May 29, 2014

Trafficked Teachers: Neoliberalism’s Latest Labor Source

from In These Times:


Trafficked Teachers: Neoliberalism’s Latest Labor Source
BY GEORGE JOSEPH


Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United States.” As a lawsuit later revealed, however, their journey through the American public school system was fraught with abuse.

According to court documents, Lourdes Navarro, chief recruiter and head of Universal Placement, made applicants pay a whopping $12,550 in interview and “processing fees” before they’d even left the Philippines. But the exploitation didn’t stop there. Immediately after the teachers landed in LAX, Navarro coerced them into signing a contract paying her 10 percent of their first and second years’ salaries; she threatened those who refused with instant deportation. Even after they started at their schools, Navarro kept the teachers dependent on her by only obtaining them one-year visas before exorbitantly charging them for an annual renewal fee. She also confiscated their passports.

“We were herded into a path, a slowly constricting path,” said Ingrid Cruz, one of the teachers, during the trial, “where the moment you feel the suspicion that something is not right, you're already way past the point of no return." Eventually, a Los Angeles jury awarded the teachers $4.5 million.

Similar horror stories have abounded across the country for years. Starting in 2001, the private contractor Omni Consortium promised 273 Filipino teachers jobs within the Houston, Texas school district—in reality, there were only 100 spots open. Once they arrived, the teachers were crammed into groups of 10 to 15 in unfinished housing properties. Omni Consortium kept all their documents, did not allow them their own transportation, and threatened them with deportation if they complained about their unemployment status or looked for another job. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16738/trafficked_teachers_neoliberalisms_latest_globalized_labor_source

May 29, 2014

New Docs Reveal Extensive Monitoring of Occupy

http://inthesetimes.com/latest/entry/new_docs_reveal_extensive_monitoring_of_occupy


New Docs Reveal Extensive Monitoring of Occupy
May 23, 2014 · Posted by Carlos Ballesteros


Lawyers that represented Occupy Wall Street defendants have obtained thousands of pages of unclassified emails and reports that reveal how heavily law enforcement officials monitored Occupy protestors, starting in 2011. The files—which contain warnings about possible Occupy actions, from protestors occupying congressional offices in Kansas to Milwaukeeans holiday caroling at “an undisclosed location of ‘high visibility’”—were mostly composed of information stemming from public venues, such as social media, and on-the-ground reports from police themselves.

Advocates for civil liberties have expressed concern over the sheer volume of the documents, especially since most of the activity present in the reports can be described as lawful.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund was responsible for obtaining the documents. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, of the Fund, was quoted in the New York Times as being concerned over the documents, which to her signal a stifling of political dissent in the United States. "People must have the ability to speak out freely to express a dissenting view without the fear that the government will treat them as enemies of the state,” she said.

The New York Times goes on to report:

The communications, distributed by people working with counterterrorism and intelligence-sharing offices known as fusion centers, were among about 4,000 pages of unclassified emails and reports obtained through freedom of information requests ... They offer details of the scrutiny in 2011 and 2012 by law enforcement officers, federal officials, security contractors, military employees and even people at a retail trade association. The monitoring appears similar to that conducted by the FBI counterterrorism officials ...

According to a Senate subcommittee report, fusion centers have not been very useful in their stated goal of informing counterterrorism operations. Currently, there are 78 such locally-run centers operating across the country, many of which are now monitoring ordinary criminal activity.

May 29, 2014

Eviction by ‘Rent-a-Cop’

from In These Times:


Eviction by ‘Rent-a-Cop’
An Illinois bill could ‘privatize’ evictions and pave the way for Wall Street abuses.

BY REBECCA BURNS


Housing activists in Chicago are sounding the alarm over a proposed state law that they say would effectively privatize the city’s eviction process and erase decades of gains surrounding tenants’ rights. Introduced by Rep. Monique D. Davis (D), who is both a legislator and small-time Chicago landlord, the bill could also prove to be a boon for the Wall Street investors currently making a foray into the rental market.

Though the proposed legislation is before the Illinois General Assembly, it is written only to apply to counties with populations of 3 million or more people; in other words, it would only impact Cook County, Illinois, which encompasses the greater Chicago area.

At present, evictions in Cook County are a civil matter carried out by a specially trained unit within the Sheriff’s office. During the past three decades, largely at the urging of advocates, this unit has begun training deputies in the nuances of tenant law and employing a social worker to consult with elderly or disabled tenants and those with young children. Police typically do not become involved in the process.

