Protester in Oakland on Saturday.
Protester in a one-sided debate Sunday.
There were more Police than protesters and journalists on Sunday morning.
On Saturday afternoon of November 19, 2011, protesters gathered in Oakland. By Saturday night a new Occupy Oakland encampment had been set up at a different location. By 9 a.m. Sunday morning, it was gone.
Striking students pass through Sather Gate
Striking students gather on Sproul Plaza Tuesday.
Music was part of the program at Sproul Plaza Tuesday
The fact that broadcast news media want to cover an issue in about 90 seconds works to the advantage of the Conservatives because most voters don’t want to get a complete picture of a complex issue and the student strike at University California Berkeley will provide an example of how the rush to oversimplify destroys journalism’s reason for being.
In the Sixties the University system in California was an outstanding opportunity for young people in that state to acquire an affordable education.
In the Seventies, Prop 13 was sold to home owning voters as a way to save money. The property tax had provided the funds for affordable educations. When Prop 13 passed, businesses saved large amounts of money when that tax was eliminated from their overhead expenses. Did they pass the savings along to consumers?
Wealthy families are used to expecting that their kids will be college educated and become industry management. The potential for middle and low class families sending their children to college may have seemed like the underclasses were stealing opportunities for large salaries from them so it behooved the wealthy to put the cost of education beyond the capability of the middle and lower class.
The fact that Prop 13 benefited business immensely made its passage a double payoff for the wealthy.
Can an explanation of how the passage of Prop 13, more than 30 years ago, caused the current student unrest, be reduced to a few words that fit on a bumper sticker?
Can the opposing force’s message of “Reduce taxes, increase jobs” be refuted on a bumper sticker?
So today students strike to make the point that they want the opportunity for an affordable education just like there was in the Sixties and the people who don’t want to restart a tax burden they managed to eliminate just say “trickle down” and dupe the voters who don’t examine the history of an issue.
To the best of this photographer/columnist’s ability to cover the start of the UCB student strike on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, we can report that we did not see a single instance of any student burning his draft card.
Doesn’t that prove conclusively that change has been delivered, just as promised?
These tents were gone by Thursday morning.
These steps are a famous protest site from the Sixties.
This tent was taken down minutes later.
The media (mostly) missed the incident that was part of protest history.
On late Wednesday afternoon, events at UCB went to warp speed. Police moved in and arrests were made. Protesters assert that videos that showed Police brutality are available online. Things had calmed down by early evening. Some protesters asserted that the police were not wearing their badges during the arrests.
Old Berkeley protesters might remember a time when a similar allegation resulted in a political cartoon in the Berkeley Barb that used a famous line from the movie “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” as a caption.
According to reports on KCBS news radio, tents were removed and more arrests were made about midnight.
Thursday morning, things were calm again.
A tent was set up and occupied by Naomi SantaCruz close to the Mario Savio historic plaque. Students were told to move it. They complied. The tent was set up at the very edge of Keay Davidson’s class on the relationship between University of California and the nuclear weapons laboratory.
About 10:36 a.m. PST on Thursday, November 10, 2011, an incident occurred and a scuffle ensued. A protester was led away by officers. Students began to chant “Police brutality, police brutality” but the law enforcement officers chose to ignore the students’ suggestion.
When Thursday’s incident occurred the TV crews being paid to record any news as it happened, were (apparently) caught off guard and the event had occurred before they could start “rolling.”
Could the tumult possibly have been much greater if the school had fired it’s football coach?
If you need help finding a credit union or small bank near you, go here.
Obama has released the long-form birth certificate they’ve been demanding, but it won’t make any difference to the hard-core Birthers. After all, they don’t like Obama so they will never trust this evidence. Better to wallow in their paranoid conspiracy theory which also doubles as a nice front for their rampant racism. MSNBC reported the story this way:
Obama releases detailed U.S. birth certificate
President slams ‘silliness’ of birther issue; Trump claims credit for release
From MSNBC.com staff and news service reports
April 27, 2011WASHINGTON — Responding to critics’ relentless claims, President Barack Obama on Wednesday produced a detailed Hawaii birth certificate in an extraordinary attempt to bury the issue of where he was born and confirm his legitimacy to hold office. He declared, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”
By going on national TV from the White House, Obama portrayed himself as a voice of reason amid a loud, lingering debate on his birth status. Though his personal attention to the issue elevated it as never before, Obama said to Republican detractors and the media, it is time to move on to bigger issues.
“Over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going,” said the president.
Read the rest here.
