AOC asks Mark Zuckerberg: Is it okay to post ads that you know are lies?
https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-mark-zuckerberg-video-congress-facebook-questioning-2019-10
Archives for the month of: October, 2019
WHAT AN OUTRAGE! “Reform” strikes again. Literally.
PRESS STATEMENT & PRESS AVAILABILITY
October 24, 2019
Contact: OEA 2nd Vice President, Chaz Garcia, 510-414-3593
Statement from OEA 2nd Vice President Chaz Garcia on Behalf of the OEA Officers on OUSD’s Use of Violence at School Board Meeting
“Last night, OUSD police pushed, choked and clubbed peaceful elementary school parents and educators who were protesting school closures. We hold the OUSD Board of Directors and Superintendent Johnson-Trammell responsible for setting the stage for this violence by erecting barricades, and for the actions of their police force. The Oakland Education Association condemns these acts of policing and violence in the strongest possible way, as we have opposed (and went on strike against) the harm done to our students by school closures, the harm done when a Board member choked a teacher in March, and OUSD’s continued spending of over $6.5 million on OUSD police while underspending on counselors, nurses, and school psychologists that our students need.”
“Oakland students, parents and educators deserve better than what the OUSD Board and Superintendent Johnson-Trammell are giving us. Oakland educators demand that OUSD immediately:
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Enact a moratorium on all planned and future school closures;
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Issue a public apology to our students, parents and educators for the use of police barricades, over-policing, and violence at last night’s board meeting;
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Defund the OUSD police force, and redirect those funds toward the counselors, nurses and other supports our students need; and immediately suspend, investigate and discipline officers for their behavior last night.”
PRESS AVAILABILITY: OEA 2nd Vice President Chaz Garcia, Noon to 2pm today (October 24th); OEA office (272 E. 12th Street, Oakland, 94606)
My favorite news commentator wrote this today in Fast Forward of the Boston Globe:
Later this afternoon, he [Trump] will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Roger Penske, presumably for being a successful race car driver and businessman. I wonder if Trump knows that Penske’s company once donated half a million bucks to a Super PAC supporting that #HumanScumMitt Romney.
You know that episode yesterday when about two dozen House Republicans stormed into a closed impeachment deposition, a move Democrats labeled as a desperate stunt designed to draw attention away from the damning facts? Well, we find out this morning that about half of those Republicans are on the three committees taking the depositions, so they already had access to the meeting room. I wonder if any of them realized that.
Masha Gessen, a Russian emigre and journalist, always has interesting commentaries on U.S. politics.
In this New Yorker article, she writes about Mark Zuckerberg and his flawed interpretation of the First Amendment.
In the course of the article, she reveals a startling fact. Zuckerberg is advising Mayor Pete.
Gessen writes:
What is the First Amendment for? I ask my students this every year. Every year, several people quickly respond that the First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to speak without restriction. True, I say, but what is it for? It’s so that Congress doesn’t pass a law that would limit the right to free speech, someone often says. Another might add that, in fact, the government does place some limits on free speech—you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, or say certain words on broadcast television and radio. I ask the question a third time: What is the First Amendment for? There is a pause as students realize that I am asking them to shift their frame of reference. Then someone says that the First Amendment is for democracy, for the plurality of opinions in the national conversation.
My students are undergraduates, some of whom will become journalists. Before they leave the confines of their small liberal-arts college, they will develop a more complicated view of politics and the media than the one they started with. The adult world they are entering, however, generally sticks to an elemental level of discourse. Last week, for example, the head of the country’s largest media company, Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, gave a nearly forty-minute lecturein which he reiterated that the right to free speech was invented so that it wouldn’t be restricted. In Zuckerberg’s narrative, as my colleague Andrew Marantz has written, freedom of speech, guaranteed by technological progress, is the beginning and the end of the conversation; this narrative willfully leaves out the damage that technological progress—and unchallenged freedom of all speech—can inflict. But the problem isn’t just Zuckerberg; more precisely, Zuckerberg is symptomatic of our collective refusal to think about speech and the media in complicated ways.
“People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world,” Zuckerberg said in his address. “It’s a fifth estate, alongside the other power structures in our society.” Zuckerberg was appropriating a countercultural term: beginning in the nineteen-sixties, “the fifth estate” referred to alternative media in the United States. Now the head of a new-media monopoly was using the term to differentiate Facebook from the news media, presumably to bolster his argument that Facebook should not be held to the same standards of civic responsibility to which we hold the fourth estate.