By contrast, HB 5395, which passed out of committee this month and is now before the Illinois House of Representatives, would change eviction laws to allow any “peace officer,” including off-duty police in the employ of private security companies or landlords, to remove tenants from their homes. Critics have denounced the idea of “rent-a-cops” unfamiliar with the nuances of tenant law carrying out this procedure. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16753/eviction_by_rent-a-cop

May 29, 2014

Chris Hedges: Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary

from truthdig:


Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary

Posted on May 25, 2014
By Chris Hedges


Cornel West, Richard D. Wolff and I, along with moderator Laura Flanders, next Sunday will inaugurate “The Anatomy of Revolution,” a series of panel discussions focusing on modern revolutionary theorists. This first event will be part of a two-day conference in New York City sponsored by the Left Forum, and nine other discussions by West, Wolff and me will follow in other venues later this year.

Sunday’s event will be about Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”—the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, works that established the standards by which rebellion is morally and legally permissible. We will ask whether the conditions for revolt set by Paine have been met with the rise of the corporate state. Should Paine’s call for the overthrow of British tyranny inspire our own call for revolution? And if it should, to echo Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

Thomas Paine is America’s one great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists—Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day and Noam Chomsky—and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups—Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West and bell hooks—but we don’t have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

Paine’s brilliance as a writer—his essay “Common Sense” is one of the finest pieces of rhetorical writing in the English language—is matched by his clear and unsentimental understanding of British imperial power. No revolutionist can challenge power if he or she does not grasp how power works. This makes Sheldon Wolin’s book “Democracy Incorporated” and his concept of “inverted totalitarianism” as important to us today as Paine’s writings on the nature of the British monarchy were in 1776. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thomas_paine_our_contemporary_20140525

May 29, 2014

Top Obama Aide Who Runs Pro-Clinton Super PAC Shills for UK Conservatives on the Side

via truthdig:



Jim Messina helped get Barack Obama elected and, if given half a chance, he’ll do the same for Hillary Clinton. So what is he doing in the U.K. trying to keep Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in power?

The New York Times profiles Messina’s entry into British politics, along with fellow Obama campaign veteran David Axelrod. Unlike Messina, Axelrod is advising the Labour Party, with an anti-austerity message that would sit well with Obama circa 2008.

Messina says he is quite comfortable working for Cameron, but his former colleagues aren’t so understanding. According to the Times, there is a “sense among some Obama campaign and administration veterans that Mr. Messina’s work for the Tories has crossed an ideological threshold that his consulting for casinos and corporations only approached.”

Axelrod, on the other hand, seems tickled by the arrangement. “I’m not here on business,” he is quoted as saying. “If I were doing this for business reasons I’d be doing something else.” .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/top_obama_aide_who_runs_pro-clinton_superpac_shills_for_conservatives_on_th

May 28, 2014

Colleges Are Buying Stuff They Can’t Afford and Making Students Pay For It

(The Nation) With tuition costs more than doubling over the past generation, and student debt now exceeding $1 trillion, everyone knows the cost of college is too damn high. About 40 million people nationwide are weighed down by education debts that often reach into the tens of thousands. But those numbers are just a sliver of the bleak shadow that Wall Street casts over higher education.

A new study on debt across the higher education system reveals that the massive debts borne by both students and their institutions has climbed to about $45 billion per year. So the debt-related payments to the financial sector—including Wall Street investors, institutional lenders and the mammoth federal student loan system—drive about one tenth of all spending on higher education nationwide. These debt-servicing costs are tied to tuition lending as well as financial debts accrued by schools themselves, which finance investments of all kinds, from professors’ salaries to libraries to indulgences like sports teams and administrators’ bonuses.

According to researchers with University of California–Berkeley’s Debt & Society Project, a project of the Center for Culture, Organizations, and Politics with research support from the American Federation of Teachers, the a key factor in the rising cost of college is driven by expenditures largely unrelated to either the quality of the education, teaching or maintaining campus facilities. Rather, college is getting unimaginably expensive for both institutions and students because it costs so much to finance the business of education, thanks to Wall Street lenders. While there are many controversial budget items in higher education—critics lament bloated administrations and the cost of sports teams and flashy amenities—the report focuses on debt itself, and the massive volume of borrowing, as a major overlooked burden on institutions.

