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John Thompson: Is Oklahoma’s Governor Cruel or Dumb or Both?

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2024 //
5

I have learned so much about what’s happening in Oklahoma from John Thompson, retired teacher and historian. Recently I asked John if he could explain the question that is the title of this post. John responded with the following post. Thank you, John!

When Kevin Stitt was elected governor in 2018, Oklahomans knew he was an extreme conservative and a true believer in the “Free Market,” as THE solution to our problems. Stitt had been the CEO of Gateway Mortgage, which had a questionable reputation. And he knew little or nothing about how government operated; The Tulsa World reported that Stitt apparently hadn’t even voted for governor before he was elected.  Even so, the World explained, “Stitt wants the Legislature and the voters of Oklahoma to give him authority no previous governor has ever had — the power to hire and fire all state agency heads and boards.”

The first bill Gov. Stitt signed into law allowed individuals to carry firearms without a permit or training and then he  “expanded the number of public spaces where guns could be carried.”

Even more disturbing, as Oklahoma Watch explained, “In his first State of the State speech, Stitt said healthcare depends on personal responsibility.” And later, he opposed Medicaid expansion.

On the other hand, in 2019, I was active in the Justice for Julius campaign, which was fighting for the life of my former student who had been sentenced to death for murder, despite the lack of evidence against him, and the evidence that Julius Jones had been framed. We were told that Stitt’s religious beliefs were sincere. Stitt saved Julius from execution, but denied and banned any future efforts for parole or clemency.

Stitt also began his administration by listening to bipartisan efforts to curtail Oklahoma’s mass incarceration; our state had one of the world’s largest incarceration rates. But, a rightwing dark money group invested $160,000 on ads that said Stitt was soft on crime. Afterwards, the Oklahomanexplained, Stitt rejected Pardon and Parole Board recommendations, and replaced several board members. Moreover, “Oklahoma has executed 14 men during Stitt’s administration, second most among U.S. states. All but one were people of color or poor, or a combination thereof.”

Stitt ignored the Pardon and Parole recommendations when executing four of them.

Also, as Oklahoma Watch explains, Stitt’s belief that healthcare was a personal responsibility  “became his tagline throughout the (COVID) pandemic.” As the Washington Post reported, in the first few days of the pandemic,  Stitt was maskless when “he attracted national attention for tweeting a photo with his family at a ‘packed’ Oklahoma City restaurant,”  and saying “he would continue to dine out ‘without living in fear, and encourages Oklahomans to do the same.’”

Stitt soon caught COVID, and he also attended, without a mask, “Trump’s rally in Tulsa — the president’s first since the pandemic set in … Local health officials warned the indoor event at a 19,000-person arena could cause a dangerous spread of the virus in a county that was already seeing a spike.” That week, Oklahoma’s  weekly COVID deaths increased by more than 40%. Republican Herman Cain caught COVID after attending the rally maskless and died afterwards.

The Washington Post also reported how Stitt resisted the federal vaccination mandate for the Oklahoma National Guard, and fired the Guard’s adjutant general for supporting vaccinations.

The Frontier also reported that Stitt ordered $2 million of hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump touted. And as NPR reported, in 2020, Stitt refused to publish Oklahoma infection and death rates. 

So, it’s hard to estimate how many thousands of deaths were attributable to Stitt, but in 2022, Oklahoma’s death rate was 5th highest in the U.S.  In 2023, it was 2nd highest in the nation.

And Stitt continued to undermine governmental and legal institutions. After he ramped up attacks on established legal compacts with Oklahoma’s tribes, and invested $600,000 in state money in compacts  which the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled were illegal, the conservative Republican Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, said he was compelled to take “extraordinary action to put an end to the governor’s betrayal of his duty … [and] ‘cause the laws of the state to be faithfully executed.’” 

As the New York Times reported, Stitt also advocated for and signed a bill that “bans nearly all abortions starting at fertilization. The new law … is the most restrictive abortion ban in the country.”

And Stitt took the lead in campaigning against Critical Race Theory which was falsely said to be undermining public education. The Oklahoman reported: 

Stitt signed House Bill 1775 that would prohibit public schoolteachers from teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive.” 

Proponents of the bill say the measure is designed to prevent the teaching of critical race theory. 

Also, the Washington Post reported: 

Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill prohibiting nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates for people who don’t identify as male or female — the first law of its kind in the United States, according to legal experts. 

… Republican backers describe the new rules as reflecting their religious beliefs, arguing that gender is binary and immutable. “I believe that people are created by God to be male or female,” Stitt said when he issued the executive order. “There is no such thing as nonbinary sex.” 

The governor’s press release said: 

I am taking decisive executive action to ensure the true definition of the word woman, meaning a biological woman, is what guides the state as we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring the safety, dignity, and sanctity of women across Oklahoma. As long as I’m governor, we will continue to protect women and ensure women-only spaces are reserved solely for biological women.

By the way, my House Representative, Mauree Turner, was the nation’s first Black, Muslim, nonbinary state legislator; As the Washington Post explained, Rep. Turner suffered through terrible abuse by Republican politicos. Their behavior was illustrative of a new norm where MAGAs seemed to compete over the ability to be cruel, and push out their colleagues who showed respect for their opponents.

Eventually, the extremism of Stitt et. al sowed division among Republicans. OpenSecrets.org was unable to locate the source of the money used by Stitt to fund primary candidates who opposed Republican incumbents who weren’t reactionary and confrontational enough, but it did “match up” expenditure from 46 Forward Inc. that funded 46 Action and Stitt’s “endorsements in the Republican state Senate primaries.”  

During Stitt’s second term, his ideology-driven policies continued to get weirder. For instance, the Oklahoma Voice reports, “Gov. Kevin Stitt has approved a controversial set of rules from the Oklahoma State Department of Education, as expected after the Legislature declined to take action on the regulations.” This gives Walters’ rules that expand test-driven accountability. The regulations also add “new ‘foundational values’ for the state Education Department that make multiple references to ‘the Creator.’” 

