Category Archives: voters
The PR ads against Teachers and Public Education
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
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
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.)
Republican Mask – Democrat Mask
Reclaim Reform (Ken Previti) has this up on the Chicago Teachers Union’s new IPO….the solution isn’t with those wearing Democrat or Republican Masks whom are in reality corporate employees…but with us.
God bless Karen Lewis and the CTU.
Moving the pet coke
Well, of course….they’re dumping pet coke in Chicago…and Whiting, Indiana….
“Petcoke tends to have higher metal content than coal – like nickel, vanadium and selenium,” added Geertsma. “Coal can have higher mercury content, so they’re both bad in terms of toxic heavy metals content.”
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The report says that Canadian exports of petcoke to the U.S. more than doubled between 2010 and 2012, and BP Whiting’s expansion will triple its petcoke production to 6,000 tons per day.
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And I got my answer to where the petcoke piles were moved to–Ohio.
More on Fukushima **edited
The comments on the last blog have some good links:
Nearly a third of all babies born after 3/11/11 are more likely to have thyroid issues. If you recall, radiation interferes with the thyroid. A good page here on what happens to the body.
More here.
Another link to a comments page about nuclear fallout and its affects on those in the military:
We think there are 150,000 more Atomic Veterans across the U.S. who do not know that their oath of secrecy has been recended, since 1963, and who also may not know that they may be entitled to VA benefits. The National Association of Atomic Veterans ( NAAV ) was formed in 1979 to assist Atomic Vet’s in accessing the VA system, for the purposes of getting treatment and compensation for a host of health issues precipitated by their exposure to ionizing radiation particles while proudly serving their country, as Mr. Beatty did, at Operation Crossroads… We continue to get phone calls, weekly, from A-vets who have recently been made aware of our organization, and who are in need of assistance in these areas. We look forward to hearing from anyone who may read this article…… Our website is: http://www.naav.com
R J Ritter – Nat. Commander
NAAV, Inc.
Member: Veteran’s Advisory Board on (radiation) Dose Reconstruction.~~~~~~~~~
Pass the word–perhaps this will help someone affected and not knowing where to go for help.
~~A side story on the chemical spill in West Virginia…criminy, if this isn’t nature slapping us in the face, warning us that we’re inept in dealing with this stuff, I don’t know what is…nature can only endure so much.
The attitude that the river will “take care of it” is utter bullshit. It’s just going to go somewhere else and cause health issues for the unfortunate ones.
Meanwhile, the Koch brothers have a pile of petcoke right next to the river in Detroit…**edited: I stand corrected. It has been removed….but the report fails to tell us where the pile was moved to..? Wanna bet it was to some poor neighborhood?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
More bad news for orcas
This is a disturbing report on our stupidity and carelessness and its impacting ecology, and specifically the orcas.
Here’s a Puget Sound indigenous group trying to help the orcas.
Of course, thinking of the west coast, my mind wandered towards the impact of Fukushima. A member of the mercury support group has stated that she felt much worse after moving to the west coast. She left after a year.
From the article:
Barrett-Lennard says the southern resident orca pod, which is found in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland, has lost seven matriarchs over the past two years, and he’s noticed a lack of vocalizations from the normally chatty mammals.
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More here. This is even more sobering in detail. There is an animated video of the radiation trail towards the United States and Canada. Be sure to click on the Laura James video –a picture says a thousand words. It made me nauseous looking at all the dead and dying sea stars.
They also make note that it is happening in Maine and New Jersey, so they question the Fukushima connection…but perhaps the radiation didn’t stop at the West Coast, but has traveled inland, as they say?
They also make note that the moose population is dying off–so much so that Wisconsin called off its moose hunt this past year. The deer population, as I’ve blogged about, is suffering and dying, too. And nobody questions GMO’s and their possible impact on these animals.
Understanding the gravity of NAFTA
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
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
…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….
Eagle 