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Michael Hiltzik: Trump’s Pathetic Lies About Obamacare and COVID

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2024 //
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At the recent Vice-Presidential debate, JD Vance engaged in sanewashing and normalizing Trump, falsely claiming that Trump tried to improve or salvage Obamacare. He lied, as LA Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik shows. In fact, Trump and most other Republicans tried to kill Obamacare. Trump was also responsible for incompetent management of the federal response to COVID, which increased the death toll.

Every newspaper should either have its own Michael Hiltzik or repost his columns.

Hiltzik writes:

My favorite Lily Tomlin line is this one: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

I love it more today than ever, because it applies so perfectly to how we must respond to the campaign claims of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Especially Trump’s assertions about his role — heroic, in his vision — in “saving” the Affordable Care Act and fighting the COVID pandemic.

I’ve written before about the firehouse of fabrication and grift emanating from the Trump campaign like a political miasma. On these topics, he has moved beyond his habit of merely concocting a false reality about, say, immigration and crime to deliberately concocting a false reality about himself. 

Donald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.

— JD Vance, flagrantly lying about Trump’s management of the Affordable Care Act

To start by summarizing: Trump did everything in his power to destroy the Affordable Care Act, starting on the very first day of his term in 2017. On COVID, he did everything in his power to make America defenseless against the spreading pandemic.

Let’s take them in order. 

Here’s what Trump said about the Affordable Care Act during his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris: “I had a choice to make when I was president, do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? … And I saved it. I did the right thing.” 

This was the prelude to his head-scratching assertion that he has “concepts of a plan” to reform healthcare in the U.S. I examined what that might mean in a recent column, in which I explained that it would turn the U.S. healthcare system to the deadly dark ages when people with preexisting medical conditions would be either denied coverage or charged monstrous markups.

During his own debate Tuesday with Tim Walz, Vance made himself an accomplice to Trump’s crime against truth.

Here’s Vance’s version of the Trumpian fantasy: 

“Donald Trump has said that if we allow states to experiment a little bit on how to cover both the chronically ill, but the non-chronically ill … He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States. And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare. … Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

Here’s what Trump actually did to the Affordable Care Act during his presidency. He had made repealing the ACA a core promise of his 2016 presidential campaign, stating on his website, “On day one of the Trump Administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare.” (Thanks are due to the indispensable Jonathan Cohn of Huffpost for excavating the quote.)

Trump drove down Obamacare enrollment every year he was in office; when Biden removed Trump’s obstacles, enrollment soared. 

(KFF / Kevin Drum)

On Inauguration Day, Trump issued an executive order instructing the entire executive branch to find ways to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision or requirement” of the ACA. 

During his presidency, he never abandoned the Republican dream of repealing Obamacare, even after July 28, 2017, when the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) strode to the Senate well and delivered a thumbs-down coup de grace to a GOP repeal bill.

Trump never ceased slandering the ACA as a “disaster.” He returned to the theme during last month’s debate: “Obamacare was lousy healthcare,” he said. “Always was. It’s not very good today.” As president, he threatened to make it “implode,” and used every tool he could get his fingers on to do so. 

In September 2017 he slashed the advertising budget for the upcoming open enrollment period for individual insurance policies by a stunning 90%, to $10 million from the previous year’s $100 million. He also cut funds for nonprofit groups that employ “navigators,” those who help people in the individual market understand their options and sign up, by roughly 40%, to $36.8 million from $62.5 million. 

Just after taking office, he abruptly canceled the customary last-minute advertising blitz to encourage enrollments in Obamacare plans before open enrollment ended on Jan. 31. The last minute surge in enrollments, which had occurred every previous year, vanished. The drop-off was particularly devastating because it was concentrated among the healthiest potential enrollees — those who often wait until the last minute to sign up and whose premiums generally subsidize older, less healthy patients.

The impact these policies had on enrollment was inescapable. In the three years before Trump took office, ACA marketplace plans experienced annual enrollment increases, to 12.7 million enrollees in 2016 from 8 million in 2014. During every year of the Trump administration, enrollment declined, falling to 11.4 million in 2020.

Every year since Joseph Biden took office, enrollment has increased, reaching a record 21.3 million this year — an 86% increase over Trump’s last year. 

As for Vance’s fatuous claim that Trump “worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care,” you have the right to ask what Vance has been smoking.

The only bipartisanship on the ACA during the Trump years, Cohn observes, were the actions of GOP senators such as McCain and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to cooperate with Democrats to stave off their fellow Republicans’ anti-ACA vandalism.

Now onto Trump’s fantasy vision of his role in fighting the COVID pandemic. Speaking in a low-energy, exhausted monotone at a speech Tuesday in Milwaukee and reading at times from a binder, he praised himself for instituting Operation Warp Speed, which funded COVID vaccine development in record time and got them rolled out in January 2021.

“We did a great job with the pandemic. Never got the credit we deserved,” he said. He then veered into blaming China for the pandemic, a familiar topic. He said bluntly that the pandemic was “caused by the Wuhan lab. I said that from the beginning, came from Wuhan. And the Wuhan lab, it wasn’t from bats in a cave that was 2,000 miles away. … It’s really the China virus.”

As for the rest of his COVID performance, he said this: “We did a great job with the ventilators, the masks and the gowns and everything. … When we got here the cupboards, our cupboards, I used to say our cupboards were bare. … No president put anything in for a pandemic.” Then he segued into praising himself for a big tax cut, and COVID was forgotten.

A few points about this spiel:

Trump is correct that Operation Warp Speed was a significant achievement. But he didn’t follow up by advocating for its product, the COVID vaccine. Instead, he has thrown in his lot with fanatical anti-vaccine agitators such as Robert F. Kennedy. He has repeated an anti-vax mantra, promising, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” This is a formula for exposing children to vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and even polio.

Trump’s reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, underscores how closely the so-called lab-leak theory of COVID’s origins is tied to right-wing partisan politics. The theory originated with Trump acolytes at the State Department, who saw the accusation as a convenient weapon in Trump’s economic war with China.

To this day, not a speck of evidence has been produced to validate this claim; scientists versed in the relevant disciplines of virology and epidemiology say the evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that the virus reached humans via the wildlife trade, and that its journey may well have started with bats thousands of miles from Wuhan, China.

Trump is lying when he says his predecessors in the White House left him without resources. The truth is that Trump himself hobbled pandemic response from the start. 

In 2016, in the wake of the Ebola epidemic in Africa, President Obama had established the the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council “to prepare for and, if possible, prevent the next outbreak from becoming an epidemic or pandemic,” in the words of its senior director, Beth Campbell. Trump dissolved it in 2018.

During the pandemic, Trump cut off funding for the World Health Organization. He eliminated a $200-million pandemic early-warning programtraining scientists in China and elsewhere to detect and respond to such threats. He sidelined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which had been established under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Due to these steps, the U.S. was fated to sleepwalk into the pandemic. The COVID death toll in the U.S. stands at more than 1.2 million, and its reported death rate from COVID of 341.1 per 100,000 population is the highest in the developed world.

Ventilators, masks and gowns? Trump placed the procurement of this essential personal protective equipment in the hands of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who handled the task incompetently. Kushner turned away urgent appeals from state and local officials for those supplies.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile, it’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” Kushner said at a briefing. 

Following his remarks, the website of the government’s national strategic stockpile of medicines and supplies was changed from asserting that its purpose was to “support” the emergency efforts of state, local and tribal authorities by ensuring that “the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most.” The new language redefined the stockpile’s role as “to supplement state and local supplies … as a short-term stopgap.”

Supplies of ventilators, masks and gowns remained scarce through the first months of the pandemic. A procurement official at a Massachusetts hospital system told me of having had to cut a deal with a shadowy broker offering 250,000 Chinese-made masks at an inflated price, completing the transaction for $1 million at a darkened warehouse five hours from home.

Trump made anti-science incompetence and disregard for the welfare of Americans part of our history. The same thing, or worse, looms on the horizon in a second Trump term.

My comment: who can forget that dramatic moment in 2017 when the late Senator John McCain strode down to the well of the Senate to cast the deciding vote not to repeal Obamacare by dramatically extending his good arm and showing a thumb’s down gesture? Trump forgot.

As to COVID, why didn’t Trump take credit for the vaccines produced by Iperatuon Warp Speed? If the scientists had called it “the TRUMP vaccine, he probably would have boasted about it. Instead, he threw his support to the anti-VAXX conspiracy theorists, which surely contributed to the death toll.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Lies, Science, Vance, J.D.

John Thompson: How the Federal Mandate for Testing Destroyed Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
24

John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He remembers the time before George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” took control of the schools away from educators. Data-driven accountability, he writes, polluted the culture of learning. After more than two decades of failure, educators and students need a better way forward.

He writes in Oklahoma Voice:

When I first walked into John Marshall High School in 1992, I was stunned by the exceptional quality of so many teachers.

It had never occurred to me that such great teaching and learning was being done in high schools. Yes, there were problems, but each year, our school would make incremental improvements.

Then, the Oklahoma City Public Schools system (OKCPS) would bow to pressure and implement disastrous policies that would wipe out those gains — or worse.

I remember when OKCPS was first forced into policies that were later dubbed “corporate school reform.”

The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002 by former Republican President George W. Bush, increased the federal government’s influence in holding schools accountable for student performance.

During the first years after the passage, local and state leaders often had some success in minimizing the damage done by school “choice” and high stakes testing. But, as in the rest of the nation, that resistance angered market-driven reformers who then doubled-down on harsher, more punitive policies.

They ordered everyone to “be on the same page,” and even today press educators to “teach to the test.”

I quickly discovered that this one-size-fits-all philosophy was disastrous for schools, teachers and students. And decades later, it still remains so.

It doesn’t take into account the difference between situational and generational poverty. It ignores that some students are seriously emotionally disturbed and/or burdened by multiple traumatic experiences, now known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). And, it fails to factor in that children, who may have reading or math disabilities, have the potential to become student leaders.

The tipping point for me was when school staffing became driven by a primitive statistical model that could not distinguish between low income students and children of situational poverty receiving free and reduced price lunches as opposed to children living in extreme poverty with multiple ACEs.

Because of the additional costs of providing services for the most emotionally disturbed students, teachers in “regular” classrooms were assigned up to 250 students.

I had classes with 60 students.

Data-driven accountability pollutes our learning cultures.

School segregation by choice combined with test-driven accountability creates a culture of competition, winners and losers, and simplistic policies that ignore poverty and Adverse Childhood Experiences.

It is a policy imposed mostly by non-educators who ignore educational and cognitive scientific research.

As these quick fixes failed — just like educators and social scientists predicted they would — the “blame game” took off, fueling an exodus of teachers and driving out the joy of teaching and learning. The change in culture particularly affected the poorest children of color.

In order to improve our learning environment and our children’s outcomes, we must first get back to building on our strengths rather than weaknesses.

For instance, if we agree on a culture where we use tests for diagnostic purposes, rather than determining winners and losers, we could go back to the time when our curriculum committees included teachers, assistant principals, and parents.

Those meetings frequently ended in compromises that brought out the best in all sides and made our schools a desired place to learn and work.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Curriculum, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Washington Post Fact-Checker on the VP Debate

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
10

Glenn Kessler is the fact-checker for The Washington Post. He is the best in the business. The only thing he does is fact-checking.

He wrote:

In the vice-presidential debate Tuesday night, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) proved he could match his running mate on the falsehood meter, though with a bit more verve and polish. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) misled on occasion, such as claiming Republicans supported a “registry for pregnancies.”

Here is a roundup of 21 claims that caught our attention, the majority by Vance. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.

“Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets, thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.”

— Vance

This is false. Vance appears to be conflating two things as he answered a question on Iran’s attack on Israel.

Iran’s crude oil production rose to 3.3 million barrels a day as of August, which is an increase since the end of the Trump administration but still lower than in 2018. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iran’s oil production in 2020 was just under 2 million barrels a day. The pandemic sent oil production and sales plummeting around the globe. Iran’s production in 2020 was the lowest in almost 40 years, the EIA said.

But experts say that even if Trump had been reelected, he would have had trouble keeping sanctions from eroding. In particular, China has become adept at evading U.S. sanctions by arranging for many buyers of Iranian oil to be small, semi-independent refineries known as “teapots.” Such entities accounted for about one-fifth of China’s worldwide oil imports, according to Reuters. “With their small size and limited business operations, teapots are hard to uncover and not exposed to the U.S. financial system,” according to a report by the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran.

“When Iran shot down an American aircraft in international airspace, Donald Trump tweeted, because that’s the standard diplomacy of Donald Trump. And when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”

— Walz

This is largely accurate. Iran attacked a U.S. drone in 2019, but Trump did not hit back. He lost his nerve at the last minute, according to various news accounts. Then Iran attacked a U.S. military base in 2020 after Trump ordered the drone killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 3, 2020. No one was killed, though more than 100 service members suffered from traumatic brain injuries.

Walz calls out Trump’s withdrawal from Iran nuclear deal

During the Oct. 1 vice-presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz (D) reminded Americans that former president Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. (Video: CBS News)

Trump initially bragged about the fact that no one was killed, but it emerged that a U.S. contractor suffered a serious eye injury and 110 troops had traumatic brain injuries while sheltering in place, with 35 being sent to Germany and the United States for treatment. Yet Trump has continued to say they suffered only from headaches — as he did again just hours before the debate.

“When was the last time that an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out? The only answer is during the four years that Donald Trump was president.”

— Vance

Vance could have given a shout-out to Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on Tuesday.

Jimmy Carter, president from 1977 to 1981, not only never formally declared war or sought authorization to use force from Congress during his presidency, but military records show not a single soldier died in hostile action during his presidency. Eight military personnel died during the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, but the military deems those as nonhostile deaths. (A helicopter collided with an aircraft.) A marine and an Army soldier were also killed when a mob burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

At least 65 active-duty troops died in hostile action during Trump’s presidency, the records show, as he ramped up commitments in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State terrorist group while also launching airstrikes on Syria as punishment for a chemical weapons attack. Trump also escalated hostilities with Iran, including the killing of Soleimani. Trump said at the time the strike was carried out in accordance with the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of 2001.

“We’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”

— Vance

This is false. The United States in 2024 ranked 17th in the world for environmental health, according to the authoritative Environmental Performance Index, a project of Yale and Columbia Universities. It ranked 27th for air quality and 9th for water and sanitation.

“What have Kamala Harris policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world.”

— Vance

This is false. Vance has previously earned Four Pinocchios for this claim, but he keeps saying it. Harris cast the deciding vote for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to foster green manufacturing jobs in the United States. The evidence shows that it’s working.

Vance’s theory, once expressed in an opinion article, is that by shifting the auto industry toward electric vehicles, the United States is going to send significant amounts of money and jobs to China. But this claim ignores what is actually in the IRA. The law was intended to help the United States catch up with China before Beijing completely takes over the EV market. The Chinese government has given huge subsidies to the EV industry in a quest to dominate it.

So the law included provisions to make sure more of the supply chain is produced in the United States, such as a consumer tax credit for EVs. The Treasury Department wrote regulations that make it harder for vehicles to qualify for the full federal EV tax credit of $7,500 if key components are sourced from China, with a grace period for some rare materials like graphite. As part of the IRA, final assembly of EV models must occur in North America to be eligible. In May, the administration also imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs.

Vance also ignores that many provisions in the IRA have sparked a manufacturing boom in the United States — designed to counter China’s dominance in the green-energy arena. Besides EVs, the bill included tax incentives intended to spur manufacturing of solar modules, wind turbines, inverters, EV batteries and power storage, and the extraction and refining of critical minerals.

In the first year after passage of the IRA, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, 280 clean-energy projects were announced across 44 states, representing $282 billion of investment that would create 175,000 jobs. “What we found was that — so far at least — the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” the report said.

“As you ask about family separation right now in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked. Some of them hopefully are at homes with their families. Some of them have been used as drug-trafficking mules.”

— Vance

This is false. Vance is referencing a number that applies to unaccompanied children who crossed the border and were placed with a sponsor, including during the last two years of Trump’s administration. An August Homeland Security inspector general report, which tracked data from October 2018 to September 2023, said 320,000 children were never given a date to appear in immigration court or missed an appearance, providing “no assurance” that the children were not vulnerable to trafficking. About one-quarter of the cases took place under Trump. The report recommended creating an automated system, rather than a manual one, which Homeland Security said it would implement.

Until this report was issued, Trump had been using a much lower figure of 88,000 “lost children,” but this was a different metric. As part of Health and Human Services Department protocol, case managers are supposed to try three times to check on the status of a child between 30 and 37 days after release to a sponsor, preferably by having a conversation with the child in addition to the sponsor. In 2023, the New York Times calculated that in 2020-2021, 85,000 children could not be reached.

But it’s not a legal requirement for HHS to make the calls — and it’s not required that children or the sponsor answer. Trump administration officials made that point when they came under fire from Democrats for supposedly losing track of children.

Applying the same metrics to the first three years of Trump’s term, when about 160,000 unaccompanied children were referred to HHS, we estimated that 54,000 children could not be reached. Comparable figures for the Biden-Harris administration, through last month, would be 400,000 referred and 135,000 not reached.

“Donald Trump had four years. He had four years to do this. And he promised you, America, how easy it would be. ‘I’ll build you a big, beautiful wall, and Mexico will pay for it.’ Less than 2 percent of that wall got built, and Mexico didn’t pay a dime.”

— Walz

The percentage is exaggerated. About 458 miles of a border barrier was built during Trump’s presidency, but most of it (373 miles) was replacement for existing primary or secondary barriers that were dilapidated or outdated, according to a Jan. 22, 2021, report by Customs and Border Protection. About 52 miles was new primary wall, and 33 miles was new secondary wall. Trump had promised to build 1,000 miles of barrier, so even taking the lower numbers gets Trump 8.5 percent.

Mexico did not pay for the barrier Trump erected along the southern border; American taxpayers did. The Trump administration directed $16.4 billion in funding to barrier construction along the southern border. About $10 billion was repurposed from Defense Department projects over the objections of Congress.

“We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country.”

— Vance

This claim lacks context. Under Biden, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics, overall drug seizures have dropped, especially for marijuana, but until this year increased substantially for fentanyl — the drug most responsible for overdose deaths. Both the decrease in marijuana seizures and the increase in fentanyl seizures reflect trends that started under Trump.

As president, Trump often touted how much seizures of drugs at the southern border had increased on his watch. This is an imperfect metric. It could mean that law enforcement is doing a better job. But more seizures also might indicate that the drug flow has increased and that law enforcement is missing even more.

The amount of fentanyl seized at the border increased under Biden and Trump, though so far, the amount jumped by a larger percentage under Trump, CBP statistics show. In Trump’s four fiscal years, the number of pounds increased 586 percent, compared with 462 percent in the first three fiscal years under Biden.

The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials increased from almost 4,800 pounds in fiscal 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal 2023. There were about 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before Trump took office.

“Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed. You’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed. You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

— Vance

It’s false to say “illegal immigrants.” In Springfield, where the city’s website says there are “12,000 to 15,000” immigrants, most of the new arrivals are from Haiti. But Vance is wrong to call them “illegal.” They are in the U.S. legally under temporary protected status (TPS), a program created in 1990 that provides deportation relief and work permits.

Vance blames ‘illegal’ Springfield migrant community

On Oct. 1, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) alleged that “illegal” migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were burdening the local economy. (Video: CBS News)

Conservatives argue that Biden has expanded TPS and thus is providing a legal pathway for people who otherwise would be undocumented. But there is no question the Haitians are in the United States legally.

The New York Times reported that “Michelle Lee-Hall, executive director of Springfield’s housing authority, said that the affordability problem in Springfield had been aggravated by landlords pivoting to Haitians who were willing to pay higher rent.”

“So there’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand that is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years.”

— Vance

This is wrong. Vance suggested that the Springfield Haitians used an app for new arrivals at the border to claim asylum. As noted, the Haitians arrived through the TPS program.

Separately, there is a humanitarian parole program for citizens of four countries in the hemisphere — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — which requires a passport and a link with a U.S.-based sponsor. But that also does not involve the app.

