Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fightback!

Report from the NEA Rep Assembly (if you like Part 3, go to Substance home and enjoy the rest): Obama is calling in!
No, wait! No he’s not? It’s not him?
Yes it is! No, wait, it’s not him!
Third try…DVR: “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?” Much good-natured laughter and applause. But a lot of people complain he comes through garbled. Not me, not even with tinnitus.
It is HE! The ONE! The PRESIDENT OF THE USA, calling in from his campaign tour in Ohio!
Standing O! Much waving of white on blue “Educators for Obama” signs–ubiquitous.
The song, “Standing Strong for America!” Flags, bunting, red, white, and blue, plus Obama pictures on the big screen.
He speaks! DVR is raptured, as are nearly all. DVR: “We are SO PROUD to be the first union in the United States to endorse you! We believe in your vision for America…We are so proud that Vice President Biden and Dr Biden (visited us)….”
Remember those suck-ups, even going back as far as elementary school?
The damn speech is linked here www.nea.org/grants/357.htm/
He likes teachers and the other guys are really rotten.
He spoke for about seven minutes, from 1:35 to 1:42 on my beloved Timex.
Crowd goes wild again.
“Four More Years! Four More Years! Four More Years!”
DVR: WE MUST RE-Elect President Barack Obama! (repeats, twice more). We’re behind you all the way!
Cameras and video sets were going off among the delegates so much during the speech, I am not sure many people paid attention to what BO had to say. I didn’t frankly, but I rarely do. I too was taking pictures–of him, the crowd, whatever. It’s all crap. When two Harvard grads are at each others’ throats, but most certainly will be doing group hugs in a year, just as Obama made his peace with the killer-cuckoldette, Hillary Clinton, I think of one of my main men, Holden Caulfield himself.
“Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has – I’m not kidding.”
So (I try hard not to fall into the NPR/PBS trap of beginning every sentence with “So…” but I am tired and fallen), what the ….just happened?

NEA delegates, drilled home against bullying for four intense days, after foisting ugly SHARK bags representing an anti-bullying campaign on every delegate who expected a quality carry-on, NEA bosses brought forth one of the biggest bullies in the world:
*toady to the rich financiers and industrialists, bottom dealers, who looted the economy and destroyed jobs in the US, thinking, “after us, the deluge,”
*drone-assassin, murderer of thousands of innocents, warrior promising endless warfare,
*while his barbarized Veterans Administration routinely denies benefits to damaged vets and forces them via an economic draft and Stop Loss rules to return again and again to conflicts even more hopeless than Vietnam,
*owner of private armies of mercenaries and the CIA,
*purveyor of more weaponry to the world’s dictators than anyone else on the planet,
*signer of the brutal National Defense Authorization Act,
*boss of Gitmo and other black torture sites,
*jailer of more than 2 million mostly black and Hispanic people,
*the well-protected toughie whose national terror squads coordinated violent attacks, and quasi-legal assaults, on the Occupy Wall Street and activist student movements in the last 24 months, driving them into retreat as his intelligence agencies, and unionites, diverted or jailed them,
*pimp for the pharma and insurance lobbies, hustling Obamacare as a step ahead,
*author–with Arne Duncan (DVR said, during a debate, “we cannot throw Duncan under a bus”) and Rham Emanuel, of the rotten Race to the Top (RaTT) which is the No Child Left Behind Act on meth,
*the grinning thug lawyer who ignores the murders of children in his falsified home town of Chicago,
*the member of the Bar who’s busied himself with destroying privacy laws and whistle-blowers,
*who extends the border fence behind the Border Czar, fascist Alan Bersin, the President who has deported more people than Bush II,
*the bogus Bible banger who couldn’t direct the arrest and trial of Bin Laden, rather the murder, as BO knew his own promotion of mysticism helped create a nation of irrationalists who could not stand a prosecution that said to OBL, “you’re nuts, have fairies dancing in your head; people make gods, gods do not make people, you murder people for a sham god,” even though only a better idea will defeat the AL Queda Jihad,
*the demagogue with the quick patter, who applauded the firing of Rhode Island teachers
*while his errand boy with the evil middle school child grin, Arne Duncan, declared Detroit the worst school system in the USA, then let the Detroit Federation of Teachers, the only hope the city had, sink in a sea of corruption and incompetence,
*This well dressed slippery little fuhrer over the corporate state and the best hope of the ruling classes to continue their rule without uprisings,
*Obama, an conscienceless herald of injustice hails…..
…NEA’s massive assembly of school workers who proclaim each day to oppose bullying and “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and They Love Him, an unconscionable bullying piece of shit.
Wowee! Meet the Old Boss! Same as the Old Boss! We shall vote our way to bona fide salvation this time around–certain!   Did he know he was taunting them? Of course he did. Saps. Rubes. Suckers. Easily gulled.

