its teachers has been a subject of dismay for many years. In 2005 Arthur Levine, then the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, shocked colleagues (and himself, he says) with a scathing report concluding that teacher preparation programs “range from inadequate to appalling.” Since then the outcry has only gotten more vociferous. This summer the National Council on Teacher Quality described teacher education as still “an industry of mediocrity.”    www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/opinion/keller-an-industry-of-mediocrity.html?_r=3&

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

“Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, i can stay in power only if it successfully destroys the national  institutions of its own people.” Hannah Arendt 

US Invades Africa (again)  The first-of-its-kind program is drawing on troops from a 3,500-member brigade in the Army’s storied First Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One, to conduct more than 100 missions in Africa over the next year. The missions range from a two-man sniper team in Burundi to 350 soldiers conducting airborne and humanitarian exercises in South Africa.
The brigade has also sent a 150-member rapid-response force to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to protect embassies in emergencies, a direct reply to the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year, which killed four Americans.  … The American commando raids this month against terrorist operatives in Libya and Somalia underscore the spreading extremist threat in Africa, and a renewed urgency to choke off insurgent cells before they can grow, according to counterterrorism specialists. Teams from the brigade here have already helped train forces in Kenya and Tanzania, which are battling fighters from the Shabab militant group in Somalia.        www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/world/africa/us-prepares-to-train-african-forces-to-fight-terror.html?_r=2&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1382124141-FWfu9qYh+0dS+0e4HBBBBw&

Afghan Special Forces Commander goes Taliban Monsif Khan, a top Afghan special forces commander in the Kunar Province, has defected to the Hezb-e Islami militant faction, marking the first time a special forces commander of such high rank has switched sides in the ongoing war.    news.antiwar.com/2013/10/20/afghan-special-forces-commander-defects-to-militants/

Drones are Good For You, Good For You, Real Good  The UN conference on drone strikes opened today in New York with calls from UN experts to see more transparency around the use of drones for extraterritorial executions by nations, and condemnations by several nations of the unlawful use of the attacks en masse by the United States.  The Obama Administration was quick to dismiss any complaints, insisting the killings of several thousand people worldwide without any legal oversight by CIA drones was “legal and just.”
Pakistan reported to the UN that at least 400 civilians were confirmed killed in the US strikes in their country, and hundreds of others are classified as “probable non-combatants.” Yemen confirmed scores of deaths as well.
The White House has dismissed the reports of civilian deaths too, insisting that civilians are killed in all wars and that they are the only ones who are capable of accurately counting how many civilians they really killed, a number which they are keeping a secret.    news.antiwar.com/2013/10/25/us-dismisses-un-criticism-insists-drone-strikes-just/

Grenada –that Lovely Little War  By Bill Bigelow
Anti-bullying curricula are the rage these days. But as teachers endeavor to build a culture of civility among young people in school, the official history curriculum they are provided often celebrates, or at least excuses, bullying among nations. Well, at least when the United States is the bully.
A good example is the U.S. invasion of Grenada—Operation Urgent Fury, as it was called by the Reagan administration—launched exactly 30 years ago this week, on Oct. 25, 1983. Grenada made an unlikely target of U.S. military might. Its main product was not oil but nutmeg. Its naval fleet consisted of about 10 fishing trawlers. Grenada’s population of 110,000 was smaller than Peoria, Illinois. At the time of the invasion, there was not a single stoplight in the entire country. So what put Grenada in the crosshairs of the Reagan administration?    zinnedproject.org/2013/10/grenada-a-lovely-little-war/

The Grenada Tragedy Unveiled by Chalky Ventour (one of the Grenada 17)  http://richgibson.com/grendaventour.htm

One of the US assets who backed the Grenada Invasion  Jonah Goldberg, Ledeen’s colleague at National Review, coined the term “Ledeen Doctrine” in a 2002 column. This tongue-in-cheek “doctrine” is usually summarized as “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” which Goldberg remembered Ledeen saying in an early 1990s speech    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS)  has made remarkable gains. Its operation, named Expunging Filth, has either expelled or absorbed the Free Syrian Army units along the spine of northern Syria. The Syrian-Turkish border town of A’zaz has been in ISIS hands for a month. Since April, ISIS began to draw in all the smaller Salafi factions, including Jabhat al-Nusra (not always without rivalry) and parts of Ahrar as-Sham (whose commander, Abu Obeida al-Binnishi, ISIS killed in September). A new report from the International Crisis Group from October 17 notes that ISIS is now “the most powerful group in northern and eastern Syria and was benefiting from control of oil fields.” Analyst Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi says that ISIS cannot be shaken from its strongholds in the north and east by any combination of FSA and its allies. Indeed, over the past few months, the ISIS has severely degraded the capacity of the Free Syrian Army, having killed one of its important battalion chiefs Kamal Hamami in July and having drawn in many of its local level fighters. The Free Syrian Army is no longer a serious threat to the Syrian government.    www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/25/al-qaedas-corridor-through-syria/

Saudi Islamofascist Puppets Cutting US Strings        Saudi Arabia has abandoned its traditional policy of discretion in recent weeks, signaling deep anger at the Obama administration’s Middle East policies and threatening to break with its most powerful ally and pursue a more robust and independent role in supporting the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.  But privately, Saudi officials concede that their efforts to forge an alternative strategy in Syria have run up against the same issue the Americans face: how to bolster the military might of a disorganized armed opposition without also empowering the jihadists who increasingly dominate its ranks.
And while Saudi officials have hinted at a broader diplomatic shift away from the United States, their options are limited there, too: Saudi Arabia is dependent on American military and oil technology, and the other countries the Saudis have courted — including France and India — can help only on the margins, analysts say.   www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/world/middleeast/saudis-faulting-american-policy-on-middle-east.html?ref=international-home

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone…. I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, journal, Dec. 4, 1860

Chrysler, the originator of the BUY AMERICAN howl, buys Mexican (read the comments)  Chrysler Group LLC confirmed Thursday that it will invest $164 million in its engine factory in Saltillo, Mexico, to boost production of its Tigershark engine.
The Auburn Hills automaker has invested nearly $1.25 billion in Saltillo this year, and Mexican President Enrique Pena was on hand Thursday to thank CEO Sergio Marchionne for his ongoing commitment to the country and dedicate the new van assembly plant that went online in July  From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20131010/AUTO0101/310100133#ixzz2hr0dCgNB

St Clair: Empire of the Senseless To a great measure, the responsibility for the fatal ease with which Obama has been able to implement his draconian policies, from domestic spying to drone strikes, must be borne by the timid response of the political left, who have serially denied what they knew to be Obama’s true agenda, an agenda of neoliberal austerity at home and imperial aggression abroad—an agenda that was incubating from the moment the young senator hand-picked Joseph Lieberman to be his ideological mentor in the US Senate.
Predictably, the more they indulge Obama, the more he tends to ignore, if not psychologically resent, their existence. For most of us, the economy is still crashing. A recent analysis by UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, revealed that 95 percent of the economic gains since the recession began have been captured by the top one percent. This was not an accidental outcome. Obama’s economic plan was geared to generate precisely this result. But no one wants to talk about it on the Left.
Witness the president’s rare conclave with the Congressional Black Caucus. With black poverty and unemployment rates at startling highs, Obama swatted away meek queries about the savage toll his economic policies have inflicted on urban America and pressed the delegation to publicly cheerlead for his scheme to shower Syria with cruise missiles. The CBC members sat mutely, soaking in Obama’s humiliating lecture, while black America remains under a state of economic siege.    www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/18/empire-of-the-senseless/

In Bankrupt Detroit, with near-fifty percent illiteracy and 45% of the street lights out, Millions for Sports Spectacles  In this bankrupt city where even keeping the streetlights on has proved a struggle, one industry has continued humming along at a multibillion-dollar clip: professional sports.
The Detroit Tigers, who are playing in the American League Championship Series, have one of the highest payrolls in baseball at $148-million (U.S.). Their star first baseman makes $23-million a year. And in a city that is contracting, the Tigers are expanding – their payroll is up 38 per cent from 2011…chigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, has supported a plan to put public money toward a $650-million downtown development project, with an arena for the Red Wings as the centrepiece. The project, plans for which include apartments, offices, restaurants and shops, is led by Olympia Development, which is owned by Michael Ilitch, the owner of the Tigers and the Red Wings, and the founder of Little Caesars Pizza.    www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/more-sports/in-a-city-that-is-bankrupt-riches-for-professional-sports/article14863987/

