I wrote about the pillaging of Minneapolis schools in an article for Counterpunch.com called ‘Race to the Slop’. The school system, home of the first charter school law in the nation, is the next big bubble to break, as more and more schools across the nation shutter their facilities and throw students into the new “consolidated schools”.  Drastic downsizing and the demolition of public assets and services such as schools has its own Huxley language to describe it. When families cannot afford to live apart due to economic constraint, they move into together and under the rubric of the propagandist, this too would be ‘consolidation’.

But the news of crisis aimed at the Minneapolis schools, news of March 10th, was most perplexing if not simply for the way the crisis was handled, but the reaction to it.

Schools receive threat

It all began when, about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday the 10th, Minneapolis school officials activated a computer program that sent an urgent and ominous telephone message to parents of all 32,000 of its students. The message notified parents that because of an unspecified threat all Minneapolis schools would be locked down with students inside until the end of the school day. According to the Star Tribune:

“Thus began an unsettling and extraordinary day in which the same technology that apparently enabled a miscreant in Australia to warn via the Internet that a Minneapolis school would be shot up also enabled the school district to notify legions of parents of what’s believed to be the first citywide school lockdown in history. And late Wednesday, an update was sent out — the lockdown would be extended through Thursday as a precautionary measure” (Mpls. schools lockdown extended through todayhttp://www.startribune.com/local/stpaul/87233697.html?elr=KArksUUUU).

Minneapolis police spokesman Jesse Garcia explained that the Minneapolis threat was telephoned in at about 7:30 a.m. to the city’s 311 information line. The unknown caller said that someone had warned on a social networking site that about two hours later, “a male will be coming to a Minneapolis school, shoot up the school and then shoot himself,” (ibid). Threats to schools on social networking sites have become increasingly common, the center said.

Within the past month, online threats against two suburban Minneapolis Twin Cities high schools have been posted. Both turned out to be unfounded, and, according to director Mike Siitari, “very few, if any” documented cases of actual school violence have stemmed from rumors posted on social networking sites.”

What some parents say

Parents were generally pleased with the way the situation was handled. Yet many citizens are running scared. Fawzi Ahmed, 49, and his wife went to Sheridan to pick up their two children rather than allow them ride the bus as they usually did. Ahmed commented:

 ”You cannot guarantee what will happen. This way, I can guarantee myself.” (ibid)

At Marcy, parents Brie Griffin and her husband, Courtney Griffin, dropped off some birthday treats for their child but saw no need to pull the first-grader from school a half-hour early. Brie Griffin said:

 ”They asked for our IDs, though, which was new.”

Courtney Griffin, her husband, remarked:

 ”Sometimes I think too much information can lead to …” (ibid). “Paranoia,” his Brie Griffin chimed in” (ibid).

When citizens in a democracy feel that too much information can lead to paranoia it is no wonder they will turn to ’strong leaders’ for guidance.

In a comment section on-line at the Star Tribune out of Minneapolis, more than one hundred citizens sounded off about the threat, how it was handled and most interestingly they attested to their own psychology and social analysis regarding the matter.

For example, one parent commented:

 ”Students Made to Suffer and Locked Up Like Criminals…” “I was very happy my kindergarten grandchild was locked up like a criminal yesterday. I don’t think he suffered too badly, however. Still … read more went to the library, had music and math. Played inside with his buddies and ate a good lunch. Kudos to the schools who have a system in place to handle the new crazy that’s become our world. Kudos also that as his grandfather and I are listed emergency contacts, we received calls at our home, as well as his parents” (ibid).

Another commentator stated simply:

“Keep your kids in school. And rest assured that when these pranksters/terrorists are found, they will be tried in a military tribunal and not a civilian court in Minneapolis. The best thing for my fellow Minneapolitans to do in light of terrorism/pranksterism would be to go shopping. Rest assured, as soon as we find out who these terrorists/pranksters are, their circle of friends will be waterboarded. America changed that fateful day 9 years ago” (ibid).

Finally, out of the 117 comments, I found this one most interesting:

“There seems to be an epidemic of alienated discouraged people who act out either in violence or the threat of violence. It would be worth it for us to examine our society and try to figure out what’s causing that and fix it” (ibid).

As cities continue to crumble economically and socially from everything associated to basic infrastructure to institutions like schools, more and more lock-downs episodes can be expected to take place in American schools. One can only hope that the insipid individualism and tendency to violence that plagues the psyche of the American citizen does not lead us into directions of more authoritarian control as parents and city residents become if not comfortable with, as least numbed by the increased violence and capitulate further to new authoritarian plans for laying down a police state.

