The River Wanders...

questionall:

Since the Department of Labor’s monthly employment report was released last Friday, very little discussion in the media has been devoted to the fact that of the 13,000 local government workers that were laid off last month, more than 11,000 were teachers or school-related staff. Reuters reported that last month’s firings have driven the number of workers employed by local government to their lowest levels since 2005.

Typically, a school will announce layoffs slated to go into effect at the end of a school year. That the firings have occurred in the middle of the year points to the fact that many districts, pressed for funds, simply have no choice but to let go of staff without warning.

“There is some expectation that state and local budgets will start to improve as the economy is picking up,” said Jan Eberly, the US Treasury’s assistant secretary on economic policy, about the findings. This echoes the refrain of the Obama administration, citing the barely 153,000 average jobs added per month in 2012 as a sign of an improving economy. It has been acknowledged, however, that at this pace, the level of employment will not reach pre-recession levels for nearly a decade.

In reality, the Obama administration has no intention to restore public sector jobs that have been eliminated since the onset of the recession in 2008. Public education has been a prime target of privatization and downsizing under the administration’s Race to the Top program. Across the country, district managers have used questions of accountability and so-called efficiency in school districts to shred public education, with teachers bearing the brunt of this onslaught.

Alongside this is the outright elimination of public education in many school districts, with its replacement by privately contracted charters. A recent announcement by the Philadelphia public school district noted it was preparing to shutter as many as three dozen schools in the city. Such a move would effectively eliminate public education for many neighborhoods in the district. Washington, D.C., has an arrangement stating that any new public facilities that are opened in the district will be given to charter operators on a first come, first served basis.

The Economix blog of the New York Times recently noted that while the private sector has added roughly 725,000 workers since 2008, the public sector has lost a near-equivalent number at 697,000. This means that a shifting has occurred within the workforce, sending workers out of the public sector and into less-secure, lower-paying private sector jobs, if they happen to be rehired at all. Over that period, 300,000 of those lost pubic sector jobs belonged to teachers.

A National Employment Law Project study released last fall found that 60 percent of the jobs that the “economic recovery” has produced were low paying, having wages between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour. In contrast, medium-paying jobs, those that made up the majority lost during the recession, made up barely 22 percent of those that have returned since.

Local governments, starved of federal and state funding, have been compelled to carry out some of the most drastic budget cuts and layoffs. US Commerce Department data shows that local and state government spending contracted 11 of 12 months throughout last year, with only a slight uptick of 0.3 percent in December.

The elimination of public education has been a central aim of Obama’s Race to the Top, an expansion on the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind. The program ties school funding to bogus “accountability” measures, singling out teachers with standardized test performance in order to label schools that fail to meet these requirements as underperforming, and thus designated to be shut down, making way for for-profit charter schools.

The teachers’ unions have facilitated these attacks. In light of the latest round of layoffs, National Education Association (NEA) teachers’ union president Dennis Van Roekel told Reuters that he remained “hopeful that President Obama and the 113th Congress, as well as governors, will prioritize our students and public education and work hard to stave off further cuts.” The NEA was the first major union to endorse the president’s re-election bid, when at the time Obama had already presided over 200,000 layoffs in the education sector.

The author also recommends:

US jobs report points to continuing stagnation
[05 January 2013]

This is a very disturbing trend.  If we allow our schools to become privatized, our kids will be far worse for it.  We will become even more dumbed down, more compliant, more unquestioning of authority.  Our country will become more stagnant and the population will become more impoverished.  We must stand up to these corporations that want to enslave us completely and are succeeding with the help of the government.

(via end-the-republican-mafia)

oxfordcommas:

10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’

Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.

1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system.
The massive…

justinspoliticalcorner:

When Muslim-American organizations and activists concerned with Islamophobia woke up the day after the election, on November 7, they were elated. Key members of what had been dubbed the House Republican “Islamophobia caucus”had been voted out of office. These Tea Party-affiliated Republicans included Joe Walsh (R-IL), who had warned in August that Islamists were “trying to kill Americans every week” and were lurking in the Chicago suburbs, and Allen West (R-FL), who linked the entire religion of Islam to terrorism.