Rich Got Richer!  The United States’s 10 highest paid chief executives took home a combined $4.7bn in compensation in 2012, and none earned less than $100m – a first for the annual poll by GMI Ratings, a corporate governance research group.
Two executives made over a billion dollars – another first. All told, US CEOs had a bumper year selling stock, making $3.3bn on stock option profits and the vesting of restricted stock.    www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/22/best-paid-chief-executives-america

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose off the common        But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.     The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own     But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who takes things that are yours and mine.     The poor and wretched don’t escape If they conspire the law to break;      This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law.     The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common     And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back. –   onthecommons.org/magazine/%E2%80%9Cstealing-common-goose%E2%80%9D#sthash.zYJLgjwb.dpuf

Food Stamps: Profiteering and Social Control  Food stamps are not the only government program that is administered by private corporations. WIC payments and child support collections are also moneymakers for Xerox and the rest of the financial services industry.
Like so many other debates in America, discussions about government spending are inherently bogus because the elephant in the room, big business, is absent. Millions of Americans are angry because food stamp recipients can use their benefits to buy junk food but don’t realize that they are able to do so because corporate America wouldn’t have it any other way.
Coca Cola, Kroger, Walmart, Kelloggs and other corporations have all lobbied the United States Department of Agriculture and congress to prevent any measures being put in place that would restrict SNAP use to healthy food choices. It isn’t difficult to understand why this is the case. They want to make as much money as possible and won’t abide anything that impedes their ability to keep turning huge profits. In just one year, nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts received more than $33 million in SNAP revenues, which is more than four times the amount of SNAP benefits received at all farmers’ markets nationwide.    www.blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-food-stamp-corporate-welfare

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

In June, President Obama said the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens.”  The Obamagogue Lied The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.  Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation….The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records, under a separate program, has generated significant controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”
Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.  …The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign surveillance to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States. The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.”  www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-of-e-mail-address-books-globally/2013/10/14/8e58b5be-34f9-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story_1.html

Pepper Spray Copper to Get $38 K for Funk 

Assaulting peaceful protesters with pepper spray can be awfully stressful, and John Pike certainly knows it better than most. Now a judge has awarded $38,000 to the former University of California cop filmed discharging his weapon on Occupy demonstrators.
Administrative Law Judge Harter has approved a workers’ compensation settlement totaling $38,059 between UC Davis and Pike, a former Marine-turned-campus law enforcement lieutenant, according to Yolo County’s Davis Enterprise newspaper.
Pike was infamously caught assaulting a group of protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement during a standoff with police in November 2011. Video footage of the incident went viral and Pike quickly became the main subject of meme-worthy ridicule around not just the small Sacramento, California-area community, but the Internet at large.    rt.com/usa/uc-davis-pike-comp-641/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gim_pqUAKcc

Reminder Of Obamagogue’s Sights on Americans U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.
The lawyers were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. He died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen.
The government lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, did not directly address the al-Awlaki case. But they said U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States.
Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.
The courts in habeas cases, such as those involving whether a detainee should be released from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, make the determination of who can be considered an enemy combatant.
Late last year, a judge threw out a lawsuit filed by al-Awlaki’s father, saying that the courts do not have the authority to review military decisions by the president aimed at protecting the country from terrorists. The cleric’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki of Yemen, was suing to prevent the U.S. from targeting his son. news.yahoo.com/obama-lawyers-citizens-targeted-war-us-154313473.html

