Free Learner

Widespread American protests

Here is an excellent 5-minute report on RT (Russia Today, a global news network) about the Occupy Wall St protests now going on in multiple US cities:

 

Not only is this extremely thoughtful reporting, in sharp contrast to what you see in the US media, but their guest is James Corbett (woot!), an alternative blogger / reporter.  (I've followed him for some time, he's a really good guy and does some great work, check out his site.)  RT frequently has such alternative researchers on its network.  One of the reasons it does that, admittedly, is to poke a finger in the eye of the US establishment, which fears these independent muckrakers. 

American and British media, which have global reach, have been waging information warfare for decades, more or less unopposed by any other major government.  (al-Jazeera, which seemed to have so much promise early on, seems now to be afraid of United States disapproval, possibly because we openly targeted their offices and reporters during the second Iraq War.)  Now there is RT to oppose Anglo-American media domination, and there's no question RT has its own agenda.  But because the US is an empire without any clothes, all they really have to do to oppose us is to speak the truth.

Max and Stacy now report on RT three days a week, in their usual entertaining style... do check them out!

9/11: on the missing gold and silver

One of the first articles I ever read about gold had to do with the gold which apparently disappeared in the wreckage of the World Trade Center.  It seems, based on newspaper articles, that there had been $950 million worth of gold and silver under WTC 4 on 9/11.  It was located a few floors below street level, protected within bomb-proof vaults.  While severely damaged, WTC 4 did not completely collapse, and the metal should have been fully recoverable, even if it had melted.  Gold and silver are fairly inert and wouldn't have reacted with other materials.

Giuliani, however, was quoted saying that around $230 million worth of precious metals had been recovered.  The question was, what happened to the other gold and silver?  Doesn't that leave hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of precious metals missing?  Had there been a heist of massive proportions, under cover of the attacks on that day?

One answer, the one that seems most likely to me, is not as thrilling.  These vaults were apparently Comex vaults (Comex = commodities exchange).  In the metals investment world, it's widely known that the Comex does not have all the gold and silver they claim to have.  They allow people to think they're buying gold or silver, when in fact the physical metal they believe they're buying does not actually exist in Comex vaults.  See, usually people will buy and sell this supposed gold and/or silver without ever taking real possession of the stuff, because that's a major hassle-- you need Brinks trucks and insurance and you pay fees, and they don't make it convenient by any means.  Basically, all these people think they own metal, but they're just taking Comex's word for it.  "Oh sure," Comex says, "we've got your 100 ounces of gold here, right in our vaults... it's got your name on it, scout's honor."  But the GATA organization and some recent testimony provide evidence that Comex doesn't have that metal.  Because (in recent years) only about 1% of purchasers actually demand to take physical possession for themselves, the Comex has never been definitively caught in its lies.  It's like a bank that only has $1 for every $100 customers believe they have on deposit.  (And don't think that isn't happening too!)

This 9/11 story of the missing metals suggests that even back in 2001 -- when gold and silver were dirt cheap and nobody wanted them, when demand was almost non-existent and you could hardly give the stuff away -- even back then it would appear that the Comex had claimed to possess more physical gold and silver than it really had.  Specifically, they had claimed to have 3 or 4 times more than they did.  Today, that recent testimony I mentioned above suggests that they claim to have 100 times more than they actually do.  And that, my friends, is a balloon waiting to be popped.  The jig will be up soon.

A heist makes a great Hollywood movie, but I'm afraid this is just your generic Wall St fraud.

My new favorite quote

 

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing."

- Gamal Abdel Nasser

 

A graveyard of paper currencies

Check out this post, which has a photo gallery of currencies which collapsed-- i.e. money which died.  The first example is a 10 Billion Dinar note.  When a government is printing currency with "10 Billion" on it you know things are not good.  I'm reminded of a guy in Zimbabwe who held up a sign: "Starving Billionaire".

One thing to notice is that it's a pretty long list, and it's by no means complete.  There were two instances of French hyperinflation, but only French note is in the list.  The Continental (currency of the American colonies) is not there, nor is the Confederate currency.  Poland isn't in the photo list, but they have experienced hyperinflation.  A few early Chinese paper failures are not there; I believe the Chinese invented the concept of totally unbacked currency, and were no doubt the first to experience a fiat currency collapse.

Among currencies that are not backed by anything, meaning that governments may freely create as much of the stuff as they like, a sudden loss of confidence in that currency is a common historical event, and an inevitable one.  People argue about the life expectancy of an unbacked currency, but I've not seen estimates above 40 years, and the US dollar has been unbacked for 40 years next month.  The paper dollar is past its life expectancy.

Maybe worrying about hyperinflation seems like doomer or survivalist thinking to some, but hyperinflation is neither a rare nor a surprising event from a historical perspective.  Just look at those photos.

