September 6, 2013

Standardized Testing (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/back_to_school_20130905/

September 5, 2013

Making the World Safe for Banksters: Syria In the Cross-hairs

Making the World Safe for Banksters: Syria In the Cross-hairs

Posted on Sep 5, 2013
By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)

In an August 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-game’ Memo,” Greg Palast posted evidence of a secret late-1990s plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally. The vehicle to be used was the Financial Services Agreement of the World Trade Organization.

The “end-game” would require not just coercing support among WTO members but taking down those countries refusing to join. Some key countries remained holdouts from the WTO, including Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria. In these Islamic countries, banks are largely state-owned; and “usury” – charging rent for the “use” of money – is viewed as a sin, if not a crime. That puts them at odds with the Western model of rent extraction by private middlemen. Publicly-owned banks are also a threat to the mushrooming derivatives business, since governments with their own banks don’t need interest rate swaps, credit default swaps, or investment-grade ratings by private rating agencies in order to finance their operations.

Bank deregulation proceeded according to plan, and the government-sanctioned and -nurtured derivatives business mushroomed into a $700-plus trillion pyramid scheme. Highly leveraged, completely unregulated, and dangerously unsustainable, it collapsed in 2008 when investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, taking a large segment of the global economy with it. The countries that managed to escape were those sustained by public banking models outside the international banking net.

These countries were not all Islamic. Forty percent of banks globally are publicly-owned. They are largely in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—which house forty percent of the global population. They also escaped the 2008 credit crisis, but they at least made a show of conforming to Western banking rules. This was not true of the “rogue” Islamic nations, where usury was forbidden by Islamic teaching. To make the world safe for usury, these rogue states had to be silenced by other means. Having failed to succumb to economic coercion, they wound up in the crosshairs of the powerful US military. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/making_the_world_safe_for_banksters_syria_in_the_cross-hairs_20130905/?ln

September 5, 2013

Tens of Thousands March Against Mexico School Privatization

Public School teachers have taken to the streets in Mexico City to protest draconian educational reforms pushed forward by the Mexican government aimed at gutting unions and privatizing schools.


http://www.commondreams.org/video/2013/09/05-0

September 5, 2013

Why Philadelphia schools will close their doors forever

(Digital Journal) Philadelphia - The School District of Philadelphia, the eighth largest school district in the United States, nestled in the country’s fifth largest city, will make history when it permanently closes it doors within the next two years.

While Philadelphia is one of the largest school districts in the country, it is also one of the most bankrupt. The district will start the 2013-2014 school on September 9 but stares at a $304 million deficit. If it weren’t for the city borrowing $50 million on behalf of the school district, none of the 218 public schools would be opening next week. The slight infusion of money allows Superintendent William Hite to open schools on time but it’s far from meeting the needs of the district that had to lay off 20 percent of its total staff over the summer. It was the second consecutive year of thinning out staff that saw 3,800 teacher and staff positions eliminated, 100 school nurses, 90 school resource officers, and 43 bilingual counselors.

Although the school district continues to have financial and academic trouble year after year, the finger pointing halts at the State of Pennsylvania. After taking control of the district in 2001, the state has not fixed any of the problems in Philadelphia; allowing the current situation to spread like a virus. Jerusah O. Conner is an education professor at Villanova University and is an expert on the Philadelphia school district. In a recent interview, Professor Conner said that the state shoulders much of the blame for the district’s problems. “Pennsylvania ranks 8th lowest in the country, spending only 35.8 percent on education. Were it not for the deliberate underinvestment and disinvestment in Philadelphia schools by the state, the district could easily be enjoying a multibillion dollar surplus instead of a deficit.”

Many in the education field say that Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett is to blame for the crisis in Philadelphia. Corbett should have allocated more money for Philadelphia after taking office but instead, he made massive budget cuts in 2011, including cutting $1 billion from education statewide. The results of Corbett’s axe wielding left the district with a $629 million shortfall that year and the momentum of the crisis continued to grow. The city of Philadelphia attempted to generate money by raising property taxes 3.85 percent last year to generate an estimated $53 million for the district but that, just like this year’s gift of $50 million, is just a band aid on a severed artery. Some lawmakers in the Pennsylvania acknowledge the crisis and put together a state rescue package for Philadelphia. The $141 million aid, along with an additional $45 million from the state previously allocated to the district, is awaiting Governor Corbett’s signature. The money is being withheld by the state while Superintendent Hite and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter negotiate with the teachers’ union about taking enormous salary cuts and rolling back certain benefits. Since there has been no agreement with the union, funding from the state is being held and will only be released once negotiations are complete. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/357577#ixzz2e39Eg9ID

September 5, 2013

Howard Zinn: The Media As The Handmaiden Of War

Uploaded on May 18, 2010

http://www.achls.org
"Freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns the press." In this presentation of the program, Books of Our Times, Dean Lawrence R. Velvel interviews American Historian Howard Zinn on his books: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train - A personal History of Our Times, and Failure To Quit - Reflections of an Optimistic Historian.

September 5, 2013

Robert Parry: All Scrubbed Up, Nowhere to Show

from Consortium News:


All Scrubbed Up, Nowhere to Show
September 4, 2013

Exclusive: Two weeks after an apparent chemical attack in Syria, the Obama administration continues to tout its “scrubbed and rescrubbed” intelligence as proving that the Syrian government is to blame. But not a single piece of verifiable evidence has been presented to the American people, notes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. “intelligence community has scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence” proving that the Syrian government launched a poison gas attack on Aug. 21, but this supposedly spotless data is still being withheld from the American people.

So, just a little more than a decade after President George W. Bush misled the nation into a disastrous war in Iraq, President Barack Obama and his team are trying to sell a new war with Syria by presenting even fewer details.

