New York Times Comes under Fire for Declaring Michael Brown to Be “No Angel” in Its Profile Article of the Dead Teenager

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Michael Brown

Michael Brown

 By Elaine Magliaro

The New York Times has come under fire for an article that it published yesterday about the life of Michael Brown—the NewYorkTimesunarmed teenager who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, recently. Jack Mirkinson (Huffington Post) said that Jon Eligon’s “lengthy profile of Brown” in the NYT touched on the “problems and promise” that Brown faced. He said, “Much of the piece could be seen as sympathetic towards him.”

Joanna Rothkopf (Salon) said that Eligon’s article “was a generally poignant piece about Michael Brown, the teenager who was gunned down by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.” She added that Eligon “wrote eloquently of Brown’s introspective final weeks struggling with religion and the meaning of life. However, the generally respectful article has unwittingly demonstrated the media’s unconscious bias.”

Rothkopf was referring to one paragraph in Eligon’s article that evidently “set people off”:

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.

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Posted in Media, Racism, Society, United States | Tagged , , | 45 Comments

Mr. Conservative: Congressional Candidate from Minnesota Once Called Female Senators “Undeserving Bimbos in Tennis Shoes” and Disparaged Native Americans on His Blog

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Jim Hagedorn

Jim Hagedorn

By Elaine Magliaro

Jim Hagedorn, the son of retired congressman Tom Hagedorn, was a “surprise victor” in last week’s Republican primary in Minnesota. The Star Tribune reported that Hagedorn “pulled off an upset in his party’s 1st District primary for Congress” when he beat Aaron Miller—the candidate who had been endorsed by the GOP. In November, Hagedorn will face off against Democrat Tim Walz, who is seeking his fifth term in Congress

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones said that Hagedorn “brings some serious baggage to his race against Walz…” Murphy said the Minnesota politics blog Bluestem Prairie had unearthed some posts that the GOP candidate had made on his old blog, Mr. Conservative. According to Murphy, Hagedorn “made light of American Indians, President Obama’s Kenyan ancestry, and female Supreme Court justices, among others, in ways many voters won’t appreciate.” Murphy added that Hagedorn had “deleted many of his old posts prior to his 2010 run for Walz’s seat—he lost in the GOP primary. But some of his writings can still be found via the Internet Archive or in screenshots taken by the Minnesota Independent.” Murphy continued by saying that Hagedorn’s posts “were not mere juvenile ramblings…” Hagedorn happened to be a Treasury Department official at the time that he wrote them.

Murphy provided examples of some of the comments that Hagedorn made about people that voters may not appreciate:

“Turns out half-aunt Zeituni is an illegal alien from Kenya who has illegally contributed money to her half-nephew’s campaign, which should make Americans half-pi$$ed,” he wrote in a typical missive during the 2008 election cycle. “The migration from Barack Obama’s second country to the United States during the next four years is going to look like a low-budget remake of Eddie Murphy’s hit comedy ‘Coming to America.'”

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Posted in Conservatives, Politics, United States | Tagged , , , | 34 Comments

Billie Holiday, Abe Meeropol, and “Strange Fruit”—the Famous Song about Lynching Black People in America

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday

By Elaine Magliaro

Eleanora Fagan, better known as Billie Holiday, was a famous American jazz singer and song writer. One of her “most iconic” songs is Strange Fruit, which was first recorded in 1939. Elizabeth Blair (NPR) called the song “a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism.” In her 2012 NPR article about the famous song, Blair told the story of Abe Meeropol, the man who wrote Strange Fruit. A“white Jewish guy from the Bronx,” Meeropol wrote the poem about the lynching of Black people and set it to music.

 

Blair:

Meeropol graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, says Gerard Pelisson, who wrote a book about the school.

In the late 1930s, Pellison says, Meeropol “was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge.”

Meeropol once said the photograph “haunted” him “for days.” So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner — who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.

When Holiday decided to sing “Strange Fruit,” the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear:

Here is the first stanza of Meeropol’s poem:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Click here to read the rest of the poem.

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Posted in American History, Equal Rights, History, Music, Poetry, Racism, Short Video, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Oregon GOP Congressional Candidate Asks Residents to Send Him Their Urine

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Art Robinson

Art Robinson

By Elaine Magliaro

Sometimes, I just have to shake my head when I read the news these days. That’s actually what I did the other day when I read an online article about Republican Congressional candidate Art Robinson of Oregon. For the third time, Robinson is hoping to unseat Democratic Congressman Pete DeFazio in the upcoming election this fall. According to Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, over the past three decades when Robinson wasn’t running for office, he was running a research nonprofit out of a family compound in the mountain town of Cave Junction, near the California border.” Robinson, a scientist/chemist who was educated at Caltech, has had some strange ideas and theories in the past.

Murphy said that in a monthly newsletter called Access to Energy, “Robinson has used his academic credentials to float theories on everything from AIDS to public schooling to climate change (which he believes is a myth). In one essay, Robinson even “proposed using airplanes to disperse radioactive waste on Oregon homes,” in the hopes that people would build up resistance to degenerative illnesses.

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Posted in Climate Change Deniers, Conservatives, Education, Politics, Science, States, United States | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

POETRY FRIDAY: Fractured Nursery Rhymes

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

MyCatIsinLovewiththeGoldfish

By Elaine Magliaro

Here are some of my original “fractured” nursery rhymes. Note: The poem Jack and June was included in a children’s poetry anthology titled My Cat Is in Love with the Goldfish and Other Loopy Love Poems. The book was published by A & C Black (London) in 2010.

 

 

 

JACK AND JUNE

Jack and June went to the moon,
Crash-landed in a crater.
Jack broke his nose and seven toes.
(He’s a crummy navigator!)

Jack cried in pain. June tried in vain
To soothe her injured mate.
She bound his toes and kissed his nose
And asked him for a date.

Jack and June began to swoon…
Fell mad in love and they
Returned to Earth, their place of birth…
And wed the very next day.

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Posted in Humor, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Public Schools for Sale?: Diane Ravitch Talks with Bill Moyers about the Privatization of Public Education

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Diane Ravitch Education Historian

Diane Ravitch
Education Historian

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

NOTE: I originally posted this article at Res Ipsa Loquitor on June 8, 2014. I think it bears re-posting at Flowers for Socrates.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University, a historian of education, and author of more than ten books—including The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003) and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010). Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993 during the administration of George H. W. Bush. When she was Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of voluntary state and national academic standards. “From 1997 to 2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal testing program. She was appointed by the Clinton administration’s Secretary of Education Richard Riley in 1997 and reappointed by him in 2001. From 1995 until 2005, she held the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution and edited Brookings Papers on Education Policy. Before entering government service, she was Adjunct Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.”

Ravitch, once a champion of charter schools, supported the No Child Left Behind initiative. After careful investigation, Ravitch changed her mind and became one of our country’s most well-known critics of charter-based education. She believes that “the privatization of public education has to stop.” In late March, Ravitch sat down with Bill Moyers on Moyers & Company to discuss the subject of privatizing of public schools—which has become “big business as bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity investors are entering what they consider to be an ‘emerging market.’” You can view a video of that program, Public Schools for Sale?, below the fold.

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Posted in Education, Education Policy, Investing, United States, Wall Street | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Ferguson (MO) Circa 2014, California Circa 1967, the Death of Denzil Dowell, the Black Panther Party, and Open Carry Laws

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Black-Panther-Party-armed-guards-in-street-shotgunsBy Elaine Magliaro

Nearly fifty years ago, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale established the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. According to Steve Wasserman of The Nation, the two “brash upstarts” from Oakland, California “quickly garnered a reputation for their willingness to stand up to police harassment and worse. They’d made a practice of shadowing the cops, California Penal Code in one hand, twelve-gauge shotgun in the other.” Charles Pierce (Esquire) said that in those days “the police were knocking off black folks with an alarming regularity.” In 1967—about six months after Seale and Newton established the Black Panther Party–“a black man named Denzil Dowell was blown away by a shotgun wielded by the police in North Richmond, an impoverished, largely black suburban community outside Oakland.”

