Archives for category: Billionaires
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Trump Sued IRS for $10 Billion. How Much Will He Pay Himself?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
10

Never in U.S. history has a President so brazenly enriched himself while serving in office. Trump’s family makes business deals with countries that pay enormous profits. Trump sells Trump-branded merchandise at every opportunity. Meme coins, crypto, invitations to dine with him for a hefty price. The money-making opportunities are abundant. Since the start of his second term, his net worth has increased by billions.

But the biggest grift of all is not yet settled. Trump sued the Treasury Department and the IRS for $10 billion for leaking data about his income taxes, an act done by a contractor who was punished with a five-year jail sentence.

The irony is that every president since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns, to demonstrate that they have no financial conflicts of interest and would not profit by serving as president. So, Trump is suing the IRS for doing what he should have done voluntarily but refused to do. He ran three times without releasing his tax returns.

By suing the IRS, he is in effect suing himself. Scott Bessent, appointed by Trump and serving at his pleasure, is on the other side of the table. What will he give his boss?

The plot thickens as the Justice Department, also under Trump’s thumb and eager to please him, is trying to reach a settlement in the case of Trump V. the Treasury Department/IRS controlled by Trump.

Trump sued in southern Florida, expecting or hoping to get a judge appointed by him, but must have been stunned when the judge turned out to be Obama appointee. This creates an incentive to settle the case before it goes to the judge.

Of all Trump’s many lawsuits, this may be the most sickening because it is the most corrupt and self-dealing.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer reported in The New York Times:

The Justice Department is holding internal discussions about settling President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Servicein the coming days, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, a move that could involve the government directly providing taxpayer funds or another public benefit to the president.

Whether to settle the suit and on what terms remains up in the air. One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Given that Mr. Trump oversees the I.R.S., the agency that he is suing, the judge in the case has taken a series of novel legal steps to probe whether there is a genuine controversy between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump. For a lawsuit to be valid, the two parties must actually be on opposite sides, otherwise the judge can throw out the case. The judge has ordered Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers — along with the Justice Department, which represents the I.R.S. in federal court — to submit briefs by May 20 explaining whether they are in conflict with one another.

White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people.

Mr. Trump has long maintained that the federal government was weaponized against him by political opponents, and he has spent much of his second term seeking retribution against, and sometimes compensation from, those he holds responsible. But depending on its terms, a settlement with the I.R.S. could be among Mr. Trump’s most brazen efforts to bend the government to his personal will — an agenda often carried out through the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump and his family have repeatedly disregarded Washington’s ethical guardrails aimed at preventing government officials from profiting from public office, including by pushing for more than $200 million in a separate administrative case with the Justice Department. But a settlement payment even a fraction of the size of Mr. Trump’s requested $10 billion could be much larger than his other attempts at private gain, potentially doubling his net worth.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the case, a spokesman for whom said, “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

In a previous filing in the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said they were in discussions with unidentified Justice Department attorneys “designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.” A government attorney has yet to make an appearance in the case.

A settlement in the coming days would fly in the face of efforts by the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida, to try and manage the conflict of interest in the case. Not only has she requested briefings from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the government by next week, she has appointed a group of six well-respected lawyers not otherwise involved in the case to provide her with their views on whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.

If a settlement is reached before Judge Williams has a chance to make a decision about whether the underlying lawsuit is valid, it could frustrate her, though legal experts say that her authority beyond that would be limited.

She would not likely be able to prevent Mr. Trump from simply withdrawing the suit and coming to a private agreement with the federal government. Even if the judge were to ultimately find that the settlement was collusive or reached in bad faith, she would likely be hamstrung in any effort to stop money or other benefits from changing hands.

Former government lawyers and experts see a clear defense to Mr. Trump’s suit, and do not see it as one the Justice Department would typically settle on its merits. A group of former I.R.S. and Justice Department officials filed an amicus brief in the case arguing, among other things, that Mr. Trump filed the suit too late and that his request for at least $10 billion was far too large.

Charles Littlejohn, the former I.R.S. contractor sentenced to five years in prison for the leak, provided tax return information about thousands of other wealthy Americans to ProPublica. Some of those people have also sued the I.R.S., and the Justice Department has defended those suits, in part by arguing that the government can’t be held liable for the actions of a contractor.

One of those suits against the I.R.S., from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, was settled in 2024, but the government did not pay Mr. Griffin any damages. Instead, the I.R.S. made a public apology for the leak.

It is unclear or how much money Mr. Trump could receive in a settlement, or if he will be paid at all.

