by Scott Creighton

Moyers takes his place in history

The link to Bill Moyers Journal has been removed from this site and it will not be back. 

I have removed the link because I just watched one of the most offensive pieces of yellow journalism that I have ever seen.

Talk about “left cover”.   The neoliberal  warmongers of the left (aka “centrists”) are tired of hearing the comparisons between Obama’s Afghanistan and Johnson’s Vietnam so it would appear what they are trying to do is to actually scrub up the history of Vietnam, to remake it, or at least to repackage Johnson’s escalation of the conflict into some kind of unavoidable noble act. 

3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers died as a result of the Vietnam War and now we have Bill Moyers attempting to regift to the American people tales of “falling dominoes” and Gulf of Tonkin attacks that never happened.

I never thought I would say this, much less write it…  Fuck You, Bill Moyers.

The video itself, Moyers story from his weekly program, Bill Moyers Journal, is beyond propaganda; it’s revisionism, pure and simple. There is absolutely no journalistic integrity what-so-ever. None. It’s Moyers rewriting history not just for the sake of clearing LBJ’s name and his own (Moyers was an advisor to LBJ in the White House) but ultimately what he is doing is attempting draw comparisons between that escalation and Obama’s upcoming announcement of his own in Afghanistan. As if to portray both LBJ and Obama as victims of their circumstances that FORCED the escalation as if it were a foregone conclusion and not a choice.

I’m not going to go too far into this critique of Moyer’s “work” here, as that I have already watched 30 minutes of it or so and I just am so outraged and disappointed that I can’t bring myself to watch Moyers shill for the war mongers anymore. 

But let me say this much… the story is in two parts.  The first part is nothing more than Moyers using LBJ’s recorded phone conversations to attempt to portray him as a troubled president who was struggling with the decision to escalate the conflict in Vietnam.  The problems with this approach are glaringly obvious. The first is that Moyers cherry picked the very recordings that he felt would present this in the best light. The second, and probably the most telling of all, is that LBJ knew he was being recorded. In fact, he chose which calls he WANTED recorded. He did that because he knew that the choice to escalate would be unpopular and history would not be kind to him for doing it. So what he did was, he carefully scripted at least his portions of the calls, knowing that in the end, these recordings would be used to justify his decision.  You can actually hear him reading off of the script in some of these recordings that Moyers selected.

You never know, since Moyers was advising him at that point, it might have been Bill’s idea to do this in the first place.  And now here we are, decades later, and Moyers is dutifully performing his last service to his president; rewriting the history of the start of our involvement in Vietnam.

The second video starts off talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but Moyers is careful to never refer to it that way. In fact, I don’t think he mentions the Gulf of Tonkin at all.  He clearly doesn’t want his educated audience to do their own homework on the topic, so he chooses to avoid giving them the actual name of the event.

But even more striking is the fact that Bill Moyers reports on the Gulf of Tokin attacks AS IF THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED.  The Gulf of Tonkin attacks were the ploy the Johnson administration used to finally justify the escalation of the Vietnam war.  It was a false-flag operation that never took place, and it was created right after Barry Goldwater won the republican nomination and was leading in the polls so it served LBJ in two ways;1. to finally provide LBJ with the covering event that allowed him to declare all out war in Vietnam (something that the first video shows Johnson had been trying to find a way to do since a week or so after Kennedy’s murder) and 2. ensured his election victory just a month or so later.

I’ll tell you one thing, Moyers has pissed all over his respectable career with this one.  Like Colin Powell sitting at the UN holding up vials of anthrax, Moyers has just reduced his legacy to shit. Go watch the video if you like. I won’t watch the rest of it. I’ll never trust a thing Moyers has to say again. I can only hope that Bill is aware of what he just did to his credibility.

by Scott Creighton

And just in case you think I was off-base with my assessment of Alex Jones’ pathetic self-promotion and stalling tactics… here is a video from Russia Today which Jones has posted on the front page of his website. In it he is asked directly about whether or not he supports a revolution in this country… immediately he holds up a copy of his new DVD that’s for sale, and says the following at around the 2:40 mark in the interview:

