Thursday, October 07, 2010

SIG Stuart Bowen's fear

Lisa Buie (St. Petersburg Times) reports 22-year-old Iraq War veteran David Jernigan "will get a soldier's farewell as members of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce, with flags in hand, line the street before the graveside service at 11:30 a.m. at Floral Memory Gardens in Dade City." As September wound down, with less than a month left to serve, Jernigan died after his car hit "a barrier" in Honolulu and he was struck exiting his car. His survivors include his grandparents Louise and Clarence Jernigan, his brothers Cody and Jesse Strong, his mother Tammy, his children Lena Paige Jernigan and Sara Lynn Jernigan and his wife Samantha who states, "He was goofy. He did anything to make people laugh, including tripping himself sometimes." Geoff Fox (Tampa Bay Tribune) notes that in Dade City today, many will be wearing red, white and blue and holding flags downtown in memory of David Jernigan.

In addition, Daniel Hartill (Maine's Sun Journal) reports 49-year-old Michael Behr, working for KBR in Iraq as a contractor, died over the weekend and his mother Florence Behr states, "It's being treated as a military, non-combatant death."

Meanwhile, most of us are more used to seeing Anne-Marie Cusac's byline in and at The Progressive, but she posted yesterday at The Huffington Post on the death of Alyssa Peterson, a US service member in Iraq who apparently took her own life in September of 2003:

As KNAU, the public radio station in Peterson's hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona, explained, "Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed." Peterson was likely refusing to participate in torture.
[. ..]
While psychologists will say that suicides have many factors, and I am not interested in offering up a simplistic explanation for Peterson's death. I suspect that what confronted this patriotic, Arabic-speaking, intelligent, sensitive, and empathetic woman in the last days of her life was evidence of a culture in conflict. She appears to have gone to Iraq as a true believer in the good of her country. She discovered there the American culture of punishment.

At Texas Tech yesterday, the Special Inspector General for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, spoke about the Iraq War. Logan G. Carver (Lubbock Avalanche-Journal) reports Bowen does not see an immediate rosy future for Iraq and that he declared, "Iraq will soon be back, I fear on the front pages. Our worst fears could be realized."

The following community websites -- plus wowOwow and Diane Rehm -- updated last night:


David Bacon's latest book is Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press) which won the CLR James Award. Bacon can be heard on KPFA's The Morning Show (over the airwaves in the Bay Area, streaming online) each Wednesday morning (begins airing at 7:00 am PST). And we'll close with this from Bacon's "California's Perfect Storm" (Rethinking Schools):

The United States today faces an economic crisis worse than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nowhere is it sharper than in the nation's schools. It's no wonder that last year saw strikes, student walkouts, and uprisings in states across the country, aimed at priorities that put banks and stockbrokers ahead of children. California was no exception. In fact, other states looked on in horror simply at the size of its budget deficit-at one point more than $34 billion. The quality of the public schools plummeted as class sizes ballooned and resources disappeared in blizzards of pink slips. Fee increases drove tens of thousands from community colleges and university campuses.
But California wasn't just a victim. Last year it saw a perfect storm of protest in virtually every part of its education system. K-12 teachers built coalitions with parents and students to fight for their jobs and their schools. Students poured out of community colleges and traveled to huge demonstrations at the capitol. Building occupations and strikes rocked the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) campuses. Together, they challenged the way the cost of the state's economic crisis is being shifted onto education, with a particularly bitter impact on communities of color. Activists questioned everything from the structural barriers to raising new taxes to the skewed budget priorities favoring prisons over schools.
Rise and Fall of the Master Plan
When the current recession hit, California had already fallen from one of the country's leaders in per-pupil education funding in the 1950s to 49th among the 50 states in the last decade. That fall was more than just a decline in dollars. It was the end of a commitment to its young people that started in 1960, when a wave of populist enthusiasm put liberals in control of the California Legislature and governor's mansion. Together, they issued a Master Plan for Higher Education that promised every student access to some degree of postsecondary schooling. Community colleges were free, omnipresent, and accepted everyone. UCs had no tuition and charged only nominal "fees" for university services. Strikes led by Third World students and civil rights demonstrations opened the doors wider to people of color and youth of working-class families generally. The state's reputation as an economic and technological powerhouse owed much to the students who passed through the system in the decades that followed.
By last year, that era wasn't even a memory for students who have grown up in an age of shrinking expectations. Yet on paper, at least, the promise remained. In urging students and teachers on UC campuses to fight instead of giving up, noted radical sociologist Mike Davis called it an epic challenge. "Equity and justice are endangered at every level of the Master Plan for Education," he argued. Davis called on his fellow faculty members to look out of their office windows. "Obscene wealth still sprawls across the coastal hills, but flatland inner cities and blue-collar interior valleys face the death of the California dream. Their children-let's not beat around the bush-are being pushed out of higher education. Their future is being cut off at its knees."
Strike! he urged them. "A strike," he said, "by matching actions to words, is the highest form of teach-in. The 24th [the date last September for the first walkout] is the beginning of learning how to shout in unison."


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thomas friedman is a great man






oh boy it never ends












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