Other rules include potential punishment for schools that continue to employ educators under investigation for wrongdoing (as defined by the ideology-driven board), and permission to fire teachers who engage in acts that “promote sexuality” within view of a minor.

And, after the voters passed a state question calling for a vote on an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00 per hour, Stitt ordered the election be delayed until 2026.   

But the most noteworthy characteristics of Stitt’s recent policies have been their cruelty.

As the Oklahoman reported in 2024:

For the second year in a row, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has rejected a federal program that would have provided additional funding for families to feed their children next summer.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer EBT program … would earmark about $40 per child per month on a card that families could then use at local grocery stores.

Oklahoma ranks fifth in the nation for child food insecurity.

The Washington Post added:

A new food program would have kicked in this summer, had Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt not turned down $48 million from a $2.5 billion initiative that the Biden administration calls “a giant step forward” in ending childhood hunger in the country. Though Oklahoma is one of the most food-insecure states, with surveys finding that more than 200,000 children are hungry at some point during a year, Stitt suggested the administration was “trying to push certain agenda items on kids.”

And as the Oklahoman reports, a new consent decree seeks to provide mental health services for  “scores of presumed-innocent Oklahomans who experience severe mental illness [and] are languishing in county jails awaiting competency restoration treatment for prolonged periods that far exceed constitutional limits.” But “Gov. Kevin Stitt, House Speaker Charles McCall and a top state mental health official are pushing back on a proposal.” 

Stitt sounds like he is resisting the funding that would be required, but I wonder if he’s also opposing the agreement because it is supported by his opponent, A.G. Gentner Drummond, who doesn’t want this injustice, which has “plagued” the criminal justice system to continue to “drag on for months or years.” 

By the way, A.G. Drummond was not at that meeting; he was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court against the execution of Richard Glossip arguing that prosecutorial misconduct prevented him from receiving a fair trial.

And that brings us back to Stitt’s original intention to hire and fire all state agency heads and boards. During his second term, Stitt, rightwingers’, and their dark money donors have doubled down on a campaign to politicize the Oklahoma Supreme Court. I doubt Stitt knew much about the Court’s history, but it used to be the most corrupt Supreme Court in America. But a bipartisan team created the Judicial Nomination Commission which was often seen as the institution that started the process of making Oklahoma a real democracy. 

A rightwing dark money group is funding an effort to remove three justices who voted for abortion and voting rights, tribal contracts, and against the creation of a Catholic charter school. So, whether he knows what he is doing or not, Stitt is helping to lead an effort to dismantle the Nominating Commission, take control over the nomination process, and likely turn back the clock to the corruption of the 1950’s and before.

And that leads to the question as to whether Stitt is primarily motivated by a simplistic “Survival of the Fittest” ideology, and merely follows the lead of Big Money? Or are his policies simply born out of his ignorance and their propaganda? Or has he fully embraced the most disgusting components of Trumpism, and thus devoted himself to brutality? Fundamentally, is he now seeking a reputation for embracing the cruelty that the MAGAs admire? 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Cruelty, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Oklahoma, Trump

Judge Chutkan Rejects Trump’s Request for More Discovery of Documents

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2024 //
11

As we have seen over the past two years, Trump has used his legal team to delay, delay, delay, with the hope of eventually getting a sympathetic judge who will dismiss the case against him. That is what happened in Florida, where Trump-appointed District Court Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the entire case about Trump’s theft of documents. The reason: She believes that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. She is the first federal judge to reach this conclusion. Many other judges and legal scholars have reached the opposite conclusion and found the appointment of special counsels to be constitutional. Her decision has been appealed by prosecutors.

Yesterday, Obama-appointed District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed most of Trump’s requests to “discover” more government documents that might show that his actions on January 6, 2021, were necessary.

The Meidas Report summarized her decision:

In a significant legal setback for Donald Trump, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a detailed ruling on his latest discovery requests in the 2020 election subversion case, dismissing most of his demands as speculative and unsupported by law. Trump had sought to compel the federal government to search for and produce a broad array of documents related to election interference, cybersecurity threats, and law enforcement actions connected to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In this article, we will succinctly analyze Judge Chutkan’s latest ruling and its implications on Trump’s election interference case. To read our full analysis below, please join as a paid subscriber to support our work.

Let’s get into it:

The ruling, issued today (October 16, 2024), addressed two key motions filed by Trump’s defense team: a Motion to Compel Discovery and a Motion for an Order Regarding the Scope of the Prosecution Team. In these motions, Trump’s lawyers asked the court to force the federal government to search nine government agencies for information across 14 categories, including classified intelligence assessments and communications about foreign election interference. Trump’s defense argued that this information would support his claim that his actions were based on legitimate concerns about election security.

Judge Chutkan, however, found that Trump’s requests were largely unsupported by the law. She pointed out that under both Brady v. Maryland and Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16, defendants bear the burden of demonstrating that the requested materials are material to their defense. “Speculation” that the government might possess favorable evidence is not enough to justify an expansive search, Chutkan noted, and Trump had failed to show that the requested documents were likely to yield new, non-cumulative evidence.

For example, Trump sought all drafts and communications related to the 2020 Election Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), claiming that these documents would help demonstrate his “good faith” concerns about foreign interference. But Chutkan rejected this request, noting that Trump did not claim to have been aware of these drafts at the time of his indicted actions. Without showing that this information could have influenced his state of mind, Trump could not meet the standard of materiality required for discovery.

Judge Chutkan also denied Trump’s request for communications and drafts of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) statement, which had described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.” Trump argued that earlier versions of the statement might show narrower language that would support his defense, but the court found this request speculative and irrelevant to Trump’s intent at the time.

Trump did win a limited victory in his request for certain “discrete, identified” documents, which Judge Chutkan ruled the government must produce. However, these documents represented only a small portion of Trump’s overall requests. The ruling emphasizes that Trump’s legal strategy cannot rely on vague or speculative claims of what might be found in government records.

Chutkan’s ruling further solidifies the challenges Trump faces as he prepares his defense in the federal criminal case. Trump’s argument that his state of mind was shaped by legitimate concerns about election integrity appears increasingly difficult to substantiate, as the court continues to limit the scope of discovery to concrete and relevant evidence.

Judge Chutkan’s Conclusion and Order

This ruling follows a pattern in which courts have resisted attempts by Trump’s legal team to broaden the scope of discovery in various legal challenges. Chutkan’s decision reiterates the principle that discovery is not an unlimited right and must be grounded in specific, demonstrable need.

With the court setting an October 30 deadline for any further motions to compel discovery, the Trump defense team will need to reconsider their approach as the case moves toward trial. Judge Chutkan’s decision is another indication that Trump’s claims, both inside and outside the courtroom, face serious judicial scrutiny.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Michael Podhorzer: The Electoral College Is Legal But Not Legitimate

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2024 //
20

https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelpodhorzer/p/the-electoral-college-legal-but-not?r=rls8&utm_medium=ios

One reaction to my last post, “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been some variation of a smug suggestion that I take a civics class because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College. Another has been a bit less condescending, something like, “Sure, but what matters is the Electoral College.” 

I have a respectful suggestion for anyone who had those kinds of reactions (other than “read the post”). I ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”   

Because when we do that, we align ourselves with those who in their times scoffed at the abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, the suffragists, the modern civil rights movement, and those who called for the direct election of senators and “one person, one vote” in legislative districts. All of these people had the courage in their own time to call out the ways in which American elections were legal but not legitimate, either by universal standards of democracy or even by the Declaration of Independence’s central claim – that governments depend on the consent of the governed, legitimately ascertained. 

Legal but not Legitimate

All democracies have to be prepared to deal with the question of what to do when something may be legal, but is plainly not legitimate, as when anti-democratic actors compete in democratic elections. Emerging out of the rubble of World War II, the leaders of the European democracies were freshly aware of the catastrophic damage done by fascist and totalitarian communist regimes that came to power through putatively democratic processes, and fashioned constitutions and laws to safeguard against anti-democratic hijacking. 

We have confronted the same challenge twice. In the aftermath of the War of Rebellion (aka the Civil War), Congress enacted several measures designed to safeguard democratic freedoms for all, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (the Insurrection Clause), and the Enforcement Acts (1870 – 1871). And nearly a century later, in response to Jim Crow and racist terrorism that effectively prevented African Americans from voting, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act (1965).¹

Unlike in Europe, however, America’s anti-democratic faction maintained enough social and political power to thwart or undermine both of these efforts. The MAGA faction, now firmly in control of the Republican Party, as well as the state governments in which half of America lives, as well as the Supreme Court, following in the footsteps of its Jim Crow and Confederate predecessors, deploys “states’ rights” to exempt its antidemocratic actions from scrutiny, and further whitewashes these actions’ fundamental illegitimacy through its control of the Supreme Court. 

When we treat all of this as “just the way it is,” we revert to the kind of learned helplessness that Martin Luther King, Jr. warned against in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: 

“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Today, we have lost the clarity we had 57 years ago when the VRA passed. Because we’ve given up on expecting our most important national institutions to do what is right, and because we’ve given up on expecting active democratic citizenship from ourselves and each other, our “democracy” has shriveled to the point that the outcome of partisan bloodsport now passes for the consent of the governed. 

In America, this century of accelerating democratic crisis has been supercharged by the exploitation of the anti-democratic features of our Constitution and traditions. Consider that: 

  • In two of the last six presidential elections (one third!) the results of the Electoral College overturned the popular vote, and in one instance (2000), that result depended not only on the Electoral College but on five partisan Supreme Court justices swooping in to prevent all the ballots in Florida from being counted. 
  • Five of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population.
  • Republicans have held the Senate majority for five of the last twelve Congresses despite representing a majority of the US population only once in that span.

Minority Rule

The typical response to objections about the anti-majoritarian features of the Constitution, or our present system more generally, hearken back to the original reasoning for checks and balances. Those features were meant to prevent the rule of the mob, or frequent lurches that disrupt the need of citizens to have a set of consistent laws that they can rely on. That’s captured in the (likely apocryphal) quote attributed to George Washington that “We pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”

With that in mind, let’s begin by looking at an idea that most readily agree to, which is the need for the system to protect the rights of those in minority groups. I think we would all agree, for example, that preventing any group of people from voting, or any other right generally enjoyed, is indefensible. Unfortunately, that foundational precept has been rhetorically hijacked to contend that the system must protect minorityinterests. 

Thus, especially over the last twenty years, our system has proved less the sturdy bulwark on behalf of the rights of minority groups and more the driving force on behalf of the very much minority interests of plutocrats and theocrats than at any time since the end of Reconstruction.

Let’s look at just how much this is the case, as reflected in our foundational institutions. 

The Senate

Let’s begin with the “saucer,” which, if it was meant to be chilling in 1789, has become positively cryogenic since. 

As the next graph shows, Republicans have held Senate majorities in five of the last twelve Congresses, despite representing a majority of the population only once, in the 109th Congress (2005-2006).²

Let’s consider two “best case” scenarios for 2025, based on a 50-50 Senate in 2025, in which either Harris or Trump is president.³ The difference between the red and blue bars visually represents the democracy gap in the US Senate. Note that if Harris is president, the 50 senators needed to pass a continuing resolution or confirm judges will represent nearly as much of the population as Senate rules envisioned would constitute the supermajority necessary to break a filibuster – while if Trump is president, he will be able to do the same with senators who represent a minority of the population – just barely enough to block cloture, if they represented the same proportion of senators. 

The Supreme Court

Since the founding, 116 jurists have been confirmed to the Supreme Court. Only five were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population – Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The following graph shows how far off from representing democratic legitimacy the present Roberts Court is from even the SCOTUS that delivered Bush vs Gore. And, of course, depending on how you measure it, either three or five of them were nominated by presidents who did not win a majority of the popular vote themselves.⁴ 

For more on how the plutotheocratic coalition behind the Federalist Society captured the Court and became the de facto legislative branch of government, see “Breaking the Law: Trump Is the Means, Not the End” and “To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided.”  

