Dear Friends,
Welcome to the new folks, from all over the world, on our Rouge Forum list. For newcomers, the Rouge Forum home page is at
www.rougeforum.org</a . There you will find current updates on education, the wars, and those good-for-the-rest-of-our-lives Rouge Forum posters on sale at cost.
Substance News won a small victory after the paper of the education resistance was denied a press pass for the American Federation of Teachers convention coming up soon. After Rouge Forum members and Substance readers let the AFT leadership know that Substance is indeed a “legitimate” news source, the AFT leaders changed course. Here is one sentence from their recent response: “”By the way, could you please let your subscribers know that you will be covering the convention so that they’ll stop e-mailing and calling?”
Substance is carrying live online updates from the National Education Association Representative Assembly right now at
http://www.substancenews.net/ and will have even broader coverage of the AFT conference soon. A subscription to the hard copy of Substance is just $16, a good way to spend a small portion of the hush money Bush is sending to people in the US.
Here is a short, 4 minute piece from George Carlin on Who Owns Education, and US?
Bill Moyers’ Journal on Post Civil War Slavery (Moyers and his guest seem to have forgotten that W.E.B. Dubois broke the ground on this)
Ten years ago, Osama bin Laden demanded that oil should be priced at $144 a barrel. Now it is. Where is Osama? For those who want to follow events in Central Asia, see the bourgeoisie nationalist Ahmed Rashid, “Descent into Chaos.” While his standpoint makes him as unable to see a way out as Bush, his presentation is detailed and worth the candle.
An overview of world military spending is here.
My own checking suggests that the US military is the most excessive user of oil and gas in the world, using about 160 million gallons of gas a month, and that sets aside oil used for other military purposes: tires, plastics in weaponry, etc. While the subprime crisis, a result of the mastery of the US economy by finance capital, surely is related to the acceleration of oil costs, as speculators shifted away from the US dollar, the massive US military increase in using oil products has to be considered—in the context that oil moves the military of every nation in the world and no nation is prepared to convert to anything else. Oil and empire are intertwined. Thus, oil and war.
Nations that promise perpetual war on the world will make peculiar demands on their schools.
Rouge Forum updates will be sporadic through the summer. Next, among other highlights, a review of the Obamagogue/McWarcriminal dogfight and the nature of capitalist democracy—and education.
For those in Southern California, we will host a Rouge Forum potluck in early August, heading back to school.
All the best,
r
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Tahnks for posting