Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

Plying Social Media, Chinese Workers Grow Bolder in Exerting Clout   The call to action, carried by social media to thousands of smartphones across this bleak factory town, roused the workers from their jobs making Nike and Adidas sneakers.
Their Taiwanese employer, Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings, the world’s largest manufacturer of branded athletic shoes, had for years underpaid the social security contributions that employees were counting on for retirement.
News of the shortfall, discovered and disseminated by a newly retired worker, stirred familiar resentments. But it was the company’s refusal to make amends that led to one of China’s largest strikes in recent memory, involving 40,000 workers who stayed off assembly lines for two weeks and cost Yue Yuen about $27 million in losses.
Last week, after government officials stepped in to resolve the impasse, the company announced it would make up the missing payments and start fully funding worker pensions as required by Chinese law.
Although played down by the state-run news media, the mass walkout illustrates the growing might of Chinese workers amid a shrinking labor pool, a slowing economy and the Communist Party’s fears of social unrest.  ….   Chinese authorities and Yue Yuen used subterfuge to force employees back to the assembly lines. According to Ms. Wang, factory management removed the time clocks for four days this week, requiring employees to sign in every two hours or be fired. Supervisors were also asked to photograph each employee. “We didn’t do it,” she said.
Yue Yuen did not respond to repeated phone calls requesting comment.
Zhen Fanfei, 35, has gone back to making Adidas midsoles, but he doubts the company will be more respectful of workers’ demands without a major change in the government’s attitude.
“Capitalists will always be capitalists,” he said.    www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/world/asia/plying-social-media-chinese-workers-grow-bolder-in-exerting-clout.html

May 5 1814

Pilger on the Mandela/ANC/SACP betrayals On 11 February, 1990, Nelson Mandela stepped out on the balcony of Cape Town City Hall with the miners’ leader Cyril Ramaphosa supporting him. Free at last, he spoke to millions in South Africa and around the world. This was the moment, an historic split-second as rare and potent as any in the universal struggle for freedom. Moral power and the power for justice could triumph over anything, any orthodoxy, it seemed. “Now is the time to intensify the struggle,” said Mandela in a proud and angry speech, perhaps his best, or the last of his best.
The next day he appeared to correct himself. Majority rule would not make blacks “dominant”. The retreat quickened. There would be no public ownership of the mines, banks and rapacious monopoly industries, no economic democracy, as he had pledged with the words: “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Reassuring the white establishment and its foreign business allies – the very orthodoxy and cronyism that had built, maintained and reinforced fascist apartheid – became the political agenda of the “new” South Africa.  ….. The violent inequality that now stalks South Africa is no dream. It was Mandela, after all, who said, “If the ANC does not deliver the goods, the people must do what they have done to the apartheid regime.”  http://johnpilger.com/articles/south-africa-20-years-of-apartheid-by-another-name

Patrick Bond on the S. African Mandela Sellout and Rising Resistance  The African National Congress (ANC), led during the 1990s by the late Nelson Mandela, is projected to be reelected in South Africa’s May 7, 2014 national election by a wide margin, probably with between 50 and 60 percent of the vote. But underneath the ruling party’s apparent popularity, the society is seething with fury, partly at the mismanagement of vast mineral wealth. The political and economic rulers’ increasingly venal policies and practices are so bad that not only did ANC elites play a direct role in massacring striking mineworkers in August 2012, but corporate South Africa was soon rated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers as “world leader in money-laundering, bribery and corruption, procurement fraud, asset misappropriation and cybercrime,” with internal management responsible for more than three quarters of what was termed “mind-boggling” levels of theft.1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5qZKQGsO4Q
With such degeneration from above, the country’s impotent socialist left was pleasantly surprised last December when the largest union in Africa, the 342,000-strong National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (“Numsa”) split away from the ANC. Numsa pledged to organize mineworkers and any other disgruntled workers, and steadily to reconstruct a new South African left from below, including radical social movements once derided as “ultraleft” (because from the early 2000s they had already broken with the ANC). The “Numsa Moment”—which I think can be contrasted to some local trade unionists’ “Lula Moment” advocacy, akin to Brazilian labor corporatism—is of enormous importance, especially if it leads to a “united front approach” and the “movement towards socialism” as promised in Numsa’s “Breaking New Ground” congress of 1,300 shop stewards, just a week after Mandela’s death.   monthlyreview.org/2014/04/01/south-africas-resource-curses-growing-social-resistance

Brooklyn Teachers Refuse to Test Twenty-six of the school’s 30 teachers sent a letter to Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña urging her to drop the test for the city’s immigrant students still learning English.  ….Prospect Heights teachers, whose school is largely filled with immigrants who have yet to master English, said nearly all of their students scored zeros on the fall exam.  http://nypost.com/2014/05/01/brooklyn-teachers-balk-at-common-core-test/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Racist Schooling Thrives in Pontiac Mich  Oversized classes have reached 46 students in some elementary schools and 42 students in the middle and high school, according to the Pontiac Education Association. Workbooks for young children are not supplied, forcing teachers to make daily copies for students, even buying their own copy machines and paper.
Students are feeling the pressure of the district’s financial problems, one teacher said.
“We go home in tears; you are just exhausted. You are giving it everything you have,” said Pontiac elementary school teacher Pam St. Onge-Cyr, who has 85 students among the two classes she teaches.
“The kids, they are angry. They know they are getting the shaft … they are acting out physically now. I have good kids getting in fights,” said Ellen Dunaj, a teacher at Herrington Elementary School.
From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140428/SCHOOLS/304220128#ixzz30cuCyxi8

LA Teacher Jail Population on the Rise Teachers are assigned to the facilities for days, weeks, months, or for more than a year at a time. District officials said about 250 are currently under investigation, enough to staff three high schools. . Most continue to receive their full salaries while their cases are under review.
The system has been in place for decades in Los Angeles Unified, and across other districts across the country. But over the past couple of years, the number of teachers pulled from their classrooms has risen sharply. That’s when officials enacted a zero-tolerance policy following high-profile teacher abuse cases like the Miramonte Elementary scandal, where a teacher was accused of lewd acts against several students.  http://www.losangelesregister.com/articles/teachers-598393-teacher-district.html?page=1

Candidates for Pinellas teachers union president come with baggage  Two students bumped into each other in a Tarpon Springs Middle School classroom last fall. Another student, seeing the collision, shouted, “You just touched her breast!” Their teacher was seventh-grade science instructor Richard Wisemiller. He responded, “How could you even find it?”  Wisemiller is the vice president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association. It’s a high-profile post that may make him the frontrunner in Wednesday’s election for the union’s presidency.
But according to Pinellas County schools documents, Wisemiller also has a decade-plus record of reprimands and suspensions for inappropriate contact and comments with his young female students. Pinellas has referred Wisemiller to the Florida Department of Education, which could choose to revoke his teaching license.
Among the events under review by the department is a science lesson last spring on the importance of opposable thumbs. According to documents, Wisemiller called a female student to the front of the classroom, taped her thumbs to her hands and told her to try to unbutton her pants. He slid his fingers into the waistband of her pants, the documents state.
“And then Mr. Wisemiller said that any guy who wouldn’t want to unbutton her shirt is crazy,” a student wrote in a witness statement, one of many collected by the district’s Office of Professional Standards.  http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/candidates-for-pinellas-teachers-union-president-come-with-baggage/2170637

Two More Capitalist School Criminals Get Wrists Slapped Two more Sweetwater school board members pleaded guilty Thursday to minor charges in the South County political corruption investigation, effectively ending a case once described as the worst scandal in a decade on a muted note.,,, While Dumanis said it was the worst corruption scandal of her tenure, and while many officials were charged with bribery and other serious crimes, most ended up pleading to minor charges similar to Lopez and Cartmill.
No one has been sentenced to any time in jail or prison. While several officials have pleaded guilty to felonies, such as Quiñones and former Superintendent Jesus Gandara, those have been reduced to misdemeanors by Espana when they were sentenced.    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/apr/25/tp-convictions-wrap-up-sweetwater-case/

