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David French: I Fought to Protect Free Speech, I Fought So That Athletes Could “Take a Knee”

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
26

It has often been said that the true test of free speech is whether you protect the speech you disagree with. Popular speech does not need protection. Dissent does.

David French is a senior writer at the National Review and a military veteran. He wrote this article for The New York Times. It is titled “Conservatives Fail the NFL’s Free Speech Test.”

I love this article.


The United States is in the grips of a free-speech paradox. At the same time that the law provides more protection to personal expression than at any time in the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans feel less free to speak. The culprit isn’t government censorship but instead corporate, community and peer intimidation.

Conservatives can recite the names of the publicly shamed from memory. There was Brendan Eich, hounded out of Mozilla for donating to a California ballot initiative that defined marriage as the union of a man and woman. There was James Damore, abruptly terminated from Google after he wrote an essay attributing the company’s difficulty in attracting female software engineers more to biology and free choice than to systemic discrimination. On campus, the list is as long and grows longer every semester.

It is right to decry this culture of intolerance and advocate for civility and engagement instead of boycotts and reprisals. The cure for bad speech is better speech — not censorship. Take that message to the heartland, and conservatives cheer.

Until, that is, Colin Kaepernick chose to kneel. Until, that is, the president demanded that the N.F.L. fire the other players who picked up on his protest after he was essentially banished from the league.

That was when the conservative mob called for heads to roll. Conform or face the consequences.

On Wednesday, the mob won. The N.F.L. announced its anthem rules for 2018, and the message was clear: Respect the flag by standing for the national anthem or stay in the locker room. If you break the rules and kneel, your team can be fined for your behavior.

This isn’t a “middle ground,” as the N.F.L. claims. It’s not a compromise. It’s corporate censorship backed up with a promise of corporate punishment. It’s every bit as oppressive as the campus or corporate attacks on expression that conservatives rightly decry.

But this is different, they say. This isn’t about politics. It’s about the flag.

I agree. It is different. Because it’s about the flag, the censorship is even worse.

One of the most compelling expressions of America’s constitutional values is contained in Justice Robert Jackson’s 1943 majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. At the height of World War II, two sisters, both Jehovah’s Witnesses, challenged the state’s mandate that they salute the flag in school. America was locked in a struggle for its very existence. The outcome was in doubt. National unity was essential.

But even in the darkest days of war, the court wrote liberating words that echo in legal history: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Make no mistake, I want football players to stand for the anthem. I want them to respect the flag. As a veteran of the war in Iraq, I’ve saluted that flag in foreign lands and deployed with it proudly on my uniform. But as much as I love the flag, I love liberty even more.

The N.F.L. isn’t the government. It has the ability to craft the speech rules its owners want. So does Google. So does Mozilla. So does Yale. American citizens can shame whomever they want to shame.

But what should they do? Should they use their liberty to punish dissent? Or should a free people protect a culture of freedom?

In our polarized times, I’ve adopted a simple standard, a civil liberties corollary to the golden rule: Fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself. Do you want corporations obliterating speech the state can’t touch? Do you want the price of participation in public debate to include the fear of lost livelihoods? Then, by all means, support the N.F.L. Cheer Silicon Valley’s terminations. Join the boycotts and shame campaigns. Watch this country’s culture of liberty wither in front of your eyes.

The vice president tweeted news of the N.F.L.’s new policy and called it “#Winning.” He’s dead wrong. It diminishes the marketplace of ideas. It mocks the convictions of his fellow citizens. And it divides in the name of a false, coerced uniformity. Writing in the Barnette decision, Justice Jackson wisely observed, “As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be.”

The N.F.L. should let players kneel. If it lets them kneel, it increases immeasurably the chances that when they do rise, they will rise with respect and joy, not fear and resentment. That’s the “winning” America needs.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Freedom of Speech

“What NFL Owners Can Learn from the History of Memorial Day”

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2018 //
8

E.J. Dionne writes here about the lessons of Memorial Day for NFL owners, who have agreed that their players are not allowed to “take a knee” when the National Anthem is sung to protest police brutality, although it is allowed in the privacy of the locker room.

It is, unfortunately, appropriate that the National Football League’s owners decided to issue their rule attacking free expression the week before Memorial Day.

A holiday dedicated to those who gave their lives for our nation’s freedom has itself been mired in political controversy almost from the beginning. The latest round of posturing and pandering around patriotism should not surprise us.

Samuel Johnson saw patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Let’s qualify that. An honest love of country is a virtue, not a vice. And nothing should sully the honor of the men and women whose sacrifices make it possible for us to speak and worship freely, and to exercise democratic control over our government.

Nonetheless, Johnson was onto something, because patriotism often is manipulated in the name of power, advantage and, in the case of the NFL’s wealthy overseers, money. And the contested history of Memorial Day is a story not only of innocent local pride but also of political and cultural clashes.

It took until 1966 for Congress to grant official recognition to Waterloo, N.Y. — it first decorated the graves of Union soldiers on May 5, 1866 — as the originator of the holiday.

But there are many other claims. The great Civil War historian James McPherson told the story of a Northern abolitionist who traveled to Charleston, S.C., to organize schools for freed slaves. On May 1, 1865, a year before Waterloo, he led a group of black children to a cemetery for Union soldiers “to scatter flowers on their graves.”

In the meantime, Southern women began organizing ceremonies for those who died doing battle for secession, culminating in the practice of Confederate Memorial Days. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the politically influential Union veterans group, is widely credited with taking the holiday national. He called on the GAR’s posts to hold decoration rites on May 30, 1868, for those who died to keep the country together. By 1891, every Northern state had established May 30 as a holiday.

It’s no shock that the holiday’s many currents of regional and racial tension rose to the surface during President Barack Obama’s time in office. In 2009, a group of scholars, including McPherson, wrote Obama, urging him to abandon the practice that began with President Woodrow Wilson of sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

As was his way, Obama responded with what he hoped would be unifying gestures. He lay the traditional wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, had a wreath delivered to the Confederate Memorial and became the first president to send one as well to the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington . It commemorates the service of more than 200,000 people of color who fought for the Union.

Oh, yes, and in 2010, when Obama chose to honor the war dead in Chicago, some of his conservative critics intimated he was the only president not to lay a Memorial Day wreath at Arlington.

That was flatly untrue. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and others had all been elsewhere on Memorial Day at least once during their terms.

So phony claims and nasty innuendo built around imagined sins against patriotism and our veterans predate President Trump. But Trump’s attacks on NFL players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice represent a particularly vile effort to mobilize political support by implying that the dissenting athletes, most of them black, lack a devotion to country.

The privileged NFL owners chose to capitulate to this divisive propaganda. The anthem at the heart of this discussion celebrates our country as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Yet the owners’ action is the opposite of bravery and a blow to freedom. Many on the right have spoken out forcefully for free speech on college campuses. But do they now propose to turn stadiums into “safe spaces” where conservatives deny others the liberties they claim for themselves? (And kudos to conservative writer and Iraq War vet David French for calling out this contradiction.)

Democrats fret that even engaging with Trump on all of this risks placing progressives on the wrong side of patriotism. But the history of Memorial Day should teach us that the meaning of our patriotism has long been a matter of necessary struggle.

We should not let the divider in the Oval Office keep us from joining together in profound appreciation of our fallen. They perished under a flag that represents “liberty and justice for all.” The living cannot surrender either of these commitments.

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dissents Ferociously from 5-4 Decision Curbing Workers’ Rights

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2018 //
54

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in strong terms from today’s Supreme Court Decision curtailing workers’ Rights.

As the oldest Justice, age 85, she has many admirers who count on her to fight for the average person, not the powerful. She is now affectionately called The Notorious RBG.

Trump’s appointee Neil Gorsuch provided the decisive vote in the 5-4 Decision. He may be the most conservative Justice on the Court.

“In Monday’s case, decided by a bitter 5-4 vote, the conservative majority ruled that employers may forbid employees from banding together to fight wage and other workplace issues covered by arbitration agreements. The court said a federal arbitration statute overrides federal labor law intended to protect workers’ bargaining power.

“Speaking for the four liberal dissenters, Ginsburg said the decision threatens to return the country to a time in the late 19th century and early 20th when workers were forced to take jobs strictly on the boss’s terms and “yellow dog” contracts, forbidding employees from joining labor unions, were common.

“The employees who had brought Monday’s case claimed they had been underpaid in violation of the Fair Labor Standards and wanted to join in a class-action lawsuit in federal court. The Supreme Court majority agreed with their employers that the arbitration contracts they had signed prohibited any collective proceedings.

