Globalist Jesus Worshiped at Golden Globes While the “Other’ CIA Film Received It’s Award

by Scott Creighton

Globalist Jesus slipped out on stage at the Golden Globes yesterday and the idol worship and false praise rang out loud and clear from all those Hollywood elites who were afraid to be seen not rejoicing in his splendor. His background didn’t matter, his brutal corporate history didn’t matter, his lies and betrayal of his wife and the honor of his office didn’t matter. All that matters is the fact that he is as rich as the ancient dictators of old and the fact that his fascist fingers grip power with the help of Hollywood’s new team of acclaimed writers: the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was a despicable display of Orwellian servitude by a group of soulless, talentless hacks risen to the ranks of what is laughably called “the A-List” simply because they will bow to their new morally bankrupt neo-liberal god-king.

Charter Schools Save Money? Think Again – $500,000 Bonus to a Failed Charter Principal

by Scott Creighton

student at Young’s Motel 6 High School

School didn’t have computers, a library or even cafeteria services and the money the for-profit school saved by cheating 181 kids out of a decent education, they apparently divided up among themselves when the gig was finally up in Orlando. Christ, according to their recent evaluation, they couldn’t even teach English!

When you think about charter schools, you think about someone trying to sell the “public/private partnership” in terms of saving taxpayers some money. It’s simply not true. It costs more per student to educate through a charter school system and most studies show the education they receive is rather substandard at best. No accountability, no morals.. the WalMartization of Education is at hand.

Spanish Townsfolk, Our Monster: Now What Are We Going to Do About It?

by Scott Creighton

UPDATE 3: “The French, Spanish and Greek governments all announced multibillion-euro austerity plans yesterday in the face of massive popular opposition.”

UPDATE 2: Slavery in the UK. The unemployed are being forced to work for major British corporations, for free, just so they can continue to receive their unemployment benefits. This plan is the same as one attempted here in the states, one that still has a great deal of support in congress. Imagine the profits retailers could pocket if they got free seasonal workers during the holiday buying season.

UPDATE: In Dubai, one of our close economic allies, they call slave owners “sponsors” and fine their slaves if they attempt to take their own lives when the desperation of their true situation becomes too unbearable to live with.

“I found myself thrown away and I thought of my poor family back home. I felt desperate and decided I should die,” she said. The National

———

While Americans cheer for the return of  zebra striped officials to the NFL games today, the Spanish, the Greeks and many others across Europe are fighting for their very lives and the freedom to determine the quality of them on their own. Our apparent lack of concern is understandable when you consider that what they are desperately struggling against is in a large part, our creation. Not only is Dr. Frankenstein disinterested in the harm his creation inflicts on the people around him by choice, but the townsfolk themselves willingly turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the cries of their neighbors in nearby villages just so long as the monster feeds elsewhere.

Promoting Fascism At the Clinton Global(ist) Initiative: Mitt Romney

by Scott Creighton

I can’t think of a better front man for the soulless Democratic Party than Bill Clinton. He a liar, a womanizer, a sleaze who used his position of authority to stick his willy in a 21 year old intern AND he has made a billion or so dollars promoting his “Global Initiative” of bring fascism lite or “the public/private partnership” to America and the rest of the developing world (yes folks, we are the developing world these days right along with Spain, Greece, Italy, the UK and many others)

And lets not forget he bombed the shit out of Yugoslavia so they could “Balkanize” the nation for various business interests, destroyed Welfare as we knew it, railroaded Brooksley Born when she tried to warn of the unregulated derivatives markets, starved half a million Iraqi children to death simply to weaken the problematic puppet Hussain, and erased the protections of Glass-Steagall which allowed the “too big too fail” banks to cripple the economy and create the necessary environment for his fascist Clinton Global Initiative to thrive.

