Untamed Teacher

PXXSERXX THX IXTXXNET

2012-01-18T16:13:00.000-05:00

I think that we are losing our civil and human rights, and that the internet is one of the tools that we are using to fight against those who are trying to take them away.

Moral: Don't Piss Off The Women

2011-12-22T12:06:00.002-05:00

The Rodney King Video of the Egyptian Revolution

2011-12-21T11:10:00.001-05:00

This is a description of the first 60 seconds of the video.

White letters in arabic on a black screen. No idea what it says. A woman's voice singing. No idea what she's saying.

Video starts.

People running. They have helmets and transparent shields. They are brandishing sticks. Other people are running away.

Lower screen right: Several people try to help a fallen comrad.

The camera focuses on this group, bringing it's members into the center of the screen. The helmets are almost upon them. There are three of them: Two helpers and a fallen one. The helpers struggle to get the fallen on his/her feet.

As helmets draw near they raise their sticks to strike. We see that the helpers separate from the fallen one, although one of them holds on to his/her hand until the last moment.

As the helmets surround the three, one of the helpers escapes, but the other is thrown to the ground. A group of 15 helmets start beating the two people on the ground.

The camera zooms in closer. The helmets are not only beating the two people on the ground, they are kicking them. The fallen one is lying on his/her back without making any defensive efforts. The helper is doubled over in a fetal position.

Most of the helmets concentrate on the fallen one. Kicks to the head and body. One helmet beats the helper mercilessly. The helper raises his legs in self defense to ward of the blows, but is otherwise not resisting.

Eleven helmets surround the fallen one who is still unresponsive. One helmet bends over and starts to drag the body. As the body is dragged, a black robe separates from the body. A helmet follows the body and kicks it as it is being dragged.

The black robe falls off completely and we see a blue bra. The fallen one is clearly a woman. The helmet who has been following her and kicking her gives her one final vicious kick in the breasts. The others move away giving clear view of the body. One helmet bends over and covers the breasts with the robe.

The video goes on for another two minutes and 48 seconds. It's all brutal, but nothing is as bad as seeing the unconscious woman beaten and kicked.

The video is on youtube. As of this writing it has more than three million views. Yesterday it had two million. You may or may not care to watch it, the choice is yours. I am linking it to this blog, but just in case google blocks it, you can find it on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iboFV-yeTE&skipcontrinter=1

(Note as of December 22, 2011: This link will take you to a page saying that this video has been flagged and giving you the option to not proceed. That is, they don't want you to watch it. The number of views are about the same as yesterday which shows that this tactic does work. That's OK. That's why I wrote the detailed description. There's a way around almost everything they do to prevent information from getting out.)

I compared this video to the Rodney King video because I think it's going to have the same effect in Egypt and around the world. There was already a call for a rally in front of the Egyptian consulate today. I wasn't really planning to go. I can't go to every rally--Egypt is very far away--and it's Christmas for goodness sake.

Now I'm going to the rally. For the fallen one.

http://www.defendegyptianrevolution.org/

Happy Thanksgiving Spray

2011-11-23T18:12:00.000-05:00

Follow more adventures of pepper spraying cop http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/page/2.

I've always liked to celebrate Thansgiving because it gives an opportunity to sit down with family and friends and reflect on how lucky I am for so many reasons and to give the Powers That Be appropriate kudos for whatever hand they have had in it all. The fact that the first Thanksgiving was really the opening salvo to genocide in the name of greed and power--not the first thing on my mind.

But that is what Wall Street is all about, isn't it? Greed and Power.

That is why I have decided to accept the invitation of Occupy Wall Street

This Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street is celebrating unity and community with an open feast at Liberty Square. From 2 to 6 p.m. at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) we will meet to share food, stories and inspiration. All members of our global community are invited to break bread with us.
Will Pepper Spraying Cop be there too? Maybe. After all he is part of the 99%.

Pepper Spraying Cop Strikes Again

2011-11-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

Check out some more sightings of pepper spraying cop. Be prepared for supreme lack of respect to every iconic image imaginable.

http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/

The Coptic Christian and the Muslim

2011-11-20T22:19:00.000-05:00

Today we are hearing a lot about clashes between Coptic Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Back in 2006 I saw a Coptic Christian, Mr. E, try to help K.N., a Muslim. I liked Mr. E., the custodian. I often stayed late after school and saw him when he came to sweep my classroom. He was an older gentleman with white hair and a permanent smile on his face. K.N. who shared a room with me also liked him.

One day she told me that they were both from Egypt, but that they had different religions--he was Christian and she was Muslim. She told me a little about the Coptic Christians.

After I learned that Mr. E. had actually been a witness to the incident with J.F., I urged K.N. to get him to write a statement in her defense.

"I don't want to make trouble for him." She said.

"Why would there be any trouble for him?" I asked. "He's just telling what he saw."

I was really stupid back then.

Eventually I got her to let me approach him. I asked him about the day that she had talked to him in the hall about giving her some garbage bags for an experiment. Yes, he remembered very well. Did he happen to see Ms. N. grab a boy as he entered the classroom? No, but there was a boy who pushed past her and then tripped when his bookbag got caught on the door. Did he know that she had been accused by the boy of tripping him on purpose? No, but the boy had gotten angry and said something about it being her fault. Could he write down what he saw? Of course, no problem.

K.N. gave Mr. E.'s handwritten letter to her attorney, and at some point during the 2006-2007 school year the attorney called the school (!) and asked to make an appointment with Mr. E. who was a witness in the 3020a hearing of K.N.

Shortly thereafter Mr. E. was brought up on charges. There had been an "incident" in one of the science classrooms. A substitute had led the students downstairs and had failed to notice that the last students on line had opened the water faucet full force and thrown papers all over the classroom floor. The classroom was flooded by the time someone noticed and turned off the water. It had been Mr. E.'s job to clean up the mess. He took a piece of paper and wrote a note to the teacher: "Make sure the water is turned off before leaving the classroom" or something equally innocuous. The next thing Mr. E. knows, he is brought up on charges for threatening a teacher.

Mr. E. told me about the "incident" (I hate that word) and I offered to write a letter in his defense. He was glad I offered. I wrote a glowing letter saying truthfully what a kind, respectful, considerate, hardworking, cheerful, gentle man he was.

A few weeks later he told me about his hearing. They wouldn't enter my letter into evidence because it wasn't notorized. "Anybody could have written it." Then they forced him to admit that he had done something wrong and had suspended him for a certain amount of time (I forget how much). I think they might have fined him too--I forget.

Anyway, Mr. E. never did show up for any of the appointments that the attorney set up through the school office (!).

OK. There was a lot of Union involvement here. First of all the Custodian's Union allowed a principal to retaliate against one of their brothers for simply telling the truth. Secondly, the UFT allowed one of its members to bring bogus charges against a custodian (union brother) in order to help the principal retaliate against him for telling the truth. I'm not sure which teacher brought the charges--Mr. E. didn't want to tell me. I always assumed it was Mr. G. who was assigned to that room and would have been the first to find Mr. E.'s note when he came in the day after the flood. But I have no proof, and have to admit it could have been someone else. Somewhere there are written records.

Without the collusion of Local 891, International Union of Operating Engineers who, according to their website, put children first and of the United Federation of Teachers, a union of professionals--without the collusion of both unions, Mr. E. might have been able to tell his story to K.N.'s attorney.

Both unions should have praised him for giving a true statement in support of a union sister, and protected him against retaliation instead of stepping back and allowing him to be fined and suspended for doing so.

Union Collusion

2011-11-20T18:56:00.000-05:00

I became suspicious of Union collusion with the DOE back in May of 2006. At that time I was the only teacher who stood up for K.N. when she was brought up on charges. Here is the letter that I wrote to Chancellor's Investigator B.F. when I thought that he might actually be a Real Investigator instead of a Bogus Co-Conspirator. Back then I made up false names for everyone: I called K.N. Adila Hassan and I called B.F. Haden Sands. Now I'm referring to them by their real initials.

There was so much that could have been done by the leadership as well as the membership. If we had fought back then the way we should have, we would not have all the school closings that we have today. We would not be losing public education in this country. Although I have refrained from taking the Union to task (there are just so many battles one can fight at one time), I feel that we need to forcefully denounce any cooperation or collusion between the Union (membership and leadership) and the 1% of this country represented in our case by Michael Bloomberg and his billionaire friends.

My evidence is anecdotal. I'll be telling you a lot of stories. The real evidence, of course, can be found among the innumerable records involving thousands of teachers during the Bloomberg Witch Hunts. So much of it was carefully and meticulously written down--much like the records kept during the Holocaust. Even if we didn't have the written records, however, we would have the memories of thousands of survivors.

Chancellor's Bogus Investigator

2011-11-20T16:05:00.001-05:00

In my last post, "No Harm, No Foul", I showed how easy it was to get a child to tell the truth. Twelve-year-old J.F. had lied about a teacher and gotten her sent to the Rubber Room, but a year later, he had caved under the pressure of a few simple questions.

J.F. told his lie to: his mother, Principal S.T., and Chancellor's investigator B.F. ( I have referred to this guy as Hayden Sands in other posts--Head in Sands, get it? he he he). There were probably a few other adults involved along the way (Assistant Principals, Counselors, Parent Coordinators, Teachers, Union Representatives, etc.) who could have prevented the teacher K.N. from being brought up on charges and sent to the Rubber Room. Why didn't they get him to tell the truth? It isn't that hard. Children lie all the time, but they have a hard time maintaining a lie consistently. They just don't have the brain, or (I would like to think) the soul for it.

In this post, I'm going to concentrate on the Chancellor's Investigator. If you haven't already, it might help to go back and read my post called "If a President Can Lie, a Principal Can Lie" which gives more detail about K.N.'s case.

The Chancellor's Investigator is usually called by the Principal after the Principal has carried out her "investigation". She or an Assistant Principal has interviewed everyone involved, has asked for statements, and has written reports. When the Investigator arrives, he is presented with a neat little folder containing all of the above. However, this person is not there to investigate anything. He is there to help repair any weaknesses in the elaborate frameup that the principal has begun to construct. I'm still searching for an appropriate title that would better describe this person's actual job description.

Chancellor's Frameup Expert?

Chancellor's Co-conspirator?

Chancellor's Rent-An-Accomplice?

This is what you do if you are a Real Investigator:

First of all, you make sure that the parents of all children involved have been informed about the incident and that they be given the opportunity to be present during at least part of the interview.

In K.N.'s case, the parents of the children who were being used to corroborate J.F.'s story were not informed about their children's statements. I know. I called them and asked.

Second, you interview both parent and child separately and together. It's no joke to bring false allegations against a teacher. You make sure that everyone knows that you expect the truth and nothing but the truth and that liars will be delt with severely.

J.F. would have caved. The six children who gave false testimony in support of J.F. would have caved. Karl, the boy who couldn't get to the bathroom in time would have provided enough testimony for you to bring several people up on charges, none of whom were K.N. For that reason alone, the principal would never have given you the opportunity to interview Karl, because she would have been the first person to be brought up on charges for locking the bathroom doors.

Third, you interview the teacher. Union representatives often tell teachers not to say anything, but if you are a Real Investigator, everyone knows that you will do everything in your power to protect teachers from false allegations.

K.N. would have given her version of events and might even have shared with you that a custodian could corroborate her version of events on the day J.F. said she had tripped him. Mr. E., one of the custodians was talking to her as she stood in the hall. She was asking Mr. E. if he could give her some plastic bags for an experiment she planned to do later in the week. Mr. E. saw J.F. push past her. He saw the children run up as the bell rang. Why hadn't she mentioned Mr. E. to the principal? He was a nice man. She didn't want to make trouble for him.

Fourth, you interview other people not included in the principal's report.

Mr. E. would have backed up K.N. He was shocked that she was in trouble. Such a nice woman. He saw the boy push her out of the way as he ran into the classroom, tripping and almost falling as he did so. Children these days don't know how to show respect for their teachers. The other children? Oh they ran up as the bell was ringing and had to stand in line as Ms. K.N. marked them late. You should have heard them complaining! Children these days!

Then you interview the entire Leadership Team that came up with the rules about locking the bathroom doors. You also interview Karl's Math teacher, Ms. B., who taught Karl during the first two periods of the day he had the bathroom accident. She admits that she didn't allow him access to the bathroom in spite of repeated requests because of Principal S.T. didn't allow children to go to the bathroom during those periods (The accident occurred at the beginning of third period).

How many principals would want a Real Investigator in their building?

No, B.F. was not expected to carry out a real investigation. If he had, he wouldn't have remained a Chancellor's Investigator for long. He was expected to help fortify a case against a targeted teacher-- someone the principal wanted to get rid of.

All of B.F.'s investigations are a matter of public record. A researcher should look for a clear pattern of bias in favor of the DOE. It would also be a good idea to interview the children.

By now, J.F. has graduated from high school. It would be interesting to interview him about his role in destroying a teacher's career. Does he still think there was no harm, no foul?

No Harm No Foul

2011-11-19T18:02:00.001-05:00

J.F. peeked in through the doorway. It was the end of the school year and J.F. had just graduated from 8th grade. He had never been my student, but for the past year he had been doing the same thing. He would stop by my room, peek in the door, and run away laughing. Once he called out, "I'm King of the School! I got a teacher fired!

He was the student I wrote about in "If a President Can Lie, So Can a Principal."

He was not referring to me, of course. I retired before they could fire me. He was referring to my colleague K.N. He had accused her of intentionally making him trip when he was in 7th grade. She had spent this whole school year in the Rubber Room as a result.

This would probably be the last time I saw him, so I decided to ask the question that occurred to me every time I saw him.

"J.F., Why did you lie about Ms. N? Why did you say that she tripped you? What did she do to you to make you want to get her fired?"

"She did! She tripped me on purpose!"

"Look. J.N. I know that isn't true. She had arthritis in both knees. The last thing she would do is grab hold of you while you were running and risk falling down."

He paused, considering his next move. Then he said,

"She wasn't really fired. She has a job in another school. So, No Harm, No Foul."

Then he ran away, and I never saw him again.

It took me barely 30 seconds to get the truth out of him--a truth Principal S _ _ _ _ _ T _ _ _ _ was never interested in hearing.

It's time to finish K.N.'s story.

Happy Thanksgiving, S _ _ _ _ _ T _ _ _ _.

The Bidding of the Many Not the Few

2011-11-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

"We Are the Many" by Makana

Reminds me of Dylan, but that's OK.

November 17

2011-11-11T11:43:00.001-05:00

It seems like there have been a lot of calls to join this march or that march. If you haven't come out yet, this would be a good one to join as a first experience. Even the UFT is backing it. If you have been marching and marching and nothing seems to have changed...well Rome wasn't built in a day and it wasn't destroyed in a day either.

George Carlin on the American Dream

2011-11-01T14:05:00.000-04:00

I wish I could joke about all that's happened to me, but since I can't, I'll let people like Carlin do it for me and remind me to never stop laughing.

TRANSCRIPT ( courtesy of shoq value)

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.

Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! Its a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, its the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.

They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

Its called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Trash Talk

2011-10-30T09:45:00.000-04:00

I know just how Oscar the Grouch feels. As far as I am concerned, dumping me into the Rubber Room was like throwing me away like a piece of garbage--They didn't even bother to recycle.

So who exactly is "they"? Well, Bloomberg and Klein, course. And then there was Principal S_ _ _ _ _ T _ _ _ _ and her ASSistant Principals. But they couldn't have done it alone. They had to have had help.

Hitler did not act alone. McCarthy did not act alone. A few teenage girls in Salem did not act alone.

Mic Check

2011-10-30T08:04:00.000-04:00

About 200 people occupied the NYC DOE Panel for Education Policy meeting last Tuesday showing the amazing effectiveness of the mic check method used in general assemblies at Occupy Wall Street.

I have gone to PEP meetings and have watched videos of PEP meetings and have never seen the crowd dominate to the extent that it did here. The auditorium wasn't full. According to the makers of the video there were only about 200 people there, but they literally blew away Walcott and his panel as if they were dried autumn leaves.

If more people go to future PEP meetings and use the same methods, maybe the assembly can someday assert its own authority and start making its own decisions about educating New York City's children.

I wasn't there, but I recognized faces of people who have been attending PEP meetings since Klein was Chancellor. (See Ed Notes Online and Grassroots Education Movement).

Normal New York Talk

2011-10-19T15:16:00.000-04:00

I came to New York City in 1978 from a Western State carrying a bright shiny degree in Elementary Education with a concentration in ESL and Bilingual Education.

"Why did you leave a nice place like that to come here?", I was asked more than once.

'There's all kinds of different people", was my favorite reply. "You can't find this kind of diversity anywhere else."

That wasn't the only reason I came, of course, but it was the only one I could give in ten words or less--which I learned was required of me if I wanted to engage in the short, staccato dialogue accepted by New Yorkers.

"Why was that guy so angry at me?" I asked one of my New Yorker friends once.
"Why do you think he was angry? He was normal.
"He was yelling at me!
No, he wasn't. That's just how people talk here.
Oh.

So normal conversation with a New Yorker came in short, loud staccato bursts. And that didn't mean they were angry. It was just normal.

Just to clarify--I was living in Brooklyn at the time. I found this delightful video that might give you an idea of my first taste of New York conversation.

The Rubber Room--No One Cares

2011-10-19T13:23:00.001-04:00

I have published Jude's story and I have started to link yesterday's blog post to as many people and organizations as possible. I have started to write a script based on the transcript of her sanity hearing. I can probably produce this script, even paying union scale to cast and crew for between $2000 and $5000. As you can see, I'm already starting to work up a budget.

Now I'm going to move on to my story. But Jude's story hasn't gone away. This blog is only a notebook. People can drop in and read it any time, but the blog itself will not bring about social justice. Networking will. Writing--both nonfiction and fiction will.

There has not been a lot of interest in my posts about Jude's story since I published yesterday --according to my blog stats. It's a hard story to read, and the ending isn't happy. What is more, it's old news for most people. That's ok.

Nobody wanted to hear about the Holocaust right after World War II, either. The Diary of Ann Frank was first published in 1947, but it didn't become a bestseller until it was released in English in 1952. Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were executed in 1953, but their story wasn't really revisited until their own children started writing books and making documentaries.

It wasn't until 15 years after the Salem witch trials that the community recognized that mistakes were made and one of the original teenage girls who started it all made a public apology.