But protection from I.R.S. audits could prove quite valuable. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president and vice president’s annual tax returns. The series of Times articles at the center of Mr. Trump’s suit, published in 2020, showed that he had paid little or no income tax for years. In 2024, the Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

At the same time, federal law prohibits the president from ordering the start or conclusion of an I.R.S. audit of a specific taxpayer.

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

Jan Resseger: Rebuffing the Attacks on Teachers and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
4

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher in Ohio who tracks education issues with careful attention to facts, details, and context. In this post, she notes that public schools have become the targets of ideologues in state legislatures and even the U.S. Department of Education. All too often, politicians use the public schools as a punching bag, but know nothing of their work or their accomplishments. werethe fsmiliar with the work and the accomplishments of teachers, she believes, state and federal officials would thank teachers instead disparaging them.

In recent local elections, voters in nearly 2/3 of school districts turned down relatively small property tax increases to fund the schools, usually repairs and physical upgrades. Legislators said this proved that voters are not happy with public schools, but Jan believes the election results reflect the squeeze of inflation and affordability caused by Trump’s policies and by the state’s failure to fund public schools adequately as it continues to expand charters and vouchers. Ohio has a Republican supermajority in both houses of its legislature, and they are eagerly funding charters and vouchers despite disappointing results.

As Jan writes, if the critics were familiar with the daily work of teachers, they would be champions of public schools, not critics.

She writes:

Attacks on the nation’s public schools fill the news. After last week’s May primary election in Ohio, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee reportedly blamed public schools for a statewide property tax revolt: “(T)hrowing money at schools stuck in an old way of thinking won’t solve any problems.”

And at the federal level at the end of April, the U.S. Department of Education, by amending federal guidance, stopped defining public school teachers and administrators as professionals by setting formal regulations that will mean graduate students in education cannot borrow as much money to pay for graduate school as others the Trump administration defines as professionals.  Education Week’s Evie Blad reports that a new federal regulation finalized by the U.S. Department of Education would “exclude education from a list of  ‘professional’ graduate degrees subjected to higher loan limits… The final rule lists the following graduate degrees as ‘professional’: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology, and clinical psychology.”  The new rule will make it harder for educators to afford graduate school by setting “new limits on federal student loans” for teachers and school administrators seeking advanced degrees to enhance their content knowledge and meet requirements for licensure.

The Department of Education must publish in the Federal Register new rules that are being proposed, and receive public comments prior to making the new rules final.  In the case of redefining graduate programs in education as non-professional, there was considerable pushback from the public. Secretary McMahon’s department ignored the comments.  For K-12 Dive, Anna Merod and Ben Unglesbee report: “Commenters told the department that impacted degree programs include master of arts in teaching, master of education, education specialist, master of library sciences, and doctor of education… The department’s final rule said the agency received many public comments calling for including education as a professional degree or to otherwise allow higher borrowing levels for students pursuing advanced education degrees.  In their arguments, commenters cited teacher shortages and the importance of graduate programs for licensure advancement… Additionally commenters noted that career changers who want to enter the profession pursue master’s degrees in education for certification, especially in high-need areas.”

Many of us value public education, but increasingly we take these institutions for granted. While schools are essential to our neighborhoods, our communities and our children, most of us have not been inside a school for years due to lockdowns during our society’s epidemic of gun violence. Constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black recently shared some statistics which ought to remind us why public schools are so essential and at the same time so vulnerable to politics: “(A)s the largest government institution in the United States, public education is an obvious potential target of those aiming to undermine faith in government institutions. Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.”

The Attack on Public Schools

The late Mike Rose, who devoted his long career at UCLA to preparing future members of the teaching profession, worried about what has, since the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, been a political attack on the nation’s public schools: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here.  Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination…”   (Why School? 2014 edition, pp 203-204)

Rose responded with a three year series of visits across the United States to the classrooms of excellent teachers identified by academics, by their peers, and by school district leaders. In the book which grew out of his school visits, Possible Lives, Rose described teachers at work and reflected on what school teachers do: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost.  It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)

What do teachers do?