Even among graduates of public colleges, the average debt burden has more than doubled between 2001 and 2009, from about $9,440 to $21,100, mirroring the debt trendlines for graduates of private non-profit institutions. That means that for a typical poor single parent, the projected cost of her student loans may well have doubled in the years it takes to earn her degree as she juggles a job and night classes. And she’s likely facing other crushing debts on top of that: a recent Pew study links high student debt burdens among households of adults younger than 40 with higher total debt, including mortgage and credit card costs, which in turn aggravates the lifelong wealth gaps that higher education was supposed to help alleviate. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/179993/colleges-are-buying-stuff-they-cant-afford-and-making-students-pay-it#

May 22, 2014

Levin Wants To Shut Off The Corporate Offshore Thievery

from the Working Life blog:


Levin Wants To Shut Off The Corporate Offshore Thievery
Posted on 21 May 2014


The corporate thieves running U.S.-based corporations are just counting the days until Carl Levin heads off to retirement at the end of this term. It was Levin, you may recall, who looked at Goldman Sachs and saw “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing”. And he isn’t letting go: he’s now moving to try to close a loophole that will put billions of dollars in taxable corporate profits into offshore accounts, a scam that robs the people of revenue.

He calls it the Stop Corporate Inversions Act. I dub it the “Stop Corporate Thievery Act” in line with my own view that when corporations willfully evade taxes, those corporations are effectively stealing from the taxpayers here by exploiting society’s broad resources–education, infrastructure, public safety and other taxpayer-financed public goods–which make profits possible and, then, discarding the entire country by the roadside.

As Levin put it yesterday:

This legislation is designed to address a loophole which, unless we close it, will unleash a flood of corporate tax avoidance that threatens to shove billions of dollars in tax burden from profitable multinationals onto the backs of their American competitors and other American taxpayers.

..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/2014/05/21/levin-wants-to-shut-off-the-corporate-offshore-thievery/#sthash.1L3852Gr.dpuf

May 22, 2014

I saw the documentary "Chasing Ice" yesterday .........

And followed it up with a good stiff drink. ...... When it comes to stopping rising sea levels, it really is too late.

May 22, 2014

America: Europe and Canada’s Willing Chump

By Dan Fejes, who lives in northeast Ohio. Cross posted from Pruning Shears


One of the more memorable turns of phrase I’ve heard in the past few years came during the effort to unionize an Ikea plant in Virginia. In the same way that Mexico became an attractive location for American capitalists because of lower wages and less stringent environmental standards, some European employers began finding America more to their liking. Or, put more colorfully:

During its successful campaign to organize the Danville workers, the International Association of Machinists (IAM), through its Machinists News Network, produced a web video called “Same Rules, Same Respect.” It charged that “when on American soil, IKEA is playing by a very different set of rules than when at home.” In the video, IAM Woodworking Division director Bill Street says, “We’ve become Sweden’s Mexico.”

That isn’t Europe’s approach across the board, of course; heaven knows Volkswagen did its best to give its American workers more of a voice. But there has definitely been a willingness for other Western nations to take advantage of America’s willingness to put itself at risk or a disadvantage. This has been especially pronounced with fossil fuels.

For instance, Canada has been at best ambivalent about building pipelines for its Alberta tar sands. On the one hand, its political and media elite is not only firmly in favor but vigorously lobbying for them. On the other, the combination of grassroots activism and court challenges has made building them in-country dicey. So it looks like Ottawa might just decide it’s easier to build what Charles Pierce called a death-funnel down the spine of the United States. Since Keystone has the enthusiastic support of climate science-denying cretins in both the House and Senate, it just might succeed. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/america-europe-canadas-willing-chump.html

May 22, 2014

Robert Reich: The Practical Choice: Not American Capitalism or “Welfare State Socialism” but ......

The Practical Choice: Not American Capitalism or “Welfare State Socialism” but an Economy That’s Working for a Few or Many
TUESDAY, MAY 20, 2014


For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.

It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.

But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.

.....(snip).....

But at least we’re the land of more equal opportunity, right? Wrong. Their poor kids have a better chance of getting ahead. While 42 percent of American kids born into poor families remain poor through their adult lives, only 30 percent of Britain’s poor kids remain impoverished – and even smaller percentages in other rich countries. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.org/post/86359911960