Yes, I am comparing the Rubber Room and the Bloomberg Teacher Witch Hunts to a. The Holocaust b. The McCarthy Witch Hunts c. The Salem Witch Trials

But people probably won't want to hear about it for another 5, 10 or 20 years. It's time to start writing the books and making the movies for when that happens.

Jude's Story Made Easy To Read

2011-10-18T16:45:00.001-04:00

Jude's Story is all over the place on this blog, so I want to put it in sequential order so that I can now refer it to other people.

Occupy Wallstreet is accused of not having demands. I can understand that. How can you demand anything from people who have no intention of engaging in a dialogue, of listening to you, of keeping their word if they do make agreements. I also have no demands. What kind of demands can you make of people who would do to a person what was done to Jude? Getting the story out is the most important thing. Then the community can decide what to do about it.

I just ask that you please read the story and pass it on.

1. Jude's Story, The American Dream

2. Jude's Story, The Crime

3. Jude's Story, Threats and Coverups

4. Jude's Story, Foundations

5. Jude's Saga Continued

6. Jude Successfully Defends Herself At Her Sanity Hearing (Part 1)

7. Jude Successfully Defends Herself At Her Sanity Hearing (Part 2)

Jude Successfully Defends Herself At Her Sanity Hearing (Part 2)

2011-10-18T16:00:00.003-04:00

The last two posts have been about Jude, whose story I began to tell last year. It will be easier to understand this and the next few posts if you read them first.

TRANSCRIPT OF SANITY HEARING CONTINUED

Q: Have you ever attempted suicide?

A: Never.

Q: Have you ever attempted to harm yourself?

A: Never, never.

Q: Do you have any plans to try to harm yourself?

A: No.

Q: Have you ever physically attempted or harmed anyone else?

A: No, no, no, never.

Q: Do you have any plans or desires to hurt anyone else?

A: No.

Q: You take care of all of your activities of daily living?

A: Absolutely.

Q: Do you eat well?

A: Absolutely; too well.

Q: Do you sleep well?

A: Yes. I do.

Q: Take care of your own personal hygiene?

A: Absolutely.

Q: Could I ask you, you mentioned that you have some records from the school?

A: Oh, absolutely.

Q: Latest being 2008?

A: Yep, yep. I put them like from 2008 going back and I think he should—I have more though.

MR MINERVA: Could I have this marked for identification?

THE COURT: Yes. Show counsel, please.

JUDE: I have 2007, 2006.

MR. STERN: Your Honor, at this time, saving the Court some time being preidentified, I’d object to these documents admission.

THE COURT: The objection?

MR. STERN: The objection is it is not certified copies of anything that it purports to be; and frankly, I don’t know its relevance at this time.

THE COURT: I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll look at it.

MR. MINERVA: It is being offered to show that the school gave her an evaluation as of April of ’08 because there was a contention that she wasn’t working for the last two and a half years.

MR. STERN: No one made that contention, Your Honor, so I’d object to it.

THE COURT: Okay. Just a moment.

THE PATIENT: I have the pay stubs back at the hospital.

THE COURT: Just a minute. Continue.

MR. MINERVA: Thank you.

Q: Ms. Jude, you heard the doctor testify that C.P.S. has had some involvement with you and the children?

A: Uh-huh.

Q. Have your children ever been taken away from you?

A. Absolutely not.

Q. You also have mentioned having problems with the neighbors across the street?

A. Absolutely.

Q. Could you tell us about your relationship with them and what’s been going on?

A. Well, they keep on calling out strange things to me and I don’t know them at all. For instance, they called out that I’m a dike. They called out that my ex-husband, that everyone knows that you found him – that he left you; everyone know he left you because you found him in bed with another man.

And they call out, they say: Watch what we do to your daughter right in front of you, we’re going to kick her “A”. They don’t say “A”, they say the word; for no reason. They sit on my retaining wall and I ask them: Could you please move? That’s my property. They say: We don’t have to. Show us the deed.

Q. Who are these neighbors?

A. Oh, these—they range in age from abut 17 to about the early 20’s; they’re like late teens. The woman who lives there, who’s the mother, she doesn’t seem to have any control over her children. They invite—I think she has three children that live there and they keep on—they’re mostly girls, they keep inviting these boys over. I counted up to 18, 19 boys. And I’m off during the summer and I’m watching the house and they’re going in and out with the girls, in and out all day. And then they, you know, come out with—they don’t go in the same way they come out; they come out I don’t know what’s going on across the street but I do know I’m not starting any trouble with them. I do know that dog mess was placed on my door. I do know my son’s bike was stolen. I did not make a lot of calls within the last two weeks because I was in the Bahamas. So that’s not. I only made one call within the last month. The call before that was like in June or something.

THE COURT: Call to?

MS. JUDE: To the police. Because when Dr. Aronson stepped up, he said: She’s made repeated calls in the last two weeks to the police about these neighbors. And I said: No, I didn’t, I was in the Bahamas; I wasn’t even there.

MR. MINERVA: How long were you in the Bahamas?

MS. JUDE: I was in the Bahamas for six days and two in Florida.

Q: What dates were those?

A: August – August 1^st through –just came back on Saturday, whatever Saturday’s date was.

Q. Approximately the 9^th?

A. Yeah, I think so.

Q: Were you admitted on the 14^th?

A: I couldn’t believe it.

Q: You also, I believe, stated or was stated by the doctor about your claim to the police of someone urinating on your rug?

A: That was in June at the end of the school year. What happened, I had a couple of things happen around the house so I called the police to the house and they came to the house. They looked and there was a spot on the living room rug. I just did my carpet last year, just have it redone. So the police were asking me: Could it be a dog? I said: Officers, you can come upstairs with me right now because my dog is locked up upstairs in a kennel and I have the key; she can’t get out.

So the dog was upstairs in the house that day in a room. And when we came – when I showed the officers, they said: How do these people get in? I said: Well, the window is open. I said when we left out, the children and me; the windows were all closed because I do check that. And I have ADT alarm but that window is not part of the alarm system. So it looked like somebody – maybe they were trying to do vandalism. The screen was askew, the window was open.

So the police asked me: Couldn’t it have been a dog? I said the dog is locked up in the kennel and the window is open and I left it closed. So I have no idea what’s going on. I just asked him: Could they dust for fingerprints, that’s all. I did not accuse anybody, did not say anything about any – I didn’t accuse anybody. I just asked: Can’t you dust for fingerprints and find out why this window is askew. They asked: Why did you leave it open? I said: I did not. I checked to make sure they were closed before I left for work.

They may have been unlocked. I have 12 windows on my bottom floor; I have two floors.

Q: Your problem with the neighbors involves teenagers to early 20’s, not with any adults?

A: Well, the adult in the house hasn’t had any problems with me. She’s having problems because she’s never there to see what her teenagers are doing. So by the time she comes, unseen, whatever information she’s hearing is hearsay from a bunch of boys who have been in the house with her daughter.

Q: Are you involved in litigation concerning your employment?

A: Absolutely. I have my employers at PERB because I have placements that I asked and because of harassment –

Q: What is PERB?

A: PERB is a labor relations board—New York State Labor Relations Board.

Q: So you currently have a claim against your employer?

A: Absolutely. We’re going back on October 2. And I have the charges, if you want to see; they’re not delusional. I don’t think that I’m being asked to punch in, when everybody else is let go, you know, after me. I’m being singled out for certain behaviors and positions that nobody else is asked to do.

If you give me a cluster position, they’re only telling me what classes I’m going to five minutes before I get there so I’m unprepared.

Q: Who’s your complaint against?

A: The union and the Board of Ed. That complaint is against the union and Board of Ed. Because of the things going on in my job. But the charges are there, I have them with me...

Q: The doctor stated that you were in marriage counseling for a time?

A: Yes, I was.

Q: For how long a period of time?

A: Well, while I was still married to him. It started in the 1990’s and ended in the 2000’s; the late 1990’s to sometime in the 2000’s.

Q: How long?

A: Maybe five or six years.

Q: That you were in counseling for?

A: Yeah.

Q: You were not receiving psychotherapy?

A: No. It was counseling.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to tell the Judge why he should discharge you today and why he should feel you wouldn’t be a danger to yourself or others?

A: Yes. Your Honor, I have never been a danger to myself. I’ve never been accused of being a danger. I’ve worked with children from 1990 to the present. I’ve worked in some of the worse classrooms in New York City. I started in the Bronx for six years and now I work in Queens and I never have been accused of harming anybody. I’ve dealt with countless parents and children.

I’m sure anybody who came into this court from my school would be shocked that I’m even here. Besides that, I can’t pay my mortgage from in here. I can’t deposit my checks. I can’t pay my car, my homeowner’s insurance. I can’t continue to maintain my household.

Also Dr. Aronson said something about that I didn’t have the psychiatric evaluation that my job requested. First of all, they didn’t request a psychiatric, they requested a medical and I did have it. I had it as soon as they could give it to me. I had it on 12/27/06… I brought in my doctor’s stuff on, which the legal department of New York City told me to go get, so I brought it in on August 31^st and at that point in time I was supposed to be given an appointment to go to 65 Court Street and I was not given an appointment from August 31^st, 2006 to August 27^th; at which time I saw a medical doctor on Court Street and a psychologist. So I had a psychological outside by my own doctor as well as theirs.

Q: Do you mean December?

A: December 27^th, 2006; at which time I saw the medical doctor at 65 Court Street and a psychologist. So I had the psychological outside by my own doctors as well as inside. And on that day, 12/27/06, I was declared medically fit.

Q: One other question, these problems you’re having with the neighbors, the doctor says you told them that you would not be calling the police anymore, that you would handle it a different way?

A: Right.

Q: Did you tell him that?

A: Yeah. I thought I told him – I thought I told you that the police suggested I go to –

THE COURT: Talk to the Court.

MS JUDE: I’m sorry. I thought I told the doctor that the police suggested that I go to arbitration. They said that there is something in our town called arbitration. So when I said: I’m not going to call the police anymore, the police came and told me, you should take your neighbors to arbitration; you can go to the Town of ___________ to a judge and he’ll hear both of your sides.

So you know this sinister thing, I’m going to do something to them or whatever, I don’t know where that insinuation comes from. If you look at anything I’ve ever done, I’ve handled everything litigiously. I let the law handle it as much as possible. I’m not going to harm them or harm myself.

MR MINERVA: Thank you. No further questions.

DECISION OF THE COURT:

After listening to everyone and everything that was said to me, with all due respect to the doctor, it appears to me the doctor appears to be a very intelligent man, well trained, careful of his observations; but in the totality, I don’t believe there is clear, convincing evidence that this lady should be in the hospital. I have doubts about every one of the criteria that are necessary to keep her in the hospital. Therefore, I’m going to release her.

As for the problems that she’s having and described, they’re not unreasonable and they’re well within the realm of possibilty of occurring. Her actions and complaints in her circumstances, I believe, are believable, and therefore, I am denying any extension of time and as I said, I’m releasing her.

MR MINERVA: Thank you

JUDE: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Jude Successfully Defends Herself At Her Sanity Hearing (Part 1)

2011-10-18T15:27:00.001-04:00

DIRECT EXAMINATION

BY MR. MINERVA

(Dr. Aronson has already testified that he has diagnosed Jude with delusional disorder persecutory subtype.)

MR. MINERVA: Morning.

JUDE: Morning.

Q: Could you tell us how old you are, please?

A: 43 years old.

Q: Could you tell us your educational background?

A: Okay. Um, I graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1983 with a Regents Diploma. I got a Regents scholarship to Hunter College and graduated from Hunter College in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. I graduated from Lehman College in 1993 with a Master of Science in Elementary Education.

Q: Could you tell us about your employment history?

A: From 1990 until the present I’ve been employed by the New York City Department of Education as an elementary school teacher, common branch license.

Q: When is the last time that you worked?

A: On June 26, 2008. I’m supposed to go back on August 28, 2008.

Q: How long have you been at St. Catherine’s Hospital?

A: I’ve been there since August 14^th.

Q: What led to your admission there?

A: I had an argument with my neighbors outside of my house. They were threatening my daughter and she did report that to the police. They were threatening me as well. So I called my ex-husband to the scene, thinking that maybe-- that because some of the things they were calling out about involved him as well, thinking that maybe he could help to resolve the situation. But the situation continued to escalate after he got there, so I called the police.

When I called the police, the police were basically only interested in my ex-husband taking the children. So I told the police: Well, I have custody. I’m the custodial parent and he’s supposed to call first. I have to make sure he’s taking them to a safe place...

...And so I was telling the police officers I didn’t –let me call somebody else. Let me call a cousin or someone to get the children.

JUDE: So what had happened, the police asked me to get the custodial order, which I went into the house to retrieve. I brought it back out to the police officers and the police officer that was reading it said that, um, I think you’re – I think you’re schizophrenic. I think you’re delusional. I think you’re suicidal and irrational.

I said: I don’t give a flying “F” what you think. I didn’t say “F”. So after that he asked me to go back in and get the marriage license. I went back in to get the marriage license and he was trying to allow my husband, my ex-husband – and I have been divorced from him for six years, who doesn’t pay child support, to drive away with my children with a man that I don’t know. And I asked the children: Do you know this man that your father came with? No. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know him...

So to make a long story short, I was upset about the way that the officers were treating me in front of my own home, which I had built 13 years ago and I own all by myself and pay the mortgage with my job as a New York City public school teacher.

I was very upset but I wasn’t physically abusive. I did make that statement to the officer. And um, oh, at that point the officer, because he said I was irrational and I wasn’t thinking rationally, put handcuffs on me. And I asked him, I said: Am I being arrested? He said: No, you’re not being arrested.

Then he said: Don’t give him the satisfaction. The neighbors were lined up outside the house. They took me, put me in a police car. I have never been arrested in my life. I’ve never been hospitalized in my life except having those three children, so I didn’t know where I was being taken. I was just taken

It was late in the afternoon and I was in a house dress type of thing and I was taken to the hospital. When I got to the hospital –

Q: Excuse me. What hospital?

A: I was taken to Stony Brook. When I got to Stony Brook, I heard the officer telling the admitting person: she’s paranoid schizophrenic and she’s suicidal. I sat there chained to a chair as he told that to the admitting person at Stony Brook.

Q: Do you have any explanation why the police took you away?

A: Because they wanted to – I believe it was because my ex-husband came and probably told them I was schizophrenic or something like that in his efforts to take the children away, you know, knowing I was having an argument with the neighbors. That was their way of dealing with the whole situation, just to, you know, make it go away.

Q: So you went to Stony Brook Hospital?

A: Yes.

Q: What happened there?

A: At Stony Brook Hospital I was chained to a chair with handcuffs and I heard the officer telling whoever is at the desk, I’m sucidal, I’m paranoid schizophrenic and that I’m irrational. Oh, at Stony Brook later on, I was put into this holding room with a lot of different patients and people that were coming in—taken, whatever. And they asked me for urine and they were asking me for labs or whatever and having never –

Being a union member for 20 years or just about, they always tell you to call your lawyer first before you do anything. I knew I wasn’t being arrested, but I had never been hospitalized so I didn’t – I did not want to give them any samples of anything because I didn’t know what type – what was going to happen.

So I asked them to just wait until I call my lawyer in the morning. I was brought in and by the time I got in, it was ten o’clock at night or so. I told them: Just wait until I call my lawyer. The lawyer’s office was opened at nine o’clock but by that time I found out that when a new staff came in, there was a new doctor who could have evaluated me and he was fresh, he wasn’t frazzled from being there all night or whatever. He told me they had already written me up.

After I spoke to the lawyer I was cooperative and ready to give them the samples they wanted. I gave them blood, urine, whatever they wanted. But I wanted to talk—I wanted to seek legal counsel because I thought I was being arrested.

Oh and sorry, the person who was at Stony Brook, the doctor, had already written me up and decided I was going to be involuntarily hospitalized at St. Catherine’s and I didn’t know. Nobody told me until after I gave them the blood and the urine samples, you know; and after I spoke to my children. If they had told me, I could have let my attorney speak to them.

Q: Prior to your being taken in to Stony Brook Hospital had you been drinking?

A: No, no.

Q: Were you taking any drugs?

A: No.

Q: Why are you in court today?

A: U’m here in court because I would like to ask the Judge and the Court to release me from the hospital.

Q: If you were released, where would you go?

A: Oh, boy, I’d have to go home. I haven’t paid my mortgage since I was in the hospital. I had to get my sister to deposit my New York City paycheck. I had to pay it, electronically, over the phone. The mortgage was due and late by the 15^th, the car note was due on the 20^th. I had to pay my homeowners insurance.

When the doctor sees me being agitated or whatever he’s thinking, it is because I’m going up and down the hallway trying to pay my bills from inside the hospital so when I come home I have a home to go to.

MINERVA: Will you be returning to work?

JUDE: Absolutely; August 28, 2008.

Q: Tell us again where you work?

A: PS ____________ Queens.

THE COURT: What grade do you teach?

JUDE: Last year I taught fourth grade. This year I’m going into third. And I have my – you know what the writeups are? I have them for the last several years, from last year, year before that and a lot of previous years; I have them all the way going back to 1990. But I have, you know, the last five years right here.

Q: You feel that you have a mental illness?

A: No, I do not.

Q: You heard the doctor say he believed you have a delusional disorder?

A: Right.

Q: You believe you have this disorder?

A: No, I do not.

Q: Do you feel you have any problems?

A: I’m under a great deal of stress, great deal of stress.

Q: What’s causing you that stress?

A: Well, I’m a homeowner. Nobody else owns the home or could pay the mortgage but me, so I’m paying it all by myself. I’m a New York City public school teacher for the last—I’m going into my 18^th year. I’m raising my children all by myself. I don’t have any help or any support except for the babysitter; and you know, you have to pay for that type of support. My ex-husband has not paid his child support. Joe Henche can tell you that my husband hasn’t paid his child support in the last five years.

He owes me $956 a month for the last five years for child support, which was awarded as part of my divorce and he has not paid me. Also there’s been things missing. For instance, my son’s bike got stolen in July off the front lawn while we were in the house. He’s eight years old. He rode his bike there, put it down and his bike was stolen off the front lawn. People were standing in the front of the house and they were laughing about it, but I can’t prove they did it.

Beside that, someone put dog mess on my door. When I came home, other people were yelling something about that, saying something about “your daughter knows we did it; some craziness. And then you know these type of things are causing stress. But mostly it is the financial aspect, the rising cost of gas; um, how will I heat my home for this winter without any extra help other than what the $80,000 New York City school teacher’s salary.

Q: How are you managing this?

A: Okay, I take the children on a lot of vacations. As a matter of fact, we just came back from the Bahamas on a Saturday prior to the incident. Prior to that Wednesday we just came back from the Bahamas and that was very relaxing. The children and I flew out of La Guardia airport; we took Delta and flew to Florida. From there we took the boat over to the Bahamas, just me and my kids that live with me. Then we went over to the Bahamas and stayed in Port Lakaya for three nights, we stayed in Freeport for three more, few back to Florida, stayed there and flew back to New York.

Q: Do you have pictures from that?

A: Absolutely.

MR. MINERVA: Could I have those marked for evidence?

THE COURT: Any objection?

MR. STERN: No Your Honor.

THE COURT: Thank you. I’ll take a look at the pictures.

Q: Those pictures are from this vacation?

A: From right now; from days ago. And I have more, I have a whole pack, so you’d be able to see it’s Port Lakaya, the Freeport post office…

THE COURT: Show the other side. Next question.

Q: Is there anything else you’ve been doing to help manage your stress?

A: Okay, I took the summer off. I could have worked to get more money this summer and teacher’s pay is $40 something dollars an hour for summer school. But I took the summer off to be with the children. I’ve made sure that they had swimming lessons this summer and that we’ve been going on—I got a beach pass to _____ and town beaches. We’ve been going to the beach a lot, boogie boarding, hanging out with the children all summer long to alleviate the stress that built up over the school year.

We’ve been hanging out together all summer long. Also, I took exercise classes sometimes to try to alleviate the stress. Like I went through a kick boxing program and I went through—I was going five days a week, one hour a day. So these things, these type of things, that’s what I do to try to alleviate some stress going on. Oh, another thing I wanted to do to alleviate the stress, I was planning to take my ex-husband to court to try to get the money back that he owes me, because you know, getting back $60,000 that somebody is owed in back child support payments, that would alleviate a great deal of stress for a single mom.

Q: Are you taking steps to do that?

A: Yes.

Q: You feel you need any help managing your stress?

A: Only legal help. “Legal help” in terms of achieving the money I’m owed.

Q: While you’re in the hospital, are you cooperative with the hospital’s routine?

A: Absolutely.

Q: What activities do you engage in?

A: Well, everyday I walked a mile, everyday, on the treadmill in the recreation room. Sometimes I play cards with some of the patients. I played Spades with some of the patients. We watched television together and I go to the community meetings.

Q: Do you take any medication?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Has the doctor asked you and offered you to take medication?

A: Yes, he has.

Q: Why aren’t you taking medication?

A: Um, I left – well, I have very – first of all, I don’t believe that I have what he thinks that I have, okay; I don’t believe I have that. Secondly, even if I did have some kind of paranoia or paranoid disorder that medication is for—is an antipsychotic and so that’s not—it’s used to treat schizophrenia, used to treat manic depression, used to treat a lot of different disorders he didn’t tell me that I had.

Also, the fact that I’m a teacher, I couldn’t drive—I can’t drive around on Vicodin. I have a herniated disk and I can’t even take Vicodin; I can’t take it and drive. How will I take antipsychotic medicine and then be able to teach? Teaching involves your whole brain. You have to breakdown the lessons, write up lesson plans; you have to think and plan. I can’t take something that will affect the way that I think.

So for the reason why when he indicated about the job, I might as well just quit if you put me on something and I can’t do the job anyway. You’re going to medicate me out of it anyway so—and another thing was that—sorry, what he said about…

Q: How did you come by this knowledge of the medication?

A: Oh, because I asked for a printout at the nurse’s station.

ANYBODY GOT SOME NICE JOKES ABOUT THE RUBBER ROOM YOU WANT TO TELL? AWWW, COMMON, THIS FUNNY, ISN'T IT????????????

Jude's Saga Continues

2011-10-18T14:46:00.003-04:00

Before starting my own story, I'm going to bring you up to date with Jude's story which I started back in 2010. I told you that it reminded me of the Rape of Gertrude Perkins and all the bad stuff that happened in the pre-civil rights era. However, I didn't tell you why. I just gave you background. Jude was in the middle of the litigation process and I was concerned that publicizing details of her case would jeopardize it.

That is how they isolated us from each other and from the public. We weren't supposed to talk about what they were doing to us to anyone. But she talked about it to me. I can't see how my silence can help her anymore, and she's not in a good place, so publishing the whole story can't really hurt her more than she has already been hurt.

Basically, Jude got in trouble at work because she reported test tampering to her principal who then, instead of supporting her, turned against her.

At about the same time, Jude found out that her husband, father of her three children, was gay. I won't go into the details of how she found out, but she was able to confirm that he had been having unprotected sex with large numbers of gay men throughout their marriage.

She filed for divorce and gave him joint custody of the children. She didn't try to cut him out of the children's lives, and I guess he got the idea that she would keep his secret and allow him to remain in the closet. However, somehow it got out anyway, as secrets often do. The only person that she talked to about it was her minister, so draw your own conclusions.

Within just a few months of each other, Jude had two life events that left her principal and coworkers mad at her for outing the test tampering in the school, and her husband and his whole family angry at her for opening the closet door. A few months after these two events happened, Jude's husband visited her school and spent a long time with the principal in her office. He did this on several other occasions. Both the husband and the principal were from the island of Jamaica, and were very possibly blood related.

For the next few years, Jude describes escalating harrassment in the school and at home. I'll skip over the harrassment at school, because that was fairly standard stuff. At home, things would happen like this: her washing machine broke down, she called the repairman, and he told her that someone had gone into the washing machine and intentionally removed a vital piece of the machinery. At that time, Jude was living alone with her three small children. She hadn't removed it and they were incapable of doing so. Draw your own conclusions. Over and over again she found things "different" when she came home, like somebody had been there while she had been at work, and had done some small damage to let her know they had been there. She also found voodoo stuff on her front door and car. This went on for years.

Did I mention that Jude' principal lives in the same neighborhood and has been seen driving past Jude's house on multiple occasions?

Jude's reaction to this harrassment would seem the logical thing to do if you thought we lived in a just society without racisim, sexism, or classism, and that the police are our friends. I guess that's what Jude thought. She reported every inicident of harrassment in school, and she reported each weird breakin to the local police. The police, instead of writing her reports up as breakins, but them down as domestic disputes.

None of this was like the Rape of Gertrude Perkins--but here it comes: The unimaginable, for anyone who thinks we've made some progress since the 1950's.

In August of 2008, about seven years after she first reported the test tampering and found out that her husband was gay, a group of boys in the neighborhood stood on Jude's front lawn and yelled insults and threats about what they were going to do to her daughter. Jude called her husband and asked him to drive out to Long Island from his home in the Bronx. She also called the police. Three hours later, the crowd of boys had dispersed. The husband showed up and so did the police. Jude came out to talk to the police about why she had called them. They sent her inside to get the divorce papers and her mortgage papers. She was sole owner of the house. When she came out they put handcuffs on her. Her two youngest children were given over to her husband. She was taken to a hospital and admitted without her consent under the care of a psychiatrist named Dr. Aronson (real name).

The police informed the doctor that neighbors had told them that Jude walked around the neighborhood naked. That she had been unemployed for two years, and that she couldn't pay her rent--that she was basically a crazy homeless person. Aronson kept her there for eight days and billed her insurance for it. He talked to her and to selected family members -- the ones she had problems with. He didn't talk to any friends or family members who were on her side. They didn't even know she was there.

As she was walking around the ward one day she saw a notice on the bulletin board saying that she had a right to a lawyer. They couldn't keep her there indefinitely without her permission. Long story short, Jude got her day in court. I have the transcript. It reads like a movie. On one side you have a black woman with her white court-appointed attorney. On the other side you have a white psychiatrist, the white attorney representing the hospital, and in the middle you have the white judge--State Supreme Court judge.

Aronson makes the case that Jude is a "delusional disorder persecutory subtype". Then Jude testifies. She is unmedicated, having refused to take any medication during her eight days at the hospital. If you go back and read her story, I mentioned that she graduated at the top of her class at Bronx High School of Science. It shows.

Unemployed for two years? Jude has paystubs for the last two years.

Can't pay her rent? Jude is a homeowner whose mortgage is up to date. In fact, she's very worried about having missed a mortgage payment while in the hospital.

Schizophrenic? She just got back from a two-week vacation in the Bahamas with her children, which she had planned and saved for all year.

Paranoid? She talks about her washing machine and a few other incidents. She talks about what the boys were shouting at her daughter--the reason that she called the police in the first place.

Walking around in the nude?-- There's Jude, sitting in court conservatively dressed and carrying herself with dignity even after everything that has happened to her and everything that has been said about her.

The judge found in her favor and ordered the hospital to let her go. She walked free, home to an empty house. Surely her children would be returned to her, based on the outcome of the hearing. But no, Dr. Aronson went to family court and gave the same testimony against her. This time it stuck and Jude never got her children back. What is more, his testimony, more than anything else is the weapon that was used against her to send her to the Rubber Room, to bring charges against her in a 3020a hearing, and to suspend her for eight months.

I have read her charges and a suspension of eight months was way overboard for what she was charged with. She was suspended on the basis Aaronson's testimony against her which the hearing officer had read, even though that isn't the official story.

The eight-month suspension is over, but they won't put Jude back to work. She's supposed to get a psychiatric evaluation before they'll let her back. Meanwhile, Jude has had to empty out her savings in order to keep up her mortgage payments.

She still hasn't gotten her kids back and is worried about one of her daughters who ran away from the father, was put in foster care, dropped out of school (she was on the honor role when she lived with Jude), is now living on the street without a high school degree but with a boy who is rumored to be a drug dealer. Congratulations Dr. Aaronson and Child Protective Services.

Jude's story is long and convoluted, but the transcript of her sanity hearing reads, as I said before, like the script of a play or a movie. I wonder if the Occupy Wall Street people might like to hear a reading of it by some young actors. I think they deserve some good entertainment in addition to their General Assemblies. Maybe I'll put part of the transcript up on this blog for the entertainment of everyone on the World Wide Web. Maybe Wikileaks would like a copy.

Let it reverberate like the voices of people in Liberty Square, Washington Square, and Times Square. Let it reverberate all over the world.

How to Avoid a Personal Meltdown

2011-10-17T21:41:00.003-04:00

"Even when not actively generating power, nuclear power reactors require cooling, typically provided by coolant flow, to remove decay heat.^[16] Pressurized water reactors use water flow at high pressure to remove waste heat. After an emergency shutdown (SCRAM), the core still generates a significant amount of residual heat, which is initially about seven percent of the total thermal output of the plant. If not removed by coolant systems, the heat could lead to core damage." (Wikipedia: Chernobyl disaster)

What do you do when you have an anger that is as wide as the ocean and as deep as the deep blue sea, and yet you are a caring individual and a responsible citizen who does not want to see innocent people, including yourself, especially yourself, hurt by this anger?

In the case of a nuclear plant, you need lots of water to keep things cool, and that analogy works for human beings.

For me, the love of my family and friends is water. A creative outlet is water. Exercise is water. Doing something nice for someone is water. Meditation and prayer. Smiling and laughing. Puppies and kittens. Flowers and trees. Music. Rain...

Children can be water, for some people, but not for me. Children remind me of February 6, 2009. It was the last day I ever taught in a classroom. Principal S _ _ _ _ _ T _ _ _ _ removed me from the classroom and sent me to the infamous Rubber Room. I retired on November 17, 2010 without being charged with anything, but as soon as she found out that I had retired, T _ _ _ _ sent me an e-mail telling me to come to school to pick up my charges. Of course, I didn't go. I had waited twenty months for her stupid trumped-up charges. As far as I was concerned she could stick them where the sun don't shine. I had no desire to ever teach again--and still don't. I don't even want to babysit.

Almost a year has passed since my retirement, and instead of feeling better about what happened to me under Bloomberg's Department of Education, I feel worse. I've tried to move on, engineering a vast coolant system. However, when I'm least expecting it--POW!!!--I'm back in the classroom hearing "You called her a slut!!!!" Or....there are a a thousand bad moments, and I can't experience any good ones. I know I had them as a teacher. I remember them with my mind, but I don't feel them with my heart.

This blog has been a pretty effective part of my coolant system. Up until now it's been a kind journal. Now I'm going to start to write down memories from early in my career as well. I'm trying to make sense of it all, and I admit I'm coming from a very negative place. I'll make an effort to remember and write the positive memories even though, as I said, I'm not feeling them.

How Does It Feel To Lose Control, Bloomberg?

2011-10-16T12:38:00.000-04:00

Top Of The Mornin' To Ya, Bloomberg,

How are you feeling after you lost control of New York City yesterday? Not too good, I'll bet. Are you harkening back to the good old days when you were able to pen up 1000 people during the Republican convention?

You know, I can relate, I really can. On Friday, February 6, 2009 I lost control of class 705. My students started shouting at me, "You called her a slut! You called her a whore!" referring to Madelene Benders, one of their classmates. I was in shock, trying to understand where this was coming from and swearing to God that I had not and would not ever do such a thing.

Yesterday, the crowd that took over Times Square was chanting:

"We are the 99%!"
"Banks got bailed out, we got sold out"
"The people, united, will never be defeated"

In my case, a couple of boys, a relatively small portion of the class, had been instigating all week long, repeating over and over that I had called Madelene a slut and that the class should band together to get me fired. In your case, a very small portion of the people have been repeating this same message about the people, the banks, and the 99% for more than a hundred years. Nothing really happens until the majority takes up the chant. Then things change.

In my case, the boys were operating with the full knowledge, consent, and support of the Principal, S_ _ _ _ _   T_ _ _ _ and her henchman, assistant principal R_ _ Z_ _ _ _. In your case, the crowd is operating without the support of the power structure of this city--in fact they are operating in direct opposition.

In my case, I lost the hearts and minds of my students--not all of them, but enough. Now, you have lost the hearts and minds of New Yorkers. Maybe not all, but enough.

In my case, it was a very controlled insurrection. The students were in essence doing the dirty work of the principal -- helping to get rid of an unwanted teacher. The overall power structure of the DOE, beginning with you at the top and filtering right down through the Chancellor to the administrators of each school building was not threatened by my students' chants. This was in essence, a "controlled burning".   For you, the burn has now gotten out of control, and the whole freaking forest is on fire.

In my case, the children were lying, and they knew it. In your case the October 15 crowds who gathered all over the world in every major city are right, and they know it.

No, Bloomberg, it doesn't feel good to have a crowd rise up against you with anger and hatred.    Now you know how it feels.

Thank you, God, for letting me see this day!

The Whole World Is Watching, Fool!

2011-10-15T06:44:00.000-04:00

Why is it always the guys in the white shirts who punch women in the face in front of hundreds of cameras? Is white the new brown?

Marching Down Broadway at 7:30 AM

2011-10-14T11:50:00.001-04:00

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

I was in Zuccotti Park while this march was going on. I had no idea that a group had taken off marching down Broadway until I heard all the police sirens. I followed the sirens to see what all the excitement was about, but by the time I got to the bull, the crowd had dispersed.

I really like that they sang one of my favorite protest songs, "We're Not Gonna Take it". Here it is for all those who wanted to make it down there today but couldn't.

Fist In The Sky

2011-10-13T18:58:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I went to hear John Carlos speak at NYU. He is a great speaker and teacher. There are videos on youtube that can give you an idea of what he's like, but I'm glad I got to be there in person. Here are the videos.

Tomorrow Bloomberg is going to try to clear Occupy Wallstreet out of Liberty Square at 7:00 AM. I am going to be there with my camera when they come with their brooms and their batons. I am not planning to get arrested, but I think it's important to be there.

Send out the call. Tell everybody who can get there, to arrive before 7:00 AM. Whose Street? Our Street!!!!!

A Billion Here, A Billion There. What Do I Care?

2011-10-09T13:20:00.000-04:00

Two perspectives (I suspect from different sides of the aisle) on the significance of a billion dollars.

Why is it that people who moan and groan about public spending never mention the billion dollar bombers?

Teachers and Parents Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-09T13:01:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Grassroots Education Movement.

Nothing's Sure But Death And Taxes

2011-10-09T11:43:00.003-04:00

This graph was posted on the facebook page of Americans Against The Tea Party.

The questions on the side of the graph say:
How will we pay for the infrastructure repair and replacement?
If growth is connected to the rich getting tax breaks, how did the US economy grow in the 50's?
If low tax rates on the rich are so necessary for a solid economy, what happened in the period between "25-28"?
What kind of BS is being sold by the Republican paty and their masters, the corporations?

These are all very good quesitons, but they have engendered more questions than I had before.

What are the tax rates in 2011?
How much do you have to make to be in the top tier?
What do the other tiers pay?
Do these tax rates include state and local taxes?
Exactly what loopholes enable the top tier to avoid paying taxes?
In what tier does the middle class fall and what is that tax rate?
What percentage do the taxes of the different tiers contribute to the Gross National Product?
What would the different tiers have to pay in order to erase the National Debt?

When different sides debate, they present evidence that supports their case only. In science, you have to report all the evidence for and against a hypothesis.

What Is The Alternative?

2011-10-07T20:10:00.000-04:00

How to Save Capitalism

2011-10-07T10:36:00.000-04:00

I happen to think that capitalism and the for-profit mentality that it represents is destroying the world, but, I listen closely to those who don't think the way I do.

After the 2008 crash I looked around on the internet for anyone who publicly predicted it and was laughed at until the crash actually happened. There were four or five--mostly traders. Peter Schiff was one of those people. In the following video, he blames government regulations and spending for the state of the economy, and he outlines the way he thinks that we might be able to bring the economy back from the brink of disaster (if it isn't too late already).

I agree that if we want to save capitalism, we should get on board with Schiff's plan. However, I would also ask: Do we really want to save capitalism?

Steve Jobs Was Not A Saint But I Still Love My Mac

2011-10-07T00:25:00.000-04:00

Someone made me aware of this facebook post which I include because I agree that the whole unvarnished truth is much more interesting than the squeaky clean version, and I, unlike Jobs, am prounion and totally against exporting jobs overseas. But (sigh) I love my Mac.