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan/Afghanistan  During the 13 years of Hamed Karzai’s presidency, Pakistan and Afghanistan experienced a period of serious tensions. Did the positions taken by Karzai himself influence these tensions or was there another reason behind them? I think both Pakistan and Afghanistan are to blame, but I think predominantly Pakistan, because there is no doubt that the Taliban leadership is living in Pakistan, they are operating from here, their logistics are based here, and Karzai has frequently expressed enormous frustration at the fact that Pakistan is not doing more to either bring them to the negotiating table or to throw them out. And on the other hand, as far as Pakistan is concerned, Karzai has always blown hot and cold. There has never been a very consistent policy from the Afghans towards Pakistan. So one day he’s very aggressive, the next day he’s wanting to negotiate about how to talk to the Taliban. So I think both sides have had a very insecure and a very rocky relationship. What are the roots of differences between the two countries? I think the roots go back a very long way. They go back to the 1970s, when the Pakistani Intelligence, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, convinced some Afghan Islamists to come and get training. The fact is that Pakistan has been using Afghans for its own policy ends for the last 55 years. Of course, this reached a height during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when Pakistan and the CIA were helping to arm the Mujahideen and choosing favorites among those Mujahideen who were mostly Islamic extremists. And then of course in the civil war in the 90s when Pakistan backed the Taliban and Iran and India and Central Asia all backed the Northern Alliance. So, it’s a very long history. In your opinion, what mistakes has the US made in Afghanistan during these 13 years? Unfortunately, the US has made huge mistakes. I think the primary mistake was to attack Iraq which was a distraction from the mission in Afghanistan. In the initial phase, when there was no war, when there was no resurgence of the Taliban, they were never able to put sufficient money and forces and development into the country because of Iraq. And after that, I think Afghanistan has always been a kind of holding operation for the Americans, it’s never really been a primary objective. Iraq was a primary objective; Afghanistan was always a secondary objective. Nevertheless, they spent enormous amounts of money – 1 trillion dollars has spent in the last 14 years – and frankly the results are very uncertain. We don’t know if the Taliban are going to return, if they’re going to be able to now retake territory, if the social programs the Americans started, like in education and health, will continue.  http://www.ahmedrashid.com/wp-content/archives/pakistan/interviews/pdf/pakistanbreakswithtraditioninafghanelection.pdf

Anand Gopal, How to Lose a War That Wasn’t There  In those early years after 2001, driven by the idée fixe that the world was rigidly divided into terrorist and non-terrorist camps, Washington allied with Afghan warlords and strongmen. Their enemies became ours, and through faulty intelligence, their feuds became repackaged as “counterterrorism.” The story of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who turned from America’s potential ally into its greatest foe, is the paradigmatic case of how the war on terror created the very enemies it sought to eradicate.  http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175837/

May 2 was the 11th anniversary of Mission Accomplished

U.S. report offers grim portrait of Afghanistan’s future “Corruption in Afghanistan includes everything from petty bribery for routine services, nepotism and tribal preference to contract fraud, large-scale theft of resources and subversion of the justice system,” the report concludes.
John F. Sopko, U.S. special investigator for Afghanistan reconstruction, criticized the Army for failing to do more to prevent American aid from ending up in the hands of Islamic jihadists fighting the Afghan government.
“The Army’s refusal to suspend or debar supporters of the insurgency from receiving government contracts because the information supporting these recommendations is classified is not only legally wrong, but contrary to sound policy and national security goals,” Sopko wrote Congress in a cover letter accompanying his report.
A separate internal report in February by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited by Sopko, said: “Corruption directly threatens the viability and legitimacy of the Afghan state.”
Experts inside and outside the Pentagon told McClatchy that the situation in Afghanistan is dismal, with rampant corruption fueled by a gusher of largely untracked reconstruction funds from the United States and other donor nations.    Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/04/30/225990/us-report-offers-grim-portrait.html#emlnl=Morning_Newsletter#storylink=cpy

Who Lost East Ukraine (and who will be on whose side in WW3?)  Day by day, in the areas surrounding the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, pro-Russian forces have defied all efforts by the central government to re-establish its authority, and on Wednesday, Ukraine’s acting president conceded what had long been obvious: The government’s police and security officials had lost control.  “Inactivity, helplessness and even criminal betrayal” plague the security forces, the acting leader, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, told a meeting of regional governors in Kiev. “It is hard to accept but it’s the truth. The majority of law enforcers in the east are incapable of performing their duties.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/world/europe/ukraine.html?emc=edit_th_20140501&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=2254121&_r=0

