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Thom Hartmann: The Cynical GOP Impeachment Claim

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
64

Thom Hartmann remembers when Republican operatives undermined John Kerry’s presidential campaign by “swift boating” him. Having no positive policies to advance to voters, they instead attack the character and ethics of the Democratic candidate.

He writes:

House Republicans have revived the infamous Swiftboat lie strategy that helped defeat John Kerry in 2004. In essence, it involves relentlessly lying about a candidate and smearing his or her name and reputation in the hopes it’ll shave a few points off their popularity with independent voters.

While virtually 100 percent of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam spoke glowingly of his service, a group who did not serve with him made up lies and exaggerations. 

Kerry and those who served with him tried to get the truth out, but, as Mark Twain is often credited as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

While Democrats prefer to win elections based on facts and policy positions, Republicans — not having anything to offer average Americans — instead default to slander and lies. Like with Obama’s birth certificate. Or Hillary’s email and Benghazi.

Wouldn’t most people, after all, resort to lies if all they had to offer was: 

— Forcing 10-year-olds to carry their rapist’s babies to term,
— More guns to slaughter more American children,
— Tax cuts for billionaires,
— More fossil fuels to create out-of-control weather,
— A government shutdown to cause a recession,
— And a Russian victory in Ukraine?

In this case, the essence of the impeachment inquiry Kevin McCarthy announced yesterday is straightforward: he believes that Joe and Hunter Biden profited from Joe’s being in the White House during the Obama administration and he thinks that’s an impeachable offense.

After all, there is:

— That $2 billion that Hunter got in a sweetheart deal from the Saudis with an annual paycheck of $25 million to manage it. 
—Or the billion he got from Qatar after his buddies in Saudi Arabia blockaded the country and threatened to starve them until they coughed up to bailout his fancy overpriced building in New York City. 
— And the more-than $600 million Hunter made while working in his dad’s White House. 
— Don’t forget the tens of millions in trademarks his wife got from the Chinese when she visited them with Dad. 
— Or his multiple meetings with Russians working for Vladimir Putin who was then trying to get his dad elected. 
— Or the $30 million given him to invest and manage by one of Israel’s largest insurance companies. 
— And the top-secret info he gave a Saudi prince that helped him overthrow his own government.

Oh, wait. That was Jared and Ivanka Kushner, not Hunter Biden.

Hunter appears to have committed three crimes, two of which he’s being prosecuted for by a Trump-appointed special prosecutor with help from a Trump-appointed judge.

First, he failed to report or pay his income taxes for two years while he was in the throes of alcohol and drug intoxication.

He’s since paid them in full, plus fines, as do tens of thousands of delinquent filers in the US every year. Republicans want him to go to prison anyway.

Second, he checked a box on an application to purchase a gun — which he only kept for two weeks and never used — which said that he wasn’t then a drug addict.

Checking that box when you are a drug addict is technically a crime, but there’s no instance I can find with a pretty thorough web search of anybody, anywhere, any time ever having been prosecuted for it.

Until now. It looks like Hunter might actually go to prison for checking the box, which raises the question: where are the Second Amendment Republicans protesting this violation of his sacred right to own a gun no matter what? Crickets.

Third, Hunter took a position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian fossil fuel giant, for which he was paid millions. This was a transparent effort to trade off his father’s name and nobody is denying that: it was “poor judgement” (to quote Hunter himself).

To show his employers how tight he was with the Vice President, he’d call his dad and conduct the phone conversation on a speaker phone for the room to hear; his business partner in the Burisma deal, Devon Archer, testified about that before James Comer’s House Oversight Committee. 

Sadly for Comer, though, Archer testified under oath that the two never discussed business or Burisma: Joe Biden kept the conversations to family, rehab, and the weather.

Nonetheless, the Republicans are sure if they dig deep enough they’ll find something at least as scandalous as Jared’s cutting the deals with Saudi Arabia that led to the Crown Prince funneling millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s pockets via the LIV Golf scheme. 

Good luck with that: unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden actually has a moral compass. He used those phone calls to try to talk his son into rehab.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene had dinner with Donald Trump this past Sunday night, and he told her he wanted Joe Biden impeached according to people who were there, and then turned up the pressure on McCarthy. Trump, of course, doesn’t want to be the only guy running for the presidency who’s been impeached and whose family is known to be corrupt through-and-through.

Now Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz are in a pissing match over who was first with the very, very cool plan to impeach Biden.

Boebert’s proposal, Greene wants the world to know, is simply a rip-off of her own efforts. After calling Boebert a “little b*tch,” Green said:

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine—she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution.”

Yesterday morning, after McCarthy’s coming announcement was public knowledge, Gaetz tweeted:

“When @SpeakerMcCarthy makes his announcement in moments, remember that as I pushed him for weeks, @kilmeade said I was: ‘Speaking into the wind’ on impeachment. Turns out, the wind may be listening!”