“Our republic is falling. That’s why (reaches for his DVD to hold up in front of the camera) I have made the film… Fall of the Republic.  I am calling for a revolution of ideas. A renaissance, a TRUE FREE MARKET… I am calling for a peaceful revolution under the bill of rights and the constitution… the peoples right, under the declaration of independence, to take their government back when it becomes oppressive and tyrannical… I don’t want a military coup…”  Jones

Jones’ message is clear; the government is tyrannical and oppressive, the globalists have used us and our taxes to seize control of most of the rest of the world’s economies and now they are in the process of turning our labor base into that of a 3rd world nation so that our business interests and the Wall Street bankers can “compete on the global market”… and what we should do about it… is buy his DVD and sit around and “think” about it.

It’s also important to note that the ONLY problem he seems to have with the neoliberal free-market ideology that is at the root of all of this, is the fact that it has become corrupt. Well, that is the entire POINT of that Chicago School economic model. It always has been about removing regulation and oversight in order to ALLOW CORRUPTION since the very FIRST laboratory they set up in Chile on Sept. 11th, 1973.  Deregulated, unchecked markets and unlimited free-trade is DESIGNED to allow for maximum corruptions and graft on a global scale.  By telling his followers this, he is basically saying to them that they shouldn’t oppose the POLICY, but rather a “few bad apples” who have corrupted it.  This is blatant pro-neoliberal propaganda on the level of George W. Bush coming out prior to the passage of the TARP Bill begging people not too allow “the system” to fail. “We MUST protect the system. The SYSTEM must NOT be allowed to fail”.

You will NEVER change a corrupt system this deeply embedded in a power structure without force… without a revolution. “Power yields to nothing except more power”. As long as Jones and Beck continue to pacify the very segments of the population who are most likely to rise up, the established power structures that Jones has made a fortune railing against will remain firmly in control of our collective future.

Just like the Glenn Beck video in which he used his recent Tampa speech to sell his recent book and plug his upcoming book, Jones used his time on the Russia Today interview to sell his video. Just like Beck who advised his followers to sit around for “100 years” doing nothing, so too is Jones telling his people who the way to fight back, is through “ideas” and not direct action. And just like Glenn Beck, who portrays the Obama adminstration’s corruption on “socialism”, Jones too misleads his followers.

Obama intends to prove the Official Conspiracy Theory of 9/11 is the Gospel with his Show Trial

How can the US government put a defendant on trial when its treatment of him violates US statutory law, international law, and every precept of the US legal code?  Mohammed has been treated as if he were a captive of Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s KGB.  And now we are going to finish him off in a show trial…. Originally Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11. To get bin Laden is the excuse given for the US invasion of Afghanistan… But after eight years of total failure to catch Osama bin Laden,  it became absolutely necessary to convict some culprit.

… The price that Mohammed will pay will be small compared to the price we Americans will pay. The outcome of Mohammed’s trial will complete the transformation of the US legal system from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state.

… The twisted logic necessary to disentangle Mohammed’s torture from his confession will also be upheld and will “provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time–a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.” 

Obama Quietly Backs PATRIOT Act Provisions

With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA PATRIOT Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms.  And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.

 Obama rejected appeals to take action to create jobs

Obama’s Saturday speech was remarkable for its callous indifference to the plight of the unemployed. He gave lip service to the problem… The barely concealed contempt of Obama and other top administration officials for working people is all the more remarkable under conditions of double-digit unemployment and reports that 49 million Americans faced hunger last year and that home foreclosures are continuing at record rates.

Obama using Blackwater for assassinations in Pakistan

The Obama administration is using mercenaries with the firm formerly known as Blackwater to kidnap and assassinate high value targets in Pakistan, according to a published report… “Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that,” Scahill’s source reportedly said. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don’t care. If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality. They’re not accountable to anybody and they know that. It’s an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?”

by Scott Creighton

The best way to defeat a revolution is to lead it. Control it, steer it, demean it, pacify it… and then you will eventually disarm it.

The people of America are angry and they will soon be getting even angrier.  The vast numbers of the unemployed, underemployed, disenfranchised, discontented, and just plain “dissed” are growing at an exponential rate.

