oil rigs are considered ships and the rig that exploded was registered
to (Palao?)a tiny island nation in the So. Pacific; one with partiularly lax
safety regs. Our coast guard cannot inspect nor enforce, but must cede
such to a 'specialist' from the oil industry who enforces only Palao's lax
regulations. Had if been a US registry, the coast guard would not have
allowed this rig to drill! The Rachel Maddow & Keith Olbermann shows
provided this information.
Scheer deals with the overseeing agency, MMS, which not only enforces
safety, but collects money from big oil; the one where the administration
is now, belatedly considering separate agencies for these functions.
What a country.
Ed
From: "Rudy Saves" <hchsc003@csun.edu>
Arizona bill targeting ethnic studies signed into law
Gov. Jan Brewer signs the bill that bans schools from teaching
classes designed for students of a particular ethnic group. School
districts may appeal the law, which becomes effective Dec. 31.
By Nicole Santa Cruz
LA Times:May 12, 2010
A bill that aims to ban ethnic studies in Arizona schools was signed
into law Tuesday by Gov. Jan Brewer, cheering critics who called such
classes divisive and alarming others who said it's yet another law
targeting Latinos in the state.
The move comes less than 20 days after Brewer signed a controversial
immigration bill that has caused widespread protests against the state.
The governor's press office did not return requests for comment Tuesday
evening.
HB 2281 <http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf> bans
schools from teaching classes that are designed for students of a
particular ethnic group, promote resentment or advocate ethnic
solidarity over treating pupils as individuals. The bill also bans
classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The bill was written to target the Chicano, or Mexican American, studies
program in the Tucson school system, said state Supt. of Public
Instruction Tom Horne.
School districts that don't comply with the new law could have as much
as 10% of their state funds withheld each month. Districts have the
right to appeal the mandate, which goes into effect Dec. 31.
Tucson Unified School District officials say the Chicano studies classes
benefit students and promote critical thinking. "We don't teach all
those ugly things they think we're teaching," said Judy Burns, the
president of the district's governing board.
She has no intention of ending the program, which offers courses from
elementary school through high school in topics such as literature,
history and social justice, with an emphasis on Latino authors and
history. About 3% of the district's 55,000 students are enrolled in such
classes.
Horne has been trying to end the program for years, saying it divides
students by race and promotes resentment. He singled out one history
book used in some classes, "Occupied America: A History of Chicanos," by
Rodolfo Acuna, a professor and founder of the Chicano studies program at
Cal State Northridge.
"To begin with, the title of the book implies to the kids that they live
in occupied America, or occupied Mexico," Horne said last week in a
telephone interview.
Also last week, Augustine Romero, director of student equity in the
Tucson school district, said it now had become politically acceptable to
attack Latinos in Arizona.
Ethnic studies are taught at high schools and colleges nationwide, but
the Tucson district officials say their 14-year-old program is unique
because it's districtwide, offered to grades K-12, and can satisfy high
school graduation requirements.
In Los Angeles, more educators have been attempting to build
curriculums, teaching lessons or units in ethnic studies, especially
with the growth of charter schools in the area, said Maythee Rojas, the
president of the National. Assn. of Ethnic Studies. "I don't think it's
uncommon anymore," she said.
In Tucson, the program is supported by a court-ordered desegregation
budget, and is part of the district's initiative to create equal access
for Latinos.
Board member Mark Stegeman said he believes the board needs to consider
the program carefully and whether the courses, as taught, violate the
new law. Perhaps an external audit could be done to assess that, he said.
Ethnic studies courses are sometimes controversial because people
believe the programs are attempting to replace one voice with another,
Rojas said.
The Tucson district plans to double the number of students in Chicano
studies in the upcoming school year, said Sean Arce, the director of the
program. Arce said that now that the bill has become law, he's waiting
for direction from the district's legal department.
mailto:nicole.santacruz@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times <http://www.latimes.com/>
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/verify_baby_verify_20100512/
Verify, Baby, Verify!
By Robert Scheer
"Drill, baby, drill!" Those were the words that Sarah Palin used to
electrify the 2008 Republican National Convention. But while she popularized
that environment-be-damned slogan, it had already defined the eight years of
oil-drilling policy that prevailed during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Those red state voters of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana whose
livelihood is now threatened by the idiocy of that unfettered deregulatory
stance might well be having second thoughts. So, too, those Democratic Party
opportunists who had prevailed on President Barack Obama to one-up the GOP
by vastly increasing the scope of offshore drilling.
Not so Palin, who last week took to Twitter to defend such inanities,
blaming the oil spill problem not on lax regulation but rather on those damn
foreigners. Ignoring the fact that her target alien company, British
Petroleum, had employed her own husband, Palin tweeted: "Gulf: learn from
Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil co's: don't naively trust-VERIFY."
Great, except that it is beyond the power of any one state to adequately
verify what is going on deep down offshore, and as Tuesday's Senate
testimony of top executives from the three companies implicated in this
spill made clear, there is plenty of blame for the Brits to share with their
good ol' American counterparts. What could be more American than Dick
Cheney's
former company, Halliburton, which constructed the well? Or Transocean,
which operated the rig and is a homegrown product of the Southwestern energy
industry?
But they are all three exactly the same: multinational corporations that
couldn't care less about the countries where their home offices happen to be
based. Recall Halliburton's controversial corporate relocation to Dubai
three years ago and Transocean's registration in the Cayman Islands. What
they are loyal to is the bottom line and the executive bonuses that it
portends. They fly the flag of a particular nation only for convenience, and
it is their threat to shift their base of operations that is used to
effectively thwart government regulation.
As her recent tweet confirms, Palin admits verification is necessary, and in
a Facebook posting, she bases that on her state's experience with the Exxon
Valdez disaster. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, verification was the
responsibility of the U.S. Department of Interior's Mineral Management
Service. That's the same pathetic industry-whipped outfit whose personnel
were literally in bed with representatives of various companies they were
supposed to be regulating.
But far beyond such racy incentives to look the other way, the MMS, over the
last decade of deregulation mania, had been encouraged to become a
handmaiden of the industry rather than its supervisor in any meaningful
sense of that term. That is the inescapable conclusion of a devastating Wall
Street Journal report last week that concluded, "The small U.S agency that
oversees offshore drilling doesn't write or implement most safety
regulations, having gradually shifted such responsibilities to the oil
industry itself for more than a decade."
That was a Republican-led decade in which regulation became a dirty word,
and as with the financial meltdown, we are now witnessing, in the oil spill
catastrophe, the dire consequences of radical free-market ideology run amok.
If offshore drilling is required for our economic well-being, a questionable
enough proposition given the inherent risks, it is a cause that will be set
back dramatically by the current disaster.
The Obama administration, which was about to launch a vast expansion of such
efforts, has had to pull back, and there are few in either party who will
now question that a much more prudent course is in order. Hence the
administration's recent decision to revamp the MMS by splitting its
regulator function from its other role of collecting tax revenue from the
oil companies it was supposed to be regulating.
After noting that the safety record of U.S. offshore drilling "compares
unfavorably" to that of other nations, the WSJ observed that the key focus
of the MMS was not safety enforcement, but rather maximizing oil production
from which the government took a share of the profits. Hopefully that
built-in and glaring, but heretofore largely unnoticed, contradiction
between the government as a regulator and as a partner in oil profits will
now be ended.
So, too, the illusion, as with the radical deregulation of the financial
industry, that unbridled corporate greed can also provide for the common
good. Greed needs a timeout with adult supervision for these out-of-control
conglomerates messing with every aspect of our lives. But that won't happen
until government regulation of multinational corporations is made
respectable once again with adequately funded agencies pursuing an
uncompromised public interest agenda.
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