In response, Greene tweeted back at him:

“Correction my friend. I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was Vice President on his very first day in office. You wouldn’t cosponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to cosponsor my articles on the border. Who’s really been making the push?”

The sad reality for this MAGA crowd is that there is no evidence, either direct or implicit, that Joe Biden ever had anything to do with his son’s business dealings or ever took any money from them. None. Even the two “IRS whistleblowers” who said Hunter had committed tax crimes that they claimed were overlooked during the Trump administration brought no evidence. The Department of Justice also denied their claims.  

Another much-heralded “whistleblower” that Comer and House Republicans had talked about for weeks turned out to be a professional con man, spy for China, and criminal who’s on the lam fleeing international arms trafficking charges. Understandably, he didn’t show up for the hearings.

But don’t let facts get in the way of a good swiftboating.

I remember when, during the 2004 election year, Jerome Corsi came on my programseveral times to hype his book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Corsi, it turned out, had never served in the US military, and his co-author, John O’Neill, served in Vietnam long after Kerry had returned to the US.

Literally none of their claims held up, but, like with the Obama birth certificate and Benghazi, they blew enough smoke that millions of swing voters concluded there must be a fire somewhere.

So now McCarthy is having to twist himself into pretzels to try to justify this bizarre fishing expedition.

Instead of seating a select committee to look into impeaching Biden, McCarthy is essentially doing a marketing move rather than a legal one. There is no “impeachment committee” with subpoena power because having one would require a majority of the House to vote for it and he knows he doesn’t have enough Republican votes to make it happen.

As McCarthy himself said just two weeks ago:

“To open an impeachment inquiry is a serious matter and House Republicans would not take it lightly or use it for political purposes. The American people deserve to be heard on this matter through their elected representatives. That’s why, if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.”

Back in 2019 — when Nancy Pelosi was debating having a vote to put together an impeachment committee when it came out that Trump had tried to extort Zelenskyy to say that Biden was corrupt — McCarthy said:

“Speaker Pelosi can’t decide on impeachment unilaterally. It requires a full vote of the House of Representatives.”

But instead of having that vote yesterday, McCarthy’s just attaching that “impeachment” label to the existing hustles being run by Comer at House Oversight and Jordan at Judiciary and Weaponization. It’s legally meaningless, but just the use of the word “impeachment” guarantees multiple news cycles, driving the “smoke” into the faces of American voters. 

This is the same McCarthy who said the entire Benghazi two-year circus was done purely to tarnish Hillary Clinton in the upcoming 2016 election. He told Sean Hannity it was his “strategy to fight and win” the election, adding:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

The fact is that presidential elections, which are often decided by just a few points or less, can be won if a candidate can simply shave those few points off their opponents’ tally. And that can be done by discouraging base voters about a candidate and thus suppressing turnout, or simply souring swing voters on that candidate.

This strategy worked for Republicans in 2004 against John Kerry and again in 2016 against Hillary Clinton; we can fully expect them to play it out now. Particularly if Democrats once again respond by trying to ignore it and wrongly assume people will realize how absurd it is. 

Slander campaigns like this must instead be hit head-on with outrage and ferocity: Democrats need to take this seriously.

So, while Don Jr. and Eric Trump are facing prosecution in a $250 million fraud suit by New York State for corrupt acts that handed their family billions of dollars scammed from banks, insurance companies, and unpaid taxes, Republicans are going to try to impeach Joe Biden for his son’s poor but entirely legal decision to sit on the Burisma board.

Meanwhile, within hours of McCarthy’s announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin came out and gushed about the “outstanding person” Elon Musk while taking Donald Trump’s side in his dispute with Jack Smith.

Irony is dead and hypocrisy has never been more alive.

Categories Biden, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Republicans

The Deceptive Language of “Reform”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
9

While looking over my site, I came across this post written in 2014.

It is as timely now as it was then. Reformers worked with communications specialists to develop language that conceals its true meaning.

For example, reformers today don’t want to improve public schools. They want to defund them. Some want to destroy them. They think that public money should go to anyone, any organization that claims they are educating young people. They are fine with funding religious schools. No doubt, they would have no objection to funding Satanic schools, for fairness sake.

These reformers believe in tight accountability for public schools, their principal, their teachers, their students.

They believe in zero accountability for anyone taking public money for nonpublic schools. In most states with vouchers, voucher schools do not require students to take state tests. Students can’t be judged by test scores as public school students are; their teachers can’t be evaluated by test scores. Their schools can’t be closed because of test scores. There are no test scores.

Teachers in public schools must be college graduates who have studied education and who are certified. Teachers in voucher schools do not need to be college graduates or have certification.

Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, now fund homeschooling. With well-educated parents, home schooling may be okay, although the children do miss the positive aspects of meeting children from different backgrounds, working in teams, and learning how to get along with others. But let’s face it: not all home schoolers are well-educated. Poorly educated parents will teach their children misinformation and limit them to what they know, and no more.