These fear-mongers won’t be able to spread their hysteria from the bully pulpit of a House seat any longer. But that doesn’t mean that the House Republican caucus has rid themselves of the scourge of anti-Muslim politicians who stoke that sentiment for political gain. On the contrary, the House Republican caucus remains the place where the ugly head of Islamophobia rests comfortably.

Here are five House Republicans who spread anti-Muslim sentiment routinely. Activists concerned with Islamophobia should watch these players in the year to come. The fight against Islamophobia in this country is far from over, and many members of the Republican Party remains wedded to that hateful ideology.

1. Michele Bachmann

This Minnesota Tea Party favorite catapulted herself into the spotlight again by hawking a wacky conspiracy theory first propagated by a former Reagan administration official and now chief Islamophobe. She narrowly won re-election in November despite spending twelve times as much as her opponent, Democrat Jim Graves.

Last summer, Bachmann garnered national attention when she and other Republicans alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-based political movement that spread throughout the Middle East, had “penetrated” the U.S. government. Specifically, Bachmann singled out a prominent Muslim-American aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named Huma Abedin as being part of the conspiracy. The Minnesota congresswoman made the allegations in letters sent to U.S. government officials.

The letter questioned whether there was “direct influence” on the intelligence community from “[Muslim] Brotherhood operatives.” And the letter also mentioned that Abedin has “family members” connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Needless to say, the allegations were bogus, and some Republican leaders blasted Bachmann for going on a witch hunt. “Accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).But other Republican officials backed up Bachmann. “Her concern was about the security of the country,” said Eric Cantor (R-VA).

Her letter to U.S. government officials made clear that Bachmann got her ideas from Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan aide and prominent neoconservative. Gaffney is a leading anti-Muslim activist in the U.S., and has produced a 10-part online series about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence in the U.S. But the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is plotting from within is a McCarthyite theory that casts aspersions on Muslim-Americans within the U.S. government. There is also no evidence to support the theory.

This summer 2012 episode was hardly the only iteration of Bachmann’s Islamophobia, though. In 2011, she stoked fear about sharia law—Islamic law—taking over U.S. courts.

2. Peter King

He may have lost his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee due to party-imposed term-limits, but you can count on King stoking the flames of fear towards Islam next year. King, a Republican hailing from Long Island, used his post as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee to specifically target the problem of terrorism within the Muslim community—and nowhere else, despite right-wing extremism being on the rise. After serving for seven years, King is no longer the head of the committee, though he will remain a member.

King has a penchant for singling out Muslim-Americans. He held a total of five separate hearings on Islam and terrorism in the United States, ostensibly to focus on the threat of “homegrown” terrorism from Muslims.

His first hearing sparked the most controversy. Titled “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response,” it was based on King’s assumption that the Muslim community in the U.S. is prone to breeding extremists. In 2004, King claimed that “80%, 85% of the mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” Despite this claim becoming a right-wing meme, there was no evidence to back it up. In fact, as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights pointed out in a letter to King before his first hearing, “experts have concluded that mosque attendance is a significant factor in the prevention of extremism.”

King courted even more controversy based on one of his star witnesses at the first hearing: Zuhdi Jasser, an activist who has become the right’s darling Muslim. Jasser is the head of a group called the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, which is funded by anti-Muslim figures like the right-wing Christian Foster Friess. Many Muslim organizations say that Jasser has little following among American Muslims. Jasser narrated an Islamophobic film put out by an Israeli-settler and neoconservative linked outfit called the Clarion Fund. The film, titled “The Third Jihad,” was shown to New York Police Department officers as training and claims that Muslim extremists are plotting from within to take over the U.S.

3. Mike McCaul

For the House Homeland Security Committee, it’s out with one Islamophobe as chief of the panel, and in with another. McCaul, a Republican hailing from Texas, has dutifully served alongside King on the committee. And now, he’s getting his chance to run it on his own.

