Carrying banners that declared “Christmas Against Crestwood” and “Methane in Your Stocking is Worse Than Coal,” nine local activists dressed as Santa Claus and his North Pole ensemble were arrested Monday and charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct at Texas-based Crestwood Midstream’s gas storage facility gates on the shore of Seneca Lake in New York.
Only Santa (Stefan Senders of Schuyler County) was handcuffed and searched before being taken into custody. The action marked nine weeks and 170 arrests as part of the ‘We Are Seneca Lake’ civil disobedience campaign.
Protesters have been blocking the Crestwood gas storage facility gates, on the shore of the largest of New York’s Finger Lakes, since Thursday, October 23—the day before major new construction on the controversial gas storage facility was authorized to begin. On Wednesday, October 29, Crestwood called the police and the first 10 protesters were arrested. Since then, protests have been ongoing, with more arrests each week.
The methane gas storage expansion project is advancing in the face of broad public opposition and unresolved questions about geological instabilities, fault lines, and possible salinization of the lake, which serves as a source of drinking water for 100,000 people. Crestwood has indicated that it intends to make Seneca Lake the gas storage and transportation hub for the northeast, as part of the gas industry’s planned expansion of infrastructure across the region.
While the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has temporarily halted plans to stockpile propane and butane in nearby caverns—out of ongoing concerns for safety, health, and the environment—Crestwood is actively constructing infrastructure for the storage of two billion cubic feet of methane (natural gas), with the blessing of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
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“As a greenhouse gas, methane is carbon dioxide’s younger and more dangerous brother,” said biologist Sandra Steingraber in a video documenting Monday’s action. “It is 86 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. So the methane that will inevitably leak from these caverns, and the pipelines that feed them, will be trapped in the atmosphere. So scientists—plus Santa and elves together—are standing in solidarity with residents of Seneca Lake and we’re going to shut this place down.”
Watch the full video, featuring Santa’s arrest and some re-imagined Christmas carols, below:
Monday’s detentions followed 28 arrests last Wednesday in a blockade led by local musicians. While blockading a large truck, the musicians sang, danced, played instruments, and held banners that read “This Land is Our Land” and “Gas/Water: Which Side Are You On?”
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With little fanfare, the United States and NATO formally ended the longest war in U.S. history with a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, leaving observers to wonder what—if anything—was achieved.
Over 13 years, U.S.-led war in Afghanistan claimed the lives of about 3,500 foreign troops (at least 2,224 of them American soldiers) and an estimated 21,000 Afghan civilians; most experts agree that the country is as violent as ever and that the death toll will continue to rise. Many say the war is over in name only.
“Afghanistan’s war is as hot as it has been since the U.S.-led invasion following the 9/11 attacks overthrew the Taliban,” Lynne O’Donnell writes for the Associated Press. Some 5,000 members of Afghanistan’s security forces—army, police and armed rural defense units—have died this year fighting the Taliban, according to Karl Ake Roghe, the outgoing head of EUPOL, the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan.
And while the ceremony marked the end of the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a new flag for the international mission “Resolute Support” was immediately unfurled.
In late September, the U.S. and Afghanistan signed a controversial Bilateral Security Agreement that allows for U.S. training, funding, and arming of the Afghan military; establishes long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan with access to numerous bases and installations in the country; and extends immunity to U.S. service members under Afghan law.
Stars and Stripes set the scene in Kabul: “During an hour-long ceremony in a drab gymnasium at the headquarters of the military coalition that has battled against insurgents for 13 years, generals hailed the end of a mission, while struggling to explain the parameters of what will still be a substantial military operation in Afghanistan.”
There will still be roughly 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan next year as part of the Resolute Support mission to train, advise and assist Afghanistan’s roughly 350,000 security forces. ISAF spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Belcher told Stars and Stripes that there would be a total of roughly 17,500 foreign troops in Afghanistan next year, which the publication notes is “far more than the 12,000-13,000 U.S. and NATO officials have been saying would be part of Resolute Support. Belcher could not say where those additional troops would be coming from nor when or why the decision was made to increase their number.”
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As Dan De Luce writes for Agence France-Presse:
That sentiment is largely shared in the UK. “[I]n Afghanistan, Britain has just suffered a humiliating defeat, the worst in more than half a century and, arguably, ranking with the worst in modern times,” Will Hutton argues at the Guardian.