Personally I can’t think of a better representative of the self-absorbed hypocritical petty bourgeoisie of the left… and the fact that he invited Mitt Vulture Capitalist Romney to headline his little party should give those types a clearer glimpse into the mirror as to what they really are and what they really support (though it’s probably too late to warn the zOmbamies)

President Obama Pitches CFR Plan: Looks to Bring the India Model of GM Genocide to Africa

by Scott Creighton

(H/T Kenny’s sideshow)

“The Clinton Foundation fighting global issues through business oriented solutions. The Clinton Foundation is the best world in the world.” propaganda video featuring Jack Black

“We are never going to end hunger in Africa without private investment,” USAID

“The structure of fascism is the union, marriage, merger or fusion of corporate economic power with governmental power” David Mills

President Obama has announced his big initiative to save the starving people of Africa by “unleashing the powers of the market” all across their continent. It’s called the New Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security. Obama has made this announcement at a G8 summit meeting at Camp David (created back in the 1930′s under the Works Progress Administration part of the New Deal) hosted by none other than the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs. You may remember them. They changed their name back in 2008 when it was inconvenient for the wife of the next president to be affiliated with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

But African civil society wants no part of this latest Monsanto aligned “public private partnership”. Whatever will the progressives do now that their flawless hero has teamed up with their most hated nemesis to exploit an entire continent like they did to India not that long ago?

Occupy the Education System: Students, Teachers and Parents Find New Spirit and Challenge the Attack on Public Schools

by Sarah Jaffe, Alternet

“I work hard, but my grades don’t matter. But I have a voice and I will be heard!”

Jordan is 13, and she’s speaking to a crowd of mostly adults, sitting on the granite steps of the New York City Department of Education at Tweed Hall. Or rather, she is speaking through them, as her words echo through the people’s mic used at Occupy Wall Street just few blocks south from where she’s speaking.

Tonight the steps of the DOE have been occupied and are packed with teachers, students, parents, and supporters holding a general assembly on the state of public education in New York.

New York City to lay off teachers, close fire companies, cut social programs

“This frontal attack on public education is highlighted by the fact that Bloomberg will allocate an increase of $139 million to charter schools next year.”

by Sandy English, WSWS

New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg last Friday announced $600 million in budget cuts for the city’s Fiscal Year 2012, which will begin on July 1.

A recent protest in Manhattan against the education cuts

Bloomberg’s $65.77 billion proposed budget, which, according to law, must be balanced and approved by the city council by June 30, includes the elimination of over 6,000 teaching positions in the public schools, plans to close 20 fire companies and cuts to youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.

Over $500 million dollars will be eliminated from the city’s Department of Education. Out of the 6,166 teaching positions eliminated, 4,600 would be cut through the layoffs of teachers. The school system, the largest in the United States, has a million students and over 75,000 teachers.

Corporate Martial Law: Public Schools Auctioned Off to Highest Bidder

by Julianne Hing, AlterNet

If you’ve ever wondered whether the solution to a cash-strapped low-performing urban school district’s financial and education woes is the wholesale privatization of the public school system, you’re about to get your answer. Detroit, which is caught up in a state that has turned on its public workers, is auctioning off its public schools.

The city is taking applications as part of its Renaissance 2012 plan to put 45 public schools up for charter school takeover, and yesterday, the Detroit Free Press reported its gotten 18 charter school companies eyeing some 50 schools.

Star Check: The Nation on the Edge of Forever

by Scott Creighton

“Space: the final privatization. These are the voyages of the starship Commerce. Its endless mission: to exploit strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations for untapped sources of cheap labor and  untold opportunities their new markets provide, to boldly go where no man has gone before on the taxpayer’s dime for a hefty profit.”

This year, John Kennedy’s dream, Gene Roddenberry’s dream, our entire generation’s dream, effectively ends without even so much as a whimper.

The space shuttle program is dead.

NASA is no longer shooting for the stars.

What NASA does now is research and develop programs for various military projects and when they get the kinks worked out of their new weapons of mass destruction, NASA hands them over, free of charge, to favored members of the military industrial complex so that they can charge us again to make what we taught them how produce.

All of this of course is paid for by you the tax-payer.

There is no risk for these companies since we pay for their R&D. They just rake in the profits.

Socialized risk and privatized profits.

Welcome to the efficiency of the public-private partnership.

Kenneth Clarke ready to bring in troops if strikes erupt over privatised prison

by Alan Travis, Guardian

The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has confirmed that he is willing to call in the army should “serious trouble” erupt over his decision that the private security company, G4S, should run Birmingham prison – making it the first public sector jail to be privatised.

“We have to be prepared should anything go wrong,” he told MPs.