Barbarism Rising–42 killed in fighting in southern Ukraine  Armed clashes left scores of people dead in Ukraine on Friday, as President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed to impose stiffer economic sanctions on Russia if it disrupts Ukraine’s upcoming election.
Officials said 42 people had been killed in battles between government supporters and Russia-backed separatists in the southern city of Odessa, marking the worst day of bloodshed in the months-long crisis.
The Black Sea port city, with a predominantly Russian-speaking population, is geographically and culturally closer to the pro-Europe western areas of Ukraine and until no had largely escaped the separatist violence.
Thirty people died when fire and smoke engulfed the central trade union building, where pro-Russia militants were said to be shooting from upper floors at pro-unity demonstrators in the streets, police said. Eight others died when they jumped from the burning building, authorities said.
The deadly blaze followed a day of street battles in the historic port, which began when rival groups of protesters converged amid volleys of Molotov cocktails, stun grenades and cobblestones, according to news reports. That clash left four dead and at least 15 wounded, police said.   www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-ukraine-crisis-20140503,0,5618938.story#ixzz30hDjJf7x

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJBV0HoBo0M

Philippines agrees to large-scale return of U.S. military forces  The U.S. and Philippine governments have worked out a new defense cooperation agreement that opens the way for the first large-scale return of American military forces to the island nation since their eviction at the end of the Cold War, according to the White House.
A day before Obama is scheduled to arrive in Manila, advisors to the president said Sunday that the two sides had worked out a 10-year deal that will allow U.S. troops, warships and aircraft joint use of Philippine military and training bases on a rotational basis.
Officials say the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement can take effect without specific approval by the Philippine Senate, which in 1991 rejected an extension of the nations’ longstanding base agreement and forced Washington to close Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, two of the Pentagon’s largest overseas facilities.
More than two decades after that ouster, the new agreement marks an improvement in U.S. relations with the former American colony, as well as recognition of the growing regional tensions with China over resource-rich islands and shoals in the South China Sea.   www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-us-philippines-defense-cooperation-20140427,0,6497128.story#ixzz30gxMyBJl

Filkins on Iraq: What we left behind (Iran Everywhere, AQ Rising)  When the last American soldiers left Iraq, at the end of 2011, the bloody civil war between the country’s Sunni and Shiite sects had been stifled but not resolved. Now the sectarian violence had returned, with terrifying intensity. For more than a year, thousands of Iraqis, nearly all of them members of the Sunni Arab minority, had been gathering to rail against Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. Although the protests were mostly peaceful, security forces responded harshly, detaining thousands of Sunni men without charges and, in one encampment, touching off a spasm of violence that left hundreds of civilians dead. Across the Sunni heartland, north and west of Baghdad, the town squares filled with angry crowds, and the rhetoric grew more extreme. In Ramadi, protesters raised black jihadi flags, representing the extremist Al Qaeda offshoot that had dominated the city during the American occupation. “We are a group called Al Qaeda!” a man shouted from a stage in the protesters’ camp. “We will cut off heads and bring justice!” The crowd cheered.

The US War on its Vets –Pressure grows in investigation of Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital
U.S. Veterans Affairs officials were under mounting pressure Friday to find an interim head for the troubled VA medical center in Phoenix, a day after three hospital executives were placed on administrative leave amid a wide-reaching scandal brought on by whistle-blowers accusing the hospital of keeping a secret waiting list to hide delays in treatment.
At least 40 veterans died while waiting for service, according to hospital employees and several members of Congress who have looked into the allegations.   www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ff-arizona-veterans-20140503,0,4678411.story#ixzz30hF3fusD

More White House Lies on Benghazi The email from Mr. Rhodes includes goals for Ms. Rice’s appearances on the shows and advice on how to discuss the subject of the protests that were raging in Libya and at other American diplomatic posts in the Middle East.
Among the goals that Mr. Rhodes identified: “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” In a section called “Top-lines,” Mr. Rhodes added: “Since we began to see protests in response to this Internet video, the president has directed the Administration to take a number of steps. His top priority has been the safety and security of all Americans serving abroad.”
Earlier emails had documented the concern among White House and other administration officials about talking points produced by the Central Intelligence Agency about the Benghazi incident. The email sent by Mr. Rhodes and released on Wednesday had not been part of the previous batch of documents.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/world/email-suggests-white-house-strategy-on-benghazi.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140501&nlid=2254121&tntemail0=y