 

Mass psychosis

This is a horrifying but interesting article on the use of anti-psychotic medications in the US.  It begins:

Has America become a nation of psychotics?

Apparently, in 2008, anti-psychotics surpassed every other category of drug -- even cholesterol-lowering statin drugs -- to become the number one most prescribed type of medication in the US.

Some other shocking statistics from the article:

• In a recent study, 1 in 5 children who saw a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an anti-psychotic drug.
• Because bipolar disorder can be treated with the newer (still patented) anti-psychotics, diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children rose by 40 times between 1994 and 2003.
• 18 of the 20 psychiatrists who wrote the current clinical treatment guidelines for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia had ties to drug companies.
• The number of Americans now classified as disabled by mental illness, enough to qualify for Social Security benefits, has more than doubled between 1987 and 2007, from 1 in 184 to 1 in 76.  This casts doubt on the efficacy of all new (expensive, patented) psychiatric drugs in general.

Anti-psychotics are inadequately studied in children, and may cause obesity and diabetes.  As with many psychiatric drugs there is also a risk that in a small minority of people they may cause violence and/or suicide.

Yep, there's a mass psychosis going on here, but it's not the sort the shrinks are seeing in their patients.

"You are the bad guys..."

I found a great rant in the form of a letter to Obama, titled Killing Old People Is Fiscally Responsible:

Let's face it: any bargain seems to look good to you, as long as it kills people. That makes you tough, I guess. You have a list of Americans to assassinate. You have six wars going, and more in the pipeline. You've made clear that Israel murdering unarmed aid workers trying to reach Gaza would be A-OK with you. And "pain" is just the price that other people will have to pay to do without healthcare, food, a roof, a coat, or -- for that matter -- hope. Of all your slogans, we seem to be left with Audacity alone, standing by itself among the ruins.

And the next couple paragraphs are even better... give it a read.

Waiting for Superman

That's the title of a documentary [watch the trailer] about failing schools in inner city neighborhoods.  It's stirred up a lot of criticism because it blames the failure of these schools largely on teacher's unions, and because it gives an intentionally distorted view of the success of charter schools.  80% of charter schools are the same or worse than their public school counterparts, but those featured in the film happen to be wildly successful.

Partway through the film, Bill Gates suddenly shows up.  The second I saw him on screen the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I realized I'd been had.  My brain clicked into gear on the topic: Identify the hidden agenda.  And I think the ulterior motive can be summarized as "Megacorp wants to raise your children."  Not only does this documentary argue that schools should be privatized, but also that kids should be going to school all year round, 8 hours a day, or-- better yet, as featured in the film-- to boarding schools.  Why not just imprison your future workers from middle school on, and put them in corporate-run "boarding schools" which can provide "better educational outcomes" than kids left at home in inner city neighborhoods?  All for the good of the kiddies, right?  And toward the destruction of their families and communities.

[This isn't really new, I suppose.  We owe K-12 schooling to Rockefellers and Carnegies and their ilk, who still exercise a great deal of control through their foundations.  And we've seen a constant expansion of hours spent in schools over the past century, most recently with the disappearance of half-day kindergarten in favor of full-day kindergarten.]

Anyone who homeschools knows that it doesn't take that much time to teach math and reading.  Kids do not need to go to school 8 hours a day all year in order to learn.  The people who want children locked away for their entire childhoods are at best useful idiots; more likely, they like the economic benefits of free child care; at worst (here I'm thinking of Gates and other elites), they're hoping to re-shape society according to whatever utopian zealotry they're currently prey to.

Hidden agendas aside, it's a heartbreaking film.  It follows a few bright, thoughtful kids as they're consigned to schools that will decimate their chances for attaining a college degree and/or a comfortable life.  Or, in some cases, they're not consigned, because they were holding a lucky number at the lottery.  The randomness, however intellectually defensible it may be, feels like an outrage when you're waiting to see if these kids get the luck of the draw.  And the rotten schools are breath-takingly rotten-- high schools where the incoming students have a 3rd grade reading level on average, and a very solid majority never graduate.

The kids in these neighborhoods are mostly going to stay in these neighborhoods, or ones like them.  The idea that public schooling is a force for equality has no empirical standing as far as I can see.  Consider, by contrast, the results from a 2009 sample of over 11,000 homeschooling students, from all 50 states, who took standardized tests through one of 15 different testing services.  They were scored on reading, language, and math, and these results were combined into a "core" score.  Some of the results:

 

There was little difference between the results of homeschooled boys and girls on core scores.

Boys—87th percentile
Girls—88th percentile

Household income had little impact on the results of homeschooled students.

$34,999 or less—85th percentile
$35,000–$49,999—86th percentile
$50,000–$69,999—86th percentile
$70,000 or more—89th percentile

The education level of the parents made a noticeable difference, but the homeschooled children of non-college educated parents still scored in the 83rd percentile, which is well above the national average.

Neither parent has a college degree—83rd percentile
One parent has a college degree—86th percentile
Both parents have a college degree—90th percentile

Whether either parent was a certified teacher did not matter.

Certified (i.e., either parent ever certified)—87th percentile
Not certified (i.e., neither parent ever certified)—88th percentile

Parental spending on home education made little difference.

Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentile

The extent of government regulation on homeschoolers did not affect the results.

Low state regulation—87th percentile
Medium state regulation—88th percentile
High state regulation—87th percentile

In a previous study of homeschooling, reading scores were the same for white and minority students, while in math white students scored in the 82nd percentile, and minority students scored in the 77th percentile.  By comparison, that math difference is around 30 percentile points in the public schools nationally, not 5.

What's the excuse for the flat playing field among homeschoolers and the drastically tilted one among the public schools?

Given high (and rising) unemployment rates among those with less education and among minorities -- i.e. people similar to those featured in Waiting for Superman -- you have to wonder why homeschooling and tiny co-op educational arrangements are not more common in poor urban neighborhoods.  In Detroit we have communal urban agriculture, which has gotten a little bit of press.  Communal urban co-op tutoring and homeschooling would seem to be a logical thing to attempt.  Where a few shared vegetable plots have been noted to reduce crime, introduce neighbors, and generally improve morale, I would think that sharing in the education of a neighborhood's children would be even better at building cohesion.  And they'd be virtually certain to do a better job than the failing schools in inner cities.

Not so much waiting for Bill Gates in a Superman costume, as waiting for Mom, Dad, and Grandma.

 

When college doesn't pay

When I was in high school, there were always posters hanging up showing how average income rises with each level of education attained.  Although those were just aggregate statistics, it was always thought of as a guarantee, both by the students and the teachers.  But of course, it isn't a guarantee at all.

I ran across this chart today, showing yearly income:

You'll notice that education seems to benefit men a lot more than women.  Most of the income difference is simple discrimination (women make somewhere around 75 cents vs. a man's dollar for equivalent work in the US).  But part of this has to do with differences in what men and women major in.  For instance, women hear that education and health care are the only booming areas of the economy, and they're seen by society as natural care-takers in a way men are not.  So they more often major in things like social work, early childhood education, or nursing, which don't pay as well as, say, an MBA.  The above chart was created in 2006 from census data; in 2006, 35% of MBA students were women.

You also have to consider that while incomes are higher with a college degree, if you went to a "good" school you might be paying $500/month or $6,000/year in student loan payments for many years after graduation.

And this chart does not take into account that some of the PhD's, for instance, didn't attain this degree until they were around 30, if not older.  If you live in a college town you're probably familiar with the long-term graduate student lifestyle.  Even if the income is much higher after that dissertation is finally defended and a job is found, it isn't clear that it would make up for 12 years of very low income.  And I hear it takes more like 6 years just to get a bachelor's degree these days, not 4.  Not that you couldn't do it in 4, but the average amount of time taken to attain a bachelor's has been increasing.

You'll also notice that those with some college are not in much better shape than those with a high school diploma.  I think there are a lot of kids who go to college because that's just what's done, in the middle class.  Don't think, just do it.  But if you don't know what you want to do for a career, you might spend 6 years fiddling around, racking up debts, and never get a degree.  Now you have 6 years' lost income and debts to be repaid-- debts which cannot be wiped out by bankruptcy.

It's something people should think about, not just sleepwalk into because hey, they're middle class!  Of course they're going straight into college!  Some kids may have a career plan that might not include college.  One of the smartest and most successful people I've met in recent years was the electrician whose company installed our generator.  He also drag-raced cars and told us about a recent race in what seemed to me like another language, and involved a lot of numbers.  I don't know for sure that he didn't have a college degree, but he would not have required one to do what he did; his educational path would've involved apprenticeship and certifications.

Many parents, though, are so certain of their children attending college that they've pre-purchased the credit hours at the state university, often many years in advance.  Turns out that's probably not a good idea, as the pre-paid plans are being mismanaged in some states, and do not contain actual guarantees in most states.

I imagine my kids will go to college, but I'd like it to be a deliberate, carefully considered choice.

 

 

The Middle East feminist revolution

One of the top most-viewed items on al-Jazeera English in the past several days has been Naomi Wolf's article The Middle East Feminist Revolution:

 

[W]omen were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements, from those of the 1960s to the recent student riots in the United Kingdom. Egyptian women also organised, strategised, and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

. . .

Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers - as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating; campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organisations; and running meetings.

. . .

[T]he historical record of what happens when educated women participate in freedom movements suggests that those in the region who would like to maintain iron-fisted rule are finished.

 

And from another well-read al-Jazeera piece:

 

 

One of the women featured in the photos, Gigi Ibrahim, was quoted as follows:

I started [my political activism] by just talking to people involved [in the labour movement]. Then I became more active and the whole thing became addictive. I went to meetings and took part in protests. I learned very quickly that most of the strikes in the labour movement were started by women [my emphasis].

. . .

I was in Tahrir Square on February 2, when pro-Mubarak thugs attacked us with petrol bombs and rocks. That was the most horrific night. I was trapped in the middle of the square. The outskirts of the square were like a war zone. The more things escalated the more determined we became not to stop. Many people were injured and many died and that pushed us to go on and not give up.

. . .

The women were also taking care of the wounded in makeshift clinics in the square. Some women were on the front line throwing rocks with the men. I was on the front line documenting the battle with my camera. It was like nothing that I have ever seen or experienced before.

 

Tonight protests began in Saubi Arabia, the country which, in all the world, is the most oppressive toward women.  Friday, March 11, is being called a "Day of Rage" in Saudi Arabia, though it's not clear how large such protests might be, considering the medieval sort of control the government exerts over its people.  Those planning the protests, according to Robert Fisk, intend to place women on the front lines, in the belief that Saudi police might be less willing to open fire with live ammunition.  It's not clear to me whether Saudi women would have any choice about taking place in the front lines of such protests, as they have virtually no rights in that country and are treated as their husbands' or fathers' slaves.  However, even if they go to the front lines unwillingly, it will surely change their perception of themselves.  If they are shot at on the front lines, the revolution becomes their own; they become founding members whether they wanted the role or not.  Revolutionary spirit spreads, and not only from one nation to another.  I hope the Saudi women will be safe from bullets and nerve gas, and that they begin to recognize their own power.

 

Global insurrection

It's been fascinating, watching this wave of revolutionary spirit catch fire across northern Africa and around the globe (now including places in China and perhaps the US).  Max Keiser has dubbed it GIABO: Global Insurrection Against Banker Occupation.  Futures speculators and central bank money printing are largely responsible (though weather plays a role too) in the skyrocketing price of food.  Since people in northern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia pay a high percentage of their total income for food (frequently more than 40% and sometimes more than 60%), this inflation is devastating.  Whatever the injustice and inequality has been in a given nation, it was the bankers' inflationary policies and speculative bets which pushed the people over the edge into desperation.  It turns out starving people are not much afraid of tear gas or even live ammunition.  If you watch this video of the Egyptian revolt, you'll hear a man saying "I haven't food, I haven't anything... I will die today!"

  

I'm reminded of something Robert Fisk (Middle East journalist) once said: When the people have lost their fear, you can't put fear back into them.  Those in power can no longer cow them.  In Libya the Air Force is bombing its own civilian population, and the Navy is firing into towns from offshore, but still they go on protesting.

On the lighter side, check out this Slate news blurb:

In an act of intercontinental solidarity, an Egyptian has ordered a pizza for Wisconsin protesters, reports Politico. The call from Africa is just one of many streaming into the Madison, Wisc., pizza parlor Ian's from all over the world. So far, people from 12 countries and 38 states have rung up looking to help get free pizza to the Wisconsin protesters clustered in the Capitol....  [S]taff members fielded calls from as far away as Turkey, Korea, Finland, China, and Australia.

Many people in the US are very anti-union, but "the people" all over the world are going to have to go back to collective actions of various sorts, in order to reverse a level of economic inequality not seen since the 1920s.

Depressingly, I just read the book "Deer Hunting with Jesus," describing the white, rural, working poor.  They feel no solidarity whatsoever with anyone poor in any other nation, and they do not take collective actions nor approve of unions.  They seem to believe on some level that they are poor because they deserve to be poor, because in America, the land of opportunity, the best and brightest can rise to wealth and fame.  This is the darker flip side to the American dream: the unarticulated shame felt by many of the poor.  For the people in Joe Bageant's book, collectives such as unions would be seen as holding strong people back while rewarding the weaker members, in violation of the American ideal of individualism.  I don't see these folks joining the Global Insurrection until their children are starving.  That's why the American leg of the GIABO has begun with an existing union, which already had an organizational structure in place.  But the revolt will spread, that's for sure.  The government is still pretending we don't have inflation, even though an MIT study called the Billion Price Project says inflation is running at 10.6% annualized, so far this year.  Nothing says "disgruntled populace" like a 10% paycut by stealth.  But the government's bald-faced lies about inflation allow them not to increase Social Security, nor food stamps payments.  The policy is: squeeze the poor and lavish brand-new money on the banks.  Who thinks that sounds sustainable?