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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Europe in Irreversible Decay, EU Elections are Proof of It! Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault. North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that things are not going well”. If everything else fails, they simply try to get some second or third job, and just survive, somehow. On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris. In these nations, there is suddenly no appetite for sacrificing their own people on the altar of well-being of Western citizens. Several countries, including Venezuela and Syria, are even willing to fight for their independence. Despite insane and sadistic embargos and sanctions imposed on them by the West; China, Russia and Iran are now flourishing, in many fields doing much better than Europe and North America. If they are really pushed any further, China, Russia and their allies combined, could easily collapse the economy of the United States; an economy which is built on clay and unserviceable debt. It is also becoming clear that militarily, the Pentagon could never defeat Beijing, Moscow, even Teheran. After terrorizing the world for ages, the West is now almost finished: morally, economically, socially, and even militarily. It still plunders, but it has no plan to improve the state of the world. It cannot even think in such terms. It hates China, and every other country that does have progressive, internationalist plans. It smears President Xi Jinping and his brainchild, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but there is nothing new and exciting that the West is able to offer to the world. Yes, of course, those regime changes, coups, military interventions and theft of natural resources, but anything else? No, silence! * During my two weeks long working visit to Europe, in the Czech Republic (now renamed to Czechia), a country that enjoys a higher HDI (Human Development Index defined by UNDP) than Italy or Spain, I saw several young, decently dressed men, picking through garbage bins, right in front of my hotel, looking for food. I saw young Europeans kneeling and begging in Stuttgart, the second richest city in Germany (where both Mercedes and Porsche car are produced). What I observed in all seven countries of the EU that I visited, was confusion, but also indifference, extreme selfishness and almost grotesque idleness. In great contrast to Asia, everybody in Europe was obsessed with their ‘rights’ and privileges, while no one gave a slightest damn about responsibilities. When my plane from Copenhagen landed in Stuttgart, it began to rain. It was not heavy rain; just rain. The Canadair jet operated by SAS is a small aircraft, and it did not get a gate. It parked a few meters from the terminal and the captain announced that ground staff refused to bring a bus, due to lightning and the downpour. And so, we stayed inside the plane, for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. The lightning ended. The drizzle continued. 40 minutes, no bus. One hour later, a bus appeared. A man from the ground staff emerged leisurely, totally wrapped in plastic, protected hermetically from rain. Passengers, on the other hand, were not even offered umbrellas. “I love myself”, I later read graffiti in the center of the city. The graffiti was not far from the central train station, which is being refurbished at the cost of several billion euros, and against the will of the citizens. The monstrous project is marching on at an insanely lazy pace, with only 5-6 construction workers detectable at a time, down in the tremendous excavations. Stuttgart is unbelievably filthy. Escalators often do not work, drunkards are all over, and so are beggars. It is as if for decades, no one did any face-lift to the city. Once free museums are charging hefty entrance fees, and most of the public benches have disappeared from parks and avenues. The decay is omnipresent. The German rail system (DB) has virtually collapsed. Almost all trains are late, from the ‘regional’; to the once glorified ICE (these German ‘bullet trains’ are actually moving slower, on average, even in comparison to some Indonesian inter-city expresses). The services provided everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Italy, are grotesquely bad. Convenience stores, cafes, hotels – all are understaffed, badly run and mostly arrogant. Humans are often replaced by dysfunctional machines. Tension is everywhere, the bad mood omnipresent. Demanding anything is unthinkable; one risks being snapped at, insulted, sent to hell. I still remember how Western propaganda used to glorify services in the capitalist countries, when we were growing up in the Communist East: “The customer is always treated like a god”. Yes, right! How laughable. For centuries, “European workers” were ‘subsidized’ by colonialist and neo-colonialist plunder, perpetrated in all non-white corners of the world. They ended up being spoiled, showered with benefits, and unproductive. That was fine for the elites: as long as the masses kept voting for the imperialist regime of the West. “The Proletariat” eventually became right-wing, imperialist, even hedonistic. I saw a lot this time, and soon I will write much more about it. What I did not witness, was hope, or enthusiasm. There was no optimism. No healthy and productive exchange of ideas, or profound debate; something I am so used to in China, Russia or Venezuela, just confusion, apathy and decay everywhere. And hate for those countries that are better, more human, more advanced, and full of socialist enthusiasm. * Italy felt slightly different. Again, I met great left-wing thinkers there; philosophers, professors, filmmakers, journalists. I spoke at Sapienza University, the biggest university in Europe. I lectured about Venezuela and Western imperialism. I worked with the Venezuelan embassy in Rome. All of that was fantastic and enlightening, but was this really Italy? A day after I left Rome for Beirut, Italians went to the polls. And they withdrew their supports from my friends of the 5-Star-Movement, leaving them with just over 17%, while doubling the backing for the extreme right-wing Northern League. This virtually happened all over Europe. UK Labor lost, while right-wing Brexit forces gained significantly. Extreme right-wing, even near-fascist parties, reached unexpected heights. It was all “me, me, me” politics. An orgy of “political selfies”. Me had enough of immigrants. Me wants better benefits. Me wants better medical care, shorter working hours. And so on. Who pays for it, no one in Europe seems to care. Not once did I hear any European politicians lamenting about the plundering of West Papua or Borneo, about Amazonia or the Middle East, let alone Africa. And immigration? Did we hear anything about that nuisance of European refugees, millions of them, many illegal, that have descended in the last decades on Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, and even Sub Continent? They are escaping, in hordes, from meaninglessness, depressions, existential emptiness. In the process, they are stripping the locals of land, real estate, beaches, everything. “Immigrants out”? Fine; then European immigrants out from the rest of the world, too! Enough of the one-sidedness! The recent EU elections clearly showed that Europe has not evolved. For countless dark centuries, it used to live only for its pleasure, murdering millions in order to support its high life. Right now, it is trying to reshuffle its political and administrative system, so it can continue doing the same. More efficiently! On top of it, absurdly, the world is expected to pity that overpaid and badly performing, mainly right-wing and lethargic European proletariat, and sacrifice further tens of millions of people, just in order to further increase its standard of living. All this should not be allowed to happen. Never again! It has to be stopped. What Europe has achieved so far, at the expense of billions of lives of “the others”, is definitely not worthy of dying for. Beware of Europe and its people! Study its history. Study imperialism, colonialism and the genocides it has been spreading all over the world. Let them vote in their fascists. But keep them away. Prevent them from spreading their poison all over the world. They want to put the interests of their countries first? Wonderful! Let us do exactly the same: The people of Russia first, too! China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!

