Category Archives: Rouge Forum Update

From Rich Gibson in San Diego:

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil is updated.

Of special interest this week:

*To top the Oscars, a new online archive of movies whose copyrights have expired, including the classic Marxist and almost altogether banned Salt of the Earth is here, download free!

*Baltimore students took the lead in direct action, opposing counterfeit claims to school reform.

*The AFL-CIO, gutted by a massive loss of member, and a deep internal split, promised to spend $40 million of its members dues income on electoral campaigns. It is unclear how the AFL-CIO plans to outbribe the truly rich, or how the union bosses plan to be sure the politicians they bribe, stay bribed.

*The split in the AFL-CIO represents a falling out among opportunists. Clearly, the NEA has lined up with old guardsman, John Sweeney, in forming a partnership to inveigle dues from NEA members, and a few luncheons for misleaders of both organizations. The AFL-CIO’s organizing principle remains the unity of politicians, corporate leaders, and union leaders, in the “national interest,” that is, against the interest of rank and file members, and against the interest of workers in the rest of the world.
Andy Stern was Sweeney’s protege, and is president of the Service Employees International Union. He betrayed Sweeney, led a splinter group involving nearly half of the members of the AFL-CIO, including some of the most mobbed-up unions in the US, including the Teamsters, the UFCW, and UNITE-HERE. With SEIU, each union can take credit for organizing large numbers of low-wage workers, and bargaining the minimum wage for them, minus union dues.
Stern’s work is described in a recent article, “His goal was to consolidate AFL-CIO’s 58 affiliated unions, no longer blame corporations on all of its troubles, and to re-establish the labor union as a partner instead of an adversary to corporations and multinationals.”

*A new book by Robert Fitch, while narrow in scope, limiting its critique to union corruption (with some amusing side glances to those “public intellectuals who, from comfortable positions, refuse to recognize the dead-end of US unionism), is worth the candle: Solidarity for Sale.

*Watch for the next issue of Substance News for a description of this week’s AFL-CIO executive committee meeting in San Diego.

*March 18 marks year three of US capital’s invasion of Iraq, for oil and social control of the vital mid-east region, seeking to stave off moves from Russia, China, Europe, and Japan. The failure of the US military adventure, already lost, is breathtaking. Here are past, and prescient, articles from the Rouge Forum News.

*We have joined with hundreds of other grassroots groups to endorse the many demonstrations that will take place throughout the world on March 18. Join us!

Follow

From Rich Gibson in SoCal:

The Rouge Forum No Blood for oil page is updated.

To date, the wars of the US have cost nearly $250 billion, while the President demands massive budget cuts in education and social services. Even mainstream newscaster Ted Koppel recognizes that these wars are about oil (though he misses the relationship of oil, geographical power, and social control).

Religious irrationalism (never too far from a dollar, but with a seeming power of its own these days) rises up and takes deadly turns…

And insurrection appears at hand in the Philippines.

However, of special interest this week is the finalization of secret merger talks between the 3.5 million member National Education Association, by far the largest union in the USA, and the AFL-CIO, in tatters since a major split in the last few months, with many of its major affiliates leaving, a falling out among gangsters and opportunists that may be unmatched in labor history.

This deal will be announced Monday at the AFL-CIO’s executive council meeting at the Hotel Del Coronado (a favorite of George W. Bush’s) in San Diego.

NEA’s top leaders were voted down overwhelmingly in an NEA representative assembly more than five years ago when they arrogantly tried to ram through a merger with the undemocratic, racist, and mobbed-up AFT-AFL-CIO. Now, they seek to achieve a merger through the back door, by “allowing” NEA affiliates to sign on.

The only beneficiaries of this maneuver will be NEA big shots, like President Reg Weaver whose total salary this year will come close to 1/2 million dollars, and some local leaders who may win a free lunch from the AFL-CIO, and of course, the bankrupt treasuries of the AFL. While NEA members will be promised greater “Clout” and “Solidarity” the fact is that the AFL-CIO’s only clout is in beating up its own members, and its solidarity amounts to the solidarity of its well-heeled gangster leaders in sabotaging its own members job actions, as in the Patco strike, P-9, the Detroit Newspaper strike, the Detroit Teachers Wildcat Strike, the California Grocery strike, and more, throughout its history, going back even before the Great Flint Strike at GM.

Meanwhile, top AFT leaders, like Al Shanker’s underboss of Florida, Pat Tornillo, languish in jail for stealing the AFT members’ money, while the DC AFT president sits in a jail just to his north for the same charge. Topping that, the Broward County Florida AFT boss, long touted as Tornillo’s inheritor, is in prison for child molestation.

School workers, all of us, will lose from this back door merger.

Here is the complete text of the NEA agreement, and following that, links on some of the labor battles noted above.

The Rejection of the NEA affiliation deal at the NEA RA

Looting the DC AFT local

Detroit Teachers Wildcat Strike

California Grocery Strike

A new book, Solidarity for Sale, by Fitch, is well worth the candle for those interested in this mega merger, as is Jack Scott’s classic, Yankee Unions Go Home.

Follow

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page has been updated, complete with a new Abolish ROTC poster that is more than one-half century old, and, with luck, not good for our lifetimes.

As usual, the page hosts several articles from Robert Fisk, one of the few western journalists with a grasp of the current crises, Here is one.

The Historians Against the War will meet in Austin in February 2006 and our friends in the Whole Schooling Consortium are hosting a conference in Portland on May 12.

As the economic attacks on working life in the US sharpened, with up to 30,000 layoffs announced at Ford, the UAW, which has lost one million members in recent decades, offered to do nearly nothing—as the rank and file at Delphi corporation, facing massive cuts, began to organize outside their UAW and New York Transit workers, following a three day strike, voted down a concessions based contract negotiated by union leaders.

Last, Substance News, edited by blacklisted educator George Schmidt (a Chicago teacher with nearly thirty years in the system before he was fired for publishing the hated CASE test) needs your support. Here’s the latest Substance.

There are several national demonstrations against the war coming up. Likely to be the largest is one planned for April 29th. Watch for a full description in the next Rouge Forum News.

Follow

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web site has been updated. Remember you can download those beautiful (and probably good for our lifetimes) posters free, or order them from us, below cost.

This week, however, we draw your attention to the threatened closure of the Oakland, CA, elementary charter school, Growing Children, where one of the leading test resisters in the US, Susan Harman, is principal.

Randolph Ward, the appointed boss of Oakland schools following the virtual abolition of the elected school board (similar to Detroit) has notified Susan Harman that Growing Children is going to be closed in June because (a) test scores are low and (b) instructional methods are not sufficiently “constructivist.”

In fact, Randolph Ward is a front man for multimillionaire Eli Broad, a key backer for the racist and anti-working class standardization/high-stakes-test attack on public schooling. As part of an effort to deepen the use of public schools as centers of social control, and a parallel scheme to privatize parts of public education, Broad profits from closing schools—and opening his own—as in the Aspire schools in Oakland.

In addition, millions of dollars in Oakland real estate now owned by the public schools are up for grabs and part of Ward’s plan appears to be to turn over public land to private developers to lay off a falsely construed school debt—as is happening in San Diego now.

For his work, Randolph Ward is being paid $240,000. His 24 hour bodyguard service is paid over $100,000. Behind every takeover of this sort is, not reason, but force and violence.

Test scores at Growing Children are indeed predictably low, among the lowest in the district. The school has 93 percent of its 150 kids, k-6, on free and reduced lunch. Throughout the country, scores on high-stakes tests reflect little but race, class, and subservience.

The charge that the school is not sufficiently constructivist, and has low scores, is really a pincer move. Good constructivism may well not produce rapid boosts in test scores. And, after all, if test scores went up markedly for masses of poor kids, the tests would be changed. The game is clearly rigged.

Susan Harman has been banned from the Oakland Schools building, and threatened by Ward’s bodyguard, because she has been a consistent critic of the tests—and of him. Clearly, Ward set out to silence her. Her example as a principal (paying herself far less than other principals in order to pass the money along to staff and kids), is hardly one that school bosses like Ward want emulated.

If we can learn nothing else from the last decade of test-fever, it is that an injury to one only goes before an injury to all. This attack on Growing Children and Susan Harman will only be duplicated elsewhere, soon.

What can you do? For starters, you can write a hard-copy letter of support to Susan Harman, Growing Children, at:

8000 International Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94621
Alameda County
Phone: (510) 568-0500
Fax: (510) 568-0505

Include your email address so she can contact you if necessary.

For a short look at Randolph Ward’s career and his connection to Eli Broad, see here.

For a more nuanced and resourced take, see, Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools, by Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian.

Follow

From Rich Gibson:

We continue to have so many visitors to our RougeForum.org web site that the server is shutting it down. Apologies to those visitors who have seen delays. The No Blood For Oil page is updated, however, and worth reviewing. This is one of the more widely circulated articles.

This week, though, we focus on the recent book by Robert Fisk, who is becoming to the wars in the Middle East what Wilfred Burchette was to the wars on Vietnam, one of the few sources of courage and truth. His book is The Great War for Civilization, The Conquest of the Middle East.

Much of Fisk’s work is posted on the Rouge Forum web site, and he has urged readers to use the site as a reference page.

A recent interview with Fisk by the journalist, Justin Podur, is here

During this week, a Yale professor, David Graeber, an extraordinarily well-credentialed anarchist was forced to resign, or chose to leave. We will have more on the continuing repression in the k12 and university worlds next week.

Follow

Rouge Forum Update from Rich Gibson:

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page was shut down for nearly a week because so many people have been visiting the pages. That’s a good problem to have, and we are trying to figure out how to get more space, at no cost. Over the holiday break we will also continue to update the format of the web pages—your comments always appreciated.

In the interim, attacks on educators escalated at all levels. TA’s at NYU went on strike and were threatened with not just dismissal, but blacklists. Teachers in California were transferred and disciplined for speaking out against the NCLB. And Oregon teachers went on strike, in part because of the NCLB, but settled and retreated on all of the NCLB issues they faced. All of this is outlined on the Rouge Forum education page. Also see the Workplace Blog for updates on the NYU TA strike.

The Rouge Forum endorsed the December 6 US National Day of Counter Recruitment, seeking to drive military recruiters off educational grounds, and will be participating in actions around the US.

This week’s New Yorker has important articles for educators and anti-war activists. Here is a link to Sy Hersh writing on the unlikely troop withdrawals.

The New Yorker also has an extensive examination of the Pennsylvania lawsuit regarding teaching evolution in schools (this article is not linked to the New Yorker web page as yet, but there is a short question and answer piece related to it). However, H. Allen Orr’s May 2005 New Yorker article on why “intelligent design” isn’t is available online.

Contrary to pundits and turned war hawks in Congress, the US can neither stay nor leave the Middle East and Central Asia quagmires. The wars are already lost, the great superpower fought to a standstill by unorganized, poorly led, unsupplied citizen-militias, and the Ozymandius of the west, having played its spectacular techno-war cards stands exposed to its imperial rivals. Yet the US cannot leave, as the oil fields, and the social power they represent, cannot be abandoned, at least not until the fields and the pipeline can be controlled—which could take a decade. Now, troops are in their third rotation to the Caspian and Iraq areas, and contemplating more, as their families struggle to get food stamps.

Hope is measured in the potential changes of mind, and deepened consciousness, that can rise from the necessary, vital, struggles of daily life.

Follow

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil reference page is updated, with new graphics and links, at RougeForum.org

Remember the Stop the War conference in LA on November 19!

NEA watched the California Nurses Association pound the CA governor into the sand on his four key propositions. But NEA spent well over $50 million on the campaign, most of it targeting the threat to dues income that prop 75 represented (would have required the union bosses to get member permission to deduct funds for political action). All told, about $250 million was spent on the campaign which left NEA members largely in the same spot they found themselves a year ago.

Senior LATimes writer and columnist Robert Scheer was fired for his political views this week.

Here is an example of Scheer’s recent work. “Lying on Intelligence.”

He follows Judith Miller out the door, who was fired for being caught lying about WMD’s on behalf of the Bush administration.

The Bush and Democratic excuse, “Who Knew Back Then?” is answered fairly simply. We knew. Take a look at the Rouge Forum archives going back to 2001, chronicling the many activists and researchers who knew the government was lying. Here is a quick example.

Lyon and Paris were hit by youth uprisings and it took the Asia Times to explain why.

Oil bosses defended their multi-billions in profits.

And the AFT agreed to a 52 month contract, with a merit pay clause, in New York City.

Follow