This was not unexpected. 

Ever since they have been tinkering with their neoliberal free-market economic models, the Chicago School globalists have known full well that they can never get these draconian reforms to be welcomed by any general population.  Just take our own recent election of “CHANGE”… what exactly did we vote for? What exactly did we get?

It’s not hard to figure out that if you intend to create massive unemployment and social discord in any nation, the vast majority of the people of that nation will eventually rise up against you and shut down your plans. So, steps must be taken to prepare for that.

The most important of these steps is too control the dissent movements themselves from within. And the best way to do that, is too lead them.

Thanks to the Global War on Terror, the surveillance state within the United States has come out of the darkness and into the light.

Not only is it intensified with hundreds of millions of dollars, but, since 9/11 occurred, it is out in the open and considered a good thing for the nation.  We already know they are targeting “dissidents” as opposed to al Qaeda sleeper cells.  It’s not about preventing another 9/11 as much as it is about quelling another revolution. When the FBI and the NSA are spending their time and their resources infiltrating Peace Fresno, it’s not because they are too stupid to understand that they really aren’t a “terrorist” threat; it’s because they are smart enough to understand that the kind of threat Peace Fresno does represent is far more dangerous to the people who really call the shots in this country.

After you create an unconstitutionally intrusive surveillance infrastructure and the climate in which it can thrive without question or oversight, then the next step is to militarize law enforcement to the point where it can put down massive popular resistance.  Again, since 9/11, funding for the police state in America (and all the other “partners” in the Global War on Terror”) has increased a hundred fold since 9/11. Except for the colors of the uniforms, it’s almost impossible to distinguish a soldier in Iraq from your average ‘tactical” officer deployed as crowd control on the streets of the United States these days. Again, that is not because the people in the Pentagon or the White House are too stupid to understand that al Qaeda doesn’t exist in here in America; its because they are smart enough to understand that the policies they enact overseas will create the same kind of resistance here in America once they are brought home. And that the resistance must be crushed quickly, publicly, and without mercy.

Finally, one of the most effective ways to undermine social unrest in a general population, is to lead it. And this is where we get to our two “Birds of a Feather”; Alex Jones and Glenn Beck.

There will always be those people within a population who will not be so easily persuaded to just follow along with the status quo as the neoliberal reforms undermine the standard of living of the majority.  As long as you can accurately forecast the political and social shift, it is important to garner control of that segment of the population as early as possible.  You do that by taking a psuedo-charismatic, someone relatively unknown  (in say the telecommunication field) with grandiose ambitions of personal fame and wealth.  You endow a measure of success on that person and then you assist them as much as possible as they build credibility within the targeted subculture.  As your planted leader’s popularity rises, he is then capable of steering the dissident energies in whatever direction that best serves the establishment.  You never have to worry about being betrayed by your puppet revolutionary “leader” as that his own personal ambition and the fear of being unmasked as a tool of the opposition will ensure obedience for as long as he is useful.

Glenn Beck and Alex Jones both have very similar backgrounds. With Jones it was an early start in public access television call in shows, and with Beck it was AM talk radio. But then, around 2000, something happened. Out of the blue, Beck received a recommendation from Sen. Joe Lieberman to attend Yale University as a “special student” and then he was shipped to Tampa to host a political talk show and Jones was somehow allowed to gain access to the secret meetings at Bohemian Grove with a video camera which garnered him a great deal of credibility in an already growing dissident/anti-globalization movement.

Now, for those AJ fans out there who wish to try to make the argument that some how that fat little egomaniac was able to “sneak” past the security services for all the world leaders who were in attendance, simply because no-one anticipated someone walking through the woods as opposed to coming up the dirt road, well… if you believe that, I can’t help you. It will hopefully suffice to say that, yes, with world leaders and industrialist and bankers in attendance, I bet someone in the vast security apparatus figured they should also cover the woods surrounding the meeting place.

Both Beck and Jones enjoy tremendous popularity. Beck’s estimated personal wealth is somewhere around $23 million or so while Jones is a little more secretive about his.  But with all his books and films and websites and various “money bombs”, Jones certainly isn’t hurting for cash in this economy like so many of his followers are.

