WEEKEND QUOTABLES

April 4, 1968

Dr. King's Legacy

On this, the 43rd anniversary of Dr. Kings assassination, thousands of union workers, including teachers, will be marching around the country remembering that King died fighting for the rights of city workers to unionize. In Detroit and march and rally is being organized to protest the legislature's recent passage of union busting legislation. 

"The Detroit 5000" March Co-Organizer; Mr. Ernest Johnson, Chairman of Community Coalition feels strongly that allowing the new bill to be exercised will be "detrimental to the civil rights and liberties that Dr. King and countless others fought and died for.

"...this dark cloud makes our pension susceptible to takeover! Everybody who believes in civil rights should be alarmed about what is taking place. If they can do this in Detroit, they can and will do it in any city that has fallen on hard times." -- Detroit 5000

Transocean execs get big bonuses

 "As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company's history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere." -- Company report to the SEC

I'm glad he qualified it

 "Nuclear energy is per kilogram 250,000 times better than hydrocarbons or any chemical ... as long as the earth exists, you wouldn't run into fuel problems." --Bill Gates

Rhee's former deputy 

Kaya Henderson wants to ease a testing regimen that she concedes has left students and school staff “stressed-out and crazy.” -- Bill Torque at WaPo

The money behind school reform

Proposed TEPCO plant on Texas Gulf coast.

Disaster capitalists Gates, Buffett...

Whenever there's an environmental disaster in the world, I always look to see how deeply Bill Gates, his partners, and his foundation are involved. The Gates Foundation's investments in Nigeria have helped turn much of that country into an unlivable, oil-polluted wasteland.

Gates got off scott free after the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf, even though his foundation owns millions of shares of BP and his hedge-fund school reform partners Warren Buffett and Whitney Tilson own NALCO the company that makes COREXIT, the dispersant that is even more harmful to the environment than the oil.

Now comes the horrific nuclear disaster at Fukushima which has even greater world-wide implications. Gates has been among the loudest champions of building more nukes in this country. He and his foundation have billions of dollars invested in nuclear development, here and around the world.

The reactors at Fukushima were built by Gates partner, G.E. and operated by TEPCO. TEPCO, which is being bashed by the Japanese government for spreading lies and misinformation in order to protect themselves and their investors from liability, is currently building more nukes down in South Texas. Partners in the South Texas project include--yes, you guessed it-- Gates and Buffett.

Gates is also the largest single owner and board chairman of TerraPower, Washington state's nuclear energy company. Other TerraPower investors include, Microsoft, Apple and Intel to Sony and Nokia to Google and eBay — that have poured about $5 billion into Gates' nuke projects.

His partner in the nuclear power industry is the Japanese company, Toshiba and Toshiba along with NRG Energy and G.E. are the direct partners with TEPCO in the U.S.and Japanese nuke business.

Warren Buffett, owns Constellation Energy--67% of which is nukes.

Gates recently put $35 million into Charles River Ventures and Khosla Ventures to build nukes.

It it any wonder then that U.S. politicians, including Pres.Obama are still singing, "NUKE BABY, NUKE" and "DRILL BABY, DRILL"? There's lots of reasons for Gates and his nuke partners to exert influence over pols in both parties. Among them, huge corporate tax breaks. G.E., the nation's largest corporation, pays only about 12% of its earnings in taxes. Don't you wish you were taxed at that rate? Gates does them one better. By investing so heavily through his $36 billion foundation, he is taxed at about a 1% rate on profits from corporate investments. Bad news for Gates--the rate may soon go up to 1.9%.

Finally, it's worth thinking about how much public school reform and public schooling itself, have become dependent of these non-taxable profits gained from these dirty and destructive Gates Foundation investments.

Ownership Society News

Innovation impossible in public schools says Gates

Billionaire Bill proved once again that you don't have to be all that smart to be the world's second-richest man. At the recent Techonomy conference, Gates thanked God for charter schools and wrote off any possibility of  "innovation" coming from within the public school system. (The Daily Riff)

Actually it was public school teachers who created the original charter schools (God was busy that day helping Microsoft's lawyers settle their anti-trust case so the teachers asked us for help). This alone shows a big problem in Gates' thinking. If innovation isn't generated from within the public schools system, how do you explain the birth of charter and small schools? 