Since King was forced out of the top spot due to party-imposed parameters, McCaul has been tapped to lead the Homeland Security Committee. McCaul’s history of Islamophobia shows why he will likely lead the committee similar to how King did.

And McCaul also runs around with the players behind the wave of Islamophobia that has swept the nation since 9/11. McCaul appeared on Frank Gaffney’s radio show last year—the same radio show where Gaffney has spread his toxic theories about sharia law and the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. And McCaul didn’t bat an eye, or mutter any response, when Gaffney carried on about the “Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in the United States.” When he got a chance to speak, McCaul indulged in speculation about the “threat” of Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group, in the Western Hemisphere—a threat for which there is little evidence for, according to PolitiFact.  

4. Louie Gohmert

This Texas Republican has promoted anti-Muslim sentiment too many times before. Gohmert was widely mocked for his August 2010 assertion that Middle Eastern terrorists were plotting new attacks on the U.S. by sending their pregnant wives to this country whose children “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists.” The phrase “terror babies” entered the political lexicon after Gohmert’s outlandish statements. Yet, as Mother Jones noted at the time, there’s not “a morsel of evidence to support Gohmert’s terror baby tale, which the congressman says he learned of from a woman on a plane while en route to the Middle East and from a retired FBI agent.”

The next year, Gohmert again made headlines with remarks about Islam and President Barack Obama. He suggested that Obama’s allegiances were with Islamic states instead of the U.S. “I know the president made the mistake one day of saying he had visited all 57 states, and I’m well aware that there are not 57 states in this country, although there are 57 members of OIC, the Islamic states in the world,” Gohmert said on the House floor. “Perhaps there was some confusion whether he’d been to all 57 Islamic states as opposed to all 50 U.S. states. But nonetheless, we have an obligation to the 50 American states, not the 57 Muslim, Islamic states…This administration [has been]  complicit in helping people who wants [sic] to destroy our country.”

5. Trent Franks

In recent years, Arizona Republican Trent Franks has taken to demonizing Muslim-Americans.

In 2009, Franks was one of four Republicans to call for an investigation of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s leading Muslim civil rights group and a favorite target of the Islamophobic right. The GOP members claimed an investigation was needed into whether CAIR was “spying” on Congressional offices in order to influence policy. The evidence for that charge was a 2007 CAIR memo that called for placing Muslim interns in key Congressional offices in order to influence policy on issues important to Muslim-Americans—something that every interest group does in Washington. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out at the time: “They stand accused of plotting to influence members of Congress and trying to help interns obtain positions in Congress in order to advance their political agenda.  That’s consistent with what virtually every political advocacy group in the nation does; it’s normally called activism and democracy.” But for House Republicans, Muslim-Americans working on Capitol Hill is a step down the road towards sharia law.

The House GOP members’ initial source for the entire CAIR debacle was a book titled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.

h/t: AlterNet

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

riyoyukai:

thelogicalsong:

There is a petition on Whitehouse.gov that will restrict congressmen and senators salaries to $75,000 a year for the next THREE YEARS to pay off the deficit! It needs 20,919 signatures, And it’s still under 5,000

HELP GET THIS DONE!

SIGNAL FUCKING BOOST

(via bohemianarthouse)

It took the mass murder of 20 children to make us face the facts about gun violence in America.  Please don’t let their deaths be in vain.

PLEASE sign the petition to end the NRA’s tax-exempt, nonprofit status.

Kick the NRA out of Congress, too.

If everyone who sees this will contact at least one (or… ALL) of the legislators who took NRA donations, we can start to get the wrong influences out of Congress and create some reasonable gun control measures.

How many children in Chicago have to die?  How many more Trayvons and Jordans?  How many more movie theaters, malls, temples, and elementary schools need to be shot up for us to realize that the 280 million guns in this country aren’t making anyone safer?

With a clean Congress LAWS CAN CHANGE.

other-stuff:

The benefits of the American Health Care system.

mslorelei:

Charles Darwin got 4,000 votes. Other write-in candidates include Voldemort, Cthulhu, Oprah Winfrey, and A Wet Rag.

(via sinshine)