In another recent study on charter schools, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, “finds little to no progress in charter school impact in Pennsylvania.” ((CREDO at Stanford University finds little to no progress in charter school impact in Pennsylvania since release of CREDO’s 2013 national charter school report, June 4, 2019.))
A June 4, 2019 press release from CREDO states that: “Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found over four years of study that the typical charter school student in Pennsylvania makes similar progress in reading and weaker growth in math compared …
There once was a world where state actors operated in an anarchic international environment, where maximizing their overall power was their goal, and war was their means of achieving it. That world is now dead.
In its place we have the current spectacle of what were known as the “great powers” who are now, at least, formally if by no means fully, democratic and economically interdependent on one another and informally, if firmly, coordinated by transnational elites.
However, lest we be confused by their seeming historical similarities, this situation is very different than the one the world found itself in …
So it appears we managed to survive another terrifying Quds Day in Berlin. It was certainly touch and go there for a while, what with the media issuing hysterical warnings about the hordes of “Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists” that were going to materialize out of the ether, goose-step down the Kurfürstendamm, and reenact Kristallnacht, or something. The city was braced for an all-out Perso-Palestinian Quds Day Pogrom, which is always a threat on Quds Day in Berlin, but the hysteria level this year was elevated, due to the …
What’s gone on this morning sends clear and dangerous signals to journalists and newsrooms across Australia. This will chill public interest reporting.
These are dark times for journalists and publishers. It did not seem coincidental that Annika Smethurst, a News Corp journalist and political affairs editor, would be a target of an Australian Federal Police warrant. Chelsea Manning, courtesy of a ruling by Judge Anthony Trenga, remains in federal custody in the United States. Julian Assange is facing decline in the maximum security abode that is Belmarsh prison …
Ottawa faces a dilemma. How far are Trudeau’s Liberals prepared to go in squeezing Cuba? Can Canadian corporations with interests on the island restrain the most pro-US, anti-socialist, elements of the ruling class?
Recently, the Canadian Embassy in Havana closed its Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship section. Now most Cubans wanting to visit Canada or get work/study permits will have to travel to a Canadian embassy in another country to submit their documents. In some cases Cubans will have to travel to another country at least twice to submit information to enter Canada. The draconian measure has already undercut cultural exchange …
Until we all just start blathering and defecating on all the billionaires' contracts and words
by Paul Haeder / June 5th, 2019
America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
I’m digging the DV piece, “The Idiot” by Jason Holland, since in a critical mass sort of black hole kind of way, his main thesis is reflective of the experiences many …
Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire, written and directed by Scott Noble, continues the run of quality documentaries by Metanoia Films. The film provides the historical context that allows the viewer to understand why inequality reigns while social justice and peace lag today. The, at first blink, curious title stems from a quotation by the American labor leader August Spies, who was one of four anarchists hanged in 1887 after being found guilty in the bomb explosion that wounded and killed several policemen and civilians in what became known as the Haymarket affair.
I have been pondering lately the significance of two elder visionaries who have exerted a lasting influence on me – Noam Chomsky (90) and Bob Dylan (77) – the former because he is an intellectual ‘rock of Gibraltar’ now in his ninth decade, and the latter because I recently saw the Nobel Laureate perform in concert more than half a century after the lyrics of his timeless classics became etched in my youthful brain.
Interestingly, both men were (are) word geniuses – one being the heralded poet- musician ‘voice of a generation’ and the other the ‘father of modern linguistics’ – who have radically …
Julian Assange is being slowly murdered by “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” at Belmarsh prison in the south-east of London. The prison is notorious for holding people who have never been charged with a crime indefinitely. It is also called the British version of Guantanamo, and, typically used to detain so-called terrorists, thus called by the British police and secret service and aped by the British MSM and establishment. Terrorists that become terrorists by continuous and repeated accusations, by media propaganda, but not necessarily by fact. Remember, if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes the truth in the minds …
Joe Biden is one of about two dozen 2020 democratic candidates running for President of the United States. This is not his first presidential campaign.
Biden served under President Barack Obama as Vice President for eight years. Obama became well-known for many antisocial policies in many spheres, especially education, including the aggressive promotion of privately-operated charter schools that siphon enormous sums of money from over-tested, under-funded, and constantly-demonized public schools. Obama also supported the widely-rejected Race to the Top law, the much-hated Common Core, and the heavily-loathed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In 2015, Obama replaced NCLB with a worse …
In a sign of how politically vulnerable he has rapidly become, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged Israel into new elections last week – less than two months after his far-right bloc appeared to win at the ballot box.
Netanyahu was forced to dissolve the 120-member parliament to block his chief rival, Benny Gantz, from getting a chance to assemble an alternative governing coalition.
Gantz, a former army general who heads the Blue and White party, won 35 seats, the same number as Netanyahu’s Likud party, in the April election, but had fewer potential allies to form a majority. So in September, Israelis …
Mumia Abu Jamal just turned 65. Known as “The Voice of the Voiceless”, he has spent most of his life in prison – 37 years now – after his death sentence in 1982. “A vindictive trial” as denounced by his supporters around the world. The evolution of this court case seems to show that, despite everything, they are right. After the commutation of the death penalty to life imprisonment in 2011, a landmark decision has just been made: the Pennsylvania court finally accepted for the first time that Mumia’s …
If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.
— Michel de Montaigne, Complete Book of Essays, Book 11, Essay 12, Page 543
For your consideration, the modern idiot in a habitat of prime viral fecundity; after centuries of western civilization spreading toxic oppressive imperialism through contrived financial schemes and brutish warfare the dream of global neoliberalism has come to full fruition where all personal responsibility for actions of selfish business interests has been discretely removed from the profiteers and accountability placed upon all powerful implacable nation states. As a result what …
Dr. Riad Malki, Palestine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs
Freedom not conditional liberty. Sovereignty not limited autonomy. Peace not subjugation.
Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank in London, recently invited Dr Riad Malki, Palestine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, to talk about the future of Palestine ahead of the ‘deal of the century’ dreamed up by the Trump administration.
Malki is involved in shaping the Palestinian response to that initiative when it is finally revealed.
During questions the editor of the BBC News website, Raffi Berg, said that while the official PLO …
? Note to readers of my column: I normally organize my weekly missives in such a way that they work almost as well in written form as they do in podcast form. This week is a bit different — this week’s podcast doesn’t just involve a song at the end that’s related to the subject at hand, but the podcast is about the album, and includes all 13 songs on it, interspersed. But if …
The divide and conquer tactics practiced by minority ruling powers are simply age-old class divisions forced on their majority subjects, but they have become more dangerous as imperial capitalism has entered a most critical period threatening more destruction than ever before. At a time when real global democracy is both more possible and necessary than ever, humanity is split into more sub-divisions than ever, with economic stratification disguised by group identity labels, most totally and a-scientifically as separate races. That is the way authority wants it and why it must be overcome before capitalism’s self-destructive roots become total reality and …
Another crude and sad chapter, yet more evidence of a system’s vengeance against its challengers. Julian Assange, like they dying Roman emperor Vespasian, may be transforming into a god of sorts, but the suffering of his mortal physical is finding its mark. While some in the cynical, narcissistic press corps still find little to commend his case, the movement to highlight his fate, and the extra-territorial vengeance of the United States, grows.
Often reviled and dismissed as ineffectual if not irrelevant, the United Nations has offered Assange some measure of protection through its articulations and findings. Ironically enough, powers happy to …
The narrow aim of maximizing profit as fast as possible compels owners of capital to say and do whatever they have to to get richer, no matter how irrational and contradictory, and no matter the cost to society and the environment. Such an aim is irresponsible and outdated, and needs to be replaced by a human-centered aim that recognizes the need for a modern economy controlled by the working class and people themselves.
The key distinction between class will and personal will is critical to appreciate here because it cuts through persistent confusion surrounding why major owners of capital do what …
The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising.