This Is Not Who We Are

Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have both talked with patriotic pride about how theirs is a “story that could only be written in America.” 

But, thanks to the Electoral College, so too is Donald Trump’s a story that could only be written in America. Absent the Electoral College, he could not have become president, nor could he persist for so long as such an asphyxiating, toxic cloud over all of our politics. Indeed, Trump stands the original justification for the Electoral College on its head. The founders felt an Electoral College representing the most responsible Americans might be needed someday as a check against popular passions which might someday elect an antidemocratic demagogue. In reality, it has done the opposite – installing an antidemocratic demagogue the people rejected.

But it’s even worse than that. Reimagine November 3rd, 2020, without an Electoral College. By the next day, Biden would have been seen as the winner, ahead by millions of votes. None of what followed would have happened, as there would have been no serious ways for Trump to have questioned the outcome in any other than the most outlandish terms. No bullying calls to Brad Raffenperger to find 11,780 votes; no Stop the Steal rally, no riot on the Capitol grounds, because that ministerial procedure would not even be a thing. 

In other words, the Electoral College process was the precondition for January 6th because of how long it delays the peaceful transfer of power, and because of how many democratically frivolous opportunities it offers bad faith losers to corrode public confidence in the election and even organize violent resistance. 

Indeed, whatever the outcome on November 5th, 2024 the fact that Harris will all but inevitably win the popular vote by a comfortable margin – and yet it will still be as “close” as it was in 2016 and 2020 in key states – all but guarantees a rerun of 2020’s post election confusion and crisis. 

We spend an exhausting amount of time and effort asking what it says about the American people that Donald Trump became president and could be again, searching for answers almost exclusively in the individual psychology, morality, or life circumstances of the individual people who vote for him, when we should be asking what it says about the American systemthat continues to produce these outcomes. Especially when for the last twenty years or more the American people routinely insist that the system is not serving them and that they have no confidence in it in general, and the Electoral College in particular. 

Notably, dissatisfaction with the Electoral College was bipartisan until 2016, when Republican voters realized its “benefits.” Now, a bit more than 70 percent of Democrats and Independents want to “amend the Constitution to base the presidential winner on the popular vote.”

But, as long as systematic reform is so easily swatted away merely by embarrassing those who would wish otherwise as being too naive or insufficiently “realistic,” we’ll bounce around the room like a Roomba, with serial diversions like “Democrats need a better message.”

This is as true now as it was in the 1960’s when James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

Which is why I would rather count myself with those who, in their times, had to acknowledge that enslavement, the disenfranchisement of women, the indirect election of senators, egregious gerrymandering, and Jim Crow were legal – but never conceded that they were legitimate. 

Footnotes:

1. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions to preclear changes to their voting laws, even if those changes were to be made by elected representatives. Section 5 was essential because we understood that without preclearance, the racist faction legally in control of the machinery of the state in those jurisdictions would continue to use their illegitimate authority to deny Black people their citizenship rights. We understood the need to take aggressive, facially anti-democratic actions to prevent “democratically” elected state governments from enacting new laws or rules to continue to disenfranchise African Americans. In other words, we rejected that faction’s claim to the benefit of the doubt that it was acting in democratic good faith. Moreover, it did not occur to anyone at the time to consider the enactment of the Voting Rights Act as intended to give one party or the other an advantage in future elections. 

2

Percent of the population is computed as the share of each Republican senator’s state of the United States population. For example, the population of Texas is 9.2 percent of the US population. Since both Texas senators are Republicans that would count as 9.2 percent in this calculation. If only one senator was Republican, that would count as 4.6 percent of the population. Using this method, if states were of equal population, the number of senators would equal the percent of the US population. 

3

By “best case” I mean that Democrats hold their current seats except West Virginia. In order to compute the percentages of the population represented by senators, the procedure is to begin with the smallest states until the number of indicated votes are reached. 

4

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were nominated by Trump, who lost the popular vote. Roberts and Alito were nominated by George W Bush who reached the White House after losing the popular vote in 2000, but who won the popular vote in 2004, the term in which he nominated Roberts and Alito.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections

Why Charter Schools Fail: An Analysis of Charter Closures from 1998-2022 by the Network for Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2024 //
6

This morning the Network for Public Education released a new study called “Doomed to Fail” that examines charter school closures from 1998-2022. This is the first time that anyone has performed a comprehensive study of charter school failures.

The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?

Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools. 

While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.

Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive. 

Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

       -By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed

       -By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.

       -More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures

       -Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%. 

        -The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.

     -The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.

     -Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.

      -School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth.. 

The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.  

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Research

Indiana: Vote for Jennifer McCormick for Governor

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2024 //
0

Jennifer McCormick was the last elected state superintendent of schools. She switched parties because of the Republicans’ hostility to public schools.

She is running for Governor of Indiana against Senator Mike Braun, who is a far-right Republican. Braun and his running mate, an evangelical extremist, want to get rid of public schools.

The 74 reports:

U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, a conservative Republican, is still ahead in the state’s gubernatorial race but his lead among Indiana voters over Democrat Jennifer McCormick has shrunk in recent weeks.

Polling released this week by the Democratic Governors Association shows Braun just three points in front of McCormick, 44% to 41%. That’s a dropoff from the Sept. 17 results of an Emerson College Polling/The Hill voter survey that had Braun with roughly 45% of the vote and McCormick with 34. Libertarian candidate Donald Rainwater also picked up more support but less dramatically so, going from 5.8% to 8%.

Indiana has not elected a Democratic governor since 2000 and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a comfortable 14 percentage point lead, 57% to 43%, over Democrat Kamala Harris, according to an ActiVote poll released Tuesday.

If elected to succeed Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, Braun and his running mate, pastor, podcaster and far-right Christian nationalist Micah Beckwith, have pledged universal school choice for every Indiana family while focusing on parental rights and school safety. 

McCormick, a career educator, was the last person elected to the superintendent of public instruction’s office before it became an appointed position in 2021. She seeks to expand affordable child care, fight what she believes is excessive state-mandated testing and call for an equitable school funding formula. 

She also wants to place limits on the state’s private school voucher initiative: The program grew to encompass more than 70,000 children in 2023-24, a 31% increase from the year before. The state allocated $439 million in tuition grants to private parochial or non-religious schools last year — up from nearly $312 million the year before.

McCormick said the program, which might have been intended for lower-income children, is often utilized by white suburban families and is too expensive. 

“We can’t afford it,” she told The 74, “and it is sucking the resources out of our traditional schools.” 

Braun, 70, wants to expand school choice by removing the $220,000 annual family income cap from the voucher program, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, and doubling the $10 millionallocated to the state’s Education Scholarship Account Program. The program, which has also seen tremendous growth in participation, gives special education students and their siblings funds for tuition and support services. 

Braun did not make himself available for an interview and attempts to reach various supporters were not successful.

“School choice programs put parents in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose schools that prioritize their children’s needs,” he states in his education plan. “Providing universal school choice will ensure every Hoosier family has the same freedom to choose their best-fit education.”

A former school board member, Braun also wants to create an Indiana Office of School Safety to streamline the efforts of several departments, including the state police — and implement age-appropriate cyber training for students regarding online safety. He said, too, that the state should limit cellphone use on campus. 

Braun wants to increase Indiana’s public teacher base salary — and financially reward educators whose students perform well. 

Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said his group endorsed McCormick, 54, because of her commitment to funding traditional public schools. 

He noted she did not have the group’s endorsement when she initially ran for the state superintendent’s office as a Republican. But, Gambill said, after filling the role and understanding the state’s educational needs, she switched parties and her values more closely aligned with the union’s. 

“She really stood up to members of — at that time — her own party in working toward what was best for our schools,” he said, speaking of her time in office. “And, of course, as soon as they were challenged, they didn’t like that. She realized that if she was going to make a difference in public education, she would have to move in a different direction.”

McCormick aims to secure a minimum base salary of $60,000 for pre-K-12 educators, and adjust veteran teacher salaries to reflect their non-educator peers. She wants to increase academic freedom, safeguard university tenure and protect the ability of teachers unions to collectively bargain for wages and benefits. 

Her running mate, Terry Goodin, a former state representative, was a teacher, assistant principal and public school superintendent at Crothersville Community Schools.

Braun, in his education plan, said he wants schools to notify parents about their child’s request to change their name or use different pronouns on campus. He has denounced gender-affirming surgery for minors and opposes transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams. Braun has the backing of Americans for Prosperity and CPAC — and maintains high ratings from the NRA. 

Braun was endorsed by Trump in 2023 and won his party’s nomination for governor in May after beating out a crowded field of GOP contenders. He acknowledged last month, according to Axios, that Harris’s presence at the top of the presidential ticket has complicated down-ballot races, including his own.

“I think that’s had an impact,” he said, “but I’m going to plow through that because this is a lot about kitchen table issues once you’re starting to run for governor.”

 Jo Napolitano is a senior reporter at The 74.

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Elections, Indiana, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Greg Olear: John Roberts and His Successful Attack on Voting Rights

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2024 //
7

Greg Olear writes about Chief Justice John Roberts and his lifelong passion to destroy voting rights. To those who thinks Roberts is a moderate, Olear says that the facts prove otherwise.

He writes:

Donald Trump is certainly going to lose the popular vote, like he did in 2020 and 2016. 

Donald Trump is probably going to lose the Electoral vote, like he did in 2020. 

But if the latter is close—and thanks to the antidemocratic architecture of the archaic Electoral College system, it may be—the House of Representatives might wind up deciding who will take the White House on January 20. Trump would probably win in the House (which, despite its intended purpose and its name, is not accurately representative of the American people).

And if it ever got that far, Trump would certainly win in the Supreme Court. There, Leonard Leo’s far-right drones are chomping at the bit to return FPOTUS to the Oval Office. Amy Coney Barrett would join with the four hateful men in robes in holding with the Donald. And proudly, eagerly joining them in such a nightmare scenario would be Chief Justice John Roberts, the reactionary in moderate’s clothing, whose raison d’être is to make the United States as antidemocratic (or, if you will, as fascist) as possible—all the while convincing the media that he’s merely an umpire calling balls and strikes.

Roberts may well be an umpire. But umpire-ness does not automatically guarantee objectivity and neutrality. Like, I’ve seen the baseball scenes in The Naked Gun. Who better to rig the game than the umpire, who can call a slider under the chin a strike and a fastball right down Broadway a ball? 

That’s exactly what Roberts has done. In his court, balls are strikes, white is black, up is down, Radiohead is Coldplay. Words have no meaning. On his watch, SCOTUS decided that “well regulated” means “not regulated at all, even a little,” and that, in the case of Trump being removed from the ballot in Colorado for leading an insurrection, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” means that it’s not actually necessary for Congress to do such a thing. Roe, legal precedent for half a century, is overturned, but the Comstock Act is okay.

There is not, and will never be, an internal logic to these decisions. Leonard Leo and the rightwing machine decide what outcomes they want, they game the lower court system to get the Supreme Court to take on the requisite cases, and then Roberts & Co. pull shit out of their collective ass to produce a ruling that pleases their rightwing whoremasters. And who pays the price? Pregnant women who cannot access necessary healthcare. Children who get gunned down by the score in schools all across the country. Minorities who have seen their federal civil rights protections evaporate. Consumers of tainted cold cuts. And, just to pull something out of today’s news, homeowners in the path of Hurricane Helene, victims of the climate change the GOP and its stooges on the Supreme Court will deny until Florida is underwater.

At the heart of all of this is voting rights. A country is only as democratic as its system for electing its leaders. By that measure, the United States is not all that democratic. State legislatures devise lopsided redistricting maps; that ensures a significant number of extremists in the House. The Senate, meanwhile, is inherently fucked by its construction, which vouchsafes New York the same number of senators as North Dakota. Thus has a minority of reactionary weirdos managed to hijack our federal government. And no one has done more to make this a reality than John Glover Roberts Jr.

“This is who he is,” David Daley, author of the excellent and exigent new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, tells me. “And John Roberts has so successfully maintained his reputation as an institutionalist, as an umpire, as a caller of balls and strikes, that he’s gotten away for 25 now with being what I call the most effective Republican politician of the last fifty years—who has delivered the right victory upon victory that they never could have won at the ballot box.”

In 2013, Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, torpedoing Section 5, which required historically racist states like Alabama and Mississippi to “preclear” any proposed changes to laws, policies, or maps related to elections. In the disgraceful Shelby County decision, the Chief Justice assured us that the South “has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” Section 5, he wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”

Incredibly, a white Republican who grew up in a whites-only town in Indiana was somehow ignorant of what was happening to racial minorities in the South. As Daley writes in Antidemocratic:

Spend some time with the Justice Department files from this era and two things become immediately clear: First, across small-towns in the South, the VRA helped to promote parity in voter registration numbers, but preclearance prevented the adoption of many new-school methods of voter suppression designed to keep the past alive in little locales where no media played watchdog and officials could not be trusted. And second, the five Supreme Court justices who declared that preclearance should have been a vestige of the past spent little time examining these stories. 

They likely knew nothing of the majority-Latino town Seguin, Texas, about a half hour east of San Antonio, where the white population accounted for a third of the population but two-thirds of the City Council. That imbalance persists because officials simply refused to redistrict for more than two decades, after both the 1980 and the 1990census. Latino leaders filed a lawsuit using Section 5 and won—only to see the city respond by rushing the filing deadlines forward for candidates so that no Latino candidates could qualify. To stave off that latest scheme, the Latino majority had to rely on preclearance—and another successful lawsuit.

Seguin, Texas is hardly the only example. Daley recounts many of them in his book. They are nauseatingly, infuriatingly unfair. To this day, and contrary to Roberts’s assurances in Shelby County, voter suppression in the South remains a big deal. And that’s just how the Chief Justice likes it.

“[P]eople on the left still say, ‘Oh, John Roberts is going to save us on this really important thing,’” Daley tells me. “And John Roberts is not going to save you. John Roberts is not an umpire. John Roberts is not your friend. John Roberts was raised in a town for whites only, that was still advertising itself as a place for Gentile Caucasians, even after the United States outlawed housing discrimination.”

Sam Alito is the most pompous of the current Leonard Leo justices. Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt. Brett Kavanaugh is the most nakedly partisan. But John Roberts is the most dangerous, the most insidious, the most fascistic, and, worst of all, the most appealing in the eyes of the press—despite the severe and possibly fatal damage he’s done to our democracy.

“This is who John Roberts is,” Daley says. “Curtailing voting rights has been John Roberts’s life’s work—and he’s really really good at it.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Justice

How Democracies Become Autocracies, By Burrowing from Within

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2024 //
9

In an opinion piece in Scientific American, Cecilia Menjívar of UCLA and Deisy Del Real of the University of Southern California contend that the United States and other nations are sliding toward autocracy. They believe we can learn from the experience of other nations.

They write:

An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.

As of 2021, of the 104 countries classified as democracies worldwide, 37 had experienced moderate to severe deterioration in key elements of democracy, such as open and free elections, fundamental rights and liberties, civic engagement, the rule of law, and checks-and-balances between government branches. This democratic backsliding wave has accelerated since 2016 and infiltrated all corners of the world.

With the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November, questions about the future of American democracy take on urgency. As the American public seems increasingly receptive to autocratic tactics, these questions become even more pressing. Will the U.S. slide into autocracy, faced with a presidential candidate in Donald Trump who promises to be a dictator on his first day in office? Can lessons from autocracies elsewhere help us detect democratic backsliding in the U.S.?

To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d’état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.

Rather than eradicating democratic institutions as leaders like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko did in the past, today’s established and emergent autocrats (as is the case of Maduro or Orbán, for instance) corrupt the courts, sabotage elections and distort information to attain and remain in power. They are elected through ostensibly free elections and connect with a public already primed to be fearful of a fabricated enemy. Critically, they use these democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes. Autocratic tactics creep into the political life of a country slowly and embed themselves deeply in the democratic apparatus they corrupt. Modern autocracy, one may say, is a tyranny of gaslighting.

We gathered a group of scholars who have looked at successful and failed autocracies worldwide in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, to identify common denominators of autocratic rulers worldwide. This research shows that modern autocrats uniformly apply key building blocks to cement their illiberal agenda and undermine democracies before taking them over. Those include manipulating the legal system, rewriting electoral laws and constitutions, and dividing the population into “us” versus “them” blocs. Autocrats routinely present themselves as the only presumed savior of the country while silencing, criminalizing and disparaging critics or any oppositional voice. They distort information and fabricate “facts” through the media, claim fraud if they lose an election, persuade the population that they can “cleanse” the country of crime and, finally, empower a repressive nationalistic diaspora and fund satellite political movements and hate groups that amplify the autocrats’ illiberal agenda to distort democracy.

In February, Bukele, the popular Salvadoran autocrat and self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” spoke at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual convention for U.S. right-wing elected officials and activists. There he received a standing ovation after he flaunted his crackdown on crime in his country and suggested the U.S. should follow his tactics. His speech demonstrates how, regardless of political history and ideology, or their nation’s wealth and place on the global stage, autocrats today deploy a similar “toolbox of tricks” aimed at legalizing their rule. That’s because they copy from one another and learn from one another’s successes and failures. Vast interconnected networks enable autocrats to cooperate, share strategies and know-how, and visit one another in public shows of friendship and solidarity to create an international united front. Just ask Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and autocrat, who received a warm reception when he spoke at the CPAC in 2022, reminding the crowd of the reason for his visit: “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces.”

Global networks of autocratic regimes also provide economic resources to other autocrats and invest in their economies, share security services to squash popular dissent, and sometimes interfere in each other’s elections.

Modern autocrats do not act alone; their connections with one another are complemented and sustained by a varied cadre of legal specialists, political strategists and academics who tend to be economically secure, well-educated and cosmopolitan. These individuals, like Michael Anton and those tied to the Trump-defending Claremont Institute, the over 400 scholars and policy experts who collaborated on Project 2025— the extreme-right game plan for a Trump presidency—and Stephen K. Bannon, who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” by filling government jobs with partisans and loyalists, move in and out of government positions and the limelight. They are nimble and, moreover, fundamental to the autocrats’ strategies, as they create videos and podcasts and write books to fabricate good images of the autocrats, write detailed blueprints for an autocratic form of government, and consult aspiring autocrats on best practices.

Evidence indicates that we are in a critical moment in U.S. democracy. Will the U.S. inevitably descend into autocracy? No, not with an alert and well-informed electorate. Recognizing the strategies that autocrats use and share, veiled behind a façade of democratic elections and wrapped in fearmongering, equips us to understand the harmful consequences of these strategies for democracy, and perhaps to stop the wave in time.

Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a Nicaraguan opposition politician and prospective presidential candidate, was accused of treason, arrested and banished simply for running as an opposition candidate by the regime of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo (who is also first lady). In exile, Chamorro has described a danger countries face: autocrats who come to power through democratic systems are “like a silent disease—the early symptoms of this silent disease are usually dismissed, but once it begins to consume the body, it is usually too late to stop it.”

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Higher Education, International, Lies

John Thompson Reviews Max Boot’s New Book, “Reagan”

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2024 //
25

John Thompson an an historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma. Here he reviews Max Boot’s new book, Reagan. He wrote this review for this blog.

He writes:

In 2018, Max Boot recounted “his extraordinary journey from lifelong Republican to vehement Trump opponent.” Although Boot once idolized Ronald Reagan, his Reagan: His Life and Legend tells the story how Reagan planted the seeds of “Trumpism.” Boot concluded that “Reagan was both more ideological and more pragmatic than most people realize–or that I realized before starting this book project more than a decade ago.” But, even when retelling Reagan’s success stories, such as working with Gorbachev, Boot exposes his weaknesses, such as those that could have led to nuclear war.

Boot starts with the way Reagan’s rhetoric and falsehoods led to Trumpism. For instance, his advertising for General Electric led to a “convergence of conservatism in the 1950s.” Boot recalls a number of Reagan’s statements that were “all false,” and how they helped “inure the Republican Party to ‘fake news.’” 

First, Reagan’s false mythology about preventing a communist takeover of Hollywood contributed to his political rise, as he “avoided becoming tarred with the excesses of McCarthyism,” even though he “served as an FBI informant and an arbiter of the blacklist.”

Moreover, Reagan called John F. Kennedy a “fellow traveler.” He also said America was adopting “temporary totalitarian measures” such as social services and federal regulation, and “we have ten years … to win or lose –by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”

But, Boot adds that the press wouldn’t call him out for lying, supposedly because he was sincere in believing his falsehoods. As his spokesman, Larry Speakes, said with a shrug, when asked about Reagan’s repeated lies, “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”

Similarly, Reagan’s allies remained silent about what they really believed about him. After visiting Reagan in the White House, Margaret Thatcher “pointed to her head and said, “There’s nothing there.”  Thatcher later criticized his war in Grenada, saying, “The Americans are worse than the Soviets.” President Nixon called Reagan a “man of limited mental capacity” and Henry Kissinger said he was “a pretty decent guy” with “negligible” brains.

Reagan said similar things about his allies, for instance, he defended Nixon’s staff that drove Watergate because they were “not criminals at heart.”

However, Reagan’s spin and lies also had more disgusting components, which were not adequately exposed. When he launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba County, where the band played “Dixie,” his aide acknowledged that, in every election, “race played a role.” There is evidence that, privately, Reagan “shared the rightwing view of (Martin Luther) King as a dangerous subversive.” And, as Tom Wicker, the New York Times journalist, said, Reagan moved racial politics “from a lack of interest in fighting racial discrimination to an active promotion of it.”  

And when opposing the anti-apartheid movement, Reagan said that South Africa had already “eliminated the segregation we once had in our own country.”

By the end of his campaign, Reagan’s advisers used President Carter’s stolen debate briefing books to prepare him for his famous victory, using the words, “There you go again.” But Boot concludes, “What has gotten lost – both at the time and subsequently was that Carter was right on the facts and Reagan was wrong”

Then, in regard to efforts to prevent an “October Surprise,” Boot concludes that “credible evidence” later emerged that his campaign reached out to delay a hostage release.

Boot explains that when Reagan took office, plenty of his staff were incompetent and/or wanted to dismantle government. He also had adult conservatives in the room who sometimes succeeded in convincing Reagan to back away from the most outrageous policy proposals. Even so, “Few if any presidents have ever been so totally isolated even from their most senior cabinet members.”  

In his first pivotal policy battle, over cutting taxes for the rich to reduce rampant inflation and unemployment, Reagan lacked curiosity and knowledge about economic facts. He once asked Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, who took the lead in fighting inflation, “Why do we need the Federal Reserve?”

After his detailed account of the ignorance Reagan showed when passing his economic plan, Boot concluded that his administration “reached its high water mark in 1981 with its massive Economic Recovery Tax Act.” 

But, “Now the nation would have to reckon with its consequences.”

Those consequences included inflation over 9%, and unemployment over 10%; the loss of 1.9 million jobs; a 45% cut in school lunch funding; 45% of jobless persons not receiving unemployment insurance; a 1983 budget deficit of $200 billion; and shrinking the middle class, increasing profits for the rich, and increasing suffering for the poor. Long-term effects included an increase in the death gap between lower and higher income persons of 570%; and by 2020, an inequality gap was wider that those of almost any developed nation.

The same pattern held for Reagan’s foreign affairs decision-making. Boot explained that Reagan apparently believed that he ordered the invasion of Grenada (which was based on falsehoods) because “he had acted as an instrument of God.” Reagan also quoted a U.S. pilot who noted that Grenada produced nutmeg, an ingredient in eggnog. The “Russians were trying to steal Christmas,” the pilot insisted. “We stopped them.” 

And, according to Boot, Reagan’s opposition to Cuba could have gone nuclear. Secretary of State Al Haig said about Cuba, “Just give me the word and I’ll turn that f____ island into a parking lot.” But, fortunately, some of his aides settled Reagan down.

And the same behaviors, when Reagan ratcheted up Cold War paranoia, “could have resulted in a nuclear war that neither side wanted.” During his years-long negotiations with Gorbachev, Reagan was sometimes restrained by his professional staff, but sometimes not. And often his absurd beliefs kept reappearing. 

Mostly due to Gorbachev’s efforts, an arms reduction treaty was eventually passed. But Boot reminds us that in 1986, “Reagan and Gorbachev nearly agreed to a ten-year plan for total nuclear disarmament, but Reagan wouldn’t abide limits on U.S. outer-space defenses.” Because Reagan had faith in that missile defense system, which other participants knew was impossible and dangerous, he “scotched the deal with Gorbachev over them.” So, now “the United States and Russia collectively possess more than ten thousand nuclear warheads. And, despite Trump’s promises to build ‘a great Iron Dome over our country,’ satellite defenses against nuclear attacks remain unviable.”

By the way, Reagan’s few sources included the 1939 movie “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” and, perhaps, a movie he was in, “Murder in the Air” (1940). 

And Reagan’s baseless beliefs also drove his commitments to mass murderers in Central American. He supported the “psychopath” in El Salvador behind the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero because he was a favorite of the racist Sen. Jesse Helms.

Reagan’s support for the Contras grew out of a plan to “1. Take the War to Nicaragua. 2. Start killing Cubans.” 

And this post doesn’t have room to recount the downing of two airlines, costing 579 lives, during chaos spread by the Reagan administration. Neither is there time to appropriately cover the punch line he told over an open microphone,   “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Even before Reagan’s dementia took control, his mental acuity was in severe decline, and he apparently forgot that he was briefed on the arms for hostages deal with Iran. Boot reports, in 1987, the Iran/Contras investigations’ “harsh conclusions” were that Reagan knew about the arms for hostages deal, but it wasn’t proven that he knew about the funding of the contras;  “Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh concluded that Reagan had known about the diversion of funds, … but he could never prove it.” 

Even so, the Reagan spin on the investigation was that it was “the lynching that failed”

During this time when Reagan was increasingly disoriented, his administration was burdened by the Housing and Urban Development ( HUD) scandal; the banking and the savings and loans collapses which were due to his deregulation; and the AIDS epidemic, which Reagan ignored, even though his administration did not. Boot then concluded, “It is damning with faint praise to say that Reagan’s record on AIDS was not as bad as it could have been.”

I believe, the same could be said in terms of most, if not all, of Reagan’s “successes.” 

Boot’s conclusions include: 

While Reagan exaggerated the credit he deserved for the economic recovery, he ducked the blame for the recession.

Even if he read more than Trump and even if “he uttered fewer falsehoods than Trump,” Reagan’s “Often-shocking ignorance of public policy,” and his “repeated false statements” paved the way for Trump. 

Reagan “mishandled a pandemic, just as Trump did”

Like Trump, Reagan “catered to white bigotry.”

Reagan “empowered Christian Nationalism” and a “growing white backlash”

Reagan “helped hollow out the middle class, thereby creating the conditions for Trump’s populist movement.” 

But, there is more to worry about. Trump’s first term was similar to Reagan’s two terms, in that Trump’s aides sometimes managed to thwart or redirect his ambitions. A second Trump term would likely be more dangerous, and with fewer or no reasonable aides to settle him down. 

Categories Accountability, History, Trump

Media Matters: A Definitive Guide to Project 2025

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2024 //
7

Media Matters has done a thorough review of the contents of Project 2025, which was written as a playbook for the next Trump administration. It was released and posted on the web in 2023, without fanfare. As more people read it and expressed their indignation, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. Ever heard of it. Didn’t know who wrote it.

But the authors of the plan included 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration. The plan was developed by the rightwing Heriage Foundation, whose president is Kevin Roberts, a friend of Trump’s.

He knew.

It’s the roadmap for the second Trump term in office.

For education, the main feature of Project 2025 is its strong support for school choice, especially vouchers. It is a formula for directing federal funds to public funding of private and religious schools, as well as home schooling. It’s the Betsy DeVos model. Its purpose is to end public schools.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Civil Rights, Democracy, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Funding, Trump, Unions

Creator of Fake Biden Robocall Fined $6 Million

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
22

This is good news. The misuse of AI threatens the integrity of our elections and our ability to trust anything that is communicated to us other than in person. Justice was served!

The man responsible for a political robocalling hoax aimed at New Hampshire voters has been fined $6 million by the Federal Communications Commission.

Steve Kramer, the New Orleans-based political consultant who has admitted his involvement in the hoax, must pay the fine for violating the federal Truth in Caller ID Act, which makes it illegal to make automated telephone calls with intent to defraud or cause harm. The FCC says that it will hand the matter to the US Justice Department if Kramer doesn’t pay up in 30 days.

The hoax occurred in January, when New Hampshire voters received robocalls in the runup to the state’s primary elections. The calls, which featured a computer-generated voice that mimicked the voice of President Joe Biden, urged voters not to cast ballots in the primary.

Kramer hired New Orleans magician Paul Carpenter to create the recording with help from ElevenLabs, a company that uses artificial intelligence to generate highly realistic simulations of individuals’ voices. Carpenter has said that he didn’t know Kramer’s plans for the AI recording. Kramer has claimed that he did it to demonstrate the dangers posed by computer-generated “deepfakes.”

Lingo Telecom, the Missouri phone company that sent out the robocalls, agreed to pay a $1 million fine last month for its involvement in the hoax.

In addition to the FCC fine, Kramer faces 13 felony counts of attempted voter suppression in the New Hampshire courts, as well as 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonating a candidate.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Elections, Fake, Technology
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