While Beck’s transition to dissent coincided precisely with the swearing-in of the new president, Jones’ took a little more time to develop.  But aside from just the remarkable access he was granted to “secretly” film the Bohemian Grove gathering, Jones was also granted a little tidbit of information that gave him even more credibility with a certain movement that was bound to develop; he predicted 9/11 a month or so prior to the attacks on his radio show.

So now you have two (and there are clearly more out there) leaders of the dissent groups out there leading the charge. 

During the Bush years, Jones was positioned to “lead” the growing dissent movement in America. The problem is, aside from selling ad space and books and money-bombs, he really didn’t do much with it.  If you think that the revolution is going to be won by standing outside the Standard Oil building with a bullhorn or by selling “survivalist seeds” you don’t know much about revolutions.  “Waking up” the general population is all well and good, but eventually you have to put your ass where your mouth is.  Revolutions are never started by the majority of the population so ultimately, endless promotion becomes stalling. Jones has enjoyed 9 years of his endlessly self-promoting ”InfoWars” and the only thing he has really managed to build is his person portfolio.

It doesn’t do any good when the shit hits the fan to “wake up” your junkyard dogs, if all you are going to do with them is make ‘em fetch you fortune.

Beck is currently employed in the same service to the elites.

Just the other day, Glenn Beck returned here to Tampa to “rally the troops” so to speak.  His schtick is pretty much the same as Jones’.  He talks about “ending the fed” and stopping the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but again it’s pretty clear that his message is just more stalling.  In fact, this video I have embedded below, shows Beck saying exactly that; wait… and buy my book.  In the following video, Beck is announcing his “100 year plan”… 100 years to take back our country, since, according to Beck, you can’t actually DO anything… right now (except buy his book and the next one that comes out detailing his “100 Year Plan”).   Now, if anything could be more obvious than that, I haven’t seen it (well, except maybe another Mormon cointelpro agent, Steven Jones, misdirecting the Truth movement with his endless “thermite” variations).  Beck actually stands up there and tells his followers that in order to retake control of this country, they have to WAIT for years and years.

Beck has successfully painted the corporatist Obama DLCers as “socialists” to his followers and has stirred up a lot of anger within his group.  Well, he didn’t actually create the anger… that comes from the loss of working class jobs and the endless attacks of the standard of living of millions and millions of good, hard-working Americans.  Beck just gets up there and reads his scripts that are prepared by the spin doctors and plays to the growing animosity of his target audience.  He blames the “socialists” and the leftists who are actually the most adamant critics of the Obama/Bush administration, and in so doing, he demonises the people who could actually ignite real “CHANGE” in America. Divide and conquer.

But his real message, unabashedly, is “wait”.  And this message is no different than Jone’s. Wait.

You will also notice that I picked two similar images of Beck and Jones.  The ridiculousness of these images is not by chance.  You see, part of their tasks is to bring ridicule and condemnation upon the very movements they lead by the task-masters assigned to “steer” the center. Jones is portrayed as a midly-racist conspiracist crack-pot by the left with the intention of dissuading the general population from even considering the legitimacy of certain claims, while Beck and his followers are cast as the proto-fascist Nazi racists.

This way, you can use these two assets to not only help steer the dissent movements into an endless state of inaction, but also to help undermine the credibility of their respective causes to the general population at large while shoring up a status-quo supporting story-line of “moderate”, centrist, acquiescence.

As Jones’s endless vortex of directionless “InfoWars” and Becks’ soon to be revealed “100 Year Plan” drone on, the only thing that one can be sure of, aside from the fact that these two will punch their elite cards while making vast sums of money off their followers,  is that nothing of any real consequence will be even attempted by the ever-growing population of the gullible oppressed. In fact, you can probably assume that were an actual revolution to take shape in this country, the handlers of these two assets would certainly direct them to steer their followers to help crush it in service to the institutions that run this nation.

And being as gullible as the following video seems to prove that they are, they would do it, turning the dissent movement into yet another, more obvious tool of oppression for the elite. 