In 2018, the Fed announced plans to raise rates by 2020 to “normal” levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at …
Four years ago, according to the New York Times (5/29/19), 34-year-old Thomas Gilbert Jr. stormed into his father’s room–and shot him dead. Calling 911, his mother quickly identified him as the shooter and described him as ”nuts–but I had no idea he was this nuts.” The victim, a prominent hedge-fund manager on Wall-Street, had been threatening to cut Junior’s $1000 weekly allowance–a tactic, she explained, to try to force young “Tommy” to enter a psychiatric hospital.
As the case has now gone to trial, the assistant D.A., admitting that the defendant has been treated for “mental illnesses” like anxiety and depression, …
Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault.
North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that things are not going well”. If everything else fails, they simply try to get some second or third job, and just survive, somehow.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but …
I have been a proud member of the National Lawyers Guild for over 30 years, beginning in law school, and serving as union staff of the SF/Bay Area Chapter for over a decade. The Guild was founded in 1937 as an organization of lawyers to defend FDR’s New Deal, and was the first racially integrated Bar Association. Its preamble states that it is:
…an association dedicated to the need for basic change in the structure of our political and economic system…which shall function as an effective political and social force in the service of the people, to the end that human …
On the eighth of April, shortly before London police forcibly carried WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy, a doctor named Sondra S Crosby wrote a letter to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights requesting that the office look into Assange’s case. Today, following a scorching rebuke of multiple governments by UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer, mass media outlets around the world are reporting that Julian Assange has been found to be the victim of brutal psychological torture.
In August of 1987 the world came together after a panic-attack over ongoing depletion of atmospheric ozone, aka: The Ozone Hole. Subsequently, global agreements to stop ozone depletion became the first ever “universally ratified treaties in UN history.” The world banned CFCs.
Thereafter, an era of good feelings about ozone restoration swept the world community and 25 years afterwards Science News magazine reported: “Ozone Hole at Smallest Size in Decades” d/d October 26, 2012.
Glory hallelujah! As a glorious Great Exhale spread across the land, similar to releasing pressurized air out of a humongous balloon, wheezing and hissing for days on end, …
It’s been more than six years since Edward Snowden went public. After all the breathless headlines, Hollywood movies, book deals, Pulitzer prizes, and glossy prime time biopics. What, pray tell, has come of it? For the average American – bupkis. In fact, mass surveillance is actually growing by leaps and bounds. Such that those who wish to salvage the remnants of their individual privacy will be forced to make some tough choices in the years ahead.
Do you find yourself unable to nod off to the sweet bliss of ignorance or denial when contemplating the catastrophic state of the world? Do you find yourself feeling deeply concerned about the enormous harm occurring to humans, our fellow Earthlings and this beautiful planet, our home? Do you find yourself feeling deeply concerned about our future—for humanity, our children/grandchildren, and our fellow living beings?
If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, and if you’re not willing to “ask your doctor” for a pill to push these thoughts and feelings away, then it’s likely you’re finding yourself …
Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. While teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions more. Wells Fargo executives are cases in point. The vastly overpaid CEO of General Electric left his teetering company in shambles. In 2019, Boeing’s CEO got a bonus (despite the Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8 crash in 2018). …
The attorney of WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange’s has revealed that he was too ill to appear in a video chat for his extradition hearing. Assange has spent the past seven weeks at Belmarsh prison, where his health has continued to deteriorate. The WikiLeaks founder faces extradition to the US over “espionage” charges dating back to 2010. Former UK MP George Galloway joins In Question to break this all down.
“I have no confidence whatsoever in the British justice system” says Craig Murray after Wikileaks are ‘gravely concerned’ over sharp decline in Julian Assange’s health.
“The greatest threat to the Earth is thinking someone else will save it.” The responsibility is ours; politicians and governments are complacent, dishonest and buried in the ideology of the past. Despite repeated warnings nothing substantial has been done and time is running out. No one else is going to Save Our Planet; a global movement of civil disobedience is needed to force governments to take the radical action needed.
In 1992 the Union of Concerned Scientists (made up of 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists) issued the ‘World Scientist’ Warning to Humanity’. They stated that, “a great change in …
