Tangelia Sinclair-Moore posted the article, A Scandal That’s Exposing Ugly Truths About the School Privatization Agenda  by David Sirota, on her Facebook page.

…Before all of these controversies, of course, there were plenty of ways to see that something other than concern for kids has been driving “reformers’” push to privatize public schools.

You could, for example, contrast privatizers’ pro-charter-school propaganda with Stanford University’s study showing that most charter schools perform no better — and often worse — than traditional public schools.

You could juxtapose the Reuters story screaming “Private Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. Public Schools” next to the New York Times headline blaring “Hedge Funds’ Leaders Rally for Charter Schools.”

You could consider that the most prolific fundraiser in the education “reform” movement is not someone with a stellar record of education policy success, but instead Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief whose tenure was defined by a massive cheating scandal.

I naively thought that this was an ideological battle.  Thanks to Tangelia for posting this so that I could see that it really was all about money.  I should have known.  We all should have known.

I also had thought that Michelle Rhee was a true reformer, but I started having some doubts when I started reading her diatribes against some of the public school teachers.

Eugene Robinson of Washington Post Writers Group has written the op-ed A Lack of Spine on Egypt.

“America cannot determine the future of Egypt,” the president said. Which means the least we can do is stand for what we believe.

In the beginning, I almost bought the twisted logic that the Egyptian military was restoring democracy rather than staging a coup. How could I think that ousting a democratically elected president could be restoring democracy?  Maybe we didn’t like Morsi’s brand of democracy, but, as Barack Obama now admits, “America cannot determine the future of Egypt”.  We cannot tell them what to do, but we can decide what crimes we will refuse to abet.  By continuing our military aid, we are abetting the crimes the Egyptian military is now perpetrating. Using snipers to kill unarmed civilians is just beyond the pale no matter what orders you give to the civilians that they refuse to obey.

I wonder if it will take us 50 years to admit our role in this situation like it seems to have in the case of the 1953 coup in Iran. (See CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran’s Coup)

Two videos from The Real News Network. Don’t blame me if you are silly enough to follow the links below.

Why are Egyptian Liberals Celebrating a Massacre?

US Foreign Policy: The Moral Hazard of “Relative Evil” Necessary to Fight “Absolute Evil”

August 20, 2013

To any of my relatives who should stumble onto this post, I plead with you not to click on the following link.

Max Blumenthal: Something Snapped when Israel Attacked Gaza

August 21, 2013

Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Negotiations Without End

This is the final segment in this series.

If we use the history of native Americans as an example, perhaps in a future generation there will be memorials to the Palestinians who were pushed off their lands, the Jewish residents of Israel will feel bad about what was done, but they will get the “benefits” of living in a state without having to give any further thought to an uprising by the few remaining Palestinians.  After all, after the cleansing is complete enough, what can the people of that future generation do?

Perhaps the Israelis of the current generation should consider one difference between the native Americans and the Palestinians.  After the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, there will still be a huge population of Palestinians outside of Israel that will harbor resentment and a desire to return to their native lands.  Isn’t that the way the Jewish Israelis managed to get the state of Israel recognized by The United Nations?

The New Economic Perspectives blog has published William K Black’s article The FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why the Banksters Love Holder.

The cutest quote from the article is:

One of the difficulties we have is that because the last two administrations have fanatical devotees of the cult of the Virgin Crisis – the myth that the ongoing crisis was the first in modern times conceived without sin (control fraud) – that it is exceptionally difficult to know what their creed is.

However, the short quite that is most indicative of the shortcomings of l;aw enforcement is the following quote”:

The U.S. Attorney for Sacramento, one of the epicenters of accounting control fraud, was foolish enough to attempt to explain why he did not investigate or prosecute the banksters:

Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. “It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,” Wagner said.

Wagner’s inability to keep his pronouns straight even when they were in the same sentence – “they” refers to the CEO, “themselves” refers to the bank the CEO is looting – was so embarrassing that he did not even try to respond to his critics. 

Black compares the prosecutions after the S & L crisis to the ones after the current crisis to emphasize how much the current law enforcement entities have fallen down on the job. The current executives in our law enforcement agencies seem to have forgotten all the resources at their disposal that have been useful in past frauds. Instead they turn to the perpetrators to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do to investigate the crimes. I am not talking about reformed perpetrators, either. These are the perpetrators who continue with their crimes. We know how well that worked out with the Whitey Bulger case. If even murder isn’t enough to get the FBI’s attention, then how can we expect them to be bothered by a few trillion dollars of fraud?

The Business Desk of the PBS NewsHour has the article ‘Structural Unemployment?’ Why Not Throw Money at the Problem?  In the article, Dean Baker, gives a well reasoned explanation as to why the current level of unemployment is cyclical, not structural.  The usual Keynesian stimulus is the solution.

In short, this story — that employers would be hiring workers if workers just had the right skills — is not supported by the evidence. If employers can’t find the workers they need, they raise wages. This is how a market economy works.

The problem with the structural unemployment story is that it is very difficult to identify any substantial segment of the labor market where there are rapidly rising wages. In the last decade, even the wages of college grads have not kept pace with the rate of inflation. If college grads just got their share of productivity growth, their wages would be rising by more than 1.5 percentage points a year above the rate of inflation. In fact, there is no major occupational category, even among workers with a college degree or higher, where wage growth has kept pace with productivity growth over the last decade.

We don’t see rising wages, therefore we can assume that employers are not having trouble finding workers; end of story.

This simple fact, and others that follow from it, has led to a growing consensus in the economics profession that the economy’s problems stem from a lack of demand rather than from structural issues.

As a rebuttal to Baker’s rebuttal, Paul Solman, of The Business Desk, offers an ill thought out experiment as proof.

Look, I have my own thought experiment — the “Mass Massage Mobilization” or MMM — in which every American would be given tax incentives or subsidies to get one-hour-long massage per week. That would employ 7 to 10 million newly trained massage therapists, depending on how hard you want to work them. No college degree would be necessary, and everyone, pretty much, would be better off. (See chapter 9, “Touch,” in the book “Born to Be Good” from Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner, for the psychological benefits to giver and receiver alike.)

But to make the MMM a sustainable solution, at some point, people need to be willing to pay for their massages. Either that or we move more and more to a socialist answer to the problem of unemployment. That may be okay, but it’s hard to ignore the problems that socialism typically brings with it — the sort of problems that conservative economist Ed Yardeni raised when we did a story on government infrastructure spending with liberal economist Bob Frank of Cornell during the depths of the Great Recession.

I would expect Solman to understand Keynesian Economics better than he shows in his thought experiment.

In my thought experiment, there is several trillion dollars in infrastructure spending that we need to keep our infrastructure from falling apart.  Hiring private sector companies and workers to build and repair this infrastructure would fulfill a much needed gap in our economy without increasing government workers very much.  The money these companies and people would earn would circulate back through the economy creating many other jobs.  As the burst of infrastructure spending was completed and infrastructure work fell to a normal level, the demand created by these other jobs would sustain the economy.  The distribution of jobs would shift from infrastructure work toward other work that was in insufficient supply at the time to meet the demand at the time.

It is beyond naivete to think that the jobs created to get the economy out of recession would have to be exactly the same jobs that would sustain the economy in perpetuity.  Even capitalists know that the economy does not work that way.

However, an economic system is never all one thing or all another.  This is not a binary system where we only use ones and zeros to describe economic activity.  We use real numbers with an infinite range to measure the economy.  To the extent that there is a structural unemployment problem it is due to the shift in economic policy that favors giving all the rewards of productivity increase to a few wealthy people at the top of the economy.  To make the Keynesian solution sustainable, there will have to be policy changes that put the distribution of wealth and income back to the more normal levels that existed before the advent of great redistribution upward that started around the 1980s.

The Real News Network has the video Manning Sentencing Defense Plays Up Psychological Stress, Fails To Use Whistleblower Defense.

SWANSON: Well, I think the information he put out helped to end the war in Iraq by persuading the Iraqi government not to allow U.S. troops to remain with immunity from criminal prosecution after having seen some of the crimes revealed by Bradley Manning. You have the testimony of a former secretary of state and other officials in Tunisia and elsewhere around what we call the Middle East thanking Bradley Manning for his assistance of nonviolent democratic movements that have in some cases overthrown tyrants. He’s a four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee because of the gratitude of nations around the world. I think–you know, former Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire credits him with helping prevent a Western intervention in Syria thus far because there is fear now on the part of many governments that whatever they do could be exposed. And that is all to the good. And Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founders of this nation would have said that was all to the good. But the prosecution has its own deep impact, and while a few Edward Snowdens may be inspired, many, many sources are going into hiding. And that could be disastrous for a government of, by, and for the people.

Little did I know that yesterday, when I posted and addendum to my previous post Bradley Manning, the Nuremberg Charter and Refusing to Collaborate with War Crimes The Real News Network would provide another reason to make the same point.

I haven’t heard whether or not the release of the helicopter pictures showing a war crime being committed was part of the indictment against Bradley Manning. If this was a defensible act, then the government would have no reason to charge him for that. This robs him of the chance to use the Nuremberg defense. If the releases of the other material were not defensible in whistle blower terms, then what defense could Manning put up than the ones his defense is using?

Just shows that if you are going to commit a defensible act, don’t commit a bunch of ancillary criminal acts for which you will be charged. In starker terms, you can commit millions of good deeds, but if you commit one crime, you are subject to punishment. That’s not odd or ironic at all. That’s life in a civilized society.

People are talking about awards for Bradley Manning for uncovering the war crime. That still might be appropriate. People should not find it surprising that an award winner might also be capable of committing a crime. These are two separate acts. People commit two separate acts all the time.

Can you imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner being arrested for DUI? Then why is it so hard to see what is happening here, and learn not to conflate honorable deeds with criminal deeds? Fortunately Manning’s legal team could face reality enough to provide him with the type of defense he needed for the crimes for which he has been charged.

The Real News Network has the interview Texas Towns Frack Their Way To Drought Conditions.

Forget about the earthquakes that fracking causes. Here is something that is much more obvious and more quickly detrimental.

If you can’t remember what you are supposed to forget, read my previous post Ohio stiffens regulations after concluding that fracking caused earthquakes.

It’s amazing what a little hype can do. Although there is a 57 page document of the Alpha Version of the Hyperloop Design.

To give you a little background, view The Daily Show video Track to the Future.

I get a kick out of new discoveries and inventions that I read about almost 40 years ago. (Since I have read part of the design document mentioned above, I realize it is not Elon Musk that is making claims that he has invented anything completely different from anything that has ever been studied before.)

Here is what the IEEE Spectrum article Loopy? No, it’s Hyperloopy has to say:

It’s been known for decades that an electro-pneumatic tubular transport can, in principle achieve stupendous speeds. IEEE Spectrum covered the idea back in 1984, in a sidebar, written by contributing editor Eric Lerner, to a feature article on the then-new idea of maglev trains. The sidebar, “Coast to coast in half an hour,” makes Musk’s proposal seem prudent by comparison. It was based on a Rand Corp. study that imagined a transcontinental tunnel virtually evacuated, to eliminate aerodynamic drag.

I read the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Spectrum much more regularly back in 1984 than I do now since I have retired.

I remember trying to calculate if the g forces would kill you. Turns out, it’s not a problem.

To only get to 800MPH with 1g acceleration would take less than 37 seconds.

Download the Excel spreadsheet to check my math. Your browser may think this linked item is just a regular HTML page, but if you save it, you can open it up in Excel and see the formulae.

The Real News Network has the interview The Government is Finally Arresting Wall Street Bankers…For Losing Wall Street’s Money with Bill Black.

DESVARIEUX: So, Bill, will you please just summarize for us what is the story behind this “London Whale” scandal?

BLACK: Sure. This is actually a story of Glass-Steagall, which was the legislation adopted after the Great Depression to prevent conflicts of interest from owning the same investment banking company and a commercial banking company. And we got rid of Glass-Steagall, which had been a brilliant success, in the next to last year of the Clinton administration. And then, of course, we had a disaster, and we passed legislation that’s called the Volcker bill that unfortunately doesn’t simply repeal the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but it’s designed to prevent this kind of speculation in derivatives by commercial banks.
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Now, these are not Wall Street traders, by the way. These are City of London traders. And that’s happening for a reason, because the City of London won the competition in laxity. And so, much of the sleaziest activity in the largest commercial banks in the world moved to the City of London, including the so-called “London Whale”, the huge trader for JPMorgan. But that’s also where the LIBOR scandal has been, the HSBC money laundering scandals, etc., etc., etc. So there’s something very rotten in the heart of the financial industry in the City of London.

I have quoted this specific part of the interview in the hopes that you will remember this every time you hear the defenders of Larry Summers say that repeal of the Glass-Steagall act had nothing to do with the crash of the big banks.

Larry Summers was a key part of the Clinton administration that supported the repeal.

The people who now carefully calculate that the repeal could not have caused the magnitude of the collapse are also the ones that predicted that the collapse of the mortgage market would not have a significant impact on the economy. You have to ask yourself, how could their calculations have been so far off the mark? Should we believe their calculations this time that Larry Summers was great for the economy?