The Beatification of Steve Jobs
by Rob Smart on Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:24pm

Steve Jobs death is a tragedy. The premature end of a brilliant and innovative mind is a great loss to the world. People talk about his zen-like utterances, his taking LSD, his visionary qualities and replay his admittedly inspiring commence address over and over again. And it is indeed an amazing speech. Everybody should listen to it and take it to heart.

We have a tendency to idealize people who passed on who were close to us or otherwise important to us. We forget the less fortunate qualities and remember only the admirable and impressive qualities. We turn the coin over so that only the shiny side is visible and the tarnished side is concealed.

When Uncle John goes to his reward we call him a wonderful man and forget that he drank too much during holiday dinners and when frustrated kicked the dog across the living room. We only remember that he was a wonderful man.

Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak) were brilliant innovators, no doubt. It should be kept in mind however that though his company earned billions he chose to ship the jobs assembling those computers to cheap-labor countries. He was virulantly anti-union, especially teacher's unions. The Walt Disney company wanted to remove him from their board because he was so rabidly anti-union. The conditions in his Chinese factories were notoriously bad.

There are people in the streets of New York and other cities protesting against the destructive consequences of such corporate attitudes.

Yes, we should mourn the loss of a genius and innovator and celebrate his achievement. But we should also be circumspect and not lose sight of the whole man.

Such a note may seem premature. He just died yesterday. But I have seen such a gush of adulation that it seems necessary to sound a cautionary note. Our perfectly legimate sentiments in response to the tragic premature death of a great man should not cause us to lose perspective.

I catch a whiff of almost instantaneous, uncritical beatification underway. But saints are an imaginary construct. They do not exist in reality. Steve Jobs was a human being, a flawed one, like all the rest of us.

The Global Assault on Public School Teachers And Their Unions

2011-10-06T15:51:00.000-04:00

Every teacher in New York City should see this video offered by the Grassroots Education Movement.

How to Escape the Bloomborg

2011-10-06T12:16:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs on how not to be a Bloomburger.

R.I.P.

We Are the 99 Percent

2011-10-05T13:09:00.000-04:00

From: Michael Mulgrew
To:
Sent: Tue, Oct 4, 2011 3:10 pm
Subject: Community-labor march to Wall St. on Oct. 5

Dear

Please join us for a community-labor march this Wednesday, Oct. 5 as we demand that the wealthiest New Yorkers pay their fair share of taxes. Albany must renew the state millionaire's tax that is due to expire on Dec. 31.

At 4:30 p.m., we will begin handing out UFT hats at the UFT banner in Foley Square. The marchers will step off at 5 p.m. from Foley Square and head to Zuccotti Park, where they will be welcomed by the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have created an encampment to denounce corporate greed and the grossly unequal distribution of wealth in this country. Their rallying cry: “We are the 99 percent.”

View the march route>>

Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew

United Federation of Teachers • A Union of Professionals
52 Broadway, New York, NY 10004 • 212.777.7500 • www.uft.org

Whose City? Our City.

2011-10-05T13:05:00.002-04:00

OCCUPY Your City

Fight Back and Make History

Dear Friend,

People young and old are taking the streets to let our government and corporations know that we are a democracy that’s not for sale.

The Occupy Wall Street protest is a full bore international indictment against corporate greed and dysfunctional government.

Will you use our inspiring video and images to activate and motivate a friend? We want everyone to know about the Occupy movement. Already, there are thousands of protesters in New York City and hundreds more in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Miami and elsewhere.

The time is now. Protests are growing more each day, with some observers estimating the Occupy movement could swell to 250,000 online activists in the coming days.

Watch our video, then add your voice to the protest near you.

Democracy requires the wisdom of crowds.

Yours,
Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New Foundation team

P.S. I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

Whose Bridge? Our Bridge!

2011-10-03T14:54:00.001-04:00

First of all, I would like to say that I fully support the hundreds of demonstrators who marched onto the Brooklyn bound roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday to protest police brutality and to support the Occupy Wallstreet movement.

Blocking a roadway is nothing compared to stealing trillions of dollars from the American people, but I don't see one banker or politician in jail. The laws and the police are obviously not meant to protect the 99%.

I was on the Brooklyn Bridge and, as a result, have now learned a new concept: kettling " a police tactic for controlling large crowds during demonstrations or protests. It involves the formation of large cordons of police officers who then move to contain a crowd within a limited area. Protesters are left only one choice of exit, determined by the police, or are completely prevented from leaving. In some cases protesters are reported to have been denied access to food, water and toilet facilities for a long period^{. "}

I joined the protest against police brutality at Liberty Square around 3:30 PM on October 1st.

There was a large police presence.

We started down Wall Street marching toward the Brooklyn Bridge chanting. There was still a large police presence with one cop every ten feet.

The crowd was peaceful, upbeat, and very loud. The chants were the same that I had heard in many other protests that I have attended this year. A few examples:

We Are the 99%, You Are The 99%

Tell Me What Democracy Looks Like, This is What Democracy Looks Like

Tax The Rich, Not The Poor

Whose Street? Our Street!

When you're in the middle of a march, you have a very miopic view of the protest. You can only see the people immediately in front, back, and to the sides.

As we approached the bridge there was a large contingent of motorcycle cops parked next to the sidewalk.

Then we started onto the bridge. Police were still to right of us, but didn't speak to us or give us any directions.

More police walked by without saying anything to us. Some were carrying plastic handcuffs.

I kept following the people in front of me.

Cars merged onto the bridge and we found ourselves occupying the same roadway with them. They drove by us in single file. There were more protestors above us. I realized that we were on the roadway and that those above us were on the pedestrian walkway. The marchers had divided at some point.

Suddenly we stopped. People yelled "keep moving!" Others replied that the police were blocking the way. Traffic was no longer moving to the right of us. This was as far as we were going to go. Many marchers sat down and called for everyone else to sit down. I wasn't sure what to do.

Right in back of me was Charles Barron and the Freedom Party. I looked at them and they seemed to be discussing what to do. Just beyond them was a line of police blocking us in from behind. Suddenly the Freedom Party seemed to come to a decision and they moved decisively to the right where the traffic had been moving and started walking back toward Manhattan. These were longtime activists who had been a part of many civil disobedience actions and who had on other occasions intentionally allowed themselves to be arrested. They obviously didn't think it was a good idea to stay, and I hadn't come with the intention of getting arrested, so I followed them.

We passed a man who was being arrested.

It seemed as though there needed to be lots and lots of police in order to arrest this one older gentleman.

The police allowed us to walk in single file towards Manhattan, but they were not the ones that opened a pathway through the police blockade--the Freedom Party people did that. I was not sure how long that very small opening would last. I saw police rolling out orange netting. By this time, I was too nervous to take photos, and just wanted to get off the bridge as soon as possible.

There were people in back of me, and I hoped that those who wanted to leave the roadway were being allowed to go, but I couldn't see how many people were behind me. People were above us on the pedestrian sidewalk taking photos and could probably see a lot more of what was going on that I could.

When I exited the bridge I tried to get onto the pedestrian walk and go back to see what was happening on the bridge to other protestors, but the cops blocked the way, and I couldn't get back on.

I found myself alone and at a loss for what to do. After walking around for a while, I decided to get on the train and go home.

I have thought a lot about what happened on Saturday. Yes, we were on the roadway and interrupting traffic, but I have been in other demonstrations where the marchers occupied part of the roadway and the traffic flowed past us on the right. It seems to me, that if the cops wanted us to stay off the roadway, they should have placed police barricades, or at least tape, to direct the marchers onto the pedestrian walkway. There had been cops all along the way, almost walling in the protestors and making sure they stayed on the sidewalk. There were twenty motorcycle cops right at the entrance of the roadway, but they weren't blocking it. A long line of cops hurried past us, but didn't give us directions. When they stopped us on the bridge and trapped us between two police lines, they did not announce a way for people to leave who were not there to be a part of a civil disobedience action, but who had simply gotten onto the wrong pathway.

The police said they made announcements with bullhorns. I didn't hear any. Have you ever tried to hear bullhorns through the chants of thousands of people?

People are saying that the cops led us into a trap, and I think I agree. For what reason? Well, now they have the pictures and fingerprints of about 700 people who go to demonstrations against corporate greed and police brutality.

Do they have the photos and fingerprints of the bankers and politicians who got us into trillions of dollars of debt?

The good news is that, to my knowledge, no one got hurt or killed, and now there is going to be an even bigger demonstration on Wednesday. All the unions will be there. Everyone is making sure that they are part of a group. It's probably not a good idea to be out there alone, but please do come if you are in New York. I'm sure you can find a group that you will be comfortable marching with. Check out the Occupy Wallstreet website.

The Long Arm of Injustice

2011-09-10T10:21:00.002-04:00

The memory of injustice done never dies. Forgive and forget? Forget that! The authorities might try to cover it up, and for a while they might seem to succeed, but the memory lives on in stories passed down from generation to generation and in obscure files waiting to be opened and read. In the end, the story comes out. In the case of Gertrude Perkins, which I wrote about almost a year ago on September 24, 2010, there seems to be a certain kind of justice done 62 years later.

Teachers Take Over Washington This Weekend

2011-07-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action!

July 28-31, 2011 in Washington, D.C. and around the country

We’re putting the Public back in public schools!

We, a collection of people from all walks of life and every corner of this nation, embody a mixture of ideas and opinions regarding how we can improve educational opportunities for all children. We stand united by one belief – it’s time for teachers and parents to organize and reclaim control of our schools.

As concerned citizens, we demand an end to the destructive policies and rhetoric that have eroded confidence in our public schools, demoralized teachers, and reduced the education of too many of our children to nothing more than test preparation.

A well-educated society is essential to the future of the United States of America. Our students must have access to a fully funded, world-class public education system, and it is our responsibility to hold our government accountable for providing the means to achieve it. Please join us!

July 30: DC Rally and March

The rally will officially begin at noon at the Ellipse, but arrive early to enjoy performances, art, and more!

At noon, Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, José Vilson, Deborah Meier, Monty Neill, and other speakers, musicians, performance poets, and more will encourage, educate, and support this movement and the Save Our Schools March demands.

At 1:30 p.m., we will march to the White House, where the demands will be read, we’ll demonstrate, and engage in a call for continued action to reclaim schools as places of learning, joy, and democracy.

If you can’t make it to DC, follow the site to find out more about ways to participate in or plan actions in your local area!

Incompetent Murdoch Journalists Fodder For Colbert

2011-07-26T11:01:00.000-04:00

When comedians do their job right, incompetent journalist clowns can make us laugh instead of vomit.

Norwegian Muslish Guman's Islam-Esque Atrocity.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The Journalist Who Brought Murdoch Down

2011-07-24T01:16:00.006-04:00

People who do their job well can change the world.

Who, What, When, Where and How of Bloomberg's War on Public Education

2011-07-23T18:44:00.000-04:00

Who?

The Indypendent published a Rogues gallery of Bloomberg's accomplices: Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Spencer Robertson, James Shelton, Eli Broad, The Waltons, Eva Moskowitz, Michael Millken, Larry Ellison, Witney Tilson, Charles Ledley, John Petry, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, Al Sharpton

Led by a band of billionaires, the school-reform movement has gained increasing momentum during the past decade, spreading its reach into urban communities across the country. But instead of truly transforming public schools, private funders want to restructure them. They insist running schools like a business is the solution. At stake is not only control over hundreds of billions of dollars in local, state and federal funding, but also the future of the next generation of schoolchildren.

What? The privatization of public education. The destruction of the trade unions.

When? Ongoing

Where? New York City, New York State, USA, All Over the World

Why? Massive wealth transfer out of public domain into private hands.

From the blog, Modern School, on the profit motive:

The Convict Who Stole Public Education—Milken’s Online Learning Cash Cow

We hear plenty about the billionaire boys club that has taken control over much of the education reform debate, the unholy triumvirate of Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton Family Foundation. However, they are just the tip of the iceberg. The rogue’s gallery of Ed Deformers who are buying up charter schools, capitalizing on NCLB, bashing teachers and generally destroying public education as we know it, includes numerous hedge fund managers, bankers, billionaires, millionaires and even a few convicted felons, like junk bond peddler Michael Milken...

One More Reason to Hate Wall Street (And Charter Schools)

It is obvious how private charter schools can turn a profit by spending less on salaries, maintenance, supplies and services than they take in from local and state taxes and donations from wealthy philanthropists. What has been flying under the radar is what hedge fund managers, big banks and foundations hope to get out of their investments in charter schools. In a recent report on Democracy Now, Juan Gonzalez turned up an obscure tax credit that was passed by Congress at the end of the Clinton administration in 2000, called a New Markets tax credit. It provides an enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities. The credit has been heavily used in recent years for charter schools...

How?

Bloomberg has used marketing warfare strategies, mobbing, and union busting,

Klein Behind His New Master

2011-07-21T10:39:00.000-04:00

Civil Liberties Under Obama - Glenn Greenwald

2011-07-20T11:07:00.002-04:00

For the past three posts I have published the transcript of the speech that Glenn Greenwald gave at the Socialism 2011 Conference. You can read the entire transcript on SocialistWorker.org, or you can watch the speech on vimeo at http://vimeo.com/26082055.

Why I Support Wikileaks

2011-07-20T10:17:00.002-04:00

CIVIL LIBERTIES UNDER OBAMA (CONTINUED)

by Glenn Greenwald

THEN THERE'S the issue of one of the most controversial aspects of the Bush assertion of executive power, which is the version of the state secrets privilege that the Bush presidency developed and pioneered. It's a somewhat technical doctrine, but it's critically important in terms of how it was being used, and how it's continuing to be used--because it basically destroys the rule of law, literally.

The state secrets doctrine was used once starting in 1950s and then applied through the next several decades. It was a doctrine that said that in certain judicial cases involving national security, some documents may be so secretive that even though they're relevant to the litigation, even though they're relevant to the case, even though in all other instances they would be allowed to be used, these documents are so sensitive and risk triggering the disclosure of important state secrets that they can't be used in the case.

What the Bush presidency did was it converted this doctrine from a document-specific privilege that said certain documents can't be used. They developed a new theory that said certain topics are so secretive that they cannot be the subject of litigation, even when the president is accused of breaking the law. That was basically the tool that the Bush presidency used to shield itself from any judicial review for its actions, even the most illegal ones.

The Obama adminstration has continued this doctrine to the point where policies that Obama once condemned as blatantly criminal, like illegal eavesdropping and rendition and torture, are now, under his administration, declared to be such vital state secrets that they cannot even be the subject of judicial review. So even if the President broke the law, he can't be put in court and have a court find that what he did was illegal, because what he did was too secret. It removes the president from the rule of law.

Then there are two policies that are brand new for the Obama administration--ones that didn't exist under the Bush presidency. The first of these is the idea that the president has the right and the power--and not just in theory, but it's actually a power that he's exercising--to target American citizens not just with eavesdropping without warning, the way that Bush did, and not just with detention without due process, the way that Bush did, but with assassination.

The Washington Post in January of 2010 reported that there were four Americans on Obama's list that he has declared, without any due process to be terrorists, who the CIA is not just permitted, but instructed, to hunt down and murder. One of them is Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born citizen in Yemen, who the U.S. government hates because he speaks effectively to the Muslim world about the violence that the U.S. commits in that part of the world, and the responsibility of Muslims and the need for Muslims to stand up to this violence. The U.S. hates him because this message is resonating.

So the solution is not to charge him with crimes, because he's not committing any crimes--because you have the First Amendment right to say the things he's saying. It's not even to detain him without due process. They're not bothering with that--they're trying to kill him. They've shot cruise missiles and used drones on at least two occasions in the last year to try to kill this U.S. citizen without due process. Not on a battlefield, but in his home, in his car, with his children--wherever they find him. This policy, this power, is one that the Obama administration has asserted for itself in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney never did.

The other policy that is brand new is one I referred to earlier as--and this is a literal description--the war on whistleblowers that is taking place in the United States.

The reason why this is so important, is because if you combine the extraordinary secrecy powers of the U.S. government that I just talked about with an unbelievably subservient establishment media that won't disclose any facts or truth without getting permission from the U.S. government, with very rare exceptions, then whistleblowing is one of the few very avenues left that we even have to learn about what our government does. That's why there's a war on whistleblowing. Because it's one of the few threats left to the U.S. government's secrecy powers.

The Obama administration trying to criminalize what Wikileaks is doing. There is a very aggressive grand jury under way in Northern Virginia to try to turn what they're doing into a crime, even though all it is really is the core of investigative journalism, revealing the secrets of the world's most powerful corporate and government factions. If that's turned into a crime, then meaningful transparency and journalism are dead.

But they're also doing a whole variety of other things, like trying to invade the social networking communications of anyone even who is suspected of supporting Wikileaks. They've even gone so far as to execute a policy of detaining anyone they suspect of being associated with Wikileaks at airports when they try to reenter the country.

These are American citizens. And they not only detain them, but they seize their laptops and other electronic devices, like thumb drives and the like, memory drives. They just seize them and copy their content. Sometimes they don't return them, and sometimes they return them after a couple months, all without any form of judicial oversight or search warrant. They literally go through and do it routinely. It's a form of pure harassment.

Then you add together things like the drastic increase in surveillance powers that the Obama administration is seeking--the demand that Internet companies not be allowed to construct networks without giving the government a back door into the networks in order to engage in surveillance, and the dictate from the president that Bush officials who got caught breaking the law in a variety of ways not be prosecuted. When you combine all these policies and a whole bunch of other ones that I'm not going to talk about, what you really do see is not just--as the individuals I began by quoting have acknowledged--the continuation of Bush policies, but an aggressive expansion of them.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHAT'S REALLY quite amazing about it is that these policies really can't be more antithetical to core guarantees of freedom as set forth in the constitution. It's amazing the Tea Party movement began the session of Congress by reading from the Constitution very melodramatically. They seem to think that things like providing health care to citizens is an offense to the Constitution, even though you can't find anything in the Constitution that suggests that's true. And yet all of these policies that are literally the very powers that the Constitution expressly says cannot be exercised, don't seem to bother them, or very many other people at all.

If you look, for example, at the Fourth Amendment, what the Fourth Amendment says is "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated." And yet you have the Obama administration literally taking American citizens and detaining them, and seizing their laptops and copying the contents and storing them, without a whiff of probable cause or a search warrant.

