by John Laesch, posted on Monday, April 1st, 2013 at 10:55 am
After making 16 similar presentations at public hearings over the course of 10 days in the Fox Valley, and receiving hundreds of tough questions, K12 Inc. finally showed up with a panel of executives. I counted seven K12 Inc. executives, one attorney, and three board members from Virtual Learning Solutions. They were all nicely dressed in business attire, their PowerPoint had new graphics, and their data was still non existent. K12 Inc. had 10 days to do their homework and once again failed to produce any substance.
For almost three hours the D365U School Board kept pushing for data, substance and explanations about K12’s questionable history of grade doctoring, cover-ups, lawsuits, scandals and investor settlements. The board was phenomenal, and Dr. Vince Gaddis (NIJwJ Steering Committee member) drove it home in a “worth the watch 12 speech” below the fold.
We as a society view our monetary debts as a moral issue: We took out the money, we should have to pay it back. The problem with this logic is that the money we are giving the banks, financial institutions and our government never existed before the interest we incurred piled up.
Pam Brown of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and Strike Debt says there’s another way out of our predicament: If our numbers are large enough, we can collectively refuse to pay back the trillions that are being extorted from us.
One year ago on September 17, a few activists began a peaceful protest just outside Wall Street in New York’s financial district. That action sparked a sweeping movement of public space “Occupations,” in which citizens could air their grievances against corporate greed, protected interests and much more. Encampments sprang up across the world, from Oakland City Hall to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Police cleared out the tents months ago, but the networks of activists, young and old, remain intact, as evidenced by this weekend’s packed schedule of Occupy actions. Watch this video to see what activists, union workers and students in debt are planning for the second year of Occupy.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is largely credited for reframing the national dialogue on economic inequality and popularizing the phrase: “We are the 99 percent.” We host a roundtable with Frances Fox Piven, an author and professor at City University of New York who has studied social movements for decades; Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence, which has extensively covered the Occupy movement; and Suzanne Collado, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street since its inception and member of the group “Strike Debt,” an effort to organize a mass upsurge of debt resistance.
Filmmaker Dennis Trainer Jr. on his new film and the challenges facing the Occupy Movement.
http://www.Occudoc.org
written, produced & directed by Dennis Trainor, Jr
contact dennistrainorjr (at) gmail (dot) com
http://www.twitter.com/dennistrainorjr
http://www.facebook.com/dennistrainorjr
Associate producer/ co-editor/ graphics/ color & titles: AJ Russo
https://vimeo.com/ajrsuper8
Have the elite leaders of our meritocratic society failed us? Nation Editor-at-Large Chris Hayes speaks with Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel about the ways intelligence is used to detrimental ends, and how we can ensure it is used for good.
Legendary Chicago activists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers talk about this week’s protests in Chicago, where NATO will hold its largest summit to date. Thousands of protesters from a diverse coalition of organizations including unions, antiwar groups, immigrant rights organizations and Occupy are expected to march in the streets. Chicago is preparing a massive security operation, with the Department of Homeland Security declaring the summit a “National Special Security Event.” Civil liberties advocates have warned it could provide the first public test of a new law that expands the ability of the Secret Service to suppress protests in or around certain restricted zones. “We think that NATO should be meeting in an underground bunker or on a remote island,” Dorhn says. “[Chicago] is being treated as really a practice military zone … [while] we don’t have money here for community mental health clinics, we don’t have money for public libraries or for schools, we don’t have money for public transportation… We want peace and not permanent wars abroad and military war games and [the] national security state at home.”
Noam Chomsky says the Occupy movement has helped rebuild class solidarity and communities of mutual support on a level unseen since the time of the Great Depression. “The Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country: Communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion … people doing things and helping each other,” Chomsky says. “That’s very much missing. There [has been] massive propaganda going on for a century, that you really shouldn’t care about anyone else, just yourself … To rebuild [class solidarity] — even in small pieces of society — can become very important, can change the conception of how society ought to function.” Chomsky also gives his assessment of President Obama, whom he says has attacked civil liberties in a way that “goes beyond George W. Bush.”
