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

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.

Biting the hand...

Seattle Times columnist Lynn Varner warns the teacher unions, "don't bite the hand [Bill Gates] you feed from." She sure doesn't.

School reformers & BP

Even though the  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lost some $140 million recently as BP stock collapsed, the foundation has raked in billions from its 43 million shares of BP Oil, much of it from high-risk drilling in the Gulf. BP has made more than $20 billion each year in profits. Warren Buffet, who is a $30 billion partner in the Foundation, also owns millions of shares of NALCO, the company that makes the toxic dispersant COREXIT that BP is currently spilling all over the Gulf. COREXIT is said to be 4x as toxic as the oil itself. It is already reportedly eating through boats in the Gulf. 

Why then isn't the Gates Foundation and Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Fund, being made to pay for some of the damage BP caused with a portion of their mega-profits?

Other owners of NALCO include Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and Apollo Management. Goldman Sachs had good timing. They dumped $250 million in BP stock just before the spill. The shares were gobbled up by the Gates Fund.

Then there's hedge-funder and phony school reformer Whitney Tilson, who is buying up BP stock as fast as he can. He says the company's stock is currently undervalued. Tilson also bankrolls Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group that is a major force behind privatization, mass teacher firings and union busting.

Tilson and DFER have the ear of Arne Duncan when it comes to setting ed policy at the DOE. Birds of a feather... (no pun intended).

'Don't worry. It's only 100,000 teachers--not 300,000'

WaPo liar Lane sounds like BP's Hayward

Lane's Post Partisan blog is anything but. Here he echoes the very partisan teacher/union bashers and tries to run the big lie past us, that firing hundreds of thousands of teachers is no big deal. 

Well, 300,000 teacher layoffs would increase the national student-teacher ratio in public schools from 15.3 to 1, to 16.6 to 1 – roughly where it was in 1997. And 100,000 teacher layoffs would increase it to 15.6 to 1 – the 2005 level. Neither number portends educational apocalypse.

Lane must not read the Chicago papers. CPS class size is projected to increase to 35/class. In L.A. the Times reports class size has already swelled above the 50 mark.

Lane is a class size deny-er. He's the schools' version of  BP's Tony Hayward who also told us not to worry, the "environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest." The loss of 300,000 (or even 100,000) teachers jobs is indeed, something to worry about.

Exactly how many shares of BP does the Gates Fund really own?

H/t to commenter David C. for telling me that I badly understated the BP stock holdings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which I reported first as 4 million and than revised to more than 7 million shares. Here's where I got my original figures. But in yesterday's NYT, Green blogger John Rudolph ("How British is BP?) reports that the Gates Fund actually owns an astonishing 43 million shares. The estimates keep climbing on par with BP's spill estimates.Stay tuned.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

CTU president-elect Karen Lewis

“Today marks the beginning of the end of scapegoating educators for all the social ills that our children, families and schools struggle against every day.  Today marks the beginning of a fight for true transparency in our educational policy -- how to accurately measure learning and teaching, how to truly improve our schools, and how to evaluate the wisdom behind our spending priorities.” (Progress Illinois)

Bloomberg in defense of BP Oil

“The guy that runs BP didn't exactly go down there and blow up the well.” (Politico)

NAACP President Ben Jealous

"Democrats have the biggest majority in the House and the Senate that any party has had in 30 years. Yet, they behave like they're in the minority. That's the crux of the problem. We're concerned that a relatively small number of relatively privileged angry people demand so much attention with so much hatred." (At Rainbow/PUSH Convention)

Glenn Beck's Blues: The right-wing hates soccer

“It doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.” (Dave Zirin in The Nation)

A child's view of the oil spill

Pufferfish Struggling in the Oil Spill (Tangerine, Fl.)

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Is there any question?

It's "a legitimate concern to question whether BP's interests in being fully forthcoming about the extent of the damage is aligned with the public interest," he said, adding: "We have to verify whatever it is they say about the damage." (Pres.Obama)

L.A. high schools students hold a "walk-in" to protest cuts

“It does sound tempting to really relax and take the day off, but I can’t take a day off knowing it’s going to affect my future,” said Kahn, 16. “We’re protesting the fact that it’s gotten to the point that we have to be cutting back on our education. The priorities of spending in California are very wrong.” (L.A. Times)

Hedge-fund school "reformers" Tilson, Buffett cleaning up on the oil spill

"In a cash-constrained world of chaos and panic, we are finding tremendous bargains," says Tilson (Tech Ticker)

Tlison's fund owns Warren Buffett's holding company. Buffett is partners with Bill Gates in the Gates Foundation (which owns more than 4 million shares of BP Oil). Buffet and Tilson also bought NALCO, the company that makes the toxic oil dispersant they are dumping into the Gulf. May be a bigger pollutant than the oil itself. They are also among the biggest backers of privately-managed charter schools. Tilson heads up Democrats for Education Reform (DFER),