Or you look at the Fifth Amendment--what it says is "No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." And yet we're allowing the government to target American citizens for murder, the ultimate deprivation, without any form, or even a pretense, of due process.
Or you look at the Fourteenth Amendment and its guarantee of equal protection under the law, and you see that President Obama is shielding criminals in the Bush administration from lawbreaking through decrees of immunity at the same time that the United States builds the largest and most merciless prison state in the world for even trivial offenses. A more violent breach of the equal protection clause can't be really imagined.

You really do wonder that if we allow these sorts of things--these kinds of breaches of basic constitutional freedoms without much backlash or objection--what is it that we would object to? What would trigger a real backlash? That, I think, is an important question to answer--to ask and answer.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SO ONE of the things I want to do to start to close the talk is to discuss what I think are the implications of this continuous and now fully bipartisan assault on civil liberties. It shouldn't really be necessary to talk about the implications of the harms of violating civil liberties because violations of civil liberties are wrong unto themselves. It doesn't matter what the implications are. It doesn't matter what the benefits are or the harms are. Putting people into cages without due process or trying to kill them without letting them have an opportunity to defend themselves are things that are inherently unjust and tyrannical.

So it doesn't much matter what the consequences are in term of proving that we shouldn't be doing these things. But the consequences are extremely serious in my view, and so I do want to spend a few minutes highlighting what I think are the most significant ones.

One of them is one that I already talked about--which is the idea that by having a Democratic president adopt these policies, it's converted these things into bipartisan consensus.

The way American political discourse works in established media circles is that if Republicans and Democrats agree on a certain proposition, it no longer gets debated. It's simply removed from the realm of what's discussed. If you ask journalists to this day why they didn't, for example, do a more diligent job of subjecting claims in the run-up to the Iraq war to critical scrutiny, what they'll tell you is that there were no Democrats calling them up and objecting or complaining to them. There was no disagreement between the two parties. That's what defines what journalists believe is worthy of conversation.

What you also have is huge numbers of people who are so loyally devoted to one of the two parties that even with policies they spent years screaming and ranting and raving about as horrendous and horrific and an assault on freedom, the minute their party adopts those policies, they will become the most vigorous defenders of them.

I know from writing about these things. I spent years having virulent arguments with followers of George Bush and the Republican Party. But almost always now, when I critique these policies, the defenders who pop up to justify them are not Republicans at all, but are Democrats. That has really changed the scope of how these policies are discussed.

The second implication that I think is critically important and not appreciated very much at all is that when the government systematically proves that it is both willing and able to transgress the limits it is supposed to be subjected to--supposed to be because when the people got together to form the country, they said "we consent to your authority as long as you honor and respect these limits"--once a government is able and willing to systematically cross those lines without any real consequence, what arises is a climate of fear in the country.

That's not just the outcome, but the purpose. I just want to talk about a couple of instances where this climate of fear has become really visible to me.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I SPENT a lot of time over the past year writing about WikiLeaks. I first started writing about WikiLeaks before most people had heard of it--before there were very many disclosures that made news in the United States, even before the collateral murder video it released showing the murder of civilians in Iraq by U.S. helicopters.

I learned about WikiLeaks because there was an article in the New York Times that described this top-secret Pentagon report that had talked about WikiLeaks and identified them as an "enemy of the state," literally. And ironically and appropriately enough, this report got leaked to WikiLeaks, which then put it on their website.

The New York Times article was very vague. It just talked about how the Pentagon thought that they were a huge threat, and the Pentagon was talking about ways to destroy WikiLeaks by planting fabricated documents with them, by exposing and invading the confidentiality of their relationship with their sources, by destroying their credibility. I didn't know very much about WikiLeaks at the time, but the fact that the Pentagon viewed them as an enemy of the state and was seeking to destroy them was enough for me to believe that they warranted a lot of attention and even support.

I then started looking into WikiLeaks and found that they had actually had some extraordinarily impressive achievements in terms of bringing transparency to very powerful factions and exposing corruption. I wrote a long piece about WikiLeaks, I wrote about why they deserved support, and I interviewed Julian Assange at the time. I posted the lengthy discussion that I had had with him, the audio of it, with this article that I wrote about WikiLeaks, and I encouraged everybody to donate money to WikiLeaks because they were suffering some budgetary constraints and wanted to expand their staff and do a lot of other things they weren't able to do because of that.

I had a link to a page where you could donate to them. In response to this article that I wrote, I had enormous numbers of people, readers and others, who told me in various ways--through e-mail and the comments section, or when they saw me at various events, and in other ways--that they agreed with everything I had said about WikiLeaks. They, too, thought that it was an endeavor highly worth supporting, but they were actually afraid to donate to WikiLeaks because they thought that if they did, they would end up on a government list somewhere--or even at some point be subjected to some form of criminal liability for aiding and abetting what could become a terrorist organization.

At the time, I didn't think that those concerns were overwhelmingly valid, because this was an organization that hadn't been declared a terrorist organization. But what really struck me was that these were people who were not prone to conspiratorial or paranoid thinking. These were very sober individuals who were literally saying that they were afraid to exercise this right that they had to donate to an organization. To me, that was incredibly eye-opening.

WikiLeaks is an organization that has never been accused of, let alone convicted of, committing a crime. Yet there were huge numbers of citizens, American citizens, petrified of exercising what is undoubtedly their Constitutional right of freedom of assembly and freedom of association and their First Amendment free speech rights to donate to an organization whose political activism and political cause they support--because of a fear that the government would somehow punish them.

That level of fear was really striking to me. And it became even more striking to me as I began to get to know a lot of people who work in the WikiLeaks organization. I spoke with a lot of them and met with a lot of them, and what all of them said, almost to a person, especially foreign nationals, is that there are a lot of people who were working very intricately and importantly in WikiLeaks who have stopped working at all with WikiLeaks--who are no longer willing to do so. And some of the people who continue to work there are very afraid, even though they continue.

What they will tell you, to a person, is that what they fear the most is not that their government is going to charge them with some sort of a crime or indict them. They say that there is a possibility that might happen, but they don't fear that, because they'll get lawyers and they believe they did nothing wrong. They'll defend themselves, and they believe that they will ultimately prevail.

What they fear the most is that one day, their government is going to knock on their door and say that the United States has requested your extradition--the way the United States is clearly trying to do with Julian Assange. Having seen what the U.S. does, especially to foreign nationals accused of jeopardizing the national security of the United States--the legal black hole that we've created for people--that is what they are petrified of the most: of ending up in the grip of the American justice system.

The fact that we have spent decades lecturing the rest of the world about what justice requires and what the rule of law means, and declaring ourselves the leader of the free world, and yet people around the world are most petrified about ending up in the American justice system, speaks volumes about what the state of civil liberties has become. I think what's really important to understand is that this isn't just an implication--this is the purpose of why these things are being done.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I WROTE about Bradley Manning and the incredibly oppressive and inhumane conditions under which he was being detained--I wrote about that in the middle of December. And I know that a lot of people's reaction to it--even people who were horrified by it--was an inability to understand why the Obama administration would do that. It seemed counter-productive. Even their State Department spokesman, a very loyal government official named P.J. Crowley, stood up in public and said this is an incredibly stupid and counterproductive thing to do, just for the prosecution itself.

Why would they be doing it? The same question gets asked about why they're trying to criminalize WikiLeaks. Why would you try to criminalize WikiLeaks? What good would that do? Even if you put Julian Assange in prison for life and destroy WikiLeaks, the technology and the template have been created for how these secrets are going to be leaked. You cannot possibly stop it.

The answer to both of those questions--why would they do it--is the same answer to the question of why the Bush administration would create a worldwide regime of torture and put people on a Caribbean island in orange jumpsuits and shackles and show the world what it is that we're doing? That, too, seems counterproductive.

The objective to all this behavior is to send a message to anyone who would dare impede the will of the United States government--or to prospective would-be whistleblowers who would discover corruption, deceit and illegality and think about exposing it to the world--that there are no limits to what we can do to you and what we will do to you if you try and impede us in any meaningful way.
It's a campaign of intimidation--of thuggish intimidation to create this climate of fear. And it's worked. What this climate of fear really does is change the relationship between the populace and the government. Because when the population fears the government--fear grounded in the knowledge that this government can transgress any limits without consequence--it's no longer necessary to take away rights formally.

What this climate of fear does is it induces people to relinquish their rights on their own. They become afraid to exercise them. And rights that people are afraid to exercise are worthless. You can offer all the array of rights in the world, but if you create a climate of fear that's potent enough and strong enough, it no longer makes a difference what rights you purport to offer. That's what I think this assault on civil liberties, more than anything else, has really accomplished.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE LAST implication that I want to highlight in closing is that when you have a government and a political culture that constantly inculcates its citizenry with fear--and fear has always been, and as this case shows, continues to be the primary tool that's used to justify this assault on civil liberties--what eventually happens is the character of the citizenry starts to change. It starts to change if the assault continues long enough, and if this fear is inculcated long enough, it changes irrevocably, so that the national character becomes radically different. It becomes fundamentally transformed.

One of the most vivid instances where this really was driven home for me was in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden. What happened there was there were all kinds of legalistic debates about whether or not this was a legitimate act of military force and whether or not the U.S. had the legal right to do it. I want to set all those debates to the side. What really struck me the most was the reaction on the part of the citizenry--the celebratory chest-beating joy that came from this accomplishment.

To me, this was highlighted most effectively by what President Obama said when he announced the killing at roughly 10 p.m. at night when he addressed the nation. This sentence in particular really struck me. He said, "The cause of securing our country is not complete. But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history."

Now the reason I found that so striking is because in principle, there are things that you can find in American history that prove that assertion to be true. We sent a man to the moon, we developed cures for diseases that saved lives around the world and continue to, there were technologies developed that have improved people's lives, there were corrections to the evils that were embedded within the American founding that constituted genuine progress--the emancipation of slaves, the ending of Jim Crow, the enfranchisement of women and non-property owners and the like. These are things you can point to in American history that can justify nationalistic pride.

But what's so interesting is there have been very few instances over the past decade, or even several decades, that have really justified this kind of sense of national unity and nationalistic self-esteem.
And what was amazing to me was that what we're now reduced to as a nation--what now gives us nationalistic purpose, what in Obama's words proves that "we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to"--is that we can ferret somebody out and hunt them down and riddle their skull with bullets, and then dump their corpse into the ocean. That has become the thing that now enables us to justify our nationalistic sense of achievement and pride. That, to me, really reflects the degradation of the national character of a country that is inculcated with fear, and that suffers systematic assaults on our civil liberties.

One of the things I think is interesting, and I just want to close with this, is that these policies, appropriately enough and happily enough, actually contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. One of the things that you see throughout history--one constant in history--is that empires cannot sustain themselves. Imperialism is unsustainable, militarism is unsustainable and a population that is inculcated with fear and that purposely gives up its own rights becomes a citizenry that is paralyzed and incapable of continuing to propel national prosperity.

So I think that one of the things that you're seeing--as the United States declines in strength and influence and other countries increase in that influence--is an effort to hold onto these policies as tightly as possible. Because declining empires always cling to militarism and civil liberties assault more tightly at the end than they do anything else. In part, that's what enables leaders to remain in power. If you can continue to scare the population enough with threats of foreign evil and foreign villains, they will overlook the raping and pillaging taking place domestically that these leaders are engaged in, and get behind their leaders.

And more so, all of these policies that I talked about--the climate of fear that they enable, the ability of the government to exercise even the most tyrannical powers--are necessary to prevent a citizenry from getting too restive and from becoming too aggressive in its assertion of dissatisfaction. Yet if you look at interviews with and discussions with Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda, one of the things that they talked about was that their goal was to trigger the United States into doing exactly what it ended up doing. They knew that a single attack on U.S. soil, very minimal in scope compared to the level of violence that we bring to the world and have been bringing to the world for decades, would trigger these bankruptcy-inducing policies. And that's what you're seeing.

Ironically, the only thing that could really stop this kind of growing assault on civil liberties and the militarism that accompanies it is a weakening of the United States to the point where they're no longer sustainable. And the weakening is happening precisely because of these very policies.

A lot of times, if you're in the United States and you talk about a weakening of the United States, it's considered to be a thing that we want to avoid--that it's a very bad thing. But I think it's a very good thing. It's really the thing that I think will ultimately arrest these criminals. So with that, I thank you very much for listening, and we'll have a discussion.

Transcribed by Karen Domínguez Burke and Rebecca Anshell Song.

Too Secret To Be Illegal

2011-07-19T14:30:00.001-04:00

CIVIL LIBERTIES UNDER OBAMA (continued)

by Glenn Greenwald

THEN THERE'S the issue of one of the most controversial aspects of the Bush assertion of executive power, which is the version of the state secrets privilege that the Bush presidency developed and pioneered. It's a somewhat technical doctrine, but it's critically important in terms of how it was being used, and how it's continuing to be used--because it basically destroys the rule of law, literally.

The state secrets doctrine was used once starting in 1950s and then applied through the next several decades. It was a doctrine that said that in certain judicial cases involving national security, some documents may be so secretive that even though they're relevant to the litigation, even though they're relevant to the case, even though in all other instances they would be allowed to be used, these documents are so sensitive and risk triggering the disclosure of important state secrets that they can't be used in the case.

What the Bush presidency did was it converted this doctrine from a document-specific privilege that said certain documents can't be used. They developed a new theory that said certain topics are so secretive that they cannot be the subject of litigation, even when the president is accused of breaking the law. That was basically the tool that the Bush presidency used to shield itself from any judicial review for its actions, even the most illegal ones.

The Obama adminstration has continued this doctrine to the point where policies that Obama once condemned as blatantly criminal, like illegal eavesdropping and rendition and torture, are now, under his administration, declared to be such vital state secrets that they cannot even be the subject of judicial review. So even if the President broke the law, he can't be put in court and have a court find that what he did was illegal, because what he did was too secret. It removes the president from the rule of law.

Then there are two policies that are brand new for the Obama administration--ones that didn't exist under the Bush presidency. The first of these is the idea that the president has the right and the power--and not just in theory, but it's actually a power that he's exercising--to target American citizens not just with eavesdropping without warning, the way that Bush did, and not just with detention without due process, the way that Bush did, but with assassination.

The Washington Post in January of 2010 reported that there were four Americans on Obama's list that he has declared, without any due process to be terrorists, who the CIA is not just permitted, but instructed, to hunt down and murder. One of them is Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born citizen in Yemen, who the U.S. government hates because he speaks effectively to the Muslim world about the violence that the U.S. commits in that part of the world, and the responsibility of Muslims and the need for Muslims to stand up to this violence. The U.S. hates him because this message is resonating.

So the solution is not to charge him with crimes, because he's not committing any crimes--because you have the First Amendment right to say the things he's saying. It's not even to detain him without due process. They're not bothering with that--they're trying to kill him. They've shot cruise missiles and used drones on at least two occasions in the last year to try to kill this U.S. citizen without due process. Not on a battlefield, but in his home, in his car, with his children--wherever they find him. This policy, this power, is one that the Obama administration has asserted for itself in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney never did.

Why I Refuse to Vote For Obama

2011-07-18T14:46:00.001-04:00

CIVIL LIBERTIES UNDER OBAMA

By Glenn Greenwald

In the beginning of the Obama presidency--and even as recently as, say, a year ago--if one were to stand up, as I'm going to do in a second, and make the observation that Obama has continued virtually the entirety of the Bush-Cheney approach to the war on civil liberties and terrorism, one would have to spend most of one's time speaking offering proof to convince people that that was true.
The reason is because not all that long ago, that was a fairly controversial and provocative observation to make. People just instinctively found it repellant--the idea that this wonderfully sophisticated, educated, progressive, constitutional lawyer, who ran on a platform of denouncing these policies and vowing to uproot them and reverse them, would actually be continuing and, in many cases, actually worsening them.

It was just something that, despite the abundance of evidence proving it was true, was something people intuitively reacted to in a negative way. And you'd have to spend a great deal of time persuading them that it was actually the case, by assembling all the evidence to prove it.

That's no longer necessary. It is so obviously the case, so self-evidently true, that what was known two years ago in Democratic circles as "the shredding of the Constitution," but is now called the "Democratic consensus," is so overwhelming and so glaring that even people who want not to see it have none-the-less come to not only recognize it, but openly acknowledge it.

It's now really conventional wisdom that this is the case. It's no longer even slightly provocative or controversial to say it. So I don't need to waste your time or mine systematically proving it to be the case. Suffice it to say that it is acknowledged and recognized across the political spectrum that Barack Obama has continued virtually all of George Bush and Dick Cheney's once-controversial terrorism and civil liberties policies.

What I find really interesting about that acknowledgement is that, as I said, it spans the ideological spectrum--and most interestingly, it is now a consensus among what had been a couple of years ago the Bush-following American right. And the reason I find it interesting that even the right wing is willing to acknowledge that these policies have continued under the Obama presidency is because for decades, Republicans have gained very potently on a political level from accusing Democrats of being weak on national security or soft on terrorism in the age of terror.

Now, "weak on national security" in American political parlance doesn't mean that somebody shies away from acts of strength and courage--and similarly, "strength in national security" doesn't mean that one acts strongly or engages in acts of courage. It means the opposite. What "strength in national security" means is a willingness to send other people's children off to war to risk their lives to kill large numbers of civilians in foreign countries. That's what "strength in national security" means.

And when Republicans have spent all these decades accusing Democrats of being weak on national security, what they mean is that Democrats have been slightly less willing to send other people's children to foreign countries to kill civilians.

This happens not to be true. Democrats are very willing to do that. If you add up body counts and the like, and are as gruesome as you want to be about it, you might even argue that Democrats are more willing.

But this has been a successful political attack on the part of Republicans, so much so that they do it instinctively. The minute there's a Democratic candidate or a Democratic president, Republicans will start accusing them of abandoning strong national security policies--of being weak on national security and soft on terrorism.

At the beginning of the Obama presidency, you saw this attack because it's just reflexive. You just wind up a conservative and this is the stuff that comes out of their mouths. So you saw the spawn of some right-wing figures, like Irving Kristol's son Bill and Dick Cheney's daughter Liz, formed groups like Keep America Safe and the like. They ran around for a few of months saying that Obama was weak on national security, and he's abandoning the policies that keep us safe, and he's endangering us, and he's going to trigger a terrorist attack.

But after a few months, it became so unbelievably obvious, so self-evident, that this was completely false--that, in fact, Obama was continuing all those policies, and in many cases was strengthening them--that even given the extremely permissive standards regarding truth and accuracy in our political discourse, it became no longer sustainable to articulate that attack. It just couldn't be said with a straight face--even on places like Fox News--that Obama was doing this, because it was so obvious that he wasn't.