Relentless Surveillance Federal grants of $7 million awarded to this city were meant largely to help thwart terror attacks at its bustling port. But instead, the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town — from gunshot-detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city’s upscale hills.  ,,,Like the Oakland effort, other pushes to use new surveillance tools in law enforcement are supported with federal dollars. The New York Police Department, aided by federal financing, has a big data system that links 3,000 surveillance cameras with license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror suspect lists. Police in Massachusetts have used federal money to buy automated license plate scanners. And police in Texas have bought a drone with homeland security money, something that Alameda County, which Oakland is part of, also tried but shelved after public protest. …For the companies that make big data tools, projects like Oakland’s are a big business opportunity. Microsoft built the technology for the New York City program. I.B.M. has sold data-mining tools for Las Vegas and Memphis.
Oakland has a contract with the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, to build its system. That company has earned the bulk of its $12 billion in annual revenue from military contracts. As the federal military budget has fallen, though, SAIC has diversified to other government agency projects, though not without problems.
The company’s contract to help modernize the New York City payroll system, using new technology like biometric readers, resulted in reports of kickbacks. Last year, the company paid the city $500 million to avoid a federal prosecution. The amount was believed to be the largest ever paid to settle accusations of government contract fraud. SAIC declined to comment.    www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-grows-in-cities.html?_r=0

But OOOPS. All the Data Burned Up? he National Security Agency’s $2 billion mega spy center is going up in flames.Technical glitches have sparked fiery explosions within the NSA’s newest and largest data storage facility in Utah, destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and delaying the facility’s opening by one year.And no one seems to know how to fix it. – See more at: www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/10/08/2-Billion-NSA-Spy-Center-Going-Flames#sthash.J8efN2Ng.dpuf

Greenwald: Epitaph for Establishment Journalism a predominant mindset among many in the media class. Journalists should not disobey the dictates of those in power. Once national security state officials decree that what they are doing should be kept concealed from the public – once they pound their mighty “SECRET” stamp onto their behavior – it is the supreme duty of all citizens, including journalists, to honor that and never utter in public what they have done. Indeed, it is not only morally wrong, but criminal, to defy these dictates. After all, “who am I to disbelieve them?”
That this mentality condemns – and would render outlawed – most of the worthwhile investigative journalism over the last several decades never seems to occur to good journalistic servants like Blackhurst. National security state officials also decreed that it would “not be in the public interest” to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the “top secret” label.    www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/independent-epitaph-establishment-journalism

Solidarity for Never

The US Union Agenda is the Empire’s War Agenda Labor bosses at all levels are the nearest and most vulnerable of workers’ enemies. Rather than “move unions to the left,” better, “demolish the labor quislings, take their treasuries, seize their buildings, as we build a mass class conscious movement to transcend the system of capital.”
Why does that make better sense?
Since the Industrial Workers of the World (a grand vision but fatally flawed practice) were nearly demolished in the Palmer Raids of 1919, American unionism has been a false flag operation: not what most people think of as unionism.
*Every major labor leader in the US adopts the corporate-state view of unity of Labor Bosses, Government, and Corporations in the national interest. These are hardly “labor” unions in the strict sense of the word. They are the empire’s unions. I assume the connections of labor and US intelligence are fairly well known and do not need to be explained. They are the unions of what now is, surely, the US corporate state.    www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/23/counterfeit-unionism-in-the-empire/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=counterfeit-unionism-in-the-empire

Michigan EA (white) and AFT (Detroit) decide to work together a year after every DFT member was fired and the DFT did nothing but declare this a “Year of Triumph” and continue to collect dues: In an effort to protect and strengthen public education in Michigan, the Michigan Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers-Michigan have formed a formal partnership, leaders of both unions announced Tuesday.
MEA and AFT-Michigan are the state’s two largest organizations representing teachers, education support professionals and higher education employees. Combined, the two unions represent about 185,000 preK-16 education employees in all corners of the state.
The partnership is not a merger, but rather an agreement to advocate together on behalf of teachers, education support professionals, higher-education employees, students and families. www.mea.org/mea-and-aft-michigan-form-formal-partnership-advocate-students-and-education-employees-0

Utla Still Backs Board Member with Sexual Harassment problems Whatever the harassment issues he faced, LA Unified’s Board President Richard Vladovic still has UTLA support, thanks to his public acknowledgement of his bad behavior.
“UTLA welcomes the fact Dr. Vladovic has addressed this head-on and will continue the important work of Board President,” said a post on the union’s Facebook page.
In his brief remarks after a closed door board meeting on Tuesday, Vladovic alluded to his past in general, saying, “I did get upset at people. I did tell them things I shouldn’t have told them.” He promised, “I intend to never do it again.”
Left unaddressed were the specific allegations in two cases released by district officials the night before, one involving multiple claims of sexual harassment. Nor did UTLA mention them in its Facebook message.    laschoolreport.com/utla-applauds-vladovic-for-addressing-bad-behavior/

Spy versus Spy

 

NSA’s Social Mapping  According to the documents leaked to the paper, the agency isn’t only tracking metadata from your phone calls and email logs, it’s using that information to create a sophisticated web of social connections of some U.S. citizens.
“Since November 2010, the NSA has been using all the information it has been collecting to unlock as many secrets as possible about certain American citizens who officials believe may have a link to foreign intelligence interests,” CNN’s Pamela Brown reports. “As one privacy expert put it, the way the information is being used is the digital equivalence of tailing a suspect.”
Karen Greenberg, director at the Center on National Security Fordham Law School says, “We assume as Americans that if somebody—if the government is looking at your information it’s because they have a reason, because you’re suspected of a crime.”
According to the documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA uses software to chart individuals’ social ties, locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information. The agency can also draw on material from Facebook profiles, GPS location information, insurance information, property records and other public and commercial sources to better analyze Americans’ phone and email logs—all intended to help the agency “discover and track” when there’s a link between an intelligence interest overseas and a U.S. citizen. www.centeronnationalsecurity.org/node/875

Lying Aobut Spying Clapper, sparked outrage when it was revealed earlier this year that he “outright lied” to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee when said the NSA does not collect data on U.S. citizens, shortly after the first NSA revelations had been published.    www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/10/12

Richard Cohen: “I was wrong about Snowden.”   I also wrote that “No one lied about the various programs” Snowden disclosed. But then we found out that James Clapper did. The director of national intelligence was asked at a Senate hearing in March if “the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false” and he replied that it was. Actually, it was his answer that was “completely false.”    www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-edward-snowden-is-no-traitor/2013/10/21/f9d2ae5a-3a74-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html?hpid=z3

The Magical Mystery Tour

above Rapist Priest Thomas Obrien of Missouri

More than 200 pages of recods about two predator priests who worked in the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese have recently been released.
More info about both men can be found at BishopAccountability.org and here:
www.semissourian.com/story/2005690.html
www.lorpb.com/documents/Clergy-September/Vincentians-(Farris).PDF
www.lorpb.com/documents/Clergy-September/Vincentians-(Ruhl).PDF
And last week, Missouri’s most notorious predator priest, Msgr. Thomas O’Brien passed away. He worked at St. Agnes parish in Springfield in the 1950s and has been sued dozens of times for sexually assaulting kids, mostly in the Kansas City area.
(One southwest Missouri man, Joe Eldred, is suing O’Brien for molesting him.)
www.examiner.net/x1760396537/Another-lawsuit-alleges-sexual-abuse-by-local-priests?refresh=true
SNAP says that many victims stay silent for decades and speak up only after the person who molested them passes away.
In response to these developments, SNAP is urging Springfield Bishop James V. Johnston to “reach out” to anyone who may have seen, suspected or suffered crimes by any of the three priests.

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

San Diego’s Red Diaper Pervo Mayor Pleads Guilty  Former San Diego mayor Bob Filner (D) pleaded guilty Tuesday to false imprisonment and battery charges involving three women, according to an official with the San Diego Superior Court.
Court spokeswoman Karen Dalton said that Filner will be sentenced Dec. 9. She said the state attorney general’s office had charged Filner “with one felony count for false imprisonment by violence, fraud, menace and deceit … and two misdemeanor counts of battery.” The victims are three unnamed women.    www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/15/former-san-diego-mayor-filner-faces-felony-false-imprisonment-charge/

The Chicago Teachers Union Links to Communism! We did NOT make this up    www.tcunation.com/profiles/blogs/chicago-teacher-s-union-and-links-to-communism

National Felon League Fans Play Dress up and have fun

 

 

Copper protects and serves Tori Hunter

Parasites Still breeding