“Ginsburg declared the agreements “arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts.” She noted that the cost of a lawsuit dissuades most workers from seeking to redress a grievance on their own and emphasized the “strength in numbers.”

“She said federal laws dating to the 1930s protect workers’ rights to band together to confront employers about working conditions. “Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees,” she insisted.”

We can pray that Trump does not get a second pick, or that the Democrats control the Senate after 2018 and can block him from picking someone else who wants to set the clock back 100 years and restore the Age of Robber Barons.

Categories Democracy, Equity, Justice

A Guide to the Corporations Defunding Public Schools and Opposing Striking Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2018 //
20

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE YOU WILL READ TODAY. SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR SCHOOL BOARD, YOUR LOCAL MEDIA, YOUR ELECTEDS. TWEET IT. POST IT ON FACEBOOK.

In the states where teachers have engaged in walkouts and strikes, public education has been systematically starved of funding. Typically, corporate taxes have been cut so that funding for education has also been cut. The corporations benefit while the children and their teachers are put on a starvation diet.

Who are the corporations and individuals behind the efforts to shrink funding for public schools and promote privatization?

This article makes it clear.

It begins like this, then details a state-by-state list of corporations and billionaires backing the cycle of austerity and school privatization.

“The ongoing wave of teacher strikes across the US is changing the conversation about public education in this country. From West Virginia to Arizona, Kentucky to Oklahoma, Colorado to North Carolina, tens of thousands of teachers have taken to the streets and filled state capitals, garnering public support and racking up victories in some of the nation’s most hostile political terrain.

“Even though the teachers who have gone on strike are paid well below the national average, their demands have gone beyond better salary and benefits for themselves. They have also struck for their students’ needs – to improve classroom quality and to increase classroom resources. Teachers are calling for greater investment in children and the country’s public education system as a whole. They are also demanding that corporations, banks, and billionaires pay their fair share to invest in schools.

“The teachers’ strikes also represent a major pushback by public sector workers against the right-wing agenda of austerity and privatization. The austerity and privatization agenda for education goes something like this: impose big tax cuts for corporations and the .01% and then use declining tax revenue as a rationale to cut funding for state-funded services like public schools. Because they are underfunded, public schools cannot provide the quality education kids deserve. Then, the right wing criticizes public schools and teachers, saying there is a crisis in education. Finally, the right wing uses this as an opportunity to make changes to the education system that benefit them – including offering privatization as a solution that solves the crisis of underfunding.

“While this cycle has put students, parents, and teachers in crisis, many corporations, banks, and billionaires are driving and profiting from it. The key forces driving the austerity and privatization agenda are similar across all the states that have seen strikes:

“*Billionaire school privatizers. A small web of billionaires – dominated by the Koch brothers and their donor network, as well as the Waltons – have given millions to state politicians who will push their pro-austerity, pro-school privatization agenda. These billionaires lead a coordinated, nationwide movement to apply business principles to education, including: promoting CEO-like superintendents, who have business experience but little or no education experience; closing “failing” schools, just as companies close unprofitable stores or factories; aggressively cutting costs, such as by recruiting less experienced teachers; instituting a market-based system in which public schools compete with privately managed charter schools, religious schools, for-profit schools, and virtual schools; and making standardized test scores the ultimate measure of student success.”

Keep reading to learn about the interlocking web that includes the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Waltons, the fossil fuel industry, their think tanks, and much more, all combined to shrink public schools and replace them with charters and vouchers.

By the way, rightwing billionaire Philip Anschutz of Colorado was the producer of the anti-teacher, anti-public education, pro-charter propaganda film “Waiting for Superman.”

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Arizona, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Walton Foundation, West Virginia

Virginia: University Admits Koch Foundation Bought Control of Key Decisions

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2018 //
34

 

After years of denying that the Koch Foundation exercised control of hiring and firing professors by giving millions of dollars, George Mason University was compelled by the release of documents to admit that it was true. 

“Virginia’s largest public university granted the conservative Charles Koch Foundation a say in the hiring and firing of professors in exchange for millions of dollars in donations, according to newly released documents.

“The release of donor agreements between George Mason University and the foundation follows years of denials by university administrators that Koch foundation donations inhibit academic freedom.

“University President Angel Cabrera wrote a note to faculty Friday night saying the agreements “fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet.” The admission came three days after a judge scrutinized the university’s earlier refusal to release any documents.

”The newly released agreements spell out million-dollar deals in which the Koch Foundation endows a fund to pay the salary of one or more professors at the university’s Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank. The agreements require creation of five-member selection committees to choose the professors and grant the donors the right to name two of the committee members.

“The Koch Foundation enjoyed similar appointment rights to advisory boards that had the right under the agreements to recommend firing a professor who failed to live up to standards.

“Cabrera emphasized in his note to faculty that the “agreements did not give donors control over academic decisions” — an apparent reference to the fact that the Koch Foundation did not control a majority of seats on the selection committees.

“A university spokesman said Cabrera was unavailable for an interview. On Monday night, Cabrera issued a statement saying he is ordering a review of all the university’s donor agreements that support faculty positions to “ensure that they do not grant donors undue influence in academic matters.”

“Cabrera’s admission that the agreements fall short of standards for academic independence is a stark departure from his earlier statements on the issue. In a 2014 blog post on the issue, he wrote that donors don’t get to decide who is hired and that “these rules are an essential part of our academic integrity. If these rules are not acceptable, we simply don’t accept the gift. Academic freedom is never for sale. Period.”

“In 2016, in an interview with The Associated Press, he denied that the Koch donations restricted academic independence and said Koch’s status as a lightning rod for his support of Republican candidates is the only reason people question the donations.

 “The documents were released to a former student, Samantha Parsons, under a Freedom of Information Act request she filed earlier this year after years of having similar requests rejected.“Parsons, who now works for the activist group UnKoch My Campus, said the documents are strikingly similar to agreements the Koch Foundation made with Florida State University that caused a similar uproar.

“She said provisions giving the foundation a say in which professors are chosen are especially alarming.

“The faculty is supposed to have the independence to choose the best-qualified candidate,” she said.”

The University recently renamed its law school for the late conservative Supreme Justice Antonin Scalia. This occurred following a Koch gift of $10 Million, plus $20 Million from an anonymous donor.

Some 300 colleges have accepted Koch funding.

When Duke historian Nancy MacLean wrote “Democracy in Chains,” criticizing the Koch-funded economist James Buchanan, she was viciously attacked by libertarians for her portrayal of Buchanan as anti-democratic and unduly influenced by Koch libertarianism. She must be smiling as the mask of impartial scholarship is stripped away by student activists.

Big Money Rules

 

Categories Academic Freedom, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Reform, Higher Education, Koch Brothers

Breaking News: #RedForEd Beats Koch Brothers in Arizona, Voucher Referendum Moves Forward!

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2018 //
18

 

The Koch Brothers have bankrolled an effort to derail a referendum on voucher expansion this November. It lost in the courts, and their next ploy was to have the legislature repeal the law that was under challenge, then re-enact it under a new name, wearing down the opposition.

But last night, the Arizona legislature failed to get the votes necessary to repeal the voucher expansion law and force opponents to start over. 

This is a huge victory for the #RedForEd Movement. Now the voters get to decide whether to continue the Koch brothers’ Plan to privatize public education.

Congratulations to SOS Arizona and the 50,000 teachers who showed up in red T-shirts to speak up for their students, their profession, and public education.

Democracy wins!

Categories ALEC, Arizona, Democracy, Education Reform, Koch Brothers, Privatization

The Corporate Plan to Prepare Our Children for a Life of Servitude

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2018 //
35

 

In this insightful and harrowing article, we can see clearly the contours of a devilish plan, hatched in the corridors of ALEC and other corporate-controlled entities. The centerpiece of the plan is the destruction and privatization of public education, which all of us own and paid for with our taxes.

Read it and get involved. Join the Networkfor Public Education. Join your local advocacy group. Never despair. Don’t stop fighting.

It begins like this:

It was the strike heard ‘round the country.

West Virginia’s public school teachers had endured years of low pay, inadequate insurance, giant class sizes, and increasingly unlivable conditions—including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app. Their governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, pledged to allow them no more than an annual 1% raise—effectively a pay cut considering inflation—in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states. In February 2018, they finally revolted: In a tense, nine-day work stoppage, they managed to wrest a 5% pay increase from the state. Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky have now revolted in similar protests.

It’s the latest battle in a contest between two countervailing forces: one bent on reengineering America for the benefit of the wealthy, the other struggling to preserve dignity and security for ordinary people.

If the story turns out the way the Jim Justices desire, the children of a first-world country will henceforth be groomed for a third-world life.

