As James Madison, Federalist No. 48, Feb. 1, 1788, wrote “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” See 2010 Presentation to Members of General Assembly of Virginia on investigation of judicial branch rule making power

This event is neither open to the media or to public scrutiny, but more importantly permit the promulgation of court rules that have violated the substantive rights of citizens, i.e., denial of the right to civil jury trials by abuse of dismissal under FRCP Rule 12, the discriminatory treatment of pro se litigants, the giving to the judicial branch absolute immunity from accountability for criminal acts or tort.

Evidence confirms that by the abuse and misuse of the Judiciary Act of 1925, the U.S. Judicial Conference Act, and the Rules Enabling Act, the Judicial Branch has conspired with government attorneys to undercut and disregard the limitations and prohibitions on government employees violation of the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution.  The extensive record confirms that there is an ongoing conspiracy by government attorneys and judges to deny nonresident U.S. citizens protection.http://www.liamsdad.org/others…. Thus, the evidence of cronyism between Beltway Lobbyist/Attorney, government attorneys and judges has revealed the usurpations of power by judges to obstruct justice in violation 18 U.S.C. § 4, § 241, § 242, and § 1204.(Jan 9, 2010 NOVA Presentation).Presentation to members of General Assembly of Virginia

Naomi Klein described a systemic approach to strip mine nations and weaken freedoms in her profoundly important book, Shock Doctrine. This article continues, in that tradition,  to list ways that the the Right is exploiting and despoiling America for corporations that are not at all loyal to the US and that do not care about the people of the nation.

When you see one of these approaches being employed or if you are victim to one of them, you should be aware that they come from the same play book.

These include:

De-regulate– To increase profits or power, eliminate regulations that protect people, workers, the environment. Glass Steagall was a case of de-regulation that dreaded trillions of economic suffering on the middle class. Every day there are thousands of lobbyists aiming at deregulating ecological, economic, worker and many other protections.

Regulate– To decrease liability, specify rules and definitions so they can be used to evade responsibility or avoid unwanted regulations or to make certain products or services more profitable. Drug laws serve liquor companies and privatized prisons. Safety laws relieve corporations of the risk of litigation.

Privatize– public assets and resources– minerals, parks, oil fields, electronic media frequencies and bandwidths, public utilities, lands, water– they are all part of the commons. Shrink them and weaken the power and strength of the land of the people. Privatize them and put them in the hand of corporations and the corporations will share the power they develop through acquisition of public resources. Enron was a case of privatization of energy resources and creation. But more and more water is being privatized. It may start with privatization of the management of the water, even if it is publicly owned.

Centralize- Centralization consolidates top down control, simplifies domination and decreases the influence of local communities and powers. This applies particularly to media, food, energy, banking.

Consolidate Executive Power– Democrat or Republican, recent presidents have grabbed more and more power away from a prostrate, willing congress, worsening the imbalance between the three branches of government. It doesn’t matter much whether there’s a Democrat or Republican in the White House. Either way they grab more power and then serve corporate masters, paying minor deference through small social issue steps of progress if Democrats, but over all, making life easier for the corporations that provide primary funding for their ascent to power.

Enable Media Consolidation and Centralization– There are only a handful of mainstream TV networks. They are ALL owned by megacorporations that do not serve the middle class, do not serve the interests of the vast majority of Americans. They serve transnational corporations. The more centralized the media becomes the fewer people there are too keep it honest, to feed fresh information and truth into it, the easier it is to keep secrets, to obscure truths and to sell outright lies. Every month more newspapers and radio stations die or merge or are acquired by giants, like Clear Channel.

Corrupt the election process–  flood it with money– from the wealthy, from corporations. It used to be a crime for corporations to spend a nickel on elections. Count the vote in ways that don’t allow for reliable recounts– electronically. Require voter IDs that disenfranchise minorities and the poor. Over and over again, we’re seeing the wealthiest candidates buying their way into primaries and elections.

Give Corporations Human Rights when corporations are given the same rights as people this dilutes the value of humanity and gives immortal, fabulously wealthy corporations obscene advantages

Legislate Against Protest Pass laws that erode the rights to protest. They’ve started passing laws that make it illegal to even photograph factory farms, or to protest against ecological wrongs. Already eco-protesters are treated as terrorists and incarcerated in the worst maximum security prisons. Will Potter of Greenisthenewred.com has been documenting these encroachments on the tools of freedom and liberty. The NDAA is a new threat to protesters.

Use Financial Resources to Further Corporate Interests via the military intelligence complex. Between the military, the CIA, FBI, NSA and other related agencies and the vast minions of privatized militias, consultants, mercenaries, etc., the USA spends well over a trillion dollars a year, probably closer to two trillion. The money goes to the biggest military industrial corporations to pay for weapons, supplies, etc. Much of the work of the military and the intelligence agencies goes towards opening new markets or securing access to new resources– oil in the ground, territory to lay pipelines, media markets to sell content… This is a trillion dollar a year business that the mainstream media help to cloak in the delusion of patriotism and heroism. Juice it up by lying about threats and feeding the media info about or actually perpetrating false flag operations.

Gerrymander and Globalize… districts, industries and communities. Gerrymandering and globalization have more in common than you might think. When you look at a district that’s 100 mils long and two miles wide, you see a clear attack on community. When you see cheap products from halfway around the world undercutting items manufactured or grown in nearby fields or factories, then globalization is at work, wreaking destruction, not just on industries and jobs but also on the fabric of the community.

Consumerize; Turn people and neighborhoods into consumers. This practice started with the missionaries and fifteenth and sixteenth century explorers luring indigenous tribal people, living happily working two or three hours a day, to work in fields or mines so they could be trinkets and alcohol. It hasn’t changed. People in the suburbs give up community, give up life quality to spend long hours either making money to buy things or watching mindless television that makes them want more things or lulls them into a soporific lethargy.

Dumb Them Down With a Lame Educational System The education system predominantly used in the USA was developed over 100 years ago, based on the Prussian model, with the aim of creating a force of obedient soldiers and factory workers. Paolo Freire described it as a banking system, in which information is deposited into the head, rather than a dialogical system where students learn through questions and dialog.

Keep Them on the Brink of Broke bleed them with health insurance or bankrupting health bills. Pay them minimum wage. Suck them into balloon mortgages that cost them their savings, their homes and leave them with no credit. Sell a system that makes it seem that the only way to get ahead is with a college education, then make them pay for it using massive amounts of student loans so they are terminally in debt.

Partner With Fundamentalists Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews work well as allies. Fundamentalist Muslims are antagonist partners. You vilify them. They vilify you. It works for both sides. Zionism works. There are about 60 million zionists and they’re mostly fundamentalist Christians hoping Israel will engage in a nuclear war that will blow up, so they can experience the rapture. Roman Emperor Constantine embraced the Christian church as a strategy for winning a battle. it worked. The partnership between the Christian church and war monger despots has existed ever since. Orthodox and other Jewish and non-Jewish zionists in the US and israel (where a lot of the Israeli settlers are transplanted from Brooklyn and other Orthodox enclaves) are incredibly effective at influencing elections, particularly through AIPAC. Corporatists just enjoy the ride of these fundamentalist mules.

Crown Prosecution Services charged Brooks, her husband, and four others with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice on Tuesday May 15. The alleged conspiracy took place between July 6 and July 19, 2011.

Brooks and the co-conspirators concealed and removed materials sought by police in their investigation of phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation subsidiary, News International, according to prosecutors. Brooks resigned as chief executive officer of the subsidiary on July 15, 2011. (Image: SnowViolent)

Brooks’ current legal troubles should not obscure the significance of her testimony before the Leveson Inquiry last week. During her several hours on the witness stand, she was confronted with an explosive email that, if true, implicates Conservative Party Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt in a conspiracy to pervert the British regulatory process in favor of News Corporation’s bid to acquire the ten-million-subscriber pay TV company BSkyB. News Corp owns 39% of the company. It sought the remaining 61%.

The acquisition was absolutely critical for for News Corp. BSkyB accounted for 14% of News Corp net income in 2011. Had the Murdoch’s completed the acquisition by the start of 2011, BSkyB would have accounted for 36% of 2011 profits.

In addition to the Hunt-BSkyB evidence, Brooks’ testimony at the Leveson Inquiry last week may result in additional charges of hiding and destroying evidence.

Were the emails lost on Brooks’ BlackBerry part of the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice?

When Brooks left the News International CEO position in 2012, she surrendered her BlackBerry to the company. Under questioning by Queen’s Counsel Robert Jay of the Leveson Inquiry on May 11, 2012, she noted of the emails that the BlackBerry had contained: “We had to image them and we had some problems with that.” (See Brooks Blackberry.) The emails were all destroyed except one, a compressed message from Prime Minister David Cameron that had no content.

Queen’s Counsel Jay pinned down the dates of the missing emails in this question: “So we have, as you explain, emails and texts which only cover a limited period, from the beginning of June 2011 until, you say, 17 July. Maybe 15 July or 17 July. Brooks responded, “I think it was the 17th.”

Those dates include a portion of the time period during which prosecutors allege that Brooks engaged in the conspiracy to pervert justice. Brooks claimed that “my Blackberry was imaged by my legal team,” the point at which the emails disappeared. If the lost BlackBerry emails are part of evidence destroyed or hidden, maybe it wasn’t Brooks’ legal team that imaged the BlackBerry and hid or destroyed the stored messages. No one on her legal team was charged in the conspiracy by Crown Prosecution Services.

Could it be that Brooks was somehow responsible for the destroyed or hidden emails? If so, her inquiry testimony last week makes her the star witness for her own prosecution. There is little doubt that Brooks provided vital evidence for any future prosecution of Jeremy Hunt.

The Michel-to-Brooks smoking gun email, June 27, 2011

The high point of the Brooks testimony last Friday came when Queen’s Counsel asked about an email sent at 16:29 on June 27, 2011: “Frederic Michel sends an email and it goes to just you” (full email). Brooks seemed surprised even though she had reviewed the evidence prior to the hearing: “I would be surprised if it just came to me. As you’ve seen from the previous emails, they were always copies in to the same — almost the same group of people, but perhaps it was directly to me.” (See Brooks 5.)
At the opening of the email, Michel tells Brooks that “Hunt will be making references to phone hacking in his statement on ­ this week … hacking has nothing to do with the media plurality issue.”

Plurality refers to the criterion Jeremy Hunt has outlined as the basis for approving News Corp’s bid to acquire the remaining shares of BSkyB. The term references the number and diversity of media outlets available to the British public. If the acquisition reduced media plurality, there would be cause to deny the bid (an unlikely outcome). Michel claimed that Hunt would exclude the explosive phone hacking allegations against News Corp’s British newspapers from his considerations on bid approval.

If true, Michel’s statement implies a conspiracy between Hunt and News Corp to rig the BSkyB approval process. Hunt would be acting as an agent for News Corp.

The Michel-to-Brooks memo ends with this: “JH [Hunt] is now starting to look into phone hacking/practices more thoroughly and has asked me to advise him privately in the coming weeks and guide his and Number 10′s [Cameron’s] positioning.”

The closing elaborates the opening paragraph and expands the conspiracy from Culture Secretary Hunt to Prime Minister Cameron.

In her reply to Michel, Brooks asks “when is the rubicon [sic] statement” and Michel responds “Probably Wednesday” (June 29, 2011).

Is Michel’s smoking gun email reliable? Look at the evidence.

News Corp apologists have seeded the media with the notion that Michel, News Corp’s chief lobbyist on the BSkyB acquisition, is some sort of Walter Mitty who exaggerates claims of his access. Brooks even alluded to this in her testimony.

Rather than rely on name calling, let’s look at the evidence based on Hunt’s behavior after June 27, 2011, to determine the veracity of the claims in the email and the implications about a Hunt-News Corp conspiracy to rig approval of the BSkyB bid. (Image: DCMS)

Thursday, June 30, 2011, House of Commons: Labour Member of Parliament (MP) Tom Watson asked Culture Secretary Hunt: “… if he will make a statement on the News Corporation acquisition of BSkyB.” Hunt replied, “Earlier today, I placed a written statement before the House outlining the next steps in my consideration of the potential merger between News Corp and BSkyB.” That statement, he said, reflected changes in his process of approving the bid that offered “a further layer of very important safeguards.”

Hunt made his statement to the House of Commons on Thursday, in line with Michel’s predictions in his email to Brooks. Was the written statement to which Hunt referred the “rubicon statement” Brooks had asked about in her reply to Michel?

What did Hunt say in his written statement on the News Corp bid to acquire BSkyB?

Written Ministerial Statement: News Corp/BSkyB merger, Jeremy Hunt, June 30, 2011 (or here)

“I believe that there are sufficient safeguards to ensure compliance with the undertakings [by News Corp]. Furthermore, the various agreements [between News Corp and the government] entered into pursuant to the undertakings will each be enforceable contracts. Therefore whilst the phone hacking allegations are very serious they were not material to my consideration.”

Hunt announced that he was in favor of approving the bid and that he was referring the News Corp acquisition to the Competition Commission. He outlined the new safeguards he had referenced to MP Watson and, in the last sentence, separated “phone hacking allegations” from his considerations. To remove any impact of the outrage against News Corp for phone hacking, Hunt had structured the referral to make sure that the Competition Commission would be “constrained to rule on issues of media plurality” only.

Hunt was playing a double game with the public, it seems. On July 20, 2011, Hunt told the BBC, “The question that News International have to answer is why malpractice happened throughout a very important part of their organisation without people like Rupert Murdoch knowing,”

Hunt was simply acting out the strategy that Michel talked about in the smoking gun email, separating the real prize, the approval of the BSkyB acquisition, from the hacking scandal while talking tough on the scandal.

Michel’s smoking gun email is clearly reliable evidence of a News Corp-Cameron government conspiracy to rig approval of News Corp’s BSkyB acquisition. Hunt’s behavior, just what the email predicted, demonstrates that the email is highly reliable evidence of that conspiracy.

Hunt went to Parliament to make a key statement on the bid within Michel’s time frame. He took the position that Michel had said he would on the bid. And, most cynically, Hunt separated the issue of corporate responsibility and fitness represented by Murdoch media properties from the approval criteria for the bid.

Ironically, to fend off the intense attacks on Hunt after the testimony of Rupert and James Murdoch in mid-April, PM Cameron suggested that the Leveson Inquiry would be the forum that would best judge Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s suitability for office.

That judgment is clear – Hunt acted as an agent for News Corp.

The inquiry also foreshadowed the charges against Rebekah Brooks for perverting the course of justice by destroying evidence.

How many careers will Rupert Murdoch end during his descent into a maelstrom of business and political oblivion?

More importantly, how many lives has Murdoch destroyed through the nihilistic news and editorial policies throughout his media empire?

END

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Rebekah Brooks Leveson Inquiry with Comments

The Money Party

Sonoma State University has announced that philanthropists Joan and Sanford Weill will be recognized as the 2012 honorary degree recipients at SSU’s graduation ceremony May 12. The Weill’s recently have donated $12 million to the Green Music Center Fund. This donation enabled SSU to complete the main concert hall, the adjoining lawn and commons performance venues, officially named the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Hall, Lawn and Commons.

Sanford (Sandy) Weill, is the former CEO of Citigroup. Weill created Citigroup in 1998 through a merger with Travelers Group. In 1997, he was the highest paid CEO in the country at $230 million. Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $1.4 billion in 2006. However, the NY Times says (4/5/12) that he has recently lost his billionaire status.
Weill was a primary player in the removal of the Glass-Steagal Act during the Clinton administration. This act allowed for Wall Street investment firms to gamble with their depositors money held in affiliated commercial banks leading to the housing crisis in 2008. The International Herald Tribune (1/4/10) described Weill as once viewed as a “brilliant deal maker, while now critics cast him as the architect of a shoddily constructed, unmanageable financial supermarket whose troubles have sideswiped investors, employees and average citizens.” Robert Scheer in the Nation Magazine (4/12) describes Weill as a “ Jolly Good Scoundrel”, and “The Man who Shattered Our Economy.” (Huffington Post 11/17/10) Scheer points out how Weill bailed out of Citigroup before the crash, “laughing all the way to the bank.” Weill is currently reported to be selling his 200-foot yacht, named the April Fool, for $69.5 million. The boat has a huge master stateroom, a Jacuzzi on the fourth-level sun deck and a sprawling outdoor eating lounge.
The New York Post (2/1/09) ran a front page story with the headline, “Citi’s Sky-High Arrogance: Company Jet For Monguls Lux Holiday.” Just weeks after Citigroup averted total collapse with a $45 billion shot in the arm of taxpayer cash, the bank jetted its former CEO Sandy Weill and his family on one of its corporate jets to a posh Mexican resort for New Year’s.
Sandy Weill paid $31 million in late 2010 for a 362-acre estate and vineyard in Sonoma County. He brought with him carpetbags of money, a pile of which he donated to gleeful SSU President Ruben Armiñana’s Green Music Center.
Jump to May 12, 2012 graduation at SSU, Sandy Weill and his wife Joan will be awarded an honorary doctorate. Many will ask, What for? Is this a doctorate honoring anything besides being the largest recent donor to the Green Music Center? It seems to smack of buying the honor instead of earning it.
Previous honorary SSU doctorate recipients have been primarily local community leaders with decades of regional merit. Included in these ranks are Herb Dwight, who has distinguished himself throughout his life as a highly respected engineer and prominent business and community leader; Belva Davis, a highly regarded reporter in the San Francisco Bay area; Bernie Goldstein, provost and vice president of academic affairs at SSU; Edward R. Stolman of Glen Ellen past president and chairman of the Federation of American Hospitals; and Donald Green. a prominent leader in the telecommunications industry. Green founded three regional companies, Digital Telephone Systems, Optilink Corp., and Advanced Fibre Communications, and became know as the “Father of Telecom Valley” in the North Bay region.
Many Sonoma county folks are not taking kindly to a near billionaire with tainted money receiving a honorary doctorate from Sonoma State University without having given decades of regional accomplishments for which to be truly honored. Thousands of people who lost their homes through foreclosures in Sonoma County might like to have something to say about such an award. Shame on Ruben Armiñana for arranging such an outrageous gesture, and dishonoring graduation for the class of 2012.
______________________________________________________________________
Peter Phillips earned a Ph.D. in 1994 at UC Davis and has been a sociology professor at Sonoma State University for the past eighteen years. He is presently President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored.

The work of the US military is to kill, its pretext – defense of the homeland. It has succeeded in training soldiers, mostly young men, to kill without remorse, that is until they leave the military with flare-ups of psychological trauma or PTSD. But neither the military nor the White House has convinced a war weary American public to accept men returning home from war in caskets or deeply wounded physically and psychologically. Americans’ increasing distaste for war presents serious problems for a state committed to on-going, unending war which includes feeding military industries, a mainstay of the American economy. What to do?