Walz repeats the misstatement. After saying he misspoke about when he arrived in China in 1989 on a teaching assignment, Walz says it again. Minnesota Public Radio reported this week that Walz did not arrive in China until August. But the protests in Tiananmen Square were ended by the Chinese military on June 3-4, making it impossible for him to be there “during the democracy protests.”

Vance is being disingenuous here. He backed a law that would impose a nationwide limit of 15 weeks for when women could get an abortion — which would overturn the laws of many liberal states. In 2022, Vance said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” Moreover, last year, he urged the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old federal law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. The Biden administration has not invoked the law, but a more conservative one could, thus limiting abortion rights even without any new laws.

“He [Trump] gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top guys.”

— Walz

This is exaggerated. When both the Joint Tax Committee and the Tax Policy Center looked at the impact of the 2017 tax bill, they concluded that most people would experience an overall reduction in taxes. The Tax Policy Center found that 80.4 percent of all taxpayers would have a tax cut, compared with about 5 percent experiencing a tax increase. In the middle quintile, 91 percent would get a tax cut, averaging about $1,090, with 7.3 percent facing a tax increase averaging about $910.

In fact, Harris has pledged to keep intact tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 when the tax cut expires in 2026. That would reduce revenue by $1.35 trillion, further confirming that not just the “top guys” got a tax cut.

“And what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25 percent, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60 percent.”

— Vance

The housing figure is mostly false. Median sale prices of homes have risen from $355,000 in the first quarter of 2021 to $412,300 in the second quarter of 2024. That’s a gain of 16 percent. It’s also a decline of about 2 percent from a high reached the fourth quarter of 2022.

Another measure — the consumer price index for housing — shows an increase of about 22 percent since January 2021.

It’s also a bit much to say Harris is responsible. The Federal Reserve Bank pinned much of the blame for the rise in home prices on the pandemic. But there are other factors, such as seniors staying in their homes, reducing supply, and real estate investors snapping up fixer-uppers for rental and resale.

The consumer price index for food shows an increase of 22 percent since January 2021. But, again, the pandemic played a role — as did factors beyond an administration’s control. In 48 states, nearly 101 million “wild aquatic birds, commercial poultry and backyard or hobbyist flocks” have been infected with bird flu since January 2022, according to the CDC. That has sent the price of eggs soaring.

“It [the tax bill] was passed in 2017, and you saw an American economic boom unlike we’ve seen in a generation in this country.”

— Vance

This is false. The tax cut was not responsible for a once-in-a-generation “American economic boom.” Trump inherited a growing economy from Barack Obama, which the tax cut may have extended a bit, but it was already running out of steam when the pandemic struck in 2020. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, manufacturing went into a mild recession.

Bill Clinton was president only 16 years before Trump. The gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in 2019, slipping from 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.4 percent in 2017. But in 1997, 1998 and 1999, under Clinton, GDP grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively.

“Donald Trump was the guy who created the largest trade deficit in American history with China.”

— Walz

This is true. The U.S. trade deficit with China hit a peak 0f $377.7 billion in 2018, when Trump was president. In 2023, it was $252 billion, the lowest in 14 years, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“All I said on this is, I got there this summer and misspoke on this. So I will just — that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China, during the democracy protests, went in. And from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

— Walz

“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies. It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.”

— Walz

This is false. Project 2025 does not say this. (Project 2025 is not an official campaign document. It’s a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page manifesto filled with detailed conservative proposals that is popularly labeled Project 2025. But there are definitely Trump connections.)

Instead the document calls for better statistical tracking of abortions across the country. Claiming that liberal states have become “sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the report says the Department of Health and Human Services “should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”

Walz’s state already does, leading a Heritage Foundation official to ask whether Walz is a “miscarriage monitor” after Harris made a similar claim in her debate with Trump.

“I never supported a national ban. I did during when I was running for Senate in 2020 to talk about setting some minimum national standard.”

— Vance

“The gross majority, close to 90 percent in some of the statistics I’ve seen, of the gun violence in this country is committed with illegally obtained firearms.”

— Vance

This is wrong. Vance made this comment during a discussion on mass shootings at schools. In a 2022 study, the National Institute of Justice, a research unit of the Justice Department, found that of the known mass shooting cases, the vast majority of shooters — 77 percent — bought at least some of their weapons legally. Illegal purchases were made by 13 percent of those committing mass shootings.

“Prescription drugs fell in 2018 for the first time in a very long time.”

— Vance

Vance overstates what happened to the consumer price index for prescription drugs. It fell by 0.6 percent for the 12 months ending in December 2018, the first time in 46 years. But there are other 12-month periods with index declines, including one as recently as 2013. Prices rose 3 percent in the 12-month period ending in December 2019 and then kept rising after that — until the pandemic. Then, the index fell almost every month of 2021, the first year of Biden’s presidency.

“But when Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health-care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

— Vance

This is false. Trump consistently tried to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, either through legislation or regulation, and he acted in a highly partisan manner. In fact, when campaigning in 2020, he falsely bragged that he had in effect killed the ACA by eliminating, in his tax bill that passed with no Democratic votes, a mandate to purchase health insurance.

Then, with the mandate effectively gone, GOP state attorneys general argued that Congress meant to have an Affordable Care Act with an individual mandate or not at all. Trump’s Justice Department, in a brief signed by Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, agreed that “the entire ACA … must fall.”

Nearly 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions could have been denied coverage by insurers or charged prohibitively high prices as a result, and Trump had no plan to replace ACA provisions such as coverage for preexisting conditions. Then Attorney General William P. Barr, according to CNN, tried to get the White House to back off from pursuing a full rollback of the Affordable Care Act but was unsuccessful. The Supreme Court, in 2021, dismissed the case.

The Trump administration also issued rules that promote the use of low-quality, short-term plans that were prohibited under Obamacare. These plans typically didn’t have the same protections for people with existing health conditions, allowing insurance companies to deny coverage or charge higher prices. (A number of states, mainly Democratic-leaning, acted to prohibit or limit these Trump plans.)

Finally, Trump threw his support behind House and Senate bills that would have allowed states to seek waivers and consider a person’s health status when writing policies in the individual market. The theory was that removing sicker people from the markets and allowing policies with skimpier options would result in lower overall premiums.

But the Congressional Budget Office concludedthat states that took advantage of these provisions could, perversely, blow up their insurance markets, leaving people with preexisting conditions with spiraling costs. About one-sixth of the U.S. population was estimated to live in states that would face this problem.

“Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said. Remember he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.”

