Bad Deeds for 11-21-2010

 

SMU’s George W. Bush Institute to put retired military personnel and others with no teacher training or experience as principals in U.S. public schools – The Bush Institute, the policy-making arm of the Presidential Library Center planned for Southern Methodist University, aims to have half the country’s public school principals trained under a new curriculum over the next 10 years.

“It is meant to be a very large project,” said James Glassman, the institute’s executive director. “We want to expand or augment the pipeline for those who will consider becoming principals.”

The idea is to develop a fast track into schools for experienced or promising leaders who don’t necessarily have training as educators – such as retired military personnel. After a brief training period, the new recruits would be assigned to campuses where they would have expanded powers to run the schools.

 

Corporate America Is Pushing Us All Off a Cliff – Corporate whistleblower Wendell Potter revealed that, when “Sicko” was being released in 2007, the health insurance industry’s PR firm, APCO Worldwide, discussed their Plan B: “Pushing Michael Moore off a cliff.”

But after looking into it, it turns out it’s nothing personal! APCO wants to push everyone off a cliff.

APCO was hatched in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter — best known for its years of representing the giant tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. APCO set up fake “grassroots” organizations around the country to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. All of a sudden, “normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-Philip Morris Americans” were popping up everywhere. And it turned out they were outraged — outraged! — by exactly the things APCO’s clients hated (such as, the government telling tobacco companies what to do). In particular, they were “furious” that regular people had the right to sue big corporations…you know, like Philip Morris.

With this success under their belts, APCO created “The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.” TASSC, funded partly by Exxon, had a leading role in a planned campaign by the fossil fuel industry to create doubt about global warming. The problem for Big Oil speaking out against global warming, according to the campaign’s own leaked documents, was that the public could see the “vested interest” that oil companies had in opposing environmental laws. APCO’s job was to help conceal those oil company interests.

And here we are in 2010. A lesser PR firm might be resting on its laurels at this point, content to sit back and watch hundreds of thousands of people continue to be pushed off the various cliffs they’ve built. But not APCO! Right now they’ve taken on their biggest challenge yet: leading a giant, multi-million dollar effort to help Wall Street “earn back the trust of the American people.”

If APCO and its Wall Street co-conspirators lull us into turning our backs on them again, we can be sure the next cliff — the next crash — will be much bigger.

 

Is your electricity provider naughty or nice? – What do naughty children get in their stocking? A lump of coal, of course! But you may want to avoid coal more often than just the holiday season. That dirty piece of coal is barely enough to run a 100-watt light bulb for 3 hours; in fact, you’d need about 714 pounds of coal to power the light bulb year round.

And you get more from that coal than just electricity. Burning 714 pounds of coal also puts about 5 pounds of sulfur dioxide into the air, which causes acid rain, and the same amount of nitrous oxide, which causes smog. Plus, don’t forget about the carbon dioxide emissions – about 1,850 pounds worth – that contribute to climate change. That’s not a very thoughtful present, is it?

Support clean, renewable energy which comes from non-polluting sources such as wind. Pick a clean electricity provider at the link:

Regards,

Jim