The Prison Officers’ Association (POA) said it would not rule out industrial action in protest at the decision, despite the fact that such action may be illegal.

Clarke said the military contingency plans, involving up to 3,000 trained regular soldiers, were needed because industrial action involving prisons “can rapidly become far worse than an ordinary strike”.

[read the rest, here]

Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans

(More on one of the buried stories I covered in my article In the Name of Business: Buried Headlines of a Changing World )

from CBS News

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

… The Obama administration is currently drafting what it’s calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

[read the rest, here]

“Waiting for Superman” Is Just Neoliberal Propaganda Marketing Pinochet’s Class Based School System to the American Left

by Scott Creighton

There are billions upon billions of dollars to be made by the corporate elite and 1%ers who are currently waiting for superman to come along and help sell the privatization of every public school system in America.  The privatization of public schools has been a mainstay in the neoliberal economic reform platform since Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys tripped down to Chile to run their “experiment” after Henry Kissinger and the CIA killed their elected president on Sept. 11th, 1973 and installed the ruthless dictator Augusto Pinochet in his place. 

In third world countries they use dictators and psychopaths to rule with an iron fist (and the occasional CIA death squad and drone strike) while their economic reforms cripple the lives of the vast majority of the indigenous population and their privatization policies sell off the public assets for pennies on the dollar.  In America, they use fraudulent politicians, billionaire celebrities and smug sellout tools like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Davis Guggenheim to spin up sappy, propaganda laden Madison Ave. multi-million dollar PR campaigns designed to fool the American people into thinking a corporate system of institutionalized inequality is actually the “progressive” solution to a carefully orchestrated ”problem”. 

Race To The Top: Obama Follows in Pinochet’s Footsteps

by Scott Creighton

Obama’s neoliberal “Race To The Top” program was nothing more than the federal government’s attempt to blackmail states into undermining their public education system for the benefit of the privitization of schools. Essentially it was the next step in the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program which set up the standardized tests that they used to claim the education system was failing. The “public” education system that is.

Proof of this overall neoliberal agenda hit close to home today as I read an article about my local county and their massive increase in new charter school applications.

You see, last week it was announced by dear old Gov. Charlie Crist that Florida had been selected as one of the “winners” in the second round of the “Race to the Top” program. The way they “won” was to “turn around failing schools”, and by that I mean they closed schools down (mostly in poor neighborhoods) and spent the money setting up for-profit “charter” schools. They also attacked the teacher’s union, which Crist himself mentioned in his celebration speech, but he said ultimately that was “ok’ because he got the head of the teacher’s union to agree to it. Charlie was just beaming with pride when he made the announcement.

So in the race to privatize everything in the new world order of the great Neoliberal Party, my state, Florida, is well out in front.  And to “reward” us the federal government, who has been deliberately underfunding public education for decades so that this day would surely come, will send us a check for around 700 million bucks.

Now, you think that money will be spent on the financially challenged public schools? Think again.

Obama Administration Declines to Declare Water as a Fundamental Human Right

by Scott Creighton

The U.N. General Assembly forced a vote on a Bolivian resolution declaring that access to clean water and sanitation is a fundamental human right. The count was 122 nations FOR the resolution, 0 AGAINST, with 41 ABSTAINING.  Guess which way the neoliberal Obama delegation went?

“It was the United States and Canada, the European—not the European Union—the United Kingdom—some of the European countries voted to abstain; some were wonderful—Australia, New Zealand. So it was all of the Anglophone, neoliberal, you know, bought into this whole agenda that everything is to be commodified…” MAUDE BARLOW, Democracy NOW!

Had that been George W. Bush siding with private businesses (who, like Bechtel (San Fransisco based and close to Nancy Pelosi), have already been pushing for the privatization of water supplies in other countries as well as here in the U.S.) over the human rights of literally billions of people across the globe, then you could damn sure expect the “Progressives” to be up in arms about this right now. As it stands with the Clinton/Obama regime in place, right before an election… not a peep, not a whimper from the fraudulent “liberal” left as their precious Peace Prize puppet denies water to the thirsty all across the globe so his friends in high places can make a buck.

Arianna Huffington Praises Obama The Union Busting “Liberal”

by Scott Creighton

So while “The Greatest Man of Our Generation” is looking to break-up the teacher’s union, Arianna Huffington is showing “progressives” how they need to cheer him in his “bipartisan” effort.

She’s right; these days, union-busting and the privatization of every public sector dollar is a bipartisan effort. It’s called the Washington Consensus.

This week, President Obama pushed back against his natural allies in civil rights groups and teachers’ unions who have criticized his education policies — particularly his Race to the Top initiative — as anti-teacher and unfair to minorities. A. Huffington

President Obama’s “Race To The Top” initiative is a pretty cynical and destructive plan to force school systems that are already struggling for every single dollar in funding they can get, to “compete” for part of a 3.5 billion dollar fund for the systems that make the most efforts in privatization. The idea is to get school boards to use the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” tricks to single out the most “under producing” schools in their system and then close them down in order to open a charter school in that area. “Charter School” meaning a for-profit privately owned school owned and operated by one a few corporations.

“When a school is chronically under-performing despite additional supports and other strategies, you have to consider bolder action, whether it’s changing the leadership, hiring a new staff or turning schools over to charter operators.” WSWS

Hiring a new staff doesn’t get you “Race To The Top” money, nor does changing leadership. What DOES get you a piece of that money is handing over large chunks of your public school system to private corporations.

The teacher’s union and the NAACP are coming out strong against this entire neoliberal push, just as they were against “No Child Left Behind” under the previous administration. But unfortunately we have President Peace Prize in the White House and the support they got back then from the left is now being seriously undermined by the well-paid leaders of the “so-called left” like Arianna Huffington.

Teacher effectiveness is the single most important factor driving student performance. Yet, because of overly rigid union contacts, we cannot pay the best teachers more based on their performance — and it’s become next to impossible to fire even the worst teachers. A. Huffington

In this little passage Arianna Huffington disgustingly suggests that the biggest problem facing education today is teacher’s unions… not critical levels of underfunding combined with over emphasis of standardized testing circa George W. Bush. She goes on..

Until we stop this insanity, our national report card will continue to be littered with Fs. The president should be applauded and given major leadership props for taking on this schlerotic status quo. This is what real, beyond-left-and-right bipartisanship looks like. A. Huffington

The “insanity” Arianna Huffington is referring to is the presence of unions in our public school systems. This from someone on the “left”? Well, the Clintonista ”New Dems” left, if that is what you want to call it.

The following are from Barack Obama is Not “the greatest man of our generation”…

In the words of the U.S. ambassador to Chile, “Not a nut or a bolt will reach Chile…. We will do all in our power to condemn Chileans to utmost poverty“

Nixon on the topic of imposing crippling sanctions of the populist government in Chile: (we will) “make the Chilean economy scream” and blame it on Allende Bidstrup

The reason he (U.S. installed dictator Pinochet) was there was to reverse the gains of the Allende social democracy and return control of the country’s economic and political assets to the oligarchy. Bidstrup

Obama feigned sympathy for the workers he was throwing onto the street, declaring, “I know you’ve already seen more than your fair share of hard times. I will not pretend the hard times are over. Difficult days lie ahead. More jobs will be lost. More plants will close. More dealerships will shut their doors, and so will many parts suppliers.”

He then cynically claimed that the workers losing their jobs were serving a greater, patriotic cause. “I want you to know that what you’re doing is making a sacrifice for the next generation—a sacrifice you may not have chosen to make, but a sacrifice you were nevertheless called to make… White

As the American oligarchy recovers from their hangovers after the Clintons threw a 5 million dollar wedding for their daughter and her Goldman Sachs investment banker husband, the rest of the country is being called upon to make sacrifices they never asked for, and in fact, they clearly voted against in 2006 AND 2008…

The only real change that is coming is the continued demonization of the real left by those phony liberal intelligentsia who are bought and paid for by the very class that has sold this nation to the highest bidder. The Clintons and the rest of the privileged elites had their “let them eat cake” moment this past Sunday as Bill Clinton somehow managed to come up with 3 million dollars for his ugly daughter’s wedding (care to guess how much of that money came from the Haiti Relief Fund?) and Arianna just had hers.

You think that is how she paid for her ticket to the social event of the century? By throwing the teachers union under the neoliberal bus? Who knows.