And so what Republicans began doing instead, including the most right-wing figures is they began openly praising President Obama in the national security context for continuing these policies. They began acknowledging, because they had to, that he was continuing all these policies.

I JUST want to give a couple of examples because I find them so conclusive and so persuasive in terms of the state of civil liberties in the United States under President Obama.

The first example is Jack Goldsmith, who was a high-ranking lawyer and right-wing ideologue in the Bush Justice Department, who approved things like "enhanced interrogation techniques"--what the civilized world would call torture--Bush's eavesdropping and the like. This is a very far-right radical ideologue lawyer who was put there to approve these policies.

He wrote an article in May 2009 in the New Republic, and it was one of the first and earliest acknowledgements on the right that this event was taking place. He was basically criticizing Dick Cheney's daughter and Irving Kristol's son for accusing Obama of abandoning these policies. What he wrote was:

[This] premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric.

We in this room would look at that observation and find it incredibly depressing and even outrageous, but Jack Goldsmith was celebrating it. He thought this was the greatest thing ever. And the reason he thought that was because he understood the implication of Obama doing this was that what were once controversial policies--what were once viewed as right-wing radical policies--had become the undebatable policy of both political parties. It had become bipartisan consensus, and by doing so, it had actually strengthened the terrorism policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

What he wrote was: "[T]he changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long run." Meaning Obama has entrenched these policies for what will likely be a generation or more, because Democratic partisans no longer pretend to find them objectionable.

Then there are other instances of similarly right-wing and even more right-wing extremists praising President Obama's approach at terrorism and civil liberties. Gen. Michael Hayden for instance, was head of the National Security Agency in 2001 and oversaw the implementation of the illegal spying program.

He then became George Bush's CIA chief for the last three years of his administration. So radical and extremist was General Hayden that Barack Obama, when he was in the Senate, actually voted against his confirmation as CIA chief on the grounds that he had broken the law so flagrantly with implementing this domestic eavesdropping program that the rule of law required senators to take a stand against his confirmation.

So this same general, Michael Hayden, gave an interview at the beginning of this year to CNN, and he gushed about President Obama in the national security context. He said, "There's been a powerful continuity between the 43rd and 44th presidents."

The head of the Heritage Foundation's National Security Program, told the New York Times in October, "I don't think it's even fair to call Obama 'Bush Lite.' It's Bush. It's really, really hard to find a difference that's meaningful and not atmospheric."

And then the face of evil in progressive circles himself, Dick Cheney, gave an interview to NBC News at the beginning of this year. He also praised President Obama and said he had been wrong at the beginning of the administration to accuse Obama of being weak on national security. Instead, Cheney said:

I think in terms of a lot of the terrorist policies, the early talk about prosecuting people who have been carrying out our policies, all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he's learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate. So I think he's learned from experience.

That's a pretty impressive array of right-wing extremists acknowledging what they don't want to acknowledge, but they have to--which is that President Obama has continued the heart and soul of George Bush and Dick Cheney's terrorism and civil liberties policies.

Similar acknowledgements are very common now on the left as well--in liberal circles, where this observation was resisted for a long time. A Yale Law professor who is a liberal and one of the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration, Bruce Ackerman, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in March, talking about the war in Libya and Obama's belief that he could wage war without Congressional approval: "Obama is bringing America closer to the imperial presidency than Bush ever did."

Jack Balkin, who is also a liberal Yale law professor, told the New Yorker magazine--in an article that everyone should read if you haven't already--about Obama's war on "whistleblowers": "We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national security state. Obama has systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush administration."

And then, my favorite quote, is from the executive director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, who addressed a progressive conference last year and was going to speak about Obama and civil liberties. He stood up and he said," I'm going to begin my speech with a fairly provocative remark." And he then made good on that promise immediately, by saying, "I am disgusted by this president." That's the executive director of the ACLU.

So given that rather extraordinary and unambiguous consensus across the political spectrum, I don't actually feel a compulsion any longer to prove to very many people that this dynamic has in fact prevailed. It's widely recognized. It's even conventional wisdom. That's quite a sea change. Because those of us who were pointing this out early on in the Obama presidency met with huge amounts of resistance, notwithstanding how abundant the evidence was long ago, that this was going to be the case. But now, it's conventional wisdom because it's so glaring.

SO I want to talk about a few of the most significant instances, in which what was once condemned as right-wing radicalism has become Democratic Party policy under the Obama presidency. As I said I could spend several hours going one by one through all the instances in which these policies are continued, but I just want to highlight a few of them.

And what's interesting here is that the point isn't that these policies were in place when Obama was inaugurated and haven't yet been uprooted. It's not a critique that he's been too slow to reverse them. The critique is the opposite--that he has affirmatively embraced them as his own, and in many cases extended them far beyond where George Bush and Dick Cheney ever dreamed of taking them.

The first area that we find this to be true in is in the area of indefinite detention--the idea that you can take people, human beings, and put them in a cage for years, indefinitely, without so much as charging them with a crime or giving them any opportunity in a court of law to defend themselves or to prove their innocence or contest the validity of the charges.

This was the heart and soul of the controversy over Guantánamo, over Abu Ghraib, over the universal worldwide system of detention that was created under the Republicans in the war on terror--the idea that we can simply, on the president's say so, with the accusation untested and unproven that someone is a terrorist or is consorting with terrorists, put them into a cage for life without a shred of due process.

This controversy is typically talked about in the context of the closing of Guantánamo, where Obama ran for president with not an ancillary promise but a central promise to close Guantánamo, and he hasn't and isn't going to. If you talk to Democratic partisans and apologists of the President, what they'll say is that the reason that he hasn't closed Guantanamo isn't his fault. The reason is because Congress passed a law or a series of laws impeding him from doing so.

That's not exactly untrue. Congress did pass a series of laws barring the closing of Guantánamo in effect, but before that ever happened, the president's plan for "closing Guantánamo" was not really to close Guantánamo at all. It was simply to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where the aspects of it that made it so controversial--namely imprisoning people for life without due process--were going to be fully preserved and retained.

The controversy, at least as I understood it, during the Bush presidency about Guantánamo wasn't: "Isn't it so outrageous that George Bush and Dick Cheney are imprisoning people without due process on an island in the Caribbean rather than doing it in Illinois"? That if you just moved it a few thousand miles north, the controversy would be diffused and the problem solved.

I think, as I understood it at least, the controversy was about the fact that it was profoundly unjust to imprison anybody without due process, let alone the thousands of people who had been imprisoned, especially since it turned out that the vast majority of them were completely innocent. And yet before Congress was going to act at all, the president announced that he had intended to continue that policy, but to bring it onto American soil, which is arguably worse, since it could affect the entire justice system.

Another policy that Obama has continued and even worsened surrounds habeas corpus--the most minimal rights that a prisoner can have, which are guaranteed under the Constitution. It's far less than being charged with a crime, where you get to go into court and the state has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you're guilty before it can punish you. Habeas corpus simply allows the prisoner to go in and make the state prove that there is some minimal evidence to justify the accusations against that person.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, in one of the very rare instances where it actually imposed a limit on executive power, said in the Boumediene case that prisoners at Guantánamo have the right to habeas corpus. That's the only right they have. They don't have the right to be charged with a crime, but at least they have the right to habeas corpus--one shot at getting into court and having the state prove that there was credible evidence to justify the allegations against them.

Since that Supreme Court decision was issued in 2008, 82 Guantánamo prisoners have gone into court asserting habeas rights, and 53 of them have won. To win a habeas case, it doesn't mean that the court finds that the preponderance of evidence is in your favor, or that there's some reasonable doubt. The court has to find that there's zero credible evidence to justify your incarceration. Nearly two-thirds of Guantanamo detainees have been successful in their habeas cases since 2008 at the time when even the Obama administration was insisting that the worst of the worst were at Guantánamo.

Now, despite the horrendous record not just of imprisoning people without due process, but imprisoning obviously innocent people without due process, the Obama administration took the position that this right which the Supreme Court recognized applies only to people in Guantánamo--but not anywhere else that the U.S. imprisons people, such as at Bagram in Afghanistan, or in places in Yemen, or any of the other places where the U.S. maintains prisons, such as in Iraq.

And the Obama administration has thus far won in court with this argument, meaning that it has won the right to circumvent that Supreme Court decision that says that habeas corpus is a right that detainees have if you're at Guantánamo. You simply don't bring them to Guantánamo anymore. Instead, you bring them to Bagram or you put them in Iraq--and that's what the administration has been doing. So thousands of prisoners continue to be detained--increasing numbers of them all the time--without a shred of due process as a result of this circumvention.

Murdoch's Spy Network

2011-07-13T18:37:00.000-04:00

Family members of 9/11 victims just called for an investigation into allegations that FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch's newspaper News of the World sought to hack into voicemail boxes of 9/11 victims.

Murdoch has already been forced to shut down the British paper since it has been revealed that its reporters hacked into the voicemail of politicians, celebrities, British soldiers and even a missing girl who was later found murdered.

But now this scandal has expanded to the US, on reports earlier this week that a former New York City police officer claims he was offered money by News of the World journalists to retrieve phone records of 9/11 victims and their families.

This is an opportunity to hold the owner of FOX News accountable before the American people for the detestable practices he promotes as journalism. Murdoch's News Corporation is a US company that operates FOX News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. And if any News Corporation outlets were spying on Americans, we deserve to know.

I just signed a petition asking Congress to investigate News Corporation. I hope you'll sign too. You can sign and learn more at the link below:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/investigate_news_corp/?r_by=24102-3970497-8HXBPgx&rc=paste1

NY POST = NEWS OF THE WORLD?

2011-07-10T10:28:00.000-04:00

LONDON (AP) — With the last edition of Britain's News of the World tabloid in hand, Rupert Murdoch descended on the U.K. Sunday to face the growing phone-hacking scandal that prompted the paper's closure.

TV footage showed the News Corp. CEO being driven into the east London offices of his U.K. newspaper division, News International. The 80-year-old Murdoch was seated in the front passenger seat of a red Range Rover with a copy of the last issue of the best-selling Sunday tabloid in his hands.

Britons, too, were snapping up the last edition of the News of the World, after the 168-year-old muckraking paper was brought down in a phone-hacking scandal.

The 8,674th edition apologizes for letting the paper's readers down, but stops short of acknowledging recent allegations that its journalists paid police for information.

"We praised high standards, we demanded high standards but, as we are now only too painfully aware, for a period of a few years up to 2006 some who worked for us, or in our name, fell shamefully short of those standards," read a full-page editorial in the paper. "Quite simply, we lost our way. Phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry."

Allegations the paper's journalists paid police for information and hacked into the voicemails of young murder victims and the grieving families of dead soldiers prompted Murdoch's News International to shut down the tabloid.

The developments have turned up the heat on Britain's media industry amid concerns a police investigation won't stop with the News of the World, and cast new scrutiny on the cozy relationship between British politicians and the tabloid press.

Murdoch, who has long been considered a kingmaker in the British media establishment, is facing a maelstrom of criticism and outrage not just over the new allegations of impropriety at his tabloid, but also the decision to shut the paper and put 200 journalists out of work.

News International declined to comment on Murdoch's movements or plans while in the U.K.
Closing down the News of the World, which was launched Oct. 1, 1843, was seen by some as a desperate attempt by the media conglomerate to stem negative fallout and thus save its 12 billion-pound ($19 billion) deal to take over satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting.

The British government has signaled that deal will be delayed because of the crisis, and the scandal has continued to unfold at breakneck pace in the media, prompting broader questions about corruption at the newspaper and media regulation in the U.K.

Soul-searching has extended to the highest levels of government, with Prime Minister David Cameron conceding politicians developed too cozy a relationship with the tabloid press. Cameron's former communications chief, Andy Coulson, is an ex-editor of the News of the World and was one of three men arrested this week as part of a police investigation into the phone-hacking and corruption allegations.

Cameron has called for a new media regulation system and pledged a public inquiry into what went wrong; the head of Murdoch's U.K. newspaper operations has hinted that more revelations are to come.
As the News of the World's final issue went to press, Assistant Police Commissioner John Yates expressed his "extreme regret" that he did not act to reopen police inquiries into phone hacking two years ago. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, he said "it's clear I could have done more."
On Sunday, opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband warned that a Murdoch takeover of BSkyB should not be allowed while the phone-hacking investigation is ongoing.

"When the public have seen the disgusting revelations that we have seen this week, the idea that this organization, which engaged in these terrible practices, should be allowed to take over BSkyB, to get that 100 percent stake, without the criminal investigation having been completed...frankly that just won't wash with the public," he told the BBC.

Buying the News of the World in 1969 gave the Australian-born Murdoch his first foothold in Britain's media. He went on to snap up several other titles, gaining almost unparalleled influence in British politics through the far-reaching power of his papers' headlines.

Murdoch has opted to remain largely silent amid the fallout, issuing one official statement describing the allegations as "deplorable and unacceptable."

Many journalists and media watchers have expressed astonishment that Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of News of the World when some of the hacking allegedly occurred, was keeping her job as head of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper operations while the paper's employees were laid off.

Murdoch on Saturday told reporters in Sun Valley, Idaho, that Brooks had his "total" support.
The scandal exploded this week after it was reported that the News of the World had hacked the mobile phone of 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler in 2002 while her family and police were desperately searching for her. News of the World operatives reportedly deleted some messages from the phone's voicemail, giving the girl's parents false hope that she was still alive.

Brooks told lawmakers she had "no knowledge whatsoever" of the Milly Dowler hacking or any other case while she was editor, according to a letter published by Britain's home affairs select committee on Saturday.

GOODY GOODY, YA HAD IT COMIN TO YA!!!!!

City Council Makes Late Night Vote -- And Bloombergville Was There

2011-06-25T13:34:00.002-04:00

The advantage of having people on the street at all times means that they can show up at a moment's notice when politicians decide to make late night deals.

"Last night at 9pm, Bloombergville learned City Council was meeting to make last moment deals on the budget at their offices at 250 Broadway, half a block from the encampment. Postponing the General Assembly, about 2 dozen members of Bloombergville gathered banners and posters and drums and set off immediately to protest."

Read More at Bloombergville Now

Bloombergville Now!

2011-06-23T11:13:00.000-04:00

Check out Bloombergville, New York City's own camp-in. It may not be as massive as those in Spain and Greece, but it has the advantage that it is close enough so that you and I can actually participate in it.

Check out the website, Bloomberg Now!

Everyone who lives and or works in New York City will be affected by these austerity cuts. Would we rather wait until things get as bad as they are in Greece before we react?

I have been closely following the popular movements in Europe on Facebook. They are not being adecuately covered by the media (what a surprise). I found an interesting article which gives the perspective of a Greek citizen. It is called, "Democracy vs Mythology: The Battle in Syntagma Square".

The writer does a good job of debunking the blame-the-victim misinformation that is being propagated through the media. Although most of the article uses facts and figures, it ends with some powerful annecdotal evidence.

" And the biggest myth of them all: Greeks are protesting because they want the bail-out but not the austerity that goes with it. This is a fundamental untruth. Greeks are protesting because they do not want the bail-out at all. They have already accepted cuts which would be unfathomable in the UK – think of what Cameron is doing and multiply it by ten. Benefits have not been paid in over six months. Basic salaries have been cut to 550 Euros (£440) a month.

My mother, who is nearly 70, who worked all her life for the Archaeology Department of the Ministry of Culture, who paid tax, national insurance and pension contributions for over 45 years, deducted at the source (as they are for the vast majority of decent hard-working people – it is the rich that can evade), has had her pension cut to less than £400 a month. She faces the same rampantly inflationary energy and food prices as the rest of Europe.

A good friend’s grandad, Panagiotis K., fought a war 70 years ago – on the same side as the rest of Western democracy. He returned and worked 50 years in a shipyard, paid his taxes, built his pension. At the age of 87 he has had to move back to his village so he can work his “pervoli” – a small arable garden – planting vegetables and keeping four chickens. So that he and his 83 year old wife might have something to eat.

A doctor talking on Al Jazeera yesterday explained how even GPs and nurses have become so desperate that they ask people for money under the table in order to treat them, in what are meant to be free state hospitals. Those who cannot afford to do this, go away to live with their ailment, or die from it. The Hippocratic oath violated out of despair, at the place of its inception.

So, the case is not that Greeks are fighting cuts. There is nothing left to cut. The IMF filleting knife has gotten to pure, white, arthritis-afflicted bone. The Greeks understand that a second bail-out is simply 'kicking the can down the road'. Greece’s primary budget deficit is, in fact, under 5bn Euros. The other 48bn Euros are servicing the debt, including that of the first bail-out, with one third being purely interest. The EU, ECB and IMF now wish to add another pile of debt on top of that, which will be used to satisfy interest payments for another year. And the Greeks have called their bluff. They have said 'Enough is enough. Keep your money.' "

The cuts that are being threatened are just the beginning. Every single dollar of debt that the US government has taken on is to be paid by we, the people; not they, the banks. You and I will pay every cent of it out of our salaries and pensions, and so will our children, and perhaps their children.

19-J Granada

2011-06-19T20:41:00.001-04:00

19 June Valencia

2011-06-19T20:30:00.000-04:00

19 June Malaga

2011-06-19T19:54:00.001-04:00

19 June Palma de Mallorca

2011-06-19T19:14:00.000-04:00

As the demonstrators passed the Opera House, the noise interrupted a performance of "La Traviata". The actors reacted by simply moving the venue to the larger audience, to the delight of everyone.

19 J Cordoba

2011-06-19T18:52:00.000-04:00

19-J Salamanca

2011-06-19T18:38:00.000-04:00

19 J Almeria

2011-06-19T16:46:00.000-04:00

19-J Santander

2011-06-19T16:14:00.001-04:00

19-J Sevilla

2011-06-19T15:41:00.000-04:00

19 J Bilbao

2011-06-19T15:05:00.000-04:00

19-J In Barcelona

2011-06-19T14:24:00.003-04:00

200,000 marched down Via Laietana in Barcelona.

Concert in Neptune

2011-06-19T13:48:00.001-04:00

European National Anthem (Ode to Joy)

Europe is united now
United it may remain
Our unity in diversity
May contribute to world peace.
May there forever reign in Europe
Faith and justice
And freedom for its people
In a greater motherland.
Citizens, Europe shall flourish,
A great task calls on you.
Golden stars in the sky are
The symbols that shall unite us.

