Saturday, November 17, 2018

The Pace of Trump's Lies is Increasing!

Counting Mendacious Coup?


Trump has been boasting today that he has answered all of the Special Counsel’s questions - "and I did it all by myself,” he smiled like a good little boy who had done his “big boy” task.  But we know that is just one more falsehood from a person so out of touch with himself and reality that he cannot utter words without dissembling or fabrication.  So sad.  So moronic - for none of us would ever have taken pen to paper while under investigation without a lawyer(s) sitting next to us.  

If there is a pattern to Trump’s quantity of lies, it might be discernible, thanks to Daniel Dale from the Toronto Star.  He counts them.  Not an envious job. Like counting the flies gorging on the murdered body of the Presidency.

But his spirit of deceit took a MAGA-jump in the last month.

From the Toronto Star and reporter/statitician Daniel Dale, who is the Washington Bureau Chief:  “815 false claims: The staggering scale of Donald Trump’s re-midterm dishonesty.”  

For the entire article and list of 815 falsehoods, please read the article

“It took Donald Trump until the 286th day of his presidency to make 815 false claims.
“He just made another 815 false claims in a month."
“In the 31 days leading up to the midterm elections on Nov. 6, Trump went on a lying spree like we have never seen before even from him — an outrageous barrage of serial dishonesty in which he obliterated all of his old records.
“How bad have these recent weeks been?
  • Trump made 664 false claims in October. That was double his previous record for a calendar month, 320 in August.
  • Trump averaged 26.3 false claims per day in the month leading up to the midterm on Nov. 6. In 2017, he averaged 2.9 per day.
  • Trump made more false claims in the two months leading up to the midterms (1,176), than he did in all of 2017 (1,011).
  • The three most dishonest single days of Trump’s presidency were the three days leading up to the midterms: 74 on election eve, Nov. 5; 58 on Nov. 3; 54 on Nov. 4.

“As always, Trump was being more frequently dishonest in part because he was simply speaking more. He had three campaign rallies on Nov. 5, the day before he set the record, and eight more rallies over the previous five days.
“But it was not only quantity. Trump packed his rally speeches with big new lies, repeatedly reciting wildly inaccurate claims about migrants, Democrats’ views on immigration and health care, and his own record. Unlike many of his lies, lots of these ones were written into the text of his speeches.
“Trump is now up to 3,749 false claims for the first 661 days of his presidency, an average of 4.4 per day.
“If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.”




Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Petition Forces CEO of Noble Charter School's Resignation - About Time


2018 – Noble Charter Schools CEO MILKIE TO RESIGN AFTER STUDENT PETITION OF 6,000 SIGNATURES

It was back on April 12, 2014, CEO Michael Milkie of Noble Street Charter Schools decided he would grace his students with a rescinding of the $5.00 fee for each infraction requiring detention.  While that appeared a moment of humanistic charity, it was more likely the heat of exposure, General Assembly concerns, and bad press which caused Mr. Milkie to adopt this costume of largesse and caring.  

Now, after protest by both students and parents, Noble Network Chairman  Allan Muchin has announced that Michael Milkie will be gone by January of 2019.  A copy of the petition can be found through an earlier blogpost by Fred Klonsky.

Below, you will find a piece written nearly six years ago warning our readers in the “blogosphere” want was really going on in Charter-World, especially when it comes to pulling in profits for a CEO like Milkie.

From 2012. (HT:FK)

"If you don’t like it – you can leave.”  - (a description of CEO Milkie’s and Mayor Emanuel’s response to questions regarding discipline policies at Noble Street Network School) – Jasmine Sarmiento, Voices of Youth in Chicago Educations.

“Noble is forcing low-income parents to choose between paying the rent and keeping their child in school. This is a tax on Chicago’s Black and Latino families, and it’s wrong..”  -  Donna Moore, parent of a student in Noble Network Schools. 


Charter School Discipline (…or...How to take out the trash, and look real good)

Back in the day, I mean way back in the day, students actually got to determine their own form of discipline – a long piece of green hickory branch usually cut by the very student about to be switched.  This was considered a vast improvement in exchange for the cane used during the 17thand 18thcenturies.  Ah, progress.  

After the mid-nineteenth century, continued disciplinary progress for public students included the paddle, in my own case, hung in plain sight above the principal’s office desk as a reminder of his overt ability to dispense justice in the form of extreme pain.  But I was just one of many south side kids being “taught” and civilized in a continuing grand experiment on a national level. 

Before all of us, even unto the mid 1850’s, education in America was provided primarily to the wealthy, and the overriding sentiment was that the poor were both uneducable and unworthy any attempts at education.  It wasn’t until 1852 that Horace Mann, then Secretary of State for Massachusetts, urged all states to provide education to allstudents, creating what he hoped would be the great equalizer and the ultimate disappearance of poverty.    