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

The Chrysler Scam The Great Financial Crisis struck U.S. automakers especially hard due to their heavy involvement in financial speculation, their existing excess industrial capacity, and the sharp decline in consumer car purchases following the crash. In the auto bailout the federal government poured $10.5 billion of taxpayer funds into Chrysler alone. In the process, Washington simply handed over a 20 percent share of the company to the Italian auto company Fiat without the latter having to pay a single cent for the stock, ostensibly in return for Fiat providing its critical managerial and technological expertise. The bailout agreement also stipulated that Fiat would have the option to buy up the remaining Chrysler shares from the U.S. government, the Canadian government, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) health-care trust.  With the U.S. automobile industry slowly recovering over the last three years while the European auto industry sank into near-depression conditions, Fiat hurried to purchase the remaining Chrysler shares so as to seize its massive cash pile. In the end, it was able to purchase the now highly profitable U.S. automaker for $3.7 billion, around one tenth (in nominal terms) of the $36 billion that Daimler-Benz paid for the company in 1998. In January 2014, Fiat announced that Chrysler had become its wholly owned subsidiary, with the firm now renamed Fiat Chrysler. The Netherlands was chosen as the headquarters of the newly merged company to avoid U.S. and Italian taxes. The biggest shareholder in what was now the world’s seventh biggest auto producer was the Italian Agnelli family, retaining a 30 percent share through its family investment firm Exor. John Elkann, grandson of the Fiat founder Gianni Agnelli and chairman of both Exor and Fiat, effectively runs the company, supported by Sergio Marchionne, CEO of both Fiat and its Chrysler subsidiary.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSn8Isv-3M

At the very moment that Fiat made its January Chrysler takeover announcement it also sought to reassure financial investors by informing them that it would be aggressively marketing the new company beginning with a long, two-minute, multi-million dollar Superbowl commercial, reaching over a 100 million prime U.S. television viewers. The reason for this marketing offensive was clear. With Chrysler now a subsidiary of an Italian automaker the palpable fear was that it would no longer be perceived as a U.S. company, particularly by such key U.S. groups as workers, labor unions, progressives, and older, moneyed Americans—potentially threatening the viability of Fiat Chrysler’s American market, upon which the entire megacorporation was now dependent. Worse still, Elkann and Marchionne were worried about the backlash that could occur once the U.S. body politic put two and two together and realized that Washington had literally given away a major U.S. auto corporation, which was now generating enormous monopoly profits courtesy of generous taxpayer subsidies coupled with the exploitation of U.S. workers—while Chrysler’s cash reserves were now being used to bail out its Italian parent corporation. Fiat thus decided to use an extended Superbowl advertisement to plant deep in the popular consciousness the notion that Chrysler was as American as America  http://monthlyreview.org/2014/04/01/monthly-review-volume-65-number-11-april-2014

Taibbi: The Divide and A 15-Year-Old Justice Department Memo Explains Why No One Was Jailed For The Financial Crisis  (Daily Show) www.upworthy.com/a-15-year-old-justice-department-memo-explains-why-no-one-was-jailed-for-the-financial-crisis

Judge will consider whether GM committed bankruptcy fraud  A federal bankruptcy judge said Friday he will consider quickly whether General Motors committed bankruptcy fraud in 2009 by not disclosing ignition switch defects that are now linked to 13 deaths.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber, who handled GM’s 2009 bankruptcy restructuring, also ruled he won’t block a hearing later this month on whether nearly 60 class-action lawsuits filed against GM should be merged. And he said some owners of 2.6 million recalled cars, mostly Saturn Ions and Chevrolet Cobalts, could be entitled to file claims against the estate of the former bankrupt automaker.
But it could be months before he makes a ruling on the big question of whether GM’s bankruptcy case should be reopened and whether millions of owners should be permitted to seek compensation for a variety of claims.      From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140502/AUTO0103/305020067#ixzz30d2grrzh

Bloomberg List of the World’s Richest People www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2014-04-29/cya

Report on Obamagogue Care : large employers could shift nearly all workers’ health coverage to marketplace by 2020 A new investor report predicts that Standard & Poor’s 500 companies could shift 90 percent of their workforce from job-based health coverage to individual insurance sold on the nation’s marketplaces by 2020.
If all U.S. companies with 50 or more employees followed suit, they could collectively save $3.25 trillion through 2025, according to the report by S&P Capital IQ, a division of McGraw Hill Financial.
Standard & Poor’s 500 companies could save $689 billion over the same period if they did likewise, the report found. Savings for S&P 500 companies could top $800 billion if health care inflation remains at the traditional 7.5 percent rate over the next decade, the report estimates.
If realized, the larger move to marketplace coverage would shift more of the cost and responsibility for employee health insurance to workers themselves.
Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/05/01/226155/report-large-employers-could-shift.html#emlnl=Most_Popular_This_Week#storylink=cpy

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, Makes $10.47 a second

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

As border security expands, complaints of abuse rise among Americans  A series of lawsuits filed in recent months in federal courts along the U.S. border with Mexico highlight what advocates say is a growing list of complaints against two U.S. agencies that have expanded rapidly amid the clamor to secure the nation’s borders.
In one lawsuit, centered on events in Chula Vista, Calif., a Border Patrol agent is accused of leaping on the hood of a car driven by a mother of five and shooting her dead. She was unarmed. The agent had been fired from his previous job as a sheriff’s deputy for a variety of misconduct.
In a second case, a Customs officer in Brownsville, Texas, violently pushed a disabled woman to the ground. She had a miscarriage the next day. Border officers also had to call firefighters to remove handcuffs that allegedly had bound her wrists too tightly
Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/04/30/226084/as-border-security-expands-complaints.html#emlnl=Most_Popular_This_Week#storylink=cpy

Few things are better at conveying what a nation really cares than how it spends its money. On that measure, Americans like to punish.
The United States spent about $80 billion on its system of jails and prisons in 2010 — about $260 for every resident of the nation. By contrast, its budget for food stamps was $227 a person.
In 2012, 2.2 million Americans were in jail or prison, a larger share of the population than in any other country; and that is about five times the average for fellow industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/business/economy/in-the-us-punishment-comes-before-the-crimes.html?action=click&module=Search&region=searchResults&mabReward=cserbias%3Aw%2C%5B%22RI%3A2%22%2C%22RI%3A3%22%5D&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry407%23%2Fincarceration+rates

NYTimes on Mass Incarceration (interactive chart) Prison Population Around the Globe
The United States has the highest incarceration rate and largest number of criminals behind bars.  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/04/22/us/20080423_PRISON_GRAPHIC.html?action=click&module=Search&region=searchResults&mabReward=cserbias%3Aw%2C%5B%22RI%3A2%22%2C%22RI%3A3%22%5D&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry407%23%2Fincarceration+rates

As Detroit rape kits sit untested, justice for victims is denied  Nearly five years after the discovery of 11,000 abandoned rape evidence kits in a Detroit police warehouse sparked outrage, only about 2,000 of the kits have undergone DNA testing, allowing serial rapists to remain free and in some cases commit more attacks.  http://www.freep.com/article/20140421/NEWS06/304210022/old-rape-kits-not-tested-Detroit-police

Thanks to Leslie Dwyer for the poster above www.design4peace.com/agribusiness/agribusinessevicts/#main

Everyone is under surveillance now, says whistleblower Edward Snowden  The US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance.
“It’s no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing,” he said. “It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.”
Snowden made his comments in a short video that was played before a debate on the proposition that surveillance today is a euphemism for mass surveillance, in Toronto, Canada. The former US National Security Agency contractor is living in Russia, having been granted temporary asylum there in June 2013.
The video was shown as two of the debaters – the former US National Security Administration director, General Michael Hayden, and the well-known civil liberties lawyer and Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz – argued in favour of the debate statement: “Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defence of our freedoms.”
Opposing the motion were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whose work based on Snowden’s leaks won a Pulitzer Prize for the Guardian last month, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social media website Reddit.
The Snowden documents, first leaked to the Guardian last June, revealed that the US government has programs in place to spy on hundreds of millions of people’s emails, social networking posts, online chat histories, browsing histories, telephone records, telephone calls and texts – “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, in the words of one leaked document.
Greenwald opened the debate by condemning the NSA’s own slogan, which he said appears repeatedly throughout its own documents: “Collect it all.”  “What is state surveillance?” Greenwald asked. “If it were about targeting in a discriminate way against those causing harm, there would be no debate.
“The actual system of state surveillance has almost nothing to do with that. What state surveillance actually is, is defended by the NSA’s actual words, that phrase they use over and over again: ‘Collect it all.’ ”
Dershowitz and Hayden spent the rest of the 90 minutes of the debate denying that the pervasive surveillance systems described by Snowden and Greenwald even exist and that surveillance programs are necessary to prevent terrorism.
“Collect it all doesn’t mean collect it all!” Hayden said, drawing laughter.   www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/03/everyone-is-under-surveillance-now-says-whistleblower-edward-snowden

Guantánamo Prosecutor Fights Handing Secrets Over to Defense The chief prosecutor at the Guantánamo Bay war-crimes court has asked a judge to set aside an order that requires the government to give defense lawyers sweeping amounts of classified details related to the Central Intelligence Agency’s treatment of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi detainee accused of orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole.
In a pretrial motion declassified last week, the prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, cited Obama administration efforts to declassify information related to a Senate Intelligence Committee report about the detention and interrogation program. That process, he said, should be allowed to play out.
Richard Kammen, an Indianapolis defense lawyer representing Mr. Nashiri, said in a phone interview that he was drafting a motion to oppose any attempts to reverse the judge’s order. He noted that he had a security clearance, and said the information he was seeking was for his own investigations and was not necessarily going to be made public.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/us/guantanamo-prosecutor-asks-judge-to-hold-off-declassification.html?hp

Radio Link –A Conversation with Prof. Nel about an Attempt to Fire Tenured Faculty for their private Online Posts  http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2298

Solidarity for Never

NYC Sellout AFT Contract Locks School Workers Down for NINE YEARS!!! TOSS IN MERIT PAY! (the opportunist saps at Democracy Now love this one)  Mayor Bill de Blasio, confronting the unsettled labor agreements that have loomed over his first months in office, announced a deal on Thursday with New York City’s largest teachers’ union that would raise wages by 18 percent over nine years in exchange for a $1.3 billion reduction in health care costs.
The agreement, which includes $3.4 billion in back pay and must be ratified by the union’s 100,000 members, is a milestone moment for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat with longstanding ties to the city’s labor movement, and city officials hope it will set a template for dozens of other outstanding contracts with the municipal work force.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/nyregion/de-blasio-new-york-teachers-contract-deal.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140502&nlid=2254121&tntemail0=y

LAUSD and UTLA:  Teacher abuse and the union that does nothing to stop it.  “I don’t believe it” is what most people say when teachers claim they have been targeted for dismissal but have done nothing wrong. The reason is, of course, that most people believe that school districts — like parish priests — are above reproach. A school district would never violate the trust in public education developed over the past century. Nor would a parish priest ….. Specifically:
* Nobody believes that a public school district would fire senior teachers and destroy a teacher’s career without having a good reason for doing so…. but LAUSD has done it hundreds of times.
* Nobody believes that a public school district would intentionally violate a teacher’s constitutional rights…. but LAUSD has done it hundreds of times.
* Nobody believes that LAUSD would risk the wrath of a powerful union by engaging in a pattern and practice of firing teachers without cause while simultaneously violating the constitution. But UTLA has done virtually nothing to help its members.
Visit TeacherLaw-LA.com to learn why I decided to “unretire” and why I represent teachers who can’t afford to pay me.   …I accumulated evidence proving what most people don’t want to believe: LAUSD’s vendetta against its senior teachers is nothing less than an elaborate financial scheme to cover up LAUSD’s decades of financial mismanagement.  http://tlawblog.com/?page_id=31

Which Way the LA school “union”?  Alex Caputo-Pearl wins runoff to lead L.A. teachers union   Caputo-Pearl, 45, won a resounding victory Tuesday, winning 80% of the United Teachers Los Angeles vote in a runoff against one-term incumbent President Warren Fletcher. In the mail-in election, 7,235 members cast ballots, fewer than one in four of those eligible to vote.www.latimes.com/local/la-me-utla-election-20140430,0,4666705.story#ixzz30ctgJiwG

One born every minute—Delaware teachers laud Common Core progress  When former National Teacher of the Year Sarah Brown Wessling showed a video of one of her lessons to a roomful of more than 250 Delaware teachers, she didn’t pick one of her best.
She picked one that she whiffed.
“We can’t have a mindset where we are more afraid of mediocrity than we are of mistakes,” Wessling said. “We have to accept that mistakes are how we learn and how we grow.”
It is a mindset teachers hope to instill in their students. But it had a broader meaning for the educators gathered at Dover Downs on Thursday night to celebrate successes in implementing the Common Core State Standards.    These teachers are spearheading the effort to transition to the new national standards. Overhauling their lessons has been a mammoth effort that is still being developed even after a few years’ work.
“We’re having to completely change the way we teach.” said Jenna White, a first-grade teacher at Woodbridge Elementary School.
Making such a major shift comes with mistakes, White and the other teachers at Thursday’s event said.  http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2014/05/01/delaware-teachers-laud-common-core-progress/8588515/

Spy versus Spy

 A New Kind of Spy  How China obtains American technological secrets   Chung was at home on February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia fell from the sky. His son Jeffrey called to tell him the news: the ship had broken apart while returning to Earth, and all seven astronauts on board had died. “That’s not a good joke to make,” Chung said. An American citizen who was born in China, Chung lived with his wife, Ling, on a cul-de-sac in Orange, California. Until his retirement, a few months earlier, he had worked on NASA’s space-shuttle program. Among other things, he had helped to design the Columbia’s crew cabin. When he realized that Jeffrey was telling the truth, he hung up the phone and wept.
In 1972, NASA outsourced the design and development of its space shuttles to the Rockwell Corporation, which was later acquired by Boeing. For three decades, Chung was a structural engineer in the stress-analysis group. The work was repetitive, but he was well suited to it. He rarely left his office, even for coffee; instead, he sat at his desk, running computer models that predicted how the fuselage would hold up under various intensities of heat and pressure.
After the Columbia accident, NASA asked Boeing to improve the design of the next shuttle. Chung had been one of the best analysts in his group, and his former supervisor called to hire him back as a subcontractor. Though he was seventy, he was glad to postpone retirement. He returned to his former habits, coming home late for dinner and then working until midnight. He was driven not by the prospect of a promotion or a raise but by the pleasure of the work. “He’d tell me how much money he had saved for Boeing,” Ling told me later. “I always teased him: ‘your Boeing, your Boeing.’ ” . . .  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/05/140505fa_fact_bhattacharjee

The Magical Mystery Tour

never give up the funny hat nor the weapon

CA- New accused cleric exposed in LA  Members of SNAP recently learned that a credibly accused cleric lived and worked with vulnerable missionary families in Los Angeles.
Brother Richard Suttle, a member of the Claretian Missionary order, was accused in 2008 of sexually abusing a child in the Phoenix Diocese in the 1980s. Church officials said the allegations were credible. When SNAP exposed this allegation in 2013, Claretian officials admitted that they sent Suttle to Argentina. They say the cleric is being monitored and has been “removed from any ministry with children.” www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-accused-clergyman-was-sent-to-argentina-chicagobased-religious-order-says-20130801,0,216928.story
But he is still on the job, SNAP says, with a Claretian UN team. Now living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he’s almost certainly among vulnerable and unsuspecting families who know nothing of the accusations against him.  http://www.snapnetwork.org/ca_new_accused_cleric_exposed_in_la

Embrace of Atheism Put an Indonesian in Prison  Growing up in a conservative Muslim household in rural West Sumatra, Alexander Aan hid a dark secret beginning at age 9: He did not believe in God. His feelings only hardened as he got older and he faked his way through daily prayers, Islamic holidays and the fasting month of Ramadan.
He stopped praying in 2008, when he was 26, and he finally told his parents and three younger siblings that he was an atheist — a rare revelation in a country like Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. They responded with disappointment and expressions of hope that he would return to Islam.
But Mr. Aan neither returned to Islam nor confined his secret to his family, and he ended up in prison after running afoul of a 2008 law restricting electronic communications.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/world/asia/indonesian-who-embraced-atheism-landed-in-prison.html?hp&_r=0

Illinois Priest Abuse Files Partial Release  www.illinoissexabuseattorney.com/chicago-archdiocese-priest-files/?imt=1&gclid=CMGB-__Lkb4CFW1nOgod0FMA6A&utm_campaign=Illinois+Arch&utm_source=Google+AdWords&utm_medium=PPC&utm_content=Priest+Files&utm_term=priests+abuse

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

So Long

Al Feldstein Al Feldstein, who took over a fledgling humor magazine called Mad in 1956 and made it a popular, profitable and enduring wellspring of American satire, died on Tuesday at his ranch in Paradise Valley, Mont. He was 88.
His wife, the former Michelle Key, confirmed the death. In recent years, he was a wildlife and landscape painter in Montana, outside Livingston.
Mr. Feldstein had been a writer and illustrator of comic books when he became editor of Mad four years into its life and just a year after it had graduated from comic-book form to a full-fledged magazine.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/business/media/soul-of-mad-magazine-al-feldstein-dies-at-88.html