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newstfionline · 7 years

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North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal Threatens China’s Path to Power

By Jane Perlez, NY Times, Sept. 5, 2017

BEIJING--The two men stood together on the reviewing stand in the North Korean capital: a top official in China’s Communist leadership wearing a tailored business suit and a young dictator in a blue jacket buttoned to his chin.

Liu Yunshan, the visiting Chinese dignitary, and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, tried to put on a show of friendship, chatting amiably as the cameras rolled, but just as often they stood silent, staring ahead as a military parade passed before them.

Nearly two years have elapsed since that encounter, the last high-level visit between China and North Korea. The stretch of time is a sign of the distance between two nations with a torturous history: one a rising power seeking regional dominance, the other an unpredictable neighbor with its own ambitions.

China has made little secret of its long-term goal to replace the United States as the major power in Asia and assume what it considers its rightful position at the center of the fastest-growing, most dynamic region in the world.

But North Korea, which defied Beijing by testing a sixth nuclear bomb on Sunday, has emerged as an unexpected and persistent obstacle.

Other major hurdles litter China’s path. Yet North Korea--an outcast of the international order that Beijing hopes to lead, but also a nuclear state in part because of China’s own policies--presents a particularly nettlesome challenge.

China’s path to dominance requires an American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on the United States for protection. But North Korea threatens to draw the United States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.

At the same time, the strategic location of the North--and its advancing nuclear capabilities--make it dangerous for China to restrain it.

“North Korea may not be the biggest problem to China, but it does add a unique and very serious dimension to China’s task of supplanting America in East Asia,” said Hugh White, a former strategist for the Australian Defense Department. “That’s because it is the only East Asian power with nuclear weapons.”

Even if the United States steps back from the region, Mr. White added, “North Korea’s capability means China can never be able to dominate the region as much as its leaders today probably hope.”

The Trump administration has bet on China to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, shunning talks with Mr. Kim and gambling that Beijing can be persuaded to use its economic leverage over the North to rein it in.

But in doing so, the White House may be misreading the complexity of China’s relationship with North Korea, one that successive generations of Chinese leaders have struggled to manage.

There is growing resentment against Mr. Kim inside China, both in the general public and the policy establishment. China keeps North Korea running with oil shipments and accounts for almost all its foreign trade. But to many Chinese, the young leader seems ungrateful.

A three-day academic seminar in Shanghai last month brought together some critics, who question North Korea’s value to Beijing as a strategic buffer against South Korea and Japan--and warn that the North could prompt them to develop nuclear weapons of their own.

“The cost is to continue to alienate Japan, enrage the United States and irritate South Korea,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University. “If Japan and South Korea feel forced to go for radical options like nuclear weapons, it will badly affect regional diplomacy.”

The spread of nuclear weapons, he added, would thrust China into “a new Cold War” in Asia, perhaps with a beefed-up American military presence. That would frustrate Beijing’s ambitions for regional supremacy while also leaving it vulnerable to being labeled an enabler of nuclear proliferation, tarnishing its international reputation.

“A balance of mutually assured destruction in Northeast Asia will not be a satisfactory situation for anyone,” said Bilahari Kausikan, a former foreign secretary for Singapore. “But it will not necessarily be unstable, and it may be of some small consolation to Washington, Tokyo and Seoul that the implications for Beijing are somewhat worse.”

President Xi Jinping is said to be aware of such risks and to have privately expressed disdain for Mr. Kim.

But like his predecessors, he has resisted punishing sanctions that might cause North Korea’s collapse and lead to a destabilizing war on its border, a refugee crisis in China’s economically vulnerable northeast, or a unified Korean Peninsula controlled by American forces.

All these possibilities could pose as much a problem for China’s plans for ascendancy in Asia as an arms race in the region. And if North Korea somehow survived, it would remain on China’s border, angry and aggrieved.

From Mr. Xi’s perspective, a hostile neighbor armed with nuclear weapons may be the worst outcome.

China has more nuclear-armed neighbors than any country in the world: Russia, India, Pakistan and now North Korea. But that situation is partly one of its own making.

The origins of North Korea’s nuclear program can be traced to a deal in 1976 between an ailing Mao Zedong and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan.

India had tested its first nuclear bomb two years earlier, and Mr. Bhutto wanted to keep up. China viewed India as a potential threat; the two had fought a brief border war. So it agreed to help.

The particulars were ironed out by Pakistani visitors to Mao’s funeral, according to the account of A. Q. Khan, the nuclear physicist who founded the uranium enrichment program of Pakistan’s bomb project.

In 1982, China shipped weapons-grade uranium to Pakistan. And in 1990, it opened its Lop Nur test site to Pakistan and secretly let the country test its first nuclear bomb there, according to “The Nuclear Express,” a book by two veterans of the American nuclear program.

The United States, upset by China’s behavior, including its sale of missile technology across the developing world, pressed it behind the scenes to stop and persuaded it to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992.

But Beijing’s recognition of the risks of proliferation came slowly, and the genie was already out of the bottle. In 1998, when India conducted five nuclear tests, Pakistan responded with a public test of its own less than three weeks later.

At about the same time, Pakistan was sharing nuclear enrichment technology with North Korea--including centrifuges, parts, designs and fuel essential for its nuclear bombs--in exchange for Korean missile technology and design help. Pakistan later accused Mr. Khan of acting on his own, but he maintains that he had the government’s blessing.

