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Harold Meyerson: Bidenenomics Is Working Faster Than Expected

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2023 //
13

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect writes that many people think that government works slowly and is outpaced by business efficiency. But, he writes, Biden’s infrastructure plans are starting at a fast clip.

America’s industrial renaissance is happening faster than almost anyone anticipated.

Meyerson writes:

It is a lie universally acknowledged as truth that the government is slow, that if you want something done quickly, you turn to the private sector.

Of course, there are a plethora of instances in which government is slow. Consider, for instance, the efforts of the National Labor Relations Board to compel companies to pay workers whom they’ve illegally fired for trying to unionize. Lawbreaking companies can drag this out for years. Of course, that’s because, beginning with the Taft-Hartley Act 75 years ago, companies and their handmaidens in Congress and the courts have stripped the NLRB of the power to enforce this law expeditiously. When the government is slow, that’s often because powerful private-sector actors have slowed it down to their own advantage.

But sometimes, government can be more swift and effective than its critics can even imagine, as the implementation of the three signature pieces of Biden administration/Democratic Congress legislation is now demonstrating. The Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have spurred the economy, which grew by 2.4 percent in the last quarter, well beyond anything the private sector could have accomplished by itself, and in less time than establishment economists thought possible. America is building factories again: The spending on factory construction is up by 76 percentfrom last year. Business spending on all forms of infrastructure—not just factories but also transportation equipment, software, and the like—is up by 56 percent. Through the magic of Keynes’s multiplier effect, government subsidies and outlays of roughly $300 billion on such projects have led to an increase in business investment of an additional $500 billion. And bolstering all this investment is the consumer purchasing power that has resulted from Biden’s initial stimulus legislation, which ended the COVID recession much more quickly than any recession in American history and yielded near record-low unemployment and levels of labor force participation not seen in many years.

Biden has sometimes been compared to Franklin Roosevelt for his efforts to renew and expand the kind of social insurance and worker empowerment initiatives that FDR undertook. I’d argue that it’s the scope, speed, and success of his public investments that most resemble Roosevelt’s. Facing the actual prospect of mass starvation in the winter of 1933-1934, FDR’s public-works program managed to employ three million Americans—in a nation of 130 million—in just 60 days. The defense spending that began in 1940 in response to the very real threat of the fascist control of all Eurasia built an army that then ranked 39th in the world in size into one that was the world’s largest by 1944, at which time the nation’s production of planes, ships, and tanks exceeded the combined total of all other nations’.

Learning not just from Roosevelt’s successes but also from the failure of the Obama administration to highlight the projects that its stimulus spending had created, Biden and Democrats are now volubly touting the projects that their own stimulus programs have engendered, many of which are already springing up. Given the public’s skepticism about the effects and durability of this economic revival, and the Republicans’ insistence that no such revival exists, Biden & Company know they will have to keep making this case straight through November of next year.

That said, can we acknowledge that Bidenomics is not only successful but speedy? Yes, we can.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Accountability, Biden, Creativity, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Funding

Rather and Kirschner: Our Fragile Freedoms

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
37

Dan Rather and Eliot Kirschner write a blog on current events called “Steady.” We are reminded about how much we miss Dan Rather on the news. In this post, they write about Trump’s latest indictment.

They write:

In an era of unprecedented upheaval, it is difficult to find suitable context and perspective for the latest indictment of Donald Trump.

After all, this isn’t the first indictment he has faced, or even the first in federal court. It isn’t the first time we have had to grapple with his moral failings, the unleashing of political violence, or the degradation of our constitutional order.

Much of what is in the document made public on Tuesday we knew before. We saw it unfold on TV. We read the reporting of its aftermath. We heard the gripping public testimony in front of the bipartisan House Select Committee that investigated the insurrection of January 6.

It wasn’t even that the indictment was a surprise. For a long time, the investigation has been in the public consciousness. After Trump announced that he had been told he was a target, it was mostly a matter of when, not if.

It is important to keep in mind that this latest indictment does not charge Trump with arguably the gravest potential crimes, like insurrection or sedition, even though many who watched in horror the events leading up to and cresting on January 6 think it obvious he is guilty of both.

Randall Eliason, a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, argued in a New York Times opinion piece titled “What Makes Jack Smith’s New Trump Indictment So Smart” that the special counsel wisely chose to limit the scope of the case (and the number of defendants) to just Trump despite the six other unnamed but easily identifiable co-conspirators. Smith did this, the piece points out, in order to proceed quickly to trial and yield the best chance at conviction. “Although it might have been psychologically gratifying to see Mr. Trump charged with sedition, the name of the legal charge is less important than the facts that will make up the government’s case,” Eliason wrote.