Behold! Glenn Beck, the multimillionaire elitist, tells his jobless and angry followers to wait a hundred years.  and they buy it….

by Scott Creighton

David Milibrand is the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom and a world-class globalist by any standard of measure.  But he has a lot to learn when it comes to sound-bite propaganda.

• He is reported to have suggested that organically produced food is no better than the Genetically Modified agribusiness manufactured bullshit coming out of Monsanto and the huge farming corporations.
• He was Tony Blair’s Head of Policy in 1994 and then again 1997 he ran Blair’s Policy Unit.
• He is a staunch advocate of setting global emission standards, personal carbon-footprint limits, and various other Global Warming based, world government managed, cap-and-trade initiatives.

The fact is, despite his upbringing, David Milibrand is a world-class globalist of the Hillary Clinton order. Along with Shillary, he attended the Karzai inauguration last week in a show of UK solidarity with the criminal and massively corrupt Karzai government. Afterwards, he explained the importance of NATO’s continued occupation of Afghanistan; he says if we left, the 2nd most corrupt government in the world (second only to Somalia) would certainly fail.

“If international forces leave, you can choose a time – five minutes, 24 hours or seven days – but the insurgent forces will overrun those forces that are prepared to put up resistance and we would be back to square one.”  Milibrand

Imagine that; in the “democracy” that we set up in Afghanistan, if we pulled out, the vast majority of the people of the country who are tired of President (One Million fake votes) Karzai and his drug lord brother, would kick the corrupt bastards to the curb and in so doing start to forge their own destiny once again.

And the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom thinks that would be a tragedy. Lets look at the facts of what MP Milibrand calls “square one”;

• Remember for a second that the Taliban had nothing to do with 911 and in fact, in a publicly held press conference they offered to hand bin Laden over to the Bush administration if they were to simply produce any evidence at all of his involvement.  Bush ignored them. And even to this day (tortured “confessions” and forged videos aside) the FBI holds that there is no real evidence of bin Laden’s involvement.
• Remember for a second that the invasion plans for attacking Afghanistan were placed on the president’s desk on Sept. 9th, 2001.
• Remember for a second that it has been reported that during a July 2001 meeting in which Unical and the Bush administration wanted the Taliban to allow U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan to protect Unical’s Trans Afghan Pipeline. It is reported that the Taliban was offered “a carpet of gold” to allow U.S. bases in Afghanistan and threatened with “carpet bombs” if they refused.
• Remember that prior to being installed as President of Afghanistan, Karzai worked for Unical.
• Remember that prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban had almost completely wiped out the opium fields in Afghanistan, and since the invasion, Afghanistan is now setting records for exporting opium and heroin to the rest of the world.

The fact is, U.S. bases and troop deployments follow the proposed route of the Trans Afghan Pipeline.  Years ago when I first wrote about the link between the invasion and the pipeline, the vast majority of the “progressives” and the conservatives both ridiculed it as “conspiracy theory”.  Now it is pretty much an accepted fact. Where mention of these facts used to be erased on  popular “progressive” and conservative blogs, these days articles detailing these connections are being published on those very same venues.

David Milibrand fears what will happen in Afghanistan if we were to pull out U.S. and NATO forces.  He fears that our political puppet regime of the ex-Unical official and the brother of the biggest heroin dealer in the Middle East, will crumble and fall if we were to leave.  What does that say about MP Milibrand? What does that say about the news organizations that repeat his claptrap without throwing up during the interview or pissing all over themselves with uncontrollable laughter as he spoke?

David Milibrand is afraid that were we to leave Afghanistan, a truly organic, self-determined future may be in store for the people of that sovereign nation that they forge for themselves.  And God-forbid the globalist allow that to happen.  He should have just taken a cue from our previous globalist secretary of state and called it “the birth pangs of a new Middle East” and left it at that.

Just a quickie… it would appear that all those emails that everyone (read as Joe Lieberman and his neocon Bush administration GWOT hawk Senate hearing “witnesses“) keeps talking about which prove Hasan’s “extremist” views (you know, the emails that a government official accidentally reported as taking place on behalf of the work that Hasan had been doing FOR THE GOVERNMENT and had absolutely NO terrorist overtones at all? You know, those emails) have been not only kept from public scrutiny… but apparently they have been kept from the scrutiny of Hasan’s lawyer as well.

