First They Came for Assange

Apr 16, 2019 YANIS VAROUFAKIS

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/assange-arrest-threat-to-journalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2019-04

THENS – My meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange all took place in the same small room. As the intelligence services of a variety of countries know, I visited Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy many times between the fall of 2015 and December 2018. What these snoops do not know is the relief I felt every time I left. 

I wanted to meet Assange because of my deep appreciation of the original WikiLeaks concept. As a teenager reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I, too, was troubled by the prospect of a high-tech surveillance state and its likely effect on human relations. Assange’s early writings – particularly his idea of using states’ own technology to create a huge digital mirror that could show everyone what they were up to – filled me with hope that we might collectively defeat Big Brother.

By the time I met Assange, that early hope had faded. Surrounded by bookcases featuring Ecuadorian literature and government publications, we would sit and chat late into the night. A device on top of a bookshelf emitted mind-numbing white noise to counter listening devices. As time passed, the claustrophobic living room, the badly hidden ceiling-mounted camera pointing at me, the white noise, and the stale air made me want to run out into the street.

Assange’s detractors have been saying for years that his confinement was self-inflicted: he hid in Ecuador’s embassy because he jumped bail in the United Kingdom to avoid answering sexual assault allegations in Sweden. As a man, I feel I have no right to express an opinion regarding those allegations. Women must be heard when reporting assault. Only the violence that men have inflicted upon women for millennia is viler than the disrespect and denigration to which women are subjected when they speak up.

I recall saying to Julian that, had it been me, I would want to confront my accusers, and listen to them carefully and respectfully, regardless of whether official charges had been brought. He replied that he, too, wanted that. “But, Yanis,” he said, “if I were to go to Stockholm, they would throw me in solitary and, before I got a chance to answer any allegations, I would be bundled into a plane heading for a US supermax prison.” To drive the point home, he showed me his lawyers’ offer to Swedish authorities to go to Stockholm if they guaranteed that he would not be extradited to the United States on espionage charges. Sweden never considered the proposal.

During Assange’s years in Ecuador’s embassy, in circumstances that the United Nations deemed “arbitrary detention,” many friends and colleagues mocked his fear – and lambasted me for believing him. Last September, the historian and feminist intellectual Germaine Greer summed up that belief on Australian public radio: “He won’t be extradited to the United States,” she said derisively, blaming Julian’s lawyers for misleading him into fearing such an extradition while collecting his book’s royalties.

Now he is languishing in Belmarsh, a notorious English high-security prison, in a windowless basement cell with even less fresh air and light than before. Unable to receive visitors, he awaits extradition to the US. “Let him rot in hell,” is a frequent response from good people around the world who were incensed by WikiLeaks’ release of Hillary Clinton’s emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, which blew fresh wind into Donald Trump’s sails. Why, they ask, has Assange not released anything damning on Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin?

Before I explain why his detractors should reconsider, let me state for the record my personal frustration with his support of Brexit, his injudicious attacks against his feminist critics, his editorializing in favor of Trump, and, crucially, his communications with Trump’s people. I expressed this frustration to his face several times.

But castigating WikiLeaks for not publishing leaks that damage all sides equally is to miss the point. WikiLeaks was established as a digital mailbox where whistle-blowers could deposit information that is true and whose revelation is in the public interest. This is WikiLeaks’ sole obligation. By design, it cannot control who leaks what; its technology prevents even Assange from knowing a whistle-blower’s identity. If this means that most leaks will embarrass Western powers, that is WikiLeaks’ great, if imperfect, service to us – a service that, to my frustration, was diminished by Julian’s editorializing.

Recent developments prove that his current predicament has nothing to do with the Swedish allegations or his role in aiding Trump against Clinton. With Chelsea Manning in prison again for refusing to confess that Assange incited, or helped, her to leak evidence of US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the best explanation of what is going on comes from Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first CIA director and now US Secretary of State.

Pompeo described WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” That is exactly right. But it is an equally accurate description of what every self-respecting news outlet ought to be. As Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky have warned, journalists who fail to oppose Assange’s extradition to the US could be next on the hit list of a president who considers them the “enemy of the people.” Celebrating his arrest and turning a blind eye to Manning’s continued suffering is a gift to liberalism’s greatest foes.

Besides liberalism, Assange’s persecution by the US security-industrial complex has another victim: women. No woman, in Sweden or elsewhere, will get justice if he is now thrown into a supermax prison for revealing crimes against humanity perpetuated by awful men in or out of uniform. No feminist goal is served by Manning’s continued suffering.

So, here is an idea: Let us join forces to block Assange’s extradition from any European country to the US, so that he can travel to Stockholm and give his accusers an opportunity to be heard. Let us work together to empower women, while protecting whistle-blowers who reveal nefarious behavior that governments, armies, and corporations would prefer to keep hidden.

A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH0iprVQ

Behind Trump’s clash with the Fed: Looming economic crisis and class conflict

18 April 2019

Nick Beams

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/18/pers-a18.html

The repeated calls by President Donald Trump for the US Federal Reserve loosen its monetary policy and provide a further boost to the stock market expose the economic and political reality behind the mask of official ideology.

In his latest remarks, contained in a tweet last Sunday, Trump said the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be 5,000 or even 10,000 points above its present near-record level if the Fed had not tightened interest rates last year. He demanded that the central bank resume the program of “quantitative easing,” under which it poured trillions into the financial markets in the wake of the 2008 finance crash.

For more than three decades the stock market has served as the primary financial mechanism through which the American ruling class has carried out an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the working population to the rich. Under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, the Dow has risen 17-fold since 1985 on the basis of a relentless assault on workers’ jobs and wages and cuts in education, health care and other social services.

Under Obama, the Dow rose more than 250 percent. Under Trump, it has risen a further 32 percent.

The official refrain has been the lie that “there is no money” for schools, health care, housing or pensions, while unlimited sums have been squandered to pay for more yachts, private islands and Manhattan penthouses for the modern-day aristocrats, along with new and more deadly conventional and nuclear weapons to prepare a new military Armageddon.

Wealth and income inequality have reached record levels, consolidating the rule of the financial oligarchy over every aspect of American social and political life.

Trump is simply declaring openly what the Fed has been doing throughout this period, behind the official pretence of “neutrality” and “independence”—and demanding that it do more of it.

If there are objections to Trump’s comments from the New York Times and other key sections of the political and media establishment, on the grounds that they infringe on the Fed’s “independence,” it is not because of any disagreement with the fundamental direction of his policies. They are concerned that Trump is seeking to transform the US central bank from the instrument of the ruling class as a whole into that of his own faction. But Trump’s factional opponents within the ruling elite base themselves on the same forms of financial parasitism as those sections for whom the real estate swindler-turned president speaks.

The legal mandate of the Fed is to adjust monetary policy so as to ensure stable prices and maximum employment, irrespective of the ups and downs of the stock market. But the Fed has been directly tailoring its policies to prop up the financial markets since the stock market plunge of October 1987, when Wall Street fell more than 22 percent in a single day and the then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan announced that the financial spigots were open.

This led to what became known as the Greenspan put: That when the markets began to falter, the Fed would be ready to step in to boost them with the provision of cheap money. Greenspan did make one attempt to curb what he termed “irrational exuberance” in 1996, but such was the adverse reaction from the financial elites that it was never again attempted.

From then on, the official mantra was that it was impossible to tell if a financial bubble was in formation and the markets had to be given their head, with the Fed intervening to support them when their speculative activities gave rise to a crisis.

This program was intensified after the financial crash of 2008, when the government doled out hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks and the Fed initiated its policy of quantitative easing, providing trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money to ensure that the speculative binge continued and expanded.

At the same time, it was insisted that corporate taxes had to be continually reduced. This has now resulted in a situation where, as a recent analysis revealed, 60 US corporations, appropriating billions of dollars in profits, paid no tax in 2018, with some receiving a tax refund.

Trump’s latest intervention is accompanied by the claim that the US economy is powering ahead and could grow even faster if only the Fed stopped holding it back. But rather than indicating strength, Trump’s ultimatums express a deepening crisis and fear that the financial house of cards will collapse unless still more money is pumped into the system.

Claims of the underlying strength of the US economy are belied by basic facts. The present interest rate of between 2.25 percent and 2.5 percent is one of the lowest in economic history, but the Trump administration wants it cut by at least 0.5 percent.

The stock market, bloated by financial speculation, is like a drug addict who demands more as his underlying health continues to deteriorate. When the US financial markets neared bear market territory earlier this year and Wall Street demanded that the Fed halt its policy of incremental rate increases, the Fed snapped into line and Chairman Jerome Powell announced it would abandon its efforts to “normalize” interest rates, leading to the latest rally, which has pushed the Dow to within a few points of its record high.

At the end of 2017, Trump claimed that the trillions of dollars handed out in corporate tax cuts would cause the economy to roar ahead with expanded investment and the provision of well-paying jobs. This lie has been exposed as the vast bulk of the money the tax cuts provided has gone for share buybacks and other parasitic means of pumping more money into the coffers of the rich.

Now the global economy, upon which the US economy is dependent notwithstanding Trump’s claims of the success of his “America First” program, is experiencing a significant slowdown after a brief upturn in 2017.

In its latest economic outlook, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for global growth, warning that 70 percent of the world economy was undergoing deceleration, a phenomenon concentrated in the advanced economies, including the US. Those warnings have been underscored by the announcement on Wednesday by the German government that it was halving its forecast for economic growth in 2019 to just 0.5 percent.

The Trump administration is frightened by the prospect of a recession, or even a significant slowdown in the economy, fueling the growing wave of strikes and protests and transforming it into a social explosion, not only in the so-called rust belt areas that voted for his presidency, but across the country.

These fears extend beyond the White House. In a recent essay, the head of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, the multibillionaire Ray Dalio, warned that when there is a “very big gap” in the economic conditions of people, a downturn can lead to conflict and “revolutions of one sort or another.”

With interest rates already at historic lows, Dalio said he was “worried what the next economic downturn will be like, especially as central banks have limited ability to reverse it.”

It is above all the fear within the ruling elite of growing socialist sentiment in the working class that underlies both Trump’s self-proclaimed war against socialism and the bipartisan attack by the ruling elite on democratic rights.

Hours After Pigs' Death, Scientists Restore Brain Cell Activity

By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer | April 17, 2019 01:00pm ET

https://www.livescience.com/65255-pig-brain-restore-cell-activity-after-death.html

In a radical experiment that has some experts questioning what it means to be "alive," scientists have restored brain circulation and some cell activity in pigs' brains hours after the animals died in a slaughterhouse.

The results, though done in pigs and not humans, challenge the long-held view that, after death, brain cells undergo sudden and irreversible damage.

Instead, the findings, published today (April 17) in the journal Nature, show that the brain of a large mammal "retains a previously underappreciated capacity for restoration" of circulation and certain cellular activities hours after death, said study senior author Nenad Sestan, a professor of neuroscience, comparative medicine, genetics and psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

"The main implication of this finding is that … cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window that we previously thought," Sestan said during a news conference yesterday. Rather than happening over a course of seconds or minutes after death, "we are showing that … [it's] a gradual, stepwise process," and that in some cases, the cell death processes can be postponed or even reversed, Sestan said.

Still, the researchers stressed that they did not observe any kind of activity in the pigs' brains that would be needed for normal brain function or things like awareness or consciousness. "This is not a living brain," Sestan said. "But it is a cellularly active brain."

The work could provide scientists with new ways of studying the brain, allowing them to examine functions in the entire, intact brain in a way that hasn't been possible before. This in turn could help scientists better understand brain diseases or the effects of brain injury, the researchers said.

Although the current study was done in pigs and not humans, pig brains are larger and more human-like compared with rodent brains.

"BrainEx"

In the study, the researchers developed a novel system for studying intact, postmortem brains, dubbed BrainEx. It's a network of pumps that pipe a synthetic solution — a substitute for blood — into the brain's arteries at a normal body temperature.

Using BrainEx, the researchers studied 32 postmortem pig brains that were obtained from a pork-processing facility (which would have otherwise been discarded). The brains were placed in the BrainEx system 4 hours after the pigs' death, and were allowed to "perfuse" with the synthetic blood substitute for 6 hours.

Scientists have developed a system called BrainEx that preserved and even restored brain cell activity in pigs' brains after death. Above, images of brain cells with neurons shown in green, astrocytes (a type of support cell in the brain) in red, and cell nuclei in blue. After death, neurons and astrocytes undergo cellular disintegration without any treatment (left), but if brains are placed in the BrainEx system, these cells are salvaged (right).

Credit: Stefano G. Daniele & Zvonimir Vrselja; Sestan Laboratory; Yale School of Medicine

During this time, the BrainEx system not only preserved brain cell structure and reduced cell death, but also restored some cellular activity. For example, some cells were metabolically active, meaning they used glucose and oxygen and produced carbon dioxide. Other cells reacted with an inflammatory response when stimulated with certain molecules.

In contrast, "control" brains that were not treated with BrainEx rapidly decomposed.

"We can see dramatic differences between the brains we are treating with our technology" and control brains, Sestan said.

Ethical concerns

Dr. Neel Singhal, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn't involved with the study, said the work was "thought provoking," because of some of the ethical issues raised. For example, although scientists are a long way from being able to restore brain function in people with severe brain injuries, if some restoration of brain activity is possible, "then we would have to change our definition of brain death," Singhal told Live Science.

The researchers did not see any signs of consciousness, nor was this a goal of the research. In fact, the synthetic blood solution included several chemicals that block neural activity, the kind of activity that would be needed for consciousness.

What's more, if any type of organized electrical activity — the kind needed for consciousness — had appeared, the researchers were prepared to take action to stop that activity by using anesthesia and lowering brain temperature, said study co-author Stephen Latham, director of Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. In other words, terminating the experiment if this happened.

In a commentary published alongside the study, Nita Farahany, a professor of lawand philosophy at Duke University, and colleagues called for more guidelines around the ethical issues raised by the study, which they say "throws into question long-standing assumptions about what makes an animal ― or a human ― alive."

Such issues include how to detect consciousness to begin with and how long systems like BrainEx should be allowed to run.

Future work

Because the study lasted for only 6 hours, more research is needed to know whether BrainEx can preserve brains for longer than this time.

In addition, a lot of questions remain about how similar this model is to the brain environment. The system does not use real blood, and the brain is not bathed in fluid as it is inside the skull, Singhal said.

But if the system can be used in future brain research, this "could lead to a whole new way of studying the postmortem brain," Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, the team lead at the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN Initiative, which co-funded the research, said in a statement. "The new technology opens up opportunities to examine complex cell and circuit connections and functions that are lost when specimens are preserved in other ways," Beckel-Mitchener said. The work also could stimulate research on ways to promote brain recovery after loss of blood flow to the brain, such as during a heart attack.

Still, the study didn't come close to being able to revive a brain, pig or human, after death. "Basically, when the brain loses circulation, it's like a very intricate building has just [started] crumbing into a million pieces," Singhal said. The new work suggests that this method "can restore some of the foundation" but there's still the cathedral of the brain to be built on top of that foundation, he said.

Defunding Children, A National Crisis in the US

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176553/tomgram%3A_belle_chesler%2C_defunding_children%2C_a_national_crisis_of_the_soul/#more

Belle Chesler, Defunding Children, A National Crisis of the Soul

Posted by Belle Chesler at 7:50am, April 18, 2019.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Email Print

Who even remembers? After all, it happened in ancient times. November 9, 2016, to be exact, at newly elected president Donald Trump’s victory rally, when he so memorably said, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” During that campaign he had similarly sworn that he would deliver a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending over the decade to come. And when he finally unveiled his vaunted plan, in February 2018, for no less than $1.5 trillion dollars, it promptly disappeared without a trace in a Congress his party still controlled. In its wake, the only infrastructure left obsessively on the president’s mind or on anybody’s table was that “great, great wall” of his (which won’t get built either).

In this, the president is following in a distinctly twenty-first-century tradition of disinvestment, one that would have been a mystery to my parents and other members of that World War II and Cold War generation. They would have thought it un-American that, in 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers, issuing its latest “report card,” gave the country’s infrastructure -- from roads to dams, levees to bridges, rail lines to drinking water -- an overall grade of D+. Among the categories that received its own special D+ were America’s schools: “the nation continues to underinvest in school facilities, leaving an estimated $38 billion annual gap. As a result, 24% of public school buildings were rated as being in fair or poor condition.” And the literal state of those buildings is, as TomDispatchregular Belle Chesler makes clear today, just one facet of the underinvestment in and deteriorating conditions of the American public school system, itself part of the deteriorating infrastructure of American democracy. And when it comes to those public schools, Donald Trump and crew aren’t even pretending that they might ever have a plan to invest in or rebuild them. Tom

Making American Schools Less Great Again

A Lesson in Educational Nihilism on a Grand Scale

By Belle Chesler

Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35-million-dollar budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year.

Teachers and staff members slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness, and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time, and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship -- one that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative -- will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of weathering another of them is devastating.

This is the third time in my 14-year-career as a visual arts teacher that we’ve faced the upheaval, disruption, and chaos of just such a budget crisis. In 2012, the district experienced a massive shortfall that resulted in the firing of 344 teachers and bloated class sizes for those of us who were left. At one point, my Drawing I classroom studio -- built to fit a maximum of 35 students -- had more than 50 of them stuffed into it. We didn’t have enough chairs, tables, or spaces to draw, so we worked in the halls. 

During that semester I taught six separate classes and was responsible for more than 250 students. Despite the pretense that real instruction was taking place, teachers like me were largely engaged in crowd management and little more. All of the meaningful parts of the job -- connecting with students, providing one-on-one support, helping struggling class members to make social and intellectual breakthroughs, not to speak of creating a healthy classroom community -- simply fell by the wayside. 

I couldn’t remember my students’ names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments we’re supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all, I was unable to provide the emotional support I normally try to give my students. I couldn’t listen because there wasn’t time.

On the drive to work, I was paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience of that year was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional identity were all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction and adult mentorship, as well as access to vital resources -- not to mention a loss of faith in one of America’s supposedly bedrock institutions, the public school. 

And keep in mind that what’s happening in my school and in Oregon’s schools more generally is anything but unique. According to the American Federation of Teachers, divestment in education is occurring in every single state in the nation, with 25 states spending less on education than they did before the recession of 2008. The refusal of individual states to prioritize spending on education coupled with the Trump administration’s proposed $7 billion in cuts to the Department of Education are already beginning to make the situation in our nation’s public schools untenable -- for both students and teachers.

Sitting in that conference room, listening to my capable and dedicated boss describe our potential return to a distorted reality I remembered well made me recoil. Bracing myself for the soul-crushing grind of trying to convince students to buy into a system that will almost by definition fail to address, no less meet, their needs -- to get them to show up each day even though there aren’t enough seats, supplies, or teachers to do the job -- is an exercise in futility. 

The truth of the matter is that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its children is refusing to invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a grand scale.

Teachers as First Responders

Schools are loud, vital, chaotic places, unlike any other public space in America. Comprehensive public high schools reflect the socioeconomic, racial, religious, and cultural makeup of the population they serve. Each school has its own particular culture and ecosystem of rules, structures, core beliefs, and values. Each also has its own set of problems, specific to the population that walks through its doors each day. Coping with the complexity and magnitude of those problems makes the job of creating a thriving, equitable, and productive space for learning something akin to magical thinking.

The reflexive blame now regularly heaped on schools, teachers, and students in this country is a misrepresentation of reality. The real reason we are being left behind our global peers when it comes to student achievement has to do with so much more than the failure to perform well on standardized tests. Our kids are struggling not because we’ve forgotten how to teach them or they’ve forgotten how to learn, but because the adults who run this society have largely decided that their collective future is not a priority. In reality, the tattered and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure of our national system of social services leaves schools and teachers as front-line first responders in what I’d call a national crisis of the soul.

So it’s no surprise to me that teachers, even in the reddest of states, have been walking out of their classrooms and demanding change. Such walkouts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia have reflected grievances more all-encompassing than the pleas for higher pay that have made the headlines. (And in so many states, they are still being paid less than a living wage.) Demands for just compensation are symbolic and easy for the public to grasp. The higher pay won through some of those walkouts represents an acknowledgement that teachers are being asked to do a seemingly impossible job in a society whose priorities are increasingly out of whack, amid the crumbling infrastructure of the public-school system itself.

The idea that the real world is somehow separate from the world inside our schools and that issues of inequality, poverty, mental health, addiction, and racism won’t impact the capacity of our students to thrive academically sets a dangerous precedent for measuring success. Assuming that the student living in a car, not a home, should be able to stay awake during a lecture, that the one returning from a week in a psychiatric ward should be able to instantly tackle a difficult math test, and that the one whose undocumented father was just picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should have no problem concentrating as her teacher diagrams sentences in English is a grand delusion.

In fact, among the many demands of teachers and their unions during the strikes of the past year were calls for more financial support for comprehensive social services for students. In Los Angeles, teachers fought for legal support for students in danger of deportation. In North Carolina, teachers are planning a new round of strikes that will, among other things, demand Medicaid coverage expansion aimed at improving student health. In Chicago, teachers included a call for affordable housing in their negotiations and so drew attention to the importance of supporting students both in and out of the classroom.

If schools are expected to pick up the slack for the gaping holes in our social safety net, it follows that they should be designed and funded with that purpose in mind.  If teachers are supposed not only to teach but to act as counselors, therapists, and social workers, they should be paid salaries that reflect such weighty demands and should have access to resources that support such work.

Why Prioritizing School Funding Matters

There is a large disconnect between the lip service paid to supporting public schools and teachers and a visible reticence to adequately fund them. Ask almost anyone -- save Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos -- if they support teachers and schools and the answer is probably “yes.” Bring up the question of how to actually provide adequate financial support for education, however, and you’ll quickly find yourself mired in arguments about wasteful school spending, pension funds that drain resources, sub-par teachers, and bureaucratic bloat, as well as claims that you can’t just continue to throw money at a problem, that money is not the solution.

I’d argue that money certainly is part of the solution. In a capitalist society, money represents value and power. In America, when you put money into something, you give it meaning. Students are more than capable of grasping that when school funding is being cut, it’s because we as a society have decided that investing in public education doesn’t carry enough value or meaning.

The prioritization of spending on the military, as well as the emphasis of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans on a staggering tax cutfor the rich, corporate tax evasion, and the dismantling of what’s left of the social safety net couldn’t send a louder message about how much of a priority the wellbeing of the majority of this nation’s kids actually is. The 2019 federal budget invested $716 billion in national security, $686 billion of which has been earmarked for the Department of Defense (with even more staggering figures expected next year). Compare that to the $59.9 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Education and the expected future cuts to its budget. Point made, no?

However, since federal school contributions add up to only a small percentage of local and state education budgets, all blame can’t go there. In Oregon, for instance, restrictions placed on property taxes in the 1990s artificially limited such revenue, forcing the state to start relying heavily on income taxes to keep schools afloat. Corporations are an important source of income for states. Yet, though corporate profits in the U.S. rose by $69.3 billion to an all-time high of more than two trillion dollars in the third quarter of 2018, over the last 40 years the states’ share of income-tax revenue has fallen to half what it was in the 1970s.

Take Nike, whose worldwide headquarters are located only a few miles from the high school where I teach. It stands as a shining example of a corporation that has profited handsomely from sheltering income abroad while evading local tax responsibilities. Nike has a special relationship with the state of Oregon, which taxes only the company's local profits, not those earned elsewhere. Adding insult to injury, according to The Oregonian, by the end of 2017, Nike had put $12.2 billion of its earnings into offshore tax shelters. Had that money been repatriated, the company could have owed up to $4.1 billion in U.S. taxes, which means it has a modest hand in the monetary shortfalls that leave schools like mine in desperate straits.

In reality, Oregon’s economy is thriving and yet how little it all matters, since here we are again on the precipice of another crisis.

In 1999, the state government formed a committee made up of educators, legislators, business leaders, and parents to create a reliable budgetary tool that would correlate school funding needs with student performance. This “Quality Education Model” set out a standard for what a “quality” education would look like for every student in Oregon. In the 20 years since then, the state legislature has reliably failed to meet the funding goals set out by that model. This year, it calls for $10.7 billion in education spending, while the state legislature’s joint ways and means committee recently released a budgetthat included spending of just $8.87 billion on the school system. Such annual shortages of funds have, over time, helped create the present gaping hole in our public education system. And each year that hole grows larger.

Restoring Faith in Our Nation’s Institutions

Public schools represent one of the bedrock institutions of American democracy. Yet as a society we’ve stood aside as the very institutions that actually made America great were gutted and undermined by short-term thinking, corporate greed, and unconscionable disrespect for our collective future.

The truth is that there is money for education, for schools, for teachers, and for students. We just don’t choose to prioritize education spending and so send a loud-and-clear message to students that education doesn’t truly matter. And when you essentially defund education for more than 40 years, you leave kids with ever less faith in American institutions, which is a genuine tragedy.

On May 8th, educators across the state of Oregon are planning to walk out of schools.  The action, a precursor to a strike, is a direct response to the inadequate funding in the upcoming state budget and a referendum on the continuing divestment in public education. Teachers like me will be stepping out of our classrooms not because we don’t want to teach, but because we do.

Belle Chesler, a TomDispatch regular, is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon.

Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced

by Lee Camp

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/nearly-100000-pentagon-whistleblower-complaints-have-been-silenced/

I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to be a whistleblower. I’d like to think I would. We all like to think we would, just like we all like to think we could catch the game-winning touchdown, triumph on “America’s Got Talent,” and fold a fitted sheet quickly and without cursing.

But to blow the whistle on a huge organization with a lot of power, likely drawing that power to come crashing down on your head—that takes some serious spine-age. Now, imagine the organization you’re calling out is arguably the largest, most powerful, most secretive and most violent organization on planet Earth. I’m speaking, of course, of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Yet thousands, even tens of thousands, of people have taken that step over the past five years. (More on this in a moment.)

All the while our organized human murder machine continues its work around the world. Every day. Every hour. Never a moment of rest. Never pausing to clip their toenails or scratch their ass. Bombs dropped. Buildings blown up. People killed or imprisoned. No end in sight.

By the way, that’s the term I like to use instead of “military”—Organized Human Murder Machine.

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? “Mili-tary” sounds too boring, too banal. Sounds like a super-lame couple you met at a party. “Yeah, Millie and Terry over there are accountants. If I have to hear one more joke about capital gains taxes, I’m gonna kill myself.”

But that’s not what the military is. The military is a gigantic organized human murder machine, and even if you “support” every action our military has ever taken, you can still acknowledge it’s an organized human murder machine. (You would just bizarrely argue that all the murder has been just and sound and pure.)

Eleven months ago I covered $21 trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments at the Pentagon over the past 20 years. Don’t try to think about the number $21 trillion because you’ll pass out and hit your head on the desk. If your salary is $40,000 a year, in order to earn $21 trillion, it would take you 525 million years. (At which point you can’t even enjoy the new jet ski you just bought with all your money because you’re almost certainly a brain in a jar … though a nice embroidered jar that only the rich brains can afford.)

Over the past year there has been a little more coverage of the utterly preposterous amount of money unaccounted for at our human murder machine. The Nation magazine, Forbes and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all covered it. Then the white blood cells of the military-industrial complex kicked into action in order to destroy the “infection.” The New York Times and Vox both claimed the $21 trillion is merely the result of large-scale misdocumentation and therefore doesn’t matter at all. Of course, the idea that tens of TRILLIONS of dollars of unaccountable adjustments don’t matter and couldn’t mask any fraud, abuse or corruption is an assertion that makes Charlie Sheen’s statement that he runs on tiger blood seem downright levelheaded.

Probably the best article to date on the $21 trillion was written a few weeks ago by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone.

Point is, even though most of the mainstream media won’t get near this subject (or worse yet—actively attack those who do), the word is getting out: There is a giant sucking sound in the center of the Pentagon, and whatever’s down there feeds on trillions of secretive dollars, then shits out incalculable death and destruction. (It’s the Death Star if officials at the Death Star spent $10,000 on a toilet seat.)

A month ago the Government Accountability Office came out with a report showing the total number of whistleblower complaints over the past five years at the Department of Defense. It’s nearly 100,000. Here’s the only part of the report that references that number:

The Department of Defense Inspector General identified 8 substantiated violations of whistleblower confidentiality between fiscal years 2013 and 2018, representing approximately .01 percent of the 95,613 contacts handled by the Inspector General during that time….

95,613 whistleblower complaints over five years.

Sadly, the Government Accountability Office was trying to brag in that sentence. They were proudly stating, “We only breached the confidentiality of .01 percent of our 95,000 whistleblower complaints. Aren’t we heroes?!”

It’s kind of like saying, “Of the 10,000 dolphins I’ve killed, not a single one has accidentally been a human.” The sane response is, “Well, I’m glad to hear that, but did you say you killed 10,000 dolphins?”

To try to get the 95,000 number to make a little more sense, that averages out to a whistleblower every six minutes of every weekday for five straight years. (That waiting room must be truly nuts. I bet all the good magazines were claimed years ago.)

But maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Perhaps the number 95,613 shouldn’t be all that shocking, and I need to roll my tongue back up and store it back within my mouth. When you have $21 trillion of unaccounted-for adjustments, it means a seizure-inducing amount of money, parts, pieces, bombs, missiles, manpower and devices are flying around with no accountability—likely creating loads of fraud, which would probably create loads of whistleblowers. Hence, maybe we all should have expected this number of whistleblowers rather than being shocked.

For example, there’s the time in 2003 when the U.S. flew $12 billion in cash to Iraq and promptly lost track of it. As the Guardian makes clear in this article, this was not an instance of hackers on a computer system stealing a bunch of ones and zeroes. This was giant pallets of cash money vanishing without a trace. In fact, it was 281 million $100 bills, weighing in at 363 tons. That’s not really the type of thing you can just smuggle away in your sweatshirt while humming “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain.”

Or here’s another example journalist David DeGraw highlights from the Government Accountability Report:

… according to a Department of Defense official, during an initial audit, the Army found 39 Blackhawk helicopters that had not been recorded in the property system. [$819 million in value] Similarly, the Air Force identified 478 buildings and structures at 12 installations that were not in the real property systems. …

The Army lost and then found 39 helicopters.

The Air Force lost and then found 478 buildings.

How does one lose a goddamn building? Unless you just had a bad breakup with David Copperfield, there’s no explanation for losing a building. (Side note: It must suck divorcing David Copperfield. “Really, honey? You think you’re gonna take the house?? PAFOOMPF! What house?!”)

Ya see, this madness stems from the fact that the Pentagon has a standard operating procedure of simply making up numbers to fill their books—which for normal human beings is termed “fraud.” But in the case of the Pentagon, it’s termed, “We get to make shit up because … ummm… national security.”

Here’s more from a 2013 Reuters article:

“Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the Department of Defense’s accounts. … but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions”—in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.”

Have no fear, patriotic Americans, this is not “lying to the American people, stealing their money, and using it for war,” this is just “unsubstantiated change actions.” Try that on your next tax return. Put in $10,000 marked “Unsubstantiated change actions.” I’m sure they’ll love that.

So let’s sum this up, shall we? The Pentagon sucks up 55% of all the discretionary tax money we pay to our government (thanks to our bought-off Congress who receive more Christmas cards from weapons contractors than they do from relatives). Those who work at the Pentagon have no idea where or how the money is spent. They make up many of the numbers resulting in tens of trillions of dollars of unaccounted-for adjustments. They lose helicopters, buildings and, in a few instances, even nuclear warheads. There is an unimaginable amount of fraud and corruption at every level and literally thousands of whistleblowers have tried to come forward every single year—one every six minutes. When they do take that incredibly brave action, over 90% of the claims are dismissed without even being investigated.

You would think, in this topsy-turvy world, if there were one organization we could trust with a trillion dollars a year of our taxpayer money, it would be the Department of Unauthorized Highly Secretive Mass Human Murder.

—

If you think this column is important, please share it. Also you can join Lee Camp’s free email newsletter here.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted Tonight.”