In other words, Smith decided not to try to prove too much; keep the charges few and based on what facts he believes are most likely to convince a jury — and whatever part of the public may be open to persuasion.

Let us stop for a moment to ponder these facts and the narrative they tell. They are chilling, but we must remember the Department of Justice will have to prove them in a court of law. Trump is presumed not guilty until and unless he is proven otherwise. He has every right to mount a vigorous defense. It’s probably best for the country that his lawyers fight hard and smart. The more thoroughly this case is adjudicated, the more its conclusion is likely to be strengthened by the process.

But in reading the indictment, all who love and care for our precious republic and its democratic traditions should feel a deep shudder of fear that we were driven to such a precipice. The writing itself is not fancy — no stacking of dependent clauses or diving into a thesaurus in search of adjectives. Reading the introduction aloud, it almost has the syncopation of a children’s picture book, even if the story it tells is one of horror:

The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.

So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.

These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.

But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.

He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.

His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election result.

What follows that in the indictment is a story we all saw unfold in real time, laid bare in a double-spaced legal document. There is also a lot to read between the lines. Even former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who enabled many of Trump’s worst instincts and misled the American public about Trump’s fitness for office, told CNN he thinks prosecutors have more evidence than what they have shared thus far. He called the indictment “very spare” and added, “I think there’s a lot more to come and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.”

Be that as it may, these 45 pages comprise one of the most consequential pieces of writing in American history. It does not have the earth-shattering rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or the urgent morality of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But it is a clear statement at one of the most pivotal intersections in our nation’s narrative; that autocracy and the fomenting of political violence to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power is not only anathema to our values — it is illegal.

History is riddled with “what ifs.” We are left to ponder what the worst outcomes might have been if things had turned out differently, from our own revolution, to World War II, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. January 6 should be added to that list.

As bad as it was, it could have been (and came close to being) much worse. And that reality bursts forth from this indictment. According to what is written in the indictment, violence was expected by Trump and his co-conspirators. They understood that their schemes to steal an election would almost certainly plunge the nation into chaos. That was the plan.

In the end, their plot was unsuccessful, but the danger has not receded. Trump is running for president. At this point he is the favorite, by far, to win the Republican nomination. And that means he could win reelection. That result would likely usher in chaos, greater and deeper division than even what we now have. It could very well end the country as we know it.

That may sound to some to be hyperbole, but by any reasonable analysis, that is a lesson to be learned from this indictment. And that is what Jack Smith hopes to prove in federal court. One can make a credible argument that this is one of (if not THE) most consequential criminal cases in American history.

A former and potentially future president is accused of trying to destroy the United States. His own vice president is a key witness. You couldn’t make this up. But this is the reality of what we face. Democracy is always fragile and must be fought for to survive. A free people must constantly be on alert and working to preserve their liberty.

At the birth of our nation, Benjamin Franklin is said to have quipped that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.” Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, spoke of how the Civil War was a “test” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.” We, the people, can take nothing for granted.

This concept of the United States of America, still relatively new in human history, is impossible to maintain without the continual peaceful transfer of power at the top. That is what this new indictment is about.

In his first inaugural address as governor of California in 1967, Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently of this truth:

“We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants. This continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it. Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

This is what is at stake for the generations alive today. It is an epic battle that will now take place in federal court as well as at the ballot box.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom

Gary Rubinstein: The Disaster Facing Houston Under Mike Miles

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
8

Gary Rubinstein has been a teacher since 1991. Four of those years were spent teaching in Houston. Gary has been watching what’s happening since Mike Miles arrived and was taken aback when Miles imposed sweeping changes on the district without spending time getting to know it. Miles’ “reforms,” Gary predicts, are heading for trouble. Those reforms come out of the “corporate reform” playbook. Maybe Miles took a page or two from the Broad Academy guidelines, applicable in all situations.

Gary writes:

With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States. For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023. The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees. Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent. While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get the ‘lay of the land,’ Miles instantly proposed some radical, and in my estimation, terrible, reforms which I will outline in this post.

He identified the three lowest performing high schools in HISD: Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest. Those three schools together with the 26 middle and elementary schools that feed into those high schools were to become part of a new ‘New Education System’ known as NES. This NES is the latest ‘turnaround’ district. Over the past 20 years there have been several of these, the most prominent are the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2003 and the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, created in 2011 with Race To The Top money. There was also Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA) in 2011 as well as a few more that have popped up around the country. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful takeover of this sort in the history of this country. The EAA has been shut down, the RSD has been merged back into the New Orleans school system and the ASD has floundered, never having any success at all in improving the test scores of the schools it took over. It is funny/sad to see this hopeful panel discussion by the leaders of these districtsbefore it was known how badly they would fail. (I’ve written a lot about the ASD, but here is something I wrote summarizing the history of these turnaround efforts.)

These turnaround efforts sometimes have school closures or staffs at schools having to reapply for their jobs and often have the schools converted into charters. For the HISD NES model, the schools are not getting taken over by charters but teachers do have to reapply for their jobs. Teachers at these schools will get raises and opportunities for bonuses with test score based merit pay. Other changes that will happen at these 29 schools are a restructuring of the teacher role where the teacher is like a ‘surgeon’ doing the most important part of the job while other tasks like grading, lesson planning, and discipline are done by others. Also, you may have read about elsewhere, libraries at these schools are converted into discipline centers where students are sent to watch a live streamed version of the lesson on a computer screen.

The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail. It is like trying to treat a broken leg by giving a patient a complete blood transfusion.

As someone who has been teaching since 1991 – and my first four years were in HISD actually, looking at the list of changes makes me shudder. Anyone who ever taught can see how most of these changes will make the schools worse but I want to summarize some of them here.

All teachers have to reapply for their jobs – When students come back and learn that many of their favorite teachers were not hired back, this can be very traumatic. There is no guarantee that the teachers who replace those who weren’t hired back, even if those teachers have been successful at a different school, will necessarily be a good fit at this school. This uncertain improvement coupled with guaranteed disruption is a pretty big risk. Why not first see how the current staff does with these new supports?

Please open the link to finish this important article.

Gary reviews the other major elements of Miles’s prepackaged plan and explains why they are unlikely to make a difference. They haven’t worked before, why will they work now? As Gary writes, takeovers typically fail because they are based on fake assumptions and prepackaged cures.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Houston, Parents, Teachers and Teaching, Texas

Two Democratic Legislators from Wisconsin Attended ALEC Meeting, Spill the Beans

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
10

Two Democratic legislators from Wisconsin joined the hard-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to keep track of what their opponents were planning. They recently attended the 50th annual ALEC convention in Orlando, Florida.

ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.

Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.

Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.

Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.

Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.

“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”

“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”

Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.

Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…

As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.

Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….

On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.

“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”

Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.

“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”

On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”

“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.

To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.

“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”

Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers

Read Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Indictment of Donald J. Trump

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
61

Inform yourself about the latest federal indictments of former President Donald J. Trump. Do not listen solely to what talking heads on the TV news say about the indictment.

Read it yourself.

When I read it, several points seemed especially noteworthy.

First, all of the incriminating evidence came from Republicans, most of whom were appointed by Trump to advise him as Justice Department officials and White House advisors.

Second, Trump was repeatedly told that he had lost the election. He was told this by a long list of high-level officials appointed by him.

Third, Trump was told repeatedly by state Republican leaders that his claims of voter fraud in specific states such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were wrong.

Fourth, no matter how many times Trump was told that there was no election fraud that would change the outcome, he continued to repeat the lies about dead voters, illegal voters, and biased voting machines in speeches and on Twitter. There was never any evidence of voter fraud, but Trump would not stop lying about it.

Fifth, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman repeatedly told state officials about the scale of voter fraud in their states despite the lack of evidence for their claims.

Sixth, Trump and his co-conspirators devised a scheme to present alternate slates of electors in seven contested states. At first, they told the alternate electors that they would serve only if the courts determined that the results of the elections were illegal.

Seventh, since there were no successful court cases, the Trump strategy changed. He would pressure Mike Pence to recognize the alternate electors or to declare that he was returning the electoral votes to the states to investigate. Trump’s goal was to delay certification of Biden’s victory and to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election.

Eighth, in the end, Trump’s conspiracy to block the peaceful transition of power was foiled because Pence would not go along with it. I read elsewhere that Pence consulted retired Federal Judge Mike Luttig, a conservative Republican. Luttig told Pence that his role on January 6 was purely ceremonial; he did not have the authority to change the outcome. Despite four years of obsequious loyalty to Trump, Pence stood up to Trump’s relentless pressure.

Lessons:

1. Our country avoided a major Constitutional crisis. If Pence had bowed to Trump, if Biden’s election had been canceled, the nation would have suffered grievously. The consequences would have been dire.

2. Trump knew that he lost the election. Almost all of his closest advisors told him so. But Trump is a sore loser. He refused to accept his loss. He simply ignored the facts and found a pod of true believers who conspired with him to overturn the election without regard to the vote, the Constitution or the good of democracy.

3. Trump and his co-conspirators are evil people who were ready to destroy our democracy rather than ceding power to the Biden administration.

4. I hope Trump is found guilty but I don’t believe he will ever serve a day in prison. He will be pardoned to avoid the spectacle of a former president in prison. However, in my view, the other conspirators are lawyers. They should lose their law licenses and serve time in prison.

Categories Accountability, Character, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Ohio: Voters Reject Issue 1!