And here’s the long-form BC:
And the measure to prohibit the use of federal funds for Planned Parenthood passed. Of course. We can’t possibly fund a service for womens health that will end up saving money in the long run. But we sure as hell can afford to sponsor NASCAR.
This, too, was never about the budget.
“So we are now officially living in a country where more than 60% of households are not making enough money for a basic household — the bottom three quintiles of American household income top out at $62,000.”
Household Income Short of $68K? Welcome To the New Poverty.
That’s right. More than half of us are officially “poor.”
We are overdue for a class revolution.
It’s summed up in the emphasized third sentence – if nuclear power plant owners followed every safety precaution, they couldn’t make any money. Neocon Republicans love to spread fear by doting on lurid tales of the destruction that could be wrought by a ‘dirty-bomb’ nuclear device in the hands of a terrorist – so far, ‘peaceful’ nuclear power has killed more people than Al-Qaeda, but you won’t hear the GOP complain; they are, after all, a paid arm of the nuclear power industry.
“…[I]t’s been normal for this company in the past [lying to the public]. It’s normal for the industry to some extent.
“It’s a highly ideological industry, and it also involves a lot of concentration of political power, as well as physical power. And those institutions become very powerful, very close to the regulators, and an adversarial culture develops where they’re constantly pushing against the safety measures, because that`s where the money is.
“If you did every single thing that you — that was possible to make it safe, then you couldn’t make any money.”
– Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” March 16, 2011, talking about the Japanese nuclear plants. [Emphasis mine.]“Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called ‘SQ’ or ‘Seismic Qualification.’ That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.
“The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York. Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from ‘failed’ to ‘passed.’ ” [snip]
“These [Japanese nuclear] plants are now releasing radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Be skeptical about the statements that the ‘levels are not dangerous.’ These are the same people who said these meltdowns could never happen. Over years, not days, there may be a thousand people, two thousand, ten thousand who will suffer from cancers induced by this radiation.” [snip]
“It would be irresponsible for me to estimate the number of cancer deaths that will occur from these releases without further information; but it is just plain criminal for the Tokyo Electric shoguns to say that these releases are not dangerous. …The carcinogenic isotopes that are released at Fukushima are already floating to Seattle with effects we simply cannot measure.”
– Greg Palast, investigative journalist and former nuclear plant inspector, from “The No BS Info on Japan’s Nuclear Operators,” March 14, 2011.
Last night, Friday, January 21, in what I know must have been a surprise to much of his audience, Keith Olbermann announced this was the last “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” thanked his viewers and those who had helped put the show on the air over the years, and then calmly read a James Thurber story named “The Scotty Who Knew Too Much,” the moral of which was: “It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.” It was an odd, unsettling moment in the context of Keith’s departure, and it’s still not clear if Olbermann quit or MSNBC fired him; the only official announcement from MSNBC being an exercise in bland Corpospeak opacity:
“MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of Countdown with Keith Olbermann will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
Richard Adams, writing in The Guardian (UK), apparently believes Olbermann was fired:
“Keith Olbermann, the liberal, outspoken anchor of MSNBC’s Countdown show, had his contract dramatically terminated by the US cable news network’s parent company NBC on Friday night.
“Olbermann had two years of a four year contract remaining, worth an estimated $30m, and was the network’s highest-rated personality, responsible in large part for MSNBC’s orientation as a liberal, Democratic-leaning channel.”
Although Comcast ferociously denies they had anything to do with this – and it is barely possible Keith simply refused to work for them and ended his contract by mutual agreement with MSNBC — the juxtaposition of FCC approval to take over NBC/Universal and Olbermann’s blink-quick departure reek with the stench of conservative mega-corporation Comcast sending a chilling message to the cable news network’s employees – especially air personalities Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell – that if they go too ‘progressive’ in their shows, if they pull back the curtain on corporate malfeasance and corruption with too much zeal and fact, they could find their contracts suddenly cancelled as well.
(The new prime-time MSNBC line-up, BTW, is O’Donnell in Keith’s slot at 8:00ET, with Ed Schultz moving into O’Donnell’s current 10:00ET berth. Rachel will stay in her current time slot.)
Thankfully, Keith is still owed $14 million on his contract, so he will have a chance to take a breather, review his options, and make a comeback elsewhere, perhaps even at the struggling third-place CNN. As Rob Soto at Etidbits.com speculates:
“As for our opinion on what’s next for the liberal anchor, don’t be surprised if Olbermann ends up on CNN sooner than later. Their ratings are in the tank, their new Parker/Spitzer series is a disaster (with Kathleen Parker reportedly not very happy being there) and is a poor lead-in to the new Piers Morgan Show. The entire evening lineup needs a makeover, and fast. Olbermann reportedly still has two years on his contract and will get paid his annual salary of about $7 million. However, what is not known at this point if he has a non-compete clause in his contract that would prohibit him from appearing on a rival station until his two-year contract is over.”
VIDEO: Olbermann signs off on final Countdown
I’ve been a regular viewer and fan of Keith Olbermann’s since he first started Countdown eight years ago and I hope he shows up on the TV machine again soon; to paraphrase his sign-off, and mix in some Dylan Thomas, I wish him good luck, and I know he won’t go gently into that good night.
© 2011 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Tenn. Tea Party Wants Slavery Removed From History Textbooks
Posted to NewsOne by Casey Gane-McCalla, Jan. 13, 2011
TENNESSEE
The Tea Party of Tennessee wants to remove incidents of slavery and genocide from American textbooks for fear they would besmirch the image of the Founding Fathers:
The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports.
As a result, the Tea Party organizations argue, there should be “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
“The thing we need to focus on about the Founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” Rounds explained of his interpretation of the legacy of the Founding Fathers.
The issue of revising curriculums to teach history in a manner that encourages the glossing over of the uglier factors of the past has popped up in other states over the past year.
NAACP Criticizes Texas Textbooks For Watering Down Slavery And Civil Rights
— AP, May 20, 2010.
43 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, can you believe this is going on?
“The Democrats have begun to do something amazing — all of a sudden they’re waging politics, acting as if they want to win the 2010 election. ”
The Rachel Maddow Show – Breaking: Democrats might want to win.
There was no promised miracle, unless it’s that 80,000-plus people showed up to the New Messiah of the Right’s Gospel Meet-and-Bleat. (Incidentally, a possible third of the crowd may have just been ordinary tourists who stuck around to see what was going on rather than Teabagger acolytes of St. Beck.)
Carrie Dann at MSNBC’s First Read fretted:
“Estimates of just how many people attended Saturday’s event have varied from modest calculations of under 90,000 to brassy declarations of over a million.
“CBS News, which hired company AirPhotosLive.com to conduct an estimate, put the tally at around 87,000. One park service official told NBC News that the number was somewhere around 300,000. (The National Park Service no longer issues official crowd estimates after it was pilloried for allegedly miscalculating attendance at the 1995 Million Man March.)
“Beck himself told the crowd that he’d seen estimates that ‘between 300,000 and 500,000′ people showed up. Sarah Palin told POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin that she was disappointed by an Associated Press description of the ‘tens of thousands’ of ralliers, adding that she believed turnout to have been over 100,000.
“And, at a rally piggybacking off of the Restoring Honor event, Minnesota congresswoman and Tea Party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann challenged anyone who calculated Beck’s audience at anything less than seven digits. ‘We’re not going let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today because we were witnesses,’ Bachmann said.”
– Carrie Dann, “A Big Beck Crowd – But How Big?” MSNBC First Read, Aug. 30, 2010.
We already know dippy Michele’s estimate of anything, including the size of the Teabagger movement, is as solid as Dick Cheney’s interpretation of the Constitution, so discard that ‘million’ tripe. In this case, Wasilla’s Mama Grizzly may be closest; about 100,000, with perhaps a quarter to third apolitical, unreligious sightseers or celebrity gawkers. As Sam Seder confirmed, it was an old, white, middle-class gathering, just like Fox News’ dwindling audience.
You don’t have to know much about South Carolina to know that, except for certain areas, the Republican Party owns the state, including the no-paper-trail ES&S voting machines that made Greene the winner. As Garland Favorito notes in “New Evidence That Alvin Greene’s ‘Win’ in SC Was Stolen!”:
“As you may already know Alvin Greene, an unemployed former military veteran who paid a $10,000 qualifying fee, did not even run a campaign. Greene held no fundraisers, ran no paid advertisements, made no campaign speeches, hired no campaign manager, conducted no state wide tours, attended no Democratic Party county events, printed no yard signs and did not even establish a web site. Vic Rawl, a county commissioner, former judge and four-term state representative, ran a normal, aggressive campaign as his campaign manager, Walter Ludwig, has explained. He personally campaigned in at least half of the counties made radio and TV appearances, attended the state convention, collected official endorsements, had 600 volunteers, printed 10,000 bumper stickers, established 180,000 database contacts, created a 104,000 Email distribution list, had 3,300 Facebook Friends, sent out 300,000 Emails just prior to the election, received 20,000 web site hits on Election Day alone and was more active on Twitter than the other Democratic Party candidates.