Members of Congress also are reprising their roles from 2002-2003, displaying almost no skepticism as they get “classified” glimpses of this well-scrubbed intelligence. And, the mainstream press has slid into the same careless acceptance of U.S. government proclamations as fact, just as it did a decade ago.

For instance, the New York Times star columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who swallowed the Iraq War lies whole, is gorging himself again on whatever the U.S. government is dishing up on Syria. “Count me with the activists on the question of whether the United States should respond to the Syrian regime’s murder of some 1,400 civilians, more than 400 of them children, with poison gas,” Friedman wrote on Wednesday. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/04/all-scrubbed-up-nowhere-to-show/

September 5, 2013

Media Question Kerry's Mysterious 1,429 Death Toll in Syria

(The Nation) Days later and we still have no idea where Secretary of State John Kerry got that amazingly precise number of 1,429 killed in the alleged Syria chemical agent attack. He hasn’t cited full sourcing for it or taken questions on that. He merely claims he can’t say because it would “compromise” intelligence, which sounds like utter bull. President Obama also cited the death toll as fact in public statements beating the drums for war.

And all other sources put the number a little or a lot lower. Why does this matter in the current debate? Obviously the higher number, particularly with the also unproven claim of more than 400 dead kids, is meant to sell a US military attack to the American people—and that’s why it’s a key claim. That 1,400 number makes the latest attack seem so much worse than earlier alleged Assad chem attacks, which we did not find horrible enough to claim they crossed the “red line.”

Despite all that, most in US media for days still cited the number with little qualifying or probing. It was often said that Kerry "revealed" the number of deaths, not "claimed."

That’s starting to change, finally, although few in the media are charging Kerry with a deliberate lie. In the midst of a major AP story (on the US’s missing signs of the chemical attack) last night the reporter notes: “The administration says 1,429 died in the attack. Casualty estimates by other groups are far lower.” A September 3 New York Times piece referred to the “stunningly higher” US death figure. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/176039/media-question-kerrys-mysterious-1429-death-toll-syria-and-why-it-matters#axzz2dvzyQRTX

September 5, 2013

Robert Parry: All Scrubbed Up, Nowhere to Show

from Consortium News:


All Scrubbed Up, Nowhere to Show
September 4, 2013

Exclusive: Two weeks after an apparent chemical attack in Syria, the Obama administration continues to tout its “scrubbed and rescrubbed” intelligence as proving that the Syrian government is to blame. But not a single piece of verifiable evidence has been presented to the American people, notes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. “intelligence community has scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence” proving that the Syrian government launched a poison gas attack on Aug. 21, but this supposedly spotless data is still being withheld from the American people.

So, just a little more than a decade after President George W. Bush misled the nation into a disastrous war in Iraq, President Barack Obama and his team are trying to sell a new war with Syria by presenting even fewer details.

Members of Congress also are reprising their roles from 2002-2003, displaying almost no skepticism as they get “classified” glimpses of this well-scrubbed intelligence. And, the mainstream press has slid into the same careless acceptance of U.S. government proclamations as fact, just as it did a decade ago.

For instance, the New York Times star columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who swallowed the Iraq War lies whole, is gorging himself again on whatever the U.S. government is dishing up on Syria. “Count me with the activists on the question of whether the United States should respond to the Syrian regime’s murder of some 1,400 civilians, more than 400 of them children, with poison gas,” Friedman wrote on Wednesday. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/04/all-scrubbed-up-nowhere-to-show/

September 5, 2013

Could U.S. Military Action Turn Syrian Civil War Into a "Widespread Regional War"?

Pt. I

Pt. II


Published on Sep 3, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org - The White House has launched what it describes as a "flood the zone" campaign to persuade Congress to authorize bombing Syria days after President Obama surprised many by announcing he would seek congressional approval before taking action against the Syrian government. On Saturday, the White House released a proposed military resolution that authorizes the president to use the armed forces "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria." Critics of military intervention say the draft resolution could open the door to possible use of ground troops or eventual attacks on other countries. "It would intensify sectarian tensions inside Syria and neighboring states in particular in Lebanon and Iraq," says Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations and Middle East studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

"It would deepen the involvement of regional powers further in Syria, particularly Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar on the one hand, and Iran, Hezbollah and to a smaller extent, Iraq. It would rekindle the collective memory of Arabs and Muslims of previous Western hegemonic attacks. The Iraq model is very much alive in the Arab imagination." While Washington debates the use of military force, the United Nations has revealed the number of refugees who have fled Syria has topped two million. The tide of children, women and men leaving Syria has risen almost 10-fold over the past 12 months.

September 5, 2013

CEOs Being Paid for Poor Performance

CEOs Being Paid for Poor Performance

Wednesday, 04 September 2013 09:13
By Sam Pizzigati, Other Words | Op-Ed


On Wall Street, they’re giving Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer the bum’s rush.

Ballmer has just announced he’ll soon retire. After his announcement, Microsoft’s shares shot up 7 percent. The wise guys on Wall Street obviously can’t wait to see Ballmer go.

And neither can business pundits. Ballmer’s 13 years at Microsoft’s summit, they seem to agree, have been a huge disappointment.
Evidence certainly does exist to back up that appraisal. Microsoft, once a pacesetter, has become a second-tier presence in the hot new frontiers of mobile and cloud computing. Under Ballmer’s watch, Microsoft’s share price has dropped by about a third.

Meanwhile, Ballmer himself has done fabulously well. The value of his own personal Microsoft stock stash has jumped since 2000 — after years of lavish executive rewards — by more than $3 billion. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18585-ceos-being-paid-for-poor-performance