— Vance

This is a whitewash of Trump’s actions.Trump encouraged a crowd of supporters to appear on Jan. 6, 2021, and then condemned his vice president when Mike Pence refused to halt the ceremonial counting of electoral votes. When the crowd attacked the Capitol, as documented in the House select committee report on the Jan. 6 attack and other reporting, Trump was reluctant to take action to calm the situation, even as his staff pleaded with him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. Trump’s tweets were so inadequate, in the view of staff members, that many resolved to resign. Even his children Ivanka and Donald Jr. found the tweets to be inappropriate. Nearly three hours passed before Trump finally told the rioters to “go home.”

Vance did not mention that, in a break with tradition, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration.

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Categories Accountability, Elections, Lies, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

What Trump Said Yesterday

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
22

On the blog called “Public Notice,” Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky wrote about Trump’s unhinged speech yesterday. He is angry and incoherent every time he speaks, so the media doesn’t find his rants to be newsworthy. As the authors point out, the media would jump all over Biden for the factual errors that Trump commits (yesterday, he confused the dictator of North Korea with the president of Iran); but Trump gets a pass because his errors, lies, and hatred are routine.

Rupar and Berlatsky write:

The vice presidential debate will be a main topic of political conversation today, but far more important (and disturbing) things happened before it took place.

This isn’t to say the debate wasn’t memorable. There were at least a couple exchanges that stood out. One came when JD Vance got upset about a moderator interjecting to fact-check racist lies he used to smear his own constituents….

But these moments pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.

Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.

Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term.

Trump spews and spews some more

Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.

His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.” 

The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)

Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) 

Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.” (Watch below.)

But all of this was just warning up to a scene during the Milwaukee event that would’ve ended anyone else’s presidential campaign.

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Trump mocks troops injured in the line of duty

That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.” 

After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran. (Watch below.)

Somehow, it got worse. Trump went on to characterize the Iranian attack as “a very nice thing” because Iran didn’t escalate further, which he suggested was the result of his toughness. Again, Trump praised Iran for a “nice” attack which seriously injured more than 100 US soldiers. (Walz highlighted these remarks from Trump during Tuesday’s debate, saying “when Iranian missiles did fall near US troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as headaches.”)

Trump’s self-aggrandizing, confused, pompous, cynical, cruel, insulting lies are not surprising. Again, he has even pushed this particular lie before. He’s also made misleading statements to erase or distract from the fact that soldiers died in Afghanistan during his presidency. He’s called soldiers who die in combat “suckers” and “losers.”

It’s manifestly clear that Trump thinks that soldiers killed or injured on his watch are an inconvenience. He mocks their sacrifice, mocks their injuries, and praises regimes that target them.

This post at Public Notice was followed by this one, written by Stephen Robinson. It sums up a vivid portrait of Trump as an addled old man.


Trump’s ignorance, callousness, and lies are not new. But what is novel is the way they all seem to have been slowed down these days so that he seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego. He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.
The remarks Trump gave in Milwaukee before he took questions from reporters were remarkably low energy by his standards. Check out the below clip of Trump praising his catastrophic covid response in a horse rasp, continually looking down to check his notes, repeating the same phrases of self-praise, getting stuck in a loop on pet words or slogans (“Wuhan … Wuhan … ”), telling subdued and meandering lies with no rhythm or applause lines. And indeed, there is no applause; the MAGA faithful are silent, wooed into a tedious fascist stupor.

It would be nice to think that such displays of grotesque ignorance, hatred, authoritarianism, and contempt for the country, for injured service members, and indeed for his own voters, would lead everyone to conclude, en masse, that Trump is disgustingly, massively, inarguably unfit to hold any office of public trust, much less president. But as we know, partisanship, racism, and institutional failures, from the media to the courts to the Justice Department, may allow Trump to win in November.

If he does, he will sit in the Oval Office. But his decrepit campaign performances suggest he will be even less capable of pretending to be anything other than a declining bigot than he was the first time around. And who’s likely to pick up the slack?

Well, as historian Kevin Kruse says, if Trump succumbs to ill health, or just sinks into his natural state of sloth and indifference, the president, de jure or de facto, would be JD Vance, “a deeply unpopular weirdo with virtually no experience, someone who won his first election less than two years ago and even then only because he’s the puppet of an insane billionaire.”

Yesterday was yet another reminder that the Republican ticket is a hideous and embarrassing blight on the American experiment and the American character. Yet, Trump continues to slump towards power, with Vance smirking and smugly lying alongside him. We’ve got about a month before we as a country either rebuke them or follow them into derp, hate, and despair.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Lies, Politics, Trump

Umair Haque: Why Is the Presidential Election So Close?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2024 //
36

Umair Haque is an economist who writes at a blog called The Issue. He recently addressed an issue that has befuddled me and probably you as well. How is it possible that Trump is tied in the polls with Kamala Harris? He is an embittered old man who spews hate and cares only about himself; she is a vibrant and empathetic woman who wants to make life better for everyone. How can they be tied?

Haque has an answer. Democrats keep talking about how good the economy is, but they don’t speak to the vast number of people who are struggling economically.

He writes:

Day after day now, polls say the same thing.

The election’s deadlocked.

Despite all of it. History, immense spending, speeches, rallies, the drama surrounding Biden stepping down, the euphoria around Kamala.

So: what’s going on here?

What Makes Politics Move in a Capitalist Society?

By now, you should know, because precisely what we’ve discussed over the last few months is coming true.

Kamala and Tim aren’t connecting on the economy.

And yet it’s the Number One Issue for voters.

Let’s recap. America’s a hyper capitalist society. In such a society, the economy is always the top issue. It comes before everything else, because in a place like America, economics is existential. There are no real safety nets. And money, having enough of it, is literally everything.

That’s not so much the case elsewhere. To use the example I always do, the Sorbonne in Paris—Europe’s best university—is free. In America, sending a kid to an Ivy League school costs three times the median income, enough to bankrupt most families.

So the economy is always issue number one. Always.

And that’s why the Dems have a long, long history of losing. Because they are frankly pretty poor at crafting economic agendas which convince Americans, since they won’t admit Americans are in dire economic pain to begin with. Americans, meanwhile, have grown up in an environment which has sort of been poisoned, and any social contract or agenda remotely European or Canadian is instantly called “communism” or “socialism.”

Put those two trends together, and you can explain the Democrats’ long losing record—or why, in America, the default is that the GOP tends to win.

How Long Can the Democrats Keep on Ignoring the Economy?

But in times like these, the economy is…even more important. Crucial. It’s always the decisive factor, but this isn’t a normal era by any stretch of imagination.

The economy is a wreck.

It is doing really, really badly. If the question is: how’s capitalism doing, then the answer is, great. Yes, stock prices are roaring, sure, profits are in rude health, and yeah, CEOs are making out like pirate emperor bandits. But none of that’s the economy.

The economy is how average people are doing, and all the indications are they’re doing pretty terribly. Incomes just now crossed 2019 levels, and that means they fell for five straight years.

Meanwhile, prices exploded.

Before that came a long, long run of stagnation: median incomes for men, for example, are lower today than they were in the 1970s.

