Anti-US military protest, Seoul, South Korea, August 13, 2022. 

Screen grab via Chinese state supported media outlet CGTN/YouTube.co

US media ignored major 

anti-US military protest in South Korea

Fake news about Kim Jong-Un gets wall-to-wall coverage

 but citizens of a key ally opposing a joint military exercise 

goes largely unnoticed.

Written by
Tim Shorrock

AUGUST 23, 2022

In America these days, almost any information about North Korea, be it rumor, fake news, or just plain silly, becomes fodder for the mainstream media. From TMZ to The Guardian, reporters know there is an insatiable appetite for anything that puts Kim and his regime in a bad or crazy light.

But when it comes to South Korea, which hosts 28,500 American ground troops and the Pentagon’s largest military base outside of North America, U.S. media coverage is, shall we say, highly selective. That was made resoundingly clear on August 14, when Seoul was the scene for the largest public demonstration in decades against the U.S. military presence in South Korea.

Amazingly, not a word about the protest appeared in the U.S. media.

That Saturday, thousands of people chanting “this land is not a U.S. war base” demonstrated against Ulchi Freedom Shield, the first large-scale military exercises between U.S. and South Korean forces since 2017. The protests were organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), South Korea’s second-largest labor federation. They were joined by a range of progressive allies, including People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), an influential citizen’s group founded in 1994.

“At a time when military tensions on the Korean Peninsula are escalating and there is no clue for inter-Korean dialogue, we are concerned that an aggressive large-scale military exercise will exacerbate the situation,” PSPD declared. “We once again urge the US and ROK governments to suspend the ROK-US joint military exercise and make efforts to create conditions for dialogue.” At the demonstration, protesters took direct aim at the heart of U.S. policy in Korea, with signs that read “No war rehearsal, No U.S.” and “No Korea-U.S.-Japan military cooperation.”

Outside of the Korean press, the only outlets to cover this massive showing against militarism were Iran’s Press TV and China’s CGTN, which provided extensive video of the mobilization. The single print story on the march appeared in Xinhua, China’s daily wire service. Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post, which often set the pace for U.S. press coverage of Asia, deemed the demonstration newsworthy. 

Hypocrisy? Yes. As I put it in a sardonic tweet, “Every rumor, fake news, intelligence leak or eyebrow twitch about Kim Jong Un and North Korea gets star treatment in the US media.” Yet, when “thousands of SOUTH KOREANS” march in Seoul against US-ROK war games, “NOT ONE PEEP.” The contrast seemed to hit a nerve: by the weekend, nearly 6,000 Twitter users had “liked” my post and over 2,000 had retweeted it.

The contradictions were evident on Twitter itself. As it often does with countries we’re not supposed to like, it slapped a label on one of my posts about the demonstration, urging users to “stay informed” because “this Tweet links to a Iran state-affiliated media website.” With that warning, Twitter was effectively delegitimizing my own coverage of the demonstration.

To be fair, political rallies on the left and right are a common occurrence in South Korea; obviously, editors and reporters must make choices about what to cover. But in a country where a majority of its citizens support the presence of U.S. forces and a U.S. general has operational control over their army in times of war, a rally of several thousand citizens openly calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal is certainly newsworthy.

At the same time, the drills have been a hot topic for years. In 2018, with much of Washington opposed, they were downgraded to computerized simulations as a way to build trust during the denuclearization talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un. Those talks collapsed in 2019, primarily over Trump’s refusal to lift U.S. sanctions in return for a partial shut down of the North’s nuclear infrastructure.  

This year, with North Korea regularly testing its long-range missiles, the new presidents in Washington and Seoul, Joe Biden and Yoon Suk Yeol, decided to resume the real-life exercises. The air, land, and sea drills, which in the past have mobilized around 50,000 South Korean and 17,500 U.S. soldiers, began on August 22 and wind up on September 1.

Sadly, the discrepancies in coverage reflect old patterns going back to the early days of the Cold War.

Editorial staffs of major U.S. newspapers and cable news shows (and now, Twitter’s upstart crew) are steeped in Cold War mythologies about the Korean War and largely reflect the viewpoint of Washington’s national security community. Currently, both parties see in the North a determined and dangerous long-term foe, and in the South a reluctant ally torn between loyalty to the United States and its expansive economic ties with China, America’s new nemesis. In this world, there is little room for coverage of South Korean trade unionists, leftists, and progressives who stand against the American consensus.

That mindset was recently on display at the Post when it praised South Koreans for electing Yoon, an inexperienced conservative hawk who said during his campaign that he might consider a pre-emptive strike on North Korea “to protect peace” on the peninsula. “South Korea makes a welcome turn toward the U.S. — just when it is really needed,” the headline crowed. The Post editorial also took a nasty swipe at former President Moon Jae-in, parroting right-wing talking points that he had “consciously” played down North Korea’s human rights record and “balked” at adding new batteries to the American THAAD missile deployment that has drawn Beijing’s ire.

For America’s papers of record, the failure to cover South Korea’s progressive left also reflects a failure of nerve. The KCTU and People’s Solidarity that organized this month’s antiwar demonstration have deep roots in the democratic movement of the late 1980s, when years of struggle culminated in the massive demonstrations of 1987 that forced the pro-U.S. generals who had ruled the South for 26 years to step aside. During that tumultuous era, both the Times and the Post offered extensive (and often outstanding) coverage of dissidents and government repression. But in recent years, they have been far more interested in covering North Korean defectors and warning the public (repeatedly) about a possible underground nuclear test than exploring the complex internal politics of South Korea.

Ironically, these papers are better prepared now to cover Korea than any time in the past 40 years. Since 2020, they have built large bureaus in South Korea and relocated their Asian news hubs from Hong Kong to Seoul, giving them an opportunity for first-class coverage of perhaps the most dynamic country in Asia. “Looking at a five, 10, 20 year horizon, [Seoul] just feels like it’s right in the middle of the action,” Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times’sinternational president, recently told the Korea Joongang Daily.

But in this coverage, the opinions and views of all Koreans need to be heard. That is particularly true when dealing with an issue as critical as the U.S.-Korean alliance, which President Biden has called “a linchpin of peace, stability, and prosperity” but many Koreans now view as a barrier to their country’s future.

Written by
Tim Shorrock

How the killing of Iran’s top general squandered US leverage in Iraq today

Washington’s decision to take out Soleimani in Baghdad ruined its chances for playing a role in mitigating a serious crisis there now.

Written by

Steven Simon

AUGUST 23, 2022

Two years ago, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on the arms control implications of hypersonic weapons. Thinking about hypothetical instances in which such as a weapon might be used to destabilizing effect, I wrote that a U.S. administration possessing this kind of weapon might use it to kill, say, Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. 

A day later, Soleimani was dead, killed by a U.S. strike, along with his Iraqi counterpart Abu Mahdi al Muhandis just outside of Baghdad International Airport. Conspiratorially inclined social media users swiftly concluded that I was a traitor with inside information attempting to warn Soleimani of an impending attack. (For the record, this is not true.) 

It’s fair to say that most observers familiar with U.S. military operations in the region and the role Soleimani played in choreographing Iranian proxy activities in the Middle East would have taken Soleimani’s presence on the U.S. list of high value targets for granted. Equally, most observers would not have imagined that he’d be killed on Iraqi soil while a guest of its government.

I’m reminded of this episode — for reasons I’ll explain — by the ongoing discussion, mostly among pundits, about whether and how the political crisis in Iraq will affect U.S. interests and, relatedly, whether the United States could or should be doing something to help resolve the crisis before it does affect U.S. interests.

Some knowledgeable commentators, like Bilal Wahab, note that the Biden administration’s hands-off stance during the crisis has perpetuated it. He recalls correctly that there was a time when the United States was deeply enmeshed in the formation of successive Iraqi governments, most significantly in the accession of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister in 2006.

Maliki’s policies during the eight years he occupied the office are generally thought to have contributed to the rise of ISIS in Iraq. This charge is debatable. ISIS originated in Syria owing to the anarchic conditions of civil war and was inadvertently armed by outsiders, including the United States. The movement at one point was assessed to include 14,497 fighters from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Tunisia, and France with smaller contingents from dozens of other countries. 

And there were the thousands of Syrians caught up in a brutal civil war who enlisted or were conscripted in ISIS, the biggest insurgent player in Syria by 2013. When these insurgents entered Iraq through its long, open border with Syria, they were in effect an invading army. On this view, the claim that the ISIS conquest of major Iraqi cities, like Mosul, was a homegrown protest against Maliki’s policies is at odds with reality. Not that these policies helped, or that Maliki’s hollowing out of the Iraqi army, which disintegrated in the face of the ISIS onslaught, was anything but disastrous. 

Whether there had been better alternatives to Maliki in 2006 when Washington selected him as its man in Baghdad is up for debate; indeed, it was debated within the White House at the time. While we cannot know whether there was a better choice, the United States learned in 2014 and the fall of Mosul that Maliki had not been a good one. The law of unintended consequences proved to be implacable.

In this case, Bilal’s recommendations are more about using leverage indirectly rather than open heart surgery. Thus, the United States provides the Kurdish Regional Government with a great deal of money, which could be withheld if the Kurdish leadership balked at a more constructive role in government formation. But this sort of leverage is theoretical; if it were not, a parade of U.S. administrations over the years would have persuaded Israel to halt settlement activity. There’s just some leverage that is too complicated to use, especially where the gain might not outweigh the political costs. 

There is also the inducement that the United States might be able to offer in the form of the international legitimacy Washington’s endorsement could confer on a compromise government. This too is theoretical. Iraqi factions are jockeying for wealth and power, not Western approval.

The current crisis stems from an intra-Shia split between two factions led by unelected leaders, Nouri al Maliki and Moqtada Sadr. Both have longstanding ties with Iran punctuated by squabbles, some of which were intense. Maliki worked closely with the United States as a matter of necessity during the long U.S. occupation. Sadr of course has not. He appears to be defying Iran’s will by taking an ax to Iraqi Shi’a unity, which reduces the transaction cost of Iran’s influence in Iraq, and by subordinating the Shi’a groups opposing him to a majority government under his control. 

This, however, makes Sadr neither a strategic foe of Iran nor a friend to the United States. At this stage, his attempt to transform his initial electoral victory into such a majority government has been quashed by the both the Iraqi Supreme Court and his own breathtaking decision to remove his 73 members of the Assembly and watch his adversaries take their seats. As a result, he has taken to fight to the streets and to the Parliament where his followers are mostly just hanging out smoking sheesha, waiting for developments.

At the same time, Sadr is attempting to seduce young, profoundly disappointed and mainly non-aligned protesters by claiming that their fight against the corrupt status quo is his own fight. How far this ploy gets Sadr is open to question. His own forces, after all, were involved in the bloody suppression of youth demonstrations in 2019. Violent conflict between the Sadrists and the Popular Mobilization Forces (also known as the People’s Mobilization Committee) — Shi’a militias that form part of Iraq’s hybrid armed forces — seems likely at the moment. 

There are off ramps, but it is primarily Sadr’s sole decision to avail himself of them, yet no one really knows what his intentions are. His militia would presumably be outgunned in a fight, which suggests that he’ll resort to bargaining at some point. 

This brings us back to Soleimani’s death at U.S. hands in Iraq. If there were one avenue for U.S. involvement in ongoing, broader attempts to unwind the confrontation, it would be through contact with the main Iraqi players. Yet, if this crisis is truly intra-Shi’a, Soleimani’s death signaled the end of U.S. influence with moderate Shi’a actors who had until that moment interacted more or less constructively with the United States. 

Whatever their personal views about Iran and the United States, Iraqi Shi’a had no choice but to condemn the Trump administration’s liquidation of a prominent representative of Iran’s government within Iraq. This disregard for Iraqi sovereignty was too blatant to wave off, especially for Parliament, which denounced cooperation with the United States. Nor was it simply a breach of Iraqi sovereignty. Iraqis saw Soleimani and al-Muhandis — and the largely Shi’a popular mobilization committees — as their saviors from ISIS tyranny.

As with other reckless steps Trump took, especially his withdrawal from the JCPOA, the targeted killing of Soleimani has had an afterlife that makes it hard for his successor to advance U.S. interests. U.S. influence is further stymied by sanctions against Popular Mobilization Forces that impede U.S. diplomatic communication when it is most needed.

U.S. interests in Iraq are not existential. But they are important. A stable Iraq is a factor in a stable region and stability lowers the prospects for — and temptation of — U.S. intervention. As a practical matter, this means helping Iraq keep ISIS down, mainly by keeping Iraqi capabilities up, and avoiding skirmishes with Iran that could make Iraqi politics even more wobbly than they already are.

If Iraqi politics devolve to open warfare between heavily armed factions, or simply fails to produce a government, these limited U.S. interests will be harder to preserve, even as the Trump administration’s missteps make it harder for the U.S. to contribute to a solution.

AS GOES TENNESSEE SO GOES AMERIKA

Tennessee showdown: Governor's big plan for right-wing charter schools sparks fierce backlash

After right-wing education hero insults teachers, Tennesseans push back on Bill Lee's charter plan. Is it too late?

By KATHRYN JOYCE
PUBLISHED AUGUST 22, 2022 

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and President of Hillsdale College Larry Arnn

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/Mandel Ngan/AFP/WikiCommons/Gage Skidmore)

The mailers arrived last week: four-page glossy brochures containing excerpted articles from The Federalist and USA Today, telling Tennesseans they'd been misled about Hillsdale College. They followed the previous week's text message campaign, when voters across the state began receiving political spam attributed to Hillsdale chief marketing officer Bill Gray, insisting that people throughout the Volunteer State were clamoring for Hillsdale to open K-12 charter schools, and directing them to a recently-built website where they could learn "the truth" about Hillsdale's work in Tennessee.

The website covered the same ground as the mailers — four pieces all dedicated to defending the small, conservative Christian college from Michigan that has become a center of right-wing educational activism — and an opening message from Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, offering an explanation of why, "Over the past few months, Hillsdale College and I have been the subject of controversy in Tennessee."

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This was all a belated damage control effort, coming six weeks after investigative journalist Phil Williams, of Tennessee's News Channel 5, published secretly-recorded video of Arnn declaring, during a closed-door event with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, that public school teachers come from "the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country." At that same reception, Arnn had argued that most college diversity officers get education degrees because they're "easy"; that teachers are "messing with people's children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them"; that modern education is akin to "enslavement" and "the plague" that "destroys generations of people"; and that he aimed to prove "that you don't have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it."

The Arnn video dropped like a bomb amid both growing Republican orthodoxy on school privatization initiatives — with support for vouchers and charters rapidly becoming a party litmus test — and what, until that point, had seemed like Hillsdale's year. Five months earlier, in his January State of the State address, Lee had announced he was embarking on a formal partnership with Hillsdale — a school he characterized as "the standard bearer in quality curriculum and the responsibility of preserving American liberty" — to open some 50 public charter schools across the state, as well as implementing Hillsdale's ideas about "informed patriotism" through a new Institute of American Civics to be launched at the University of Tennessee's flagship campus.

At the time, Tennessee's Republican-dominated legislature gave the announcement a standing ovation. The partnership looked to be a crowning achievement for Hillsdale, setting 2022 up as a year of exponentially growing influence for a school that has long punched above its weight. As Salon reported in a three-part investigative series in March, Hillsdale has quietly become one of the most influential forces in conservative politics. The school's 1,500-student campus in southern Michigan draws leading right-wing intellectuals, politicians and even Supreme Court justices. Its Washington, D.C., branch hosts a rotating cast of conservative pundits and Republican staffers as guest faculty.

When Donald Trump sought to rebut the New York Times' "1619 Project," with its emphasis on the central role of slavery in America's founding, he turned to Arnn and another top Hillsdale official to lead his "1776 Commission." And since the school began a national network of publicly-funded charter schools in 2010, Hillsdale's "classical education" model — extolling Western civilization, American exceptionalism and the idea that America was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles — has become the chief model of what conservatives want to see in education.

Its influence has been felt far beyond Tennessee. In Florida, which has a number of Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools, the college enjoys close ties to the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis. At a Hillsdale leadership summit this February, DeSantis and Arnn traded compliments, with Arnn calling the governor "one of the most important people living" and DeSantis saying he'd rather hire a Hillsdale graduate than one from his own alma mater, Yale, because he knew the former would "have the foundations necessary" to help pursue "conservative policies."

Several years ago, Hillsdale was tapped to help overhaul Florida's civics standards along more "patriotic" lines. Following the release of those revamped standards, Hillsdale was again contracted to help train teachers to implement them this summer. As the Miami Herald's Ana Ceballos and Sommer Brugal reported in late June, the first trainings led to immediate complaints from teachers that the standards seemed set on advancing Christian nationalism and minimizing the horrors of U.S. chattel slavery (in keeping with Hillsdale's "1776 Curriculum," which argues that even slave-owning founding fathers were closet abolitionists).

In a follow-up story this July, Ceballos and Brugal reported that two people associated with Hillsdale — a staffer involved with the "1776 Curriculum" and the head of the school's College Republicans club — had been hired to screen textbooks for "prohibited topics," leading to the DeSantis administration's April announcement that it had rejected nearly half the math textbooks schools had submitted for approval on the grounds that they promoted critical race theory or social emotional learning.

In Arizona, far-right gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has declared that she "believe[s] in the Hillsdale College curriculum" as one that "makes sense" and "sets our kids up for success," as that state's NBC 12 reported last week. A spokesperson for Lake elaborated that the candidate, who also wants to ban diversity, equity and inclusion training in public schools, had chosen Hillsdale's curriculum "as an alternative to the biased, CRT-based indoctrination permeating current textbooks and lesson plans." In 2018, another Arizona Republican, then-superintendent of public instruction Diane Douglas, who promoted the anti-evolution "Intelligent Design" theory, unsuccessfully tried to get Hillsdale's curriculum adopted by the state's entire public school system to replace its history and science standards, which she denounced as "vague and incomplete at best, indoctrination at worst."

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And in South Dakota, where Arnn says pro-Trump Republican Gov. Kristi Noem offered to build Hillsdale a whole new campus, a newly-concluded effort to overhaul the state's social studies standards was also tied to Hillsdale. The 15-person workgroup that drafted the standards — which included 13 registered Republicans but only three currently certified teachers from the state — was led by former Hillsdale professor William Morrisey. As Corey Allen Heidelberg reported this April at the Dakota Free Press, one person who applied to join the workgroup claimed the hiring committee told them "the draft standards were already being created at Hillsdale College."

The final standards, which were released last week, include lessons on "patriotism" and warn that neither "Debating current political positions" nor "partaking in political activism at the bequest of a school or teacher" belong in the classroom. But the document includes its fair share of contentious conservative political arguments, including a provision that students must explain how Progressivism (classed alongside totalitarianism, communism, socialism and fascism) stands in "tension" with "America's founding principles." Other sections reiterate ideas found in Hillsdale's curricula, including that the "main Progressive ideas" depart from the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; that even slave-holding founding fathers "wished" for abolition; and that U.S. slavery must be compared with slavery and indentured servitude in Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

* * *

Amid this sprawling, somewhat amorphous sphere of influence, Hillsdale's contract with Tennessee was set to take the tiny college's vision for an empire of classical academies to the next level. All that abruptly came into question after the report of Arnn's comments, and the revelation that Lee had sat through them silently, listening while, as Williams reported, Arnn "hinted" that Lee "might have what it takes to be president someday." Lee said nothing in defense of his state's public school teachers, but did pipe up to say at one point that he believed Tennessee needed not just 50 but 100 Hillsdale charters.

The backlash was quick and explosive, and surprisingly bipartisan.

J.C. Bowman, executive director of the Professional Educators of Tennessee, a teachers' union, said he was "infuriated" by Arnn's "clear disdain for public educators." One of the state's principals' associations suggested that anyone who "could speak so vehemently against educators and educator preparation programs" should "be blackballed from having an impact on the system." Tennessee's association of superintendents invoked Teddy Roosevelt to vow that it would "work diligently to resist the efforts of misguided critics who are not 'in the arena' and whose supercilious opinions are worthy only of collective disdain."
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Democratic politicians, of course, promptly condemned Arnn's remarks. State Sen. Heidi Campbell tweeted, "There is not a single community in Tennessee that would willingly defund their own public schools in exchange for a charter affiliated with Gov. Bill Lee's offensive friend or Hillsdale College." Jason Martin, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Lee this fall, launched a petition arguing that "our public school teachers who sacrifice so much daily should not fall victim to a governor who wants to radicalize our children through far-right, cherrypicked, 'pseudo-education' using *illegal* voucher based schooling."

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But even in deep-red Tennessee, Republicans joined in as well. House Speaker Cameron Sexton declared that Arnn had "insulted generations of teachers." Rep. Mark White, chair of Tennessee's House education committee, wrote on Facebook, "When the General Assembly convenes again next January any hope that Hillsdale will operate in Tennessee has been shattered." Lt. Gov. Randy McNally warned that Arnn's comments would "feature prominently in the vetting process" for any proposed Hillsdale charter schools." Last week, in one of many school board resolutions supporting teachers or condemning Arnn, Williamson County school board member Eric Welch — a Republican who presides over the district where Gov. Lee grew up — decried Arnn's "very asinine" insults and Lee's "deafening" silence.

More substantially though, some schools and districts began to cut their ties with Hillsdale. At Skillern Elementary, a Chattanooga charter school that was set to implement Hillsdale's curriculum, administrators announced in early July that they had terminated their contract with the college in order to avoid "inaccurate" "media frenzies." By mid-July, three school boards that had received the first charter applications from Hillsdale — or, more precisely, from American Classical Education, the independent group established to manage the applications of Hillsdale's American Classical Academy charters — had rejected the proposals before them, with two citing Arnn's comments explicitly. One such board, in the Jackson-Madison district, passed a resolution stating that students would be poorly served by Hillsdale charters, given Arnn's "low opinion of school teachers and administrators."

At first, Lee tried to claim that Arnn hadn't been talking about Tennessee teachers but rather "left-leaning activists in the public education system." But by late July he seemed to be distancing himself from Arnn, saying that Hillsdale's charters were "not my vision" and that he'd only met Arnn "maybe five times" in the previous two years. Last week, Lee added that he was "not engaged in Hillsdale's efforts."

In the face of all this, Hillsdale has struggled to craft a response. A college spokesperson argued to the Tennessean, Nashville's daily newspaper, that Arnn wasn't belittling teachers but rather "educational bureaucracies" that fail teachers and students alike. In mid-July, Arnn published op-eds in both the Tennessean and USA Today, saying he'd made similar remarks "many times" in the past and likely would do so again, but when he did, he used "dumb" not to mean "unintelligent" but rather "ill-conceived."

Conservative commentators with ties to Hillsdale College have come to Arnn's defense, writing that public school teachers have low SAT scores and poor literacy skills, and are indoctrinated in "cultural Marxism."

Two additional defenses were published in conservative outlets by writers affiliated with Hillsdale. At The Federalist, executive editor Joy Pullman, a Hillsdale alumnus, argued that Arnn hadn't been "mocking the intelligence of all public school teachers," then went on to charge at length that teachers have below-average SAT scores; that teaching licensure exams were set at a reading level "one step past being merely able to sound out the words on the page"; and that teachers' colleges substitute "a strong indoctrination in cultural Marxism" for academic excellence. At the National Review, Kevin Williamson, who has taught at Hillsdale, more succinctly wrote, "Larry Arnn is right."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when those arguments were bundled into mailers and sent out across Tennessee, public anger didn't abate. Across Twitter, Tennesseans responded to Hillsdale's posts with variations on the directive, "Keep your ass out of Tennessee."

"People are just infuriated by Hillsdale at this point," said state Rep. Gloria Johnson, a Democrat and former longtime public school teacher. "They're furious still."

* * *

But that's not the end of the story. In the words of Andy Spears, publisher of TN Ed Report, if people think that "Hillsdale is 'on pause' in Tennessee, that's not what's happening." For one thing, said Spears, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Hillsdale-inspired Institute of American Civics — one of a number of "civics" or "classics" institutes announced by red-state governors in recent months — continues apace. Beyond that, all three of the American Classical Academy charters denied by local school boards have filed appeals with the State Charter Commission: an entity created by a 2019 law that was promoted by Lee, who has since appointed all nine of its members.

That has led progressive and conservative observers alike to suspect the commission will overturn the local denials and accredit the charters on its own authority. Already this year the commission overturned another charter denial in one of the counties that rejected a Hillsdale application. As Spears notes, the website for American Classical Academy reads, without qualification, that it will open schools in all three counties in 2023.

"Preparations have been made to make this a slam dunk," said Republican state Sen. Bob Ramsey, in a podcast interview last week with the progressive outlet Tennessee Holler. "Preparations have been made legislatively that there's really going to be no options but to approve it."

All that is by design, says Jennifer Berkshire, coauthor with Jack Schneider of the 2020 book "A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door." "The reason they have those state commissions — and often it was Democrats who set them up — is to get around public opinion," Berkshire said. Having early on run into local opposition, charter school advocates realized that as long as local communities had the ability to block their efforts, "they couldn't scale up fast enough. So in all those states, they set up these state-level entities that were meant to be a workaround so the people couldn't block them. So it's not just that Bill Lee has it stacked; it's that they were intended to thwart public opinion."

"All the chaos we're seeing around public schools right now is part of the privatization push," says Amy Frogge. "To market new 'solutions' for schools, privatizers have to create doubt and fear around public schools."

What's also by design is the larger cultural and political context that's driving demand for Hillsdale charters and similar projects, says Amy Frogge, a former member of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education in Tennessee and executive director of the public-school advocacy organization Pastors for Tennessee Children. "All the chaos we're seeing around public schools right now" — from panics around "critical race theory" to supposed "grooming" — "is part of the privatization push," said Frogge. "In order to market new 'solutions' for schools, which are always for-profit solutions, privatizers have to create doubt and fear around public schools."

Johnson also notes that many of the same Republicans who have condemned Arnn, or criticized Lee for not confronting him, also voted to create the charter commission in the first place, including Rep. Mark White, the House education chair who declared Hillsdale's plans "shattered."

"It's really not up to [White] and a legislative body at this point," said Johnson. "It's up to that charter commission that he voted to create."

Other education advocates warn that Hillsdale's charters are just one aspect of a much larger move toward school privatization. Tennessee is also in the process of crafting a new school funding scheme, called TISA (Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement), which has been supported by national "school choice" groups like Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. It proposes creating different levels of student funding based on various categories: With a base rate of just under $7,000 per student, individual funding would increase based on where a student lives, their family income, whether they have learning disabilities and so on.

Given that this formula is set to go into effect in 2023, Spears and others have speculated that it may have implications for vouchers and the expansion of private schools and charters. Following the pattern of pretty much all "school choice" plans, that also means it would have implications for public schools, which could lose even more money to cover their basic operating expenses.

"A lot of the same people who claim to be very worked up about the Hillsdale thing are very gung-ho about changing the school funding system to make it more 'backpack-ish,'" said Berkshire. That's a reference to the common "school choice" metaphor that school funding should be attached to students rather than schools, with children carrying a figurative "backpack" of public funding that goes with them whether they attend public school or not.

Tennessee education writer TC Weber argues that the state's funding plan is based on, "the ability to identify just how much investment each child is worth. Something that is important to virtually nobody unless they are looking to siphon off some public dollars into private bank accounts."

Amid this larger plan, Weber told Salon, the Hillsdale scandal seems almost like a sideshow. "Where the real danger lies is that this governor has been very, very good at shifting public money into private pockets," said Weber. "While we were all screaming over Hillsdale, they quietly passed the rules for TISA."

"That's the frustrating piece" about the Hillsdale backlash, Spears said. "You have all this rhetoric that says, 'We support our local schools.' 'The governor should have done more.' The reality is they're not doing anything to stop this," he continued. "They voted for a privatization funding formula. They didn't stop the Hillsdale contract. They're not calling a special session to cancel the charter commission or Hillsdale. To me, as long as you have a state charter commission 100% appointed by this governor and you're out there screaming, you might as well be screaming into the void. They're saying things to keep their voters placated in an election year."

* * *

Indeed, election-year dynamics have already been shaped by some of these questions. Ahead of Tennessee's Aug. 4 primary elections, pro-charter and pro-voucher political action groups got heavily involved in Republican races, funding opponents of incumbents who have fought "school choice." That led to the defeat of two incumbent Republican lawmakers, state Sen. Bob Ramsey and state Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver. While Ramsey is known as a moderate, Weaver, who was present at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, most certainly is not. But both had flouted privatization initiatives — by opposing vouchers or the state charter commission, or voting to reduce the governor's control over the state board of education — and that marked them as targets.

After his defeat, Ramsey told the Tennessean that, "Sending your kids to private school on public money has been the holy grail since integration for conservatives." In his subsequent interview with Tennessee Holler, Ramsey added that he saw his opponent's campaign slogan, "Fund students, not schools" as "a good capsule of what the intent is": to "do away with" public education.

"There is an effort to define school choice as a litmus test on the right, akin to abortion," said Berkshire. "They have decided they're willing to buck their own constituents, namely rural residents and lawmakers, in order to push this stuff through. So you're starting to see, in state after state, what happened to Ramsey." In practice, that means major school privatization donors, such as Betsy DeVos' American Federation of Children, flooding local races with money in order to "knock out the public school Republicans."

Spears agreed, comparing it to the lock the NRA has over the GOP. "That became part of the Republican Party platform: You could not oppose the NRA, period. Now, 10 years later, we have this privatization agenda and it's the same thing. If you are on the wrong side of privatization, they are going to come after you."

Yet the backlash against Hillsdale following Arnn's disparaging remarks may still hold some promise.

"There is an effort to define school choice as a litmus test on the right, akin to abortion," says Jennifer Berkshire. Privatization donors are flooding local races with money to "knock out the public school Republicans."

Berkshire said she was surprised by the ferocity of the backlash — "Why did it set off such a firestorm, considering that schools of education have been such reliable punching bags?" After all, she said, in Florida, Ron DeSantis has effectively been making the same argument for weeks, declaring that there's no need for teacher certification. Earlier this summer, Arizona decreed the state's teachers don't even need a college degree.

Part of the explanation for the backlash may be the expansion of the "school choice" movement beyond its customary targets in urban communities, where privatization efforts have long been wrapped in gauzy rhetoric about helping minority students, but where the fallout from their implementation remains safely distant from suburban and rural schools.

"The campaign to blow up the school system starts to run into the reality that a lot of places that are really red see the schools as an extension of their own communities," said Berkshire. Many of the tactics currently used to foster demand for school privatization — like panics about CRT or "grooming" — "are a harder sell" when the teachers are family or friends.

Indeed, as Marta Aldrich of Chalkbeat Tennessee noted last week, all three of the counties that rejected Hillsdale's American Classical Academy schools are suburban districts with no other charters. And, Spears adds, they're largely conservative communities whose school board members "are a far cry from the 'woke left,'" but still don't want what Hillsdale's offering.

Ramsey acknowledged as much, telling the Tennessee Holler that his own district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight off another charter proposal eight years ago. When the Holler's editor-in-chief, Justin Kanew, pointed out an obvious discrepancy — that Republicans who have championed charters for Tennessee's cities clearly don't want them for their own kids — Ramsey said he was right. He recalled how Tennesseans from districts with charters "would come to me and say, 'Hey, I hope you guys do have some charter schools and put them in your district, and then you can see what a mess it's caused in our districts.'"

Spears fears that might be exactly what it takes. There's a chance, he said, that the backlash might be enough to help Democratic — and pro-public education — candidates regain ground in Tennessee. Gubernatorial nominee Jason Martin is certainly trying. This past week he responded to Hillsdale's mailers with his own campaign messages, that "we all know what [Larry Arnn] said and how he meant it" and vowing that, if elected, he would cancel Hillsdale's contract.

Defeated Republican Bob Ramsey says people come up to him and say, "Hey, I hope you guys do have some charter schools in your district, and then you can see what a mess it's caused in ours."

But Spears also admits that the Hillsdale charters will probably open: "I think a lot of the road has been paved already." In the long run, he foresees Tennessee looking "a lot like Florida," with its mix of charters and voucher programs and relentless attacks on public school funding. But the effects may not become apparent for several years — long after this November's election.

"Fortunately or unfortunately, local schools are going to have to see a charter open in their district and see what that looks like before they really understand what that means. What it does to your budget, what it does to your tax base," Spears continued. "When local voters see this happen, they're going to be surprised, and not in a good way. "

Rep. Johnson has slightly more hope. "What it's going to take is a whole lot of Tennesseans rising up and saying, 'We love our public schools. We don't want these charters by people who don't understand the training necessary to educate kids,'" she said. "If people speak out enough, if these guys have a clue, they won't approve these charters. Because no matter how they try to connect, charters and vouchers are not popular in this state.

Frogge says that, after 10 years of advocating on behalf of a public school system besieged by all sides, she and other public education advocates are exhausted, but cautiously optimistic about what the Hillsdale scandal has wrought.

"Dr. Arnn's remarks gave us a very clear view of what privatizers really think about our public schools and public teachers," said Frogge. "His remarks were so radical and demeaning that he opened a lot of eyes."

As other areas of the state are affected by pressure to accept charter schools or voucher schemes, she imagines "there will be increasing resistance to efforts to privatize," and growing awareness of how the "privatization playbook" operates to undermine public schools and justify radical "solutions."

"Voters should understand that we're just taking steps in this playbook, with the ultimate goal of dismantling public education," Frogge said, warning that, once privatization efforts go too far, "it's very difficult to reverse course." The expansion of that threat to new, more rural and conservative areas, she said, has the capacity "to change the narrative. I hope it's in time to make a difference."

American University and its staffers reach an agreement over pay and benefits

American University and its staffers have reached a settlement agreement to increase pay and benefits of the provost's office, the union said.

Dee Dwyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

JONATHAN FRANKLINF
August 27, 2022

Staffers at American University in Washington, D.C., have reached a settlement agreement after they went on strike this week over complaints of unfair working conditions and low wages, the union and the university said on Friday.

The deal increases pay and benefits for staff members of the university's provost office, according to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500. 

The weeklong strike was authorized after two years of bargaining failed to bring a contract that provided employees with better wages and equity pay.



Currently, there are 550 staff members at the university — ranging from administrative staff, counselors, advisors, technicians and coordinators — who are represented by SEIU 500. More than 91% of American University's staff voted in favor of the week-long strike, according to the union.

An SEIU spokesperson says the agreement provides full-time workers with raises between 7.5% and 13.5% over two years and lowest-paid workers will receive upgrades and additional increases.

The union had filed unfair labor practice charges against the university for what it called the university's "bad faith bargaining." It plans to withdraw all except two charges after the new agreement is ratified.

American University President Sylvia Burwell said in a statement that she was "pleased to announce that we have reached tentative agreements on contracts for both the adjunct faculty and the Provost and Enrollment division staff unit. ... Throughout this process, we negotiated in good faith and worked to reach an agreement. Since these are tentative agreements, further details will be available in the coming days."

Classes for the fall semester begin for students on Monday.

In Permafrost Thaw, Scientists Seek To Understand Radon Risk


The cancer-causing gas is colorless, odorless and tasteless, making it an invisible threat to homes built on permafrost.




By Chris Baraniuk
August 23, 2022 by Undark 

Deep in the frozen ground of the north, a radioactive hazard has lain trapped for millennia. But UK scientist Paul Glover realized some years back that it wouldn’t always be that way: One day it might get out.

Glover had attended a conference where a speaker described the low permeability of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years or, in some cases, thousands. It is an icy shield, a thick blanket that locks contaminants, microbes and molecules below foot — and that includes the cancer-causing radioactive gas radon.

“It immediately occurred to me that, well, if there is radon underground, it will be trapped there by a layer of permafrost,” recalls Glover, a petrophysicist at the University of Leeds in England. “What happens if that layer suddenly isn’t there anymore?” Ever since then, Glover has worked on methods to estimate how much radon — which is released as the element radium decays — might be liberated as climate change causes the permafrost to thaw.

Significant areas of Arctic and sub-Arctic ground contain permafrost — but today it is melting, and the rate of that thaw is accelerating. In a report published in January, Glover and coauthor Martin Blouin, now technical director at the mapping software firm Geostack, used modeling techniques to show that homes with basements built on areas of permafrost could be exposed to high levels of radon gas in the future. “As the permafrost melts, this reservoir of active radon can flood to the surface and get into buildings — and by being in buildings, cause a health hazard,” Glover says.

No one knows exactly how quickly radon diffuses through icy ground, but by using the rate of diffusion of carbon dioxide and adjusting for the properties of radon, Glover came up with a figure that he could use in the model. Based on 40 percent permafrost thaw, the calculations reveal that radon emissions could raise radioactivity levels to more than 200 becquerels per meter cubed (Bq/m3) for a period of more than four years in homes with basements at or below ground level. This happens when the 40 percent thaw occurs in 15 years or less.

According to the World Health Organization, the risk of lung cancer increases by about 16 percent with every 100 Bq/m3 of long-term exposure. Some countries, including the UK, set the safe level of average exposure at 200 Bq/m3. But without testing for radon in areas where the geology suggests it’s present, people will not know whether they are at risk — because the gas is odorless, colorless and tasteless.

Glover stresses that the model in the paper is an early attempt to understand how permafrost thaw could affect people’s exposure to the gas. It doesn’t, for example, account for seasonal variation in the rate of permafrost thaw or the effects of soil compaction when ice within it melts, something which could pump yet more radon to the surface.

Some 3.3 million people live on permafrost that will have completely melted away by 2050, according to estimates in a 2021 study. Not all of these people live in areas prone to radon but many do: For example, in parts of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia. And the link between radon exposure and lung cancer is well-established, as is the fact that smoking further increases one’s risk, says Stacy Stanifer, oncology clinical nurse specialist at the University of Kentucky’s College of Nursing. She points to studies suggesting that radon could be behind up to 1 in 10 lung cancer deaths, of which there are 1 million in total worldwide every year.

“Breathing radon is dangerous for everyone, but it’s even more harmful when you also breathe tobacco smoke,” says Stanifer. Smoking is prevalent in Arctic and sub-Arctic communities; for example, a 2012 study reported that nearly two-thirds of Canadian Inuit age 15 and over who live within the Inuit homeland said they smoke cigarettes daily, compared with 16 percent of Canadians overall.

Scientists don’t know how much radon is actually emanating from areas with melting permafrost today, says Nicholas Hasson, a geoscientist and PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks: “I would call this a blank spot.” He notes that, in real life, permafrost layers are complex and irregular, and agrees with Glover that field measurements are essential to validate the model. Instead of a uniform sheet of ice underground, imagine permafrost as more of a higgledy-piggledy Swiss cheese of ice, with some areas much thicker than others and places where groundwater courses through it, exacerbating the thaw.

Hasson and colleagues have studied locations where permafrost is thawing unusually quickly and emitting methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Similar “chimneys” could be spewing out elevated amounts of radon gas in some places, he suggests.

For human health, what really matters is the amount of radon that gets into people’s homes. Scientists and even homeowners themselves can use radioactivity detectors to assess this. A study published online in February 2022, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, measured levels of radon over the course of a year in more than 250 homes in three towns in Greenland. Out of 59 homes in Narsaq, for instance, 17 were found to have radiation levels above 200 Bq/m3.

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Lead author Violeta Hansen, a radioecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, stresses that these are early results based on a small number of homes. It would take much more research, she says, before she could evaluate the health risks associated with radon in properties like these across Greenland. She is now leading an international project that will run field experiments and gather radon measurements from homes in various countries, including Canada and Greenland. “We need to come back to the public with low-cost and effective, validated mitigation measures,” Hansen says.

The good news is that there are tried-and-tested methods of lowering levels of radon inside a house once the homeowner knows it is there.

It is important to avoid panicking people without solid data and solutions on hand, says Aaron Goodarzi, a radiobiologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. The good news is that there are tried-and-tested methods of lowering levels of radon inside a house once the homeowner knows it is there. Goodarzi points, for example, to a technique called sub slab depressurization, in which a sealed pipe is inserted below the house and connected to a fan. This sucks any radon out from below the building before blowing it away into the atmosphere. “Think of it simply like a bypass,” he says.

The type of building matters. Glover’s model found that homes built on piles or stilts, and thus separated from the ground, did not experience a boost in radon levels. Fortunately, many homes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic are constructed in this fashion. But for those that aren’t, the cost of mitigating radon could be prohibitive for low-income communities in these regions. “That’s an equity issue that has to be considered, certainly,” says Goodarzi, who notes that the onus might be on social housing administrators in some areas to ensure that the housing they provide is healthy.

A spokesperson for Health Canada says that the government agency currently recommends that homeowners test radon levels in their properties and use certified suppliers to install mitigation technologies if such are required.

Many people may not think about radon very much, given the fact that it is invisible. Glover says that getting informed now, before the permafrost thaw worsens, could save lives.

“We know that people die from it,” he says. “But at the same time, there’s so much that we can do to protect ourselves.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

Chris Baraniuk is a freelance science journalist and nature lover who lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His work has been published by the BBC, the Guardian, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Hakai Magazine, among other publications.

THE TAO IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE
How Sun Tzu theory about war and strategy is applicable in contemporary warfare today?



By Muskan Moazzam
August 22, 2022

Sun Tzu was the famous Chinese war scholar who wrote about war and strategy and war tactics and contributed to the art of war during 5th century. His book the art of war is considered to be one of the most influential books for the modern militants because of its significance that it has been written during the warring era. This book is contributes a lot to the modern warfare tactics and strategies used by the militants in the contemporary warfare era.

Sun Tzu says about war is that the best of the war is that if you know your strategies and your enemy strategies then nobody can defeat you. He states that a general who understands war is minister of people’s fate and arbitrator of nation’s destiny.

For war principal, sun Tzu advocates that highest realization of warfare is attacking enemy plan and to disrupt their alliances and then is to attack their army and afterwards to attack their cities and attacking cities should be perused to last resort.

He says that victorious first win the war and go to the war while the defeater first think and then go to the war to seek the win.

According to the sun Tzu, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

The Afghanistan war is an example which can be explained by using the Sun Tzu’s Art of war. The Afghanistan war is divided into 3 phases; the initial removal of Al-Qaeda and Taliban , the efforts to stop their resurgence and reemergence in 2009 and then post 2014 When ISAF forces withdrew.

The first phase of the Afghanistan war started when United States using a small number of forces and air power launched an operation known as enduring freedom and the Taliban regime was ousted in just two months while al Qaeda was thrown out of the country. United States of America used the principal of the art of war described by the Sun Tzu which is that United States won the war by small fighting with a quick speed over the enemy. No one can disagree that these initial operations were not successful but after that united states was not able to capture the leaders of the terrorist organization al Qaeda which later came back to attack the US.

As Sun Tzu stated that

“Your aim must be to take all under heaven intact. Thus your troops are not worn out and your gains will be complete. This is the art of offensive strategy.”

The second phase started when the leaders of al Qaeda and Taliban flew across the border. It was difficult for United States to go and attack against the border of Pakistan so Taliban had time to regroup them and then infiltrate again into the Afghanistan to reconquer the Afghanistan. After that United States established in Afghan government in Afghanistan led by Hamid Karzai as the president of new Afghanistan government but unfortunately this government was inefficient in reaching to the masses of the country and to get their support against it Taliban. The incompetency and insufficiency of the western forces to have control and the inability of the newly formed Afghanistan government left a vacuum which was filled by Taliban on their return. And in addition to this then when US forces could push the terrorists out of the provinces, the insufficient afghan army and police were not able to hold the control of these areas which were again used to be captured by Taliban. It was clear in the second phase that the initial success was not capitalized and the lack of planning and preparation to control the country after initial success didn’t let the fruits of success to be spread across the country. As Sun Tzu argued that;

“To rely on rustics and not prepare is the greatest of crimes to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues”.

The problem was further exaggerated by the inability of Afghanistan government which allowed the reemergence of Taliban in Afghanistan. As Sun Tzu stated that;

“Now to win battles and take your objectives but to fail to exploit these achievements is ominous and may be described as wasteful delay.”

In 2009 the Barack Obama assumed the office of president of United States and he wanted to replicate the Bush policy in Afghanistan but later he decided to withdraw some of the international forces from Afghanistan in 2014. Later in the trump era a deal was signed with the Taliban whose purpose was that US and allied forces will withdraw from Afghanistan and later in the Biden’s term the United States withdrew all its forces from Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of US and Allied forces, the US formed government in Afghanistan and Afghan army too collapsed and the Taliban came back in power. The Taliban whom US kicked out initially are again back in power in Afghanistan.

According to the principles of the art of war the initial success was not utilized which led to the failure of US War on Terror in Afghanistan. The objectives such as the nation building were impossible to achieve according to the history and the nature of country and the challenges in Afghanistan. In addition to this along with Iraq war the United States was not able to give maximum attention to honest on war. There was no beforehand knowledge of the Afghan war and this absence of foreknowledge became problematic in later stages. As Sun Tzu stated that

Now the reason the enlightened Prince and the vice general conquered the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.

The lack of clear objectives and knowledge about the enemy was cause of failure of US and Allied forces in Afghanistan war. As the Sun Tzu argued that “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”.