Category Archives: communications/media

The PR ads against Teachers and Public Education

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Mercedes Schneider has this up on a billboard blasting Randi Weingarten and teachers  unions (read: public education).  (hat tip to Diane Ravitch)

Note that sleazy Rick Berman is behind this attack ad.

This is what parents have to look forward to, with dictatorships as Charters:

This is a comment signed Concerned Charter Teacher:

I work at Success Academy and thought you might be interested in the following. Just heard that we are planning a pro-charter parent march on October 8th. Our schools are being closed for the morning. Teachers, parents, students, and central office staff are being required to join the march. Other charter schools are joining as well. Several emails from senior leadership make it clear that the event is not optional. It seems very unethical that adults and children are being forced into this political statement, but I don’t know what, if anything, can be done. [Emphasis added.]

 

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Event is not optional.

Thinking is not optional.

Art is not optional.

Music is not optional.

Being a kid is not optional.

 

Slanting the news

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Diane Ravitch has this up on Politico’s slanted reports on Education.  I have noticed this myself lately of the few articles I’ve read on there–a definite change in the wind, so to speak.  The comments are interesting, too, as others have noticed and some suspect the Billionaires Media Club is at work here.

From the comments:

Ryan

January 14, 2014 at 11:20 am

It’s the billionaire boys club at work again, I’m afraid. Stephanie B. Simon was a superb reporter working stories on the privatization of public schools, and Silicon Valley’s and Wall Street’s pieces of the pie. Then she was hired by Politico, and her stories have changed. Similar thing happened to the NYT Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Mike Winerip, who early on did a great piece on the scam that is K-12 Inc’s so-called ‘virtual schools.’ Really K-12 is just peddling incredibly overpriced software and a few overloaded teachers to answer questions. NYT offered him full-time work, and put him on the baby boomer beat (?) and now he is writing its Motherlode blog — dispensing advice to parents. Gates $$ have totally shifted Ed Week’s reporting — it seems they aren’t even bothering to re-write the press releases fro the privatizers. PBS has done only a little reporting on the privatization of education. Rachel Maddow is silent. And on it goes.

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(underlining is mine to emphasize reporters’ collaboration by silence or slanted reporting.)

 

Understanding the gravity of NAFTA

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Idle No More has a post up on the far-reaching effects of NAFTA.  This is especially important because now we have NAFTA on steroids with TPP being fast-tracked through Congress.

Here’s an update on Blackfire.

More here.

From the article:

Though officials did meet with NGOs opposed to the mine, they accepted Blackfire’s take that protestors were out to squeeze money from the firm, says MiningWatch’s analysis of the emails.

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Of course….because the mining company execs see everything in $$, they think everyone *else* thinks as they do.  It is inconceivable to them that there are people who value the environment, their health, their children’s health, the Earth, etc.

Note how the company was unable to substantiate claims against Abarca.  It appears he was thrown in jail under false claims.

NAFTA, and I fear TPP, are all about taking power and control away from the local people.  It means losing their autonomy to decide what happens in their communities, as the mega million dollar lawsuit illustrates.

These trade agreements are not supportive of the democratic process, rather a dictatorial process.  How is this representation of taxpayers?

Huffington, Gates, join forces

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In what could be called the Billionaires’ News Service, Ariana Huffington and Bill Gates, amongst other billionaires, want to control even more of the media message….er, I mean, news…

…and this, my friends, is why we need the Fairness Doctrine.  This is why we need a break up of the monopoly of the press and media by the 1%–they already have their voices heard, over and over.  They were able to sell the Iraq War through their monopoly of the news outlets–radio, paper, TV–as we saw in the previous blog on Iraq Veterans against the War.  It was scripted without so much as one critical media reporter…oh, wait, Phil Donahue was critical…and he was fired.  The more that media is concentrated, the less independent voices are heard.  If we had the media we had in the 60s and 70s, there would have been more investigating of WMD’s, and less cheerleading by the talking heads.

The Guardian link, has a little more detail.  Keep in mind that the Guardian has also joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation… further concentrating Gates’ media messaging…

A side note~~A commenter on the commondreams site has this link up**.  Wow. If this is true, it opens up yet another can of worms of falsifying evidence to get us into yet another war….

And the questions begin:  Why did Scahill and Jones refuse to share a stage with Mother Marian?  If Scahill is as good as investigative reporter that he is reported to be, then why would he not investigate the accusations against Mother Marian?  Why did he not seek her out to get her side of the story?  This is all just mindboggling.

**also note that the author writes articles published in Huffington Post.

Gov. Pence wants to give $1 billion to businesses

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…in the form of a tax break…by eliminating property taxes for businesses.

From the article:

An analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency determined that if the tax were eliminated, schools and cities in Lake County would lose $74.2 million, Porter County $14 million and LaPorte County $7.2 million. That’s about the same annual impact as property tax caps, which have decimated government services in all three counties.