Gordon Lafer, Associate Professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, and Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, help illuminate why this is happening, who is behind it, and what’s at stake as the educational system that once united Americans and prepared them for a life of social and economic mobility is wiped out of existence.

The Plan: Lower People’s Expectations

When Lafer began to study the tsunami of corporate-backed legislation that swept the country in early 2011 in the wake of Citizens United—the 2010 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the green light to spend unlimited sums to influence the political system—he wasn’t yet clear what was happening. In state after state, a pattern was emerging of highly coordinated campaigns to smash unions, shrink taxes for the wealthy, and cut public services. Headlines blamed globalization and technology for the squeeze on the majority of the population, but Lafer began to see something far more deliberate working behind the scenes: a hidden force that was well-funded, laser-focused, and astonishingly effective.

Lafer pored over the activities of business lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – funded by giant corporations including Walmart, Amazon.com, and Bank of America—that produces “model legislation” in areas its conservative members use to promote privatization. He studied the Koch network, a constellation of groups affiliated with billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. (Koch Industries is the country’s second-largest private company with business including crude oil supply and refining and chemical production). Again and again, he found that corporate-backed lobbyists were able to subvert the clear preferences of the public and their elected representatives in both parties. Of all the areas these lobbyists were able to influence, the policy campaign that netted the most laws passed, featured the most big players, and boasted the most effective organizations was public education. For these U.S. corporations, undermining the public school system was the Holy Grail.


After five years of research and the publication of The One Percent Solution, Lafer concluded that by lobbying to make changes like increasing class sizes, pushing for online instruction, lowering accreditation requirements for teachers, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, getting rid of publicly elected school boards and a host of other tactics, Big Business was aiming to dismantle public education.

The grand plan was even more ambitious. These titans of business wished to completely change the way Americans and their children viewed their life potential. Transforming education was the key.

 

 

 

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Koch Brothers

The Teachers’ Strikes Are Just the Beginning

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2018 //
31

 

The spring of 2018 may well be remembered as the beginning of a mass movement by working people against the domination of corporations and the 1%.

The leadership in red states and the federal government have tilted the tax system to favor the very wealthy, while demanding sacrifices from the powerless majority.

The teachers in West Virginia were first to say “Enough!”

But they are far from last.

The ALEC-inspired Republican legislatures killed collective bargaining, and the Supreme Court in expected to hobble labor unions with the Janus decision.

But that’s not going to stop working people from organizing and demanding a fair share of the bounty that they produced.

For all of Facebook’s sins and transgressions, it has nonetheless created a way for voiceless people to organize and act. Teachers and others created collectives on Facebook and used them to mobilize for mass actions.

The teachers’ strikes were organized by grassroots efforts that began on Facebook. Powerless teachers discovered that by acting in concert, they became powerful. They have used their numbers to demand fair pay and benefits and have stood up courageously to legislatures known to be in the pockets of the oil and gas industries and other malefactors of vast wealth.

Piece by piece, day by day, as they lead us, we will recover our democracy. We will rebuild the institutions now under assault by Trumpism and its variants. The names of the leaders are not well-known. They won’t be on the covers of magazines or interviewed by late night TV hosts. They are ordinary citizens who have stepped forward to demand justice, equity, and fairness and to revive our democracy.

 

Categories Courage, Democracy, Equity, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Resistance, Teachers, West Virginia

Needed: A Trustbuster to Break Up Four Mega-Corporations

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2018 //
43

 

Four corporate behemoths dominate our economy, writes Ross Barkan. It is time to break them up and foster healthy competition. Progressives met that challenge over a century ago. Have the Big Four become too big to fail and too powerful to regulate?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/19/democrats-break-up-techs-big-four-apple-google-facebook-apple

”Four corporations dominate American life. They have the wealth of nations. They have generated unfathomable revenue, created a number of jobs, and decimated many more. Their control of the economy is total.

“They are Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Unless we do something, their power will remain limitless.

“Any Democrat running for president who claims to be a progressive should put trust-busting at the top of their agenda. Socialist or capitalist, big government or small, the priority should be the same: to ensure the people who consume goods and create goods are not exploited.

“All four corporate behemoths are too large. These monopolies fuel staggering inequality and stifle the kind of economic growth that used to be more evenly distributed. Profits are immense and gains for actual workers are small – these corporations do not generate employment, let alone unionized employment, on the scale of earlier revolutionary giants.”