Then there is the blessing that the US Supreme Court gave to public funding for religious schools. The purpose of most religious schools is to teach their religion. The long word for that is indoctrination. We have a long history of not funding religious schools. But now all of us are expected to foot the bill for children to learn the prayers and rituals of every religion. I don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s religion to be inculcated. I also don’t want to pay taxes to inculcate my own religion.

But the Supreme Court has step by step moved us to a point where the government’s refusal to pay for Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, and evangelical schools—with no regulation, no accountability, and no oversight—violates freedom of religion. That’s where we are going.

Ninety percent of the people in this country graduated from public schols. Those who sent their children to private or religious school paid their own tuition. That arrangement worked. Over time, we became the leading nation on earth in many fields of endeavor. Our education system surely had something to do with our national success.

I believe that people should have choices. Most public schools offer more curricular choices than charter schools, private schools, or religious schools. Anyone may choose to leave the public school to attend a nonpublic school, but they should not ask the taxpayers to underwrite their private choice.

The public pays for a police force, but it does not pay for private security guards. The public pays for firefighters, highways, beaches, parks, and many other public services. Why should the public pay for your decision to choose a private service?

Saddest of all, the current trend toward school choice will lower the overall quality of education. The children of the affluent who attend elite private schools will get a great education, although they will not get exposed to real life on their $60,000 a year campus. None of those campuses will get poor voucher kids because all they bring is a pittance.

We are now learning that most public schools are superior to most of the voucher schools. Many charter schools are low-performing.

On average, school choice will dumb down our rising generation. It will deepen social and religious divisions. It will not produce better education or a better-educated society. It will widen pre-existing inequalities.

Books have been and will be written about this fateful time, when we abandoned one of our most important, most democratic institutions. Libertarians and religious zealots have worked for years, decades, on this project. By convincing leaders of both parties to follow them, they have betrayed the rest of us. They have lost sight of the common good.

Those two words are key. The “common good.” With them, we as a society can conquer any goal, realize any ideal. Without them, we are reduced to squabbling tribes, cliques, factions. We are becoming what the Founding Fathers warned about.

If it’s not too late, that is the banner behind which we should rally: the common good. An understanding that we are all in the same boat, and we must take care of others.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk Blames “the Jews” for X’s Problems

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
24

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble referring to Twitter as X. A single letter is not a name. And I have decided to stay on Twitter, because that’s how I reach nearly 150,000 people. When they retweet (re-X?) my posts, I reach even more. So I’m sticking with Twitter, despite Elon Musk and the proliferation of racists and anti-Semites on Twitter.

Michael Hiltzik, my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times, recently blasted Musk for blaming the misfortunes of Twitter on the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights racial and religious hatred, and especially anti-Semitism. Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for defamation. That’s ironic, almost funny.

Hiltzik writes:

Elon Musk has long been known for blaming everyone else but himself for the various fiascos visited upon his companies — meddlesome bureaucrats for COVID-related production slowdowns at Tesla, the Pentagon and conniving rivals for the loss of a government contract by SpaceX, nasty woke advertisers for the decline of X (ex-Twitter).

So what were the chances that he would get around to blaming the Jews? Based on the evidence at hand, 100%.

Over the weekend, Musk launched a ferocious, spittle-flecked attack on the Anti-Defamation League, which describes itself (accurately enough) as “a global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens.”

Musk decided that the ADL is responsible for (in his words) “most of our revenue loss [at X]….Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”

My goodness! When does he blame George Soros?

He asserted that the U.S. advertising revenue at X is “down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” And he tweeted that he has “no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.”

Not to put a fine point on things, but all this shows Musk to have gone utterly off the rails and over the edge of conspiracy-mongering paranoia. It’s the most extreme outburst of antisemitism by a purportedly mainstream public figure in more than 100 years.

Musk’s hate-spasm easily outflanks the previous champion of public antisemitism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was caught on tape in July arguing that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while leaving Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese relatively immune. It’s as if Musk challenged Kennedy’s effort to seize the antisemitism crown by saying, “Oh, yeah? Watch this.”

Musk’s outburst makes the position of Linda Yaccarino, the formerly respected entertainment executive who accepted the job of X’s CEO to restore the platform to the good graces of corporate advertisers, hopelessly untenable. Why she doesn’t resign is a mystery. His words also should prompt the federal government to question his suitability, and that of his company SpaceX, to hold government contracts of any kind.

Musk has bought into the notion — advanced by openly antisemitic X accounts — that the ADL fosters antisemitism by calling it out wherever it appears.

“The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform,” he tweeted on Sunday. He was responding to a tweet quoting the far-right conspiracy-monger Alex Jones calling the ADL “the most pro-Hitler organization I’ve ever seen.” He further implied that the ADL is “somehow complicit in creating the very thing they complain about!”

So in this bizarro world, fighting antisemitism promotes antisemitism!

Musk implicitly endorsed the hashtag #BantheADL,” advocating banning the organization from X, by replying, “Perhaps we should run a poll on this.” Surely he knows that his right-wing followers would swamp any such poll on the “yes” side.

It’s crystal clear that X’s revenue problem is Elon Musk and his policies. He has welcomed dispensers of antisemitism, racism and other varieties of hate speech back onto the platform, while amplifying misinformation about purported COVID treatments and homophobic slurs retailed by conspiracy movements such as QAnon.

Corporate advertisers in the consumer market don’t need the ADL to tell them that it’s bad for their brands to be associated with a social media platform bristling with neo-Nazis and other denizens of the cultural underworld.

It’s true that the ADL has had its eyes on Musk and X for some time. That’s because the platform’s content moderation policies have fostered a documented surge of hate speech since Musk acquired it last October.

In March, the ADL reported that Twitter had refused to remove tweets or accounts that incited violence against Jews. Two months later, it followed up with a report that Musk’s decision to reinstate 65 Twitter accounts that had previously been banned for hate speech had contributed to the antisemitism surge.

The tweet-and-reply threads of many of these accounts, the ADL found, had become “magnets for vile antisemitic content.” They were rife with such “familiar antisemitic tropes” as “conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Rothschild banking family controlling global politics, finance, and media” and accusations that Jews are aiming to “destroy ‘the West’ by promoting transgender identities and lifestyles and ‘replacing’ white people via immigration (e.g., the Great Replacement).”

Tellingly, beyond stating his determination to “clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism,” and declaring, “I’m pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind,” Musk in his weekend outburst made no effort to address the specific points raised by the ADL — he merely asserted that the organization’s accusations were “unfounded.”

Obviously, that won’t do. According to ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, Yaccarino reached out to him last month, leading to a “frank + productive conversation…about @X, what works and what doesn’t, and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform,” he tweeted.

ADL will “give her and Elon Musk credit if the service gets better… and reserve the right to call them out until it does,” Greenblatt added.

It’s a safe bet that as long as Musk reigns over X, the platform will have a long, long way to go to warrant any credit for eradicating hate speech at all.

There are few precedents in American history for someone with the public renown of Elon Musk voicing or hosting opinions of such unalloyed virulence. The closest analogue is probably Henry Ford, who in 1920 began publishing screeds in the Dearborn Independent, a local weekly he had acquired, alleging the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.

“Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford,” Josh Marshall observed Tuesday on his website, Talking Points Memo. “The comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.”

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Media

Alana Semuels: Why You Should Not Shop at Walmart

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
40

Alana Semuels writes for TIME magazine, where this article appeared. She rightly notes that dollars spent at Walmart hurt locally-owned businesses. In many parts of the country, you can drive through small towns and see empty stores that used to be owned by local folk. They couldn’t compete with Walmart’s low prices. Maybe mom-and-pop got a job as greeters at the Walmart twenty miles away. Walmart keeps its prices low not only by its buying power but by prohibiting its workers from forming unions.

Walmart destroys small towns and communities by killing their local economy. if Walmart finds that its super store is not profitable, it will close it and move on, leaving behind devastated towns and communities.

But that’s not the only reason to avoid Walmart. Its owners, the Walton family, are avid supports of school choice. They are the biggest supporters of charter schools, other than the federal government, which dutifully spends $440 million every year to expand new charters, mostly corporate chains like Walmart. Did you ever imagine that your local public school would be replaced by a chain school? Of course, members of the Walton family top the list of America’s billionaires. With a combined wealth of more than $240 billion, they are America’s richest family. Don’t make them richer.

Ironically, Sam Walton, the founding father, graduated from public schools. He graduated from the David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. Unlike his descendants, he did not hate public schools; he did not want to privatize and destroy them.

Alana Semuels wrote:

Every week, I go onto Walmart’s website and order a bunch of groceries to be delivered to my house and then feel a little bit guilty.

Walmart is a multi-billion dollar corporation with headquarters more than 1,000 miles from my home; the money I spend there goes to shareholders and executives who live far away, instead of to my local grocery store, Key Food, an 86-year-old co-op of independently owned stores based near my home in New York. By shopping at Walmart, I am likely contributing to the demise of the independently-owned grocery store, which is disappearing across the country.

But the prices make the choice easy. On a recent day, the 42-oz tub of Quaker Oats I get each week was $9.99 at Key Foods and $5.68 at Walmart; a 500 ml bottle of California Olive Ranch olive oil was $14.49 at Key Foods and $8.37 at Walmart; Rao’s homemade tomato sauce was $9.99, while I could have gotten the exact same item on Walmart for $6.88. On these three items alone, I saved $14 by shopping at Walmart.