Steve Wasserman reported that the police said that Dowell, a construction worker, “had been killed by a single shotgun blast to the back and head; they claimed that he had been caught burglarizing a liquor store and, when ordered to halt, had failed to do so.” Wasserman said that the “coroner’s report told a different story.” Dowell’s body “bore six bullet holes”—and “there was reason to believe Dowell had been shot while surrendering with his hands raised high.” Dowell’s mother believed that the police had murdered her son—but an all-white jury found that the young man’s death was “justifiable homicide.” Wasserman said that many people in North Richmond didn’t agree with the jury’s decision.

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Posted in American History, Courts, Crime, Equal Rights, History, Justice, Law Enforcement, Local Government, Murder, Politics, Propaganda, Racism, States, United States | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Charter Schools and The Profit Motive

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

SchoolRoom1By Elaine Magliaro

NOTE: I originally posted this article about charter schools and their backers at Res Ipsa Loquitor on March 16, 2013. I think it bears re-posting at Flowers for Socrates.

In a 2010 New York Times article titled Charter Schools’ New Cheerleaders: Financiers, reporters Tripp Gabriel and Jennifer Medina wrote the following about what was going on in the state of New York:

Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm…

Although the April 9 breakfast with Mr. Cuomo was not a formal fund-raiser, the hedge fund managers have been wielding their money to influence educational policy in Albany, particularly among Democrats, who control both the Senate and the Assembly but have historically been aligned with the teachers unions.

They[hedge fund managers] have been contributing generously to lawmakers in hopes of creating a friendlier climate for charter schools. More immediately, they have raised a multimillion-dollar war chest to lobby this month for a bill to raise the maximum number of charter schools statewide to 460 from 200.

That same year—2010—Juan Gonzalez believed that he had uncovered one of the reasons why hedge fund managers, some wealthy Americans, and the executives of some Wall Street banks had become such big proponents of charter schools and had gotten involved in their development. Gonzalez said the banks and other wealthy investors had been making “windfall profits” by taking advantage of “a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.” That little know tax break, the New Markets Tax Credit, can be so lucrative, Gonzalez said, “that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.” He added that the tax break “gives an enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities, and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools.”

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Posted in Education, Education Policy, United States, Wall Street | Tagged , | 47 Comments

Who the F*ck is Dan Loeb and How Is He Connected to Teacher Pensions and School Reformers?

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Dan Loeb Third Point LLC

Dan Loeb
Third Point LLC

By Elaine Magliaro

I have focused much of my time lately doing research on anti-teacher/anti-tenure school reformers—including Campbell Brown, David Boies, and Michelle Rhee. In my post about school reformer/star lawyer David Boies, I noted how certain names kept “popping up in the groups leading the charge to eliminate due process for teachers and to establish more charter schools.” It seemed almost “incestuous” to me. I provided a little breakdown of the connections between the people serving on the boards of organizations hoping to eliminate teacher tenure.

I’m re-posting that breakdown for you here:

– Adrian Fenty is a member of the Board of Directors of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Fenty was the mayor who hired Michele Rhee to manage the schools in Washington, D.C.

– David Boies serves on the Board of Directors of Campbell Brown’s group Partnership for Educational Justice—as does Joe Williams who is the Executive Director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

– David Boies, Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz (CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools), Joel Klein (former New York City schools chancellor, chair of the Broad Center and, head of Amplify—the education division of Rupert Murdoch’s  News Corp.), and Campbell Brown’s husband Dan Senor all serve as members of the Board of Directors of StudentsFirstNY.

– Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein also serve as members of the StudentsFirst National Board of Directors.

– Campbell Brown Serves on the Board of Directors of Moskowitz’s Success Academy.

Dan Loeb and Public Pensions

One name that I failed to include in my breakdown was Dan Loeb. I also neglected to point out that some so-called school reformers are eager to eliminate defined benefit pensions for public school teachers. You may be wondering who the f*ck Dan Loeb is and what he has to do with teacher pensions and school reform. Loeb is a co-founder of StudentsFirstNY. He manages a hedge fund known as Third Point LLC. (FYI: It has been reported that Loeb earned $380 million in 2012.)

Edited to add: Loeb is also a member of the Board of Directors of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools.

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Posted in Courts, Education, Politics, Stock Market, United States, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 17 Comments

A Sunday Morning Video: Mark Fiore’s “Rick Perry’s Operation Strong Candidate”

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

Posted in Immigrants, Law Enforcement, Mexico, Politics, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments