____________________________________________________________________________
Latest on Marc Norton Online...
____________________________________________________________________________
NO CONCESSIONS: Hotel Workers Beat Hilton, Fight On
Fog City Journal
March 9, 2011
Update (April 18, 2011):
San Francisco's Local 2 settled last week with the Westin St. Francis, Palace Hotel,
St. Regis and Fairmont -- on the same terms as the Hilton. No concessions! No retreat!
Update (June, 2011):
Local 2 has now settled with the Intercontinental, the Mark Hopkins, the Holiday Inn Fisherman's Wharf, the Holiday Inn Civic Center and the Marriott Union Square.
 At a time when workers everywhere are either in retreat or fighting desperately to hold the line, UNITE HERE hotel workers have scored a major victory, securing solid gains in wages, benefits and working conditions — in a drawn-out battle against one of finance capital’s largest corporate behemoths.
The Blackstone Group, which owns Hilton Hotels, rolled over and gave up the brass ring, agreeing to contract settlements in San Francisco, Chicago and Honolulu that cover nearly 4,000 workers. Blackstone is a private equity company that manages around $100 billion in assets.
Hotel workers have now shown clearly that we can raise the banner of NO CONCESSIONS, fight and win against the biggest of the big. Like the brave workers in Wisconsin and the Midwest, we are standing tall, and intend to stay on our feet through thick and thin...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
It's the CLASS WAR, Stupid
Beyond Chron
January 18, 2011
 “It’s a war,” proclaimed Blackstone Group Chairman, CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” For those a little fuzzy on their history, that’s what finally got England and France into World War II.
Blackstone is the owner of Hilton Hotels, currently at war with UNITE HERE Local 2.
Andrew Ross, the business writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, regurgitated Schwarzman’s now-infamous quote in his column last Tuesday.
But neither Schwarzman nor Ross was thinking about Blackstone’s war on hotel workers. Ross was writing about Schwarzman’s war with President Barack Obama... [more]
____________________________________________________________________________
HOTEL WORKERS and GUESTS only a "Pawn in their Game" –
BANKERS and REAL ESTATE SPECULATORS Rule the Industry
 Beyond Chron
May 24, 2010
The war between the giant hotel corporations and hotel workers is heating up again. The recent three-day strike
at the San Francisco Hilton Union Square by
UNITE HERE Local 2
workers was just one battle in this fight.
But the story in the corporate media is not about economic justice for low-income and hard working room cleaners, housemen, bellmen, cooks, servers and dishwashers. Instead, the corporate media focuses on hotel room rates and occupancy levels, beating the drum for the allegedly suffering hotel companies.
The corporate media, as usual, ignores the real story: the hotel industry today is much more about bankers, hedge funds, real estate speculators and financial profiteering than it is about selling rooms. The buying and selling of hotels, often huge properties in prime downtown locations, creates immense profits for the business barons who finance the industry -- and continues to do so even in the midst of the current financial crisis.
In this sense, hotel workers and hotel guests alike are mere pawns in a much larger game. Behind brand-name hotels like the Hilton stand the bankers and speculators, including the infamous Goldman Sachs, whose connection to the hotel industry will likely surprise many. Other players – such as the Blackstone Group, Millennium Partners or HEI – are not household names, but are nevertheless the real powers behind the throne... [more]
____________________________________________________________________________
SUPERINTENDENT GARCIA Gives JROTC a HELPING HAND
Beyond Chron
October 5, 2009
 Superintendent Carlos Garcia's September 18 memo, delivered triumphantly to school administrators by ardent JROTC supporter Margaret Chiu, Assistant Superintendent for high schools, is one of those dirty little secrets that strip the facade from an institution, revealing the true moral and political bankruptcy at its core.
In this instance, the San Francisco school district's utter obeisance to the Pentagon is writ large for all to see. Garcia's memo restores the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), one of the Pentagon's favorite military recruitment programs, as an independent fiefdom within the district, answerable to no one except its military masters. Garcia effectively guts the "Independent Study" Physical Education (PE) program for JROTC cadets, crafted by district administrators over the summer, and hands over to JROTC's military-appointed functionaries the ability to grant PE credit willy-nilly just like in the bad old days.
Despite all of the rhetoric about JROTC and "leadership development," the district has now demonstrated its complete lack of anything even resembling leadership, washing its hand of any meaningful oversight of JROTC when confronted by the Pentagon's demands for raw recruits. Perhaps this was inevitable. How can a mere Carlos Garcia be expected to stand up to the Pentagon when even the Change We Can Believe In President Barack Obama does not seem to know how to react to the demands of General Stanley McChrystal and his imperial cohorts for more troops in Afghanistan? [more]
____________________________________________________________________________
 KILLERS: McNAMARA and ANDERSON
Beyond Chron
July 8, 2009
The obituary page in last Tuesday's
San Francisco Chronicle had me looking
for the vomitorium.
The five-column headline at the top read "Killer, now blamed in girl's death,
a 'monster.'"
Curtis Dean Anderson confessed to kidnapping and killing one 7-year old girl, stands accused by the police of kidnapping and killing yet another 7-year old, and bragged about kidnapping and molesting many other children. "Everyone, it seems, hated Curtis Dean Anderson. Except his mother. And even she had doubts."
Right below this obit is a three-column headline:
"Robert McNamara -- led escalation of Vietnam War."
Do I really have to point out the irony here? The unemotional eulogy to McNamara, who "directed the escalation" of the war that killed three million Vietnamese -- including countless children -- never once uses the word "killer." But a killer is exactly what McNamara was...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
The TORTURE LADY wants PE Credit for JROTC
 San Francisco Bay Guardian
June 9, 2009
Right-wing San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders jumped into the JROTC end-game with an opinion piece on Sunday.
In April, Saunders, who endorsed
John McCain for President, opined that
"In Obamaland... the left chants, 'torture doesn't work...' But common sense tells you that techniques like sleep deprivation [and] waterboarding... work, at least some times."
In her latest rant, Saunders recounts the
pro-JROTC mythology at length, but her
real play is to torture the truth with the claim that the California Board of Education has "said local school districts have the authority to offer PE [physical education] credits for JROTC."
What the California Board of Education actually did was revise its Physical Education Framework to say that JROTC classes "may not" meet PE standards, instead of "do not" meet PE standards.
But, "if a district desires to award physical education credit for courses such as JROTC, marching band, cheerleading, and drill, it is the responsibility of the district to determine how each particular course, as conducted in its district, supports a course of study for grades nine through twelve... and substantially meets the objectives and criteria" for state PE curriculum and credentialing requirements.San Francisco school district officials responsible for the physical education program have repeatedly and publicly stated that JROTC does not and can not meet current state PE requirements.
San Francisco school district officials responsible for the physical education program have repeatedly and publicly stated that JROTC does not and can not meet current state PE requirements... [more]
____________________________________________________________________________
ARNE and GAVIN and HYDRA
 Beyond Chron
May 22, 2009
Many eyes will be on Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan when he speaks today at the
San Francisco School Alliance Luncheon at the historic Palace Hotel, as well as at the California Mayor's Education Roundtable, hosted by Mayor Gavin Newsom. Newsom's Education Advisor,
Hydra Mendoza, who doubles as a school board member, has her fingerprints all over this event, aiding the Gav to get a generous helping of publicity in his twittering campaign for Governor of the collapsing State of California...
Duncan and Mendoza will not just be sharing lunch at the Palace today. They also share a deep and abiding commitment to the militarization of education and of our youth. As CEO of Chicago's schools, one of the largest school districts in the nation, Duncan oversaw a district with the largest concentration of military academies in the nation... [more]
____________________________________________________________________________
TWO BUCK
MUNI FARE PLOT
HATCHED in 2005
Beyond Chron
May 19, 2009
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
JROTC: THE UNTOLD STORY
The original version of this article
was published in Beyond Chron
on October 28, 2008.
"Without JROTC, I would not be where I am today -- a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army." So writes Jason, a former JROTC cadet, in his post on the Keep JROTC Alive in San Francisco Facebook site... [more]
____________________________________________________________________________
ACLU Slams JROTC as Violation of International Law
Beyond Chron (May 20, 2008)
San Francisco Bay View (May 21, 2008)
 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a major report last week stating that the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) violates a protocol of the United Nations-sponsored Convention on the Rights of the Child, by targeting students as young as 14 for recruitment to the military.
"The United States military's procedures for recruiting students plainly violate internationally accepted standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and aggressive recruitment tactics," according to Jennifer Turner of the ACLU Human Rights Project...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
FREE MUNI!
FREE SAN FRANCISCO!
Beyond Chron (February 1, 2008)
San Francisco Bay View (February 6, 2008)
 Matier and Ross, San Francisco's premier political gossips, say that Mayor Gavin Newsom plunked down $55,000 for a report telling him that making Muni free would get a lot of people to use public transit.
Hey, Gavin, anybody on the street could have told you that
for zip. But what really takes the cake is that the well-paid consultants who wrote this report concluded that getting
more people to use Muni would be a BAD thing...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
 TIGERS, CAPITALISM
and THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
Beyond Chron
January 22, 2008
Tigers kill, as we saw at the San Francisco Zoo
on Christmas day.
But for all its ferocity, the tiger is not the King of Beasts. That title belongs to the lion. Let loose an equal number of tigers and lions, and the lions will
kill off the tigers. Why? Because the tiger, ever the rugged individualist, fights alone. Lions fight together as a pack.
I didn't learn this fact from some nature book. I learned it from reading a book called
Caviar and Cabbage, a collection of newspaper columns by Melvin B. Tolson.
Tolson was the professor, poet and writer portrayed by Denzel Washington in
The Great Debaters, which is based on a true story from 1935 America...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
PERPETRATOR of JANE KIM DEATH THREAT IDENTIFIED
 The original version of this article
was published in Beyond Chron
on November 29, 2007.
Beyond Chron has learned the identity of the person who sent out a Facebook message last year which said "Jane Kim needs to die." Kim is an elected member of the San Francisco School Board, and an ally of school board members who voted last November to phase out the JROTC program from San Francisco schools.
Kim has identified the person who made the death threat as Daniel Chin, a JROTC cadet who graduated from Lowell High School in 2006. Significantly, Chin has emerged as a leader of the pro-JROTC forces trying to overturn the School Board's decision to phase out JROTC. According to the board's mandate, there should be no more JROTC classes after the end of the current 2007-2008 school year...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
Mel Gibson's APOCALYPTO and its CRITICS
 Beyond Chron
January 10, 2007
Mel Gibson's Apocalypto has been ravaged by many critics --
by those out to get Gibson for his recent anti-Semitic tirade at an unlucky Los Angeles cop, and by a few
nay-saying archaeologists and historians, most of whom need a good lesson in distinguishing the forest from the trees. Nevertheless, Apocalypto has been a major commercial success, and has brought Mayan civilization to the attention of the public to an extent that the pundits and armchair academics never could have and never would have...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
 SIR! NO SIR! tells the courageous story of mass resistance to the Vietnam war by active-duty GIs. This is a story that the corporate media, the politicians, establishment historians and the entertainment industry have worked overtime to bury. As the preview says, you need to know this story.
There have been many movies about the war in Vietnam, but the war wasn't a movie. It was a time when hundreds of thousands of armed american men and women participated in grassroots, rank-and-file politics in a way that hasn't been seen since... [more]
Based on an article published in
Beyond Chron, April 12, 2006
____________________________________________________________________________
 PAUL ROBESON, Son of a Slave
Graduate of Columbia Law School,
Class of 1923
Columbia Review
March, 2006
Congressman Scherer,
House Un-American Activities Committee:
Why do you not stay in Russia?
ROBESON: Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
THE SUPREME COURT and "ENEMY COMBATANTS"
Covert Action Quarterly
Spring 2005, Number 78
“If my thought dreams could be seen,
they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”
-Bob Dylan, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Both the corporate media and the pundits of the left claim to see a "major victory" for the “rule of law” in the June 28, 2004 Supreme Court rulings on Guantánamo and “enemy combatants.”
But the fundamental aspect of these decisions is that they have enshrined the concept of enemy combatants into our legal system...
A few more victories like this, and we will all be eating prison gruel...
[more]
____________________________________________________________________________
 | 