So people are struggling. The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck, large percentages struggle to pay bills, and of course, generations are in downward mobility, while “unretirement” is becoming a social trend.

The Democrats continue to make the fatal mistake they always make.

Ignoring all this.

People Trust Trump on the Economy More Because the Democrats Don’t Seem to Actually Care About It

Who was it that reached right into the heart of the working class, and empathized with its misfortunes? It wasn’t the Democrats. It was Trump.

Think of how bizarre that is. Trump’s a guy that likes to flaunt being a billionaire. But because the Democrats ignored the biggest socioeconomic issue of the last half century, he was able to walk away with the whole ballgame.

Let me put that even more sharply.

To this day, Democrats won’t dare mention this damning statistic, that median incomes are where they were, or lower, than half a century ago.

Those really are Roman sorts of social indicators, no exaggeration necessary. A half decade of stagnation is OK, maybe. But a half century?

But the Democrats never, ever even look in this direction. They look away awkwardly.

Their silence is deafening.

Why is Trump still so widely supported?

Because more people trust him on the economy. (And on immigration, which is the same thing, because here there’s a naive theory of economics, that immigrants take our jobs and so forth, which can be true, but in America, has more to do with the reverse, offshoring, etcetera.)

Why do people trust Trump more on the economy?

He empathizes with their pain.

The Democrats don’t even attempt to. They deliberately ignore it. But this is, let me say it again, the single biggest socioeconomic issue in modern history.

What happens when socioeconomics stagnate for long periods of time—like half centuries? Democracies die. People give up on their institutions and leaders. They give up on each other. They turn on one another…

And there’s a good reason why.

How Economic Stagnation Leads to Social Collapse

If the pie’s the same size, or shrinking, as it is for many Americans, then the only option is to try and fight tooth and nail to keep your slice. To have a bigger slice, you need to take it from someone else.

That’s how democracies die by way of stagnant or declining economies.

It isn’t a theory, speculation, opinion: there’s a formal mechanism at work, a kind of vicious cycle, an engine of ruin.

A shrinking pie, a stagnant one, necessitates a less democratic society. I have to take from you. To keep my slice the same size, I need to wrest it away from everyone else.

Thus, democratic norms of peace, equality, justice, and truth soon corrode. They’re replaced by authoritarian fascist norms of violence, domination, hierarchy, and blood-and-soil destiny.

This is how democracies die, and while that’s a phrase you’ll see used a lot, it’s not very well understood even by the columnists and pundits who sort of utter it ad infinitum. This isn’t a game. It’s not a set of platitudes.

This is what happened to America.

And still is.

“Hey, At Least They’re Not the Fascists”

The Democrats just refuse to acknowledge any of this. The long run stagnation. The decline. Any real aspect of it how it’s sort of wrecked the Dream, and destroyed generations of Americans’ fortunes and possibilities.

That leaves a gigantic, truly enormous, vacuum. One that’s big enough for Donald Trump’s ego to fill.

It’s a striking, bizarre thing to see the working and lower middle class support a billionaire, who of course, is also a convicted fraudster. Sort of crazy, right? That happens because nobody trusts the Dems on the economy, and nobody trusts the Dems on the economy because they won’t even admit a glimmer of reality when it comes to the economy.

So what truths can they speak back to people, to gain their trust?

Hence, here we are, sort of half-heartedly supporting them, most of us, knowing that they aren’t going to do a whole lot to really fix much, but hey, at least they’re not the fascists.

Not exactly the stuff of an inspiring politics, is it?

Why the Election’s Closer Than it Should Be

The Democrats still have time to fix this problem, and I say that chuckling, because we all know they won’t.

If anything, it’s probably going to get worse.

People are going to be mystified about why the Democrats think things are great, when they struggle to pay the bills.

They’ll look at Trump, who at least empathizes with them, and says things are bad out there, and it’ll strike a chord in them. Trump will continue to be more credible on the economy, the most important issue, even though he’s, wait for it, a convicted fraudster.

And after a time, Kamala’s grin is going to seem a little off kilter to a lot of people. Why does she keep on smiling, when things are pretty bad for me and mine? Is she for real? What’s the deal here?

I’m not trying to be unkind, I’m just pointing out that being joyous, while it’s fine and nice and good, and even touching, for those who are already true believers, also carries a risk in times like these. It can come across as tone-deaf. These are difficult, difficult days for the vast, vast majority of people, and I know that in statistics like “50% of young people feel numb” or “70% of people feel financially traumatized.”

Given those sorts of social currents, it might be tough to grin your way into the Presidency. In fact, it already is. The contest’s deadlocked. Joy is a tough sell, and at some point, it can verge on Let Them Eat Cake.

Again, those are wicked words, and I’m sorry to write them, but it has to be said, if only for the 0.001% chance the Democrats come to their senses, and begin to actually speak sense, truth, reality, on the Number One Issue to most people, the economy.

People don’t trust them on this issue, and there’s a good reason for that. Not what they want to do. But what they won’t say. The attitude they won’t take. The deafening silence everyone can hear when it comes to admitting how troubled and tough things actually are.

If I wanted you to trust me, and there was smoke billowing from the house, but I kept on telling you the curtains were wonderful, and hey, wait until you see the garage, what would you think of me? This is where the Democrats are heading when it comes to the economy, if they aren’t already, with a whole lot of people.

And that’s why the election’s a lot closer than it should be.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Economy, Harris, Kamala, Republicans, Trump

Leonie Haimson: Mayoral Control of Schools Has Failed in NYC

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2024 //
2

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, writes about the latest developments in New York City. Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on multiple charges of corruption. His top aides resigned, including his schools chancellor David Banks. Adams says he is innocent and won’t resign. Leonie worries about what will happen to the city’s public schools, which are controlled by the mayor. Some of us–Leonie and I–long for the end of mayoral control and a revival of an independent Board of Education. Checks and balances are a very important part of democratic government. Under mayoral control, there is more cronyism than accountability.

She writes:

Mayor indicted, Chancellor resigning, and the Panel for Educational Policy eliminates its Contract Committee; so much for Mayoral control!! 

Mayor Eric Adams talks to the press outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York City, on September 26, 2024, after he was indicted on federal criminal charges

Mayor Adams has now been indicted on  five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.  Chancellor Banks is resigning as of Dec. 31, 2024, to be replaced by Melissa Aviles-Ramos, current Deputy Chancellor for Family Engagement. This follows the announced resignations of other top officials, including the Police Commissioner and Commissioner of Health, in the last two weeks.

We should recall the false narratives promoted by those including Governor Hochul who insisted on extending unchecked Mayoral control for two more years last April, with no strings attached: that any other system invited corruption, instability, and inefficiency. The Mayor himself insisted on renaming Mayoral control “Mayoral Accountability”, and Chancellor Banks threatened to resign if the governance system was altered in any significant way. And look at what has happened since. 

The only minor tweak the Legislature made to Mayoral control was that the Chair of the Panel for Educational Policy chair would be appointed by the Mayor from among three nominees put forward by leaders of the Legislature and Board of Regents. And yet it turns out that the new Chair will be exactly the same man who already held that seat as a Mayoral appointee, Greg Faulkner. The only difference is that now the Mayor will get an extra PEP appointee, to further cement his control over controversial educational policies, as well as questionable contracts and spending.

The Chancellor himself was reported having privately met with the CEO of 21stCentEd in October of 2022, and  subsequently greenlit a major contract with this company that had hired his brother, Terrence Banks, as a lobbyist. According to the Daily News,  21stCentEd has since received more than $1.4 million in business from the Department of Education for providing a variety of services. In cases where a family member is involved, the city requires that a Conflict of Interest waiver be obtained.  And yet Banks never applied for one. Both Chancellor Banks and Terence Banks have had their homes raided and their telephones seized by federal investigators.

Terence Banks also apparently lobbied for a Florida-based tech firm called Saferwatch which markets “panic button” apps to be used to alert authorities in case of school emergencies such as fires or active shooters.  The NYPD signed a contract with Saferwatch which was piloted in several schools  last year.

We have seen tremendous privacy problems with Teenspace, an online mental health program for NYC students 13 and up, relentlessly promoted by the Mayor and the Chancellor, after the Department of Health signed a $26 million dollar with the parent company Talkspace last year. And yet as we have discovered, Teenspace collects, shares and uses personal student data for marketing and commercial purposes with multiple social media “partners” that would be illegal if the contract was with the DOE rather than the Department of Health.  When a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is collected by 34 cookies, and shared with 15 ad trackers, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies. The company has also been sued in Californiafor sharing personal data with TikTok, including  the mental health data of minors. One should not be surprised to learn that lobbying firm for Talkspace is Oaktree Solutions, the firm owned by Frank Carone,  a close associate and a former chief of staff to the Mayor who was with him last night when Adams was huddling with his attorneys after learning of his federal indictments. 

Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Adams own partner,  Tracey Collins, who already worked at DOE,  was promoted and named the “senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” and received a 23% boost to her salary to $221,597 a year.  Shortly thereafter, Sharon Adams, the wife of the Mayor’s brother Bernard Adams, was hired by DOE, at a salary of $150,000-a-year .

The whirlwind of scandals and investigations surrounding the Mayor and his top appointees, including the Chancellor, should give rise to a new call for more accountability, oversight and checks and balances at DOE, but I fear that no lessons will be learned by those in power, because their interests lie in maintaining one-person rule, and ignoring the voices of parents and teachers.  Indeed, there have been many cases of large-scale corruption at the DOE under previous administrations. 

Eric Goldstein was hired in 2004 during Bloomberg/Klein years as a deputy overseeing food, transportation and high school sports, and promoted to chief executive in 2007. Goldstein was just recently sentenced to two years in prison, for a corrupt scheme he was involved in 2015-2016, during the De Blasio administration, by receiving bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to tainted food served to public school kids — including chicken tenders laden with plastic, bones and metal, causing choking. 

There is also the recently revealed, shocking case of DOE staffers in the Queens office who took their own kids on trips to Disneyland and other trips by using federal funds meant to provide educational experiences for homeless children.  For some reason, the DOE failed to ask for restitution for the money stolen; and neither the DOE nor the Special Investigator for Schools  reported the alleged fraud, forgery and misuse of federal funds to any authorities for possible prosecution.  To make things even more bizarre, the SCI held off posting its findings report, dated January 2023, for nearly two years after it was completed, and when they did so, they posted it quietly without any press release or notification, perhaps in hopes it would be ignored by the media focused instead on the allegations and investigations surrounding the Mayor.  I have since reported these alleged crimes to the Inspector General’s office of the US Department of Education, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

There have been many more multi-million dollar DOE corruption scandals under Mayoral control over the last 20 years, a selection of which I summarized in my testimony to the State Education Department and my presentation last year to the NYC Bar Association, both posted here.

And yet despite all these allegations of cronyism and worse, the first thing that the newly reconstituted Panel for Education Policy did in its first meeting of the new school year on September 25 is to eliminate its Contracts Committee by amending their  Bylaws  as depicted below. 

Image

This committee, whose meetings have been livestreamed and recorded, has provided the only public airing of discussion and questioning of DOE officials by PEP members of the rationale behind  hundreds of millions of dollars of questionable DOE contracts before the final Panel vote.  The approval to ditch the committee was 13-6, with one abstention.   As usual, every Mayoral appointee plus the new, supposedly “independent” Chair voted in lockstep to eliminate the Contracts Committee and its monthly public meetings.  So much for so-called Mayoral accountability!

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Failure, New York City

Tom Ultican: The Plutocrat Privatizers Target Delaware

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2024 //
9

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced math, is a close observer of the public school privatization movement. In this post, he reviews the situation in Delaware, where the big money for privatization is coming from the DuPont family. The school board of the Christina district recently fired its superintendent, who was named superintendent of the year only two years ago. The reason, Tultican writes, was his opposition to charter schools.

He begins:

July 10th the Christina school board voted, at 2:45 AM, to remove popular Superintendent Dan Shelton. The seven member board split 4 to 3. It seems that Shelton’s opposition to allowing charter schools to take over the district motivated the vote. The Christina school district serves the small Delaware cities of Wilmington, Newark and their outskirts. It is a modest sized district with about 14,000 students. The unseen force behind the ouster was the DuPont family.

The attack by billionaires on schools in Delaware is similar to harm visiting public education throughout the nation. The local rich guy sets up tax exempt “charities” and uses them to undermine local schools. The “charities” hire young ambitious and talented people to lead the effort. Looking behind the scenes in Delaware illuminates the undermining of public schools nationwide.

Board President Donald Patton was joined by Vice President Alethea Smith-Tucker, Y.F. Lou, and Dr. Naveed Baqir in voting to oust the Superintendent two months before the new school year begins. It is alleged that they are the compromised four. In a local pod cast, Highland Bunker, board member Doug Manley reported that Matt Clifford, who dropped out of the recent school board election, was offered support if he agreed to vote with Board President Patton. Manley also speculated that Y. F. Lou received the same offer.

Trustee Manley stated that in his view the only reason Shelton was removed from office was because of his opposition to letting charter schools parcel out the district. It is notable that in 2022, Shelton was named Delaware State Superintendent of the Year.

Longwood Foundation

The Longwood Foundation is not called the DuPont Foundation because it was originally established in 1937 by Pierre DuPont to support Longwood Gardens. A tax reform act in 1969 caused a change and Longwood Gardens Inc. was formed to finance the gardens. The Longwood Foundation remained in existence to “principally support charitable organizations” and push forward the DuPont agenda.