Spanish have not given up on Europe, just on banks and politicians.

North and East Join Together

2011-06-19T12:45:00.000-04:00

Marchers from Northern and Eastern parts of Madrid fuse together as they work their way toward Neptune where they will meet with other groups. Each group numbers around 10,000.

What Do One Hundred Thousand People Look And Sound Like?

2011-06-19T11:18:00.001-04:00

View of Plaza de Neptuno from the air.

Meet Up At Neptune Plaza

2011-06-19T10:58:00.001-04:00

Marchers from all over Madrid converge on Plaza de Neptuno to protest the signing of the Euro Pact.

This is one group of marchers coming from the North of Madrid heading toward Neptune.

Massive Demonstrations Throughout Spain

2011-06-19T07:25:00.000-04:00

Today the Spanish people are protesting against the Euro Pact. There are demonstrations planned in every city and town.

You can find the list of cities here.

In Madrid, capital of Spain, they have organized marches from six different areas around the city which are supposed to meet at the Plaza de Neptuno at approximately 1:30 pm their time and then move on as one group to the Congress.

You can find the map of their routes here.

Watch on livestream here.

Good Morning Spain

2011-06-19T06:11:00.000-04:00

Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind-Part 1

2011-06-18T11:14:00.000-04:00

Spanish Revolution - 15M "It's time to fly"

2011-06-18T10:15:00.000-04:00

Check out "Spanish Revolution" and "Democracia Real Ya" on Facebook.

The Story of Stuff

2011-06-05T16:04:00.000-04:00

What do they sign when they ratify the Euro Pact?

2011-06-05T15:35:00.000-04:00

THERE ARE REASONS; ONCE AGAIN, TAKE THE STREET

19th June

ALL STREETS AND SQUARES OF SPAIN AND EUROPE

NO TO THE EURO PACT: We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers.

The EURO PACT: New attack on democracy ONCE AGAIN.

ONCE AGAIN, the EU leaders endorse a policy misleading the public to the benefit of large financial corporations, instead of defending the citizens.

On 27th June, all European governments, including that of Spain, will sign in Brussels a major socioeconomic daylight robbery of an international scope: the so-called Euro Pact, by which the politicians of the European Union agree to legislate the orders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and the World Bank (WB).

Failure to comply with these orders means, the rating agencies that have led Greece, Ireland and Portugal to the ruins (Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch) will resume their attacks.

What do they sign when they ratify the Euro Pact?

- The public sector salaries should be consistent with the competitiveness of the private sector, WHICH MEANS: further cuts in the public sector as it must offer the same benefits as the private sector´s derisory wages and increasing working hours. Including a sharp cut in the numbers of public employees.

- Therefore all countries should adjust their laws to the dictates of the banks, WHICH MEANS governments are ONCE AGAIN not legislating for the protection and interests of citizens but in the favour of large banking corporations and the markets.

- The retirement age will be delayed in all the countries in accordance with life expectancy.

- Enhancing competitiveness: linking wages to productivity, just like what has already been done in Spain with the latest labour reform which calls for more flexible redundancy laws, more flexible labour agreements and more flexible contracts, thus endangering the current system of collective negotiation of labour laws.

- To foster cheap lay-offs and Temporary Employment Agencies (TEA). The banks will lower the financial strains to encourage the hiring of workers, and in doing so will demolish the Social Security system and will be introducing the figure of "the perpetual intern and the perpetual precarious worker”.

- The freezing of all pensions.

- Reduction of social benefits.

- Reduction of the social protection systems, worsening the Social Security system.

- Reduction of spending on education, resulting in poorer results, which are conditions that favour and promote its ultimate privatisation.

- Increased direct and indirect taxes for citizens, small and medium businesses and penalties for not complying with the payment of these taxes through fines, interest, fees, etc.

- Changes to our constitution and that of the signatory countries with the aim of "adjusting the economy within the parameters of the IMF, ECB and World Bank” resulting in the loss of sovereignty of the people.

ONCE AGAIN, governments do not use political power to legislate and to stop the provokers of the crisis and international banks and large hedge funds, for example, stepping in against financial corporations. Instead, with the signing of the Pact of the Euro scheduled for June 27, will strengthen the large financial corporations and adopt policies that are of interest to banks and large European companies. As if we hadn´t had enough, all governments independently of their political colour, will sign this agreement to commit to large financial corporations and thus, as ever, sacrifice the citizens ONCE AGAIN, enabling the financiers to continue defrauding the world using financial products that are as sophisticated as they are risky and fraudulent, and permitting bank usury.

Using the deception that to deal with the debt crisis that grips Europe, increasing the competitiveness of national economies can only be achieved by reducing labour costs ... ONCE AGAIN.

Still no mention of intervention in tax havens where the great fortunes rest or making laws against tax evasion. Still no talk of taxing financial transactions, regulating rating agencies, etc. Still no mention of measures against unemployment and in favour of social welfare.

Still there is no consideration for a public and independent audit of the public debt in order to enable citizens to know what the debt really is and what part of it actually corresponds to the banks and private equity funds which according to the data we have constitutes most of the PUBLIC DEBT.

ONCE AGAIN, we are served the impoverishment of society on a platter in benefit of expanding the great fortunes and accentuating the social divide.

In this way, the historical record of the profits of large financial corporations are ONCE AGAINenlarged even more, the record high salaries of CEOs and executives will increase even more, and thus we reach record levels of poverty and unemployment.

The difficulty of accessing this information is due to the lack of political transparency and the fear that ALL OF EUROPE will TAKE THE STREET.

THERE ARE REASONS; ONCE AGAIN, TAKE THE STREET

International facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=166343293429569

Spanish People Will Rally Against Euro-Pact On June 19

2011-06-05T14:52:00.000-04:00

El 15 de mayo empezó todo
It all began on May 15th

Salimos a la calle para reclamar una democracia real
We took to the streets to demand true democracy

Para gritar que no somos mercancía en manos de políticos y banqueros
To shout that we are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers

Ese día prendimos la llama
That day we lit the flame

Y no queremos que esa llama se apague
And we will not let it burn out

Esta revolución pacífica continúa
The peaceful revolution continues

Seguiremos hasta que nos escuchen
We will go on until we are heard

Junto con las acampadas de los indignados
Together with the encampments of the Indignants

Volveremos a tomar las calles, ahora contra el pacto del euro
We will again take to the streets against the euro-pact

Porque no queremos que hipotequen nuestro futuro
Because we don't want our future mortgaged

Porque no queremos pagar una deuda ilegitima
Because we don't want to pay an illegitimate debt

No más recortes en nuestra sanidad
No more cuts to our health care

No más recortes en educación
No more cuts to our education

No más destrucción de los derechos de los trabajadores
No more destruction of workers' rights

Por una jubilación digna
We want retirement with dignity

Por unos salarios dignos
We want decent salaries

Exigimos que la crisis la pague quien la creo
We demand that the crisis be paid by those who created it.

Exigimos que se gobierne para el pueblo y no contra el pueblo
We demand government for the people, not against the people

Y por mucho que intenten impedirlo
However much they try to stop us

Por mucho que quieran callarnos
However much they try to shut us up

Su violencia es nuestra convicción
Their violence is our conviction

El 19/062011
On June 19, 2011

Toma la calle
Take to the streets

http://www.democraciarealya.es/

Spanish Revolution

2011-05-28T11:54:00.000-04:00

May 12, 2011 Rally and March Against Layoffs and Budget Cuts

2011-05-11T12:07:00.001-04:00

If you are a New York City public school teacher, I am sure that you have heard about the big rally tomorrow. The UFT elected leadership is urging all members to converge on City Hall tomorrow afternoon at 4:00 PM. Here is a link to the info on the UFT website.

City Hall is a very big place, however. I hope that the chapter leader in each school is organizing teachers to either travel together or meet at a special location.

If you do not have a specific group to rally with (it's much more fun that way), here is an invitation for you.

Where will you be on May 12th?

Come hang out with Real Reformers.

Since there will be thousands of people converging downtown, Teachers Unite and the Fight Back Friday committee (NYCoRE, GEM, Teachers Unite, People Power Movement, CAPE, ICE, TJC) encourage teachers, parents, and youth to first meet-up with fellow education organizers before we join our union brothers and sisters for the teach-ins and march.

Date: Thursday, 5/12
Meet-up Time: 4-4:15pm

Location: Southwest corner of Reade St. and Centre St. in Manhattan

I strongly urge you to come to this rally. I know you're tired at the end of the day, and discouraged after years of Bloomberg scapegoating, but this is an opportunity to show Bloomberg that we are a united force. Remember, it is not the UFT leadership that intimidates Bloomberg -- that is pretty obvious. It is the UFT members marching in unison that scares the Charlie Roger Able Peter out of him.

For the sake of your job and all the reasons you must keep it, please come to City Hall tomorrow.

Retirees and those who are retiring soon: Jobs are threatened today; Your pensions could very well be threatened tomorrow.

None of our benefits are out of Bloomberg's reach.

What is a Competent Journalist?

2011-05-06T10:33:00.001-04:00

I am going to interrupt my series of posts about the Three Incompetents, CARL CAMPANILE, REUVEN FENTON & YOAV GONEN, based on their article about Amy Woda in order to consider what we might expect from competent journalists.

I am not a journalist, but I am a member of the public that depends on journalists for the information they need to make responsible decisions. I think that I can recognize when gross incompetents such as Campanile, Fenton, and Gonen are not doing their job just as non-teachers are confident that they know a bad teacher when they see one. However, I think it would be helpful to see how experienced journalists define competency in journalism. I would like to note that I am looking to EXPERIENCED JOURNALISTS, not first-year novices, not publishers, not advertisers, not the guy on the corner who sells newspapers.

I found a list of 10 skills that journalists needed in order to be competent. I will be referring to them in future posts as I point out the many ways in which the NY POST fails its readers.

Moriah Untamed

Incompetent NY POST Journalists Fail To Recognize a Lead And How To Follow IT

2011-05-04T14:33:00.001-04:00

This is the fourth in a series of at least nine posts in which I show that NY POST journalists CARL CAMPANILE, REUVEN FENTON & YOAV GONEN are incompetent journalists. Here are links to the first three plus the article about Amy Woda and other teachers that started it all.

1. Incompetent NY POST Journalists Can't Google.
2. Incompetent NY POST Journalists Hide the Identities of DOE Bureaucrats.
3. Incompetent NY POST Journalists Don't Know the Difference Between PIP and PIP-PLUS.

If journalists are to be something other than corporate propagandists, they need to know how to recognize and follow a lead. There are several leads that the Three Incompetents did not bother to follow, but one of the most important, in my opinion is the following quote from their article:

"Woda, however, disagreed with the arbitrator's ruling.

"It's a kangaroo court, where the outcome is always predetermined," she told The Post. "Basically, it's a way to get rid of the people who've been around for more than five years and cost the city too much."

This is a lead. It implies that we have pervasive agism in the DOE system, which is immoral, unethical, and illegal.

Amy's attorney presented evidence that 75% of the teachers over the age of 40 had been harrassed out of PS 62 by the principal, Angela O'Dowd. It would have taken very little effort for the Three Incompetents to get a list of the teachers over 40 who had worked in PS 62 prior to O'Dowd's administration and how many of those teachers continued to teach at PS 62 after five years. All they had to do was ask Amy. They could have then followed up by asking the teachers why they had left.

I don't have access to the information that the Three Incompetents do, but I suggest that you watch the following video that Angela O'Dowd made about PS62. How many people over the age of 40 can you count?

However, Amy was not just accusing Angela O'Dowd. She was accusing the whole process and everyone involved in it. That's a lead that is more difficult to follow up. The statistics are there, but neither the DOE nor the UFT are making them public.

The data exists, though, and I can't wait for the day that competent journalists (if any exist) get hold of it.

SPECIFICATION OF INCOMPETENCE #4 : NY POST journalists fail to identify and follow-up on leads that could expose wide-spread corruption in the New York City Department of Education.

Incompetent NY POST Journalists Don't Know the Difference Between PIP and PIP-Plus

2011-05-02T18:15:00.004-04:00

And you probably don't either. You won't know unless you have been targeted for termination by your principal, who has given you letters to file and "U" rated lesson observations. That's when your chapter leader or even your district representative might suggest that you apply for PIP--the Peer Intervention Program.

"I don't need any intervention" you might protest. "These observations and letters to file are bogus. She's harrassing me. I want to file a grievance against her for harrassment!"

Your helpful union representatives point out that it is all but impossible to win a grievance against your principal for harrassment, but that it would help you if you went through the Peer Intervention Program because that would show that you were trying to address the issues that your principal has with you. What is more, for the first six months you are in the program, the administrators in your building are not allowed to come into your classroom for the purpose of evaluating you.

Six months of peace. Hmmm.

You go to the UFT website and look up the program. This is what you find.

Are you a tenured teacher or guidance counselor who is struggling with pedagogical and professional issues?

Are you ready to take responsibility for achieving high standards and becoming more effective?

"Get confidential one-on-one help from highly experienced, specially selected colleagues who will create individualized professional development plans with you to emphasize your strengths and improve your shortcomings.

With the Peer Intervention Program (PIP), you can take charge of your own professional standards, address instructional issues and turn your career around.

Or, after working with your intervenor for several months you decide your career is not fulfilling, with the help of a PIP career counselor you can discover one that is. This can be either within the education field or a completely different career path.

All of the support you receive at PIP is voluntary, confidential and nonevaluative. It’s also compassionate and holistic. A counselor is available for support throughout your participation."

You aren't too happy about the part that says, " emphasize your strengths and improve your shortcomings" and you certainly aren't going to need a career counselor, but you agree to apply anyway. After all, everyone can improve in some way, and you'll have that much more ammunition against your Principal-From-Hell after you have completed the program.

You apply, are accepted, and meet your "intervenor" who is a lovely person. In fact, she is the first really supportive person you have met in a long time. You and she sign a confidentiality agreement which states that everything that goes on between you and her is private. She cannot be called to testify against you. She builds rapport with you, and is very positive about your strengths and shows you how to "give them what they want" so that you can avoid any more "U" ratings.

After six months or so your intervenor tells you that you have made a lot of progress and that she is going to recommend you for PIP-PLUS. It sounds like she is passing you on to graduate school. PLUS: that means better, right? Besides, it's not like you have a choice. They tell you that if you fail to complete the PIP program it will look very bad for you in a hearing before an arbitrator. You don't realize that they are lying to you. PIP and PIP-PLUS are two very different programs. The UFT runs PIP. A company paid by the DOE runs PIP-PLUS. You don't know at this point that 90% of those who enter the PIP-PLUS program fail.

You are introduced to the PIP-PLUS representative who also seems like a very nice person. He praises you and tells you that you are doing a fine job. Then he disappears, and doesn't reappear until he is testifying against you in a 3020a hearing. He testifies to the fact that you did not improve at all despite large amounts of help and intervention. The hearing arbitrator takes the PIP-PLUS testimony as "expert testimony" and rules that you are indeed a hopelessly incompetent teacher.

You are terminated, and a few months later, the NY POST publicly humiliates you by displaying your picture, and the charges against you, in the print copy of the newspaper as well as on the website.

This scenario is a mixture between my experience and that of Amy. I am only guessing at Amy's because she would rather not be involved in this project. I totally understand. However, there are colleagues of Amy who have given me some information in addition to the article written by the incompetent reporters, Carl Campanile, Reuven Fenton, and Yoav Gonan.

According to the Three Incompetents,

"Over a dozen observations conducted by superiors as well as by an independent "peer intervention" educator agreed to by the union found that Woda lacked classroom-management and lesson-planning skills."

It was this independent "peer invervention" educator's testimony that killed Amy's case--but it was not the PIP person, it was the PIP-PLUS person. Her PIP without-the-plus intervenor could not be called to testify against her because of the confidentiality agreement that they had signed.

"So what", you might say. "The union agreed to this PIP-PLUS guy."

Yes. But that doesn't mean that Amy was incompetent. The PIP-PLUS guy works for a company that depends on the DOE for renewing their contract. He is therefore, not unbiased.

But it is troubling that the UFT signed off on the PIP-PLUS program. It shouldn't even be called PIP or related in any way to a UFT program of any kind. Many of the PIP-PLUS people are retired administrators.

I did go through the PIP program, but I refused to be passed on to PIP-PLUS. I made this decision based on my own research and the information I gained by reading two blogs:

1. Betsy Combier's Rubber Room Reporter and specifically the following extremely indepth and informative post about the 3020a process and the role of PIP-PLUS in that process: The Gotcha Squad and the New York City Rubber Rooms.

2. The blog Chaz's School Daze -- especially the posts: Why is the Union Not Telling The Members At The Schools What They Know About How Administrators Target Teachers For Incompetence?

and

A Peek Into The DOE's Secretive "Gotcha Squad" And How They Are Trying To Terminate Teachers

SPECIFICATION OF INCOMPETENCE #3 : NY POST journalists fail to investigate the PIP-PLUS program, it's relationship to the 3020a process, and the financial implications for experts who do not deliver testimony that is sympathetic to the DOE's case, and prejudicial against the teacher's case.

Moriah Untamed

Incompetent NY POST Journalists Hide the Identities of DOE Bureauocrats

2011-05-01T01:44:00.002-04:00

Angela O'Dowd, Principal PS 62

The NY POST journalists Carl Campanile, Reuven Fenton, and Yoav Gonan went to all the trouble of obtaining the records of Amy Woda's hearing so that they could publicly humiliate her in this article. However, with all that information at hand, they decided not to include the names of any of the other players in the story. I think it's unfair to leave out the principal who went to so much trouble to bring Amy up on charges, so I will supplement the POST article with infomation I got surfing the web.

Since the POST article only reveals the name of the school, I had to go to the DOE website to find the name of the principal, Angela O'Dowd.

Then I went to See Through New York, where you can find the salaries of all the people who work for the City. They have no record of her. My ex-principal's salary comes up when you type in her name, but O'Dowd's doesn't. I wonder why. Maybe she's being paid under another name.

She describes herself in the following way on her twitter feed. "I'm a New York City Principal. I grew up in Dublin. I'm passionate about education policy and social justice."