Drones to the rescue! With drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, Americans need not worry about their own soldiers being killed. Those who drop the bombs do so from any one of a number of military bases somewhere in the United States. Research and common sense show that the further away soldiers are from those they kill, the less likely they are to feel guilt or remorse. Drones, it seems, solve the PTSD problem.
Since so many Americans now turn off the news of war, they will not know of how, as they do not know about combat on the ground, of the many civilians killed in drone attacks – most are women and children. But those victims are not Americans, specifically, they are not American men. So who cares? As John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, in the cold sociopathy of an increasingly US militarized stated, “Sometimes you have to take lives to save lives,” and I would add, as long as most of the lives you take are of brown people and are not American men. War is, after all, gendered and racist violence.

The day after Brennan announced that the USA is conducting CIA drone warfare, on May 1 President Obama spoke to Americans in what most pundits agreed was a campaign speech from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where he and President Karzai had just signed a Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement. So you might wonder what is all the fuss about drones anyway. Aren’t Americans on our way out of Afghanistan? Looking closely at the details of the agreement that Obama did not mention in his television broadcast, we find that it actually “commits Afghanistan to provide U.S. personnel access to and use of Afghan facilities through 2014 and beyond. … for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, for the purposes of training Afghan Forces and targeting the remnants of al-Qaeda” (White House, Office of the Press Secretary. May 1, 2012.)

There is every reason to believe that not only the US war in Afghanistan, but the US policy of ongoing, unending war is, under Obama’s leadership, morphing into a drone war. For years the USA has been launching drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia even though the US Congress has not declared war on those states. Since 2002 the CIA has conducted up to 321 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing up to 3,100 people. In December, 2009 US drones dropped cluster bombs on a village in Yemen and killed 40 people, 21 children and 14 women, 5 of whom were pregnant were killed.

Killing women and children and killing brown people intersects misogyny and racism upon which the military is built. A few weeks ago, a case opened in British courts of a CIA drone strike in Pakistan in March 2011 which killed up to 53 people in an open air meeting of the local jirga (parliament) in that region. US intelligence that directs drone strikes is focusing not on specific people anymore. Rather as journalist Jeremy Schahill exposes, they study the “pattern of life” of groups of people who gather in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia That is exactly how the CIA defended its drone strike: ‘The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ [Al Qaeda] -linked militants, were killed,’ even though Al Qaeda’s not known to hold its meetings in public, open air places.

Drones are a growth industry but the chief companies are familiar in the military industrial complex: Northrupp Grumman, Raytheon, and General Atomics with a powerful lobby in Washington. In February, 2012, Obama, the President most responsible for escalation of drone warfare, brought war home when signed into law a Federal Aviation Reauthorization Bill, heavily lobbied by the drone industry which stands to gain between $12 and $30 billion in sales, for the use of drones for surveillance in the U.S.A.

For years Americans were told that drones were only used for surveillance, for intelligence gathering, in places like Pakistan, all the while the US military is making enemies they then have to kill and labels them insurgents or Al Qaeda when the CIA drones bomb them to smithereens. Now the CIA turns its drones on us. So Americans (or anyone anywhere on the earth) watch your “patterns of behavior” for on our home ground, ‘we have met the enemy and they are us’.

Kathleen Barry, Sociologist and Professor Emerita of Penn State University is the author of Unmaking War, Remaking Men (2011). www.unmakingwar.net

Dozens of Students and Faculty stood quietly and turned their backs when Sonoma State University President Ruben Armiñana presented the former CEO of Citigroup, Sanford (Sandy) Weill, with an honorary doctorate during commencement May 12, 2012.

Andrew McGuire, Honorary SSU Doctorate receipent in 1996, stated, “Weill should be shunned, not honored… he’s a criminal who robbed people with a fountain pen.”

Sandy Weill merged Citicorp and Travelers Group (to form Citigroup) in 1997. To do so he convinced President Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to sign-on to Republican legislation to gut the Glass-Steagall Act, which had been enacted after the Great Depression to protect depositors’ money from risky speculation. In 1997, Sandy Weill was the highest paid executive in the United States earning $230 million.

Weill brought casino finance into the mainstream—exactly what Glass-Steagall was intended to prevent—resulting in the economic collapse of Wall Street in 2008 hurting millions of Americans and resulting in massive home foreclosures.

Time magazine listed Sandy Weill as one of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.” The International Herald Tribune (1/4/10) described Weill as once viewed as a “brilliant deal maker, while now critics cast him as the architect of a shoddily constructed, unmanageable financial supermarket whose troubles have sideswiped investors, employees and average citizens.” Robert Scheer in the Nation Magazine (4/12) describes Weill as a “ Jolly Good Scoundrel”, and “The Man who Shattered Our Economy.” (Huffington Post 11/17/10) Scheer points out how Weill bailed out of Citigroup before the crash, “laughing all the way to the bank.”
Sandy Weill paid $31 million in late 2010 for a 362-acre estate and vineyard in Sonoma County. He brought with him carpetbags of money, $12 million he donated to SSU President Ruben Armiñana’s Green Music Center. Armiñana returned the favor by making the decision to award Weill an honorary doctorate without faculty approval.
Chair of the SSU Faculty, Ben Ford, stated, “It is certainly accurate to say that the decision to recommend the honorary degrees to the CSU Board of Trustees was solely the President’s, and was not a result of a recommendation from a faculty and student committee.”
The protest was organized by students, faculty, alumni, and community groups calling themselves The Day of Shame Organizing Coalition. Supporting groups included: Occupy Santa Rosa, Occupy Petaluma, Santa Rosa Peace and Justice Center, Think Progress, Sonoma Living Wage Coalition, and Project Censored

http://shameonssu.org/category/day-of-shame/

Wall Streeters, big banks, and their proxies in political office are all reaching for the Xanax tonight. The Greek left, led by Alexis Tsipras, is saying that there’s no obligation to pay back the rotten deal handed down to the Greek people. (Image: Oneiros)

“After accepting a mandate to create a multiparty administration following inconclusive elections, Alexis Tsipras sent shock waves through financial markets by announcing the pledges Athens had made to secure rescue funds from the EU and IMF were null and void.

“The popular verdict clearly renders the bailout deal null,” said the politician, whose stridently anti-austerity coalition of the radical left, known as Syriza, sprung the surprise of the weekend’s poll, coming in second with 16.8% of the vote. “This is an historic moment for the left and the popular movement and a great responsibility for me.” Guardian, May 8, 2012

And what does this mean?

