Thomas Harrington - Technocrats

Published on Monday, December 5, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/05-6

by Thomas S. Harrington

During the last few days and weeks we have been hearing a lot about technocrats, as in “the technocrat Mario Monti has just been named Prime Minister of Italy” or  “the newly-appointed President of the European Central Bank is the technocrat Mario Draghi”.  

Though none of the reporters and pundits I have seen employing it recently have ever stopped to define the term, its implied meaning is quite clear:  a person of demonstrated financial skill who is unburdened by the ideological and political baggage blinding or crippling the incumbent policy makers.

Because the technocrat is effectively “above the fray” and interested in looking at reality solely in terms of “practical solutions”, the story goes, he (they are generally always men) is much better positioned than “mere politicians” to resolve the society’s most pressing social and economic problems.

Insofar as it used in the American context, the term  “fascist” functions largely as a political epithet, an insult we hurl at someone whose high-handed behavior offends us. 

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Kenneth Saltman - The Failure of Corporate School Reform -- Toward a New Common School Movement

Monday 5 December 2011

by: Kenneth J. Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/failure-corporate-school-reform-toward-new-common-school-movement/1322671494

In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform.

While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads "CEO"; or install corporate models of numerical "accountability," paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising "return on investment"; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California's new science curriculum: the examples are endless.

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Paul Craig Roberts - The Obama Regime Has No Constitutional Scruples

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Obama-Regime-Has-No-Co-by-paul-craig-roberts-111205-601.html

December 5, 2011 By paul craig roberts Under AUMF, the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability. During an interview with RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military.  I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo Party. These conclusions are self-evident, and I stand by them.

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Andre Damon and Barry Grey - Study Documents Desperate Conditions Facing the Unemployed in America

By Andre Damon and Barry Grey 

Global Research, December 5, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28047

A study published Friday by Rutgers University documents the desperate situation facing millions of American workers who lost their jobs in the recession that began four years ago. The survey of laid-off workers, conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, found that only 22 percent of those who lost their jobs between August 2008 and August 2009 were working full-time as of August 2011.

Just 7 percent of the unemployed initially contacted by the Heldrich Center in the summer of 2009 say they have regained their previous income level. Another 23 percent say they are on their way back, having experienced a minor downward change in their quality of life that they believe to be temporary.

But a full 36 percent speak of “cataclysmic effects” of the recession and prolonged unemployment, including 21 percent whom the report’s authors consider to have been “devastated” and another 15 percent “who appear to have been wrecked by the recession.” (Emphasis in the original). The former category includes those in poor financial shape who have suffered a major decline in their standard of living, even if they believe it to be temporary. The latter comprises workers who are in poor financial shape, have suffered a major decline in lifestyle and believe the new state of affairs to be permanent.

Forty-seven percent of those surveyed say their personal financial situation is in “poor shape,” 58 percent say the economic crisis has had a “major impact” on themselves and their families, and 41 percent believe that the impact on their standard of living will be permanent.

The study found that the crisis has taken its biggest toll on those with no college education, 46 percent of whom have been “devastated” or “wrecked.” However, nearly a quarter (24 percent) of college graduates in the survey have likewise been “devastated” by the jobs crisis.

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The Truth of the Dangers of Hydrofracking

Learn the truth about the many dangers of hydraulic fracturing in this DEC Hearing at the Rally Against Fracking in New York City, October 8th, 2011.

Explore more of the dangers and latest information at http://www.garynull.com/home/category/fracking

Al-Jazeera-English - 'Facile': Greenpeace Penetrates French Nuclear Plant

Published on Monday, December 5, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2011/12/201112514312118302.html

Activists hang banner on reactor building in what they say was operation to expose weaknesses in national security.

Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading "Coucou" and "Facile", (meaning "Hey" and "Easy") on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country.

Activists hung a banner reading 'Coucou' (Hey) and 'Facile' (Easy) on the reactor containment building. (AFP) Police, whom the environmental activist group immediately told of the publicity stunt, took several hours to round up nine intruders who had broken into the power plant in Nogent-sur-Seine, about 95km southeast of Paris, on Monday.

Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures, ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year, was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors.

"With this nonviolent action, Greenpeace has shown how vulnerable French nuclear plants are," said Sophia Majnoni d'Intignano, a Greenpeace activist.

Activists who tried to enter three other French nuclear sites, in a co-ordinated action on the same day, were prevented from doing so, but Greenpeace said other invaders were still holed up inside other, unspecified, nuclear sites.

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Bruce Levine - How the Occupy Movement Helped Americans Move Beyond Denial and Depression to Action

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet

Posted on December 5, 2011, Printed on December 6, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153269/how_the_occupy_movement_helped_americans_move_beyond_denial_and_depression_to_action

 While the term liberation psychology is less commonly known in the United States than in Latin America, the spirit of liberation psychology has been embraced by U.S. Occupy participants.

Liberation psychology, unlike mainstream psychology, questions adjustment to the societal status quo, and it energizes oppressed people to resist all injustices. Liberation psychology attempts to discover how demoralized people can regain the energy necessary to take back the power that they had handed over to illegitimate authorities. 

The Occupy movement has tapped into the energy supply that many oppressed and exploited people ultimately discover. We discover it when we come out of denial that we are a subjugated people. We discover just how energizing it can be to delegitimize oppressive institutions and authorities. And when these oppressive authorities react violently to peaceful resistance, their violence validates their illegitimacy—and provides us with even more energy.

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Salvatore Babones - The Other 99 Percent -- How the U.S. Compares

Institute for Policy Studies, December 5, 2011 · By Salvatore Babones

http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/the_other_99_percent_how_the_us_compares

The other 99 percent fare much worse in the United States than in any other developed country.

One reason why the Occupy Wall Street movement grabbed the world’s attention was its protest against the injustices of 21st century capitalism. The Occupiers focused on the fact that "the other 99 percent" — the non-wealthy majority of the population — are increasingly excluded from the world’s economies.

The other 99 percent didn’t benefit from the economic booms of the 2000s. The other 99 percent didn’t cause the global financial crisis. The other 99 percent paid for the bank bailouts of 2008. And yet, the other 99 percent are now being asked to suffer cuts in pay, benefits, and government services. Increasingly, the other 99 percent are saying "no."

Occupy movements have now sprung up in at least 20 countries, and probably more. They all speak, in one way or another, for the other 99 percent. But the other 99 percent means different things in different places.

In some countries, the other 99 percent are truly oppressed.  In others, they manage reasonably well.

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eurekalert.org - Global carbon emissions reach record 10 billion tons -- threatening 2 degree target

Public release date: 4-Dec-2011
University of East Anglia

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/uoea-gce120111.php

Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by 49 per cent in the last two decades, according to the latest figures by an international team, including researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia (UEA).

Published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new analysis by the Global Carbon Project shows fossil fuel emissions increased by 5.9 per cent in 2010 and by 49 per cent since 1990 – the reference year for the Kyoto protocol.

On average, fossil fuel emissions have risen by 3.1 per cent each year between 2000 and 2010 – three times the rate of increase during the 1990s. They are projected to continue to increase by 3.1 per cent in 2011.

Total emissions - which combine fossil fuel combustion, cement production, deforestation and other land use emissions - reached 10 billion tonnes of carbon1 in 2010 for the first time. Half of the emissions remained in the atmosphere, where CO2 concentration reached 389.6 parts per million. The remaining emissions were taken up by the ocean and land reservoirs, in approximately equal proportions.

Rebounding from the global financial crisis of 2008-09 when emissions temporarily decreased, last year's high growth was caused by both emerging and developed economies. Rich countries continued to outsource part of their emissions to emerging economies through international trade.

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International Center for Integrated Mountain Development - New reports identify impacts of climate change on world's highest mountains

Public release date: 4-Dec-2011

International Center for Integrated Mountain Development

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/bc-nri120211.php

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA -- Findings from the most comprehensive assessment to date on climate change, snow and glacier melt in Asia's mountainous Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region -- site of Mount Everest and many of the world's tallest peaks -- highlight the region's extreme vulnerability to climate change, as rising temperatures disturb the balance of snow, ice and water, threatening millions of mountain people and 1.3 billion people living downstream in Asia's major river basins.

The findings, published in three reports by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), were released today during Mountain Day, a convening of mountain experts, policy makers, and climate change negotiators on the sidelines of UN climate talks.

The three reports published by ICIMOD provide the most up-to-date compilation of information on the current status of climate change in the HKH region and the first authoritative data on the number and extent of glaciers and the patterns of snowfall in the world's most mountainous region.

"The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region is like a gentle giant. While physically imposing, it is one of the most ecologically sensitive areas in the world," said David Molden, director general of ICIMOD. "We must meet the intensity of climate change in these mountains with an equal intensity of will to mitigate and to adapt to the impacts."

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