Monday News

 

The prison industry in America has been exploitative and nefarious for years and decades. Folks have exposed this truism from across the political spectrum. The inhumane exploitation in the American prison system has been exposed by human rights organizations. Millions of prisons work for a pittance. Tycoons exploit the prison industry as a means to get wealth. In that sense, they do not have to worry about strikes, paying unemployment insurance, vacations, or comp time. The workers in prison are full time and they are never absent. So, some corporations want to do this as a means to have cheaply paid workers without dealing with true workers' rights. Some of them or the prisoners are paid 25 cents an hour. Some are locked up in isolated cells if they refuse to work. About 2 million inmates are in state, federal, and private prison nationwide. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports. We know that there are too many folks in prison. There is an increase of private contracting of prisons. “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.” Wall Street heavily invests in the prison industry complex. These prisoners in the federal level produce military helmets, ID tags, pants, tents, bags, canteens, ammunition belts, etc. They create airplane parts, home appliances, etc. The jailing of those who are convicted of nonviolent crimes still make those convicted served long prison sentences. Mere possession of some drugs can cause a person to serve 5 to 10 years in prison. The three strikes law increases the prison system too. Prison labor has been harmful and exploitative for human life. The prison privatization boom under Reagan and Bush Sr. It grew under Clinton too. There has been private prison system continuing. Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness. So, the prison industrial complex has been a mess for a while. Things should change.

 

 

The White House is dealing with the jobless benefits package. The White House said on Friday that it would agree with a budget deal with the Republicans that could have an extension of federal benefits for the long term unemployed (or they could compromise further). These unemployed benefits will be scheduled to expire at the end of the month. If the benefits end, it will end cash assistance for 1.3 million human beings immediately after the holidays and impact an additional 3.6 million people in the first half of 2014. If unemployment benefits are cut, that callous and cruel act will leave nearly 5 million people and their families to destitution. Many Republicans and even some Democrats want this to happen. Emergency unemployment benefits have been not cut massively in the times of the past. Unemployment is still very high. Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisers this week pointed out that long-term unemployment in the US is 2.6 percent, more than double “any other time that we have allowed benefits” to lapse. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said at his Friday press briefing that Obama would not make an extension of long term benefits a precondition for reaching an agreement in current talks with leaders of the House-Senate conference committee tasked with coming up with a budget by December 13. The conference committee is headed by Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray. It was created as part of the agreement to end the government shutdown in October. The temporary spending authorization that ended the 16 day shutdown expires in January 15. The President recently talked about how income inequality is a defining challenge of our time. He wants to do something about it to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. The short term action of extending unemployment benefits is fine. We also need the long term solution of investment sand other means to grow the economy to benefit all Americans not just the few. We have issues with the judge ruled in favor of the bankruptcy of Detroit (which the White House supported). That bankruptcy can open the way for the pensions of city workers in Detroit and all over the country to be gutted. There has been moderate job growth according to the Labor Department's employment report. The official unemployment rate is 7.0 percent. It shows that 4.1 million human beings have been out of work for a half year or more. This understates the actual level of long term unemployment. According to the Labor Department, the average duration of unemployment increased by more than a week in November, to 37.2 weeks, while the percentage of the jobless who have been out of work for more than six months hit 37.3 percent, up from 36.1 percent in October. We have huge joblessness since we know about laid off workers who have given up looking for a job and young people who are unable to land their first position. Many millions of workers are excluded from the labor force.  According to a survey by the Economic Policy Institute, five million “missing workers” have dropped out of the labor force over the past five years. While the percentage of the population that is employed rose slightly last month, to 58.6 percent, it is still below what it was in July and down 4.4 percentage points since 2006. The reactionary budget agreement will most likely include the reactionary plan of cutting social spending and imposing new taxes on consumers via user fees. The deal is similar to the sequester cuts. The Democrats are prepared for ending corporate tax loopholes and regressive fees on consumers including a surcharge on travel.  Some $20 billion in savings are to come from an increase in federal workers’ contributions to their pension plans. The increased pension contributions will come on top of three years of frozen wages for federal workers and income losses from unpaid furloughs resulting from the sequester. This shows that the leadership of the Republicans and the Democrats want to transfer wealth from the lower income and middle class to the top of American society.