Will any candidate step up to the challenge? Will candidates from both parties court the 1% for campaign contributions in exchange for protecting them from taxation and regulation?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, Education Reform

Ed Berger: Arizona Government and Dark Money

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2018 //
3

Ed Berger, retired teacher, lives in Arizona and fights for the return of honest government.

He writes:

Arizona Government Does Not Match The Decency And Will Of Its People

We live in Arizona. We are decent, law abiding, citizens. So why is Arizona considered one of the most corrupt states in America? Why is Arizona often the example of how Democracy can be subverted? Why is our state out of sync with its population? What is wrong? Arizona government does not match the values of our citizens.
What can we do to make our elected representatives reflect the decency and will of the people? We must vote to remove those who corrupt the democratic process and their elected positions by accepting Dark Money.

Let’s examine a recent Senate/House vote. House Bill 2153 was passed into law over the objections of community leaders and citizens of all political parties and went into effect April 2, 2018. It prohibits any local government requirement to identify contributors to local political campaigns. Seventeen Senate members and thirty-three House members approved this measure and Governor Ducey signed it into law. This runs counter to initiatives by many communities acting in the public interest to expose Dark Money and its’ use to buy and place representatives and government leaders. They want to stop the covert, negative and destructive methods of oligarchs that bypass the citizen’s right to elect representatives they have vetted and chosen.

This is a current example of how the will of the people was ignored. To clean AZ government, we can study how representatives voted on key issues like this one, share their deeds, and get the bad ones gone. What We The People now have is a list of the seventeen senators and thirty-three house members who sold us out.

Prescott is still reeling from the effect of Dark Money in recent elections. In the race for District #1, few know that DeVos money (Dark Money) went to support a candidate this community rejected. With access to DeVos money and the use of gerrymandering, the citizen’s candidate was undermined and defeated. His opponent won and now owes DeVos bigtime. The recent mayoral election in Prescott is another example of how democracy is subverted by money and power. Those elected to represent us in the legislature are too often there because they owe allegiance to those who want our government to serve them, and not the people.

When one is aware of this fact, we can begin to understand how tens of millions of our taxpayer dollars have not only been mismanaged but have gone into the pockets of privatizers and profiteers. For many years, our legislature has passed and supported laws that do not allow accounting or transparency for how taxpayer public dollars are spent by charter schools. They have also done away with conflict of interest rules that would make it a criminal offence for legislators to use public money and position for personal gain. In addition, they have done away with democratically elected schools boards in favor of private corporate boards to oversee charter schools. Real public schools have elected school boards. But those who control the legislature have eliminated the tools of transparency and accountability that protect our investment in public education from being siphoned off from the needs of children and into the pockets of privateers.

This has been done to our state. Captive and bought members of the legislature have created uncounted millionaires by directing our money to friends, family, and those they support ideologically. This has been done out of pure greed. Ideologically it is done to starve and damage our public schools because they are “government schools” and have not yet been privatized for profit, not for kids. These are our schools, the ones over 80% of AZ citizens want to support and improve.

These are two on the many examples of the subversion of the democratic process. Yavapai County is reported to be a Republican stronghold. Some say people here always voted a straight “R” ticket. That may have been true years ago. Today Yavapai County is not Republican or Democrat or Independent. The citizens of this county have learned that the state government is not GOP, but rather a Koch, Goldwater Institute, APS, ALEC assembly of people who often describe themselves a Libertarians, which roughly translated means, ‘We have the right to rape, rip, and run if it serves us. We have the right to access for our personal gain the taxes citizens pay. We believe in privatizing all public resources, including prisons, schools and government functions.’ If one votes a straight “R” ticket what they are getting is a “Koch” ticket. Times have changed and now the legislature and governor are owned by forces that serve only themselves. Too often our politicians dance with the ones who ‘brung’ them.

So how do we win back the respect of other Americans and our decency as a people?

#1 We identify the legislators and political leaders that are owned by outside forces. We do this by examining their voting records and red tag all who have voted for laws that restrict financial accountability, shield members from conflicts of interest, and favor those who profit from privatizing prisons, schools, and public services.

#2 We share our information, educate our friends and neighbors, and support candidates that, regardless of political party affiliation, represent us and our community.

#3 We vote after vetting the candidates.

 

Categories ALEC, Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Citizenship, Civics, Dark Money, Democracy, Koch Brothers
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