Over the last decade, the foundation has spent $1,812,200 to support Reading Assist Inc. whose web page says:

“Reading Assist provides high-dosage tutoring for students in grades K-3 in the lowest 25% for reading proficiency, with a focus on serving in schools where there is the highest need.

“We recruit, train, and embed AmeriCorps members – known as Reading Assist Fellows – willing to commit a school year of service to provide our accredited, one-on-one intervention program to struggling readers.”

Reading Assist is a science of reading (SoR) advocate whose founder has ties to the dyslexia community. AmeriCorps has helped provide Teach for America (TFA) training and recruits. In other words, these organizations come with privatization blemishes. Many researchers believe SoR is bad science promoted by wealthy people and publishing companies while TFA is their army.

Longwood is still a DuPont family run organization. According to the 2022 tax form 990PF (TIN: 51-0066734), John DuPont is the current president and Margaret DuPont is Vice President. The tax records also show that in the last decade they have provided the fake education graduate school, Relay Graduate School, $1,300,000.

The Foundation concentrates its spending into the Wilmington area and does very little spending nationally. So their spending of more than $15,000,000 on charter schools in the last decade has made a huge impact locally. Margaret and one other DuPont family member also sit on the board of the smaller Chelsea Foundation (TIN: 51-6015638) which also provides grants to charter schools. It is this drive to privatize the Christina School District that seems to have led to firing a respected and popular administrator.

In 2017, Indiana scholars Jim Scheurich, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams posted an article on Diane Ravitch’s blog that outlined the model used by billionaires to gain control of local schools.  Point five of their rich guy privatization model is, “Development of a network of local organizations or affiliates that all collaborate closely on the same local agenda.”

Please open the link to finish the article.

One other interesting point in Ultican’s post. Remember Julia Keleher? She was appointed to be the Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico when the island was in dire financial straits. She pushed charters and vouchers and was widely opposed by teachers, parents, and students. She ended her time on the island with a jail sentence:

While serving as Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico, Keleher who is not Puerto Rican, secured a new law allowing for charter schools and vouchers plus the closure of hundreds of schools.

On December 28, 2016, Keleher was appointed Puerto Rico Secretary of Education by Governor-elect Ricardo Rosselló who became so hated he was driven from office in 2019. The appointment was just a few months before hurricane Maria hit. Keleher also became disliked as was demonstrated by San Juan protesters loudly chanting, “Julia go home!”

Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17, 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She plead guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud. Almost as soon as she finished her prison term, she was hired by First State Educate. Now she is the executive director.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Delaware, Education Reform, Teach for America

Charlie Sykes on Laura Loomer

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2024 //
13

Laura Loomer is a Trump fan who craves fame. She seems to have struck gold. She now travels with Trump on his private jet. She has insulted everyone who doesn’t worship Trump, and she has smeared every group that offends her. Charlie Sykes, a prominent Never Trumper, describes his view of Laura Loomer.

He writes:

“It is extraordinary. Laura Loomer is not just a bigot, she is a freak. She is at the far edges of the fever swamp. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene described her as racist and offensive. And yet Donald Trump is associating with her; these are the kinds of people who have his ear right now. So, at this moment of the campaign — I mean think about this we’re less than two months away from the election — Donald Trump is associating with some of the craziest, weirdest figures on the right.”  — Me on “Morning Joe,” September 12, 2024

Sykes writes:

Apparently, I triggered Loomer when I called her a freak…

…which is odd, when you think about it. 

By now — you’d think — she’d be used to being called an antisemitic-Islamophobic-racist-grotesquerie, as well as a conspiracist nutjob, and an overall vile human being. (Details below.)

After all, Trump’s favorite worm-tongue is not your standard-issue deplorable; she’s more like a leak from a laboratory of deplorability: a mutation of all the toxic insanity, bigotry, and demented inhumanity that has poisoned our politics. 

So, you might imagine that she would have developed a thickish hide.

But no.

On Thursday (which was quite a busy day for her), she spent a good chunk of her morning lashing out at Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lindsey Graham… and me. 

Personally, I thought “oxygen thief” was an underwhelming way to end this rant. But she was pretty jazzed by her efforts.

I am, of course, deeply flattered, honored, and not at all humbled by the fact that this loathsome mutant dislikes me. I may frame it.

Why is Donald Trump hanging out with Loomer? 

Why did he want her to be hired by his campaign? Why did she fly with him to the debate this week? Why would he take this 9/11 Truther to this week’s solemn remembrance? Why is he so enamored of her presence? 

Was Nick Fuentes unavailable? Were Alex Jones, David Duke, and the Tiki-torch dudes otherwise engaged? Or does she have other charms for the former president? I couldn’t possibly say.

But it seems clear that she is providing Trump the sort of safe space he so desperately craves — a space where his darkest and ugliest instincts are stroked and validated. Perhaps most important: she hates the people he hates. As Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo note, “Loomer has called Kamala Harris ‘a drug using prostitute.’ As for why Harris doesn’t have biological children, she once said: “I’m willing to bet she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.’”

Open the link to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Trump

Network for Public Education Launches National Center on Charter School Accountability

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2024 //
14

Having spent years covering charter scandals and seeking accountability for charters, the Network for Public Education realized that it could not compete with the high-powered corporate public relations firms representing the charter school industry. So, we decided, the only way to get accountability is to do it ourselves.

So NPE established the National Center on Charter School Accountability, which will produce reviews of charter school performance.

Here it is:

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cheating, Closing schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Peter Greene: Why Sex Scandals Matter

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2024 //
8

When I first heard about the sex scandal swirling around Corey DeAngelis, I didn’t believe it. As I did more digging through links on the Internet, my disbelief turned to amazement. I never met Corey, but he used to harass me on Twitter until I blocked him.

How could someone who had inveighed against “the woke agenda” and urged the adoption of vouchers to escape that agenda have done what the rumors said? I didn’t think I would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I don’t care what others do in their private lives. I believe in Tim Walz’s credo: “Mind your own damn business.” But I was troubled by the hypocrisy.

Corey worked for Betsy DeVos and was her leading salesman for vouchers. DeVos and her family are rabidly anti-LGBT. For years, they have funded anti-LGBT organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Yet the rumor was that Corey had performed in gay porn, and there were many videos online to prove it.

One of the alleged virtues of vouchers was that they enable students to escape pedophile teachers and to attend schools that ban LGBT students. I couldn’t make sense of these two lives.

Peter Greene wrote about Corey’s apparent double life.

Peter began:

I’m old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).

Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he’s been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice. 

The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn’t picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate– Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon. 

There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren’t wasting so much time panicking over other peoples’ business. 

And yet this parade of personal scandal– the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose–matters for several reasons….

I don’t wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don’t wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can’t spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself. 

You should open the post and read Peter’s measured views.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Character, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy
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