Later, the efforts of modernists like Phillipp Emanuel von Fellenberg and Francis Parker (1850’s) promoted concepts that remain current: “modern behavioral modification methods should attempt to address the underlying reasons or motivations for student misbehavior and tailor consequences to fit the (particular) transgression.  School administrators should seek to encourage a positive association with school along with socially acceptable behavior” (www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool/evolving_classroom/discipline.html). In essence, these movements suggested that learning was best accomplished with support, encouragement and kindness. This was quite the opposite of discipline for being incorrect in answer or deportment.  Remember that word, deportment.

In the early 1900’s, as schooling became mandatory for all American youngsters, teachers found themselves stepping further and further into the roles of parents (in loco parentis), and “one value attached to this development asserted that while adults should be punished for their crimes, children should be rehabilitated for theirs, thus formalizing a beginning to the separation between juvenile misconduct and suffering as its remedy” (www.public.findlaw.com/education/school_discipline_history.html) .  I’m often sorry my own principal had not harkened to these findings…but I digress. 

Augmenting these modifications of the kinds of discipline painfully dished out in the working houses and boarding schools of the past, the 20thcentury educator awakened to the concept that education was more than simply transfer; instead, with the assistance of forward thinkers like Rosenblatt, Berne, Spock, etc., psycho-social arguments promoted the student’s own involvement in a transactional paradigm of learning.   In short, teachers and educators moved way from the traditional belief that students learn best by rote and by sitting demurely in linear rows at rigid attention; quite the opposite, best practice now held to a more personalized and interactive learning/teaching construct.

Introducing NOBLE STREET.

The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which runs 10 city high schools and yearns for more after recent school closings, has found an entirely new, novel method of exacting discipline for student “misbehavior.”  This is the same network of schools that Mayor Rahm Emanuel praised for having the “secret sauce” for improving students’ scores, behavior, and success rates.  It would appear that the secret sauce of which the Mayor and Superintendent Brizard crow is in great part actually a monetary disciplinary fee that has raised nearly $400,000 this year for Noble Street, left parents foundering to scrape together fines that are imposed upon them for their own student’s deportment, and has caused the flight of nearly 13% of students from the Noble Street charter schools back into the public system from whence they came – seeking opportunity and assistance to improve their own lots in life and finding failure for disciplinarily high expectations – monetarily? 

In fact, according to the Chicago Tribune (Ahmed-Ullah, Noreen.  Protests targets charter discipline fees. Chicago Tribune. 14 Feb. 2012), the loss of students from the Noble Network schools to other public districts has increased from 211 students in 2010 to 473 students in 2011.  At the same time, CEO Michael Milkie will point glowingly at the Noble Networks improved graduation rates, not surprisingly – from 78.8% in 2010 to 86.2% in 2011.  And CEO Mr. Milkie, who earns an annual salary over $200,000, should be proud of his enterprise’s increased revenue stream.  Noble Street has received almost $400,000 in disciplinary fees since the 2008-2009 school year (Ahmed-Ullah).  George M. Schmidt of Substance Newsreports “the charter company is profiting to the tune of some $200,000 per year from a disciplinary code that can only be called predatory” (www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3055).   

Following the kind of schema found in the factory/transference models of business and schools of the early 1900’s, Noble Street has implemented the “SMART” disciplinary code.  Here is what SMART’s acronym entails:

S = Sit up straight and be ready to learn.
M= Make eye contact when addressed.
A= Articulate in standard English and speak in proper volume.
R= Respond appropriately.
T= Track the speaker.


Each of these misdemeanors comes with a fine of $5 or more.  In fact, infractions include an unbelievably long list of potential infractions not necessarily spelled out – chewing gum, carrying “chips,” forgetting your belt, tardiness, carrying a marking pen, having an energy drink, making a noise with a pen, etc.  Each infraction (and others) will cost a student $5.00 or more (Rossi, Rosalind. School’s discipline: you act up you pay up. Chicago Sun Times.  14 Feb. 2012).  

By the way, if a student is having a bad day – or time of it – 12 detentions/infractions or more will result in a $140 fine (they call it a fee) to attend an obligatory class on “behavior.”  Additional detentions will result in an additional discipline class for an additional $140. Any student (more likely their family) who cannot pay will be held back from moving on to the next class – regardless of his or her grades.  Please keep in mind that even though Noble Street schools are funded by wealthy benefactors like Penny Pritzker, nearly 90% of the families are low-income (Schmidt, George), and cannot afford the mounting fees for students who are having difficulty adapting to the “SMART” model.  

Unlike the public system, Noble is allowed tougher disciplinary policies than the CPU because it is a charter – remember our earlier changing characterizations of public vs. private when it came to our model Chicago Math and Science Academy (see Vocabulary – Feb 19 & 26).  Meanwhile, CEO Mr. Milkie affirms that SMART and the other “disciplinary policies at NOBLE promote basic, common sense citizenship things, which you know teenagers need” (Golab, Art.  www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3055)

On the national level, school chief Arne Duncan also touts Milkie’s Noble Street agenda and, along with Pritzkers and other wealthy benefactors, endorses the programs used there: “’ We’re dramatically changing the opportunity structure,’ Duncan told Chicagoa few weeks before leaving his CPS post to become the U.S. secretary of education. ‘We have tried to make this [city] a mecca for people who want to make change in public education ‘” (Rodkin, Dennis. Charting a new course. Chicago Magazine.com.  29 Feb. 2012). 

Thursday, November 1, 2018


“I Will Order 15,000 Troops to Our Border” (and shift the enormous costs of doing so on a Dept. of Defense already drowning in wars.) 

Yesterday, Trump threatened to send more troops to the US/Mexico border than are currently active in Afghanistan.  USA Today describes this latest diversion as “a boondoggle bigger than the infamous Bridge to Nowhere – an expensive political ploy with no practical purpose.”  

Operation Faithful Patriot will order thousands of our military to be rushed to the border to stop people hundreds of miles away who are walking en masse and seeking political asylum (for which there exist thoughtful legal scrutiny) and desperately trying to flee political and gang violence in their home countries. While independent reports may demonstrate that there are no real threats from this group of asylum-seekers, the President argues we are in danger because he has “heard people talk” or argues that “we (media) cannot deny someone could be dangerous.”  Finally, sandwiching an anti-Democratic advertisement showing a deranged Latino speaking during sentencing, Trump has linked a caravan of impoverished masses seeking help with a partisan and racial opportunity to ignite his political base.  

Insufferable.

Please find below a letter published in Common Dreams from Rory Fanning to his fellow active-duty soldiers. 

Background: Rory Fanning, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion, became one of the first U.S. Army Rangers to resist the Iraq war and the Global War on Terror. In 2008–2009 he walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman foundation. Rory is the author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America and co-author of Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter. He has bylines at Common Dreams, The GuardianThe Nation, and TomDispatch. In 2015 he was awarded a grant from the Chicago Teachers Union to speak to CPS students about America’s endless wars and to fill in some of the blanks military recruiters often ignore about America’s endless wars. As a sponsored lifetime member of Veterans for Peace, Rory has traveled multiple times to Japan on speaking tours to express solidarity with those seeking to abolish nuclear weapons and close U.S. military bases around the world. Rory currently lives in Chicago and works for Haymarket Books. 

The letter is entitled “Your Commander-in-Chief Is Lying to You.”

“To All Active Duty Soldiers:

“Your Commander-in-chief is lying to you. You should refuse his orders to deploy to the southern U.S. border should you be called to do so. Despite what Trump and his administration are saying, the migrants moving North towards the U.S. are not a threat. These small numbers of people are escaping intense violence. In fact, much of the reason these men and women—with families just like yours and ours—are fleeing their homes is because of the US meddling in their country’s elections. Look no further than Honduras, where the Obama administration supported the overthrow of a democratically elected president who was then replaced by a repressive dictator.

“These extremely poor and vulnerable people are desperate for peace.  Who among us would walk a thousand miles with only the clothes on our back without great cause? The odds are good that your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. lived similar experiences to these migrants. Your family members came to the U.S. to seek a better life—some fled violence. Consider this as you are asked to confront these unarmed men, women and children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. To do so would be the ultimate hypocrisy.

“The U.S. is the richest country in the world, in part because it has exploited countries in Latin America for decades. If you treat people from these countries like criminals, as Trump hopes you will, you only contribute to the legacy of pillage and plunder beneath our southern border. We need to confront this history together, we need to confront the reality of America’s wealth and both share and give it back with these people. Above all else, we cannot turn them away at our door. They will die if we do.

“By every moral or ethical standard it is your duty to refuse orders to "defend" the U.S. from these migrants.  History will look kindly upon you if you do. There are tens of thousands of us who will support your decision to lay your weapons down. You are better than your Commander-in-chief. Our only advice is to resist in groups. Organize with your fellow soldiers. Do not go this alone. It is much harder to punish the many than the few.

In solidarity,

Rory Fanning
Former U.S. Army Ranger, War-Resister
Spenser Rapone
Former U.S. Army Ranger and Infantry Officer, War-Resister”



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