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
48

The AP reported that Issue 1 was defeated today in Ohio. with 65%+ of the vote counted, 57% of voters opposed Issue 1.

Issue 1 would have changed the vote required to change the state constitution from a simple majority of 50% + 1 to 60% + 1. The goal of the Republicans was to block a referendum in November on abortion rights.

In November, voters will decide whether to add protection of reproductive rights to the Ohio Constitution. It appears that they will, now that Issue 1 was defeated. Red state Kansas voters did the same, and voters in Kentucky and Montana rejected laws banning abortion.

Wherever the issue goes to a vote, a majority will support women’s reproductive rights. To restore the rights canceled by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, take it to the voters.

Democracy rules.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ohio, Republicans

OHIO: Vote NO on Issue #1! Today!

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2023 //
2

The Ohio legislature passed a strict ban on abortion, prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. That is so early that women don’t know they are pregnant. So the law amounts to a total ban.

Supporters of abortion rights gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot that would write protection for abortion rights into the state constitution.

The legislature doesn’t want that referendum to pass, so they called a special election for August 8—TODAY—asking if voters would change the law so that it takes a 60% + 1 majority to pass a change in the state constitution. Currently, a referendum wil pass with 50% plus 1. (Several months ago, the legislature banned special elections in August because of low turnout; but they ignored the law they assed, hoping for low turnout.)

The legislature assumes that the abortion rights supporters cannot teach 60%.

This referendum attacks not just abortion rights; it attacks democracy. Should it pass, any change in the state constitution would be very difficult to achieve.

If you support democracy, if you believe that 50% + 1 should win elections, vote NO today against Issue #1.

No matter how you feel about abortion, defend democracy. Vote NO on Issue #1.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Ohio

DeSantis Says He Will “Start Slitting Throats” After His Election; Federal Employees Object to Threats of Violence

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2023 //
42

Ron DeSantis is campaigning to be more racist, more homophobic, angrier and more violent than Trump. To get to Trump’s right is not an easy matter. DeSantis must work hard to reach the militias, Proud Boys, and KKK element in the GOP. He has to sound like a fascist.

He recently proclaimed while campaigning in New Hampshire that if he is elected, he will “start slitting throats” of federal employees, otherwise known as “the Deep State.” On Day One.

The union representing federal employees thought that was a disgusting proposal.

The knives are out in a seemingly avoidable war between Florida’s Governor and a union representing 760,000 federal employees.

In a pointed statement, the American Federation of Government Employees‘ head said Ron DeSantis had “no place in office” after the Governor’s vow to eliminate members of the federal workforce by violent means.

“We’re going to have all these deep state people, you know we’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” the Governor said in Rye, New Hampshire this week at a BBQ event.

“We’ve seen too often in recent years – from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to the sacking of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — that violent anti-government rhetoric from politicians has deadly consequences. Any candidate who positions themselves within that shameful tradition has no place in public office,” asserted AFGE National President Everett Kelley Thursday.

“No federal employee should face death threats from anyone, least of all from someone seeking to lead the U.S. government,” Kelley added, calling on DeSantis to “retract his irresponsible statement.”

Ironically, the Granite State promise to slit throats is only one recent time he used the vivid image to make a point about reshaping the federal government to his liking.

During a July 27 interview with Real America’s Voice, DeSantis said he wanted a Defense Secretary who was ready to “slit some throats” and be “very firm, very strong” in imposing their will.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

South Dakota: A Catholic School Parent Explains Why He Opposes Vouchers

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
50

Kevin Woster, a veteran journalist in South Dakota, explains here why he opposes vouchers, even though he sent his own children to Catholic school and appreciated the education they got there.

He notes that the South Dakota legislature considered vouchers and did not pass them but he is sure that the issue will be back again for debate.

He and his wife made the right decision by sending their children to Catholic schools, but he nonetheless thinks it would be wrong to take public money for private schools.

He believes that public money should not be used to fund private schools.

It’s public money, for public schools. And the commitment and responsibility to provide a free public education isn’t a new idea. It’s a constitutional idea, as in the South Dakota Constitution, which reads in part:

“The stability of a republican form of government depending on the morality and intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature to establish and maintain a general and uniform system of public schools wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all; and to adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education.”

And as taxpaying citizens, it’s our duty to support that system of free public schools.

Making your choice with your checkbook, not public money

Just because my first wife, Jaciel, and I decided to send our kids to a Catholic-school system didn’t mean we were absolved of our responsibilities as citizens to support public schools. You don’t stop being a citizen because you decide to become a private-school parent. You are both. You must be both.

It would be wrong, he believes, to weaken the public schools for the benefit of those who have made private choices.

Categories Catholic Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Funding, Religion, School Choice, South Dakota, Special Education, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump
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