“So how did this happen? All South Carolina elections are conducted on statewide unverifiable electronic voting equipment manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). South Carolina’s voting machines have no independent audit trail of each vote cast. This is necessary to audit the accuracy of the vote recording mechanism that transfers the selections the voter sees on the screen to the vote storage areas. All precinct printouts, ballot images and any other forms of paper documents that can be printed are not created independently but produced internally from the machines after the vote was recorded and could have been corrupted. It is technically impossible for anyone in the state to claim that South Carolina’s Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines record accurately on Election Day since there is no mechanism such as a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) to independently audit the vote recording. No amount of pre-election testing can assure DRE recording accuracy. The Federal Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Technical Guidelines Development Committee concluded that: “The National Institute of Standards and Testing & EAC Security & Transparency Subcommittee do not know how to write testable requirements to satisfy that the software in a DRE is correct” The reason for such a conclusion is that many electronic voting machines, such as those used in South Carolina, can be programmed in a variety of ways to count differently on Election Day than during testing. As a result, South Carolina voters cannot verify that the selections they see on the screen were electronically recorded, election officials cannot audit the actual vote counts and there is no directly created evidence of voter intent that can be used in a recount.”
So, while Vic Rawl won handily in certified mail-in absentee paper ballots by a 55 to 45 percent margin, the easily hacked and unverfiable ES&S equipment gave the hapless GOP plant Greene a 60 percent landslide. The probability of this happening is on the order of winning the Power Ball lottery 10 times in a row. As Favorito writes elsewhere in the article:
“Alvin Greene was declared the winner based on a near landslide 60-40% margin in Election Day electronic voting results. However, certified mail-in paper ballot results, received from the counties after a 15-business-day response period allowed under South Carolina law, show that Vic Rawl actually won the verifiable mail-in paper ballot absentee voting by a solid 55-45% margin.”
(Read the article and a detailed breakdown of the numbers here.)
Sen. Jim DeMint and the SC GOP must be mighty afraid, following the Gov. Mark Sanford sex scandal and the other Republican disasters, to pull a stunt like this.
It’s also interesting how uncurious our Big Media is over this obvious election theft. Will this new evidence bring them around?
CNN reported Sunday morning (5/30) that BP’s ‘Top Kill’ scheme to staunch the flow of oil gushing from the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico has failed. (Read the CNN story and see the video here.)
Next up, BP plans yet another ‘cap’ that won’t work any better than the first one.
Carol Browner, former head of the EPA and an adviser to President Obama, has confirmed that this is the worst environmental catastrophe in American history.
For an appreciation of just how horrible and far-reaching is this disaster, read “10 Things You Need (But Don’t Want) To Know About the BP Oil Spill,” by Dana Perdomo, Alternet, here.
I have to wonder: How much is BP playing us? I’ll bet gas will be up to $5 a gallon by the end of summer and it will be blamed on the big oil spill – BP and their corporate colleagues will rake in even more billions while the oil continues to flow from the bottom of the Gulf.
The only thing that will stop this from happening again is criminal prosecutions for negligent homicide, gross malfeasance, and fraud, with senior BP execs going to jail and the US government seizing their assets and disallowing any past, present or future profits from this mess. Of course, common sense would also dictate that all offshore drilling leases should be cancelled.
I won’t hold my breath, made shorter by air pollution from the byproducts of BP’s main source of income.
Both died Wednesday, Jan. 27th of natural causes, J.D. Salinger was 91; Howard Zinn was 87.
Read more about Salinger here.
Read more about Zinn here.
A sampling of quotes from Howard Zinn:
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Take Action on the 2nd-Month Anniversary of the OWS Movement
Just two months ago, Americans began assembling in Zuccotti Park in New York City to protest our lives being taken over by corrupt politicians who work for the Big Banks and Multinational Corporations instead of ‘We the People.’ Since then, the OWS Movement has spread like wildfire and has had enough influence to, among other things, change the media debate from cutting programs beneficial to the 99 Percent to discussing the obscene rewards the 1 Percent enjoys from gaming our system and bribery at the expense of the rest of us. If you can, try to show up for the protests that will be happening all over the nation, but especially in Zuccotti Park. For more info, go to Occupy Wall St.org.
Poster copyright 2011 R Black.