Here instead, however, is what those three years showed Rose about school teachers and the complexity of their work: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.”  (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

In a comprehensive 2014 summary, Rose defines what teachers do:  “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

Reacquainting ourselves with Mike Rose’s thinking is one way for us all to consider the complexity of public schools as institutions and the challenges faced by the professionals who spend six or seven hours every day working with our children.  I fear that few of the state legislators and federal officials who deride teachers, who insult teachers by denying their professional status, and who chronically underfund public schools have recently spent much time visiting a public school.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ohio, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Teaching, Tennessee

Trump Gives No-Bid Contract to Paint the Historic Reflecting Pool Blue

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
24

Trump must spend a lot of time redesigning the nation’s Capitol. Tearing down the East Wing, without asking anyone’s permission; building a “triumphal arch” that will tower over the area; paving over the Rose Garden installed by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy; turning the historic White House Treaty Room, where important documents were signed, into a guest bedroom.

He is treating the White House as if it were his private property, when in fact he has a four-year lease on a historic home.

His latest project is to drain and repaint the reflecting pool that connects the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. He decided that the pool should be painted swimming pool blue. It’s been drained and the painting has begun.

The contract was awarded without competitive bids. Trump chose a swimming pool contractor who worked on the pool at one of his clubs.

Trump seems to think that he can do whatever he wants, without regard to law, tradition, or rules. Not for him!

Here is a gift article describing the situation.

At least, he didn’t paint it gold!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Jan Resseger: Linda McMahon Decides Which Federal Programs Live or Die, Not Congress

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2026 //
1

Jan Resseger, the most reliable analyst of federal programs, reports on the Trump administration’s decisions to increase or decrease or eliminate federal programs at will–regardless of Congressuonal direction.

By the way, be sure to read The New Yorker‘s fascinating dissection of the career path of wrestling entrepreneur and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Wrestling prepared her for politics, says writer Zach Helfand.

A brief excerpt:

Eventually, Linda McMahon came to be “tombstoned” (held upside down and slammed on her head) by a wrestler named Kane, “stunnered” (put in a three-quarter facelock jawbreaker) by Stone Cold Steve Austin, sexually assaulted, cheated on, driven to seek a divorce, lusted over, and sedated. Vince tried to get Shane to slap her in a scene, but Shane [her son] refused. Stephanie [her daughter] slapped her, though, and she slapped Stephanie. McMahon’s most memorable story arc involved Vince demanding a divorce, triggering a nervous breakdown in the ring which rendered her catatonic. For months, Vince would roll out her limp body in a wheelchair and subject her to various humiliations. The wrestler Trish Stratus, who was kissed and groped by Vince in a scene in front of a vegetative McMahon, has recalled that during rehearsal Linda asked, “If I drool, would that be more effective for my character?”

Before the election, I foolishly predicted that Trump would never get rid of the Department of Education because many Republicans support it. I did not anticipate that Trump would appoint a Secretary willing to hollow it out by transferring most of its programs to other departments.

Resseger follows up by showing how McMahon has cut and rearranged the budget:

If you have been tracking what is happening to federal funding for the nation’s public schools, you won’t be surprised to learn that Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman continues his role as the best reporter on this subject.  Here are two updates from last week.

How will federal funding flow this year once most of the Department of Education’s programs have been sent to other federal departments through interagency agreements?

Lieberman reassures state education officials and school district leaders that most key programs will continue to have their funds released “through the U.S. Department of Education’s grant portal this summer… Programs like Title I aid for disadvantaged students and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)… allocate funds for school districts, but by law the money flows first to states in two batches, one on July 1 and another three months later… In a statement, an Education Department spokesperson said the agency is ‘committed to delivering formula funding by the July 1 deadline.”

Operation of Title I is traveling to the Department of Labor, and the work IDEA is traveling to the Department of Health and Human Services.  Lieberman describes what is expected to happen with Title I: “The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration in recent months has advertised new education grant competitions ‘on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education,’ and the two agencies have touted their collaboration in jointly running the competitions.  Still, most staffers overseeing those programs still work for the Department of Education. The postings announcing grant availability list Education department email addresses under the section with contact information.”

To what extent did the Trump Administration Violate the Congressional power of the purse last year?

Lieberman reports that data recently released by the Department of Education shows that under Linda McMahon’s leadership, the Department of Education “sidestepped Congress on more than $1 billion in education spending.”

“The Education Department, under President Donald Trump, subsequently subtracted appropriated funding from more than a dozen programs and instead added those dollars to other priorities, according to an Education Week analysis of congressional justification documents the White House published this month as part of its fiscal year 2027 budget proposal… The Education Department typically publishes its ‘spending plan’ mere weeks after Congress passes a new fiscal year budget, confirming allocations lawmakers laid out in their budget bills.  Congress approved fiscal 2025 spending (last year’s final federal budget) in March of last year, but the Education Department’s spending plan never materialized. That means the recently published numbers offer the first glimpse at how the executive branch decided to spend funds Congress appropriated more than a year ago.”