This strategy of claiming not to be the media has worked well for Facebook. On Monday, when Bloomberg broke the news that Zuckerberg has advised the Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on campaign hires, the story called Zuckerberg “one of tech’s most powerful executives.” CNN referred to him and his wife, Priscilla Chan, as “two of America’s most influential businesspeople and philanthropists.” Vox’s Recode vertical calledhim “the world’s third-richest person” and observed that he had become so toxic that “accepting a political donation from Mark Zuckerberg in 2020 is nowhere close to worth the money.” (The Times appears not to have covered the story for now.) Any one of these frames makes for an important and troubling story: a Presidential campaign in bed with a major tech corporation, influenced by and possibly intertwined with one of the country’s richest men—that is bad. It’s worse when one recalls Buttigieg’s attempts to go after Elizabeth Warren during last week’s Democratic debate. Warren has called for breaking up Facebook’s social-media monopoly, and Zuckerberg has referred to Warren as an “existential” threat to the company. Now imagine if it were the head of ABC or CNN or the New York Times Company who had served as an informal hiring consultant to a Presidential candidate. It would almost certainly be a bigger story and more broadly perceived as troublesome. Most of us still believe that the media are an essential component of democracy, and that a media outlet that is partisan or committed to a single candidate, but not in a transparent way, is a bad democratic actor.
In case you didn’t open this link in the previous post, David Kristofferson recommends this article that explains why Dutch children are the “happiest in the world.”
Here are three of the six reasons:
1. Babies get more sleep.
2. Kids spend more time with both parents.
3. Kids feel less pressure to excel in school.
To read the author’s explanations and to learn about the other three reasons, open the link.
Here is a 2018 listing of the happiest children and countries in the world.
The Netherlands is still first.
According to the rankings, Dutch kids’ education, their material well-being and behaviors and risks were the best in the world. Their happiness is attributed to a non-competitive, low-stress school culture and a good work-life balance for parents, among other reasons.
Finland is number 4.
Finland was fourth overall but No. 2 in material well-being and No. 4 in education for children. Recently, it was named the happiest country on Earth. What gives? Among other things, their taxation system has narrowed, if not eliminated, a lot of disparity between the rich and poor. And children’s services, including education, child care and health, are well-funded. Men and women are, in general, equal. What’s not to be happy about?
Shortly after I read this very provocative post by David Kristofferson, I saw a story in Education Week that suicide rates among young Americans have recently soared.
Quoting data from federal sources, it said:
Suicide rates for teens between the ages of 15 and 19 increased by 76 percent between 2007 and 2017. And the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-olds nearly tripled over that same time period, according to CDC’s data.
Kristofferson writes that something is clearly wrong with the way we raise our children. His own district in California surveyed high school students and reported that nearly a third of them describe themselves as”sad.” A sizable fraction have recently used drugs or alcohol.
He then goes on to contrast two parenting styles: the wholesome Dutch approach, which produces”the happiest children in the world” and the strict Tiger Mom approach, which establishes rigid standards of behavior: all work and no play, a phenomenon that captured media attention a few years ago.
As a grandmother who was once a very loving non-Tiger Mom, I think there is something terribly wrong with the absurd pressure we put on our children today. What they need most of all, after their basic needs are met, is unconditional love, the knowledge that someone is crazy about them. That’s a line I heard many years ago from a celebrated Yale child psychologist, Dr. Alfred Solnit: Every child needs to know that someone is crazy about her or him.
It is illegal for public schools to refuse admission to students with disabilities.
A charter school in Philadelphia admitted a six-year-old, then rejected her when the parent told the school the child had special needs.
An education advocacy group sued a Philadelphia charter school on Thursday, alleging it barred a 6-year-old from enrolling after learning she required services for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder.
The Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School in July accepted the girl for first grade this fall, according to the lawsuit brought by the Education Law Center. But when she and her mother, Georgette Hand, went to the school later that month with her documents, Veronica Joyner, the school’s founder and chief administrative officer, said she could not enroll the child because of her special needs.
Joyner told Hand the school “did not have the class or teacher to provide the services required” by the girl’s Individualized Education Plan, which specifies how schools must meet her needs, according to the lawsuit filed in Common Pleas Court Thursday. The suit seeks to have the girl immediately enrolled at the charter and awarded “compensatory education services” for the time she was excluded from the school. It also asks the court to order the school to include students with disabilities, and to contract with a provider to train staff on inclusion and diversity.
Margie Wakelin, a staff attorney for the Education Law Center, called the case “explicit” discrimination.
Charter schools say they are “public schools,” but they act like private schools.
Maurice Cunningham, a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, is renowned for his practice of “following the money” in Massachusetts. He naturally keeps encountering the Walton money that flows generously to torpedo public spending for public schools in Massachusetts. Maurice Cunningham is one of the heroes in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.
In this post, he identifies the malign tentacles of Walton money that is currently engaged in trying to block legislation to increase the funding of public schools in the Bay State.
You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and Cunningham provides the scorecard. The name of the organization is less important than the source of the money. If you spot a group called Latinos for Education, remember they are a Walton front.
When you think of the name Walton, think of a family that has accumulated over $150 billion but abhors unions, detests the minimum wage, and likes to keep their workers underpaid and tightly controlled. And think of a family that is intent on destroying the public schools that 85% of American children attend. How would you describe them? Avaricious. Greedy. Selfish.
Evidently every part of the Trump administration believes it is above the law. The Washington Post reported today that the Education Department spent millions for student aid at for-profit colleges that were ineligible to receive federal
funding.
A trove of documents released Tuesday by the House Education and Labor Committee shows the Education Department provided $10.7 million in federal loans and grants to students at the Illinois Institute of Art and the Art Institute of Colorado even though officials knew the for-profit colleges were not accredited and ineligible to receive such aid.
The documents build on prior reports from the committee describing efforts by Education Department officials to shield Dream Center Education Holdings, owner of the Art Institutes and Argosy University, from the consequences of lying to students about the accreditation of its since-closed schools. Now it appears the Education Department tried to shield itself from an ill-fated decision to allow millions of dollars to flow to those schools.
Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), chairman of the House Education Committee, is threatening to subpoena Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for more documents related to the department’s role in Dream Center’s actions. Scott says the agency has obstructed the committee’s investigation and refused to answer questions, as emails and letters paint a picture of a federal agency complicit in an effort to place profits before students.
Teresa Hanafin, writer of the Boston Globe’s daily Fast Forward, succinctly summarizes the state of the impeachment inquiry. If you think it is wrong to use foreign aid as a weapon to gather dirt on your election opponents and then lie about it, this will disturb you. If you think it’s okay, it won’t.
So I’m not sure how many times we have to hear it, but just in case there’s anyone left out there who still doesn’t think that Trump refused to give Ukraine desperately needed military funds until it launched an investigation into his political rivals: Just read the opening statement delivered yesterday by Ukraine ambassador William Taylor, a highly respected career diplomat, to the House committees holding an impeachment inquiry.
The bottom line: He directly implicated Trump personally in an effort to withhold military aid until Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, agreed to publicly announce investigations of Trump’s rivals.
Important point: Trump didn’t really care whether Ukraine actually carried out those investigations; he just wanted Zelensky to make a public statement that he could use against Joe Biden on the campaign trail. He also showed no concern about any other corruption in Ukraine.
So how will Congress, particularly Republicans, respond today? Here’s an explanation of Taylor’s testimony:
> First, his street cred: Taylor, 72, graduated from West Point and was an Army infantry officer for six years, including with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. He has served in every administration of both parties since 1985. All of which makes the attempt by White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham to trash him as one of those “radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution” pretty insulting.
> He had left government service when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked him to replace Marie Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine in June after Trump’s henchman, Rudy Giuliani, had smeared her and gotten Trump to fire her when she refused to go along with his Biden scheme. Taylor, upset about Yovanovitch’s shoddy treatment, hesitated to take the job, but eventually agreed after a trusted Republican mentor advised him, “If your country asks you to do something, you do it — if you can be effective.” (I bet he regrets listening to that guy.)
> He soon realized that in addition to normal diplomatic channels, there was a “highly irregular” policymaking process being run off the books by Gordon Sondland, the big-money Trump donor who was rewarded with the EU ambassadorship; Kurt Volker, a special representative to Ukraine; Energy Secretary Rick Perry; and Giuliani.
> He discovered that the oddball group was focused on just one thing: Making sure that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, publicly announced that his government was going to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who had been on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was VP. He also was being pressured to say that he would look into a bizarre conspiracy theory that held that despite what every US intelligence agency had concluded, it wasn’t actually Russia that had tried to interfere in the 2016 election to help Trump; it really was Ukraine, and it was trying to help — you guessed it — Hillary Clinton.
> By July, Taylor realized that Trump was withholding millions in military aid that Ukraine needed to fight off attacks from Russian-backed troops because Zelensky still hadn’t agreed to make that public statement about Trump’s political rivals. Around that time, he visited the front lines of Ukraine fighting, where he saw “armed and hostile Russian-led forces.” In one of the more poignant parts of his statement, he said he realized that “more Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance” that Trump was holding up to boost his personal political goals.
> In September, Sondland told Taylor that Trump had told him that he wanted Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine would investigate Burisma, the company where Hunter Biden had sat on the board of directors, and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election.
Sondland also said he had been wrong when he said that a White House visit was contingent on such an announcement. In fact, “everything” was dependent on a public statement, including security assistance. This upset Taylor so much that he threatened to quit.
> At the end of his statement, Taylor pleaded with lawmakers to continue to “support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor. Russian aggression cannot stand.”
He also spoke of two Ukraine stories: One a positive, bipartisan story about “a young nation, struggling to break free of its past, hopeful that [a] new government will finally usher in a new Ukraine.” But the other story dominating the past several months is much darker: a “rancorous story about whistleblowers, Mr. Giuliani, side channels, quid pro quos, corruption, and interference in elections.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 