According to the FBI, investigators from one of its Joint Terrorism Task Forces determined “that the content of those communications was consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center [in Washington].”  CNN

Galligan said he has received a military personnel file pertaining to Hasan, but said it has only basic details on where his client went to school and where he received additional training. He said he has not received any classified documents yet, and has not seen the e-mails that investigators said show Hasan corresponding with a radical Muslim cleric.  CNN

But that isn’t all… it would appear that if those documents are classified as “SECRET”, for the good of the Global War on Terror, Hasan’s lawyer may NEVER get a chance to go over them, as that the military has not upgraded his security clearance status as of yet.  Nice touch, huh?

Galligan said the Army has not responded to his request that his own security clearance be reinstated.  CNN

(This is why I said long ago that Obama was clearly more dangerous to America than McCain. Obama will get away with even more than Bush did, simply because he is perceived as a democrat. Bush’s neoliberal privatization plan of the public education system (No Child Left Behind) is continuing on an accelerated pace under Obama. And people who were strongly opposed to it under Bush, are now campaigning FOR it under Obama as if we can’t see what it really is. 4.3 billion dollars is a joke. And even still, they are dangling that money out there like a prize to the school systems that desperately NEED the money… TO TEACH OUR FUCKING CHILDREN!  Bush would NEVER have gotten away with that kind of cynical bullshit. He would NEVER have gotten away with holding our CHILDREN’S FUTURES HOSTAGE like this… solely for the purpose of putting MORE MONEY in the coffers of the FOR PROFIT EDUCATION CORPORATIONS…. yet Obama?  He will be praised for it.)

by Tom Eley, WSWS

Recent days have seen an unlikely threesome promoting the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” public schools initiative. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has joined with Al Sharpton and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to tour the country in support of the plan.

The basic idea is to force state governments to compete for $4.35 billion in federal assistance, with the money going to those states which do the most to promote charter schools, utilize standardized testing, and weaken workplace rules for teachers. Essentially, the scheme sets up a bidding war among the states for desperately needed funds on the basis of an anti-public education agenda that has been promoted for decades by the right wing.

Pairing the Democratic Party demagogue Sharpton with Gingrich is aimed at suggesting that a broad coalition has formed behind Obama’s education agenda.

Sharpton’s role is to defuse opposition in largely African-American urban schools that will be particularly devastated by Obama’s policies. Citing the “achievement gap” that remains between black and white students, Sharpton now champions the same policies he opposed when they were put forward by the Bush administration.

The teachers unions are also on board. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association now support essentially the same policies they opposed under the previous administration. The difference is that they were shut out of education “reform” by the Bush administration, while Obama and the Democrats are eager to utilize their services in attacking teachers and undermining the foundations of public education.

Further underscoring the true nature of the “reforms” being put in place is the support offered by Gingrich, a diehard opponent of government social programs and partisan of school privatization.

As for Obama’s education secretary, while CEO of the Chicago public education system Duncan forced the shutdown of dozens of schools, the tearing up of rules for teachers relating to seniority and academic freedom, and the creation of a wave of charter schools, including military-style academies.

What are the results of Duncan’s years in Chicago? The graduation rate from the city’s high schools is little better than 50 percent, and dozens of high schoolers have been killed, many as a result of traversing hostile gang territory en route to distant schools, their neighborhood schools having been closed.

Presented by Duncan as an enormous amount of money, the $4.35 billion fund is a tiny fraction of Obama’s outlays for the military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about 2 hundredths of 1 percent of the $23 trillion Washington has made available to the finance industry. The grand total allotted for education is less than the individual personal fortunes of about 60 Americans, and a fraction of the Christmas bonuses that Wall Street will pay its executives and traders next month.

By 2011, the combined state-level funding gap for schools will be $20 billion. This does not include local revenue shortfalls, much of it resulting from collapsing real estate tax assessments. Scores of school districts will be bankrupt by the end of the year. The state of Hawaii has gone so far as to cut the school week to four days.

Only a handful of states will receive any “Race to the Top” money, possibly fewer than 15, according to the Wall Street Journal. “This is going to be highly competitive, and there are going to be a lot more losers than winners,” Duncan bluntly declared in announcing the 30-plus criteria that will be used to judge the states.

These blackmail tactics are already having the desired effect. A number of states have in recent months passed legislation promoting charter schools, expanding testing and other metrics, and channeling funding to those schools whose students perform well. These policies will starve the very schools that need funding the most.

Obama’s policies encourage the development of an openly class-based system of education. Wealthy districts will prosper, while the great majority of schools—in the cities, rural areas and even the suburbs—will suffer or vanish.

Many teachers, students and parents oppose Obama’s education policies. After Duncan outlined the plan in July, “1,200 public comments poured into the Department of Education” condemning the plan, the New York Times noted.

The Obama administration responded with its usual contempt for popular opinion. “Even after all the comments, the rules are as comprehensive and demanding as before, they haven’t changed,” said Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff. “We’re seeking reforms, so we haven’t backed off anything.”

As it becomes clear what Obama’s education policies mean and as the public school system continues to collapse, teachers, students and parents will move to defend public education, which has for nearly two centuries been bound up with egalitarian and democratic principles.

This opposition will require an independent political perspective, in opposition to both parties of big business and based on a socialist program.

Just where did that .6 number come from?

A hacker has leaked thousands of emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University that appear to show how climate change data was fudged and the peer review process skewed to favor the manmade climate change hypothesis.  Corbett Report

This time, it’s Dana Perino, the former White House Press Secretary under George Bush who didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.

Perino has been working for the globalist PR firm Bursten-Marsteller as an adviser on international affairs. Now, under the Obama administration, this vapid advertising/PR/policy sales scumbag will be overseeing government propaganda as a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a government agency that “oversees all of the US government’s non-military international broadcasting outlets, including Voice of America, Alhurra television, Radio Sawa, TV Marti, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe” Raw Story, created under another globalist democrat’s administration… (opps, I mean a “New Democrat”) … Bill Clinton.

Yet another Bushie falls right into place under Obama’s “CHANGE” regime.

by Scott Creighton

As Obama gets set to “surge” in Afghanistan while you and I pay extra taxes to foot the bill, and as his CIA directed drones rain Hellfire missiles down on civilian targets in Pakistan… again, Obama’s US war crimes ambassador Stephen Rapp is at a gathering in The Hague of the International Criminal Court’s Assembly of State Parties doing his best to soften the ICC’s definition of the crime of waging wars of aggression.  In short, the Obama administration apparently wants any declaration from the ICC of “crimes of aggression” tied into the United Nations Security Councils declaration of a crime of aggression.  That means that the United States would have effective VETO power over any war crime resolution coming out of the ICC.  This would effectively ensure that no ICC charges of war crimes of aggression would ever be forth-coming against the United States or Israel either for that matter, since the U.S. has been vetoing anything that ever comes up in the Security Council that even hints at Israel being the aggressor in the occupied territories of Palestine.

“Our view has been and remains that, should the Rome Statute be amended to include a defined crime of aggression, jurisdiction should follow a Security Council determination that aggression has occurred.”  Rapp

The United States is taking part in a meeting of the ASP, as an observer, for the first time since the world’s only permanent court for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity started operating in 2002.  Raw Story

In what could only be considered to be a joke by anyone with a pulse and half a brain, Rapp went on to say that the Obama administration is committed “to the rule of law and the principle of accountability is firm.”  It is also important to note that we are participating only as an “observer” because when this body was founded in 2002, the Bush administration knew damn well that they were already in the process of ramping up their own war crimes of aggression, and G.W. Bush figured if we signed up, he and Cheney would eventually face charges as international war criminals (and that might adversely effect his speaking fees).  As a side note, we have YET to sign up even now under Obama’s “CHANGE” regime.

The hypocrisy of that statement coming from a member of the Obama administration is just too obvious to comment on. The examples of Obama’s policy to “look forward not backward” are just too plentiful for me too list here and now.  Please feel free to fill in your own sarcastic closing quip at this point.