Then I stumbled on a website called the Teacher's Network . It seems that as of the year 2000-2001 this was Angela O'Dowd's contact information:

Angela O’Dowd
PS 217
1100 Newkirk Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11230
angodowd@hotmail.com
Principal:
Mary Teatum

In addition, they describe her as follows:

"Angela O’Dowd was born in Ireland but attended college in New York. She has an M.S. in Education, has taught fourth grade for three years, and is currently working as a technology staff developer at the District 22 office. She has worked for two years with AUSSIE (Australia, United States, Services In Education) consultants and participated in a national teacher training certificate program for leadership in Internet and video instruction."

O'Dowd seems to have quickly moved up in the DOE bureaucracy, because by 2003 she was already principal of PS 62 according to a 2008 article in the Daily News. This article also praises O'Dowd for the improvement in test scores under her administration.

Unfortuantely, many of my questions have been left unanswered. The NY POST article states that Amy, a 14-year veteran teacher received her first U-rating from O'Dowd in 2006-2007. The article in the Daily News stresses how much the test scores had improved by 2008 (In spite of Amy?). Did Amy transfer to PS 62 from another school where she had always received satisfactory ratings or did she suddenly receive a "U" after receiving "S" ratings from O'Dowd since 2003? Maybe Amy, or someone who knows about her case can fill us in.

What is obvious, is that the NY POST journalists have this information and did not see fit to divulge it to their readers. It's important to know why a teacher who had received so many satisfactory ratings suddenly received nothing but "unsatisfactories".

Note: As of May 2, 2011 I have received the following information. Amy had 14 years with the DOE as of 2008. That means she started teaching in 1992. She was teaching at PS 62 "long before" O'Dowd was brought on board. That means that O'Dowd herself gave Amy satisfactory ratings prior to 2006. My source did not know the name of the principal who gave Amy satisfactory ratings before that.

SPECIFICATION OF INCOMPETENCE #2 : NY POST journalists hide the names, credentials, and work history of bureaucrats who are key players in the destruction of a teacher's careers while printing as much derogatory information as possible about the teacher. Their reporting is slanted and biased.

Incompetent NY Post Journalists Can't Google

2011-04-30T10:18:00.000-04:00

How many New York Post journalists does it take to perform a Google search on the exact location of a NYC public school? More than three, it would appear.

In my last post I referred to the article written about Amy Woda and other teachers by NY Post journalists Carl Campanile, Reuven Fenton, and Yoav Gonan with a photograph by Gregory P. Mango.
The article reported that Amy had been brought up on charges for nine specifications of incompetence, and I promised to come up with at least nine specifications of incompetence against the journalists.

The article states, "In the case cited above, tenured second-grade teacher Amy Woda--a 14-year veteran working at PS 62 in Forest Hills, Queens -- had received nine specifications ... blah blah blah "

PS 62 is in RICHMOND HILL, not FOREST HILLS.

What's the difference? Well, as anyone who can use Google Maps can see, FOREST HILLS is to the north of Jackie Robinson Parkway and is indicated by the little red balloon marked "A". Richmond Hill is south of Jackie Robinson Parkway, south of Forest Park and on the other side of the Long Island Railroad tracks. The purple balloon indicates the location of PS 62.

Don't get me wrong. Richmond Hill is a very nice neighborhood full of very nice people. It's just not Forest Hills where the US Open takes place. Compare house prices if you don't believe me.

To place Amy's school in Forest Hills is to mislead the reader into believing that she was serving a very different population of students and parents. New Yorkers who read this article will have a blink of a think--barely noticable to the thinker--"Well, if she can't teach in that neighborhood, she can't teach anywhere".

SPECIFICATION OF INCOMPETENCE #1 -- NY POST journalists misled their readers as to the location of PS 62 and the type of student population attending PS 62 by failing to use Google or any other search engine to verify the correct neighborhood where said school is located.

The Public Pillorying of Amy Woda

2011-04-29T23:58:00.003-04:00

It would seem that the NYC DOE was not finished with Amy Woda when they finally terminated her last year. It wasn't enough to put her through a grueling 46 days of hearings. No, they needed to turn her over to the NY Post's Yellow Journalists, Carl Campanile, Reuven Fenton, and Yoav Gonan for slicing, dicing, and liquifing.

They even sent Gregory P. Mango to lie in wait for Amy outside her house.

Now if anyone ever googles her name, the Post will help determine their opinion of her. The picture will erase anyone's doubt about whether she is the same person as the Amy Woda in the article.

What did she do to deserve this? According to the article, she had
9 specifications of incompetence.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

I'll bet I can come up with 9 or more specifications of incompetence against Carl Campanile, Reuven Fenton, and Yoav Gonan based on this article alone. And that's just what I'm going to do.

Moriah Untamed

Parents Sue Bloomberg for 100 Million

2011-04-28T15:06:00.000-04:00

PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release: APRIL 27, 2011

Also In This Release
ADVISORY: Albany Court Argument This Thursday Regarding Cathie Black Waiver

Contact:
Advocates for Justice            212-228-6320 x 8
Arthur Schwartz, Esq.          917-923-8136
Chris Owens, Exec. Dir.         718-514-4874

New York City Parents Sue Bloomberg for $100 Million
Over Cathie Black "Damage"

"This Mayor Has Committed Misfeasance and Our Children Have Suffered"

Advocates for Justice, a public interest law firm, today filed initial papers for a civil lawsuit against Mayor Michael Bloomberg on behalf of a class of all New York City public school parents . The Mayor is charged with committing "misfeasance of office" through the appointment of Ms. Cathleen P. Black as Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and thereby damaging the education of public school children in the City of New York.

The 14 Claimant parents, along with the newly formed New York City Parents Union, are demanding $100 million in compensatory damages from Mr. Bloomberg personally as the individual now held accountable under New York State's education law for the performance of the public education system, as well as a public apology from the Mayor for his handling of Ms. Black's appointment and brief tenure in office.

A Notice of Claim setting forth the nature of the lawsuit was filed today by Advocates for Justice with the Office of New York City Comptroller John Liu. This legal action -- possibly the first of its kind in the history of New York City -- claims that the Mayor had or should have had full knowledge of Ms. Black's inability to perform at an appropriate level in the position of Chancellor.

Section 3(f) of the Notice Claim states that "Michael Bloomberg, as Mayor, has a fiduciary obligation to act with the utmost of prudence and responsibility in running the New York City school system. He either knew, or should have known, that the appointment of Black was not in the best interests of the system, but he appointed her nonetheless. By so acting, Michael Bloomberg breached his fiduciary duty to the parents of all school children in New York City public schools and is guilty of 'misfeasance of office.' "

The parents want Mayor Bloomberg to place $100 million of his own money -- or approximately $1 million for each day of Ms. Black's nearly 100-day tenure -- into a fund used exclusively for the training and development of teachers and supervisors as compensation for the damage to the morale and performance of staff and teachers, which therefore impaired the education of students.

Arthur Z. Schwartz, attorney for the Claimants, emphasized that the Notice of Claim was a precursor to a lawsuit against Bloomberg personally, not one against the City of New York. "The Mayor's ego, and his insistence on 'selling' the school system rather than building it from the ground up, led to this disaster. The Mayor took a lot from the City's school children with this error, and he should be required to make repairs - in a sum that he is uniquely qualified to do."

Ms. Mariama Sanoh, an active Brooklyn parent who is a Claimant and a founder of the New York City Parents Union, said that Mayor Bloomberg abused his power. "When outraged parents stated that Cathie Black was unqualified to be Chancellor, Mayor Bloomberg accused us -- the real stakeholders in our children's education -- of playing politics. But it was Mayor Bloomberg who abused his power by appointing someone with no education experience to lead the nations largest public school system. And it was Mayor Bloomberg who played politics with the New York State Education Commissioner to get unqualified Cathie Black approved for the job. The Mayor has committed misfeasance and our children have suffered. There have to be consequences for these bad choices."

Ms. Shino Tanikawa, a Claimant and member of Manhattan's Community Education Council 2, demanded consistency in how education matters are treated. "Accountability has been the foundation of Mayor Bloomberg's alleged "reform" agenda, yet he himself has not been accountable to us for any of his misguided decisions. Our children have suffered his arrogance and egotism enough, and we, the parents, demand that the Mayor now be held accountable."

Central Brooklyn parent Muba Yarofulani is a founding member of the New York City Parents Union, Co-President of the Coalition for Public Education (CPE), and President of the District 18 Presidents Council. She objected to Mayor Bloomberg's dominance over the public education system. "The 1.1 million students in New York City's public schools deserved a qualified Chancellor. Mayor Bloomberg refused to hear the cries of parents from communities like mine; we knew that Cathie Black should not be appointed. This Mayor's dictatorship over our education system is failing our children, and I am one of those mothers who will continue to battle his wealth and political might. Mayor Bloomberg must be held accountable for his failures. Our children must see that there are consequences for the rich just as there are for the poor."

Ms. Mona Davids, a Bronx charter school parent, and a founder of the New York City Parents Union, pronounced Mayor Bloomberg's behavior as corrupt. "Outside of New York City, when an elected official appoints a friend, family member or crony with no relevant experience to a high profile job, it is called 'graft' and an abuse of power," said Ms. Davids. "Mayor Bloomberg's appointment of his friend, Cathie Black, without first conducting a national search or ensuring that she had the qualifications to lead the nation's largest school system, was pure corruption and disrespectful to NYC parents, students and educators. Mayor Bloomberg's appointment showed our children that, even when you are not qualified for a job, it's not what you know but who you know."

Hon. Chris Owens, a Brooklyn Claimant and former Community School Board President, focused on the need for unorthodox measures. "This Mayor has bought three elections, including a third term in office! The political process has not provided recourse for concerned parents because the Mayoral elections have been corrupted by the power of money. So we have to do something to show everyone that the disastrous ramming of Cathie Black down our throats warrants more than a few days of critical media stories. The Mayor owes this City and he has the means to compensate our public education system for a portion of the harm that he inflicted upon it."

Ms. Julie Cavanagh is a teacher in Brooklyn who supports the parents' lawsuit. "I am glad to see legal action being taken directly against Mayor Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg speaks about accountability for schools, students and teachers, but never is he held accountable for the disastrous and devastating decisions he has made for our schools and our children. It is time for this Mayor to be held accountable. As if over-testing, overcrowding, and overtly ignoring the voices of stakeholders were not enough, Bloomberg appointed and vigorously defended a Chancellor we all knew was unqualified for our children. The Mayor's actions have caused irreparable harm to our school system, and it is time for him to answer to the people he was elected to serve."

A copy of the Notice of Claim may be requested by contacting Chris Owens.

# # #

ADVISORY: Albany Court Argument To Take Place This Thursday Regarding Cathie Black Waiver
Deny Waiver Coalition Continues Challenge To
Black Waiver As A Dangerous Precedent

Representing the Deny Waiver Coalition, Advocates for Justice President Arthur Schwartz will argue that, for serving as a superintendent of schools as the Chancellor does in New York City, the minimum qualification of a Master's Degree and the requirement that candidates for Chancellor have work experience in the educational field cannot be cast aside in the future.

New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner's disastrous dismissal of these requirements in granting a waiver of employment qualifications to an unqualified Chancellor nominee, Cathleen P. Black, in November, 2010 may have created a terrible precedent.

The case will be heard in the Appellate Division, Third Department, located in Albany on Thursday, April 28th at around 1:00 PM.

Advocates for Justice
A Legal Foundation
275 Seventh Avenue, Suite 1760
New York, NY 10001 - 8407
212-228-6320 x 8
COwens@advocatesforjustice.net

About Advocates for Justice
Advocates for Justice is a not-for-profit legal foundation founded in January, 2011. Advocates for Justice is a voice for "the Other America," the vast majority of the American people who work hard, live righteous lives, but have to struggle for survival. Advocates for Justice is recognized as a tax-exempt public foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Quick Links

Advocates for Justice
NYC Parents Union
Deny Waiver Coalition

__._,_.___

Come to Walcott's 1st PEP Meeting

2011-04-28T08:44:00.001-04:00

Can Bloomberg cut down the opposition that has been building against his destructive policies simply by replacing his salesperson? We say NO!

Tomorrow, April 28th at the PROSPECT HEIGHTS CAMPUS at 6pm, the Panel for Educational Policy will hold a meeting and then vote to co-locate 13 more charter schools in public school buildings.

Charter schools are a threat to everything we hold dear about education: they are privately-run education corporations that divert money from the public schools, underserve our highest-needs students, and do not offer the protections we know teachers need to be good at their jobs. Many charters encourage rote memorization instead of real learning and often times they engage in military-like discipline practices. Additionally, co-locations divide communities and create separate and unequal learning opportunities within one building.

Please join the

Grassroots Education Movement

at this PEP Meeting to demand an end to these disastrous policies and to Mayoral Control.

Thursday, April 28th

Prospect Heights Campus

Washington & Eastern, 2/3/4/5 to Franklin or Shuttle to Brooklyn Museum

Sign up to speak: 5:00

Meeting begins: 6:00

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6 Reasons YOU should attend the Panel for Educational Policy Meeting TOMORROW, April 28th:

1. We must come out and make a public statement against the mayor's destructive policies, especially because we have a new chancellor. Anything less and Bloomerg will argue that all the opposition we have built against his policies was nothing more than dislike for Cathie Black.

2. Charter schools often get significant turnout at these meetings to support them, particularly from teachers whose principals can require them to attend and say what they demand with threats of firing. They use school funds to pay for buses for parents and students, and provide t-shirts and glossy signs. We must counter with our own message and our own voices.

3. Mayoral control is a neoliberal policy that removes power from communities and places it in the hands of one wealthy individual. This is not progress! This is not justice! But only the people can demand a change, and PEP meetings are one place to make that demand.

4. As the DOE gears up to layoff 4,658 teachers in the upcoming budget, funding for charters is planned to increase by $139 million.

5. The panel will also be voting to close the country's first dual language Arabic middle school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. This is occurring despite the fact that a federal panel concluded that the DOE discriminated against the founding principal when they removed her. The panel stated that the DOE "succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on D.O.E. as an employer."

6. You may actually enjoy yourself! While it's true that PEP meetings can be pretty devastating, they can also be entertaining and inspiring as well. You'll hear amazing speeches from students, parents, teachers and elected officials. Join GEM at the mic for our anti-privatization song if you fancy. Sign up to speak and make your case to the new Chancellor. Meet interesting, inspiring people. It can be a really invigorating experience to stand up to the powerful forces we are facing. And who doesn't enjoy a little adrenaline rush at a blood boiling event once in a while?

For more info go to gemnyc.org or email us at gemnyc@gmail.com

Teacher Bashing Taking a Quantum Leap

2011-04-20T11:40:00.000-04:00

Teachers are being jailed and killed in Hondouras by a regime that has partnered with the New Orleans charter school system. It can't happen in America? The support for the new Hondouran regime comes from within America.

More at The Real News

Teacher Bashing Is Bloomberg's Smokescreen

2011-04-14T19:26:00.000-04:00

As teachers across New York City prepare to take a needed vacation, I wish you well. Each and every one of you deserves to take a break from the most stressful part of your job: serving as a Bloomberg Scapegoat.

Have you ever had one of those kids who loves to play tricks and then points to someone else when you look at him, hoping that he will divert your gaze and the blame onto an innocent bystander? That's what Bloomberg is doing every time he starts talking about the Baaaaaad Teachers. Other mayors have learned his trick, and it's become a tactic used across the nation.

Perhaps we should chip in and buy this tee shirt for him so his finger doesn't get tired. On second thought he doesn't need it. He has bought hundreds people to do the pointing for him.

One of them is Sydney Morris who bills herself as Co-founder of Educators 4 Excellence.

Sydney has done Bloomberg the big fat favor of being the little finger that points at which teachers should be laid off first in the event of a budget crisis. Take note that her job is to point away from the person responsible for the budget crisis and every other crisis in the DOE--He Who Controls It All--Voldebloom. On Tuesday of this week I went to a Panel Discussion on LIFO hosted by Teach for America. She was one of the people on the panel. I won't go into detail because Norm Scot has done a much better job over at Education Notes On Line.

According to Sydney, "a team of 11 New York City teachers" have taken responsiblility to write "the first research-based proposal for conducting layoffs based on merit rather than seniority". She calls it the Educators 4 Excellence Layoff Policy Team White Paper.

These are the little Bloomberg fingers who signed this policy paper.

Christine Casher teaches 9th and 10th grade literature in Manhattan.
Esther Chu teaches middle school science in Brooklyn.
Michelle Costa teaches high school mathematics in Brooklyn.
Margie Crousillat teaches kindergarten in the Bronx.
Elizabeth Doctor teaches 3rd grade in Harlem.
Jamie Ferrel teaches 6th and 7th grade special education English in the Bronx.
Laura Frazier teaches high school mathematics in the Bronx.
Jarell Lee teaches 3rd grade in Brooklyn.
Evan Piekara teaches middle school ELA and Social Studies in the Bronx.
Jane Viau teaches AP Statistics and Economics in Harlem.
Val Lorie Wilson teaches middle school special education in the Bronx.

I'm not going to go into an analysis of which teachers would be first on the chopping block according to the "White Paper". That would be looking in the direction that the little fingers are pointing, and therefore validating their purpose.

No, I would like to list all the things that we are NOT supposed to look at while we get all riled up about their "research-based proposal".

The "Policy White Paper" came out in the middle of February:

We weren't supposed to look at:

the PEP meetings that were voting on school closings and charter colocations.
the horrible job Cathie Black was doing.
Cairo
Wisconsin

Now what are we NOT supposed to be looking at?

the fact that What's-His-Name, Cathie Black's replacement, has a total of only one and one-half years of teaching experience, in kindergarten, and also had to be granted a waiver.
the fact that Bloomberg has wasted billions of dollars in DOE money in dozens of failed enterprises.
the fact that the Rubber Rooms still exist.
the fact that the ATR pool is growing exponentially due to continued school closings.
the fact that charter schools are invading public schools all over the city.
the fact that we have opened a Third Front in the never-ending, and extremely expensive, War on Terror.

As any teacher--or parent for that matter--knows, when the guilty kid tries to blame the innocent kid by pointing away from himself, it's important not to look in the direction of the pointing finger, but to focus directly at the perpetrator, giving him a look that says "I know all, it is impossible to fool me". Once he gets caught, he usually stops the misbehavior, at least for a while.

Have a good vacation. Relax. Enjoy. You deserve it. But when you come back, I suggest you get together and find a way of focusing the eye of truth on the real guilty party in the New York City Department of Education.