More at www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3392&section=Article

Welcome To Detroit! A Guide to the City for Delegates to
The American Federation of Teachers Convention July 27th-30th, 2012
by Rich Gibson July 12, 2012
The AFT will convene in Cobo Hall, downtown Detroit, this year. It’s an odd place for the AFT tops to ply their hustle, claiming in a slogan even more vapid than the National Education Association’s recent “We Educate America!” AFT says, “We Make A Difference Every Day!”
Well, the Detroit Federation of Teachers surely made a difference. Their bosses organized the decay of what was once touted as the finest urban school system in the USA, with more than 300 thousand students, around 12 thousand teachers, in the early seventies–the bellwether local of the AFT, through a period of slow rot, and now, the near-complete collapse of the entire Detroit Public School system and the local union too. (more   richgibson.com/welcome.htm

The Little Red Schoolhouse

ACLU Sues Highland Park Schools as Kids Can’t Read, but suit won’t solve poverty The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed a class-action lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court on Thursday on behalf of eight students in the Highland Park Public Schools alleging district and state officials failed to ensure children can read at the appropriate grade level.
Three-quarters of students lack basic literacy skills to meet grade level, said Kary L. Moss, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan, which she called “unacceptable.”  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120712/SCHOOLS/207120415/1026/schools/ACLU-sues-Highland-Park-schools-state-over-students-poor-reading-proficiency

BridgePoint: So what if We are not Accredited, we are Job Creators! Bridgepoint Education soon may face tough decisions regarding its San Diego work force after its Ashford University arm failed to win accreditation on Monday from a regional college certification agency.
The fast-growing, for-profit education company must address shortfalls in its scholastic programs pinpointed by Western Association of Schools and Colleges, or WASC, analysts and education experts said. At the same time, it must juggle its business operation quickly to save its current accreditation — possibly relocating an unknown number of jobs out of San Diego in the process.
“We believe numerous and potentially expensive changes will need to occur before WASC accredits Bridgepoint, and it could take several years,” said Brandon Dobell, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago.
Maintaining accreditation is critical for Bridgepoint, since it is a precondition to participating in federal financial aid programs, including Pell Grants and government-backed student loans. The company received more than 85 percent of its $933 million in revenue from federal student aid programs last year.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jul/10/bridgepoint-education-may-relocate-local-jobs-afte/

Eastern Mich U to EMU Prezzie–hey, you’re a drunk! The Eastern Michigan University regents have threatened to fire President Susan Martin unless she gets her drinking under control.
The Board of Regents, in a letter dated May 17, cited several incidents involving alcohol including one in April at an alumni event in Washington.
“It is, however, incumbent on us to emphasize the severity of this incident and its potential impact on your role and symbol of the university,” wrote the board’s executive committee.
In an email to the campus today, Martin said the incident wouldn’t happen again.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20120710/METRO/207100405/EMU-regents-tell-university-s-president-get-her-drinking-under-control?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM_G4Y7SX3g

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Obamagogue Moves on Africa They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa.
Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”  http://ethiopiantimes.wordpress.com/

CFR and the Muslim Bros Long Game n the 18 months since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood has risen swiftly from the cave to the castle. It founded the now-dominant Freedom and Justice Party last April, won a massive plurality in the winter parliamentary elections, and, last week, celebrated as its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won Egypt’s presidential elections. After 84 years of using its nationwide social services networks to build an Islamic state in Egypt from the ground up, the Brotherhood is, for the first time, poised to shape Egyptian society from the top down.
There is, however, a catch: most of the Brotherhood’s gains exist in name only. In early June, a court order invalidated the parliamentary elections and dissolved the Brotherhood-dominated parliament. Then, just prior to the second round of the presidential elections, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) issued a constitutional declaration that seized executive authority from the presidency, ultimately rendering Morsi a mostly powerless figure.
But after weeks of mounting tension with the SCAF, including mass demonstrations against the junta’s power grab, the Brotherhood is dialing things down. It fears that agitating for more authority now could foment unrest and alienate a deeply divided public. It is also wary of what happened in Algeria in 1991, when the country’s military-backed government responded to the electoral victory of an Islamist party with a harsh crackdown that culminated in civil war. To avoid further violence and cement its place in Egyptian politics, the Brotherhood now hopes to create a period of calm in the short run so that it can act more assertively in the future…  http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137770/eric-trager/the-muslim-brotherhoods-long-game?cid=nlc-this_week_on_foreignaffairs_co-071212-the_muslim_brotherhoods_long_g_2-071212

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Brother can you Spare A Job In June, the economy added a meager 80,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent.
Early this year, optimists buzzed that the jobless rate might touch below 8 percent by the election, a milestone that would be a major symbolic victory for the incumbent. Then employment growth slowed in March and took a turn toward the paltry in April and May.
With Friday’s report, what looked like a blip has now become a streak. And with a gridlocked Congress unlikely to pass any additional stimulus measures before the election, the president is stuck again with an economy in stall mode.   June’s job growth, after a revised increase of 77,000 in May, was just about enough to keep up with population growth, but not nearly enough to reduce the backlog of 13 million unemployed workers.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/business/economy/unemployment-report-for-june.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120707

Who Lost San Bernadino (and two other CA towns, plus Scranton and who is next?) Buckling under rising employee costs, recession-racked revenues and the sudden takeaway of millions of state dollars, officials in the city of San Bernardino said they risked being unable to make payroll and satisfy creditors.
“We are bankrupt,” Mayor Pat Morris said.  http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jul/11/san-bernardino-reached-point-no-return/

Banksters Back at It Again–Libor Back in 1919, a number of team members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the World Series to cash in on bets they had made in a gambling scheme.
Then, as now, baseball players were idolized by fans, and the World Series was the very top of the sport’s mountain. That so many trusted heroes would violate that trust to make a few extra bucks was devastating. The White Sox of that year will forever be known as the “Black Sox.”
Now, scale up to 2012 and shift your focus from baseball to the British Banking Association. Could there be a more trusted group in money’s marketplace than the graybeards of London’s financial district?
Yet these icons—not a few duped and underpaid baseball players—have been caught rigging interest rates and stealing money from everyone in the world who trusted them: nations, states, cities, school districts, home buyers, credit card holders, pension funds and more.
Conspiracies don’t happen without accomplices. In this instance, the venerable Barclays, which already has admitted its involvement, and quite likely Citigroup, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank, all of whom are under investigation.
Could there be others? Almost certainly.  http://uspolitics.einnews.com/column/104430183/the-great-libor-robbery-and-the-corruption-of-major-markets?promo=800&utm_source=MailingList&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Breaking+News%3A+world80-wednesday

Hollowing Out America Both candidates are only tinkering at the edges of the most important issue facing the United States: the hollowing out of the employment marketplace, the disappearance of mid-level jobs.
The issue of the disappearing middle is not new, but credible economists have added a more threatening twist to the argument: the possibility that a well-functioning, efficient modern market economy, driven by exponential growth in the rate of technological innovation, can simultaneously produce economic growth and eliminate millions of middle-class jobs.
Michael Spence, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, and David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., have argued that this “hollowing out” process is a result of twin upheavals: globalization and the hyper-acceleration of technological progress.  http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/?hp

Black Americans and the Subprime Explosion The implosion of the subprime lending market has left a scar on the finances of black Americans — one that not only has wiped out a generation of economic progress but could leave them at a financial disadvantage for decades.
At issue are the largely invisible but profoundly influential three-digit credit scores that help determine who can buy a car, finance a college education or own a home. The scores are based on consumers’ financial history and suffer when they fall behind on their bills.   www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-black-americans-financial-damage-from-subprime-implosion-is-likely-to-last/2012/07/08/gJQAwNmzWW_story.html?hpid=z1

JO Morgan Loses Big Again. Jamie Dimon, “sorry about that, now where is my bonus?” JPMorgan Chase said Friday that a bad trade had cost the bank $5.8 billion this year, almost triple its original estimate, and raised the prospect that traders had improperly tried to conceal the blunder.
“This has shaken our company to the core,” CEO Jamie Dimon said.
The bank said managers tied to the bad trade had been dismissed without severance pay and that it planned to revoke two years’ worth of pay from each of those executives.
JPMorgan said it had lost $4.4 billion because of the trade from April through June, and its chief financial officer said the bank had lost an additional $1.4 billion in the first three months of the year.
Dimon’s original estimate of the loss from the bad trade, disclosed in a surprise conference call with Wall Street analysts in May, was $2 billion.  http://www.freep.com/article/20120713/BUSINESS/120713062/JPMorgan-bad-trade-cost-5-8-billion?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Solidarity Fornever

The New Detroit Federation of Teachers Contract Class Size Rules Under a new three-year contract imposed last week on the teachers’ union, DPS will “make reasonable efforts” at reorganizing class sizes for students in K-12 when they exceed contractual limits.
In grades K-3, the class maximum is 25. But under the new contract with the Detroit Federation of Teachers, which took effect July 1, a class would need to reach 41 students before DPS moves to reduce it.
In grades 4-5, where 30 is the limit, it would take 46 students to trigger a response. In grades 6-12, where class sizes were increased to 35, leveling efforts would begin once the class reaches 61 students.www.detroitnews.com/article/20120713/SCHOOLS/207130335/1026/schools/Class-sizes-may-grow-Detroit-Public-Schools

How the Wisconsin Direct action Movement was Diverted, Demoralized, and Demolished The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can’t play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate “individuals” and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall.  http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175556/tomgram%3A_andy_kroll%2C_how_the_wisconsin_uprising_got_hijacked/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=f11b9122e1-TD_Kroll6_10_2012&utm_medium=email#more

Emerging Popular Fascism

Rich, Drug Addled, Fascist, Dead, and Arrested When Eva Rausing approached the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square four years ago to deal with a routine passport matter, she had to pass through British security, then face an airport-style metal detector so she and her handbag could be scanned for weapons and contraband.
The wealthy American didn’t leave her stash at home. She tried to pass the security scan with small amounts of crack cocaine, heroin and a banned stimulant in her purse.  The subsequent arrest led police to search the multimillion-dollar property she shared with her husband, Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing. Police found still more drugs, including a sizeable amount of cocaine.
Charges were dropped in exchange for a formal police warning, but the arrest made public what close family and friends already knew: The golden couple, with untold riches, were deeply mired in drug addiction even as they gave millions to numerous anti-addiction charities.
Their sad tale reached its climax this week when the 48-year-old Eva Rausing was found dead  http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/uk-police-eva-rausing-wife-of-billionaire-tetrapak-heir-found-dead-in-west-london-home/2012/07/11/gJQAxzoKcW_story.html?hpid=z4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-VYoGowUuo

Happy 100th Birthday Woody!

$11 Billion this Year, to Keep the Corporate State’s Secrets, and that’s not the half of it The federal government spent more than $11 billion to protect its secrets last year, double the cost of classification a decade ago — and that is only the part it will reveal. The total does not include the costs incurred by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other spy agencies, whose spending is — you guessed it — classified.  Spending on secrecy has increased steadily for more than a decade, driven in part by the expanding counterterrorism programs after the 2001 terrorist attacks, but also by the continuing protection of cold war secrets dating back decades. The total cost for 2001 was $4.7 billion, the oversight office said.
The spending report, showing an increase of 12 percent from 2010, comes at a time of intense public debate over secrecy and leaks of classified information. Six prosecutions of government officials for disclosing classified information to the news media have occurred under the Obama administration, and two new leak investigations are under way.
The antisecrecy group WikiLeaks set off a furor in 2010 and 2011 by obtaining and releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential United States government documents, including diplomatic cables. Both Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congressional intelligence committees have denounced recent leaks to the news media for damaging national security and have called for a crackdown.
But some independent experts say the ballooning classification system is the problem, sweeping huge quantities of unremarkable information in along with genuinely important secrets.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/us/politics/cost-to-protect-us-secrets-doubles-in-decade-to-11-billion.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

The Magical Mystery Tour

The Penn State Report Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and
welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State. The most
powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children
who Sandusky victimized. Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley never
demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of
Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest.  http://www.thefreehreportonpsu.com/Press_Release_07_12_12.pdf

Bad Teacher student in a parked car and arrested on suspicion of child molestation, authorities said.
Orange County Sheriffs Department’s deputies were on routine patrol Wednesday afternoon when they spotted a woman and a young man kissing in a car parked off Starr Street and Beach Boulevard, authorities said.
“They noticed that he was quite a bit younger, so they spoke to them,” said Jim Amormino, spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Judy Lee, 39, has taught at Magnolia High School in Anaheim for eight years. She admitted to having sexual relations with the student on school grounds and in other parts of Orange County since November of last year, Amormino said
Lee is married to a pastor and the mother of four children, KTLA reported. latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/anaheim-teacher-accused-kissing-former-student.html

Spy Versus Spy

above spy Robert Hanssen, a member of Opus Dei, underling of Louis Freeh, also OD and leader of the Waco coverup, who did PSU this week. Hanssen was an FBI Agent who spent two solid decades spying for the Soviets and Russians before he was caught in 2001 to massive media attention. In fact, one of the most key pieces of information Hanssen ever leaked was only acted upon by his Soviet employers when Ames provided confirmation, leading to the execution of a Russian General who had successfully spied for the Americans for 20 years. Hanssen made millions in his spy role, beginning just three years after his first post with the FBI, and continued on to be the most successful of his peers until his luck finally ran out. Hanssen was no idealist, he stated himself that he only did it “for the money.”

Robert de La Rochefoucauld belonged to one of the oldest families of the French nobility, whose members included François de La Rochefoucauld, the author of a classic 17th-century book of maxims. For 30 years he was the mayor of Ouzouer-sur-Trézée, an idyllic canal town in the Loire Valley, and he used the aristocratic title of count.  But he is best remembered as a courageous and celebrated saboteur who fought for the honor of France in World War II as a secret agent with the British.
His exploits were legend, involving an eclectic and decidedly resourceful collection of tools in the service of sabotage and escape, including loaves of bread, a stolen limousine, the leg of a table, a bicycle and a nun’s habit, not to mention the more established accouterments of espionage like parachutes, explosives and a submarine.   www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/world/europe/robert-de-la-rochefoucauld-noted-for-war-exploits-dies-at-88.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Best Thing in the History of the World