Why WaPo and Kaplan stock crashed, Friday

Testing giant Kaplan, WaPo's main profit center, is under investigation by the feds. NYT reports that undercover officers have uncovered "deceptive practices."

Speaking of the Post, they ran this story, page 1 on Saturday, where the FDA assures us that the dispersant COREXIT, used in massive quantities by BP to break up oil globs in the Gulf, is NOT harmful when ingested by humans (that's us). My tip for investors like Warren Buffet, who already owns millions of shares of NALCO (NLC)  producer of COREXIT--buy more. It's currently trading at only $24.5/share.  My tip for fish eaters, this stuff goes great with crab meat or shrimp.

Business 'standards'

Hewlett-Packard is big into the e-Learning business and is a big player in the world of ed philanthropy. But last week, HP's CEO Mark Hurd was forced to resign after he was caught diddling around with a company contractor on company time and on the company dime. OK, stuff like this goes on all the time in the biz world. No big deal, right? But the statement that caught my on this story was:

The shakeup stems from an internal investigation launched after a former HP contractor came forward to accuse Hurd of sexual harassment. A subsequent investigation overseen by HP's board found there was no violation of the company's sexual harassment policy, but concluded Hurd had violated standards of business conduct. (Tech Chronicles)

So the obvious question is, why the gap between HP policy on sexual harassment and "standards of business conduct"? Then I wonder about the size of Hurd's golden parachute.



Side note: Hurd replaced former CEO Carly Fiorina, the T-Party wing-nut Republican senate candidate in California.

Symbol of the ownership society

Drill baby, drill!

27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf not checked for leaks, r u shittin me?

Of 50,000 wells ever drilled in the Gulf, 23,500 have been permanently abandoned, the AP reported. Another 3,500 are classified as "temporarily abandoned," but some have been left in that condition since the 1950s without the full safeguards of permanent abandonment.

No wonder Tilson is "bullish" on BP.

Who knew?

Tilson may be right about being bullish on BP stock. It turns out that they can deduct much of the cost of the Gulf cleanup from their taxes. Destroying the Gulf of Mexico and the economy of 5 states is deductible. Who knew?

Bullish on BP

Have no fear, Bill Gates. Your foundation's millions of BP shares are safe. Hedge-fund ed "reformer" Whitney Tilson is bullish on BP.

I thought 'life' meant, without parole

BP's Hayward finally got "his life back." Spent yesterday yachting. 

Steinberg is a jerk

I always thought Chicago columnist Neil Steinberg was a jerk, at least ever since he called the late, great Studs Terkel an "idiot". As a writer, Steinberg couldn't carry Stud's jock. It's not that Steinberg never writes anything worth quoting. He does and I have quoted his column from time to time. But as my guys at the gym often note, when my jump shot falls through the net, "the sun even shines on a dog's ass some days."

My feelings about Steinberg were confirmed the other day when he consciously misrepresented the views of newly-elected CTU prez Karen Lewis. His bull crap column thankfully didn't elude the critical eye of PURE's Julie Woestehoff.

Here's what Karen said (full speech here):

"Outside of the classroom, we need society to recommit to bettering all communities.  We also need our parents to recommit to the education of their children.  But inside the classroom, the only people who can improve our schools are professional educators.  Corporate heads and politicians do not have a clue about teaching and learning.  They have never sat one minute on this side of a teacher’s desk.  But they’re the ones calling the shots and we’re supposed to accept it as 'reform.' ”

Here's the "quote" Steinberg used: ""The only people who can improve our schools are professional educators."

Means something completely different out of context, doesn't it?

Smarmy Steinberg responds to Julie's letter with  an apology "clairifcation" right out of  Joe Barton's BP playbook.

Lewis represents a fresh start, and she shouldn't feel ill-used on her first day. We all need to try harder in this tight economy, and that includes me.

Steinberg is still as jerk.
 

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All this follows on the heels of an excellent Sun-Times commentary by another former CTU prez, Deborah Lynch ("Children are pawns in CPS plans to increase class size"). 

It's like a wake around here these days. It's hard to comfort colleagues who are leaving by no fault of their own. And it's hard to comfort the students who are also shell-shocked because so many of their favorite teachers are leaving.