These prices are one reason that Walmart captures one in four grocery dollars in America, but there’s an argument to be made that Walmart and other big chains including Dollar General, which is expanding at a rapid clip across the country, come by those prices unfairly because of their market power.

There’s a law on the books—1936’s Robinson-Patman Act—that essentially says suppliers in any industry can’t give lower prices and special deals to big chain stores if it costs the same to serve them as other stores. The law also says retailers can’t try and bully suppliers into giving those discounts.

But because Walmart and dollar stores are so huge, representing a big part of a supplier’s business, they’re able to extract deals and low prices from suppliers, according to Small Business Rising and the Main Street Competition Coalition, two groups of independent business owners making their case in Congressional hearings and television ads. The pandemic highlighted just how unfairly Walmart can wield its power, the small businesses are telling regulators, because it was able to demand that suppliers stock its shelves when competitors weren’t able to get the same products for weeks or months. It’s not just groceries; independent pharmacies, book stores, auto parts stores, and other types of retailers are also struggling on an uneven playing field, they say.

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Charter Schools, Competition, Disruption, School Choice, Vouchers

Nikhil Goyal’s Stunning New Book About How Poverty Damages Lives

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
25

Nikhil Goyal has written an alarming book about the effects of poverty on young people. His book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty documents the lives of three teenagers in Philadelphia, all of whom live in poverty.

The book is an implicit rebuke of the “reformers” who insisted that schools were the root cause of inequality, not poverty. They liked to say, “fix schools, and that will fix poverty.”

Goyal describes the obstacles in these young people’s lives, and it’s clear that the “reformers” had it backwards.

A recent review by Julia Craven in The Washington Post raves about the book.

Each of the three protagonists in sociologist Nikhil Goyal’s new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” is navigating a pivotal juncture: adolescence, that unique and universally exhausting stage of human development when one moment can sometimes change the trajectory of life. For Ryan Rivera, that moment is being among a group of preteen boys who set fire to a trash can near their middle school’s atrium, a childish mistake that cast him into the school-to-prison pipeline. Corem Coreano, who came out as queer, and then changed their name and pronouns, ultimately made the difficult choice to leave home because of their mother’s refusal to leave an abusive relationship. And Giancarlos Rodriguez was — puzzlingly — thrown out of Philadelphia’s education system after fighting to protect his and his peers’ future by leading student walkouts to protest school closures and educational budget cuts.

Rooted in almost a decade of reporting, “Live to See the Day” is a sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color. All three protagonists hail from Kensington, an impoverished neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

According to Goyal, babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away.

A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction. In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.

Goyal, who is on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders, makes clear why programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were destined to fail. They ignored the conditions in which young people live. Evaluating their teachers by test scores, firing them, closing their schools, turning their schools over to entrepreneurs and corporate chains do nothing to change their lives.

Categories Corporate Reform, Inequity, Injustice, Philadelphia, Poverty, Students

Was Your Dinner Produced by Child Labor?

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
10

Mother Jones published an alarming report about the revival of child labor, based on the work of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Promoted by Republican governors despite federal law, child labor has become increasingly dangerous. Children are hired to replace adult immigrants and to keep costs low.

If you’ve eaten a burger and fries recently, there’s a chance that the potatoes were picked by middle schoolers, working through the school day in a field in Idaho. The steer that became the beef patty may well have been killed at a slaughterhouse where teenagers work, and the bone saws used to process the meat could easily have been cleaned by a 13-year-old, wearing a bulky hard hat and oversized gloves. It’s also quite possible that the burger was grilled, flipped and assembled by a child working at McDonald’s on a school night, far later than federal law allows.

This sort of child labor—culled from thousands of examples in U.S. Department of Labor investigations—has been mostly illegal in the U.S. since the 1930s, but that hasn’t stopped a surprising number of companies from engaging in it. In February, the department announced that the nation is experiencing a sharp rise in child labor violations across all industries; since 2018, the agency has documented a 69-percent increase in children who were employed illegally.

A FERN analysis of investigation data released by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—which is tasked with enforcing federal child labor laws—found that more than 75 percent of recent violations were committed by employers in the food industry. The agency uncovered more than 12,000 child labor violations in the nation’s food system—out of 16,000 total violations across all industries—between Jan. 1, 2018 and Nov. 23, 2022, the most recent date for which data were publicly available. Investigators found minors working illegally at vegetable farms in Texas and Florida, at dairy farms in Minnesota and New Hampshire and at poultry plants in Alabama and Mississippi. Children are involved in every step of the food supply chain, working illegally from farm to table…

Supermarkets and other food and beverage stores were well represented, too, responsible for 7.7 percent of the violations. In one particularly egregious example, from 2021, a 16-year-old supermarket worker in Clarksburg, Tennessee, was tasked with cleaning out a meat grinder, even though federal law prohibits employers from having minors clean or operate them. As the boy reached into the machine, the grinder switched on and ripped off half of his arm.

Who could have imagined that states and employers today would be rolling back protections for children enacted in the 1930s?

Categories Childhood, Cruelty

Lisa Haver: More Than Half the Charters in Philly Have Empty Seats

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
11

For many years, the charter lobbyists have claimed that there were long waiting lists of students hoping to get into a charter school. This claim should be taken with pounds of salt. No one ever audits these lists. A reporter in Boston once told me that he tried to audit the list and found many duplicate names, names of students who had already enrolled in a charter school, and some who had already graduated high school. Obviously, there is political benefit in never updating the wait lists, which helps charter advocates demand more charters.

Lisa Haver, a public school activist, reported that a review of public records reveals that more than half the city’s charter schools are underenrolled.

She writes:

In recent months, promoters of school choice lobbied Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to expand the state’s voucher program to include the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program (PASS) which would divert an additional $100 million from public school districts to private schools. Already established voucher programs in the state include the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and the Education Improvement Tax Credit.

Shapiro, after intense pressure from public school advocates, reversed his position and signed the state’s $45.5 billion budget without the voucher provision.

School choice proponents claim that public school students are “trapped” in failing schools, trying in vain to find an alternative. A recent Sunday Inquirer editorial, written by wealthy suburban backers of more privatization of the city’s schools, painted public schools as “cages” from which children could not escape. The only solution, they claim, is to take funding for public schools and give it to individuals to use as tuition to attend private schools. Their version of school choice does not acknowledge that the choice is not the families’ but the schools’–who can reject any applicant without explanation and can discriminate against students on the basis of sexual identity. Most voucher money would go to students already attending religious and exclusive private schools. Education policy expert Josh Cowen writes that a decade of research indicates that vouchers actually lower academic achievement.

What those lobbying for more voucher programs can’t explain is why more families don’t leave the district schools, which they paint with a broad brush as “failing”, and attend any of the district’s 83 charter schools. They refer to the elusive “charter waiting list” of 25, 000 students (inexplicably down from their previous list of 40,000) without producing the list or offering proof of any kind of its existence. The truth is that there is no charter waiting list for the simple reason that most of the city’s charter schools are under-enrolled.

Current data shows that 58 of the district’s 83 charter schools–67%–are under their authorized enrollment. Fifteen charter schools are between 20% and 40% under-enrolled. Two schools are below 50% of their authorized enrollment. Families living in any part of the city could choose from among the 65 charters with citywide admission. Renaissance schools are nominally neighborhood schools, but many have a large percentage from outside their official catchment areas.

Obviously, Philadelphia’s schoolchildren are not trapped in district schools. Parents have fought to stop the hostile takeover of their schools by charter companies, and many continue to choose district public schools over charters. In addition, the low percentage of in-catchment enrollment at Renaissance charters shows that parents will travel farther rather than attend a charter they find to be substandard.

Philadelphia’s schools need more funding, not less. Diverting money to private and religious schools means fewer educational opportunities for Philadelphia’s children.


Note: All data cited in this report can be found on the School District of Philadelphia website. Current enrollment figures are from the 2022-23 school year (except where noted). Schools with enrollment lower than authorized are designated “under”; percentages are given for those more than 5% under-enrolled.

In the balance of the article, Haver identifies the schools that are undeeenrolled.

Categories Education Reform

Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
18

Democrats in Wisconsin celebrated the election last spring of a liberal judge to the State Supreme Court. Her election was decisive—she won by 11 points. Her election shifted the balance on the court to 4-3 favoring liberals. Justice Janet Protasiewicz made clear as she campaigned that she would support abortion rights and oppose partisan gerrymandering. Republicans claim that her campaign statements demonstrate she is prejudiced, which is grounds for impeachment. The legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, which is evidence of partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts in a state with a Democratic governor.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature is talking about impeaching a newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice even before she has heard a case.

The unprecedented attempt to impeach and remove Justice Janet Protasiewicz from office comes as the court is being asked to throw out legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 that cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.

Here is a closer look at where things stand:

Protasiewicz won election in April to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court beginning Aug. 1. Her 11-point victory gave liberals a 4-3 majority, ending a 15-year run with conservatives in control.

During her first week in office, two lawsuits were filed by Democratic-friendly groups and law firms seeking to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps.

WHY IS THERE TALK OF IMPEACHMENT?

Republican lawmakers who have talked about the possibility, most notably Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also argue her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party disqualifies her.

The state Democratic Party is not part of either redistricting lawsuit, but supports the efforts.

The court has yet to say whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Protasiewicz also has yet to say whether she will step aside in the cases, including the decision on whether to hear them.

If she does step aside, the court would be divided 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices. However, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn has sided with liberals on major cases in the past, angering Republicans.

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

Protasiewicz frequently spoke about redistricting during the campaign, calling the current Republican-friendly maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

“Let’s be clear here,” she said at a January forum. “The maps are rigged here, bottom line.”

“They do not reflect people in this state,” Protasiewicz said at the same forum. “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair. I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

She never promised to rule one way or another.

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

On recusal, the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause says a judge must recuse if they have a financial interest in the case, or if there is a strong possibility of bias.

There are also state rules laying out when a judge must step aside from a case. Those generally include any time their impartiality on a case can be called into question, such as having a personal bias toward one of those suing, having a financial interest or making statements as a candidate that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to ruling one way or another.

On impeachment, the Wisconsin Constitution limits the reasons to impeach a sitting officeholder to corrupt conduct in office or the commission or a crime or misdemeanor.

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

The Wisconsin Legislature has voted only once to impeach a state judge who was alleged to have accepted bribes and heard cases in which he had financial interests. It happened in 1853, just five years after statehood, and the state Senate did not convict.

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

It takes a majority vote in the Assembly to impeach and a two-thirds majority, or 22 votes, in the Senate to convict. Republicans have enough votes in both chambers to impeach and convict Protasiewicz.

If the Assembly impeached her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, has said he is still researching impeachment and has not committed to moving ahead.

The day after Protasiewicz was elected, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu seemed to cast doubt on the Senate proceeding with impeachment.

“To impeach someone, they would need to do something very serious,” LeMahieu told WISN-TV. “We are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin.”

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

The court is under no deadline to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Likewise, Protasiewicz doesn’t have a deadline for deciding whether she will recuse herself. Both decisions could come at any point.

If the court decides to hear the challenges, it would then set a timeline for arguments. It is unclear when, if Protasiewicz remains on the case, the Legislature might proceed with impeachment proceedings.

Why would the Republicans move to impeach the Justice? Power. They have successfully gerrymandered their state and don’t want to lose their super-majorities in both houses, where they can veto anything that Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposes.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Wisconsin

September 11: A Day Seared into Our Memories

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
15

Some days live on in our memories forever. In my parents’ lives, Pearl Harbor was one of those days. The death of FDR was another.

In my lifetime, those days include the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.

Then came September 11. I live directly across the New York Harbor from lower Manhattan. I heard the first plane crash. I ran to the harbor and arrived just in time to see the second plane crash into the second World Trade Center building. I saw it. That sight is seared into my memory.

The events of the day were unforgettable. The sounds (sirens and jets), the smell of burning plastics, the scenes we saw on television—the bodies flying through the air.

For many weeks afterwards, there were signs posted in public places in NYC: photographs of men and women who were missing. “Have you seen…?”

There will be debates and books for years about why it happened. It was terrorism, for sure. That day led us into a war that lasted for 20 years and cost even more lives. It changed the act of taking a flight, imposing security measures.

For the thousands of innocent men and women who died that day, it was a tragedy. I mourn for the children who lost parents and grandparents, for those who lost husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. I mourn for the firefighters and police officers who ran to the burning buildings and lost their lives. It is a sad day of remembrance.

Categories Evil, International

Thom Hartmann: Never Again Let a President Lie Us into War

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
78

Thom Hartmann writes here about how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney cynically used the attacks of 9/11 to get us into America’s longest war. They wanted to go to war. I can’t help but think that if 537 votes in Florida had gone a different way, the world would be a different place today. It was those 537 votes that made Bush the President, not Al Gore. Remember that: Every vote counts.

Hartmann writes:

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost…

Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, followed by their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier.

Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies.

Given the costs of both these wars — and the current possibility of our being drawn deeper into conflict in both Ukraine and Taiwan — it’s an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world.

To be clear, I support US involvement — and even an expanded US involvement — in the defense of the Ukrainian democracy against Putin’s Hitler-grabs-Poland-like attack and mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. Had the world mobilized to stop Hitler when he invaded Poland in 1939 there almost certainly wouldn’t have been either the Holocaust or WWII, which is why Europe is so united in this effort.

If Putin succeeds in taking Ukraine, his administration has already suggested that both Poland and Moldova are next, with the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) also on the menu. That would almost certainly lead to war in Europe.

And China is watching: a Putin victory in Ukraine will encourage Xi to try to take Taiwan. Between the two — war in both Europe and the Pacific — we could find ourselves in the middle of World War III if Putin isn’t stopped now.

That said, essentially defensive military involvement like with Ukraine or in World War II have been the exception rather than the rule in American history. We’ve been far more likely to have presidents lie us into wars for their own personal and political gain than to defend ourselves or other democracies.

For example, after 9/11 in 2001 the Taliban that then ran Afghanistan offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.”

The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to disaster (but simultaneously set himself up for re-election in 2004 as a “wartime president”).

To further complicate things for Bush and Cheney, the 9/11 attacks were not planned, hatched, developed, practiced, expanded, worked out, or otherwise devised in Afghanistan or by even one single citizen of Afghanistan.

That country and its leadership in 2001, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, as I detailed in depth here on August 15th of last year. The actual planning and management of the operation was done out of Pakistan and Germany, mostly by Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The Taliban were bad guys, trashing the rights of women and running a tinpot dictatorship, but they represented no threat whatsoever to America or our allies.

Almost two decades later, though, then-President Trump and Mike Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy, shutting down 9 of the 10 US air bases in that country to screw incoming President Joe Biden, and the release of 5000 of Afghanistan’s worst Taliban war criminals — all over the strong objections of the democratically elected Afghan government in 2019.

Trump did this so could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he’d “negotiated peace” in Afghanistan, when in fact he’d set up the debacle that happened around President Biden’s withdrawal from that country.

”The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good,” Trump proclaimed — after ordering the mullah who then named himself President of Afghanistan — freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghan’s government, which Trump had cut out of the negotiations.

Following that betrayal of both Afghanistan and America, Trump and the GOP scrubbed the record of their embrace of the Taliban from their websites, as noted here and here.

And the conservative Boris Johnson administration in the UK came right out and said that Trump’s “rushed” deal with the Taliban — without involvement of the Afghan government or the international community — set up the difficulties Biden faced.

“The die was cast,” Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC, “when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation.”

So, Republican George W. Bush lied us into both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and then Donald Trump tried to lie us out of at least one of them.

But this was far from the first time a president has lied us into a war.

— Vietnam wasn’t the first time an American president and his buddies in the media lied us into a war when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie.

— Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor (it caught fire all by itself).

— The first time we were lied into a major war by a president was probably the Mexican-American war of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we’d been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie.

— You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears slaughter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan (among other atrocities) it was all based on a series of lies.

Bush’s lies that took us into Afghanistan and, a bit over a year later into Iraq, are particularly egregious, however, given his and Cheney’s reasons for those lies.

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3- day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” when our guy Osama Bin Laden, who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan, engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida and on 9/11 Bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan:

“CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the Sept. 11 terrorists attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.”

When the Obama administration finally caught and killed Bin Laden, he was back in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run terrorist training camps there — unrelated to 9/11 — but they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. Dresser Industries was big into asbestos and about to fall into bankruptcy because of asbestos lawsuits that the company was fighting through the court system.

Cheney bet Dresser would ultimately win the suits and had Halliburton buy the company on the cheap, but a year later, in 1999, Dresser got turned down by the courts and Haliburton’s stock went into freefall, crashing 68 percent in a matter of months.

Bush had asked Cheney — who’d worked in his father’s White House as Secretary of Defense — to help him find a suitable candidate for VP.

Cheney, as his company was collapsing, recommended himself for the job. In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as VP, Halliburton subsidiary KBR received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. Bush was seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; a war that gave him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today.

Even Trump had to get into the “let’s lie about Afghanistan” game, in his case to have bragging rights that he’d “ended the war in Afghanistan.”

In 2019, Trump went around the Afghan government (to their outrage: he even invited the Taliban to Camp David in a move that disgusted the world) to cut a so-called “peace deal” that sent thousands of newly-empowered Taliban fighters back into the field, and then drew down our troops to the point where today’s chaos in that country was absolutely predictable.

Trump’s deal was the signal to the 300,000+ Afghan army recruits we’d put together and paid that America no longer had their back and if the Taliban showed up they should just run away. Which, of course, is what happened on Trump’s watch. As Susannah George of The Washington Post noted:

“The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the [Trump] February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.”

Jon Perr’s article at Daily Kos did a great summary, with the title: “Trump put 5,000 Taliban fighters back in battle and tied Biden’s hands in Afghanistan.”

Trump schemed and lied to help his own reelection efforts, and the people who worked with our military and the US-backed Afghan government paid a terrible price for it.

As President Biden told America:

“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500.

“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost.

When President Ford withdrew US forces from Vietnam (I remember it well), there was barely a mention of McNamara’s and LBJ’s lies that got us into that war.

Similarly, today’s reporting on the chaos in Afghanistan and the war to seize the Iraqi oil fields almost never mention Bush’s and Cheney’s lies and ulterior motives in getting us into those wars in the first place.

George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We can’t afford to let these lies go down the memory hole, like we have the other wars we were lied into that I mentioned earlier. Sadly, it’s clear now that neither Bush nor Cheney will be held accountable for their lies or for the American, Afghan, and Iraqi blood and treasure they cost.

But both should be subject to a clear and public airing of the crimes they committed in office and required — at the very least — to apologize to the thousands of American families destroyed by the loss of their soldier children, parents, and spouses, as well as to the people of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

If the media refuses to mention the Bush/Cheney lies on this anniversary of 9/11, it’s all the more important that the rest of us use this opportunity to do so. Pass it on.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Fraud, Freedom, History, Trump
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