More and more alienated and discouraged people are being minted daily by a society in ruins. The one commentator who commented that people should go shopping echoes the ghost of George W. Bush whom a little less than two weeks after the 911 attacks stated:

“Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed. I encourage you to all go shopping more.”

As the more thoughtful commentator immediately above noted, it would be worth our time to ‘stop and frisk’ our society and try to critically examine what’s causing the social despair, capitulation to “lock-down” policies, calls for military tribunals, waterboarding and the outsourcing of fear to law enforcement. If we don’t, we might find ourselves all locked down in the sweltering serenity of Aldous Huxley’s, Brave New World, if we aren’t already.

Many educators feel that the so-called “21^st Century Learning” which advocates a more technology based and supposedly student-centered curriculum for the future is the magic bullet of educational reform. In this, they find themselves in perfect agreement with the companies which stand the most to gain from such an approach: those which sell ICT (information and communication technologies) and those which sell education (ie. the charter school companies and the school improvement industry). Justifications for the technology make-over of education range from the simple fact that we have so much of it, through to the notion that it provides ideal “differentiated instruction” which is customized for the learner, all the way to the assumption that computers will be the key to being competitive in the global “knowledge economy” of the future. One thing that is certain about the technology boom is that many are banking on using it as a way to undermine teachers and in particular their unions, which are seen as the primary obstacle to profits.

According to Moe and Chubb’s Liberating Learning, technology is destined to save America from its poor scores on the Program for International Student Assessment administered by the global business think-tank, the OECD. Moe, a researcher at the Hoover Institute, and Chubb, an executive with the for-profit Edison Learning charter school chain, believe that online education is that answer because it will make it possible for all students to learn anywhere and any time and because it will be the tool that allows education to finally get rid of “political blocking” caused by unions in defence of high wages. According to James K. Glassman’s review in the Wall Street Journal, (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528325721325523.html) the book blames “the thwarting of such simple reforms as paying teachers for performance. Many states prohibit even gathering data that link individual teachers to the test scores of their students.”

Moe and Chubb cite the success of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in allowing 8000 students to earn credits without union impediment. “And the classes aren’t just digital correspondence courses — there are textbooks and live educators, including ‘synchronous teachers,’ who work with students through instant messaging, voice and interactive whiteboards while the kids are engaged with their lessons online. Advisers are required to communicate with students’ families at least once a week by email and once every two weeks by phone.”

According to Moe and Chubb, the U.S. has (as of June 2009) over 190 cyber charter schools, up from just 57 in 2003. Glassman explains, “Many of the new cyber charters are managed by two for-profit companies, K12 and Connections Academy. Meanwhile, some students in traditional schools are taking individual courses online, and companies such as Educomp, based in India, are tutoring U.S. students after school hours.”

A similar review of Liberating Learning by Dave Saba of the Heartland Institute, explains in a review which has been tellingly titled “End of Union Control is Key to Reform” that “The combination of innovative digital curricula and easily accessible data on school, teacher, and student performance will be the ‘one-two punch’ that will overwhelm the status quo and force schools to change.” http://www.heartland.org/publications/school%20reform/article/26042/End_of_Union_Control_Is_Key_to_Reform.html

And indeed, such technology may well turn out to be poison for teachers and their unions, for, according to Moe and Chubb, “the new computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student — perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that.” Glassman’s review explains that the beauty of such online delivery systems is that “Technology also disperses teachers geographically (making them elusive for union organizers); lets in private-sector players who aren’t members of the guild; and enables outsourcing to foreign countries.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528325721325523.html

Most people find the replacement of live workers in areas from automated phone answering through to automated grocery checkouts to be both an annoyance and an obstruction. Perhaps the time has come to ask: Is teaching not a fundamentally more complex, more important and more human interaction than a paying for a grocery item or answering a phone? Will computers really ever be able to compensate for the human touch? Many believe that the only real beneficiaries of the technology boom have been the tech giants themselves. Is it not at least possible people may not want to Liberate Learning if it means liberating it from live, in person, teacher student interaction? These would seem to have been the kinds of questions Isaac Asimov was thinking about when he concluded his 1951 Sci-Fi prediction that there would be a wistful nostalgia in the future for “The Fun They Had”:

“The screen was lit up, and it said: “Today’s arithmetic lesson is on the addition of proper fractions. Please insert yesterday’s homework in the proper slot.”

Margie did so with a sigh. She was thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather’s grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. They learned the same things, so they could help one another on the homework and talk about it.

And the teachers were people…

The mechanical teacher was flashing on the screen: “When we add the fractions 1/2 and 1/4…”

Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had.”