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I can smell ALEC all over this push to eliminate taxes for the wealthiest while putting more of the burden on the middle class and poor, if they try to make it up through sales tax.

And then there’s the continued assault on Glenda Ritz’ authority as a duly elected official who got more votes than Pence.  (Indeed, they were practically begging people to attend his inauguration.  A website reported that 1500 people attended his inauguration….I’m betting that 1,000 were homeless people given $20 to be there. Or perhaps state workers threatened with their jobs if they didn’t attend. /snark)  I also tried to access the site that lists Pence’s contributors for his inauguration day–the website was listed as suspicious!  Nope, not going to risk that.

Anyway, here we are still under the death grip of the Koch brothers and neocon toadies….

No More

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Jeff Nguyen has a blog up featuring Eddie Vedder’s song “No More”.

God bless Phil Donahue— still fighting the good fight.  I grew up watching Donahue and he opened my world.  He talked about subjects that were taboo.  He asked intelligent questions.  I loved the “live” aspect of his shows where callers could call in to add to the story.

It was a sad day when his show was no more.  And even sadder that he was fired from MSNBC for speaking out against the Iraq war.

 

NSA: It’s worse than we thought

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I hope you’re sitting down, because this is going to blow you away.

An interactive graphic from Der Spiegel explains that this tool is a part of NSA’s ANT division that the agency developed so it can see and hear what is happening in a room “without having to actually install radio-signal-emitting bugging devices in them.”

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…and you thought that mercury poisoned folk like myself were crazy for saying that EMF’s bothered us greatly.  When I was sicker, I could not talk on a cell phone for an hour, or I would become ill with a migraine.  EMF’s from the classroom smartboard/computer/wand make me ill.

And as far as the radiated beams causing cancer…well, that is a stone in the gravel pit.  The NSA is running amok with nobody reining them in or following anything that looks like our Constitution…

Oh, and in case you missed it–they’re also intercepting laptops bought online and installing spyware on them. Yep.

….because we got to get the boogeyman.

We got to get the boogeyman.

I wonder about this and those birds falling out of the sky.  More here.

Michael Twitty on Culinary Injustice

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Here is a good video of Michael Twitty and his efforts to have African cooks recognized for their contributions to culinary endeavors.

I just want to add that women in general have added so much to our culinary endeavors, but that has been under recognized, if at all.   Men put on white hats and call themselves “chefs”.  Women cook.  Get it?

 

 

Education News and the postal service

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Raginghorseblog has a good riddance message to “if-you’re-poor-blame-God” Mayor Bloomberg.

Mercedes Schneider has a post up here on New Years and here on AFT Myths–really good blog on the myths and debunking them with pointed questions.

As I thought about the profiteers circling around public education, the postal service popped into my head.  They actually made a profit last year, but you wouldn’t know it by theBush Administration’s demanding they pay into retirement funds for people not even born yet…

…it suddenly occurred to me that not only are the profiteers going after public education and other social programs, the postal service is also a target for a couple of reasons:  a) strong union–gotta break those unions; and  b) public service efficiently run but could be run more *cough* efficiently.  Or, in other words ::damn, look at the golden opportunity to make some bucks while delivering crappy service…::  and, finally, c) postal workers make pretty good money….so they gotta get rid of them!

See…they can’t portray the postal carriers like teachers and say that they are not doing their job because, well, the mail gets delivered in a reasonable time with good rates through wind and rain and dark of night. They had to come up with some other way to bankrupt them and make it look like it was their fault, see?  Hence, we have the nonsense of paying for people that aren’t even born….making it look like they can’t make a profit or be self-sufficient…then the neocons/neolibs cry foul and trot out the overused sob story that the postal service is costing taxpayers money!  Not exactly.  They are funded by Congress for $100 million to deliver service to the blind and Americans overseas.  Otherwise, they are funded by stamps and other services the public pays for.

Even more astounding is that the postal service made a profit in this economy.  Now that’s impressive!

Opposing Enbridge

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Warrior Publications has this up on the curious fact that people opposing the Enbridge pipeline are not the radicals that the Oil industry and the politicos would like you to think.

Like I’ve said before, there are a lot more people in favor of protecting the environment but are afraid to be categorized as terrorists or radicals, so they remain silent.  It really came home to me when I wrote an op-ed for my local paper talking about environmental concerns, including GMO labeling.  I had people call me and talk to me in person (in a low voice, no doubt so no one else could hear the conversation) about how they agreed with me.  But they didn’t take that next step and write their own op-ed on how they, too, wanted to protect the environment.

The oil industry and others have done a bang up job of portraying *all* environmentalists as radical, violent people….when only a small number of people have done things that are disagreeable to the rest.  And I’m sure there were agent provocateurs amongst the violent ones.

The following isn’t related to the environmental protests, but it is helpful in understanding that it isn’t paranoia on the part of protestors: