When President Obama won his office, many felt cheered and relieved that a savvy, well-spoken – "cool" – man of the people had replaced an incurious, inarticulate – embarrassing – aristocrat as "leader of the free world." But many right-wing media outfits and politicians have kept campaigning against Obama, and some have cast silly suspicion on the country's first black president as a foreign-born Marxist that would "turn [the US] into a Muslim nation." And, since Obama routed some of the TARP bank bailout money to save General Motors, and some of the Recovery Act stimulus money to create a domestic electric car industry, many right-wingers have gone on to smear GM's new electric car – the Chevy Volt. In the same silly fashion, some of these right-wingers have painted the car as an "exploding Obamamobile," made in China, that might leave you stranded in the Lincoln Tunnel. But (like Obama) the Chevy Volt is cool. You plug it into an electric socket in your garage overnight, and the next day drive it 35 miles solely on electric power, for about one-third the price of gasoline. After those 35 miles, whether you find yourself in the Lincoln Tunnel or anywhere else, the Volt's gasoline motor switches on, and you can drive to the farthest coast getting 40 highway miles per gallon. If you never drive more than 35 miles, you practically never buy gas. And, by the acclaim of the automotive press and of those who own one, the Volt is a safe, trouble-free, well-performing, fun-to-drive vehicle. 39 owners reviewed the Volt at Edmunds' website, giving it an average of five out of five stars. Here are some of the comments:

The best way that I can describe how the Volt drives and handles is that it is solid and extremely quiet. The doors close with a solid thud and when underway, the steering is connected to the road and the cabin is extremely quiet. ... (2012-03-23)

I just purchased a Volt; great car: great performance, really fun to drive, amazing torque, very high quality build, been running it almost entirely on electricity (... radius of my daily driving is not more than 35 miles), the gasoline engine kicks in seamlessely to extend range to 300+ miles (at approx 40 mpg), and easy to recharge at night. ... (2012-03-03)

This car is fantastic! -- It's as roomy as an entry level Mercedes Benz, zips around city streets like a sports car, handles like a BMW and is quieter than a Rolls Royce. ... The interior is sleek and comfortable ... According to my odometer, so far I've driven 1325 miles on 0.2 gallons of gas. (2012-02-16)

This is the best car I have ever owned. It looks good, handles well and is incredibly inexpensive to drive. 6,500 miles and 41 gallons of gas - only because I drove it to FL from MI. 42.5 mpg on the way down using gas. I drive it typically under 30 miles per day and usually have 39-40 miles of battery available when I start in the morning. So unless I need to go more than 40 miles, I don't use any gas. I plug the car into my 110v house system at 8:00 at night and it's fully charged in 10 hrs (6 am). ... (2012-01-26)

My wife and I had the privilege of having a 1999 GM EV1 when it was a prototype all electric car with a range of 90-110 miles. ... We loved that car! When the EV1 was taken back by GM as part of the agreed up prototye lease agreement we kept waiting and looking for an alternative fuel replacement. ...

The Volt meets nearly all my needs. It has an all electric range of 38-50 miles in my experience. ... I am an engineer and this car is loaded with features. I feel GM could have badged this as a Cadillac. (2012-04-20)

These ratings are borne out by Consumer Reports' survey finding the Chevy Volt number one in customer satisfaction. The Volt has also won the North American and Euro Car of the Year awards. And a citizen of the U.S.A. can take pride that this machine is designed, engineered and built in America, its factories in Flint, Hamtrammack, and elsewhere around Detroit, the good old heart of America's auto industry. And you don't have to say it of President Obama to say it of the Chevy Volt – it is all-American and cool.

many felt cheered "Anger Marks Beginning, Joy Marks End of Bush Regime" - The Paragraph - November 8th, 2008

foreign-born "Fox News Legitimizes Birthers" Reported by Ellen - News Hounds - July 14, 2009

During Special Report’s Political Grapevine segment tonight (7/14/09), Bret Baier announced ..., “A U.S. soldier who has been ordered to Afghanistan is refusing to go… (saying) President Obama was not born in the United States and therefore is ineligible to be Commander-in-Chief. ... (His) attorney is involved in a second case that challenges the legitimacy of the Obama presidency. The Los Angeles Times reports a California judge has agreed to hear the merits of that case.” As a banner on the screen read, “PERSISTENT PROBLEM” next to a photo of Obama and the U.S. Supreme Court, Baier added, “It is just one of dozens of legal challenges to the president’s nationality.”

But rather than inform his viewers that those “challenges” have been thoroughly debunked, Baier presented the issue as a he said/she said, adding, “At least two of them have already been dismissed by the Supreme Court. The White House press secretary again Monday brushed aside the matter, saying, quote, ‘The noble truth is that the president was born in Hawaii, a state of the United States of America.’” Baier never pointed out that Obama's American birth certificate has been produced and authenticated.

Marxist "Latest Right-Wing Meme (Again): Calling Obama Un-American; King: No American Experience; Limbaugh: He’s “A Foreign Agent”" - by Alan Colmes - August 16, 2010

BYSTANDING CONSTITUENT: ... He’s a Marxist! He’s a Muslim Marxist.
Rep. Steve King of Iowa: He’s at least a Marxist. And he surely understands the Muslim culture.
CONSTITUENT: He surely does. That’s where he grew up with, that’s his culture.
KING: He doesn’t have an American experience. ...

turn [the US] into a Muslim nation "Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty - Why GOP Rep. Bob Inglis is looking for a new job." By David Corn - Mother Jones - Aug. 3, 2010

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. ... "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." ... "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.

... Inglis, who served six years in Congress during the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the House in 2004, had also ticked off right-wingers in the state's 4th Congressional District by urging tea-party activists to "turn Glenn Beck off" and by calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) to apologize for shouting "You lie!" at Obama during the president's State of the Union address. For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. And he's ... noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

right-wingers have gone on to smear "The Car the Right Wing Can't Kill" By Froma Harrop - Real Clear Politics - April 5, 2012

The right-wing media had launched an outrageous smear campaign against it. As former GM executive Bob Lutz sarcastically put it, the Volt had become "the poster child for President Obama's socialist meddling in the free automotive market."

Lutz responded with special anger to a recent Bill O'Reilly Fox News show in which the host condemned the Volt as "an unmitigated disaster." Joshing over the disappointing Volt sales, O'Reilly's guest Lou Dobbs said, "It doesn't work." Also, "It catches fire."

exploding Obamamobile "GM’s Buyers Reject ‘Obamamobile’ Volt as Campaign Heats Up: Cars" By Tim Higgins - Bloomberg - Mar 9, 2012

“Although we loaded the Volt with state-of-the-art safety features, we did not engineer the Volt to be a political punching bag,” GM Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson said during a Congressional hearing on the Volt in January. “And that, sadly, is what the Volt has become.”

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich faulted the Volt for its lack of space for a gun rack. Front-runner Mitt Romney called it “an idea whose time has not come.” American Tradition Partnership Inc., a conservative group, referred to Volts as “exploding Obamamobiles.”

made in China "Republicans Criticize Obama for Supporting the American-Made Chevy Volt in New Video" by Brit Liggett - Inhabitat - 02/28/12

The video also says that the Volt is made in China. Some of them are, but only the models that are to be sold in China. US models are made by American workers mainly in the Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly plant, which was recently revived and has put American auto workers back on the assembly line

stranded in the Lincoln Tunnel "Fox Tests Volt, Runs Out Of Juice In Lincoln Tunnel" By Bertel Schmitt - The Truth About Cars - February 6, 2012 - (Fox News video)

35 miles solely on electric power "Chevrolet Volt Math Everybody Can Understand" - Rob Peterson, Chevrolet Volt Communications - 23 February 2012

So to summarize:
-Average cost to charge the Volt for 35 miles of EV driving: $1.50
-MPG of the Volt in extended-range mode: 35 city / 40 highway or 37 combined
-Average cost per mile so far from Volt drivers: $.03 - .06
-Cost per mile of a conventional vehicle that gets 30 mpg with gas at $3.90 per gallon: $.13

acclaim "2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year: Chevrolet Volt" By Angus MacKenzie - Motor Trend - January, 2011

The Volt boasts some of the most advanced engineering ever seen in a mainstream American automobile. The powertrain allows the car to run as an EV, a series hybrid, or a parallel hybrid, depending on how far you drive and how you drive. The secret sauce is how GM controls the powerflow between the 149-horse electricmotor, the generator, and the 84-horse,1.4-liter naturally aspirated internal-combustion engine. It's fundamentally different from the way Toyota handles things in the Prius.

39 owners reviewed the Volt "2012 Chevrolet Volt Consumer Reviews" - Edmunds

Consumer Reports' survey "Consumer Reports Owner Satisfaction Survey: Chevrolet Volt Edges Out Sports Cars for Top Spot" - The Auto Channel - YONKERS, NY - Dec. 1, 2011

North American "Chevrolet Volt wins coveted North American Car of the Year" By Chris Woodyard - USA TODAY - 2011-01-10

Euro "Ampera/Volt sweeps on Car of the Year 2012" - CarOfTheYear.org - 03/05/2012

built in America "CHEVROLET VOLT: BORN AND BUILT IN THE U.S." - GM news release - Oct. 10, 2010 (doc file)

“While the advanced technologies in vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt have the potential to address global transportation challenges, they have deep roots in the U.S., particularly in the state of Michigan, the birthplace of the American automotive industry,” said Tony Posawatz, Volt vehicle line director. “In addition to GM’s investments, suppliers and other partners are making major manufacturing and R&D investments in the U.S. and in Michigan to commercialize electrically driven transportation.”

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2012

Notes on the selections by Guy Z:

Songs are all just educated guesses, but possible in terms of recording date. Some are a “good bet,” though, as Williams would almost certainly have played the Hucklebuck at some point. 60 Minute Man was a #1 hit for The Dominoes in 51. The day after the Moondog, Freed played Rocking the Blues as the 2nd song of his broadcast.

1. Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers – The Hucklebuck (1949)

2. Tiny Grimes & the Rocking Highlanders – Rockin’ the Blues (1951)

3. Danny Cobb (vocalist with the Paul Williams Orchestra) – Rockin’ Chair Blues (1951)

4. The Dominoes – 60 Minute Man (1951)

5. Varetta Williams – You Are Gone (1951)

Outside the Cleveland Arena the week of the Moondog Coronation Ball – BBC

Inside the Cleveland Arena during Moondog Coronation Ball 1952-03-21 – BBC

Sources

1. ‘How the world’s first rock concert ended in chaos’ By Jude Sheerin BBC News, Cleveland, 20 March 2012

Less well known is the reason why the Moondog Coronation Ball ended in disaster: a minor printing error.

The mistake was caused by someone forgetting to add the date to tickets issued for a follow-up ball, which Mintz had set about organising immediately after the initial one sold out.

As a result, an estimated 20,000 people showed up on the same night for the first concert – at a venue which could hold half that number.

2. Alan Freed Biography by Ben Fong-Torres

Freed was inducted into the first class of the Hall, in January 23, 1986, alongside such pioneers and greats as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke.

3. World Series of Rock – Wikipedia entry

4. WMJI – Moondog Coronation Ball

5. Sunday Oldies Jukebox, WSTB, Akron, Ohio

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2012

Throng protests “right to shirk” in Indianapolis

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

National Right to Shirk Act?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) urges a federal “right to shirk” law to limit free bargaining, and asks you to be a “sledgehammer” against “forced unionism” — something that doesn’t exist.⁶

Sources

1. ‘Indiana state House approves right-to-work bill’ by James B. Kelleher, Reuters, 2012-01-25

The House approved the law by a 54-to-44 margin, even though five Republicans joined Democratic lawmakers to oppose it.

The state Senate voted 28 to 22 in favor of the measure, with nine Republicans joining all 13 Democrats in voting against it.

3. Universal Declaration of Human Rights

4. ‘“Right to Work” Laws: Get the Facts’ – Minnesota AFL-CIO

A “right to work” law is a state law that stops employers and employees from negotiating an agreement – also known as a union security clause – that requires all workers who receive the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement to pay their share of the costs of representing them. Right to Work laws say that unions must represent every eligible employee, whether he or she pays dues or not. In other words, “Right to Work” laws allow workers to pay nothing and still get all the benefits of union membership.

“Right to Work” laws aren’t fair to dues-paying members. If a worker who is represented by a union and doesn’t pay dues is fired illegally, the union must use its time and money to defend him or her, even if that requires going through a costly, time-consuming legal process. Since the union represents everyone, everyone benefits, so everyone should share in the costs of providing these services. Amazingly, nonmembers who are represented by a union can even sue the union is they think it has not represented them well enough!

5. ‘The Duty of Fair Representation’ – UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America)

Throughout the years a legal principle has been developed by the National Labor Relations Board called “the duty of fair representation” (DFR). This legal principle quite simply states that a union must represent all workers equally and without prejudice. A union cannot refuse to represent or improperly represent a worker due to the worker’s age, race, creed, nationality, sex, religion, political beliefs, union status or personality. If a union fails to represent a worker due to prejudice, or hostility, the union can be charged.

The idea of failure to represent includes failing to properly investigate a grievance, process a grievance, or in some cases, even to arbitrate a grievance.

The duty to represent all workers is especially true in the case where a non-member or anti-union worker files a grievance. Personal feelings or the feelings of the membership cannot be allowed to interfere with the processing of that person’s grievance.

6. ‘“Right to Work” Laws: Get the Facts’ – Minnesota AFL-CIO

Q: Without a “right to work” law, can a worker be forced to join a union?
A: No. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that no collective bargaining agreement can require anyone to join a union. Unions and employers may only negotiate contract provisions requiring nonmembers to pay their fair share of the union’s costs in representing them.

…

Q: Does a union security clause require nonmembers to pay full union dues?
A: No. Nonmembers are required to pay only the proportion of union dues related to collective bargaining expenses, so these costs are fairly shared by all represented employees.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2012

Links to Other Versions

• Thomas Jefferson’s Bible at the Smithsonian: Complete photo images of the original, plus transcription in the original King James Version.
• The Jefferson Bible in King James Version Revised
• The Jefferson Bible in NIV: Maybe a smoother translation than the WEB, but due to copyright limits, is presented mostly in frames.
• The Jefferson Bible for the 21st Century: $1 eBook; WEB version with word-smithing by Timothy Pontious; free audio version HERE.

Sources

1. ‘How many words in the King James Bible?’ – from answers.com

2. ‘Thomas Jefferson’s Gravestone’ The Paragraph, 2007-07-03

3. Letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813-10-13

… It was the reformation of this “wretched depravity” of morals which Jesus undertook. In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurgos, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered Apostles, the Apostolic Fathers, and the Christians of the first century. Their Platonizing successors, indeed, in after times, in order to legitimate the corruptions which they had incorporated into the doctrines of Jesus, found it necessary to disavow the primitive Christians, who had taken their principles from the mouth of Jesus himself, of his Apostles, and the Fathers contemporary with them. They excommunicated their followers as heretics, branding them with the opprobrious name of Ebionites or Beggars.

4. ‘Thomas Jefferson’s Bible – History, page 4’ – The Smithsonian National Museum of American History’

At seventy-seven years of age, Thomas Jefferson constructed his book by cutting excerpts from six printed volumes published in English, French, Latin, and Greek of the Gospels of the New Testament. He arranged them to tell a chronological and edited story of Jesus’s life, parables, and moral teaching. Left behind in the source material were those elements that he could not support through reason or that he believed were later embellishments, such as the miracles and the Resurrection.

5. World English Bible (WEB)

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2012

Occupy Chicago guards first aid tent.

[A]t 11 o’clock white shirt Chicago police officers came up and told us that there’s an ordinance that says you have to leave the park at 11 p.m., and if you do not leave or move your tent, you will be arrested. And then they were like “Are you sure you don’t want to move your tent, or do you want us to move your tent?” And we told the officers we believe that Chicago occupiers have a right to protest, a right to assemble and freedom of speech, and we believe that this ordinance is violating that right. And as long as the protesters are here, we will be here. … [F]inally at 1 o’clock they put this big light, like a ball park light, and put it on the tent. And then they moved in on us. And so all the protesters surrounded the tent to prevent them from taking the tent down, and to prevent them from arresting us. So they surrounded the protesters and us, and then maybe like an hour later they moved in. They arrested the back people first and then they went to the right side, the front. And then once they arrested everybody, … they took the tent down and we were just standing there, and there was people watching us get arrested. We were the last two to get arrested.

Martese Chism (AP/M. Spencer Green)

Birdia Keglar

My grandmother, her name was Birdia Keglar. And in the 1960’s … she marched with Dr. King, and made the effort trying to get the black people in Mississippi to register to vote. So in January 1966, when I was five years old, she went to Jackson, Mississippi, to give testimony there – with a group, this was like three cars. She went to Jackson, Mississippi, to Senator Robert Kennedy’s hearing to give a testimony on them being denied their right to vote. And on her way back, she was pulled over and it was maybe six people, but her and another woman, they were murdered … And at the time — I mean cause they let us know that you could die, but to keep the dream alive and keep moving forward. And so at six years old, that’s when I made up my mind that when everybody else was crying at the funeral, as a child I didn’t cry. I said, “I will continue your dream, continue your fight.” And so I went on to college, and did everything. And until now, it looks like the things that the civil rights people fought for, that the American dream is in trouble. And I feel that it’s my time, the nurses’ time to fight to save this dream … And on her way back in that car, you know when they tell the story … My grandmother dealt with a lot of college kids, white college kids, coming down there to help them. She would hide them in her home, and I was too young to remember. So when I see these kids, it brings back memory … when she did it. And that’s why I’m like, they’re standing up for their rights, this is not the first time young kids have stood up for other people’s rights. … [A]nd our nurses union, we believe that’s the right thing to do so we’re standing with them.

Chism said she would go back to Grant Park:

… As long as they’re out there, we’re going to be out there with them.

Malloy asked, “Is there anything you need listeners of this program to do — just support the movement I guess.”

… They need to call their legislature. Because, what our union is trying to do, is to get Congress to tax Wall Street. Because we believe that this economic crisis, it was caused by Wall Street. And so we’re trying to get Congress to pass a financial transaction tax. … [T]he only way we can heal Main Street, we have to deal with Wall Street. And I know it’s not going to be an easy fight, because I can see what the president is going through now. But if people put the pressure, like they did with the civil rights movement. And even with freeing the slaves, it’s the people. So the people need to start moving. Join the nurses, doing the Occupy Wall Street. And we have a movement to move Washington into the people’s direction.

Sources

(1) ‘Interview of Martese Chism by Mike Malloy 2011-10-24’ From The Mike Malloy Show, Monday, October 24th, 2011 – audio and transcript

(2) ‘Police again arrest Occupy Chicago protesters in Grant Park’ By Peter Nickeas and Jim Jaworski, Chicago Tribune, October 23, 2011

(3) ‘Jailed Occupy Chicago Protesters Describe Harsh Treatment By Police, Plan To Picket Rahm Emanuel’s Office’ The Huffington Post/AP

The nursing group said two volunteer nurses were arrested along with the protestors. The women were finally released at about 1:30 a.m. Monday after spending about 23 hours in police custody.

“It was a terrible experience,” said longtime Stroger Hospital nurse Martese Chism, who said she didn’t expect to spend an entire day in jail. Despite spending a night in a cold cell and having her mattress taken from her, Chism said she’d return for protests next weekend, if asked.

Other Occupiers took to Facebook and Twitter to complain about conditions in the jail. Occupiers accused 1st District officers of hanging up on callers checking to see if their friends or family members were still in custody, and claimed that 30 men were held in one room with no toilet paper for 30 hours.

The arrestees also claimed they were unable to make their one phone call for more than 16 hours.

(4) ‘Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy’ by Bruce Watson – CSPAN Book/TV – CLICK HERE to buy the book at Powell’s.

(5) ‘FREEDOM SUMMER AND THE FREEDOM SCHOOLS’ By Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann and Linda Reid Gold, EducationAndDemocracy.org

In the summer of l964, forty-one Freedom Schools opened in the churches, on the back porches, and under the trees of Mississippi. The students were native Mississippians, averaging fifteen years of age, but often including small children who had not yet begun school to the elderly who had spent their lives laboring in the fields. Their teachers were volunteers, for the most part still students themselves. The task of this small group of students and teachers was daunting. They set out to replace the fear of nearly two hundred years of violent control with hope and organized action. Both students and teachers faced the possibility, and in some cases, the reality, of brutal retaliation from local whites. They had little money and few supplies. Yet the Freedom Schools set out to alter forever the state of Mississippi, the stronghold of the Southern way of life.

(6) ‘Creating Jim Crow: In-Depth Essay’ By Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D.

In Mississippi, the method of controlling black votes and regulating their economic and public lives by full-scale and openly brutal violence was known as the First Mississippi Plan of 1875. Whites openly resorted to violence and fraud to control the black vote, shooting down black voters “just like birds.” …

When Mississippi began formally and legally to segregate and disfranchise blacks by changing its state constitution and passing supportive legislation in the 1890s, knowing observers referred to these legal moves as the Second Mississippi Plan. …

(7) ‘Dying To Vote In Mississippi, Part II’ By Susan Klopfer

In the early evening hours of January 12, 1966, as they returned home from a special meeting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Jackson, the two civil rights activists from Tallahatchie County were killed and four other passengers injured, two seriously, after their car left the road near the small town of Sidon, south of Greenwood in Leflore County.

Birdia Keglar, 56, was found decapitated and both of Adeline Hamlet’s arms had been “cleanly” severed from her body, confirm two Keglar family members, a close friend, and a Tallahatchie County minister. …

Months earlier, both women were hanged in effigy by local Klansmen and warned not to participate in further voting rights activities. Each had testified before a congressional hearing in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Keglar and the others were coming back home this time from a subcommittee meeting on discrimination and poverty in the Delta headed by Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Several times before, Klansmen had tried to force [the driver] Grafton Gray off the road; Klansmen running blacks off the road was not an unusual event to take place in the Delta. Stories abound of such incidents, Chism and others confirmed.

Gray’s surviving second wife said that she was married after the accident “… and he would not tell me anything about it, nothing at all. I could tell that he was still afraid to talk. He had told me about other times Klansmen tried to run him off the road, but he would say nothing about this accident. It affected him greatly.”

…

(8) ‘FBI says end near in civil rights-era prosecutions’ by Allen G. Breed, Associated Press, Nov 05, 2011

Hamlett, 78, was a retired schoolteacher and one of the first blacks to register to vote in Tallahatchie County, Miss. Keglar, 57, was an organizer for the NAACP who had sued the local sheriff after she was prevented from paying her poll tax. Each had testified before a congressional commission in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The women died on Jan. 11, 1966, as they were returning home from a secret meeting in Jackson with then-U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. For years, relatives and certain researchers have insisted that the car was run off the road by the Klan.

…

Zachery was told that the driver of the car, Grafton Gray, supposedly played dead and could hear the women being tortured. “When my family members would try to talk to him, he would not,” she recently told the AP.

The FBI tracked down the wreck’s lone survivor, backseat passenger Richard Simpson, a white activist from Massachusetts, who confirmed the basic details contained in a Mississippi Highway Patrol report, the bureau’s letter said. The accident report said a car on the wrong side of the road struck the activists’ car head-on.

“The impact caused the hood of (the) car to break loose and move through the windshield, fatally injuring” Hamlett and Keglar, the FBI determined.

On a gloriously sunny spring day this year, two FBI agents appeared at 79-year-old Lila Hamlett’s door in Kansas City, Mo., to deliver their letter.

Dated May 27, it said there was “insufficient evidence to indicate that a racially motivated homicide occurred.”

(9) ‘After Over Four Decades, Justice Still Eludes Family of 3 Civil Rights Workers Slain in Mississippi Burning Killings’ – Democracy Now!, 2010-08-13

As the Justice Department announces it has closed nearly half of its investigations into unresolved killings from the civil rights era, we look back at the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the subject of the new documentary Neshoba: The Price of Freedom. Although dozens of white men are believed to have been involved in the murders and cover-up, only one man, a Baptist preacher named Edgar Ray Killen, is behind bars today. Four suspects are still alive in the case. We play excerpts of Neshoba and speak with its co-director, Micki Dickoff. We’re also joined by the brothers of two of the victims, Ben Chaney and David Goodman. And we speak with award-winning Mississippi-based journalist Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger, who’s spent the past twenty years investigating unresolved civil rights murder cases, as well as Bruce Watson, author of the new book Freedom Summer: The Savage Season that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2011-02-08 (monasosh)

As the situation continues to unfold, our first concern is preventing injury or loss of life. So I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters.

The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.

…

But we’ve always been clear that there must be reform: political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people. In the absence of these reforms, grievances have built up over time. …

Violence will not address the grievances of the Egyptian people. And suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. What’s needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people: a meaningful dialogue between the government and its citizens, and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.

Occupy Wall Street, 2011-11-15 (Henny Ray Abrams)

[T]he President’s position is that obviously every municipality has to make its own decisions about how to handle these issues, and we would hope and want, as these decisions are made, that it balances between a long tradition of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in this country and obviously of demonstrating and protesting, and also the very important need to maintain law and order and health and safety standards, which was obviously a concern in this case.

So for Egypt, a call for the government to address the people’s grievances; for America, no such call. For Egypt, a clear statement for the human rights of assembly and free speech; for America, a hope to “balance” those rights. For Egypt, a call for police to keep from violence; for America, as the log of police violence lengthens, silence.^{6 7}

Sources

1) Occupy Wall Street – About

Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally. #ows is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.

2) ‘Bloody and bruised: the journalist caught in Egypt unrest’ by Jack Shenker, The Guardian, Wednesday 26 January 2011

“The police attacked us to get us out of the square; they didn’t care who you were, they just attacked everybody,” a lawyer standing next to me, Ahmed Mamdouh, said breathlessly. “They … hit our heads and hurt some people. There are some people bleeding, we don’t know where they’re taking us. I want to send a message to my wife; I’m not afraid but she will be so scared, this is my first protest and she told me not to come here today.”

3) Remarks by the President on the Situation in Egypt 2011-01-28

4) ‘Watch: Police make violent arrests during ‘Occupy Wall St.’ eviction’ By Andrew Jones, The Raw Story, Tuesday, November 15, 2011

New York City police once again acted aggressively towards Occupy Wall Street protesters, using pepper spray and tear gas as they made rough arrests early Tuesday morning at Zuccotti Park.

5) Press Gaggle by Press Secretary Jay Carney and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, 2011-11-15

6) ‘In day of protests, “Occupy Wall Street” faces police violence’ By Alain Sherter, CBS News, 2011-11-17

Such unnecessary force has become a feature of law enforcement operations against the Occupy movement in recent weeks. Scott Olsen, a former U.S. Marine and Iraq war veteran, suffered a fractured skull and brain injuries in October after being hit by a tear gas canister or rubber bullet reportedly fired by Oakland police. At the University of California-Berkeley, campus police also are under investigation for allegedly roughing up students and faculty (as seen in this video) at an Occupy rally earlier this month. And in Seattle this week, an 84-year-old community activist, a priest and a pregnant teenager were pepper-sprayed.

Such tactics have drawn fire not only from Occupy Wall Street and civil libertarians, but also from law enforcement experts. Here is what Norm Stamper, who was the police chief in Seattle during the chaotic anti-World Trade Organization protests in 1999, recently had to say about police violence in the latest uprising:

More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland — where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile — brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, U.S. police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: The NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

One Occupy-affiliated protester in New York, who said he was a former NYPD officer, echoed this theme of an increasingly aggressive, militarized police prone to responding to mostly peaceful protests with inappropriate force. The police are “jacked up” to crack down, he told me.

7) ‘Caught on Camera: 10 Shockingly Violent Police Assaults on Occupy Protesters’ By Joshua Holland, Alternet, November 18, 2011

Occupations across the country have born the brunt of some violent police tactics, and in a world where everyone has a camera-phone, a lot of their brutish behavior has been caught in photographs and on video.

Police work is difficult and dangerous, and the majority of officers on the street behave like pros. When it comes to controlling crowds of angry protesters, they’re often put into tense situations and ordered to do things they may not want to do by commanders who are far removed from the scene. I’ve witnessed a lot of restraint from cops, which of course doesn’t make the news.

But being human, cops are also prone to fear and rage like everyone else. A minority of cops, like a minority of protesters, lose their cool in tense situations. The difference is that they aren’t amateurs – they’re well trained and have guidelines that they’re required to follow. When a cop loses his or her cool, it can be terrifying. And when a protester exercising his or her right to assemble and speak is a victim of excessive force, it also violates the United States Constitution.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Occupy Cleveland – circa 2011-10-21

There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the ‘non-rich’, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

The Managerial Aristocracy, like in the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the thriving nineties, needs to commandeer a vast chunk of that rising profit share, either through capital income, or simply paying itself a lot.

Could the plutonomies die because the [American] dream is dead, because enough of society does not believe they can participate? The answer is of course yes. … There are signs around the world that society is unhappy with plutonomy … But as yet, there seems little political fight being born out on this battleground.

Now the political fight has been born, and the next Citigroup report to investors may begin with “Welcome to the Plutonomy Backlash.”

Sources

(1) Citigroup Plutonomy Report 1 2005-10 (pdf)

The 2007 Michael Moore movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” publicized the Citigroup plutonomy reports.

(2) Citigroup Plutonomy Report 2 2006-03 (pdf)— follow-up report upon the release of the 2004 Federal Reserve Consumer Finance Survey.

‘It’s the Inequality, Stupid’ By Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, Mother Jones, 2011-03
The following charts show the top 1% in income stretching its shares between 2001 and 2007, and the top 1% in net worth having more than the bottom 90% in 2007.

(3) ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, 2008-12-26

‘Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis’ by Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica, Aug. 26, 2010

Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

(4) ‘Sanders on The Fed Audit: This is socialism for the rich’ – vtdigger.com, 2011-07-21

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study.

“As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders (I-Vt.). “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

(5) ‘Obama’s Risky Business’ by Jeff Madick, New York Review of Books, 2010-07-15

The financial reregulation package just passed by Congress is far from a comprehensive reform of American finance. Despite the enormous threat to the world’s financial markets created by the failure of Lehman Brothers and the stunning excesses of insurance giant AIG and banking conglomerate Citigroup, the reforms are in truth modest. Neither the Obama administration nor Congress opted to cut banks down to size, and the bill is only placing mild limits on risky banking activities. The giant financial institutions, meanwhile, are as big—even bigger—than ever and bankers’ compensation is once again at stunning levels.

But the problem with the legislation is not merely its small scale. It is the way it is supposed to be implemented: to avoid controversy and get the bill passed, congressional reformers foisted the responsibility for setting most of the specific, sticky rules on federal regulators at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and elsewhere, who are to make them over the next year or two. These are, for the most part, the same regulators who failed to stop the speculative excesses and ensuing credit crisis of 2008. While they now have a few more tools at their disposal, their already substantial tool box was barely touched in the years leading up to the housing and credit crash and severe recession. Will it be different next time?

(6) ‘Can the Middle Class Be Saved?’ by Don Peck, The Atlantic, September 2011

Income inequality usually shrinks during a recession, but in the Great Recession, it didn’t. From 2007 to 2009, the most-recent years for which data are available, it widened a little. The top 1 percent of earners did see their incomes drop more than those of other Americans in 2008. But that fall was due almost entirely to the stock-market crash, and with it a 50 percent reduction in realized capital gains. Excluding capital gains, top earners saw their share of national income rise even in 2008. And in any case, the stock market has since rallied. Corporate profits have marched smartly upward, quarter after quarter, since the beginning of 2009.

Even in the financial sector, high earners have come back strong. In 2009, the country’s top 25 hedge-fund managers earned $25 billion among them—more than they had made in 2007, before the crash. And while the crisis may have begun with mass layoffs on Wall Street, the financial industry has remained well shielded compared with other sectors; from the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2010, finance shed 8 percent of its jobs, compared with 27 percent in construction and 17 percent in manufacturing. Throughout the recession, the unemployment rate in finance and insurance has been substantially below that of the nation overall.

(7) ‘Great recession is over, officially’ – The Virginian-Pilot, 2010-09-22

Americans have plenty of reasons not to trust the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which said Monday that the Great Recession was over.

In August, 27 states reported higher unemployment rates than the previous month – 7 million jobs lost during the recession. The number of people living in poverty – including one in five children – was higher last year than in the previous 50 years. One in 10 households has missed at least one mortgage payment, and one in five home-owners owes more on their home than it’s worth.

…

The declaration that a recession has begun or ended is technical and based on when the economy began a steady decline and when it reached its lowest point.

Officially, the recession began in December 2007 and reached its nadir in June 2009, the committee said.

The factors determining the start and end are gross domestic product, which has been growing steadily for a year; income, which has been increasing since June 2009; industrial production, now 6.2 percent higher than a year earlier; retail sales, up nearly 5 percent over a year ago; and employment.

Unemployment, now at 9.6 percent, was at its highest rate during this downturn in October 2009, when it hit 10.1 percent.

(8) ‘Unemployment rate dips amid sluggish jobs growth’ by Dan Burrows, CBS News, 2011-11-04

The economy added 80,000 jobs in October, the slowest pace of hiring in four months, while the unemployment rate ticked down to 9 percent from 9.1 percent.

…

The broadest measure of unemployment, which includes the unemployed, part-time workers in search of full-time work and so-called discouraged workers who have given up actively looking for jobs, fell to 16.2 percent from 16.5 percent in September, the Labor Department said.

(9) ‘Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’’ By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times, September 13, 2011

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

…

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

(10) ‘Student Debt and the Class of 2010’ – Project on Student Debt, November 2011 (pdf)

We estimate that two-thirds of college seniors who graduated in 2010 had student loan debt, with an average of $25,250 for those with debt, up five percent from the previous year.

(11) ‘U.S. Credit Conditions – Mortgage Delinquency Rate 90+ Days’ – Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2010-Q3

The Federal Reserve considers the record rate of mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures and their impacts on communities an urgent problem. …

Foreclosure Activity on Slow Burn – RealtyTrac, October 11, 2011

“U.S. foreclosure activity has been mired down since October of last year, when the robo-signing controversy sparked a flurry of investigations into lender foreclosure procedures and paperwork,” said James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “While foreclosure activity in September and the third quarter continued to register well below levels from a year ago, there is evidence that this temporary downward trend is about to change direction, with foreclosure activity slowly beginning to ramp back up.

“Third quarter foreclosure activity increased marginally from the previous quarter, breaking a trend of three consecutive quarterly decreases that started in the fourth quarter of 2010,” Saccacio continued. “This marginal increase in overall foreclosure activity was fueled by a 14 percent jump in new default notices, indicating that lenders are cautiously throwing more wood into the foreclosure fireplace after spending months trying to clear the chimney of sloppily filed foreclosures.”

(12) Occupy Together – Actions and Directory From Wall Street, the Occupy Movement has spread to hundreds of cities across the U.S., and more across the world.

(13) New York City General Assembly #occupywallstreet – FAQ

What is Occupy Wall Street?

Occupy Wall Street is an otherwise unaffiliated group of concerned citizens like you and me, come together
around one organizing principle: We will not remain passive as formerly democratic institutions become the
means of enforcing the will of only 1-2% of the population who control the magnitude of American wealth.

Occupy Wall Street is an exercise in “direct democracy”. We feel we can no longer make our voices heard
as we watch our votes for change usher in the same old power structure time and time again. Since we can
no longer trust our elected representatives to represent us rather than their large donors, we are creating a
microcosm of what democracy really looks like. We do this to inspire one another to speak up. It is a reminder
to our representatives and the moneyed interests that direct them: we the people still know our power.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Moynihan Station (Moynihan Station Dev. Corp.)

Ivanpah Mojave Desert Solar Plant Unit 1 tower
(BrightSource Energy, Inc.)

WPA Plaque on bridge in Springfield, Ohio
(Ohio Federal Writers’ Project)

Cleveland Innerbelt Bridge – to be built with Recovery Act funding
(Old bridge to be replaced is ghosted-out in foreground.) (ODOT)

Sources

5. The stimulus will have no lasting legacy.

False. It’s been said that while the New Deal left behind a landscape of bridges and dams, the stimulus did little more than fill potholes and create a lot of temporary jobs. In truth, the Recovery Act provided critical funding for a number of projects that people will be able to point to generations from now.

Here are 10 significant projects, most under construction, funded by the Recovery Act:

(2) ‘Works Progress Administration (WPA)’ – u-s-history.com

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was instituted by presidential executive order under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of April 1935, to generate public jobs for the unemployed. …

…

The WPA was charged with selecting projects that would make a real and lasting contribution — but would not vie with private firms. As it turned out, the “pump-priming” effect of federal projects actually stimulated private business during the Depression years. The WPA focused on tangible improvements: During its tenure, workers constructed 651,087 miles of roads, streets and highways; and built, repaired or refurbished 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 parks, and 853 landing fields. In addition, workers cleaned slums, revived forests, and extended electrical power to rural locations.

Work was provided for nearly a million students through the WPA National Youth Administration (NYA). The Federal One projects employed 40,000 artists and other cultural workers to produce music and theater, sculptures, murals and paintings, state and regional travel guides, and surveys of national archives. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a program designed to address the problem of jobless young men aged between 18 and 25 years old. CCC camps were set up all around the country.

…

With wartime prosperity rising in the 1940s, the WPA became more difficult to justify, and on June 30, 1943 the agency was terminated by presidential proclamation. All told, the WPA had employed more than 8,500,000 individuals on 1,410,000 projects with an average salary of $41.57 a month, and had spent about $11 billion.

(3) ‘American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work’ by Nick Taylor, Bantam Books, 2009

“The sole function of government,” Hoover had said in the fall of 1931, two years after the crash, “is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise.” His predecessor, Coolidge, had put it more succinctly (a practice for which he was famous; his nickname was “Silent Cal”): “The chief business of the American people is business.”
But the New Era had failed, and Hoover’s efforts to revive it had been fruitless. Babe Ruth had put the president’s performance into harsh perspective. Early in 1930, the New York Yankees slugger was holding out for a contract that would pay him $80,000 a year. When sportswriters reminded him that the president made $75,000, Ruth responded, “What’s Hoover got to do with it? Besides, I had a better year than he did.”

And conditions were not improving. Businesses continued to fail at an unprecedented rate, more than 50,000 since the crash, and the pace of these failures was accelerating. By 1932, more than 3,600 banks had closed, robbing millions of depositors of their life’s savings. Every time a bank or business shut its doors, men and women lost their jobs and their buying power, which meant more business failures. As a result, industry was operating at a fraction of capacity, with production lines slowed or shut down entirely.

…

If you’ve traveled the nation’s highways, flown into New York’s LaGuardia Airport, strolled San Antonio’s River Walk, or seen the Pacific Ocean from the Beach Chalet in San Francisco, you have experienced some part of the legacy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—one of the enduring cornerstones of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a staggering 13 million American workers were jobless and many millions more of their family members were equally in need. Desperation ruled the land.
What people wanted were jobs, not handouts: the pride of earning a paycheck; and in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created. This was the Works Progress Administration, and it would forever change the physical landscape and the social policies of the United States.
The WPA lasted for eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 81/2 million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Under its colorful head, Harry Hopkins, the agency’s remarkable accomplishment was to combine the urgency of putting people back to work with its vision of physically rebuilding America. Its workers laid roads, erected dams, bridges, tunnels, and airports. They stocked rivers, made toys, sewed clothes, served millions of hot school lunches. When disasters struck, they were there by the thousands to rescue the stranded. And all across the country the WPA’s arts programs performed concerts, staged plays, painted murals, delighted children with circuses, created invaluable guidebooks. Eventoday, more than sixty years after the WPA ceased to exist, there is almost no area in America that does not bear some visible mark of its presence.

(4) ‘THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 – SEVENTH QUARTERLY REPORT’ – JULY 1, 2011, COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS

CEA estimates that as of the first quarter of 2011, the ARRA has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by between 2.4 and 3.6 million.

(5) Recovery Explorer – recovery.gov
Projects by Category and Portion Completed through 2011-09-07:

Infrastructure: 21,131
completed – 12,297
> 50% – 4080
< 50% – 3033
not started – 1721

Transportation: 15,400
completed – 5581
> 50% – 7773
< 50% – 1159
not started – 887

Energy/Environment – 8504
completed – 2960
> 50% – 2560
< 50% – 2400
not started – 584

Total:45,035
completed – 20,838

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

Teachers called to stand and be fired.
Providence Journal / Connie Grosh

Sources

(2) Central Falls Teachers Complaint – UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT – DISTRICT OF RHODE ISLAND

35. By letter dated February 9, 2010, Gallo informed the Union that unless it agreed to her demands, as aforesaid, she would either terminate all of the teachers or inform Commissioner Gist that “we have collectively failed to select an intervention model for the high school.”

36. By letter dated February 11, 2010, Jane Sessums informed Gallo that she could not and would not agree to change the collective bargaining agreement without reviewing certain relevant information and meeting with the Dr. Gallo regarding “changes in time, compensation, or other issues related to the transformation model.”

37. After receiving Sessums’ letter, on or about February 11, 2010, Gallo announced that she would fire every teacher at CFHS.

(3) ‘Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged’ By Jennifer D. Jordan, The Providence Journal, 2010-02-24

Meanwhile, state and local education officials received some high-powered support of their own, when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in, saying he “applauded” them for “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.”

(4) ‘Central Falls at center of national school reform debate’ By JOHN E. MULLIGAN, The Providence Journal, 2010-03-02

“But if a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” the president continued.

“And that’s what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests — 7 percent. When a school board wasn’t able to deliver change by other means, they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff,” Mr. Obama said.

…

Union officials quickly criticized what they called Mr. Obama’s comments “condoning the mass firing.” A joint statement, issued from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington; Marcia Reback, president of the state affiliate, and Central Falls Teachers Union President Jane Sessums, said Mr. Obama’s remarks “completely ignore” key particulars of the dispute.

(5) ‘In Florida, teacher pay now tied to performance’ By Leslie Postal, Orlando Sentinel, March 26, 2011

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has signed a far-reaching teacher merit-pay bill that will overhaul how teachers across the state will be evaluated and paid.

The law creates an evaluation system that relies heavily on student test score data to judge teacher quality. For new teachers, it also creates a performance-based pay system and ends tenure-like job protections.

Florida’s merit-pay push is part of a national effort to improve education by tying teachers’ pay to their overall effectiveness.

(6) ‘Study blasts popular teacher evaluation method’ By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post, 2010-08-29

“Value-added modeling” is indeed all the rage in teacher evaluation: The Obama administration supports it, and the Los Angeles Times used it to grade more than 6,000 California teachers in a controversial project. States are changing laws in order to make standardized tests an important part of teacher evaluation.

Unfortunately, this rush is being done without evidence that it works well. The study, by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit think tank based in Washington, concludes that heavy reliance on VAM methods should not dominate high-stakes decisions about teacher evaluation and pay.

(7) ‘Firing Line: The Grand Coalition Against Teachers’ by Joanne Barkan, Dissent Magazine, June 29, 2011

How to Find and Fire Bad Teachers the Reform Way

The ed reformers have a formula for producing an outstanding teaching force: identify and dismiss all bad teachers, replace them with excellent ones, keep the latter on staff by paying them more, and evaluate everyone regularly to make sure no teacher is slipping. Private schools have the freedom to do this. But public schools, according to the credo, are hamstrung by protections for teachers—due process (imprecisely called tenure), seniority, and set salary scales—which are written into state laws and union contracts.* Because of due process, the reformers claim, it’s too difficult to get rid of bad teachers; because of seniority, they aren’t necessarily the first laid off; because of salary scales, they get paid as much as better teachers. The reformers want the quality of teaching alone to determine if a public school teacher stays employed or gets a raise.

But how do you measure quality accurately? The reformers promote relying heavily on students’ standardized test scores: students who do well on these tests have clearly learned something, the argument goes. Therefore if you track the test scores of each teacher’s students every year, you can measure how much students have learned and use that number to make personnel decisions. The traditional protections can go, the unions will be weaker (a boon to reformers who consider them roadblocks to change), and, voilà, public schools will improve.

Due process, seniority, and salary scales predate unionization; they grew out of state and local civil service reforms in the early twentieth century when political machines thrived in large part by controlling jobs. Civil service laws protected teachers against the graft, cronyism, and favoritism that plagued public school systems under the thumb of political bosses and run by patronage. The laws benefited children by aiming for a meritocracy: teaching jobs would go to those who had training and skills. Since the 1960s when public employees in many states won the right to bargain collectively, teachers’ contracts have included the same protections.

The traditional protections are just that—protections against corruption and favoritism; they have nothing to do with evaluating teachers. Even if an ideal evaluation system existed, teachers would still need recourse when administrators and politicians ignored regulations. Yet the reformers have misleadingly conflated the two issues: we can’t get proper evaluations, they claim, without eliminating protections. Since state laws can be written to take precedence over teachers’ contracts, the most effective way to eliminate protections is to get state laws changed. This is what the reform campaign is doing around the country.

A short digression on due process: it doesn’t mean that public school teachers cannot be fired. The problem is extremely drawn-out and costly procedures for hearings and rulings. Unions get the blame for this, but departments of education (notorious for bureaucratic snafus and foot-dragging) and the lawyers on both sides (also foot-draggers) bear equal responsibility. The solution is straightforward: strict time limits for the process. But, perversely, with the escalation of the reform campaign, “reform superintendents” have a greater interest in showing that due process doesn’t work than in repairing it.

…

The Political Triumph of VAM

The Bush Administration launched the era of federally mandated, high-stakes testing in public schools with its “No Child Left Behind” program in 2001. Schools not making “adequate yearly progress” in raising math and reading scores risked being re-staffed, replaced with charters, or shut down. This quickly produced predictable results: teaching to the test, narrowed curriculum, and incidents of cheating. But the next step—the federal drive to use student test scores to grade teachers—came exclusively from the Obama administration.

Obama chose ed reformer Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, and Duncan, in turn, hired John Schnur, another reformer, as an advisor. Schnur came up with the idea of using the reform agenda as the core of a contest for federal grants. Called “Race to the Top” (RTTT), the contest offered states the chance to win funds if they pledged to mandate specific reforms, including test-based teacher evaluations in all subjects (for an account of RTTT’s genesis, see the New York Times Magazine, May 17, 2010). Desperate for funds, states accepted this micromanagement. Duncan announced the winners in 2010, and since then, those states have been passing laws to fulfill their pledges. Other states are following suit in large part because the reform movement has so effectively popularized the notion of holding every teacher accountable with “objective, performance-based” measures.

The following states have passed laws or have legislation in the works: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. Others are coming on board every month. Many of the new laws require test scores to count for as much as 50 percent of an evaluation (given the unreliable calculations, even 10 percent could distort an assessment); the rest is made up by a combination of “traditional measures” such as principals’ observations, reviews of lesson plans, and portfolios of student work. All the new laws weaken protections for teachers.

Florida’s new law, for example, requires the commissioner of education to come up with a value-added model that will determine 50 percent of every teacher’s and principal’s evaluation; the evaluations will decide salaries and dismissals. On April 4, 2011, Frederick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a tireless ed-reform advocate, wrote this about Florida’s law in his Education Week blog:

I’ll bet right now that SB 736 is going to be a train wreck. Mandatory terminations will force some good teachers out of good schools because of predictable statistical fluctuations, and parents will be livid. Questions about cheating will rear their ugly head. A thrown-together growth model and rapidly generated tests, pursued with scarce resources and under a new Commissioner, are going to be predictably half-baked and prone to problems.

…

Evaluating Teachers: It’s Not Rocket Science and Shouldn’t Be

While ed reformers push a top-down technocratic procedure, the programs for assessing teacher performance that actually work take a radically different approach. They’re based on two assumptions: administrators and teachers should design and implement a program together, and it should incorporate “professional development” (showing teachers how to improve). One such program—“Peer Assistance and Review” (PAR)—is being used successfully in seven school districts around the country: in Toledo since 1981, Cincinnati since 1985, Rochester since 1987, Minneapolis since 1997, San Juan since 2000, Montgomery County since 2001, and Syracuse since 2005.

A PAR program has two main components: a district PAR Panel made up of seven to twelve members, half of them teachers and half administrators, and a corps of Consulting Teachers (CTs). Typically, teachers who want to become CTs apply to the panel. Those who are chosen take a leave of absence from their classrooms for three to five years and assume responsibility for a caseload of ten to twenty teachers who are either new or low-performing. The CTs observe “their” teachers at work regularly during the school year, provide intensive mentoring, keep detailed records of progress and problems, and report to the panel on each teacher’s development. They also recommend retaining, dismissing, or giving the teachers more assistance. The panel reviews reports and records, interviews each teacher, and makes a decision. The CTs receive extra pay during their term and then return to teaching (see “A User’s Guide to Peer Assistance and Review”).

(8) Baltimore teacher: No Child Left Behind must be left behind

Established in 1996, the Baltimore Curriculum Project currently oversees four charter schools.

According to the government, all four of those schools failed in their mission last year.

According to [the president, Muriel] Berkeley, the schools were successful.

“Teachers were happy with the improvements they saw,” Berkeley said. “Principals, parents and family were all excited about the progress the students were making. But it didn’t necessarily translate into test scores.”

No Child Left Behind relies solely on state tests to determine whether schools are a success (and thus eligible for federal funds). Between grades 3 and 8, students are given an annual multiple choice state test, and the percentage of students who pass it are used as a yardstick of the school’s success. The goal of NCLB is to achieve 100 percent proficiency — every single child in the U.S. passing their state math and reading tests — by 2014. Every year, the yardstick for achievement gets longer, and more schools are considered “failing,” and are in danger of mass layoffs, loss of funding or even closure of the school altogether.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan predicted that this year, 82 percent of the country’s 100,000 public schools would be labeled as failing.

“The idea that you can measure the quality of a school based on answers to an arbitrary state test is misguided,” Berkeley said. …

…

“The minute you define the purpose of public education as a result on a test, you’ve ruined it,” she said.

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011

But I didn’t, and I wonder why …

Well, I did eventually cut my grass, but not till latter May. And it’s no wonder why — I’m slow to mow to start with, and the very rainy spring in the land south of Lake Erie this year often left the yard too soggy to mow.¹ But the lack of mowing had a benefit — a nice showing of wildflowers, with honeybees working them. And it saved some time and gasoline. So, I imagine I’ll let that yard grow again next year — especially since I found some advice on meadow care that suits me: “Mow once a year in early spring before new growth begins.”² That’s it. So that’s the plan.

Here are some pictures of the yard in bloom, 14 May 2011:

Golden Ragwort

Wild Blue Phlox

Ajuga, in Two Shades

Honeybee

What is the white flower among the grass?

Sources

(1) ‘Temperature and Precipitation Maps March – May 2011’ – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – National Climatic Data Center

(2) ‘Lawn Alternatives’ – Organic Gardening
Page 2: U.S. region-by-region advice

By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright 2011