 

 

The newly elected Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio has to do what he has to do now. Now, he should be held accountable for his actions. Many folks say that this is a New Day, New York. There is the downtown rally on December 5 that wanted to protest with a celebration of the election of Bill de Blasio and a number of citywide officials and city Council members who are called liberal Democrats. Now, the city is currently ruled by and for the 1 percent. Folks believe that de Blasio is the agent of change. Yet, folks should not celebrate because your team won the coin flip. I am certainly glad that the current Mayor Michael Bloomberg is about to exit. He allowed class corruption to flourish and the rich to plunder much of the resources in the city. Some folks in the city have been scapegoated and demeaned. Bloomberg even falsely labeled an de Blasio ad racist for just him showing his family. But the part of the interview that will stick to Bloomberg's legacy for the long run is when he mused, "Wouldn't it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?" That sums up the Bloomberg mentality. Bloomberg wanted NYC to cater to the rich. A real metropolis should have respect for its citizens. New York City is a large city with 8 million people. It has a 400 year history. Bloomberg never saw most of these people in his life. He acts like that NYC must be great by allowing high end businesses to have a luxury product and only highly educated workers to handle the situation. Now, we have tons of workers paid minimum wage while the super-rich laugh their way to the bank. Bloomberg spent his 12 years in office making the upper echelons of the professional class feel as welcome as possible, while for the rest of us, he built a digital city of data. Children became test scores; adults disappeared under statistics about job creation and decreasing crime, and so on. Many things have improved in New York for the past 12 years, but NYC still experiences great poverty and great police brutality. De Blasio talked about the tale of two cities in describing income inequality. We will wait and see whether he will do something or not. De Blasio has pledged to lobby the state to raise the minimum wage and raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for an expansion of early childhood education. He must deal with workers without a contract and without a raise. He also has to deal with the cost of giving workers new contracts with back pay, which is estimated at about 7 billion dollars. Bloomberg did not set aside 7 billion dollars for workers. De Blasio claimed that 7 billion dollars is impossible to find. Yet, it is easy to find. There are abandoned buildings in NYC. In other words, he could eliminate tax breaks given to luxury apartment development. He could have a commuter tax for wealthy folks. He can grow the property tax for many luxury buildings (which is very low as compared to what that middle and working class homeowners pay across the city). Addressing inequality means redistributing wealth. The biggest façade of them all is the supposedly impenetrable wall between the vast wealth in private hands in New York City, and the impoverished budget of the city's government. Taking $7 billion from the elites and giving it to public-sector workforce--the backbone of what's left of the city's stable working class--is a good place to start. Now, we have more Brooklyn gentrifiers, etc. More than 50,000 New Yorkers are homeless on any given night.  We have to decide between benefiting human beings or growing radically more empty penthouses. Carl Weisbrod or a major player in the local real estate and gentrification business runs de Blasio's transition team. Time will tell what the future is. We have to fight for real solutions to inequality.

 

There have been debates and issues with Common Core and other new educational standards. Common Core Standards relates to the guidelines where students should know English language arts and math. These standards have little to no input from massive educational experts. The standards are followed by 45 states and four U.S. territories like Washington, D.C. There has been resistance to Common Core nationwide and across the political spectrum. In mid-November, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of superintendents: "It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback [against Common Core] is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who--all of a sudden--their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary." I may not agree with Duncan on his comments on Katrina, but he makes an interesting point. This is an opening to argue that "white suburban moms" and dads have a lot to learn from parents, teachers and students in urban schools who have been coping with--and trying to resist--the onslaught of corporate education deforms for a decade. Education historian Diane Ravitch said that Duncan's comments were in response to the outrage express by suburban New York parents (of moms and dads) at the recent release of student test scores on new assessments aligned to Common Core. Education authorities set the cut-off scores on the new Common Core-aligned assessments artificially high. In fact, the state commissioner for education publicly predicted that only 30 percent of students would pass – which is exactly what happened. Education blogger Jersey Jazzmun made the accurate point that sports should be about competition and education should not deal with greedy competition. Education should be about learning. The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world with some 12 million children living with food insecurity. Many of the standards from the Common Core standards were organized by a private organization like Achieve, Inc.  contracted by non-governmental organizations (the National Governors Association and Council of State School Officers), and funded in large part by the Gates Foundation. The federal government is prohibited from forming a national curriculum. Many reactionaries oppose Common Core not for legitimate reasons, but to oppose any action made by the White House. At times, civil rights movements have raised demands for "local control" to win greater equity, improve the educational experiences for students of color, and ensure that parents of color had greater say over how neighborhood schools were run. Most often, though, calls for "local control" have been used as reactionary cover to maintain the racial segregation and class-based sorting endemic in public education. There are progressive critiques of Common Core, but is has been overshadowed by reactionary resistance under the guise of "local control." Both parties have members who love to increase massively the growth of standardized tests children take, tie teacher salaries to those test scores, dismissing whole school staff, and shut down neighborhood schools. The direct ancestors of today’s high stakes tests were “designed by racist pseudoscientists of the early 20th century” to “prove that whites born in the U.S. were the most intelligent of all peoples.”  Such testing limits the curriculum to certain tested items. Reactionaries always blame the victims for a lack of jobs, a lack of benefits, and a lack of safety net. We should oppose corporate driven reforms and advocate real schools that our kids deserve. The solution is apparent. We should equalize resources in schools, have culturally relevant pedagogy and assessment, lower class size to give individualized attention that children deserve, and have the most effective form of assessment that can be created. Education is a human right for all of humanity period.

 

 

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The Kardashian family 2013 Christmas card outlines the mainstream, corporate controlled entertainment industry and its wickedness & contradictions in full display. A lot of folks have in set views on the Kardashians. You know my views on the Kardashians. It is what it is. Now, the Christmas card is interesting since it has a lot of symbolism in it. The card is less about spirituality and more about materialism and the decadence of Western society. The card was shot by the elite photographer David Lachapellle. The card is grim and summarized the entertainment rule all of the way through. The industry is not only allied with the murderous military industrial complex. It is allied with Big Pharma, and the rest of the corporate engines of control over the masses of society. The industry is ruled by shadowy elite (with their bankers and billionaires head of the corporations running distributions and media conglomerates) that readily promotes a toxic culture. There is much symbolism in the card that deals with the occult, the industry, Illuminist themes, etc. The shot deals with an abandoned movie theater. The movie theater seems to be destroyed and vandalized. Tons of things are going on in the card from left to right. Kim Kardashian is there in the card posing with a revealing outfit. Her image, which is Eurocentric, is highly lusted by many. The reality is that humanity is diverse and humanity should be treated with dignity and respect. Yet, there is nothing wrong with loving and appreciating the beautiful black African phenotype either. Black is Beautiful. Her fame and family links are many reasons why she is where she is now. There is a dollar sign to her, which is self-explanatory. Money and profit lusted after has been a reality of companies during this time of the year. The Jenner sisters pose in a strange way. They pose in front of 2 All Seeing Eye pyramids. The All Seeing Eye found in the One dollar bill has many reasons. There are dismembered mannequins (which is a symbol of mind control and the debasement of human life. Mind control and the debasement of human life have been common among the CIA, the industry, and other factions of world power for eons of human history). There is the image of the Mother and Child archetype, which is a mockery of Mary and Jesus Christ. Kyle wears a vulva shaped headdress. She looks like a high priestess. The sisters stand on a pile of celebrity magazines, representing garbage (since many of such magazines advance distraction, lies, disinformation, and non-relevant issues to build up humanity). Ironically, they build their careers on such magazines though. Behind the sisters at the base of the pyramid is an image of the box of Wheaties. It has the image of Bruce Jenner when he was an Olympic athlete. Khole Kardashian poses while sitting on the backseat of a car. Kourtney's son Mason lays on it. The rest of the family either looks distress or full of happiness. The whole money transactions in life can be complicated. Many celebrities lust after fame, but fame has its price. It is not all it cracked up to be. There are images of African mothers and babies in the background. This is ironic since many celebrities adopt African babies and these babies are stripped from their African mothers constantly. Also, many celebrities exploit celebrities of black African descent (or black people in general) as a means to gain profit or to seek cultural exploitation. Many do not care about black people at all, which is historic. This card outlines what the industry is all about. It deals with mind control, superficiality, materialism, exploitation (even of children), and distraction. P.S. Christmas came from paganism and many Christians then and now oppose it for various reasons. So, we should focus on loving our families, working to enrich humanity, rejecting materialism, loving Africa, and rejecting token fame (and embrace true happiness in our lives). It is as simple as that.

 

By Timothy