Here are merely some of Lieberman’s examples of what the new numbers show.  “For four Education Department programs, the Trump administration spent more than what Congress had prescribed: charter schools ($60 million added), civics instruction ($140 million added), historically Black colleges and universities ($439 million added), and tribal colleges ($56 million added).  To come up with those added expenditures, the Trump administration effectively zeroed out another four programs entirely, rerouting a total of $463 million for teacher preparation, public television, university foreign-language studies programs, and Hispanic-serving higher education institutions.  For another eight programs, the executive branch underspent the allocation Congress approved. That included redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars for minority-serving institutions within a higher education grant program—Aid for Institutional Development—that the Trump administration has argued violates the Constitution.”

Lieberman explains where McMahon’s department found $60 million to add to charter school spending: “To bolster the Charter Schools program, the agency depleted the entire $31 million allocation for the Ready to Learn grant program, which supports the development of educational TV programming for young children. The remaining $29 million boot for charter schools came from portions of fiscal 2025 allocations for four other programs: Magnet Schools ($14 million), Javits Gifted and Talented ($9 million),  Statewide Family Engagement Centers ($3 million), and Assistance in Arts Education ($3 million). The Trump administration last year slashed ongoing grants for each of those four programs as well as dozens of others, arguing in many cases that individual grantees were engaged in diversity-related initiatives that contradicted the president’s priories. But for most of those changes, the department offered no public announcement, instead notifying individual grant recipients with little warning that their awards had been discontinued.”

Perhaps there will be less cutting or rearranging of Congressionally allocated education dollars in the coming year: “Lawmakers included language in the fiscal 2026 budget law they approved in February that much more explicitly restricts movement of money from one program to another. The Department has already begun soliciting new grant applications for programs it moved to disrupt or shutter last year… Lieberman reports that the ranking members of the Senate and House appropriations committees, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) “said they prioritized unambiguous guardrails in the fiscal 2026 budget to block the Trump administration from further reprogramming funds.”

Lieberman adds, however, that Office  of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought has threatened to use “pocket rescissions,’ in which the executive branch proposes to rescind appropriated funds so late in the fiscal year that the money expires whether Congress approves the changes or not. In other words, this year, Congress could allow Congressionally appropriated dollars expire.

Lieberman quotes Sarah Abernathy, who served for a decade as executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a federal budget advocacy group: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen an administration say, ‘We have tons of authority to make our own decisions about funding levels for programs.’ “

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Extremism, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

How Jared Kushner Became a Billionaire

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2026 //
2

A blog called Home of the Brave has been running a series about “Profiles in Corruption.”

The most recent was about Jared Kushner, husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

If the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in November, the public can expect a steady stream of investigations about how friends and relatives of Trump cashed in.

Home of the Brave writes:

This article is Part Three in a series called ‘Profiles in Corruption,’ in which we shine a light on the personal financial interests of people close to the president. Previously, we profiled Don Jr. and JD Vance.

Before Jared Kushner became a billionaire, he was the wealthy son of a New York real estate magnate and paid next to nothing in federal income taxes for several years running. The New York Times reported that between 2009 and 2016, Jared Kushner utilized real estate depreciation rules to avoid cutting checks to Uncle Sam. Kushner’s wealth quintupled from around $64 million in 2008 to $324 million in 2018.

The wealth he has accumulated since 2018 is even more staggering. Leveraging the rolodex he accrued as an advisor in the West Wing, Kushner launched a private equity firm in 2021 called Affinity Partners and quickly secured lucrative investments from abroad. In four years, he turned Affinity Partners into a $4.8 billionenterprise.

When you add up Kushner’s 100 percent ownership stake in Affinity, his 20 percent stakein Kushner Companies (his family’s real estate business), his $105 million dollar home in Florida, and his collection of artwork, cash, and other personal investments, Kushner’s total net worth now exceeds the three comma benchmark. He officially became a billionaire in September 2025.

Before we unpack how Kushner amassed his fortune, let’s ask: Why does this matter?

It’s not illegal for the president’s son-in-law to become rich; we are not alleging that Kushner has committed any crime. But since Kushner became a senior advisor in Trump’s first administration and an unofficial negotiator in the second, his business activity warrants close scrutiny. And his sprawling web of business deals with Middle Eastern governments raises concerns about whether Kushner can negotiate in good faith on behalf of the United States government.

Kushner’s story is part of a pattern: people in Trump’s inner circle are monetizing their proximity to the president and obtaining financial gains that wouldn’t exist without that access. The American people are left wondering whose interest is driving the administration’s policy decisions: the public’s interest, or the personal financial interests of the president’s friends and family.

Before he was part of the Trump family, Kushner was a scion of a different New York City real estate empire. Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, started a real estate development firm in New York in 1985. But in 2005, Charles Kushner was found guilty of federal tax violations and an attempted plan to blackmail his brother-in-law by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, secretly film the encounter, and send the video tape to Kushner’s own sister, the man’s wife. The elder Kushner was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison. (As an aside, Donald Trump pardoned Charles Kushner in 2020. Today, Charles Kushner serves as the United States Ambassador to France and Monaco.)

While Charles Kushner was serving his time in jail, Jared was called up to run the family’s real estate business. At the time, he was a joint law-M.B.A. student at NYU, and he was dating Ivanka Trump. He and Ivanka got married in October 2009

Fast forward to 2017. His personal wealth had grown substantially, in part due to his savvy navigation of federal income tax rules as discussed above. His father-in-law became the President of the United States, and Kushner served as a senior White House advisor and Middle East envoy. This role was unprecedented for someone with no government experience, no Senate confirmation, and no apparent expertise in foreign policy. He was the architect of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreements that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. In the process, he built close personal relationships with the leaders of several Gulf states including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known popularly as MBS.

When Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, US intelligence agencies concluded MBS ordered the killing. Kushner was, according to the New York Times, a key defenderof MBS inside the White House—helping ensure the relationship between Kushner’s country and MBS’s survived. (Kushner also reportedly communicated with MBS through WhatsApp to conduct official business—a breach of protocol that presaged  Signalgate.)

The $2 Billion Question

Six months after leaving the White House in January 2021, Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, for Affinity Partners, his newly formed private equity firm.

Here’s what makes that remarkable: Saudi Arabia’s own investment board didn’t want to do it. According to the New York Times, a review panel that screens investment for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund flagged Affinity Partners for inexperienced management, unsatisfactory due diligence, excessive management fees, and, in their words, “public relations risks” tied to Kushner’s White House role. Despite these concerns, Crown Prince MBS overruled the panel and approved the deal.

Also, interestingly, Kushner was not the only former Trump administration official soliciting investments from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund at the time. Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary during Trump’s first term, was also starting a new fund. Mnuchin, a man with decades of finance experience, received a $1 billion investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, setting off alarm bells in Congress. Despite acknowledging the risks and concerns in investing in Kushner’s firm, the Saudis wound up investing twice as much money in Kushner’s firm as they did Mnuchin’s.

The Gulf money kept coming for Jared. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and the Abu-Dhabi based firm Lunate combined to invest $1.5 billion into Affinity Partners in 2024. Today, Affinity manages roughly $4.8 billion in assets—the majority of it from the same Gulf countries whose leadership Kushner courted while serving as a US official.

Congress noticed. In 2024, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Or.) called on then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Kushner and Affinity Partners for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They alleged that Kushner was simultaneously acting as a “political consultant” to Trump and as what they called a “shadow diplomat” for Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari interests—while collecting tens of millions in management fees from those same governments.

After the 2024 election, when Republicans took control of Congress and the White House, the investigation into Kushner fizzled out.

The Bottom Line

Today, Jared Kushner is traveling the world—as an unelected, not-officially-appointed official—actively shaping US government policy. At the same time, he is soliciting funds for his own private equity business. In the Middle East especially, the countries with whom Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, is negotiating are greatly impacted by American foreign policy. Kushner’s participation in nuclear negotiations with Iran is well-documented. At least three separate reports suggest that Kushner told his father-in-law that Iran was using the negotiations to “buy time,” which encouraged Trump to order airstrikes targeting Iran’s senior leadership.

Given his financial interests in the region and his close relationships with senior government officials in Gulf countries, Kushner cannot be trusted to negotiate on the United States’s behalf in good faith. He cannot be relied upon to offer judicious, unbiased advice to his commander-in-chief. And given his proximity to the president, we cannot trust that other countries view their investments in Kushner’s private equity firm purely through a financial lens.

With Kushner, geopolitics, personal financial interests, national security and U.S. foreign policy are inextricably linked. Right now, he is purporting to represent the interests of all Americans as a de-facto diplomat, while so much of his personal wealth is linked to related government policy decisions. That’s a conflict of interest in plain sight. The least he could do is abide by public financial disclosure rules, as executive branch officials and presidential appointees have done for decades. He could attempt to dispel the public’s doubt about potential conflicts of interest. Instead, Kushner insists he’s just a “volunteer” helping out the government; as a result he is exempt from the usual financial disclosure laws.

Still, Kushner continues to hold a murky, unofficial role in Trump’s administration. This allows Kushner to legally negotiate with foreign countries on the president’s behalf while seeking investments from foreign countries’ sovereign wealth funds for his private business. We have to wonder what is guiding Kushner’s actions: his private financial interests or the public interests of the United States? We have to wonder if our government’s foreign policy is being exchanged for private investment into the president’s son-in-law’s private equity firm.

Yesterday, Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote the following to Kushner: “You are now reportedly participating as ‘Special Envoy for Peace’ in negotiations on behalf of the United States government to address the roiling conflicts in the Middle East. At the same time, you are soliciting billions of dollars from Gulf Monarchies for your private business ventures while already managing billions of dollars of their money in your international investment firm … To whom do your professional obligations and fiduciary duties belong?”

It’s a good question. If what’s best for Kushner’s bottom line is at odds with what’s best for the American people, can Kushner be trusted to faithfully defend the interests of the United States and suffer the personal financial hit?

Kushner is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. He is jet-setting around the globe, collecting $5 billion from foreign governments. Meanwhile, Americans are staring into a future where $5 per gallon gas prices are in the realm of possibility. We deserve better.

Home of the Brave exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies, and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Trump

Tom Ultican: Billionaire Fads Are Undermining Schools

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2026 //
3

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, says that all the bright and shiny fads have actually harmed students and teachers. I have not posted the entirety of his commentary. To finish reading it, open this link.

He writes:

Trump’s billionaire education leader, Linda McMahon, claimed on Fox News, “We’re doing terribly, I mean, our education system’s failed our kids.” Like a typical oligarch, she bolstered her point by mischaracterizing NAEP assessment levels stating, “only about 30% of high school and eighth graders can read proficiently or do math proficiently.” Maybe that sounds bad, but the reality is those numbers indicate that 30% of students are achieving at a high B or low A grade-level which sounds pretty good to me.

McMahon was promoting her nonpartisan “History Rocks!” tour. The sponsors of the tour are certainly not nonpartisan. They include America 250 Civics Education Coalition, led by pro-Trump America First Policy Institute which is composed of right-wing organizations such as Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation.

However, even though standardized testing is a terrible method for evaluating schools and students, it is notable that the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results have been falling since 2013.

The NAEP data plotted above is for all tested US students in 8th grade and 4th grade reading. Around 2013, results started dropping. Data for math also shows this same trend. Because education has so many variables, establishing a solid cause and effect relationship for this decline is impossible.

Based on my personal experience in the classroom and my years of observing education outcomes, I have developed a theory that at least partially explains the decline.

Education Technology

In the 1990s, I worked in Silicon Valley researching friction problems associated with computer equipment. Part of my assignment was to develop software that ran testing devices, gathered massive data sets and loaded them into a Microsoft data base which created reports that I shared with customers. Once the testing was setup and started, everything from then on was automated. I loved pushing technology and making it do things no one else had.

In 1999, I got tired of Silicon Valley. That is when I returned to San Diego and sought a teaching credential. At the time, I imagined being able to use my technology expertise in future classrooms. I had become genuinely excited about education technology (edtech).

I wish I could say my expectations were met but I cannot.

I discovered that instead of edtech driving exploration, it was aimed at controlling and replacing teachers.

As part of the master of education program at UCSD, we were sent to local schools to work with students. I went to a local high school to work with struggling math students in a recovery class. Students were assigned to work on computer presented math problems which were then graded by the computer.

As the education technology critic Audre Watters has observed:

“Just because it’s a worksheet on an iPad doesn’t mean it’s transformational or exciting. It’s still a worksheet.”

In retrospect, this experience was an early effort to replace teachers with computer screens. Instead of working on making edtech an exciting addition to education, the effort was pointed toward putting kids at screens instead learning from teachers. The technology industry was promising to reduce the need for costly teachers.

Physics Lab Class

This picture shows an example of using technology to engage students in authentic learning. Two photogates affixed to the ramp were accurate to + or – 0.001 seconds. Here the students were adjusting the ramp to achieve constant velocity when a marble rolled down the ramp. The photogates provided data including the time for test object to roll through the gate and the time between gates. Since students new the diameter of the test ball and the distance between the gates, they were able to calculate three velocities. Once the three velocities were all equal, they changed to a test ball with identical geometry but significantly less mass. They were then able to observe that the mass of the ball did not change the velocity which accords with Galileo Galilei’s 1589 experiment testing mass and gravity.