By 2002, the trade was so brazen that Pakistan sent an American-made C-130 cargo plane to North Korea to collect a shipment of ballistic missile parts, a flight that was detected by United States satellites.

While China wanted Pakistan to counterbalance India, it is less clear how it would have benefited from the North’s obtaining nuclear technology. Beijing’s ties with South Korea were improving at the time, but its relationship with the North had hit a rocky patch--again.

Mao is often quoted in the West as saying that North Korea and China are “as close as lips and teeth.” But his actual words, an ancient Chinese idiom, are better translated, “If the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold.” He was warning that China would be in danger without North Korea.

In 1950, Mao sent more than one million Chinese soldiers, including his own son, into the Korean War to help the North fight the United States. By the time the armistice was signed three years later, more than 400,000 Chinese troops had been killed and wounded, a sacrifice in blood that one might have expected to forge a lasting loyalty between the two countries.

But there has always been an edge to the relationship, bred at the start by two Communist rivalries--between Mao and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and between Mao and Stalin, who both saw themselves as overlords of the new state created after World War II.

Then Kim showed who was in charge, purging a faction of senior leaders with Soviet connections in 1955 and moving the next year against more than a dozen members of an elite North Korean military group with ties to Mao. Several were arrested while a handful escaped to China.

The Soviets urged Mao to join them in retaliating against Kim. Chinese troops had not fully withdrawn from the North yet. But Mao demurred, according to a recent article by Sergey Radchenko, a professor of international studies at Cardiff University, citing newly declassified documents from Russian archives.

For the most part, Mao tolerated North Korea’s displays of disloyalty because he was afraid of losing it to the Soviet Union, which was the North’s main economic benefactor and provided it with aid that Mao could not match.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, China enjoyed more room to maneuver. In 1992, seeking trade, it established diplomatic relations with South Korea, infuriating the North, which was suddenly poorer and more isolated than ever.

From then on, according to Shen Zhihua, a historian of Chinese-Korean relations, “The treaty of alliance between China and North Korea became a piece of scrap paper.”

China now imports more goods from South Korea than it does from any other country, while the South counts China as its largest market for both exports and imports. One of President Xi Jinping’s first foreign policy initiatives sought to take advantage of those ties and weaken the South Korean alliance with the United States.

But North Korea got in the way. After the North conducted its fourth nuclear test in early 2016, South Korea’s president at the time, Park Geun-hye, tried to call Mr. Xi to ask for his help in restraining the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

Ms. Park’s aides were unable to arrange the call, according to local news reports. Chinese analysts said Mr. Xi was unwilling to accept Ms. Park’s demand for “the most severe” sanctions against the North.

By refusing to abandon Pyongyang, Mr. Xi lost ground in Seoul.

Ms. Park strengthened relations with Washington and agreed to deploy a missile defense system that Beijing opposed.

For more than a decade, the United States has asked China for talks to discuss what each nation would do if North Korea collapses--but China has resisted, worried that agreeing to do so would be a betrayal.

Among the most pressing questions: Where are the North’s nuclear weapons and who would secure them? How would the two countries’ military forces avoid clashing as they raced to do so? And what should the Korean Peninsula look like afterward?

The Pentagon has asked Beijing to discuss such “contingency plans” since the presidency of George W. Bush, but on each occasion, the Chinese response has been silence, according to a former United States defense official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject.

“The Chinese are concerned about how the North Koreans would react,” said Ralph A. Cossa, the president of the Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu. “I think it stops the conversation in the room.”

As tensions have climbed in recent weeks, questions about what China would do in a crisis remain unanswered. But there is a broad understanding that Beijing would be opposed to American forces crossing the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea.

Global Times, a state-owned tabloid that reflects the opinion of some segments of the party elite, published an editorial last month warning North Korea that China would remain neutral if it attacked the United States.

But the editorial also said that China was prepared to stop any attempt by American and South Korean forces “to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula.”

“The common expectation,” said Yun Sun, a scholar at the Stimson Center in Washington, “is that China is prepared to intervene to preserve a functional North Korean government, as well as the survival of North Korea as a country.”

#China #North Korea #China-North Korea relations

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: Despite tremendous hardship which the Venezuelan people are having to face, despite the sanctions and intimidation from abroad, President Nicolás Maduro has won a second six-year term. Two weeks ago, at the Venezuelan embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where I addressed several leaders of East African left-wing opposition, an acting Charge d’ Affaires, Jose Avila Torres, declared: “People of Venezuela are now facing similar situation as the Syrian people.” True. Both nations, Venezuela and Syria, are separated by a tremendous geographical distance, but they are united by the same fate, same determination and courage. During the Spanish Civil War, Czech anti-fascist fighters, volunteers in the International Brigades, used to say: “In Madrid we are fighting for Prague”. Madrid fell to Franco’s fascists in October 1939. Prague had been occupied by German troops several months earlier, in March 1939. It was the blindness and cowardice of the European leaders, as well as the support which the murderous fascist hordes received from populations of all corners of the continent, which led to one of the greatest tragedies in modern history – a tragedy which only ended on May 9, 1945, when the Soviet troops liberated Prague, defeating Nazi Germany and de facto saving the world. More than 70 years later, the world is facing another calamity. The West, mentally unfit to peacefully end its several centuries long murderous reign over the planet – a reign that has already taken several hundreds of millions of human lives – is flexing its muscle and madly snapping in all directions, provoking, antagonizing and even directly attacking countries as far apart as North Korea (DPRK), China, Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela. What is happening now is not called fascism or Nazism, but it clearly is precisely that, as the barbaric rule is based on a profound spite for non-Western human lives, on fanatical right-wing dogmas which are stinking of exceptionalism, and on the unbridled desire to control the world. Many countries that refused to yield to brutal Western force were recently literally leveled with the ground, including Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. In many other ones, the governments were overthrown by direct and indirect interventions, as well as deceit, as was the case in the mightiest country in Latin America – Brazil. Countless “color”, “umbrella” and other “revolutions” as well as “springs” have been sponsored by Washington, London and other Western capitals. But the world is waking up, slowly but irreversibly, and the fight for survival of our human race has already begun. Venezuela and Syria are, unquestionably, at the front line of the struggle. Against all odds, bleeding but heroically erect, they stand against the overwhelmingly mightier force, and refuse to give up. President Hugo Chavez “Here no one surrenders!” shouted Hugo Chavez, already balding from chemotherapy, dying of cancer which many in Latin America believe, was administered to him from the United States. His fist was clenched and heavy rain was falling on his face. Like this, died one of the greatest revolutionaries of our time. But his revolution survived, and is marching on! I am well aware of the fact that many of my readers are from the West. Somehow, particularly in Europe, I cannot explain, anymore, what it really is to be a revolutionary. Recently I spoke at a big gathering of ‘progressive’ teachers, which took place in Scandinavia. I tried to fire them up, to explain to them what monstrous crimes the West has been committing all over the world, for centuries. I tried and I failed. When the lights went on, I was drilled by hundreds of eyes. Yes, there was an applause, and many stood up in that fake cliché – a standing ovation. But I knew that our worlds were far apart. What followed were pre-fabricated and shallow questions about human rights in China, about “Assad’s regime”, but nothing about the collective responsibility of people of the West. To understand what goes on in Syria and in Venezuela, requires stepping out of the Western mindset. It cannot be understood by selfish minds that are only obsessed with sexuality and sexual orientation, and with self-interest. There is something essential, something very basic and human that is taking place in both Syria and Venezuela. It is about human pride, about motherland, about love for justice and dreams, about a much better arrangement for the world. It is not petty; in fact, it is huge, and even worth fighting and dying for. In both places, the West miscalculated, as it clearly miscalculated in such ‘cases’ as Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, DPRK. “Patria no se vende!”, they have been saying in Cuba, for decades – “Fatherland is not for sale!” Profit is not everything. Personal gain is not everything. Selfishness and tiny but inflated egos are not everything. Justice and dignity are much more. Human ideals are much more. To some people they are. Really, they are, trust me – no matter how unreal it may appear in the West. Syria is bleeding, but it refused to surrender to the terrorism injected by the West and its allies. Aleppo was turned into a modern-day Stalingrad. At a tremendous cost, the city withstood all vicious assaults, it managed to reverse the course of the war, and as a result, it saved the country. Venezuela, like Cuba in the early 90’s, found itself alone, abandoned, spat at and demonized. But it did not fall on its knees. In Europe and North America, analyses of what is happening there have been made “logically” and “rationally”. Or have they, really? Do people in the West really know what it is like to be colonized? Do they know what the “Venezuelan opposition is”? Do they know about the consistency of the terror being spread by the West, for centuries and all over Latin America, from such places like the Dominican Republic and Honduras, all the way down to Chile and Argentina? No, they know nothing, or they know very little, like those Germans who were living right next to the extermination camps and after the war they claimed that they had no idea what that smoke coming up from the chimneys was all about. There is hardly any country in Central or South America, whose government has not at least been overthrown once by the North, whenever it decided to work on behalf of its people. And Brazil, last year, became the ‘latest edition’ of the nightmares, disinformation campaigns, ‘fake news’ and coups – being spread with ‘compliments’ from the North, through local ‘elites’. You see, there is really no point of discussing too many issues with the ‘opposition’ in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba or Bolivia. What has to be said was already pronounced. What goes on is not some academic discussion club, but a war; a real and brutal civil war. I know the ‘opposition’ in South American countries, and I know the ‘elites’ there. Yes, of course, I know many of my comrades, the revolutionaries, but I am also familiar with the ‘elites’. Just to illustrate, let me recall a conversation I once had in Bolivia, with the son of a powerful right-wing senator, who doubled as a media magnate. In a slightly drunken state he kept repeating to me: We will soon kick the ass of that Indian shit [president of Bolivia, Evo Morales] … You think we care about money? We have plenty of money! We don’t care if we lose millions of dollars, even tens of millions! We will spread insecurity, uncertainty, fear, deficits and if we have to, even hunger… We’ll bleed those Indians to death! All this may sound ‘irrational’, even directly against their own capitalist gospel. But they don’t care about rationality, only about power. And their handlers from the North will compensate their losses, anyway. There is no way to negotiate, to debate with these kinds of people. They are traitors, thieves and murderers. For years and decades, they used the same strategy, betting on the soft-heartedness and humanism of their socialist opponents. They dragged progressive governments into endless and futile debates, then used their own as well as Western media to smear them. If it did not work, they choked their own economies, creating deficits, like in Chile before the 1973 Pinochet’s coup. If that did not work, they’d used terror – naked and merciless. And finally, as the last resort – direct Western interventions. They are not in it for ‘democracy’ or even for some ‘free market’. They are serving their Western masters and their own feudalist interests. To negotiate with them is to lose. It is identical with playing the game by their own rules. Because behind them is the entire Western propaganda, as well as financial and military machinery. The only way to survive is to toughen up, to clench teeth, and to fight. As Cuba has been doing for decades, and yes, as Venezuela is doing now. This approach does not look ‘lovely’; it is not always ‘neat’, but it is the only way forward, the only way for progress and revolution to survive. Before Dilma got ‘impeached’ by the pro-Western bunch of corrupt freaks, I suggested in my essay that was censored by Counterpunch but published by dozens of other outlets world-wide, in many languages, that she should send tanks into the streets of Brasilia. I suggested that it was her duty, in the name of the people of Brazil, who voted for her, and who benefited greatly from the rule of her PT. She did not do it, and I am almost certain that now she is regretting so. Her people are once again getting robbed; they are suffering. And the entire South America is, as a result, in disarray! Corruption? Mismanagement? For decades and centuries, the people of Latin America were ruled and robbed by the corrupt bandits, who were using their continent as a milking cow, while living in the repulsive opulence of the Western aristocracy. All that was done, naturally, in the name of ‘democracy’, a total charade. Venezuela is still there – people are rallying behind the government – in terrible pain and half-starving but rallying nevertheless. It is because for many people there, personal interests are secondary. What matters is their country, socialist ideology and the great South American fatherland. Patria grande. It is impossible to explain. It is not rational, it is intuitive, deep, essential and human. Those who have no ideology and ability to commit, will not understand. And, frankly, who cares if they will or not. Hopefully, soon, both Brazil and Mexico – the two most populous nations in Latin America – will vote in new left-wing governments. Things will then change, will become much better, for Venezuela. Until then, Caracas has to rely on its far-away but close comrades and friends, China, Iran and Russia, but also on its beautiful and brave sister – Cuba. Evo Morales recently warned that the West is plotting a coup in Venezuela. Maduro’s government has to survive another few months. Before Brazil is back, before Mexico joins. It will be a tough, perhaps even bloody fight. But history is not made by weak compromises and capitulations. One cannot negotiate with Fascism. France tried, before WWII, and we all know the results. The West and its fascism can only be fought, never appeased When one defends his country, things can never be tidy and neat. There are no saints. Sainthood leads to defeat. Saints are born later, when victory is won and the nation can afford it. Venezuela and Syria have to be supported and defended, by all means. These wonderful people, Venezuelans and Syrians, are now bleeding, fighting for the entire non-Western and oppressed world. In Caracas and Damascus, people are struggling, battling and dying for Honduras and Iran, for Afghanistan and West Africa. Their enemies can only be stopped by force. In Scandinavia, a Syrian gusano, who lives in the West, who smears president Assad and gets fully compensated for it, challenged me, as well as the Syrian ‘regime’ and Iran, during the Q/A session. I said I refuse to discuss this with him, as even if we were to spend two hours shouting at each other, in public, we would never find any common ground. People like him began the war, and war they should get. I told him that he is definitely paid for his efforts and that the only way for us to settle this is ‘outside’, on the street. Venezuela and Syria cannot fall. Too much is now at stake. Both countries are presently fighting something enormous and sinister – they are fighting against the entire Western imperialism. It is not just about some ‘opposition’, or even the treasonous elements in their societies. This is much bigger. This is about the future, about the survival of humanity. Billions of people in all parts of the world have been closely following the elections in the Bolivarian Republic. There, the people have voted. President Maduro won. He won again. Scarred, bruised, but he won. Once again, socialism defeated fascism. And long live Venezuela, damn it! • Originally published by New Eastern Outlook (NEO) http://clubof.info/

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sallysklar · 6 years

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Janresseger: Important New Study Shows How Charter School Expansion Ruins School District Budgets

Across West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and Colorado, school teachers have been striking all spring to call attention to their miserably low salaries and consequent teacher shortages in their states. Teachers have also been showing us the deplorable conditions in their schools—elimination of librarians and nurses—swelling class sizes and outrageous caseloads for school counselors.

The teachers’ mass walkouts have alerted us to the impact of the great recession on states’ revenues and especially to the all-Red states that have continued to cut taxes even as their state education budgets collapsed.

But there are other contributing factors to the crisis to which teachers have been calling our attention. This morning, In the Public Interest (ITPI) released Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts, an important and very readable report on another primary contributor to school districts’ financial woes: the massive growth of charter schools in the past two decades. The report’s author, political economist Gordon Lafer is familiar with attacks on public education and the promotion of privatization across many of the all-Red states. He authored the notable 2017 book: The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time.

Here is the pithy summary blurb by which ITPI introduces its new report, which explores charter school growth in three California school districts as examples of a much wider problem for school districts across the country: “In a first-of-its-kind analysis, this report reveals that neighborhood public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools. In 2016-17, charter schools cost the Oakland Unified School District $57.3 million, the San Diego Unified School District $65.9 million, and Santa Clara County’s East Side Union High School District $19.3 million. The California Charter School Act currently doesn’t allow school boards to consider how a proposed charter school may impact a district’s educational programs or fiscal health when weighing new charter applications. However, when a student leaves a neighborhood school for a charter school, all the funding for that student leaves with them, while all the costs do not.”

What stand out in this report is the perfectly lucid explanation about exactly how charter school funding depletes the budgets of local school districts and what it means for the students left in the traditional public schools when some students carry their per-pupil funding away to a charter school: “To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community. When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district. By California state law, school funding is based on student attendance; when a student moves from a traditional public school to a charter school, her pro-rated share of school funding follows her to the new school. Thus, the expansion of charter schools necessarily entails lost funding for traditional public schools and school districts. If schools and district offices could simply reduce their own expenses in proportion to the lost revenue, there would be no fiscal shortfall. Unfortunately this is not the case.”

The report continues: “If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of heating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment. In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.” As other studies have shown, the greatest fiscal burden for local school districts is for special education, because traditional public schools continue to serve the children with the most serious disabilities, the children who require expensive services most charters elect not to provide.

What about the problems in school districts where the school population is already shrinking? In recent years charters have somehow been prescribed in places like Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland as a way to attract families to the district. But ITPI’s report explains why such thinking is flawed: “It is true that shrinking student populations cause a fiscal crisis for school districts. However, charter schools exacerbate this problem in unique ways. First, charter schools make it extremely difficult for districts to consolidate schools in the face of falling enrollment… When the creation of new schools is no longer tied to student population growth but rather is open to any number of entrepreneurs aimed at competing for market share, the inevitable result is an increased number of schools for the same population of students. In Albany, New York, over the course of a decade the district went from serving 10,380 students in 17 schools to serving just slightly more students—10,568—but in 24 schools…. And the New York Times reported that in the city of Detroit, ‘the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles…’ The problem is particularly destructive in communities whose total school population is already shrinking…. In such districts school systems already struggling to meet student needs with diminishing resources are faced with additional dramatic cuts in funding.”

In California, ITPI estimates, “the net impact of each student who transfers from a traditional public school to a charter school to be approximately $5,000 in San Diego, $5,700 in Oakland, and $6,600 in the East Side (Santa Clara) district.”

In addition to reporting on this study’s investigation of three California school districts, ITPI reviews studies of charter growth across the country: “Because school funding formulas differ from state to state, and because the studies were conducted at different points over the past decade, the results vary significantly. Yet in every case, studies found that charter growth has caused school districts to suffer much more in lost revenue than they are able to make up in reduced expenses—resulting in large net shortfalls for district students. In the smaller cities of Buffalo, New York and Durham, North Carolina, the net impact of charter schools was estimated at a loss of $25 million per year to each school district. In Nashville, Tennessee, the loss is approaching $50 million per year. And in Los Angeles—the nation’s second-largest school district—the net loss is estimated at over $500 million per year… While the magnitude of charter schools’ impact obviously varies by size of district, we can control for district size by converting the findings into impacts per charter students. In that case, all of the studies described above found the net loss to school districts for each student who moves from a district to charter school to be somewhere between $3,100 and $6,700.”

Lafer, the report’s author, painstakingly explains his methodology for determining the financial losses to the school districts in Oakland, San Diego, and Santa Clara County, and the effects of California state law to deny local school districts the capacity to control their budgets even as more and more charters are approved. But for the purposes of this blog, what is most significant is the warning about the very idea of creating charters to introduce marketplace school choice even while causing fiscal distress for already underfunded school districts: “If a school district anywhere in the country—in the absence of charter schools—announced that it wanted to create a second system-within-a-system, with a new set of schools whose number, size, specialization, budget, and geographic locations would not be coordinated with the existing school system, we would regard this as the poster child of government inefficiency and a waste of tax dollars. But this is indeed how the charter school system functions.”

Please read this fine report from In the Public Interest: Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts.

elaine May 8, 2018

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