“But the US, although much more effective than the patronising British, was, at a meta strategic level, wrong,” he continues. “The war against terrorism, developed by George W Bush in the hours after 9/11 with little consultation with his own military or cabinet, let alone his allies, is one of the great failures of the rightwing mind. The reflex reaction to an act of mass terror was not to outsmart, out-think and marginalise the new enemy—it was to get even by being even more violent, lawless and vicious, leading Nato into the Afghan quagmire, and the coalition in Iraq. Two trillion dollars later and hundreds of thousand dead and displaced, the world is predictably much less safe for the west than it was—and jihadism is much more entrenched.”
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Despite the December 28th “official” end of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, a new Rolling Stone article provides more proof that armed combat is nowhere near over: the Obama administration still considers the country to be an “area of active hostilities” and therefore does not impose more stringent standards aimed at limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes.
At issue are the Presidential Policy Guidelines (pdf), passed in May 2013 in response to widespread concerns about the killing and wounding of non-combatants by U.S. drone strikes. The new guidelines impose the requirement that “before lethal action may be taken,” U.S. forces are required to attain “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.” It is impossible to verify the impact of this reform on civilian deaths and injuries, because U.S. drone attacks are shrouded in near total secrecy.
However, an unnamed senior administration official told Rolling Stone journalist John Knefel that the Presidential Policy Guidelines do not apply to Afghanistan. “Afghanistan will continue to be considered an ‘area of active hostilities’ in 2015,” said the official. “The PPG does not apply to areas of active hostilities.”
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This is not the first time President Obama has played fast and loose with its own drone war reforms. In October 2014, it was revealed that the Obama administration holds that the reforms also do not apply to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Syria, because they are also deemed to be “areas of active hostilities.”
According to Knefel, “That perplexing distinction – that formal combat operations are over but that the U.S. still remains in an armed conflict – in many ways exemplifies the lasting legacy of Obama’s foreign policy. From Yemen to Pakistan to Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan, the administration has consistently downplayed its actions – some acknowledged and some covert – saying that the wars are (almost) over while retaining virtually all the powers of a country at war.”
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Hundreds of Stanford University professors published an open letter on Sunday demanding that the university divest the entirety of its holdings from all fossil fuel companies.
“If a university seeks to educate extraordinary youth so they may achieve the brightest possible future, what does it mean for that university simultaneously to invest in the destruction of that future?” asks the letter addressed to university president John Hennessy and the school Board of Trustees.
Coming in the wake of the May 2014 Board of Trustees announcement that the school would not invest in publicly traded coal companies—a decision the university faculty praised for setting a “precedent of responsibility and integrity”—the letter reasons: “Given that the university has signaled its awareness of the dangers posed by fossil fuels, what are the implications of Stanford’s making only a partial confrontation with this danger?”
The letter notes that in order to stay beneath the scientifically designated 2-degree warming threshold, beyond which we face cataclysmic climate disruption, scientific consensus says we must cap fossil fuel emissions at 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Current fossil fuel companies claim holdings sufficient to produce 2795 gigatons.
Even after coal “is taken out of the equation,” the world’s oil and gas holdings still represent 978 gigatons of carbon, or nearly double the 565 gigaton cap. Thus, the decision to divest from coal, the group argues, is not enough.
“The urgency and magnitude of climate change call not for partial solutions, however admirable: they demand the more profound and thorough commitment embodied in divestment from all fossil-fuel companies,” the letter states.
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The letter was signed by 303 Stanford faculty members from a wide range of academic departments. Among the signatories are former Stanford president Donald Kennedy, and two Nobel Prize winners, Professor Douglas Osheroff (Physics, 1996) and Professor Roger Kornberg (Chemistry, 2006). Also included is Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, who was among the 2014 recipients of the Fields Medal, which is known as the ‘Nobel Prize of Mathematics.’
According to the Stanford Daily, as of August 2013, the university’s investment has an approximate value of $18.7 billion.
The faculty letter comes just weeks after the student campaign Fossil Free Stanford pledged that they would make 2015 the year they “finished what they started,” by calling on the university to “divest the rest” after the coal divestment. On their Facebook page, Fossil Free Stanford praised the faculty support.
“When university faculty get this organized, you know something momentous is happening,” said university senior Michael Peñuelas, who serves as the faculty liaison for Fossil Free Stanford.
The Stanford letter follows a series of similar faculty initiatives, including a Harvard Faculty for Divestment letter with 226 signatories, and a Faculty Association resolution at the University of California, Berkeley.
You can read the full Stanford faculty letter here.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement last month that, at the invitation of the Republican Party, he will side-step the White House and directly address Congress on Iran has kicked up a storm of opposition—from within Washington, as well as U.S. civil society.
Grassroots groups say that the resultant fallout has the potential to move U.S. discourse beyond partisan politics by opening up space for real criticism of the Israeli government and the pursuit of de-militarized policies towards Iran and beyond.
“This could be a historic turning point,” said Jewish Voice for Peace Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson. “We are seeing signs that the unprecedented crisis over Netanyahu’s speech may mean an end to the era of virtually unanimous bipartisan support for Israel’s harmful policies.”
Netanyahu rebuffed the Obama administration when, in late January, he accepted an invitation from Republican House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) to directly address Congress on Iran. The move was widely viewed as a breach of protocol aimed at snubbing Obama and undercutting the ongoing talks between Iran and the five members of the United Nations Security Council (U.S., Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France) plus Germany, which the Israeli prime minister has vigorously opposed.
“After a decade marked by thousands of American casualties, suicide bombings, massive regional destabilization, and now the ascendence of ISIS, it is clear that Netanyahu and those who lobbied for the Iraq war are in no position to give Congress further advice.” —Trita Parsi, National Iranian-American Council
In a press statement, the National Iranian-American Council called Netanyahu’s latest maneuver an “outrageous political stunt that could kill diplomacy with Iran and start a war.”
Top White House officials—including the president—have announced that they will not meet with Netanyahu when he visits Washington on March 3rd, initially citing Israel’s upcoming elections. This has opened a divide with the Republican Party, which plans to move forward with the speech—without the president’s blessing.
At least 25 members of Congress have followed suit and pledged they won’t show. Many of those boycotting hail from the Congressional Black Caucus, after civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis Rep. (D-Ga.) kicked off the initiative.
But an even larger number of politicians have proclaimed that they are on the fence and have not yet decided whether they will attend. This includes big Democratic Party players, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
“The response to the speech is more important than the speech itself,” Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams. “The response has shown the divide between U.S. and Israeli policy towards Iran. It has also given political cover to those members of Congress who have been looking for way to criticize Israel without what they have believed—I think incorrectly—is political suicide.”
Human rights, anti-war, and Palestine solidarity groups say now is the time for grassroots groups to mobilize to shift discourse in Washington and beyond.
A call to action from a coalition of groups—including Jewish Voice for Peace, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, and American Muslims for Palestine—urges people to call on their representatives to boycott the speech “not because it’s a partisan snub, nor because the date is close to the Israeli elections, but because Netanyahu is going to Washington to undermine the U.S. strategy of diplomacy with Iran.”
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“Netanyahu does not speak about peace in good faith—illegal settlements and human rights violations against Palestinians have only increased under his leadership,” the campaign declares.
Josh Ruebner of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation told Common Dreams, “Our efforts have generated more than 100,000 letters to members of Congress through our skipthespeech.org website. The goal is to convince more members of congress to join those 25 who have pledged to boycott the speech.”
“This could be a historic turning point. We are seeing signs that the unprecedented crisis over Netanyahu’s speech may mean an end to the era of virtually unanimous bipartisan support for Israel’s harmful policies.” —Rebecca Vilkomerson, Jewish Voice for PeaceA petition from Just Foreign Policy—which has already garnered over 26,000 signatures—calls on members of Congress to urge “Speaker Boehner and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to cancel Netanyahu’s scheduled talk to Congress weeks before the Israeli election.” If the talk is not canceled, the petition continues, representatives should boycott. Another petition from Credo has garnered over 60,000 signatures.
NIAC on Thursday ran a full-page New York Times advertisement, which urges, “Call Congress to support diplomacy, not war.”
“While causation is always hard to determine, I think that grassroots pressure is having an impact,” Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy told Common Dreams.
Analysts say that there are numerous signs that a war-weary U.S. public is growing increasingly skeptical of Israel’s actions, from the push for military escalation with Iran to the brutal 50-day war on Gaza last summer.
A poll (pdf) released Tuesday by CNN and ORC finds that a majority of people in the U.S. think that GOP leaders did the “wrong thing by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without first notifying the president that they would do so.”
Furthermore, concerns about the prime minister’s visit are being voiced by by moderate and even staunchly pro-Israel forces—including Americans for Peace Now and J Street—who are calling for a “postponement” of the address until after Israeli elections (slated to take place just weeks after Netanyahu’s visit). Three House Democrats have circulated a letter to Boehner echoing this demand. And even the editorial board of The New York Times published a partial criticism of Netanyahu’s political play.
“The stakes in the Iran negotiations could not be higher,” emphasized Bennis. “This is a moment where there is a possibility of what has long been known as a ‘grand bargain’ between the U.S. and Iran. The negotiating teams and presidents on both sides face significant right-wing opposition. We need to make sure negotiations do not get derailed by a congressional move to increase sanctions.”
This is not the first time Netanyahu has sought to influence U.S. foreign policy by testifying to Congress. In 2002, the prime minister strongly urged U.S. lawmakers to launch the now-discredited invasion of Iraq, declaring, “if you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
“After a decade marked by thousands of American casualties, suicide bombings, massive regional destabilization, and now the ascendence of ISIS, it is clear that Netanyahu and those who lobbied for the Iraq war are in no position to give Congress further advice,” said Trita Parsi, president of NIAC.
“There is an opportunity to stop the next catastrophic war before it starts, and that only happens if diplomacy is allowed to succeed,” Parsi continued.
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McLaren’s Carlos Sainz admitted his run to fifth in Sunday’s Eifel GP had left him a little “out of place”, the Spaniard struggling once again to get to grips with his car’s new updates.
After Lando Norris raced the revised MCL35 in Russia, Sainz was the recipient in Germany of McLaren’s new nose and upgrade package.
But from yesterday’s single free practice session to today’s race, Sainz felt at odds with a car whose performance – in his view – did not equal that of its previous specification.
As a consequence, the McLaren driver was unable to take the midfield fight at the Nürburging to his Renault and Racing Point rivals.
“It’s a fifth place that tastes good because it’s 10 points, but when you’re suffering in the race for 60 laps, you end up a little out of place,” Sainz told Spanish TV station Movistar.
“I’m not very happy, actually. It is a fifth place that tastes little when you see [Daniel] Ricciardo and [Sergio] Perez ahead [fighting for] on the podium, and that we have missed an opportunity to fight for that podium.
“With the car I had today I couldn’t fight for the podium, but maybe with the one I had two races ago, maybe I could.”
Sainz was reluctant to offer too much detail about the issues impacting the handling of McLaren contender but hinted at excessive front tyre wear and graining.
“We had much more graining than the rest,” he said. “The car goes a lot from the nose and that costs you more degradation.
“But I hope this will serve to get 60 laps of analysis, data and go back to the factory to investigate what is in this new package that does not just give me a good feeling and does not give us the sensations and performance we expected.”
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Sergio Perez’s P4 finish in the Eifel GP coupled with super-sub Nico Hulkenberg’s run in the points has allowed Racing Point to leap-frog McLaren for third in the Constructors’ standings while Renault is now just two points adrift.
Sainz admitted McLaren will need to put its thinking cap on to figure out how it gain regain the upper hand over its rivals.
“There is going to be a lot of thinking process going into the next couple of weeks to decide what we do with the car, what upgrades we decide to keep, how we develop this car,” he said.
“Because at the moment, Renault is two tenths quicker than us, racing Point is one or two tenths quicker than us and that means if we want to finish higher in the championship we need to find a bit [of time].”
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Queen Elizabeth II | Pool photo by Chris Jackson/AFP via Getty Images
Despite Brexit, high honors for Brits serving in Brussels
Work in EU capital propels four Brits to this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours lists.
Britain may have quit the EU, but serving Britain in the EU capital still ranks as a good way to catch attention and make it to the Queen’s Birthday Honours lists.
This year’s awards include four diplomats who served the U.K. in Brussels: the ambassador to the EU, Tim Barrow; the ambassador to NATO, Sarah MacIntosh; former European commissioner for security, Julian King; and Ivan Smyth, former legal counsellor at the U.K. representation.
All four were appointed to the Order of St. Michael and St. George, with Barrow and King named Knight Grand Cross, the highest rank; MacIntosh named Dame Commander, the second-highest rank; and Smyth named as companion.
The Queen’s Birthday Honours lists are normally announced in June but were postponed this year to give time to nominate frontline responders to the coronavirus pandemic.
VANCOUVER — A federal government fund providing financing for affordable housing projects needs to be rebuilt because it doesn’t do enough to help provinces outside of Ontario, advocates say.
The National Housing Co-Investment Fund, administered by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., provides a mix of loans and forgivable debt to those building affordable housing and multi-use projects.
Data obtained by federal NDP housing critic Jenny Kwan shows nearly 74 per cent of the financing for loans and grants has gone to Ontario projects from its inception in May 2018 to June 2020.
“The application process has been exceedingly slow and complicated, and it also means, and continues to mean, that little of the money is flowing out the door in an expeditious way to the community in need,” Kwan said in an interview.
“The investment fund is still heavily skewed in its funding to Ontario. Ontario is the only province that’s really getting finalized agreements in large amounts and the rest of the country is still lagging far behind.”
Ontario projects received roughly $1.39 billion out of $1.46 billion awarded since the program began, most of it going towards repairs for Toronto Community Housing.
B.C. has received $9 million in finalized funding, or about 0.55 per cent of the $1.46 billion handed out so far, Kwan said.
Ahmed Hussen, the minister of families, children and social development, was not available for an interview, but department spokeswoman Jessica Eritou said the government has made the largest housing investment in Canadian history for rental and community housing.
“We have made important progress, but we know how urgent the needs are, particularly in B.C. It is why we are absolutely committed to working with CMHC to get funds out the door faster,” she said in a statement.
Eritou said the numbers released by Kwan don’t provide enough context on the state of housing funding.
“The information failed to tell the story of the dozens of B.C. applications under the National Housing Co-Investment Fund being assessed, along with additional applications under other (National Housing Strategy) programs with applications nearing completion, or with loan agreements or memorandums of understanding in place,” she said.
Approach needs to change: advocate
The national housing strategy is a 10-year, $55 billion plan launched by the federal government in 2017, focusing on housing for Indigenous and vulnerable people and those in northern communities. It aims to cut chronic homelessness by 50 per cent and help build 125,000 new homes.
B.C. has received $2.5 billion in funding under the National Housing Strategy as of June 2020, Eritou said.
That funding is equivalent to just over a quarter of the strategy’s total available funds to date, she said.
More than $190 million has been committed to B.C. through the housing investment fund to repair or build 2,420 units of housing as of that date as well, Eritou added.
Jill Atkey, the CEO of the B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association, said it’s time for the government’s approach to funding housing to change.
“I think the investment being made here in B.C. is still pretty inadequate to make a dent in the demand for affordable housing,” she said in an interview. “We continue to want to see this program restructured so we can deploy those investments much more quickly and forcefully here in B.C.”
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Atkey described the application process as “off-putting” to many in the non-profit housing sector, with more than 200 questions on the application and a long wait time for approval.
Veronique Laflamme, a spokeswoman for the Quebec housing advocacy group Popular Action Front in Urban Redevelopment, said the investment fund is not enough to help affordable housing projects.
Laflamme says her main concern with the fund is that it’s not a long-term solution.
“It’s not a vision. It’s not a plan to be sure that we’ll have more adequate housing in Canada to answer our core housing needs. It’s not a good tool to meet the goals of the so-called national housing strategy,” she said.
Kwan agrees, and said she would like to see more support offered to Canada Mortgage and Housing to work through the applications it receives.
She said she would also like to see the federal government work more closely with all levels of governments and non-government agencies to offer more financial support for housing projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 10, 2020.
As it turns out, there’s no high-stakes test that can account for this.
A new study released on Friday shows that more than half of students enrolled in U.S. public schools live in poverty, a measurement that the report’s authors say places the U.S. on the road to overall social decline.
Released by the Southern Education Foundation, the new analysis (pdf) used the most recent national census figures available to confirm that 51 percent of the students across the nation’s public schools were low income in 2013.
According to the report:
In addition to documenting the number of students who receive some form of government assistance during their school day, including key programs that offer free or reduced-price lunches, the report makes plain that the pervasive poverty among the nation’s young people is having a direct and negative impact on student learning and the public education system’s ability to meet its goal of providing adequate education for all.
“A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.” —Michael Rebell, Campaign for Educational Equity
“No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low income students simply a matter of fairness,” the report states. “Their success or failure in the public schools will determine the entire body of human capital and educational potential that the nation will possess in the future. Without improving the educational support that the nation provides its low income students – students with the largest needs and usually with the least support — the trends of the last decade will be prologue for a nation not at risk, but a nation in decline.”