“Alarm in EU capitals is growing, with Germany in particular emphasising that Greece must stick with the terms of the agreements it has signed with lenders who have committed themselves to give a total of €240bn to the crisis-hit country.

“The prospect of protracted political instability has stoked fears that Greece is not just teetering on a political precipice but also laying the ground, however unwittingly, for its own euro exit.” Guardian, May 8, 201

The Greek left saying that the people are not obligated to pay the debt created by their leaders and Goldman in back rooms in Greece and elsewhere.

“As in the American subprime crisis and the implosion of the American International Group, financial derivatives played a role in the run-up of Greek debt. Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.

“In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come.” New York Times, February 13, 2010

A debt created through illegal means is not a debt at all. That is the basic argument. How can the people be obligated to pay (and suffer) for what their leaders did in secret with Wall Street?

The Germans are whining. German Chancellor Angela Merkel may need another of those George W. Bush (remember him) back rubs.

Time to liberate ourselves from this useless charade of bogus debt created by the ultimate criminal class, the type that steal everything that isn’t nailed down and are freed to do it again and again … financed with bailouts from we the people.

END

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The Money Party

]]> http://www.dailycensored.com/2012/05/08/just-say-no-to-illegal-debt-say-greek-leftists-forming-government/feed/ 3 http://www.dailycensored.com/2012/05/07/americas-new-slavery/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=americas-new-slavery http://www.dailycensored.com/2012/05/07/americas-new-slavery/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 16:51:30 +0000 guestwriter http://bdockdesign.com/obg/?p=24112 By Elaine Leeder

For the last fifteen years, I have been running self-help groups and classes for prisoners in a number of California and New York State prisons. When I first entered, I was struck by the glaring racial and ethnic disparity among inmates, with blacks and Latinos being the predominant groups that I encountered inside.

The racial divides manifested by this disproportionate number of people of color who are in prison looked like the contemporary form of slavery was alive and well in the American criminal justice system. When I studied the subject, I found that more black men are living in prison now than lived under slavery in 1865, the year that terrible practice officially ended.

Why the disparity? Why is it that members of minority groups receive the disproportionate share of life sentences? Why are two-thirds of all people with life sentences (66.4%—and in New York State, 83.7%!) non-white? Why, in looking at incarcerated juveniles, are 77% of them members of ethnic and racial minorities? These statistics come as no surprise to those of us who work on this issue. To many observers—beyond the evidence of just my own eyes—the survival of the slavery system behind bars is clear.

What is most frightening, however, is that the general public is totally unaware of this reality. And even among those are aware, there is seeming disinterest where there should be a mass outpouring of concern and call for change. When we compliment ourselves in this country on the long way we have come in dealing with issues of racism, we are ignoring the gross disparities in sentencing and incarceration—this outrage about which nothing is being done!

The men I work with at San Quentin State Prison in California know this fact first hand, and rail against it. But their voices and those of their families are unheard. Because they have no clout politically, this blatant racism continues to hide in plain sight. But on the inside, there is no disguising the fact or papering it over. In prison, all ethnic groups separate themselves by race and color. The whites have their own sections, as do the blacks, the Mexicans from the north and those from the south. Then there are the unaffiliated and the “others”: Filipinos, Asian Pacific Islanders, and the rest who are not part of any large group. When looking at people in the Yard as they work out, you see these racial divides shaping the prisoners’ only world.

So I wonder: When will we as a society finally confront the fact that we are still living the old racism, merely in a new form? When are we going to confront our inherent inequalities and begin to see at last that racism lives on behind the walls and bars of our nation’s prisons?

Elaine Leeder, Dean of the School Of Social Sciences at Sonoma State University, is the author of the recently published My Life With Lifers, (see mylifewithlifers.com) based on her many years of teaching and other support work with inmates at San Quentin and elsewhere.

Therefore, based on the above, I assert that citizens have lost control over the government and its employees, refusal to comply with the limitations, prohibitions, and rule of law imposed upon them under our constitutional system.Deprivation of Rights of U.S. Citizens Fathers, i.e., we now find ourselves in the surreal position that by a Bill of Attainder in the form of a President’s Executive Order it can be authorized the murder of a U.S. citizens only accused of being a “terrorist,” without the requirement of a jury trial, or even the disclosing the evidence to support the determination.  This violates the holding in both Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 5-14 (1956), and Kinsella v. U.S., 361 U.S. 234, 249 (1960)(when United States government employees act against its citizens and non citizens abroad, they can do so only in accordance with all the limitations and prohibitions imposed by Art. III, § 2, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution).

But, the benchmark of the rule of law is that citizens have only delegated both power and authority to the government and its employee, and they can only act within the U.S. Constitutional framework.  In summary, pursuant to the rules of law under our constitutional system, “[n]o man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it. It is the only supreme power in our system of government, and every man who by accepting office participates in its functions is only the more strongly bound to submit to that supremacy, and to observe the limitations which it imposes upon the exercise of the authority which it gives.” (Emphasis added). United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196, 220 (1882).  Therefore, ”[i]t is the duty of courts to be watchful for the constitutional rights of the citizen, and against any stealthy encroachments thereon.” Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 635 (1996).  See Promulgation of Unconstitutional court rules to control independence of lawyers

But, the evidence uncovered during my past years of litigation against the abuse of power in D.C., confirms that based on cronyism and financial interests of Beltway Lobbyists/Attorneys, government attorneys and judges, they have conspired to act outside of their scope of employment, authority, jurisdiction, and not in the interest of citizens of the United States.  The reality is there has been a failure of the legal profession to protect the rights of citizens.  Because of these motives not in the tradition of our constitutional system-what there acts evoke is the history of the sorry acts of German judges, lawyers and law schools violation of the rights of citizens under the German Constitution–which was a key part in aiding the inhuman acts of Hitler and NAZI, because, “[by] the time the gas vans came and the human slaughter factories were built in Auschwitz and the other death camps, the murder of the six million Jews and other persecuted minorities was done completely within the framework of German law.” Professor Michael Bazyler, The Legacy of the Holocaust and Lessons for Today: Research for a New Textbook Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law.

Thus, there is a clear and present danger to our Republic by a coup d’etate of the oligarch of the legal profession in the Beltway under both Democratic and Republican Administrations.

