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

This article may be reproduced in full or part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

Paying students for grades

The commodification of education and learning reach deep into the pockets and psychic recesses of everyday life.  With testing regimes placing ‘grades’ as the gold index for success in and out of schools, it is little wonder that paying students for grades is on the advance.  Holding out crass material rewards in the form of greenbacks for these trinkets they call ‘grades’ is now just a form of currency exchange.  In fact, with education itself having little more than ‘exchange value’ for most participants, the new ‘Gold/Grade’ standard was inevitable.

In June of 2009 in New York, according to the New York Post:

“About two-thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program — which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments — improved their scores since last year’s state tests by margins above the citywide average.  The gains at some schools approached 40 percentage points” (LEARN- &-EARN PLAN PAYS OFF SCORES SOAR AT CASH-FOR-KIDS SCHOOLS

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_Ciw4CQ7×8j0tM8yUOdZ35I;jsessionid=2A1FB30BA6C6F096AE9149AC1F52DD36#ixzz0hgZQcK2l)

(http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_Ciw4CQ7×8j0tM8yUOdZ35I;jsessionid=2A1FB30BA6C6F096AE9149AC1F52DD36#ixzz0hgZ72HtQ)

(lynn.bonner@newsobserver.com)

More than 8,000 kids have collectively earned $1.25 million since September of 2008 in the two years the privately funded pilot program has been in place.  Another version of Race to the Top through good old fashioned cold cash!

The pay-for-grades initiative, created by Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, is run out of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Educational Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs), which is conducting similar cash-for-kids trials in Chicago and Washington, DC. (ibid).

According to their website EdLabs says its mission is:

“transforming education through the power of the scientific method (http://www.edlabs.harvard.edu/).

They go on to announce:

The most important medical innovation of the 21^st century was the randomized clinical trial: a method for getting at effective solutions.  Education has not yet followed suit.  It is time for education to adopt the scientific method and, like the medical field, immerse itself in path breaking research and development.  The pharmaceutical industry alones spend $40 billion per year on R and D to find new solutions to medical problems.  Education spends essentially $0.  We believe that applying an  R&D model to education will provide a way to unearth root causes of performance gaps, effectively evaluate options for reform, and achieve effective and transparent solutions” (ibid).

One would think that with this ‘evidence based’ model EdLab would be conducting research on chimpanzees or lab rats.  No, not this time, this time the experiment is aimed directly at the population; our kids as guinea pigs for the lab-coated research teams.  Evidently part of the science is based on Pavlovian theory and the method is to see, if life canines, students will salivate at the thought of a commercial transaction for learning.  If they do, this is evidence they learn; if they don’t then it is not.  Simple, right?

But the whole scam, wrapped up in scientism, hardly science, is really a statement about the approach, that in this case Harvard is asking us to use when we try to understand student performance in school.  The underlying assumption is that motivation is the culprit and only money can cure this.  CEOs use raises, bonuses and stock options as carrots to get workers to excel, right.  So why not apply the lesson to kids.  Poverty, undernourishment, homelessness, lack of affordable housing, delinquency, racism lack of jobs, lack of relevance in education, testing regimes that reduce learning to facts to be memorized along broken families or families struggling with two jobs to even stay afloat have nothing to do with EdLabs ‘novel’ approach nor in their mind motivational factors and learning.

A look at EdLabs partners find the usual suspects we find when we turn the earth to discover who is actually promoting these pernicious programs.  KIPP charter schools is one.  Teach for America and the Sesameworkshop are the two others. All three are strong players in the educational privatization efforts sweeping the nation and darlings of Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education.  However, these groups seem to have turned to actual mind control with their Sparks program.

One student in New York, Alize Cancel, a 13-year-old at IS 286, spent some of the $180 she has earned this year on school supplies and shoes.

“It’s all we talk about. Every day we ask our teachers, ‘Did we pass? When do we get paid?  It made me study more because I was getting paid” (ibid).

So much for the love of learning and critical discourse.

According to a September 2008 article in USA Today:

“As children settle in for the 2008-09 school year, business interests are lining up behind pay-for-grades initiatives at schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, New York and elsewhere. The most ambitious project, funded by the foundations of ExxonMobil, Bill Gates and Michael Dell, will pay students at 67 high schools in seven states $100 to $200 for scores on advanced-placement (AP) college-prep exams that are high enough to earn college credit. It also awards teachers for getting the right training to teach AP classes and pays them bonuses for each successful student” (Jones, Del., CEOs split on paying for good grades September 12, 2008 http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2008-09-10-pay-for-grades_N.htm)

Gates and Dell are notorious for not paying their workers when they can get away with it and of course they opt to outsource American jobs to third world countries where the cost of labor is cheaper, thus hollowing out communities.  As to Exxon, they don’t even pay taxes, so a few bucks for grades is chicken scratch to the predators.  Never mind that, they’re philanthropists, right?  Arne Duncan seems to think so.

When student performance is numerically calcified and institutionalized within education then we see the true hidden curriculum: that is to teach kids that all human activity must be compensated for in the form of cash.  The ethics behind programs like these that inculcate such gross ideas like crass materialism, go it alone learning and compensation-based learning are premised on the monetarization of consciousness through external reward systems; they are capitalist social engineering programs that encourage the embracement of wage-slavery and consumerism, both psychically and socially, through the colonization  of subjectivity.  This is the real educational lesson that is being passed on in the name of educational efficacy.  “Get good grades, get good money.  Get good money; get good stuff.”

Using grades to close and then privatize schools

The earning and rewarding of grades is not just being used to monetarize learning and commodify education, it is also a scheme used by the privatizers and their managerial courtesans to close schools under No Child Left Behind for not making steady ‘annual yearly progress’ (AYP) on standardized tests.  When this happens, as in the case of Rhode Island to use just one example, the grades can then be used as ‘evidence’ to justify the closing of public schools and then subsequently turning them over to the new privatized makeover artists like charter school educational maintenance organizations (EMO’s) (the same people who support EdLab!).  Thus, grades are not only the currency of the masters to dangle in front of the hoi poloi, the students; they are also the raison de’etre, the ‘scientific tool’ that the privatizers use to condone school closures, denying many children education while forging new opportunities for investors.

When the numerologists designed NCLB, under both the democratic and republican party leadership, they knew they now had a powerful weapon they could yield to attack public education and public unions.  With ‘measurable outcomes’ the new logic of the irrational, the ‘scientific method’ could now argue for the school closures.  Never mind that the tests themselves evaluate little or no critical thinking or learning; they are not supposed to do this — they are inauthentic underachievement devices utilized for everything but assessing learning.

They are designed to classify, categorize and sort students in a social engineering fantasy of assuring who enters the corridors of power, and also who will be placed on dead-end vocational tracks or low-paid service work in the corridors or exploitation.  In other words, they are not only used to track kids, as predators have a tendency to do, but they operate as upper level entry conveyor belts for those whose prodigy is seen wedded to the inauthentic tests.

Other uses of grades: The Case of North Carolina where if you can’t pay students for grades, charge them for grades!

However, a new and interesting twist arose in North Carolina in 2009 when it came to the use of test scores as ‘exchange value’.  In Goldsboro, a middle school in North Carolina, evidently cookie and bake sales were not able to bring in the necessary revenue the school needs now that they are facing fiscal budget cuts and rising deficits.  So the school, Rosewood School, and Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with an innovative idea and Shepherd endorsed it as a new way to raise money.  What was it?  Selling grades themselves.  That’s right, forget about paying kids to do well on tests, why not just sell grades to kids as if they were commodities like gold or silver.  Principal Shepherd commended the idea commenting that:

“Last year they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” (District nixes cash-for-grades fundraiser, November 11, 2009 http://www.newsobserver.com/2009/11/11/185460/district-nixes-cash-for-grades.html).

So, instead of relying on chocolates and bake sales Shepherd went ahead and instigated the “pay for play”.

A $20 ‘donation’ to ROSEwood Middle School by a student would have gotten a student a 20 test points — 10 extra points on two tests of the student’s choosing.  That could raise a ‘B’ to an ‘A’, or a failing grade to a ‘D’ (ibid).  That is until Wayne County, North Carolina school administrators stopped the fundraiser on November 11th 2009, issuing the following statement:

“Yesterday afternoon, the district administration met with [Rosewood Middle School principal] Mrs. Shepherd and directed the the following actions be taken: (1) the fundraiser will be immediately stopped; (2) no extra grade credit will be issued that may have resulted from donations; and (3) beginning November 12, all donations will be returned” (ibid).

Shepherd balked and rejected the suggestion that the school is selling grades.  She was quick to respond:

“Extra points on two tests won’t make a difference in a student’s final grade. It’s wrong to think that “one particular grade could change the entire focus of nine weeks” (ibid).

Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for the state Department of Public Instruction retorted:

“If a student in college were to approach a professor to buy a grade, we would be frowning on that. It might even be a reason for dismissal. We’re teaching kids something that if they were to do it later, they could get in trouble for” (ibid).

Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics and an ethicist at Clemson University hopes Rosewood reconsiders its fundraising strategy:

“To my mind, it’s the integrity of the educational enterprise that’s at stake here” (ibid).

Carmen Zepp, a Raleigh parent, said there should be policies against offering students test credit for anything other than what they’ve learned.  Zepp objected this year when her daughter’s social studies teacher at Knightdale High School had students bring to school tissues and hand sanitizer. The supplies counted for 25 percent of a “supply check” grade.  According to Zepp:

“It’s awful.  It’s indicative of the fact that our schools don’t have enough money. They can’t get tissues or hand sanitizer or whatever without bribery. And that’s pretty sad” (ibid)

Wait!  What about the ‘free market’?  Some would argue that under unregulated capitalism, where everything is reduced to an exchange value and a commodity, this is just perfectly fine!  After all, it is keeping with the ethic of fundamental free market capitalism that says everything, no matter what it is, must be commodified and has a price.  If students expect to succeed in the downsized Empire, shouldn’t they be able to learn the rules of the market?  After all, Eli Broad buys schools, Bill Gates buys workers and educational policy, the Walton Family buys associates, and corporations are now free to pay as much as they wish in the form of free speech to buy their own coin operated politicians and public policy.  Shouldn’t grades be allowed to be bought and sold as well?

Isn’t this the lesson we really want to teach kids that anything is for sale, from body parts, politicians, weapons, public policy to grades?  That under capitalism we will not only pay you for your grades and use your grades to pay you back by closing your schools, but you too can buy grades under the notion of ‘choice’ on the educational stock exchange for as little as $20.00; the cost of two dime bags of dope on the street.  And if you can’t afford the cost of the grades, there will not doubt be a Pay Day Loan outfit near your school that will front you the cash at 456% interest.  Such a deal!

Making the grade: “Loose Change” we can believe in!

All of the current efforts aimed at educational reform, be they Race to the Top, charter schools, compensation pay for students, closing schools under No Child Left Behind, merit pay for teachers are all based on the sordid ethical conceptions of competition as the motivating factor in learning to become an educated person.  This should be no surprise.  In an era of deception, insipid individualism and covetous acquisition, all hall marks of the capitalist economy, children are to learn early that their success in life will be defined by their status in life.  They are taught that wealth is money, when in fact wealth is community, friendships and family.

In order to understand education, it is increasingly obvious to more and more people that one must understand the pressure cooker in which education reigns, and this pressure cooker is capitalism.  As long as the ethic and material conditions that state that profits come before people, we will see not only grades commodified but the actual commodification of childhood, which if you’ve noticed, has gone unabated for at least thirty years.

Perhaps a ‘Grade Market’, much like the stock market is needed; a place where children can buy and sell grades as ‘futures’ or ‘derivatives’ or ‘hedge’ their bets in the grade market.  Certainly a career on Wall Street will require a familiarity with toxic assets and in education there is no greater toxic asset than grades.

Levying war against the US is defined as treason in the US Constitution. The political and corporate media oligarchy who lied to levy war in Iraq committed treason against the US.

AMERICAN INDUSTRIALISTS TRADED WITH THE ENEMY

Author Charles Higham, in a shocking expose of American corporate greed, has revealed a disgraceful if not criminal collaboration of some of America’s largest corporations with Nazi German not only before but during World War II.

Higham documents his claims with information gathered through the National Archives and the Freedom of Information Act. His book, Trading With The Enemy, gives evidence that such industrial and financial giants as DuPont, Rockefeller, Ford, Chase Manhattan Bank, I.T.T., General Motors, and Standard Oil purposely collaborated with the Nazi’s either for monetary gain or because they were Nazi sympathizers hoping for a German victory.

Higham claims that, among other examples, Standard Oil supplied fuel for German U-boats through neutral Spain; ITT supplied equipment for the Nazi’s buzz bombs; Ford maintained a motor plant in Vichy France that produced tanks and troop carriers for the Third Reich; Chase Manhattan Bank trafficked in the Gold market through the Nazi-controlled Bank for International Settlement in Basel.

Most of the above concerns were interlocked with the German industrial giant I.G. Farben, the company that produced poison gas for the death camps and that ran the largest camp, Auschwitz, for its slave labor.

Source for this story was a review of the Higham book that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/9/83; it was cited as the #8 censored story of 1982.

REPORTED IN 2010

The Canadian Press reported on January 26, 2010, that “Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and a monster but arose to power thanks to big business leaders and other supporters who appreciated his vow to destroy communism and control workers, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone said Monday.

“Stone, who is working on a 10–part documentary on the 20^th century titled ‘The Secret History of the United States,’ said the German dictator was ‘enabled by Western bankers’ and managed to ‘seduce’ Germany’s military industrial complex.”

Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it!

All eyes should be on Detroit where the poverty and inequality is glaring under the oppressive weight of ‘compassionate conservatism’ but where  the resistance is dazzling  .  Educational activists and all public and private workers  within all parts of the nation should learn from and support the work of Detroit Teachers and their community of encouragement of strength in their fight against the privatization plans of wind-up, coin operated politicians in the pay of the billionaire philanthropists out to shot-gun public education.  The unity is not only palpable but the victories attainable.

Now the Games begin!  Full disclosure will be forced through legal discovery

The strength of the Detroit community standing up to the dictatorial rule of Robert Bobb is growing monumentally. Now the majority of the city is united to speak the truth and defend public education in Detroit, as the Detroit School Board and hundreds of teachers are represented by the legal team of Scheff, Washington, and Driver. This alliance is unprecedented and indicates the historic significance of this moment in Detroit.  Not only is the alliance unprecedented, it is through ‘discovery’, when Bobb is forced to undergo interrogation, in the form of “interrogatories” as his underlings will also be forced to do, and “depositions”, that the truth will really emerge about the relentless plans to privatize Detroit schools.  We should be treated to quite a show if Eli Broad and his merry band of privatizers are forced to undergo what is called “discovery” in legal circles.

While the corporate media continues to attack teachers, we are more energized than ever, feeling support of the community growing around us, locally and nationally as word gets out about what we’re doing.  And it is getting out nationally, for it must; not just for Detroit, but for all of us, for all of us in the public sector who have given our lives and our hearts to public education.  For our students who want nothing more than an education and a chance at life, and for working people who will become more embolden over the winning strategy of Detroit Teachers, their union and their district.

The next step, elect the Defend Public Education/Save our Students Slate to represent the DFT at the AFT Michigan and national conventions, and grow our movement by working with other teachers from all over the US to fight the AFT policies dismantling our locals!

Let us hope that Robert Bobb is put under the lens of scrutiny not just for his mendacious and perfidious behavior, but for those of us to be able to see how corporate power works, how handpicked water carriers like Bobb are picked, who controls them and why.  This is very much like the health debate where faux groups and ‘so called’ leaders are privately elected to ‘represent’ the public when their only interest in privatizing public systems.  Touché! Detroit and thank you!

Detroit Board of Education to Join Teachers in the fight against privatization in the form of ‘Robert Bobb’

Board of Ed Signs on to Lawsuit

detroitteacher | March 9, 2010 at 12:18 AM | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pLykY-5x

Dateline: Monday, March 9^th, 2010

The Detroit Board of Education is joining the teachers of the Defend Education/Save our Students slate in the lawsuit against Robert Bobb for accepting additional compensation of $145,000 from private foundations.

The Board vote was unanimous among the voting members to join the suit, which claims this private contribution is a conflict of interest.

During public comment prior to the Board’s closed session with attorneys community members present spoke out strongly, telling the board “You gotta do something for the people” and “You have the power, use it”. Speakers included teachers, parents, students, grandparents, great-grandparents, and bus drivers. What has previously been labeled as a radical dissident “splinter” group of teachers, is actually an entire community coming together to stand up for themselves.

There will be a press Conference Tomorrow (Tues. March 9) at 3:45 in front of the Fisher Building.

Readers, I will keep you informed at dailycensored.  Look for FOX News to get into the frey as the billionaire ‘boyz’ club looks for media manipulation and sensory deprivation.

Now that is starting to change.

Youth Movement

In California, a college and university student movement started over the last six months. The attacks on college and university students that have generated this movement are part of wider attacks on public education as well as on all public services and on the working class in general. Almost immediately, the university students grasped the slogan “defend free public education” – making the link between their own situation and that of public education in general. At a California state-wide student conference last October, it was agreed to organize a state-wide strike for March 4.

Here in the working class town of Oakland, California, an “Outreach Committee” was set up build the movement in this area. One key issue was decided immediately: Our intent was to actually disrupt the workings of the state, and we were going to try to do that through setting up a protest starting at noon, rather than at the end of the work day. We also wanted this to be an event of, by and for the youth of Oakland.

This contrasted to San Francisco, where the union officialdom conspired with the Board of Education to block a day-time rally. There, they organized a rally for 5:00 p.m. to ensure that workers didn’t walk off work and students didn’t walk out of school. Throughout the region, those forces who sought to tame the movement pushed for attendance at this San Francisco rally rather than the one in Oakland.

A key focus in Oakland was to organize in the high schools. However, the size of our effort was limited by the extreme constraints on our actual forces and resources. As a result, in most schools we were unable to establish regular working groups to organize a strike. Yet on March 4, by 7:30 in the morning, there were some 30 or 40 students standing outside the high school near my home, with home-made picket signs in hand, shouting and cheering. With just the minimal outside help, these students had organized themselves!

Euphoria

The noon rally at the city center was one of the most dynamic this particular participant has ever seen in his 40 years of activism, as wave after wave of students came rolling into the rally. Hundreds of students from Oakland High School, came marching in, shouting, cheering and dancing. Then came students from East Oakland, from other parts of Oakland, and finally from Berkeley, including University of California, Berkeley. Each contingent was greeted with euphoria, and they responded in kind.

It was consciously decided in advance that we wanted the real voice of the youth to be heard, not some pre-packaged speeches of “important”, mainly older, people. An important part of this plan was to have the music of the youth – rap or “spoken word” – be part of the program. Each contingent of students decided for themselves who would represent them. No mere quotes on an article can adequately portray the electricity of the event, no more than a photograph can portray the splendor of the Grand Canyon. With that in mind, here are some quotes from the event. (Note that almost every other comment was greeted by hands and fists waving in the air and youth cheering and shouting.):

“They Can’t Keep Us Down”

From two high school students: “We want all the students’ voices to be heard, no matter what… Si se puede! (‘Yes we can’ in Spanish).”…. “You cut funding, you cut our dreams away.” “Power to the people”  “We know that the schools in the hills (where the wealthy tend to live) aren’t being cut; we know that the schools in the (working class) flats (flatlands) are being cut.”

From a young teacher: “My parents are immigrants. They came to the country for hope. I don’t see hope…. I’m glad to see that you all know that… you are the future, and I want every one of you to feel that you have a future and a life that is yours, not someone else’s…. I see a community here that is helping itself, and we got to let them know that they can’t keep us down, can they? (Chorus of “noooo!”).”

From short interviews with two community college students: “Everything is broken… We need money. We need teachers… this is the start of something (not just a one day affair).”  …“This is the beginning of something…. This is for the older generation, the younger generation, for everybody.”

From a former substitute teacher, presently a construction worker and socialist: “You should be very proud of the historical traditions of your city. The very last general strike in the US took place in this city (Oakland), Dec. 1, 1946. Twenty years later, straight out of West Oakland, Huey P. Newton, Bobby  Seale and 16 year old Bobby Hutton started the black Panthers…. We’ve taken the struggle forward. We are not stopping. This  must be one of the opening shots. Are you with me? (Cheers and shouts of“Yeaaahhh!”) Should education be free? (Yeaaaahhhhh!”)”

Music and “Controlled Chaos”

It is said that every movement of working class people generates its own music. This was clearly seen here, as the music of the youth – rap, or “spoken word” – was a central part of the program. The unrelenting, driving energy of the rap artists permeated the entire event.

In the history of military strategy and tactics, it is often noted that any plan for any particular battle almost always breaks down within the first few minutes as it is impossible to account for all the factors involved. To an extent, this was what happened at the Oakland protest; from the start, the enormous enthusiasm led to a state of near chaos on the stage as dozens of students nearly overwhelmed the stage, and the organizers were unprepared for this. It was a state of near ‘controlled chaos”, but this very state was overall positive. The youth, themselves, clearly saw and felt that this was their event, that it was their feelings and thoughts that were being expressed in the way that they, themselves express things.

The Oakland protest stands as sharp contrast to that organized for 5:00 p.m. by the Oakland school teachers’ union officialdom nearby and the one at the same time organized in San Francisco by a combined effort of the San Francisco capitalist politicians and the San Francisco union hierarchy. Both were tame and dull in contrast.

Movement Will Continue

Unlike developments of previous decades, this youth movement is almost certain to carry on, since the issue that generates it – the economic crisis and the resulting economic attacks – will not disappear. As it does, it will tend to sink ever deeper roots into the working class as a whole. This is so because, unlike the period of the youth movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, in this period the working class as a whole has been facing major and ongoing attacks. Combined with this has been the process of an ever-increasing isolation between the rank and file of the unions and their own leadership. As a result, the union hierarchy is in a far weaker position to control and co-opt this growing movement..

Attempts to Co-opt

This doesn’t mean they won’t try. They are already combining with the liberal wing of the (capitalist controlled) Democratic Party to divert the movement. The main drive in that attempt is to tame it, to make it less confrontational and less disruptive. Coinciding with this is an attempt to channel its goals into those more acceptable to the union officialdom and the liberal Democrats. They have two main goals: First is channel this growing movement away from direct confrontation with and mass disobedience of the forces of the state; they will attempt this through attempts to drag the movement into liberal Democratic politics. In addition, they will try to divert the movement into more tame goals.

It is inevitable that in the earlier stages of this youth movement, the focus will be on public education. However, it was clear from talking with different young people that they clearly see the link between this and the attacks on all workers. It will be important to consciously foster this as the movement develops.

No movement of any sector of the working class, however, develops in a straight line towards confronting the system as a whole. However, the conditions for this are more present now than at any time in this writer’s experience. This is because of the economic crisis that capitalism as a whole is experiencing and the resulting unrelenting attacks on the working class.

Global Spring Time

Thus, a new “spring time” is dawning in America – a spring time for the US working class. As opposed to how spring weather develops globally – where spring in the Northern Hemisphere means fall in the global South – this springtime is a global spring for the world’s working class.