Speaking with the Washington Post, Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University noted how the poverty rate has been increasing even as some economic indicators have improved. “We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” Rebell said. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”
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The latest findings come as the Department of Education and lawmakers in Congress begin new debate about the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ASEA), more broadly known by updated versions or programs supported by that law— No Child Left Behind (NCLB) under President George W. Bush and the Race To The Top Program (RTTT) under President Obama.
Opponents of the fixation by both Democrats and Republicans on high-stakes standardized testing and other planks of the “corporate education reform agenda” are hoping that ASEA re-authorization is their next opportunity to point out the failure of the policies codified in both NCLB and RTTT.
As Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said earlier this week in response to a policy speech by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: “Any law that doesn’t address our biggest challenges—funding inequity, segregation, the effects of poverty—will fail to make the sweeping transformation our kids and our schools need.”
She continued, “Current federal educational policy—No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and waivers—has enshrined a focus on testing, not learning, especially high-stakes testing and the consequences and sanctions that flow from it. That’s wrong, and that’s why there is a clarion call for change. The waiver strategy and Race to the Top exacerbated the test-fixation that was put in place with NCLB, allowing sanctions and consequences to eclipse all else. [Based on Duncan’s speech], it seems the secretary may want to justify and enshrine that status quo and that’s worrisome.”
In a article for The Nation magazine last year, poverty and education experts Greg Kaufmann and Elaine Weiss described the huge body of research which has shown the various factors associated with how poverty affects student learning, including: “parents’ educational attainment; how parents read to, play with and respond to their children; the quality of early care and early education; access to consistent physical and mental health services and healthy food.”
What’s missing from the larger debate, according to Kaufmann and Weiss, is understanding “the impact of concentrated poverty—and of racial and socioeconomic segregation—on student achievement” in a much wider context. “It’s time that we stop ignoring [the impacts of poverty and inequalityon education],” they wrote. “The past few decades have seen increasing income polarization, with the top 1 percent reaping the vast majority of societal gains, the middle class shrinking, and those at the bottom losing ground. As a result, concentrated poverty is more potent and relevant an issue than ever.”
And according to an analysis of the SEF findings by Education Week, the increasing levels of poverty among students will, and should be, a larger part of the current debate about education policy:
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John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent and whistleblower who was jailed for revealing secrets about the CIA torture program, wants to know why there’s been no accountability for the brutal crimes now-documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
In a phone interview from Loretto Prison in Pennsylvania, Kiriakou told The Intercept’s Andrew Jerell Jones that after the report’s release, his cousin had printed the over 500-page unclassified executive summary of the report and mailed it to him in five separate envelopes.
Kiriakou, an 18-year veteran of the CIA who in 2007 revealed to news media some of the first details about the agency’s widespread use of torture, said that the primary thing that shocked him upon reading the Senate report is that agents, some of whom acted without authorization and whose crimes are now widely documented, continue to walk free.
“We knew about the waterboarding, we knew about the cold cells, we knew about the loud music and the sleep deprivation. We knew about all the things that have been ‘approved’ by the Justice Department,” Kiriakou said. “But what we didn’t know was what individual CIA officers were doing on their own without any authorization. And I would like to know why those officers aren’t being prosecuted.”
When asked about the brutal treatment of detainees, namely Afghan prisoner Gul Rahman, who was killed in the prison, Kirakou said: “The man was murdered in cold blood, so where’s the prosecution? You come home, you murder somebody in cold blood, you get a promotion and a $2,500 bonus. That is not the message we ought to be sending.”
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To date, the father of five is the only CIA agent who has gone to jail in connection with the torture program. Kiriakou was prosecuted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act for allegedly revealing classified information to a reporter. After agreeing to a plea deal in October 2012, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Though outraged by the impunity of the rogue CIA actors, Kiriakou confirmed to Jones that approval of the torture program came all the way from the top.
He said: “I remember sitting at a meeting with one of the top three officials at the CIA when the program was approved. And throughout the conversation, he kept on saying, ‘I can’t believe the president signed off on that program. I can’t believe it.’ He kept saying it. Because it was so radical and violent that even internally we didn’t think there would be permission forthcoming. And there was. And it got out of hand, and it was a slippery slope and the ball kept rolling down the hill. And the next thing you know, we’re killing people.”
The complete interview is available to read at The Intercept.
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