As James Madison, Federalist No. 48, Feb. 1, 1788, wrote “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”Presentation by I Rodriguez to Members of General Assembly of Virginia

Readers might remember the distasteful case of gun-for-hire, former Superintendent of the Philadelphia School District and New Orleans School District, Paul Vallas and his erstwhile dismantling of New Orleans’ school district after Hurricane Katrina.  Vallas was on hand to help fire the entire New Orleans unionized teacher’s labor force and impose conservative, Paul T. Hill’s dreadful disaster capitalist policies on the fledgling school district (http://dailycensored.com/2009/12/15/teachers-unions-and-charter-schools-taking-race-to-the-top-money-and-starving-public-schools-their-teachers-and-students/).

 As I wrote back in 2009, this was all an effort to smash and grab districts all over the country and force them to submit to privatization through charter schools.

Vallas was also very successful as a serial dismantler in Philadelphia where he once ran the schools with similar success for the business community, the philanthro-pirates and reactionary forces bent on denying our nation’s children an education (http://dailycensored.com/2010/02/12/taking-a-school-field-trip-philly-schools-and-imagine-2014/).

Perhaps one of Vallas great successes for the one-percent was his work on behalf of the privatizers in Haiti after the earthquake where he was paid a hefty sum to sprinkle his magic privatization dust all over the earthquake torn country.  Vallas loves natural disasters and is always on hand when disaster capitalism is in the works; Haiti was no different.

According to Doorwall:

“Along with financial support from the IDB and other donors, the Haitian government will also receive technical assistance from leading experts in education reform. One key advisor will be Paul Vallas, who led the transformation of the New Orleans public schools system after Hurricane Katrina.”(http://itsdc16.iadb.org/news/detail.cfm?lang=en&artid=7150&id=7150).

Doorwall also claimed, correctly:

“By always appearing to be  ”saving” people and systems, the new breed of venture philanthropists find tremendous opportunities in places like Haiti to reform them along lines which will be profitable in the future (http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/29/haiti-converting-to-charter-schools-more-disaster-capitalism/).

Now, Paul Vallas, educational executioner for the one-percent, is back in the news.  This time it is Philadelphia again but the game plan are schools all over the world.

From Quebec to England, from Chile to the United States, from Spain to Greece and from Italy to France, Western capitaslist countries are refusing to provide opportunities for working people and the poor to get an education.  The rulers of these countries know that their time is limited and that education, and especially an education for liberation, will move the clock forward on the demise of the one percent. 

The attack on public education is a “package deal” that includes k-12 and higher institutions of learning.  Privatization is the public policy but privation is the desired learning outcome.

May 4, 2012

Philadelphia Public Schools Being Dismantled

Larry Miller’s blog: http://millermps.wordpress.com

Who’s Killing Philly Public Schools?

Daniel Denvir

City Paper

Evan M. Lopez and Neal Santos

Thomas Knudsen, the man who was temporarily put in charge of Philadelphia schools in January, was running late to last Monday’s press conference.

He had been delivering the same presentation all day, and doomsday rumors had already leaked: The plan he was about to lay out would dismantle the central office and parcel out school management, at least in part, to private companies.

Knudsen, paid $150,000 to hold the newly created post of Chief Recovery Officer through June, made a point of shaking the hand of every single reporter in the room before beginning his presentation. “Philadelphia public schools is not the school district,” he announced, laying out the five-year plan before the School Reform Commission (SRC). “There’s a redefinition, and we’ll get to that later.”

He got to it, using terms like “portfolios,” “modernization,” “right-sizing,” “entrepreneurialism” and “competition.” In short, it was a plan to shutter 40 schools next year, and an additional six every year thereafter until 2017. The remaining schools would be herded into “achievement networks” of 20 to 30 schools; public and private groups would compete to manage the networks. And the central office would be reduced to a skeleton crew of about 200. (About 1,000-plus positions existed in 2010, and district HQ has already eliminated more than a third of those.) Charter schools, the plan projects, would teach an estimated 40 percent of students by 2017.

The plan is bold — after all, closing just eight schools this year prompted an uproar. It’s also terrifying, says former Philadelphia School District superintendent David Hornbeck, considering the poor academic records and corruption at many charter schools. “What is being proposed, in effect, is ‘charterizing’ the whole district, when there is a lot of evidence that at best [charters] have no positive effect on student achievement, and there is a lot of evidence they cost more,” he tells City Paper. And “charters in many instances, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, have served private interests — sometimes of public officials.”

What’s even more startling than the drastic overhaul proposal is who engineered it. The plan was prepared with the assistance of Boston Consulting Group, a major global-business consultancy and school “right-sizing” mastermind. Boston’s previous accomplishments include recommending that New Orleans, which has decimated its teachers’ union and put most schools under charter control, create the exact same species of achievement networks in 2006. Last year, Boston also recommended that Australian education leaders close schools and cut spending. Indeed, Boston recommendations seem like a forgone conclusion: Their website touts “reform” hallmarks like evaluating student achievement through standardized tests and undermining traditional teacher certification.

It’s unclear what Boston Consulting Group actually did with the $1.5 million contract paid for by the William Penn Foundation, given their apparent cut-and-paste approach to tackling Philly’s school problems. Indeed, a former Boston employee has publicly described the company’s approach as merely “force-fit[ting] analysis to a conclusion” — in this case, the dismantling of the school system.

Another goal of Boston could be enriching its allies, or scoring them political victories. Former Boston executives and consultants now hold senior posts at charter-school networks like KIPP — which could well apply to manage a Philly achievement network — and Broad Center, an urban schools executive recruiter and trainer and a leading proponent of corporate-inspired reform.

Boston Consulting may describe itself as an innovator, with its private-sector-inspired experiments. But to longtime Philly public school watchers, this just looks like the latest attack on the city’s public education. Since 2001 — when the commonwealth swooped in and took over, but did not fix, the district — Philly schools have suffered the blatant mismanagement of former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, the corruption of charter operators, the unchecked greed of for-profit education companies and, in recent years, debilitating state budget cuts and a leadership vacuum from the district and the city. Each of these players has done damage; none has come close to addressing the district’s core problems of insufficient funding and widespread poverty among students and families. If Philly’s public school system does eventually crumble, all of these culprits will share a portion of the blame.

