Saludos a los Kossacks de Baja Arizona
Y Kossaks de cualquier estado, país o planeta. Hope everybody's doin' OK this Memorial Day Weekend. An editorial in today's Star says that Baja Kossack Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), along with co-sponsors Ron Barber (D-AZ) and Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ), has introduced The Saguaro National Park Boundary Expansion and Study Act of 2013, HR 1934. The act will expand Saguaro National Park by 2,525 acres, 2150 in Saguaro East and 375 in the West Unit. Here's the map:
Wait a minute, that map looks familiar, the Saguaro East one. Let's see, it's north of Vail, there's Old Spanish Trail, I think that's Pistol Hill Road. Oh Yeah! I remember, we're having a meet-up out there in, like, six days, on Saturday, June 1. This diary will be a chance to talk about plans and firm up arrangements.
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March Against Monsanto
So we went over to Reid Park for the March Against Monsanto yesterday. It looked like about 1,000 people were there, the line was pretty long. We marched from the center of the park north, turned left and marched west to Country Club, then left again and down Country Club to 22nd, and then east on 22nd and back to where we started. I only saw one other Kossack there but I didn't get a chance to talk with her.
Best sign of the day: The Economy Isn't Broken, It's Fixed. Here's some video:
Education Reform
So there's this corporate-directed, bi-partisan education reform movement going on all over the country. It's never really been about improving education. It's a neo-liberal effort to privatize public education; to make it a for-profit cash cow for corporations. If you want to see where it's heading, just look at the situation in Chile where the Pinochet dictatorship put Uncle Miltie's crackpot free-market economics into practice. Anyway, there's a new aspect to this that just makes me sick. There's a private-sector outfit called inBloom that is collecting a database on kids' school records. Here's more from my friend David Safier over at Blog for Arizona, the story is here ☛ Blog for Arizona
Look Familiar ?
I've become a regular in joe shikspack's Evening Blues series. joe does a news round-up that also features a different blues artist every night. It hits the recent list every weeknight at 5:30 BST. Last week someone posted an interesting quote in joe's thread. It's from The American Conservative, to which I will not link.
Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.
I dug up the original New York Times piece and the guy took considerable liberties with it, adding some stuff of his own, but it's an interesting quote, no ?
Finally
I don't usually write about myself, I don't think I'm all that damned interesting, but we're celebrating three milestones in the Zello family this summer. Mrs. Z retired from teaching this year after 34 years with Tucson Unified School District. She does a great job, one of her principals once told her she could teach a rock to read. She'll miss the kids, but not the paperwork, the bossy administrators or all the teacher-bashing that comes with the aforementioned privatization campaign. Also in TUSD, the Kid graduated from University High this year. He plans to got to the UofA and to study Electrical and Computer Engineering. He already has a part-time job in his field lined up. And, as if this weren't enough, Mr. and Mrs. Zello will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary on June 18. I don't know how she does it.
OK, that's all I got, check in and let us hear from you.