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html

Massive school closures in KC to be done by fall:

The politics of ‘compassionate conservatism”

You’ve no doubt heard the dismal news out Wednesday, March 12, 2020.  Kansas City’s school superintendent said he is going to shutter nearly half the district’s schools due to plummeting enrollment and budget deficits.  Perhaps, more grotesque was his comment noting that while “painful,” he will move forward quickly so that all the closures will be complete by fall.  This is school leadership in the era of ‘compassionate conservative’ economics.  I guess “too big to fail” doesn’t apply to our nation’s schools like it does to Wall Street bankers.

The school board narrowly approved the plan Wednesday night to close 29 of the district’s 61 schools to try to stave off bankruptcy. The closures have angered many parents, students and teachers, but administrators say they had no choice because without them, the district would have been in the red by 2011 (Massive school closures in KC to be done by fall HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5itXI7J7kJ7Eka6sEx9IofeKycRqgD9ECJAA80).

Under the current political regime that fails to assist foreclosing homeowners, fails to stimulate the economy with massive amounts of capital unlike the way they stimulated their friends on Wall Street; under an administration that will not spend the money needed to create federal jobs knowing the private sector has gruesomely failed in creating any jobs but instead is destroying them (either by outsourcing them to third world countries through their privatized trade agreements or decimating the public sector), we can expect that bankruptcy for the entire school district is around the corner.  Add to this reckoning two trillion dollars spent on two illegal wars and Kansas City, like much of America, is looking down the barrel of some serious economic and social unrest.

Although other school districts nationwide have, continue or are considering closures as the Second Great depression ravages their budgets, Kansas City’s plan is striking. In rapidly shrinking Detroit, 29 schools closed before classes began this fall, but that still left the district with 172 schools. Most other districts are closing just one or two schools (ibid).  But not Kansas City.  They are moving quickly to destroy as many as they can.  This is not simply an attack on public education; it is an all out “shock and awe” bombardment of our nation’s schools.

Superintendent for the Kansas City schools, John Covington groveled at a recent news conference:

“It has been a difficult and painful and emotional process that affects our entire community. No one likes closing schools.” (ibid).

Nor do they like politicians like Covington who close them. These are spineless officials that did nothing and do nothing (other than accept high administrative salaries) while deficits and bankruptcies roll like Tsunamis across our nation’s cities.  A close look at the school board’s recent history reveals a chaotic, almost nonfunctioning body that put off making tough choices and even routine improvements for generations.

Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a research group in Washington had this to say:

“This is extraordinary. The school board was dysfunctional for years. There was very poor governance for a long period of time, and it was like a revolving door with superintendents.” (SUSAN SAULNY Board’s Decision to Close 28 Kansas City Schools Follows Years of Inaction http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12schools.html)

Mr. Jennings also said the board was plagued with “a general unwillingness to face the facts” of the chaos it created.

Of course this brings up the other troubling item — the state of the nation’s journalism and corporate media.  Citizens of Kansas City had no idea that fiscal crisis’ hunted down their public schools.  Nor do many of them understand the economic policies behind the urban political posturing that has gone on for decades in both Kansas City and elsewhere.  This crisis was created from whole cloth, just as the financial crisis on Wall Street was, but when did you see the media put a critical lens on the rapacious policies that raped the city of funds?  And if you did, it was usually clothed and disguised as a “black mother with two kids” getting welfare while the corporate welfare and public trough feeding by corporatized forces is touted as free market capitalism, when the only thing that is free is the private pillage unfettered by the supplicant media forces.

In 2006, the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington-based coalition of the nation’s largest school districts, produced an extensive analysis of what was going wrong in the Kansas City schools. It concluded that the board wasted too much time on administrative trivia, its instructional program lacked “cohesion and forward momentum” and it had “no machinery” for intervening when students fell behind. The council included advice in the report on how the schools could fix themselves, but little if any action appeared to have been taken as a result (ibid).

The school closures and issues surround them are multi-faceted

The school closures in Kansas City, Missouri are part of the historical seeds of economic rot that have now come home to roost and given rise to the deplorable Race to the Top, the privatized educational policy being pursued by the Obama administration which stresses school closures in favor of charter schools and no doubt inevitably public school vouchers.

White flight, racism and neo-liberal economics

The issues behind the school closures in Kansas City, Missouri also involve decades and decades of racism, the growth of the suburbs and white-flight and the role of real estate developers and corporate Wall Street banksters in financing the suburban development for profit while destroying urban Kansas City, Missouri through urban ‘removal’ and gentrification.  Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said it succinctly:

“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment. And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district. It is shameful and sinful.” (ibid).

As middle class whites fled the inner city and deindustrialization left a hole where jobs once existed, financial capital was used to finance real estate development that created massive deficits that have now bankrupted public services and swallowed the schools.  Over the years, many students left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs (ibid).

The issue is obviously economic and another sad tragedy in the tale of neo-liberal economics, the result of thirty years of Milton Friedman Chicago School of Economic policies.  The district now has a $50 million budget shortfall.  Like most other urban cities (not to mention school districts) in the United States along with the states that harbor them, the district is more than broke, it is insolvent and in bankruptcy.

All of this is the result of decades and decades of neo-liberal economic priorities and policies.  These neo-liberal policies have lowered state and federal taxation on the rich, allowed for public subsidies to private real estate developers through enterprise zones, waived myriad development fees, arranged mutual benefit agreements that socialize the cost of private business infrastructures such as public roads, public electrical infrastructure, institutions like Fire Departments, more police, crossing guards for children and many other public amenities we as citizens take for granted and pay for every day, but to which the corporations, developers and their banskster financiers contribute nothing.  This is the pillage of the ‘commons’.

What neo-liberal economic policies have managed to do, coupled with age old racism, redlining and white flight is to make easy money off suburban development while laying the ground work for the bankruptcy of American cities and with them, their schools.  Disinvestment in urban centers and/or gentrification has been a painful burden to bear for Kansas City residents and their children.

John Covington, for example, has stressed that the district’s buildings are only half-full as student population has plummeted amid political squabbling and chronically abysmal test scores under No Child Left Behind and state coordinated mandatory tests.  Students have been leaving the Kansas City public schools in droves. Close to 18,000 students exited to better suburban districts or charter schools in the last 10 years alone. The student enrollment is now 17,400 children, who are mostly black and impoverished (SUSAN SAULNY Board’s Decision to Close 28 Kansas City Schools Follows Years of Inaction http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12schools.html)

The District administrators state the closures were necessary to keep the district from plowing through what little is left of the $2 billion it received as part of a groundbreaking desegregation case it had been involved with.  This means we can expect the economic situation to get worse as housing values fall, unemployment increases, transportation worsens, and many children cease to attend public schools.

The school closures and massive layoffs of multiple personnel, from teachers to janitors, will also have an economic and social ripple effect, economically slowing any possible progress Kansas City might experience in their job growth or housing markets.  According to Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks, the school closure plan had prompted some housing developers to consider backing out of projects (ibid).  Where will the fired teachers and staff go?  How will they live?

At times before Wednesday night’s vote, the board’s meeting threatened to fall into chaos, with members trading insults, not following rules of order and even crying. An angry audience shouted its general disapproval.

“This is too much, too fast,” said a parent, Carmen Edwards, after the vote.

Nakisha Eubanks, a mother of three students, said: “I don’t want my kids in this district, going through all this disruption. But I can’t move, and I don’t have transportation. So, this is it.” (ibid).

Now the work of disassembling public education begins

Now, according to the associated press article, officials have to focus on the massive job of downsizing the district — reworking school bus routes, figuring out what to do with vacant buildings and slashing payroll. Covington said he has been working on the transition plan for several weeks and that it would be in place for the start of the school year.  He has spent the past month making the case to sometimes angry groups of parents and students that the closures are necessary.  Like Robert Bobb in Detroit, Covington is busy putting on dog and pony shows for an angry and understandably low information public citizenry.

Covington gave few details to the press, but he said the plan would likely involve staggering start and class schedule times for middle school students who would now attend school with high school students.  Covington said

“We will be moving forward with deliberate speed to put together a transformation plan that we will be using to make sure that the quality of educational opportunities and the services that we provide for all children in the Kansas City schools that will remain open is of high quality,” (ibid)

Under the approved plan, teachers at six other low-performing schools will be required to reapply for their jobs and the district will try to sell its downtown central office. It also is expected to cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs, including about 285 teachers.

Emotional board member Duane Kelly told the crowd of more than 200 people Wednesday, “This is the most painful vote I have ever cast” in 10 years on the board. Some chanted for the removal of the superintendent, while one woman asked the crowd, “Is anyone else ready to home school their children?”

Opening for the Sultans?

Will Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Fisher Family, Reed Hastings of NetFlix and the Walton Family Fund now enter the fray?  Probably, the billionaire’s boy’s club is the only game in town now that cities are bereft of funds and saddled with decades of capitalist driven deficits.  This is the perfect economic storm for the disaster capitalists to profit from.  Much like New Orleans after Katrina, the school system is up for grabs due to lack of public funds.  So, as another city and another school system bite the dust, depriving our children of a decent education and educational opportunities, look for the philanthro-capitalists to put together a “bail-out” plan of their own, one that will closely resemble the plans they have put forth in cities like LA, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Michigan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

This is all part and parcel of Race to the Top and with the corporate media concealing more than it is revealing the opportunity for the billionaire’s boy’s club to sell their pernicious privatization policies to a beleaguered public is greater than ever.  This is why it is so important to follow the resistance and strategies put forth in Detroit, Michigan in face of similar school closings and teacher firings.  For in Detroit, as I and teachers and students have tried to show, there is a strategy in place to rout out the Eli Broad graduates, the privatizers and assassins of public education and organize a people’s resistance to privatization.

My headline is legally accurate, and the side of history you want to be on when America finally recognizes our government and corporate media’s fascism.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

1. Understand the laws of war (and here). These were legislated after WW2 and are crystal-clear that only self-defense, in a narrow legal meaning, can justify war. The current US wars are not even close to being lawful and are legal treason against the US. Those involved with US military, government, and law enforcement have an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. To fulfill their oath they must immediately refuse all orders associated with unlawful wars and military-related constant violation of treaties, and arrest those who issue unlawful orders. The Oath of Enlistment to the US Constitution supersedes the fascist insertion of Nazi propaganda to “always place the mission first” of blindly following unlawful orders.
2. Employ the obvious and simple solutions to end our economic controlled demolition and evolve to a civil economy. End poverty through global cooperation to achieve the UN Millennium Goals by developed countries investing 0.7% of their income (not that the UN is serious for their accomplishment, but the goals are what we should invest to produce). Support global security through cooperation, dignity, justice, and freedom. Create a US Department of Peace to help.
3. Communicate. Trust your unique, beautiful, and powerful self-expression to share as you feel appropriate. Understand that while many people are ready to embrace difficult facts, many are not. Anticipate that you will be attacked and prepare your virtuous response in the spirit of competition, just as you do in other fields.
4. Prosecute the war leaders for obvious violation of the letter and spirit of US war laws and constant lies to engage in further wars. Because the crimes are so broad and deep, I recommend Truth and Reconciliation (T&R) to exchange full truth and return of stolen US assets for non-prosecution. This is the most expeditious way to understand and end all unlawful and harmful acts. Those who reject T&R are subject to prosecution.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

To say the plan is potentially controversial is an understatement. The US already has E-Verify, currently voluntary, which companies can use to check the legal status of its workers. It is mostly ineffective because it is not mandatory and hasn’t been implemented correctly. Checking W9 forms is also supposed to prevent illegals from finding work. The failure in these systems is the employers not the employees.

Biometric IDs, however are also not a viable solution. It would be to easy to track a person’s movements, the cost of failure is high as well as numerous other privacy and civil rights issues.

Under the legislation envisioned by Messrs. Graham and Schumer, the estimated 10.8 million people living illegally in the U.S. would be offered a path to citizenship, though they would have to register, pay taxes, pay a fine and wait in line. A guest-worker program would let a set number of new foreigners come to the U.S. legally to work.

The crux of the problem is that many of the illegals who have forged documents are already paying taxes, buying goods and contributing to society. Many others are on work visas that are easily renewed, most of which do not require the foreign citizen to return to their home country to reapply anymore.

It is the illegals who are not working or working under the table for cash that are creating the problems. By requiring all Americans to carry biometric ID, you are punishing those who are not guilty while continuing to ignore the original problem. Mr. Schumer, however, does not see it this way.

“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens.

Except that the card will cause more problems. You will continue to have undocumented workers who get paid in cash and a new wave of identity theft will begin. The latter, as well as individual privacy concerns, is where the objections stem from.

“It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people’s privacy,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We’re also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification.”

Mr. Graham says he respects those concerns but disagrees. “We’ve all got Social Security cards,” he said. “They’re just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That’s all I’m saying.”

Respectfully, Mr. Graham has forgotten that social security cards were never intended to be used for identification purposes. It is unfair and disingenuous to make the comparison.

Mr. Schumer said employers would be able to buy a scanner to check the IDs for as much as $800. Small employers, he said, could take their applicants to a government office to like the Department of Motor Vehicles and have their hands scanned there.

It should never be suggested that the DMV be in charge of collecting individual biometric information. The proposed card is for identification and verification of employment eligibility. It has nothing to do with driving a vehicle. The department of Motor Vehicles should not be responsible for collecting biometric information.

The privacy concerns would be raised higher, given the fact that several states have already implemented REAL-ID into their driver’s licenses. Now, not only would your personal identity documents be stored in a DMV database, so would your biometric data. These databases would become gold mines for identity thieves and the black market.

Before this ever gets out of committee and sent for a vote on the senate floor, we should inform our senators that ID cards with biometric information is unnecessary for American citizens. It would be expensive and complicated to implement and, as Americans, we should never be treated guilty simply for wanting to work.

On January 7^th, President Rene Preval of Haiti put the final touches on the privatization of Haiti’s public telephone company, TELECO. Five days later the horrific earthquake leveled Haiti, killing over 200.000 people. The selling off of assets, the International Monetary Fund’s austerity measures, were under full swing under the Preval administration in order to pay off debt owed by Haiti to the international financiers.

One of Preval’s acts as President after the first American backed coup against Aristide in 1994 was to privatize the public cement company, Cimint d’Haiti. Today the massive amount of cement need to rebuild the country has to be either bought from foreign companies, or from a company partially owned by the Minister of Tourism, Patrick Delatour. According to USA Today, “Haiti’s top reconstruction planning official owns part of the countries largest concrete company, which stands to reap major gains from the coming wave of international rebuilding aid.”

Delatour likens his position to that of Dick Cheney’s. That is  his own way of explaining that he has no conflict of interest. Cheney had retained his stock options in Halliburton when he became Vice President in 2001 as he steered billions in no bid contracts to both his former company and its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root. Mr. Delatour seems to feel this absolves him of any possible wrongdoing on his part, as Mr. Cheney seemed to be above reproach.

www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-02-23-delatour_N.htm

In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, journalist Avi Lewis, economist Camille Chambers and Haitian presidential advisor Patrick Elie explain the politics of rebuilding. Avi Lewis said, ”The state in Haiti used to include major public companies-rice, flour, electricity, telephones. Today after decades of privatization and pressure from the US and international financiers, control of these businesses moved offshore.” There is no actual production of cement in Haiti. There is only a packaging plant for imported cement. Haiti’s cement industry is the story of failure that will weigh heavily on the process of reconstruction.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/16/haiti_the_politics_of_rebuilding_a

In October of 1997, Preval sold Haiti’s public flour mill to Continental Grain, whose board of directors includes Henry Kissinger. Former Secretary of State Kissinger’s crimes are too numerous to mention here but he could be considered the world’s worst war criminal. Continental bought the mill in conjunction with Seaboard Flour, owned by the secretive Bresky family of Boston, whose business history rivals Kissinger’s in sheer amorality. Harry Bresky has been sued repeatedly for staling from his companies. After being unable to hire Americans at low wages for his plants, he imported Mexicans and Guatemalans to his plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota, but he neglected to give them anywhere to live, creating a massive homeless problem and a burden on local welfare programs. He has been guilty of horrendous environmental crimes such as dumping raw sewage from his corporate hog slaughtering plant. The Bresky family is worth over 500 million dollars and owns companies all over Latin America and Africa. The Seaboard- Continental flour plant collapsed in the earthquake.

These three formerly public companies could have provided much needed employment in a hopelessly unemployed country. The cement company alone could have provided not just employment, but literally the building blocks for a new city. There is no reason for a lack of a cement company in Haiti, a country that is built on an island primarily of limestone. The offshoring of these companies is a crime against the people of Haiti. Aristide was vehemently against privatizing these companies, believing that the people were to decide how to dispose of their own shared public companies. Because he stood up for the people of Haiti,it was he that was disposed of not once, but twice, in American backed coups. The flour and rice companies could have fed a starving nation. A vibrant telecommunication company could have helped rebuild the country.

The people of Haiti want Aristide back. But in the words of Condoleeza Rice, “Aristide will never set foot in the Western Hemisphere again.”

Antonio Veciana described three failed assassination plots he directed against Fidel Castro – with the help and encouragement of the CIA. In 1960, Maurice Bishop, aka David Atlee Phillips, had recruited Veciana for CIA dirty trick operations in Havana. Veciana described how the Agency, working with the Catholic Church, forged a Cuban “law” in which the revolutionary government would substitute for parental authority. Using this forged document, CIA agents circulated the story throughout Cuba, and included an offer by the Catholic Church to spirit the propertied classes’ children, ages 8-19, to the United States. Once free of the indoctrinating state, in the land of freedom, the kids and their parents could count on the US government to assure the children’s welfare until the families reunited – presumably after Fidel’s government was overthrown. In 1960, most of the Cubans who fled for Miami or contemplated departures believed US marines would soon clean up the “communists.”

Monsignor Walsh directed the Church role in Operation Peter Pan. Some 14,000 Cuban children got smuggled out of Cuba between 1960-62. Some kids fared well in the hands of foster families; others less so. But Veciana’s CIA supervisors went beyond “psychological warfare” — like kid theft. Veciana told me that on April 13, 1961, his agents torched El Encanto, Havana’s Macy’s. He also described three of his plots to kill Castro. The first at the Presidential Palace in October 1961 failed when the guys who swore to fire a bazooka at Fidel chickened out.

Ten years later, Bishop-Phillips informed Veciana about a planned Fidel trip to Chile — wink wink. (Veciana testified on this before the Senate, http://cuban-exile.com/doc_326-350/doc0329.html) He recruited two aspiring assassins in Miami and, thanks to his easy relations with the CIA and Venezuelan intelligence, arranged to train them in Caracas as news cameramen. Landing in Chile a month before Cuba’s leader, the two integrated themselves into the foreign press corps. The weapon to kill Fidel at his opening press conference they hid inside a camera. But Fidel’s late 1971 arrival in the Chilean capital also coincided with the departure of the hitmen’s courage.

Disappointed but unwilling to concede, Veciana went to Plan B. Bishop-Phillips told him Fidel planned a stop in Quito, Ecuador on his return to Cuba. Veciana contacted Luis Posada Carrilles employed by Venezuelan intelligence – and the CIA. A marksman, armed with a sniper rifle with telescopic sight which Veciana acquired, Posada could “put one in Fidel’s forehead” from half a mile away as he descended from the plane, Veciana told me, “if there was a certain get away.” Luckily, for Fidel, Posada, saw no assured escape route, and declined Veciana’s assassination offer.

New York, Saturday, summer 1984.

Nestor Garcia of Cuba’s New York UN Mission received a disturbing cable from Havana. He called Robert Muller, chief of security for the US UN Mission. “I need to talk to you, him immediately.”

Muller told Garcia his son, “a promising southpaw,” was pitching Little League game that morning. “Surely this can wait.”

“No, it can’t,” responded Garcia. The exasperated Muller met Garcia at an Irish pub in Manhattan. “This better be good, Nestor.”

Garcia read the Havana cable detailing a planned assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in three days as Reagan campaigned for reelection in North Carolina, with names of the perspective assassins and other key details.

Within hours, Secret Service investigators confirmed this with Garcia in his NY apartment. Shortly after, Garcia read a news item from a North Carolina paper announcing the arrest of several men on vague charges. Muller relayed to Garcia White House thanks. (Nestor Garcia, Diplomacia Sin Sombra, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2007)

The FBI did not, however, arrest those who planned assassinations against Castro. Indeed, in October 1976, Luis Posada, who chickened out of the Ecuador plan, hired two others to bomb a Cuban passenger plane as it ascended from Barbados. 73 passengers and crew died.

In the 1990s, Posada hired other lackeys to bomb Havana tourist sites, killing one tourist. In 1999, Panamanian police arrested him and three other hitmen. They had explosives in their rented car to be used to blow up Castro who was scheduled to speak at a Panamanian University. In 2004, the would-be assassins received a pardon from outgoing President Moscoso and now live in the United States.

Cuba remains on the State Department’s terrorist list. Washington has not claimed instances of Havana-backed plots against US Presidents; on the contrary, Cuba helped save Reagan from a possible attempt. The CIA, says Cuba, has backed some 600 documented attempts against Castro. The CIA confirms only 30. Does only attempts qualify for Washington’s name on Cuba’s terrorist list? Or should Secretary Clinton acknowledge Cuba doesn’t belong on its list? Long Live Reciprocity!

Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose films are available through roundworldproductions@gmail.com

The word “dictatorship” means law is whatever “leadership” dictates; literally the diction of the leader (leader = Fuhrer in German).

Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — “I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.”

• First, one of the most respected Constitutional Law scholars, Jonathan Turley powerfully explains the unconstitutional and related Military Commission Act of 2006 with Keith Olbermann (8 minutes).
• Second, liberal Rachel Maddow eloquently attacks President Obama on indefinite detention (7 minutes).
• Third, Turley and Olbermann discuss how the Obama administration is EXPANDING Bush administration policies against the Constitution (4 minutes).
• Fourth, telegenic young reporters from a non-American station discuss this bill on the only show I could find. Our corporate media lies through omission in their non-reporting of this unconstitutional bill.

1. Understand the laws of war (and here). These were legislated after WW2 and are crystal-clear that only self-defense, in a narrow legal meaning, can justify war. The current US wars are not even close to being lawful and are legal treason against the US. Those involved with US military, government, and law enforcement have an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. To fulfill their oath they must immediately refuse all orders associated with unlawful wars and military-related constant violation of treaties, and arrest those who issue unlawful orders. The Oath of Enlistment to the US Constitution supersedes the fascist insertion of Nazi propaganda to “always place the mission first” of blindly following unlawful orders.
2. Employ the obvious and simple solutions to end our economic controlled demolition and evolve to a civil economy. End poverty through global cooperation to achieve the UN Millennium Goals by developed countries investing 0.7% of their income (not that the UN is serious for their accomplishment, but the goals are what we should invest to produce). Support global security through cooperation, dignity, justice, and freedom. Create a US Department of Peace to help.
3. Communicate. Trust your unique, beautiful, and powerful self-expression to share as you feel appropriate. Understand that while many people are ready to embrace difficult facts, many are not. Anticipate that you will be attacked and prepare your virtuous response in the spirit of competition, just as you do in other fields.
4. Prosecute the war leaders for obvious violation of the letter and spirit of US war laws and constant lies to engage in further wars. Because the crimes are so broad and deep, I recommend Truth and Reconciliation (T&R) to exchange full truth and return of stolen US assets for non-prosecution. This is the most expeditious way to understand and end all unlawful and harmful acts. Those who reject T&R are subject to prosecution.

(March 10) Wall Streets is headed toward international pariah status thanks to two recent actions by the European Union (EU).

On Tuesday, the EU announced that it was banning Wall Street banks from the lucrative government bond business in Europe.   They didn’t express official concern or fire off a warning shot.  They simply banned Wall Street from financing government bond deals like the one Goldman Sachs sold to Greece.  The Guardian pointed out that Wall Street bond business from European governments has gone down over the last two years.  Now the business is gone period. In effect, the EU has labeled Wall Streets business tactics as too dangerous for their governments to handle.

Then on Wednesday, the President of the European Commission said that the EU was considering a ban on government debt speculation through Credit Default Swaps (CDS)  President José Manuel Barroso announced that, “the Commission will examine closely the relevance of banning purely speculative naked sales on Credit Default Swaps of sovereign debt.”   While not an outright ban, the threat of banning CDS on national debt would be a major loss for the world’s financial speculators, particularly those in the United States and Great Britain.

These two hostile moves toward Wall Street by Europe were discussed by officials in the context of the current Greek debt crisis.  Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs has been implicated in helping the Greek government hide the true nature and size of the debt.  Discovery of this sleight-of-hand action exacerbated an already challenging crisis.

While the Greek crisis was presented as the proximate cause of the anti Wall Street actions, these announcements follow a March 6 national referendum in Iceland.  Citizens voted overwhelmingly, 93% to 2%, to reject their government’s plan to have citizens to cover the losses of Iceland’s second largest private bank, around $6 billion.

In January, public opinion polls showed opposition to the bailout in the mid 50% range.  The 93% opposition vote Saturday was a startling and bold statement of citizen opposition to subsidies for the private sector.

A few days before the vote, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said:

“The debt that had to be accumulated, when it’s going badly, is now becoming the object of speculation by precisely those institutions that we saved a year-and-a-half ago.  That’s very difficult to explain to people in a democracy who should trust us.”   Business Week, February 23

Escaping the sinking ship?

The Chancellor is right.  It has becomes increasingly difficult to explain socialism for the financial elite and survival of the fittest for the rest of us.  Despite promises of trickle down benefits from policies that benefit only those at the top, the record since the 1970’s has been one of declining living standards and benefits for those who produce the wealth through their hard work.

The politicians behind the two policies are the center-right Merkel of Germany and hard right President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.  Could their sudden, harsh actions against Wall Street reflect a general awareness among their patrons, the European financial elite, that citizens have had enough?  Are the leaders worried that the contrived government debt crises throughout the continent will be met by citizens with sustained, angry protests and democratic defiance of de facto socialism for the financial elite?

Goldman and other Wall Street banks are a perpetual presence along the corridors of power in Washington, DC.  Will this insider influence be used to dictate a U.S. response that reflects the will of Wall Street at the expense of the people?

Merkel and Sarkozy are hardly heroes of working men and women.   They’re reacting to the excesses of Wall Street as those excesses threaten the Euro currency and its beneficiaries, not their people.  To a greater degree, no doubt, their actions reflect fear among the European elite that the entire continent might rise up in a rage if they continue policies that turn the vast majority of citizens into indentured servants.

Citizens all over the world are getting a crash course on the politics of scarcity for the many and abundance for the very few.

END

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