Unfortunately, only small companies were working to develop engaging technology for learning. Larger companies were developing school management systems that gathered large data sets on all students and teachers. Or they were creating schemes where teachers created lessons on their platforms which then claimed ownership of the lessons.

The school district I was in bought every student an I-pad and then three years later replaced those I-pads with laptop computers. Because these devices were such a classroom distraction, teachers often required students to put them in their backpacks and store them under their desks.

It was worse than a waste of money. It was undermining learning.

 In my AP physics classes, students were not working through the assigned problems. They discovered that almost all physics problems had a worked-out example on line. I was getting the most beautiful work I had ever seen but the students were clueless when tested.

It seems fair to identify edtech as a possible cause for declining test scores. Artificial intelligence will likely make — not working or thinking — an even bigger problem.

Science of Reading

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. Establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort from the beginning. It was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers over 18-months. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important domains. They did not review everything and there was no new research. Their report is the basis for SoR.

To finish reading the post, open this link.

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Literacy, Technology

A Must-Watch Interview: Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
2

This is a very important interview, a thoughtful discussion between two remarkable people.

Two historians talk about Trump tyranny, the rule of oligarchs, and the power of the fossil fuel industry.

Snyder reminds us of the importance of the November elections. It’s our chance to put limits on the oligarchs and authoritarians.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

Bernie Sanders: This is What Oligarchy Looks Like

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2026 //
7

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont posted this message on social media:

@BernieSanders •

One family, the right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons, will soon control:

TikTok

CBS

CNN

HBO

Discovery Channel

BET

Cartoon Network

Comedy Central

DC Studios

Fandango

Miramax

MTV

Nickelodeon

Paramount

Pluto TV

Showtime

TBS

The CW

TNT

Warner Bros.

And more

This is oligarchy.

•

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Media

Paul Krugman: Treason in the Oil Markets

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2026 //
14

Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize winning economist, writes about shady speculation in the oil futures market. He says it’s not just insider trading, it’s treason.

He writes:

Source: Yahoo Finance


Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.

But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.

The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.

But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?
The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,

At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.

This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.

When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”

Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.

Second, financial trading based on what should be closely held secrets reveals information to current or potential foreign adversaries. To exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, who needs to bribe agents within the government, or recruit them with honey traps, when you can infer the same information by keeping track of transactions on futures markets?

Finally, there isn’t that big a gap between using knowledge of national secrets to make lucrative financial trades and simply selling those secrets to the highest bidder. Once you’re breached the line that says you shouldn’t profit personally from access to information that is or should be highly classified, the line between trading based on state secrets and selling those secrets directly is a blurry one.

In fact, I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning. Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?

I’m sure we’ll find out once Kash Patel’s FBI carries out its careful, no-holds-barred investigation.

For the humor-impaired, that was a joke. However, I do believe that the culprits will be easy to determine once Democrats are back in power, and they must apply the full force of law to the people responsible.

One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.

There’s a broader lesson here: You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.

Among other things, deeply corrupt governments tend to be very bad at waging war, no matter how much they may exalt “warrior ethos” and “lethality.” When we do a post-mortem on how the Iran debacle happened, arrogant ignorance may still get top billing. But grotesque venality will come a close second.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Cheating, Corruption, Fraud, Trump

Peter Greene: Nebraska GOP Wants Vouchers, Even After Voters Rejected Them

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2026 //
1

Peter Greene retired after 39 years of teaching, and now is the best-informed and most prolific writer about misguided and sometimes malicious efforts to “reform” public schools.

Peter has his own blog–Curmudgucation–and also writes a column about reform frauds for FORBES.

In this post, he tells the remarkable and unsavory story of vouchers in Nebraska. Nebraska is a solid red state, but its voters don’t want vouchers. Rural legislators–even Republicans–know it’s a waste of money and are sure to defund their public schools.

But the voucher-pushers keep looking for clever ways to bypass the voters, who have made it clear that they don’t want vouchers.

Peter Greene writes:

Nebraska’s voucher fans are bound and determined, like legislators in many states, to get around the voters so they can get vouchers installed.

In May of 2023, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools.

The concept has been floated in Nebraska before, notably turning up more than once in 2022’s session. In 2023, it finally progressed through the legislature. But NSEA political action director Brian Nikkelson told the Nebraska Examiner that the public did not support the vouchers, and if the bill was passed, there would be a petition drive to force the bill to go on the ballot for voters to decide.

