Saturday, March 23, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
38 Years Prison and 148 Lashes for Iranian Human Rights Defender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=4wOaaJJVdMw
John Cleese and Eric Idle on Rupert Murdoch
John Cleese: "I would love to strangle Rupert Murdoch with my bare hands." (at 2:25)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsEeBNonbZQ
Wall Street Applauds as Disney Nears Finish Line on Fox Acquisition
Wall Street is rooting for Disney as the media giant reaches
the finish line this week in its 15-month quest to acquire most of Rupert
Murdoch’s film and TV empire. Fox shareholders, on the other hand, are being a
little more cautious.
Disney is
poised to close the $71.3 billion deal that took many twists and turns last
year shortly after 9 p.m. PT on Tuesday. (See timeline below). The birth
of the Murdochs’ successor Fox Corporation — home of Fox Broadcasting, Fox News
and Fox Sports — will also be official on Tuesday.
The completion of the historic
transaction has top Wall Street analysts weighing in with a vote of confidence
in Disney’s big gambit and the leadership of chairman-CEO Bob Iger. Disney
shares have mostly been flat or down since the acquisition was unveiled Dec.
14, 2017, but its been trending up since mid-February in anticipation of the
deal closing. The stock was up 48 cents at the close of trading Friday to
$114.96. It’s up 7% for the year to date.
On Friday, Disney revealed the
selections made by 21st
Century Fox shareholders on whether to receive $38 in stock or cash in
exchange for their Fox shares in the transaction. Slightly more than half —
51.57% — chose cash, while 36.65% chose Disney stock. The remaining 11.79% of
holdings of roughly 1.8 billion shares outstanding did not make a selection by
Thursday’s 5 p.m. ET deadline. Disney had projected that the compensation
breakdown in cash and stock would be about 50-50.
JPMorgan analyst Alexia
Quadrani offered a bullish take on Disney’s chances despite the enormous
challenges ahead with a report this month projecting that its soon-to-launch
Disney+ platform could over time draw as many as 160 million subscribers
worldwide, including 45 million in the U.S.
“While there is little
question there are more DTC services today than ultimately should survive, we
have no doubt that Disney+ remains on the short list of products that should
prevail longer-term,” Quadrani wrote. “Our confidence in the resilient success
of Disney+ comes from the company’s unmatched brand recognition, extensive
premium content and unparalleled ecosystem to market the service.”
Iger is heading into what will
likely be the biggest challenge of his Disney tenure. He’s re-engineering the
studio’s film and TV operations toward direct-to-consumer platforms, and at the
same time the company will be juggling a massive integration process of far-flung
Fox assets including the 20th Century Fox studio, FX Networks, National
Geographic Partners and a vast collection of international channels. The industry
is bracing for the impact of thousands of layoffs, estimated as high as 4,000,
as the companies are consolidated.
Industry analysts recognize
the climb ahead for Disney as it will have to soldier through a period of big
losses of foregone licensing revenue for its movies and TV shows. The hit will
be magnified by the need to invest even more in content overall to support the
direct-to-consumer streaming platforms, which include Hulu, soon to be
majority-owned by Disney, and ESPN+. Disney is banking on Fox’s content engines
and deep vault of titles and IP — not to mention the management stars that come
with the deal — to add heft to the content pipeline that will feed the new
streaming services.
Michael Nathanson, longtime
Disney watcher and analyst for MoffettNathanson, underscored the uniqueness of
Disney’s opportunity to recalibrate its operations for a new era of media.
Disney is fortified by the IP-rich acquisition strategy on Iger’s watch (the
murderer’s row of Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm) and also the weight of its own
considerable brand.
“Disney is a brand, not a name
of a corporate holding company, and has clear, well defined and widely embraced
brand strengths plus an undeniable track record of producing excellent
content,” Nathanson wrote in a recent report. “The company has historically
taken big swings… and won over the past few decades. From building theme parks
around the world to acquiring Pixar et al., Disney has continually invested for
long-term growth and sustainability. While Disney+ doesn’t have a paying
subscriber yet, the company will own an unrivaled film and TV library, multiple
mass marketing vehicles to activate consumer interest and a technology platform
in BAMTech that seems to be ready to go.”
As of today, Iger and Co. are in
the final two-day sprint to complete the Fox transaction. Here’s a timeline of
key events in the deal that promises to change the face of Hollywood.
Nov. 6, 2017: CNBC’s
David Faber delivers
the bombshell exclusive that Bob Iger and Rupert Murdoch had been
discussing a possible transaction on and off for several months.
After Faber’s report, Comcast
jumps into the fray in an effort to counter Disney’s bid with an all-cash
offer. Fox juggles talks with Disney and Comcast for a few weeks.
Dec. 11: Disney closes in as
it becomes clear Fox’s board prefers to sell to Iger. Comcast pulls itself out
of the running with a statement asserting it never got the “level of
engagement” necessary to reach a deal.
Dec. 14: Disney and 21st
Century Fox unveil the historic $52.8 billion transaction. Lachlan
Murdoch emerges as the heir apparent for the post-sale Fox Corporation.
After the new year, rumors
increased that Comcast was back to considering a new bid for 21st Century Fox.
The decision would hinge on a federal judge’s ruling in the antitrust trial
against the AT&T-Time Warner merger. At the same time, Comcast also began
looking at mounting a counteroffer against 21st Century Fox for the satcaster
Sky. Fox had been trying to buy the 61% of Sky that it did not own.
Feb. 27, 2018: Comcast unveils
a detailed bid for Sky, mounts a push with analysts.
As the corporate battle
unfolds, industry insiders in Hollywood become obsessed with sorting out the
post-merger org chart. Speculation at Fox about who will go to Disney and who
will not is rampant.
April 25: Comcast formally
unveils $31 billion bid for Sky. Chatter on the Street increases about
Comcast’s preliminary efforts to raise financing for another all-cash bid for
Fox.
May 8: 21st Century Fox CEO James
Murdoch won’t move to Disney if the deal Fox deal closes, the Wall Street
Journal reports.
May 23: Comcast confirms plan
to field counteroffer for 21st Century Fox. Fox’s board re-enters talks with
Comcast and with Disney.
June 12: U.S. District Court Judge
Richard Leon rules overwhelmingly in AT&T’s favor, clearing the path for
its takeover of Time Warner.
June 13: Comcast unveils $65
billion all-cash bid for Fox.
June 20: Disney unveils
revised merger agreement raising price to $71.3 billion. Comcast shifts its
focus to buying Sky.
June 27: The Justice
Department approves the Disney-Fox deal
under the condition that Disney sell Fox’s 22 regional sports networks within
90 days of the deal closing.
July 19: Comcast formally bows
out of the hunt for Fox.
July 27: Disney and 21st
Century Fox shareholders resoundingly approve the deal in separate votes.
Sept. 22: Comcast lands
Sky for $40 billion after outbidding Fox in a blind auction process. Disney’s
Ben Sherwood confirms plan to exit post-merger.
Oct. 8: Fox’s Peter Rice and
Dana Walden are set for top leadership roles at Disney’s TV division, Variety reports.
FX Networks’ John Landgraf and Nat Geo’s Gary Knell will also make the
transition to Disney.
Oct. 18: Fox’s Emma Watts, Fox
Searchlight’s Stephen Gilula and Nancy Utley and Fox 2000’s Elizabeth Gabler
are confirmed to make the transition to Disney.
Nov. 6: The European Union
approves the Disney-Fox transaction
on the condition Disney sell its 50% interest in select European channels owned
through the A+E Networks joint venture with Hearst.
Feb. 27: Brazil approves the
transaction on the condition that Disney sell off its interest in Fox
Sports-branded channels in the market.
March 11: The last regulatory
approval comes through from Mexico, clearing the way for Disney to trigger the
shareholder election period.
March 12: Disney sets March 20
at 12:02 a.m. ET as the closing date.
March 15: Disney announces
that nearly 52% of Fox shareholders elected to take $38 a share in cash while
nearly 37% elected to receive Disney shares.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Chelsea Manning and the New Inquisition
The U.S. government,
determined to extradite and try Julian
Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange
and WikiLeaks did
in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what
The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing the same material.
There is no
federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government
secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of
Manning, who on March 8 was sent
back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about
this issue.
If Manning, a former Army
private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain
and pass on the leaked material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents.
The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama
administration, which under the Espionage Act charged
eight people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz,
Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and
Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection
between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been
severed.
Manning, who worked as an Army
intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009, provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000
documents copied from military and government archives, including the “Collateral Murder” video
footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians that
included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and found guilty in
2013.
The campaign to criminalize
whistleblowing has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and
crimes to those who have the skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden
did, needed to hack into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents.
This is why hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and
WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state
is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those
activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced.
The failure of news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington
Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt
them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The
target is the press itself.
“If we actually had a
functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a
witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose,” I
wrote after I and Cornel
West attended Manning’s
sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not have been headed,
bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His
testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied
to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning
down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to
Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of
rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and
generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian
dead would be held to account for the 109,032 ‘violent deaths’ in Iraq,
including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’
video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that
left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”
Manning has always insisted
her leak of the classified documents and videos was prompted solely by her own
conscience. She has refused to implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this
month, although President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence
after she served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer
questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While
incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary confinement
and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in prison. She knows from
painful experience the myriad ways the system can break you psychologically and
physically. And yet she has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in
court on behalf of the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps
the last thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is
deteriorating in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.
Manning—who was known as
Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone gender reassignment surgery and needs
frequent medical monitoring. Judge Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a
request by her lawyers for house arrest. Manning was granted immunity by
prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, and because she had immunity
she was unable to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against
self-incrimination or to have her attorney present. The judge found her in
contempt of court and sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton,
who has long been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has
vowed to hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is
disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning said any
questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First, Fourth and Sixth
Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the grand jury.
“All of the substantive
questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in
2010—answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in
2013,” she said on March 7, the day before she was jailed.
“I will not comply with this,
or any other grand jury,” she said later in a statement issued from jail.
“Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to
additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand
jury system.”
“The grand jury’s questions
pertained to disclosures from nine years ago and took place six years after an
in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day
about these events,” she went on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”
Manning reiterated that she
“will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to,
particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute
activists for protected political speech.”
The New York Times, Britain’s
The Guardian, Spain’s El PaÃs, France’s Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all
published the WikiLeaks files provided by Manning. How could they not?
WikiLeaks had shamed them into doing their jobs. But once they took the
incendiary material from Manning and Assange, these organizations callously
abandoned them. No doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized
against the two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking
place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press and
cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian capitalism.
President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for news outlets such as
The New York Times and The Washington Post, referring to them as the “enemy of
the people.” Any legal tools given to the administration to shut down these
news outlets, or at least hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the
president.
The prosecutions of government
whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of
the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are
parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the
machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems.
The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism exposed as a con,
have had enough of us examining and questioning their abuses, pillage and
crimes.
“The national security state
can try to reduce our activity,” Assange told me during one of our meetings at
the embassy in London. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are
three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required
to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the
military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you know who
is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and
breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but
how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are
leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of
information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out
quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to
defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ
[Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage
people from engaging in this behavior.
But the opposite is also true.
When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This
is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”
“The medium-term perspective
is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the
internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them
having been educated on the internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have
no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the
internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means
that these organizations will see their capacity to control information
diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”
The long term is not so
sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy
Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—wrote a book titled “Cypherpunks:
Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that we are “galloping
into a new transnational dystopia.” The internet has become not only a tool to
educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a “Postmodern Surveillance
Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This
new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of
mass surveillance and mass control.”
“All communications will be
surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all
their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new
Establishment, from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that
can only produce a very controlling atmosphere.”
“How can a normal person be
free within that system?” he asks. “[He or she] simply cannot, it’s
impossible.”
It is only through encryption
that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through
the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the
abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become
more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and
perhaps impossible to use.
“The internet, our greatest
tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most
dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
That is where we are headed. A
few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they
are persecuted will be next.
China plans multibillion-dollar investment to knock US from top spot in fastest supercomputer ranking
China and the US dominate when
it comes to the world’s fastest supercomputers, owning 45.4 per cent and 21.8
per cent of the top systems globally respectively
Multibillion-dollar investment
aimed at upgrading three existing supercomputer labs to the latest exascale
computing technology over three-year period
China is planning a multibillion-dollar
investment to upgrade its supercomputer infrastructure to regain leadership
after the US took top spot for the fastest supercomputer in 2018, ending
China’s five-year dominance, according to people familiar with the matter.
China is aiming for its newest
Shuguang supercomputers to operate at about 50 per cent faster than the current
best US machines, which assuming all goes to plan should help China wrest the
title back from the US in this year’s rankings of the world’s fastest machines,
according to people, who asked not to be named discussing private information.
These next-generation Chinese
supercomputers will be delivered to the computer network information Centre of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing for the global Top500 rankings
of the world’s fastest computers, the people said.
The ability to produce
state-of-the-art supercomputers is an important metric of any nation’s
technical prowess as they are widely deployed for tasks ranging from weather
predictions and modelling ocean currents to energy technology and simulating
nuclear explosions. Demand for supercomputing in commercial applications is
also on the rise, driven by developments in artificial intelligence.
In 2015, US President Barack
Obama signed an executive order to authorise the creation of the National
Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) to accelerate the development of
technologies for exascale supercomputers and to fund research into
post-semiconductor-based computing.
Exascale computing refers to
machines capable of at least a quintillion (or a billion billion) calculations
per second.
Bottom of Form
Calls to the computer network
information centre of CAS seeking confirmation of the plan were not answered
and the centre did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment. Phone calls
made to China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, which coordinates the
country’s science and technology activities, went unanswered. The National
Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program
that oversees the NSCI did not immediately respond to an email asking for
comment on China’s plan.
China and the US dominate when
it comes to the world’s fastest supercomputers, owning 45.4 per cent and 21.8
per cent of the top systems globally respectively, followed by 6.2 per cent for
Japan and 4 per cent in the United Kingdom, according to the Top500 list released
in November. Supercomputer rivalry between the US and China has also been
reflected in trade friction between the two countries, especially since China’s
rapid rise in the field.
China began to build
supercomputers without US semiconductors after the Obama administration banned
the sale of high-end Intel, Nvidia and AMD chips for Chinese supercomputers in
2015. The following year, China launched its Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer,
powered by a Linux-based Chinese operating system and incorporating a locally
developed chip called Matrix-2000. This machine became the fastest
supercomputer on the Top500 list in June 2016.
“Huge information processing
capability is the foundation of artificial intelligence, the industrial
internet, 5G and other future industries,” said Cao Zhongxiong, executive
director of new technology studies at Shenzhen-based think tank China
Development Institute. “Although the US is a major competitor and it has tried
to rein in China’s progress, the enormous internal demand for supercomputing
capacity has forced China to solve the problems through its independent
development.”
China’s planned investment,
funded by the central government and respective local governments, will help
the country lay out a bigger blueprint for the future development of Chinese
supercomputers.
Specifically, funding will be
used to upgrade three existing facilities to the latest exascale computing
machines over the next three years.
The Qingdao National
Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, the National Supercomputing
Centre of Tianjin and National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen are expected
to complete their upgrade to exascale computing machines in 2020, 2021 and
2022, respectively, as part of efforts by China for “continuous leadership” in
supercomputing, said the people, adding that the exascale computers in these
centres should be able to perform calculations several times faster than
Summit, the top US machine.
The US has its Exascale
Computing Project with the goal of launching an exascale computing ecosystem by
2021.
The four other national
supercomputer centres in China are located in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, Ji’nan,
Shandong province, Changsha, Hunan province, and Guangzhou, Guangdong province.
Although the US has dominated
supercomputing for many years, China has been No 1 on the global Top500 list
since the launch of Tianhe-2 in 2013. Located in the National Supercomputer
Centre in Guangzhou, Tianhe-2 was built by China’s National University of
Defence Technology.
China was able to maintain No
1 spot until 2017. However, in June 2018 the US Summit supercomputer operated
by the US Department of Energy became No 1 in the Top500 list, pushing Sunway
TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi into second place.
In the most recent semi-annual
global contest in November last year, the Summit and Sierra US supercomputers
led in the charts, while China’s Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 were in third
and fourth positions.
Leading supercomputer
manufacturers in China include the National Research Centre of Parallel
Computer Engineering and Technology, Dawning Information Industry, and the
National University of Defence Technology.
Millions of American youth attend schools with police but no support staff
By Valery Tsekov
18 March 2019
On March 4, the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) published a devastating report which
exposed the increasingly militarized state of public schools in the United
States and chronic underfunding of school support staff.
The report, “Cops and No
Counselors: How the Lack of School Mental Health Staff is Harming Students”
provides a state-level student-to-staff ratio of employed student counselors,
nurses, psychologists, and social workers and contrasts these numbers to the
increasing presence of police officers in public schools, especially in
lower-income neighborhoods. The statistics revealed in this report are
harrowing.
The ACLU found that over 90
percent of individual schools in the US do not meet the one to 250
counselor-to-student ratio recommended by professional standards and the US
Public Health Service. On average, all of the schools in the country employ
close to half of this number of counselors: one for every 444 students, with
Arizona having the worst ratio in the country at one counselor for every 758
students. Only three states out of 50 meet the recommended ratio.
Student-to-counselor ratios
The report went on to note
that there are 1.7 million students in the US who attend schools where there
are police on campus but no counselors at all; 6 million students attend
schools where police are present but not a single school psychologist is
employed; and finally, 10 million students have police in their schools where
not a single social worker is employed.
Many schools in the US do not
have any nurses on campus. The nurse-to-student ratio recommended by
professional standards is one nurse for every 750 students. Twenty-nine states
do not meet this standard. Michigan and Oregon employ the fewest school nurses
in the country. The ratios of students per nurse provided in the report for
these two states are downright criminal: both are above 4,100 students per
nurse. Three million children in the country attend schools where there are
police officers on staff but not a single nurse.
Student-to-nurse ratios
These statistics are
staggering. Even as they are being starved of much needed funds, working-class
schools are being turned into armed camps replete with metal detectors, online
video surveillance and even military equipment.
Examples can be found
throughout the country.
· The impoverished Detroit
Public Schools spent $41.7 million on a district-wide security upgrade in 2011,
creating a 23,000 square-foot Police Command Center and Headquarters for the school
system.
· Just last week in Chicago at
a mayoral forum, Democratic candidate and former president of the Chicago
Police Board Lori Lightfoot suggested turning the city’s 38 recently shuttered
schools into police-training sites.
· Capitalizing on last year’s
horrific massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, the Florida
state legislature recently passed a bill allocating $58
million toward arming teachers throughout the state.
Detroit Public School Control
and Command Center
While millions of dollars are
easily found to militarize public schools, teachers and students are told by
Republican and Democratic politicians alike that there is no money for much
needed resources like nurses, counselors and other support staff. These
conditions have compelled hundreds of thousands of teachers to go on strike, in
a wave of teachers struggles across the US and internationally. In every case,
teachers have made the demand for more support staff a central issue, and in
every case the unions have facilitated the ramming through of concessionary
contracts that do nothing to address the fundamental issues.
Most recently in Oakland, in a
state dominated by the Democratic Party, the union rejected demands by
rank-and-file teachers to include opposition to budget cuts in the strike
demands, even though the district planned to pay for any pay increases by
slashing millions of dollars from educational services and closing schools. The
contract the union hailed as “historic” left untouched the staffing ratios for
nurses in the district, which currently stand at one for every 1,350 students.
The effect of these dual
processes, the chronic underfunding of education and the further militarization
of schools, has devastating effects on students. The ACLU report notes that
there is no research to substantiate the claim that having police present in
schools has any positive effect on delinquent behavior and school safety. On
the contrary, the report notes that "in many cases, [the presence of law
enforcement staff in schools] causes harm. When in schools, police officers do
what they are trained to do, which is detain, handcuff, and arrest. This leads
to greater student alienation and a more threatening school climate."
The ACLU found that schools
where police are always present have reported 3.5 times as many arrests per
10,000 students as schools without police.
To the extent that the
American government invests in public schools, hiring additional police is
promoted by the political establishment as a necessary response to increasingly
frequent school shootings. However, filling school campuses with cops does
nothing to address the underlying societal ills that are the root causes of
violent and antisocial crimes committed in the first place.
Student-to-social worker
ratios
Outbursts of mass violence,
along with other causes of early death among teens such as drug overdoses and
suicides, are bound up with the growth of social inequality and the miserable
conditions under which the bulk of the working class is living. Since the
economic recession of 2008 and the decline of full-time employment that
followed as a result of the restructuring of many major industries under the
Obama administration, economic uncertainties in working-class families have no
doubt plagued millions of children in the last decade.
Children in the US today are
growing up in a country that has been at war during the entirety of their
lives; wars that have destroyed entire societies and whose victims are treated
with callous indifference in the bourgeois media. These experiences sweep into
social consciousness in innumerable ways.
In fact, the ACLU report cites
a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which found that the
suicide rate among children ages 10 to 17 increased by 70 percent between 2006
and 2016. Approximately 72 percent of children in the US will have experienced
at least one major stressful event—such as witnessing violence, experiencing
abuse, or experiencing the loss of a loved one—before the age of 18.
Under such conditions, the
need for school nurses, psychologists, and counselors can quickly become life
and death questions for students.
The authors of the report note
the substantial amount of research done on the benefits of having health care
professionals trained to work with children in schools: “School counselors,
nurses, social workers, and psychologists are frequently the first to see
children who are sick, stressed, or traumatized.” The report goes on to state
that “schools with such services see improved attendance rates, better academic
achievement, and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspension,
expulsion, and other disciplinary incidents.”
The data cited in the report
shows that school-based mental health and special learning needs services, when
made available, improve the overall safety of schools and promote student
participation in interactive educational initiatives.
The resources to provide all
of these services and much more exist in society. However, to secure a healthy
and productive learning environment for teachers and students requires a
frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling class and the social and economic
system it defends, capitalism.
The defense of public
education requires a fight for socialism, which above all means the establishment
of a society based on social need, not private profit, in which the wealth
produced by the working class is owned and controlled democratically, and in
which every individual has the right to an education, a decent job, a livable
income, health care, a healthy environment, and access to culture.
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