“Executive skills and experience.” That was what Knudsen was supposed to bring to the table as chief recovery officer, according to SRC chairman Pedro Ramos. After all, he had turned around a financially troubled Philadelphia Gas Works. But “executive skills” might not be enough to heal the school district. Setting aside academic problems — only about 60 percent of students graduate; less than 60 percent score proficient in reading and math; and 80 percent are “economically disadvantaged,” a key indicator of poor performance — the district’s financial woes appear almost insurmountable. Philadelphia already raised property taxes 3.85 percent last year, to direct an estimated $53 million to city schools. Ultimately, Knudsen and his team will need to close a $218 million deficit for the coming year, part of a $1.1 billion cumulative deficit by 2017.

But even Boston’s plan, to butcher and sell off the district for its parts, is predicated upon a reluctant City Council forking over $91 million in additional property-tax revenue. A separate ruling by the State Tax Equalization Board, which found the city’s valuation methods to be illegal, could cost the district tens of millions more.

Mayor Michael Nutter has called on Council to approve the additional funding — and announced his support for Knudsen’s plan. It is “stark but realistic,” he said, suggesting that critics “grow up and deal with” it.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan, however, called it “a cynical, right-wing and market-driven plan to privatize public education.” And New York University education historian Diane Ravitch said Knudsen’s plan has no basis in research, and criticized Nutter for giving up on schools. “I think he should be advocating for public education,” she told CP.

The plan cuts $156 million from personnel costs and $149 million from payments to charters. And Knudsen threatened to outsource all custodial, maintenance and transportation work to private companies unless union workers could underbid them. “There are other people out there who do these things, if not better, then at least less expensively,” he said.

This seems to now be the mantra governing public education in cities like Philadelphia: Other people do these things maybe not better, but cheaper.

Last summer’s $629 million shortfall, fueled by $1 billion in statewide budget cuts to education delivered by Republican legislators and Gov. Tom Corbett, led to the elimination of 3,800 teacher and staff positions, including 1,300 layoffs. Layoffs have continued this school year: About 100 nurses got pink slips, along with 90 school police officers and 43 bilingual counseling assistants. Advocates say the counselors are crucial to preventing violence at schools like South Philly High, where the district pledged big changes after attacks on Asian-American students in 2009. South Philly lost more than $1.5 million in funding this year.

Cuts have also forced districts statewide to depend evermore on property taxes, exacerbating the inequity between rich and poor municipalities.

CP asked Knudsen if the five-year plan would address the district’s central problems: too few teachers, too few school police, too few extracurriculars, too few libraries.

“The things that other networks do in other parts of the country,” said Knudsen, “is that these networks attract resources.” It was a startling admission: Like high-end charters, Philly schools would panhandle for donations from rich people. On prodding, Knudsen conceded, philanthropy wasn’t the only hope. The economy could also get better.

But by then Boston’s decentralization plan will have irreparably transformed the district.

“There just isn’t the political will to give the resources to people who aren’t perceived as having political power,” says Nijmie Dzurinko, former head of the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU). That has been true for decades. But this Sunday at Mother Bethel AME Church, a gathering of about 150 teachers, parents and community members — organized by the church-based advocacy group POWER — pledged a fight. “The mayor, the governor and the SRC are not making the right decisions for our children,” Rev. Kevin Johnson of Bright Hope Baptist Church preached to the energized pews.

On Aug. 18, 2011, just four days before she would resign, Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman sauntered into an auditorium to the tune of Sade’s “Is It a Crime?” and delivered a provocative defense of her controversial tenure to a group of district principals. “Is it a crime to stand up for children instead of stooping down into the political sandbox and selling our children for a politician’s campaign victory?” She dared the SRC to fire her — knowing that her departure was already being arranged.

It was the capstone of a melodramatic, and traumatic, three-year tenure. CP would soon reveal that Ackerman spent taxpayer money on pro-Ackerman propaganda, including protest signs and a farewell tribute video produced by three communications staffers who collectively took home $440,000 in salaries.

Ackerman liked to pay administrators generously, but she said it paid off. That summer, Philadelphia schools celebrated their ninth straight year of test-score gains.

But the acrimony, protest and theater overshadowed a less entertaining problem. The month before, the Public School Notebook revealed that the state was investigating 29 Philadelphia schools (among 89 statewide) for cheating on standardized tests. By March 2012, the scope of the scandal had widened dramatically: Citywide, 56 schools — including one in five district schools — are under investigation, including 11 of the city’s top-tier Vanguard Schools.

And there was the financial problem: District chief financial officer Michael Masch and Ackerman did not like each other, and reportedly stopped discussing budgetary matters in spring 2010. That October, Masch reported that the district faced a shortfall of more than $250 million as stimulus money ran out. Yet by January 2011, he still insisted to the SRC: “We don’t have a budget crisis.”

At the same time, money was flying out the door. That month, the district paid out $63 million to Morgan Stanley Capital Services, Goldman Sachs Capital Markets and Wells Fargo Bank to cancel a budgetary gamble gone horribly wrong. In 2004, at the height of the pre-recession financial deregulation adventure, the district took out something called “interest-rate swaps” on a number of bonds. The swaps were supposed to protect the district from high interest rates. But interest rates crashed, and the district lost an astonishing $71.87 million, according to the liberal Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center.

Then came Corbett’s announcement of $1 billion in education cuts. The district’s shortfall grew to $629 million. Critics pilloried Ackerman for poor planning and for spending money on pet projects. Ackerman, on her way out with a $900,000 severance package, blamed Masch.

The public memory of Ackerman is defined by her authoritarianism and grandstanding. Low points include accusations launched against Asian student victims at South Philly High, retaliation against whistleblowers speaking out on improper contracting, tumult following the removal of a popular principal at West Philly High, the persecution of Audenried teacher Hope Moffett, who spoke out against charter conversions, and, of course, the propaganda machine. Ackerman’s legacy is still being hashed out: the Renaissance Schools turnaround program for low-performing schools, which turned some schools over to charters, is still in effect.

But, as that drama played out, most people forgot one important thing: The state, not the city, was in charge the entire time — and it still is.

On the morning of Nov. 29, 2001, hundreds of students walked out of class and into Philadelphia streets to protest the state takeover — enacted via the General Assembly in purported response to budget woes and poor performance — and a plan to put for-profit Edison Schools Inc. in charge of the central office and 60 low-performing schools.

The takeover, originally scheduled for Nov. 30, was pushed back to Dec. 21. But the walkouts, coordinated by PSU and Youth United for Change, continued on Dec. 18, and U.S Rep. Chaka Fattah sought, and failed to get, an injunction blocking Edison contract. He alleged a conflict of interest: Former Gov. Tom Ridge had contracted Edison to study privatization, they had recommended privatization and they were now poised to take the business.

Street, too, criticized the takeover, but he soon reached a new deal with Ridge’s replacement, Gov. Mark Schweiker: The city would get $75 million in aid and two appointments, instead of one, to the five-member SRC; Edison would not take over district headquarters; and the number of schools turned over to them would be reduced.

Even scaled back, it would be American public education’s greatest foray into privatization, and the largest state takeover, too.

The protests against the new SRC continued into 2002, and City Council, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, PSU and NAACP filed more lawsuits. But on April 18, a student blockade couldn’t stop privatization: Edison got 20 schools, and 22 schools were handed over to other private companies.

“I’m a corporate guy, and the bottom line is that you have a firm that has systemwide experience,” said then-SRC chairman James Nevels at the time. “What we wanted to do was capture that experience.” That experience included Chester Upland, where Nevels had served on the state-appointed Board of Control that gave Edison control of eight of nine district schools. Four years later, Edison left Chester. After a lackluster performance, the for-profit “educational management organizations” left Philly, too.

Former Mayor Ed Rendell, then running for governor, endorsed the takeover, but told the Inquirer, “We must not lose sight of what was the real issue . . . adequate funding for all of Pennsylvania’s schools.”

Of course, it’s been a long time since Philly schools had close to adequate funding — and for the past decade, city leaders have not fought much to rectify that. Amid the tumult of protests, Street terminated Philly’s last vocal demand for more money when he withdrew a federal lawsuit contending that state underfunding to Philadelphia schools constituted race discrimination.

The lawsuit, filed under feisty Superintendent David Hornbeck, tried to accomplish in federal court what had already failed at the state level. Pennsylvania Supreme Court had in 1999 ruled against two lawsuits — one filed by the Philadelphia School District, the city, the NAACP and parents; the second filed by the Association of Rural and Small Schools — contending that Harrisburg’s inequitable funding violated the state constitution’s requirement that the “General Assembly … provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”

The district faced an $80 million budget shortfall at the time, exacerbated by policy changes under Ridge and Gov. Robert Casey that reduced the share of education funding accorded to poor districts. The funding gap between Philly and suburban school districts had doubled in just six years, and Philly had needs that wealthy schools did not — involving day care, security, immigrant students who do not speak English and, most importantly, students who come to school with more problems and less preparation.

“It’s not like prior to that Philadelphia got its fair share,” Hornbeck tells CP from Baltimore, where he now lives. “It’s just that they got even more gouged.”

Hornbeck was a civil rights leader for Philadelphia’s children: With Rendell’s backing, he refused to make further cuts and threatened to let the schools shutdown. In fact, the initial move toward state takeover, 1998′s Act 46, was the response of an angry legislature to block Hornbeck from carrying out this threat. In the process, teachers lost the right to strike. After Hornbeck’s June 2000 resignation, there would be no serious demand for fair funding from a city or school district leader.

In 2001, Hornbeck took his fight statewide, founding Good Schools Pennsylvania to mobilize behind Gov. Rendell’s plan for increased funding. Today, school and city leadership implement Corbett’s plans instead of fighting them.

“The real culprit,” says Hornbeck, “has less to do with any kind of mismanagement at the school district and much more to do with the continued shortchanging of the district in financial terms by the state. The biggest indictment that can be brought against folks in the city is the lack of advocacy, aggressiveness, on behalf of the kids.”

In 2002, poor students of color became the talk of Washington. President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring aggressive interventions at schools where students failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress on tests.

Testifying in favor of the law was Superintendent Paul Vallas, who took over Philly schools in 2002. Vallas broke with teachers’ unions and superintendents across the state, who correctly predicted that the law would become a hated one. They foresaw that teachers would give up an ever-larger part of the school day to teach to the test (or as we now see, cheat to the test), while science, arts, social studies, physical education and recess were winnowed out.

Vallas eagerly embraced the new law. He turned over three schools — Shoemaker, Pickett and Thomas — to Mastery Charter Schools, a private nonprofit, and paid millions of dollars to Kaplan for a test-prep curriculum.

In recent years, President Barack Obama has doubled down on NCLB, despite criticizing the law during his 2008 campaign. His “Race to the Top” grants condition federal funding on increasing the importance of high-stakes tests, and on the removal of constraints on charter growth.

So the state took over Philly schools, and the federal government took on a growing role in classroom management. Neither, however, would take responsibility for funding the schools. Gov. Rendell, at least, did try. In June 2006, the legislature voted to ask an important question: Just how much money did Pennsylvania schools need, and how much were they receiving? Pennsylvania, according to the “costing out” study, needed to spend $4.6 billion more on schools per year, a 26.8 percent increase. Philly, with a poor tax base and dire needs, required nearly $1 billion more each year. Armed with data, Rendell in 2008 cajoled the legislature into directing resources to under-funded districts.

“That was my line in the sand every year in the budget,” Rendell tells CP. “That’s why in 2008 and 2009 we had the long budget deadlocks. And I eventually won.”

However, as Corbett eagerly points out, the second year’s funding was backed by $654 million in temporary stimulus dollars. His cuts have, for now, reversed that progress.

“He’s dealing with the effects of the recession,” says Rendell. And “dealing with the fact that he took a no-tax pledge. … He told us exactly what he’s going to do and he’s living up to his word. For better or worse.”

The state legislature passed a bill legalizing privately managed public schools in 1997. Since then, though, charter schools have failed to live up to their utopian promise. A Stanford University study found that students at almost half of Pennsylvania’s charters performed “significantly worse” than their peers at traditional schools.

Still, there are good charters. Hundreds of students enter a lottery each year for a seat at Center City’s Independence Charter School, a top-tier school whose board is packed with well-connected, affluent members. This, presumably, is the sort of fundraising prowess that Knudsen hopes for.

But other charters depend on young and inexperienced teachers who are asked to work very, very hard. “The workload is really high,” says one Mastery teacher, a Teach for America participant. This will not be his career. “Most of the teachers are under 35. That pace is not sustainable.”

It may not be sustainable for the district either. Last month, Commonwealth Court ruled the district illegally capped enrollment at the Walter D. Palmer Learning Partners Charter School; it must pay out $1.3 million as a result. The implications could be disastrous: If the district can’t negotiate charter growth, it cannot budget.