CZAR WARS
Obama's 'gay' appointee: I'd handle student differently
Obama's 'gay' appointee: I'd handle student differently
But Office of Safe Schools chief declines to express 'regret'
Posted: September 30, 2009
3:45 pm Eastern
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
 Kevin Jennings |
The homosexual activist picked by the Obama administration to oversee the Office of Safe Schools in the U.S. Department of Education now claims he should have handled a situation while he was a teacher involving a sexually active student "differently," but the statement from Kevin Jennings fails to express "regret."
"A teacher was told by a 15-year-old high school sophomore that he was having homosexual sex with an 'older man.' At the very least, statutory rape occurred. Fox News reported that the teacher violated a state law requiring that he report the abuse. That former teacher, Kevin Jennings, is President Obama's 'safe school czar.' ... Clearly, the process for vetting White House employees has broken down," the Times editorial board said.
Read entire article ...
By Joseph Abrams
FOXNews.com
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
John Holdren, President Obama's chief science adviser, is facing scrutiny for radical population control measures he discussed in a 1977 ecology textbook. (AP photo)
President Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.
Holdren, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford and headed a science policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the past 13 years, won the unanimous approval of the Senate as the president's chief science adviser.
He was confirmed with little fanfare on March 19 as director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, a 50-person directorate that advises the president on scientific affairs, focusing on energy independence and global warming.
Read article.
The Bizarre Views of President Obama’s 'Science Czar'
Population Research Institute (www.pop.org)
FRONT ROYAL, Va. (Catholic Online) - President Obama’s top science adviser and I have something in common: We both have a long-term association with Paul Ehrlich, my former colleague at Stanford University. There any similarity ends, however. Holdren, who has co-authored books on population control with Ehrlich and his wife, is the Stanford Professor’s ideological clone. For my part, I have long opposed the prescriptions of the infamous population bombster, and now find myself compelled to reject the almost identical views of the lesser-known but now more powerful Holdren as well.
What views? Let’s start with his 1973 book, co-authored with the Ehrlichs, called Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. In it, he argued that “Human values and institutions have set mankind on a collision course with the laws of nature. Human beings cling jealously to their prerogative to reproduce as they please—and they please to make each new generation larger than the last—yet endless multiplication on a finite planet is impossible. Most humans aspire to greater material prosperity, but the number of people that can be supported on Earth if everyone is rich is even smaller than if everyone is poor.”
I found this article on a blog by
Obama's Green Czar - Van Jones - Communist Radical -GREEN & RED
Saturday, June 13, 2009
[Prepared as a Memo for the Working Class Studies Association Conference, June 6-8 2009, at the University of Pittsburgh.]
By Carl Davidson
SolidarityEconomy.net
1.
One of the more important progressive measures launched in the first
100 days of the Obama administration is the Green Jobs Initiative
within the broader Economic Recovery Act. There is substantial money
allocated to it, and the appointee brought on to shepherd its
development, Van Jones, is one of the few Obama appointees clearly from
the left. Green Jobs is also a product of the Blue-Green Alliance, a
joint effort by labor unions and environmental groups, which have
funded advocacy for the program for years.
2.
There are two aspects to Green Jobs, the immediate and the structural.
The immediate has to do with bringing living-wage employment with a
future to those who need it most, the unemployed and under-employed
youth of the inner city. The structural has to do with Green Jobs being
part of a larger effort to shift the country's energy system from one
based on burning carbon and uranium to one based on sustainable
renewables-solar, wind, wave, hydro and geothermal. All these require
major upgrading of the country's infrastructure and a retooling of its
manufacturing for more advanced products and production. Both aspects
require a new Green industrial policy, alongside an erosion of the
country's traditional military-industrial policy and more recent
neoliberal market fundamentalism.
3. The neoliberal diehards in
the House and Senate GOP, together with the rightwing populism stirred
up by the Fox-Limbaugh-Hannity media reactionaries, are preparing an
all-out attack of Green Jobs on several fronts. First, they attack the
whole concept that there is any urgency to anything Green. In their
view, global warming and climate change is simply a leftwing hoax used
as a cover to attack the free market and promote government planning,
leading to socialism. Second, they attack it as affirmative action for
people of color, supposedly masking moral failure and public schools as
the real reason for the problems of the inner city. Third, they are
preparing a red-baiting campaign against Van Jones in particular, as
part of a wider effort to red-bait Obama and deny the legitimacy of his
election.
4. Green Jobs will require more than White House and
Congressional Democrat support in order to survive this resistance and
counter-attack. Getting a program adopted by Congress is only the first
step on a long road to its deployment. Community and youth
organizations, environmental group and the trade unions are facing the
task of launching a social movement to see to it that Green Jobs is not
gutted, delayed or otherwise sabotaged.
5. Green Jobs can be
undermined indirectly as well. The program ultimately has to be
deployed locally, and pass through state, county and city governments
and their hangers-on. Left to their own inclinations, funds for Green
Jobs may be diverted to parks or highway projects that shore up
existing government worker payrolls with little new employment of those
most in need. Alternately, new construction can be turned over to firms
importing non-union labor, or using labor at minimum wage rather than
living wage standards. Only local coalitions mobilized with some clout
at the base can prevent this, and the ball is in the court of the left
to organize them.
6. Green Jobs is a natural for the left to
build coalitions of diversity in working-class and low-income
communities. Start with organizations close to those who need green
jobs most-inner city youth service agencies, neighborhood churches and
their youth groups, sports groups-then approach others needed to make a
collaborative work, such as trade union apprenticeship programs,
community college trade skills teachers, local home building or
remodeling companies looking for new projects. With this assembled,
find the local political incumbents, especially at the state level,
ready to go to bat for your project. Connect with Green For All, Van
Jones' group, if its in a major city near you, for advice.
7.
The left has its own approach to bring to the Green Jobs table, apart
from being a catalytic organizer. Green Jobs can be implemented in a
'low road' way, by giving funds to contractors who hire youth at
minimum wage, who in turn winterize a few public buildings, bypass the
unions and dump the youth when it's over. Obviously, this is to be
avoided. But there's a high road, solidarity economy approach that
builds a stakeholder collaborative of businesses, unions, credit unions
and school, with a strategic view of a lasting green construction
worker cooperative as an outcome, together with higher-tech career
paths through community college partnership with high-tech green firms.
The solidarity economy, in turn, serves as a way to educate concretely
about the prospects for a socialist future.
8. Green Jobs is a
product of a long and complex series of working-class and youth
struggles. One part reaches back to the global justice battles in the
streets of Seattle more than a decade ago. The unions joined this to
battle NAFTA, and the youth came out of green and global justice
concerns. Both found themselves on the same sides of the barricades
battling police in the streets-'Teamsters and Turtles Forever!' was a
spontaneous slogan. Some in the Steelworkers Union and the Sierra Club
took it further, and in a paradigm shift, began to see each other as
natural allies rather than natural adversaries. The tons of steel and
19,000 machined parts in every wind turbine had to be manufactured and
assembled somewhere, after all. This was formally put together and
funded as the Blue-Green Alliance. The other component came from the
anger of inner city youth facing jails and police harassment and
brutality. Demanding jobs for youth was not new and often ignored, but
when Van Jones in Oakland put out 'Green Jobs, Not Jails' to put kids
to work insulating buildings and installing solar panels, he suddenly
had people listening in a new way. There is more to the story, but this
is the heart of it, an organic development from class struggle,
labor-community alliances and youth insurgency. There will be more
battles, but with this energy to build on, the prospects are very
bright.
[Carl Davidson is
webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net, a national committee member of the
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and a
coordinating committee member of the US Solidarity Economy Network.
Together with Jerry Harris, he is author of 'Cyber-Radicalism: A New
Left for a Global Age, available at http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker If you like this article, use the PayPal button to give support. Email him at [email protected] ]
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