And so there was. It was a heck of a battle, with the pro-voucher forces have attracting a mountain of money, some of it from outside the state. Paul Hammel at the Nebraska Examiner reported that big money contributors include C.L. Werner, an Omaha-based trucking company executive ($100,000), Tom Peed and his son Shawn of a Lincoln publishing company ($75,000 each), and former Nebraska governor U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts ($25,000). Governor Pillen himself has contributed $100,000 to the campaign to save vouchers from a vote.

At the same time, Hammel reported, the American Federation for Children, the school choice advocacy group founded by Betsy DeVos, has contributed $103,000 in in-kind services and $583,000 in cash to the campaign.

It didn’t matter. Support Our Schools needed 60,000 signatures to force a referendum. They ended up with about twice that number (that’s roughly 10% of all eligible voters in the state). So this November, the voters of Nebraska were supposed to have their say. So you’d expect that voucher fans, who keep telling us how much everyone loves vouchers, would just sit back, secure in the knowledge that their program would win the referendum handily.

Well, no.

Instead, legislators cooked up LB 1402. This bill proposed to repeal the Opportunity Scholarships that were created under LB 753, and then to replace them with a new version of Opportunity Scholarships. This version would have been an education savings account (ESA) style super-voucher that hands over taxpayer money to send a student to a private or parochial school. It was more sketchy than last year’s bill because it appropriates state funds (rather than tax-credited contributions) to pay for the vouchers.

But mostly what it did it render the petition drive moot, because it repealed the version of vouchers that the public was going to vote on. “Ha,” they apparently thought. “That’ll stop those damned voters.”

In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. That repeal passed in November 2024, with 45 out of 49 legislative districts voting to repeal, and Nebraska’s voucher law was toast. The voters had sent a clear and unequivocal message.

Surely the state’s leaders would say, “Well, the voters have spoken, so that’s that.”

Fat chance.

Voucherphiles were back with a new proposal in January 2025. “I’m not dissuaded by the fact that it was defeated at the ballot box,” said freshman State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of Omaha.

To nobody’s surprise, Governor Jim Pillen was first to jump on the as-yet-rule-free federal school voucher proposal. Okay, it was a small surprise, because Nebraska is not known for grabbing federal dollars, but hey– this is Free Federal Money for private schools. In fact, U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., helped Congress usher the tax credits provision onto President Donald Trump’s desk, even though his home district was among those shooting down vouchers in 2024.

Pillen’s new idea is to sell vouchers for the “gap” year, the year between the time when Nebraska’s vouchers are required to end and the time when the federal vouchers are supposed to kick in. The proposal is being sent through the state’s Labor Department rather than the Department of Education because that would skirt the requirement for any sort of hearing or debate, probably because voucherphiles have a pretty good idea of how that would go.

Nebraska is one of those states where rural Republicans have opposed all attempts at vouchers, and they aren’t sounding any friendlier about this one. Zach Wendling at Nebraska Examiner talked to State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a Republican who opposed Linehan’s previous proposals; he said he is opposed to using any public money for private school choice. He’s still waiting to see how the federal tax credit program includes public schools (because, remember, there are no actual rules yet attached to the federal voucher program).

“The referendum simply eliminated that. Period, end of story,” he continued on the state policy. “There’s no other interpretation you can draw from that.”

The gap funding would cost about $5 million for around 2,500 students. Of course, with no rules in place, it’s possible that not all of Nebraska’s current voucher students would qualify for federal vouchers. Nor can we predict what slice of the federal money pie Nebraska would be entitled to. If it comes to that, we could expect voucherphiles to argue that more gap funding is needed to cover new gaps, or maybe to expand above and beyond the federal offerings.

Nebraska voucher fans are making a lot of “think of the children” noises, but families have plenty of time to look for new arrangements (i.e. finding the student a new school or going back to paying the full tuition with their own money).

This is the same story we’ve seen over and over again. Vouchers never win when voters have a chance to be heard. Every single taxpayer-funded voucher program in this country has been created without giving the taxpayers a say or ignoring the say they had already said. Taxpayer-funded vouchers are all the result of legislators backed by deep-pocketed voucher fans deciding they are going to inflict these on the taxpayers. Nebraska’s taxpayers just happen to have a few more tools to fight back with, but Nebraska’s voucherphiles just keep looking for a way to avoid that whole pesky democracy thing.

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Nebraska, Privatization, Rural Schools, School Choice, Vouchers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »