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Umair Haque: Kamala’s Economic Policies Are “Brilliant”!

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2024 //
46

Umair Haque is an economist. In this post, he takes aim at journalists who have taken potshots at Kamala Harris’s economic proposals. He explains why they are, as he puts it, “brilliant.”

He writes:

It took nanoseconds. Kamala announced her economic policies. Wham! The press pounced. All in unison. Without taking even a second to think. Bad! Terrible! Awful! The Washington Post went so far as to legitimize Trump calling her a communist.

Welcome to the crackpot level of American media, and nowhere is it worse than its commentary on economics.

My friends, I’m here to tell you something. Kamala’s economic policies are brilliant. Absolutely stellar. They are the economic state of the art, reflecting not just the latest thinking, but also aimed directly at solving America’s biggest problems. Price gouging. Housing. Having a family. This is stuff that should be celebrated. America is becoming a leader again through such policies.

I know that for a fact. I’ve been the chief economist of one of the world’s largest corporations. I keep up with the literature. I’ve written peer-reviewed books about the economy. This is why so many of you follow me. I know precisely what I’m talking about.

They don’t. Journalism’s criticism of Kamala’s econ policies isn’t criticism at all. It’s a disgrace. They are just making it all up. I’m going to explain that to you, as well, because I feel that our econ journalists are an embarrassment. They lash out at Kamala—and yet they appear not to know the current state of the field at all. They’re regurgitating tired, obsolete far-right talking points from decades ago. Which have all been discredited in the real world. I’m going to explain that to you, in this dense essay, and it’s dense because I want to do justice to Kamala’s policies, and rebut some of the sheer nonsense coming from these crackpots by teaching you a thing or two about econ.

If you feel like something’s off here, it is. They’re trying to get Kamala. Just like they got Biden. This sort of thing is the equivalent of character assassination, and our media should be doing better. What do I mean?

How to Raise a Society’s (Falling) Standard of Living

The Washington Post minced no words. Instantaneously, their editorial board called Kamala’s trio of policies “gimmicks,” while their columnists savaged them, too. Fair? Spectacularly foolish.

Kamala’s first policy is to offer families a $6K tax break for having a first child. A gimmick? Give me a break. America’s median family income is about $70K. Before taxes. That’s about 10% of median income. Would you like a 10% raise? That’s what you’ll get. I think at this juncture, most Americans would be grateful for 10% more income. Half of families—that’s what “median” means—make less than that, of course. So up to half of American families could get a lift more than 10% of their incomes. 

In this day and age? We’re savaged by a “cost of living crisis.” I put that in quotes to emphasize that I don’t make it up: even the world’s most pre-eminent, and most conservative, financial institutions, like the IMF, call it that. During an historic cost of living crisis, giving people more than a 10% lift in incomes? That’s a Very Big Deal. 

Sound like a “gimmick” to you? The media didn’t even bother doing this basic math. It takes five seconds. But they appear not to even know these fundamental facts about the economy—median incomes, cost of living crisis, etcetera. Like I said: this isn’t criticism. They’re just making stuff up. The IMF itself—one of the world’s, again, most conservative institutions—has recommended governments find ways to help people address the cost of living crisis. Ways just like this.

It’s shocking to me that the editorial board of the Washington Post and their columnists wouldn’t know this. But maybe it shouldn’t be. They seem more focused on gotcha journalism these days than facts. And facts are what I’m trying to teach you. Facts enlighten us, and now you know whyKamala’s first policy is brilliant.

Many readers pointed out to me that the Post is now run by a former Murdoch editor? Does that play a role here? 

Let’s come to the second policy, which is building three million new homes. Targeted directly at the middle and working class, not to be sold to investors, aka private equity funds. Is that a…gimmick?

Three million homes. They will house three million families. That’s twelve million people. Twelve million people is 4% of America’s population. In other words, Kamala’s proposing enough housing for a sizable share of the population. If you’re one of those twelve million, is that a gimmick? Having a new, affordable home to live in? A “gimmick,” if we’re fair, is something that doesn’t really count—maybe it affects .001% of the population. But 4%? That’s very real. Far from a gimmick—that’s a policy with real, and tremendous impact. If it’s repeated in a second term, we’re talking housing for 10% of a society’s population, roughly. A gimmick? You must be kidding.

Let’s think harder about it. To build each of those homes, perhaps 10 people will be employed. Probably more, but let’s stick with ten. That’s 30 million jobs. What do 30 million new jobs do? They raise demand in the economy. What are we currently struggling with? A situation of slow demand, which the IMF—let me say it yet again, the world’s most authoritative financial institution—has called weak and sluggish and a threat to financial stability. Creating 30 million jobs right about now is an incredibly smart move, because it restores health, demand, and growth, the good kind, to the economy, when things are risky and uncertain and difficult.

Again, how hard is this to understand? I’ve explained it to you simply, and yet, media didn’t want to think any of this through for even the few seconds it took me to explain it to you. That’s disgraceful. If a media can’t do that, what purpose does it serve?

Let’s keep going. What do those 30 million jobs do, in turn? They create growth, because now, of course, more demand is flowing through the economy, more money is in people’s pockets, and they can go out and spend and invest it. As they do that, new businesses can roar, and more than that, the magical thing called certainty and confidence return. That in turn sparks a virtuous cycle of investment, which is the key to raising living standards.

And that’s really what all this is about. Raising living standards. That’s the point of an economy, after all. And yet our media, pundits, journalists, editorial boards—they seem deliberately unwilling to engage with that point and fact, instead, just regurgitating discredited talking points. All the above is “communism!” My God. Can you even imagine? If any time we talk about raising living standards, it’s “communism,” then of course, we’re not having a sane conversation anymore. We’re just trying to reason with crackpots, which is what America’s media has become, sadly.

Why American Living Standards Have Fallen

I’ll come back to that. First, let’s tackle the third proposal from Kamala, which is the one that really set the media’s hair on fire.

Price gouging. They went nuts. Price gouging?! Where? Where’s the evidence? The Post’s economics columnist went so far as to equate taking on price gouging to “price controls,” and say that was communist. So there’s the Post, calling Kamala a communist.

Let’s pause there. The Post’s columnist literally made this up. Kamala’s proposal pointedly doesn’t mention price controls. And in fact, there are already price controls in the economy. Here’s one Big One. The…minimum wage. Does it make America a “communist” society because it has a minimum wage? You see how ridiculous this is. And you also see how illiterate economics commentators are not to understand this elementary level of stuff.

Why do we want to stop price gouging, anyways? Far from being “communism,”, because that’s how we restore capitalism to good health. Price gouging is already illegal in most states, and every other developed country besides America. Why? Because it’s usually evidence of, and propelled by, “anti-competitive behaviour.” Anti-competitive behaviour means basically building monopolies. America’s economy is the most highly concentrated on earth—just a handful of gigantic companies control nearly every industry. What we want, if we’re interested in the health of capitalism, is competition.

Competition between market players, which ends up in price competition. Why do we want price competition? Because prices are “signals” in economics. The integrity of the “price signal” is paramount in economics, because it allows economies to allocate resources efficiently. But if prices are out of whack, if they’re bad signals, then an economy can’t do that. And that is why we want no price gouging—not for moral reasons, or because we’re “communists,” but because we want capitalism to be healthy, and for prices to be reliable, meaningful signals.

Again, it’s utterly shocking to me that media wouldn’t know this, or worse, not be able to tell you this. The Washington Post literally legitimized Trump calling Kamala a communist, and people went into an uproar, rightly so. But on an even deeper level, it’s worse than it seems, because, no, it’s not “communism,” we’re actually trying to defend capitalism, by making prices work the way they should.

Whew, it makes my head sort of explode, but let me return to the issue.

How do we know if there’s price gouging or not? The wrong way to do it is the way pundits tried to—revealing, again, that they don’t know what they’re doing. They looked at “longitudinal” data, aka, prices over time, in a narrow way. The correct way to do it is to look at comparative data.

Let me explain, and here’s a brief tutorial in social science, by the way.

Think about any major category of expenditure in America. Let’s take for example healthcare. Healthcare costs in America have exploded by thousands of percent over the last few decades. So has, for example, sending a kid to college. That’s also true for food, and of course housing. 

Now. In most of these categories, the same hasn’t been true in many other countries. In France, my favorite example is that the Sorbonne is free, while sending a kid to Harvard will cost $100K a year or whatnot. Healthcare’s affordable, even if it’s private, in most of the rest of the rich world. Why is that? And what does it tell us?

It tells us that something went badly wrong in America. Americans pay astronomical prices for most basic categories of goods and services compared to most if not many of their peer countries. And that’s clear evidence of price gouging.

And Americans know that by now. We all know that when you get some kind of bill, for example, from an HMO, it’s literally mostly made up. And if you call up and make a fuss, you can get them to drop some of the “charges,” because they’re fictional to begin with. 

One thing that strikes most Americans who’ve lived overseas is how much cheaper food is. It comes as a shock. Fruit, dairy, meat, even snacks—half the price or less. That, too, isn’t just evidence of price problems in America, it’s because Europe’s laws on food have been carefully designed to keep it relatively affordable for people.

Is there price gouging in America? Media and pundits have gone hysterical asking this question, and then tried to answer it in naive and unsophisticated ways. They end up missing the forest for the trees. There’s a much simpler, and yet more sophisticated way, to think about the question. If there’s not price gouging in America, how come life in peer countries is so much more affordable? 

This is all why America’s standard of living has been falling. According to the most authoritative index on the subject.

That’s a fact. Another one that those writing about economics should know. If there’s not price gouging happening, then why are living standards falling? America’s hardly out of money, housing, or jobs, after all. The reason must be that people are having a harder and harder affording the standard of living their parents and grandparents once enjoyed.

How (Not) to Think About Economics

You see my point, perhaps. Let me make it really, really clear though. There’s a lot of crackpot “research” that comes from “think tanks” in America, which is just right wing propaganda, basically. But the last really good paper on all this? By an eminent and internationally respected economist? Here’s what it found:

I review the causes and consequences of rising concentration of market shares that is occurring in most U.S. industries. While concentration is not necessarily harmful to the economy, my assessment of the available evidence leads me to conclude that Increased barriers to entry have resulted in lower investment, higher prices, and lower productivity growth. I estimate that the associated decline in competition has likely decreased aggregate labor income in the United States by more than $1 trillion between 2000 and 2019.

Now connect that to the evidence on falling living standards.

And there are literally tons of papers like that, because this is what the field has found. Its a consensus now in mainstream economics that, yes, this is a problem, monopolies, raising prices, leading to lower investment and growth. But—again—the editorial boards and journalists we’re dealing with don’t appear to actually read, know, or grasp modern economics at all, and so they don’t know this. But then what business do they have teaching you rank disinformation?

All of that’s abysmal and shocking to me. Let me sum up where we are.

Kamala’s policies aren’t gimmicks. They’re brilliant. Because they hold to transform the American economy, by raising living standards again. 

Kamala’s policies aren’t “communism.” They’re designed to keep capitalism healthy. Those are polar opposites, and that journalists and editorial boards have fallen for the former tell us what level their thinking is at—nonfunctional.

Kamala’s policies aren’t some kind of radical leftism. In fact, they are precisely the directions that the cutting edge of the field of economics, the best economists, already suggest. But because journalists and editorial boards don’t read that stuff, they don’t know that, and that’s actually disgraceful, because they’re just making stuff up, and miseducating you. The truth is that 99% of the world’s better economists would nod their heads at Kamala’s plans, and approve whole-heartedly. (And if crackpots from American thinktanks disagree, so much the better.)

We should celebrate policies this smart, innovative, and ferocious. To reflect the cutting edge of economics, to transform living standards, to lay a foundation for growth—these are brave and wise and good things. For media and journalists to paint them as the opposite is, like I’ve said, disgraceful. It betrays that they literally appear to have no idea about the very issues they’re pretending to be authorities opining on, that they hope you listen to. You shouldn’t. Their ignorance is one thing, but when ignorance joins hands with itself, it’s called folly, and nobody should make that mistake.

America Deserves Better

America deserves better than the charade media is playing out with policy. If you don’t understand the first thing about economics, as I’ve proven here, then…keep your mouth shut and go read and learn instead. It’s shocking and alarming that a major American paper, as we discussed above, would call keeping capitalism healthy “communism,” and play right into Trump’s hands, repeating his smear. Just crazy—but irresponsible, too, and egregiously outside the boundaries of good journalism. This is some of the lowest quality writing and thinking I believe I’ve ever seen—I’d flunk it out of a college class—and America deserves better.

Tomorrow, I’ll write some more about this—this is too long already. Take some time with it. This was dense, and I packed a lot of lessons and example into this essay. Let me end on this note.

I’m here to tell it to you like it is. If Kamala’s policies sucked, I’d tell you. If they were pie-in-the-sky, I’d say it. If they were fantastical or brain-dead, you’d hear it from me. The fact is that they are brilliant. Remarkable. Smart. I don’t say that lightly. Don’t let those who don’t know the first thing about economics, don’t read papers or books, and still think the wealth is going to trickle down, or right-wing thinktanks are credible—don’t let them convince you otherwise. Don’t join them in their folly. This moment is too crucial for that.

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Categories Democracy, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Harris, Kamala, Media

Peter Greene: Conservatives Think States Can Support Both Public Schools and “Choice.” They Can’t.

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
21

Peter Greene critiques the conservative idea that states should support public schools and all sorts of choice. Greene explains why this idea erodes the quality of public schools, which enroll the vast majority of the nation’s students. Conservatives blame teachers’ unions for whatever they dont like about pibkic schools, but Greene denonstrates that they are wrong. Open the link to read the full article.

He writes:

In the National Review, Michael Petrilli, Thomas Fordham Institute honcho and long-time reformster, poses the argument that folks on the right don’t need to choose “between expanding parental options and improving traditional public schools.” Instead, he asserts, they “can and should do both.”

On the one hand, it’s a welcome argument these days when the culture panic crowd has settled on a scorched earth option for public schools. As Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, put it in his now-delayed-until-after-it-can’t-hurt-Trump-election-prospects book, “We don’t merely seek an exit from the system; we are coming for the curriculums and classrooms of the remaining public schools, too.” For many on the right, the education policy goal is to obliterate public schools and/or force them to closely resemble the private christianist schools that culture panickers favor. 

Pertrilli is sympathetic to the “let’s just give parents the money and be done with it” crowd. 

We’ve inherited a “system” that is 150 years old and is saddled with layers upon layers of previous reforms, regulations, overlapping and calcified bureaucracies, and a massive power imbalance between employees and constituents, thanks to the almighty teachers unions.

Sigh. Reforms and regulations, sure, though it would be nice for Petrilli to acknowledge that for the last forty-ish years, those have mostly come from his own reformster crowd. And I am deeply tired of the old “almighty teachers unions” trope, which is some serious baloney. But his audience thinks it’s true, so let’s move on. 

Petrilli’s point is that conservatives should not be focusing on “school choice” alone, but should embrace an “all of the above” approach. Petrilli dismisses Democrats as “none of the above” because of their “fealty to the unions,” which is, again, baloney. Democrats have spent a couple of decades as willing collaborators with the GOP ; if they are “none of the above” it’s because they’ve lost both the ability and authority to pretend to be public education supporters. The nomination of Tim Walz has given them a chance to get on the public education team, but let’s wait and see–there’s no ball that the Democratic Party can’t drop.

Petrilli sits on a practical point here (one that Robert Pondiscio has made repeatedly over the years)– public schools are a) beloved by many voters, b) not going away, and c) still educate the vast, vast majority of U.S. students. Therefore, folks should care about the quality of public education.

Petrilli then floats some ideas, all while missing the major obstacle to his idea. There are, he claims, many reforms that haven’t been tried yet, “including in red states where the teachers unions don’t have veto power.” I believe the actual number of states where the union doesn’t have veto power is fifty. But I do appreciate his backhanded acknowledgement that many states have dis-empowered their teachers unions and still haven’t accomplished diddly or squat. It’s almost as if the unions are not the real obstacle to progress.

His ideas? Well, there’s ending teacher tenure, a dog that will neither hunt nor lie down and die. First of all, there is no teacher tenure. What there is is policy that requires school districts to follow a procedure to get rid of bad teachers. Behind every teacher who shouldn’t still have a job is an administrator who isn’t doing theirs. 

Tenure and LIFO (Last In First Out) interfere with the reformster model of Genius CEO school management, in which the Genius CEO should be able to fire anyone he wants to for any reason he conceives of, including having become too expensive or so experienced they start getting uppity. 

The theory behind much of education reform has been that all educational shortfalls have been caused by Bad Teachers, and so the focus has been on catching them (with value-added processing of Big Standardized Test scores), firing them, and replacing them with super-duper teachers from the magical super-duper teacher tree. Meanwhile, other teachers would find this new threatening environment inspirational, and they would suddenly unleash the secrets of student achievement that they always had tucked away in their file cabinet, but simply hadn’t implemented.

This is a bad model, a non-sensical model, a model that has had a few decades to prove itself, and has not. Nor has Petrilli’s other idea– merit pay has been tried, and there are few signs that it even sort of works, particularly since schools can’t do a true merit pay system and also it’s often meant as a cost-saving technique (Let’s lower base pay and let teachers battle each other to win “merit” bonuses that will make up the difference).

Petrilli also argues against increased pay for teacher masters degrees because those degrees “add no value in terms of quality of teaching and learning” aka they don’t make BS Test scores go up. He suggests moving that extra money to create incentives for teachers to move to the toughest schools. 

Petrilli gets well into weeds in his big finish, in which he cites the “wisdom of former Florida governor Jeb Bush” and the golden state of Florida as if it’s a model for all-of-the-above reform and not a state that has steadily degraded and undercut public schools in order to boost charter and private operations, with results that only look great if you squint hard and ignore certain parts(Look at 4th grade scores, but be sure to ignore 8th and 12th grade results). And if you believe that test results are the only true measure of educational excellence.

So, in sum, Petrilli’s notion that GOP state leaders should support public education is a good point. What is working against it?

One is that his list is lacking. Part of the reform movement’s trouble at this point is that many of its original ideas were aimed primarily at discrediting public education. The remaining core– use standardized tests to identify and remove bad teachers– is weak sauce. Even if you believe (wrongly) that the core problem of public education is bad teaching, this is no way to address that issue. 

Beyond bad teachers, the modern reform movement hasn’t had a new idea to offer for a couple of decades. 

Petrilli also overlooks a major challenge in the “all of the above approach,” a challenge that reformsters and choicers have steadfastly ignored for decades.

You cannot run multiple parallel school systems for the same cost as a single system. 

If you want to pay for public schools and charter schools and vouchers, it is going to cost more money. “School choice” is a misnomer, because school choice has always been available. Choicers are not arguing for school choice–they’re arguing for taxpayer funded school choice. That will require more taxpayer funds. 

You can’t have six school systems for the price of one. So legislators have been left with a choice. On the one hand, they can tell taxpayers “We think school choice is so important that we are going to raise your taxes to pay for it.” On the other hand, they can drain money from the public system to pay for charters and vouchers all while making noises about how the public system is totes overfunded and can spare the money easy peasy. 

I can offer a suggestion for conservatives who want to help public schools improve.

Get over your anti-union selves.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, School Choice, Segregation, Unions, Vouchers

Dean Baker: The Little-Known Biden-Harris Success Story

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
6

Dean Baker published a terrific article in The New Republic, called “The Biggest Success Story the Country Doesn’t Know About.” Baker is a  macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot.

He wrote:

Over the last few weeks, an extraordinary series of events has altered the course of an election that previously seemed to have few surprises in store. Eight days after Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden announced his historic decision to withdraw from the presidential race and cast his support for Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his stead. It will be some time before we know all the political ramifications of these events, but whatever they may be, they will not change the past.

What can the past tell us about what’s to come? Perhaps the most critical element of a candidate’s platform is their approach to the economy. In assessing Harris as a presidential candidate, people will want to look at the economic track record of the Biden-Harris administration. As always, the president takes the lead role in setting the economic course for the administration, but throughout Biden’s term in office, Harris was standing alongside him. The Republicans will surely blame her for everything that went wrong and many things that didn’t. On the other hand, Harris can take credit for what went right, and there is much here to boast about. Indeed, she can (and should) run on the outstanding—and criminally underappreciated—economic record of the Biden administration.

Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seenthe longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president’s watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden’s recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growtheven as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

Finally, the negative assessment that voters routinely give the Biden administration on the economy seems more based on what they hear from the media or elsewhere. They generally rate their own financial situation positively and say that the economy in their city or state is doing well. It is only the national economy, of which they have no direct knowledge, that they rate poorly.

Let the Good Times Roll!

Before going through what is positive about the Biden economy, I’ll just state the obvious. Tens of millions of people are struggling to get by, or not getting by at all. This is a horrible situation, which we should be trying to change every way we can. However, this has always been the case. We have a badly underdeveloped system of social supports, so that people cannot count on getting the food, health care, and shelter they need.

It’s also the case that the spurt of inflation in 2021 and 2022 was a shock after a long period of low inflation. People found themselves paying considerably more for food, gas, shelter, and other essentials, and in many cases their pay did not keep up, especially at the time these prices were soaring.

But the Biden administration has taken important steps to directly improve the situation for low- and moderate-income people, notably by making the subsidies in the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, more generous and expanding the Child Tax Credit, or CTC. He increased the benefitsin the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by 21 percent. Unfortunately, the expansion of the CTC, which was included in the initial recovery package, was only temporary. It expired at the end of 2021, and Biden has been unable to get the support needed in Congress to extend it.

While we should always recognize the enormous work left to be done, we need as well to acknowledge when we are making progress, and we have made an enormous amount of progress in improving living standards during Biden’s presidency. Also, the suffering of tens of millions of people at the lower end of the income distribution can’t possibly be the explanation for negative views of the economy. People at the bottom were suffering at least as much in 2019, when most people gave the economy high marks.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Higher Education

Tim Walz Comes Home to Nebraska Today!

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2024 //
28

I watched Tim Walz speak to a crowd in his home state of Nebraska, and he was wonderful.

I encourage you to watch this good, decent man. He knows that what matters most in our leaders is their character and their values. He has them.

The above link is for Tim Walz’s speech.

If you want to watch the whole event, including his introduction by his wife Gwen, open this link. If you are a teacher, you will love her call-out to teachers, and the crowd roaring “TEACHERS! TEACHERS! TEACHERS!”

Categories Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Joy, Trump, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Dan Rather: Elon Musk Pushes Lies and Fake News

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2024 //
7

Dan Rather warns about the danger of one-man control of a major social media company. He had Elon Musk in mind. Musk is supporting Trump, and he is using Twitter, his personal megaphone, to help Trump and smear Harris.

I have been locked out of Twitter since mid-July, because Twitter says I am underage. Really! So I am no longer influenced by Musk propaganda. But millions of other people are.

Rather writes on his blog “Steady”:

Imagine having the ability to instantly lob information, true or not, to millions of people across the globe. Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), has that ability. One would hope that with that power would come responsibility. In a perfect world, the owners of social media companies would be fair-minded and objective. Alas.

For all the talk of social media reform after 2016 and the Facebook fiasco when misinformation ran rampant across that platform, it now appears that Musk has decided not only to support the Republican candidate for president but to personally help spread misinformation about voting and the election.

Plus, in 2024, Musk has more powerful tools than Facebook ever imagined eight years ago. Artificial intelligence is coming into its own, and the dangers it presents to our democracy are profound.

Musk has recently released an AI chatbot, which, if you don’t know, is basically a computer that can simulate a human conversation. Musk named his Grok, and within hours of President Biden bowing out of the race, it created a post that read: “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” naming nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. The message suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the filing deadline to get on the ballot in those states.

This is 100% false and was shared with millions of users on X.

Secretaries of state in five of the nine states have written a letter to Musk urging him to “immediately implement changes” to Grok. I’m not holding my breath.

When Grok was launched late last year, Musk called it the anti-“woke” chatbot — his characterization. He said he wanted the AI search assistant to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” Those other AI systems, powered by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, are specifically designed to avoid controversial topics.

But it’s not just Grok that is pushing out lies. Musk himself reposted a manipulated version of Harris’s first campaign video. It featured an altered voice track that sounds just like Harris. In it “she” says she didn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and that she is the “ultimate diversity hire.” Musk tagged the video as “amazing” and didn’t include a disclaimer. His post has garnered 135 million views, so far. It has not been taken down.

Talk about strange bedfellows. Over the years, there has been no love lost between Musk and Donald Trump. As recently as May, Trump was a vociferous and vocal proponent of the oil and gas industry. Remember the Mar-a-Lago get-together where he promised to end Biden’s green energy initiatives, including his electric vehicle policies, in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions?

Apparently Musk and Trump have mended some pretty tall fences. For his part, Musk has promised lots of cash to the pro-Trump America PAC. Maybe Trump didn’t get what he asked for from his oil and gas friends.

The Musk-backed America PAC is already helping Trump in swing states. The PAC’s website is tricking people into sharing personal data. The site promises to help people register to vote, but when a user enters a zip code in a battleground state, after also giving their name and phone number, they are directed to a page that says “thank you.” They are then asked to “complete the form below.” But there is no form. And there is no redirection to a voter registration site.

In exchange, Trump now thinks electric vehicles are “incredible.” What a shocker. At a rally in Georgia on Sunday, Trump told his supporters, “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So, I have no choice.”

The Michigan secretary of state is investigating Musk and the PAC. “Every citizen should know exactly how their personal information is being used by PACs, especially if an entity is claiming it will help people register to vote in Michigan or any other state,” a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said.

In 2022, President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University about the dangers of artificial intelligence, foreseeing that “regulation has to be part of the answer” to combating online disinformation. His closing thought is a reminder that AI can be a help as well as a hindrance — but that it can’t exist in a vacuum.

“The internet is a tool. Social media is a tool. At the end of the day, tools don’t control us. We control them. And we can remake them. It’s up to each of us to decide what we value and then use the tools we’ve been given to advance those values,” Obama said.

For all intents and purposes, social media has become our town square — but unlike most communities, it has no sheriff, and it very much needs one. In his or her absence it is up to us, social media’s users, to be wary consumers.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Media, Propaganda

Lawrence O’Donnell: Wake Up, Reporters! Do Your Job

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
24

Lawrence O’Donnell appears nightly on MSNBC at 10 pm EST. I love his show because he is so smart.

This episode is a must-watch.

As a bonus, here is Robert Reich wondering why the media doesn’t report honestly about Trump’s dementia.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Media, Trump

The New Republic: Tim Walz Is the Best Antidote to the Poison and Lies of FOX News

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
45

I don’t know how any self-respecting journalist could work for FOX News. It offers a good job in a competitive industry, but why sell your soul to the devil? I have recently seen tweets by Megyn Kelly, viciously attacking Kamala Harris, and every time I do, I remember Trump saying of her in 2016, after the first GOP debate, that she had blood coming out of her orifices. Yet still she is his sycophant.

In The New Republic, Thom Hartmann writes that Tim Walz may be the perfect antidote to FOX’s vitriol. If you want to reprogram family members, introduce them to Tim Walz. He is a good man, a decent man, not a FOX liar.

Hartmann writes:

All across America families are in mourning: Their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the right-wing hate and rage machine.

Jen Senko produced a movie—The Brainwashing of My Dad—about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my radio show a few times, and her story is one replicated across America millions of times. Her father—a totally normal Midwestern guy—began watching Fox “News” when he retired, and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.

Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, is America’s intervention against the mind poison that Trump, Fox “News,” and right-wing hate radio have infected our nation with.

He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s veterans during his decade in Congress.

He used the G.I. bill to go to college, getting his master’s degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his school’s football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever.

He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.

He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start his school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.

No purchased bone-spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad, who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in World War II, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.

His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up J.D. Vance—with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals and birth rates and fealty to his billionaire patrons—for the weird guy that he is. He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multibillion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.

To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch in 1985 so Murdoch could legally purchase U.S. media properties; Reagan ordered the Federal Communications Commission to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.

In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting: Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times), former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Fox and Murdoch’s power in Australia came, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

It’s the same here. When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6 coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.

Along with its relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6—while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House adviser to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.

While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the right-wing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded right-wing hate.

So let the dad jokes begin!

As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’s head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door, and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”

And God willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be vice president of the United States.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Goodness, Lies, Walz, Tim

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim

John Thompson: Elders for Kamala Zoom for a Better World

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2024 //
4

John Thompson of Oklahoma writes about a Zoom he attended for people over 60, called “Elders for Kamala.” What a great idea to harness the power of Zoom to reach thousands, tens of thousands of people, and bring them together in conversationfor a common purpose. I joined a Women for Kamala. There was also White Dudes for Kamala, and many more. The purpose now is to change the direction of the country from the personal vendettas of Trump to Kamala’s capacious vision for the future.

He writes:

An incredible burst of energy has grown out of zoom calls for Kamala Harris by Black women, then Black men; White women and men; Black queer men, South Asian women, Latinas, Native women; and, now, the Third Act’s “Elders for Kamala.” I was blown away by the Third Act’s zoom call which spoke to around 11,000 and harnessed “our long years of wisdom and courage to back Kamala Harris as she tries to protect our democracy.”

The Third Act is a “community of Americans over 60 determined to change the world for the better.” It “harnesses an unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.”

The call began with Jane Fonda, who was particularly eloquent in calling for an end to tax breaks for oil and gas industries. She was followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders who praised World War II veterans and those who suffered through the Great Depression, and who laid the foundation for post-WWII generations. Similarly, Black co-moderator Akaya Windwood thanked her mother for her dream as she put her Akaya on the bus to the Sit-Ins, and helped pave the way for the dream of a Black President.

Co-moderator Bill McKibben praised today’s “mild chaos of the best kind,” and shifted his focus to kids who will be alive in the 22th Century.  Robin Wall Kimmerer advanced the conversation about how such change occurs. It requires today’s elders to be “good Ancestors;” she then brought the house down by proposing the meme, “Pollinators for Kamala.”

Judith LeBanc, Executive Director of the Native Organizers Alliance, and a citizen of the Caddo Nation, articulated a message which I believe is especially important for young people. She said, “Representation is not destination,” but it lays a crucial foundation for empowering “our ancestors” in behalf of “our descendents.”  She cited the progress made by Interior Department Secretary Deb Van Holland as evidence that, “Politics doesn’t end on election day; it begins on election day.”

Gus Speth, who served in the Carter Administration, as well as co-founding the National Resources Defense Council, and who was jailed for protesting the Keystone pipeline, gave more specific advice. He said that the positions he took in political and legal battles were less important than the position he took in a D.C. jail for civil disobedience. Reverend Lennox Yearwood, who was arrested for protesting the pipeline while campaigning for Barrack Obama, also explained how he found a balance between working outside and inside the political system.

Former Senator John Kerry, who had been a spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, stressed another way to find such a balance. Sen. Kerry explained how and why climate change is our greatest security threat. It will produce 10s of millions of climate refugees, further undermining stability in a dangerous world. Sen. Kerry then praised Jane Fonda for her leadership in the 1969 Earthday. Then, Kerry recalled how his team targeted and defeated 7 of the “Dirty Dozen,” who were the worst climate deniers in Congress. That helped lead the way to the foundation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Similarly, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit explained that corporate powers sought to “privatize our imagination.” She then pointed out Sam Brown’s experience in organizing the nation’s biggest anti-Vietnam War rally, and how Brown said “we don’t want to elect Putin’s best friend.”  Author and co-founder of the Chief Relationship Officer of Bioneers, Nina Simons, explained that we need Kamala to win big so we will have more power to “really win for the earth.” 

And Terry Tempest Williams called in from a house in Utah where the heat wave produced temperatures as high as 100 degrees in-doors. She personally witnesses so many tragic climate disasters, but she also set the stage for hopeful advice. She began by introducing the audience to her cats, and then calling the crowd to “put our love into action” for Kamala Harris. We should see ourselves as “Elders in training,” who “listen and support our young people.”

Of course, this is just a brief account of the Third Act’s elders’ advice. I haven’t even gotten to all the former legislators, activists, and authors who shared their wisdom on zoom. My personal focus is on cross-cultural and cross-generational conversations, so I was thrilled to experience the eloquence with which they discussed the stages of history that produce change. I loved the way they grounded those processes in the best of humanity. Even though participants were blunt about the existential threats we face, they offered hope. 

For instance, the author Catherine Grundy said that humans “have the ability to evolve on a daily basis,” and “impossible is just a word.” Former Senator Tim Wirth addressed the nuances of operating in the political system, but also said, “the nicest thing about the last two weeks is …. So many people had a great smile on their face.”

While our immediate focus must be on the next three months, their call for shortterm and longterm grassroots actions after election day were extremely valuable. Between election day and the inauguration, we can celebrate but, mostly we must beat back Trump’s likely efforts to steal the election. Then we must commit to decades of work. “Elders for Kamala” is thus an inspiring, as well as pragmatic, call for unity and building on our better selves to save both our democracy and planet.   

Categories Creativity, Democracy, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Walz, Tim

Kamalamania!!!

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2024 //
115

On Monday, we started watching the Kamala & Tim rally in Philadelphia an hour early. We couldn’t wait! The arena at Temple University was packed, and the crowd was excited. We shared their excitement, watching at home.

Josh Shapiro was terrific, dynamic, and passionate in introducing the candidates. I thought, “This guy has a great future ahead of him. He might be President in eight years.” But I was glad Kamala didn’t choose him to run with her, because the ticket will be bombarded with racism and misogyny; it doesn’t need the additional handicap of anti-Semitism. Also, I was turned off by his support for vouchers; Republicans do that, not Democrats.

What was enthralling about the Philly event and the rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was the euphoria. The large crowds cheered and applauded with ebullience.

They chanted “We won’t go back!”

When JD Vance’s name was mentioned, they chanted “He’s a weirdo!”

When Trump’s name was mentioned, the crowd chanted, “Lock him up!”

In Eau Claire, Kamala thanked President Biden for his fifty years of service, and the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Joe!“

The crowds cheered every reference to restoring the right of women to control their bodies. They cheered their support for gay rights. They cheered the importance of clean air and clean water. They cheered her pledge to pass gun control legislation. They cheered her promise to sign voting rights legislation. They cheered the candidates’ pledge to champion unions and to build the middle class. Kamala said, “When the middle class is strong, America is strong,” and the crowd cheered louder.

Ebullience! Enthusiasm! Energy!

Something transformative is happening in the race and to the Democratic Party. People are ready to work for this ticket, ready to turn the country in a direction that serves the people, not big corporations.

A political party that was divided and fearful has been transformed in only weeks into a mass of people willing to march, cheer, sign up new voters, dig deep, and turn this country towards the future.

Two things stand out.

First, MAGA is a backward-looking movement, longing for the days of white Christian male supremacy, when men ran the world, and women had babies and stayed in the kitchen. Kamala says: “We are not going back!” and she paints a picture of building a nation with a better future for everyone.

Second, there is a striking difference in tone between the two parties. The Republican candidates are angry, humorless, bitter, and vengeful; their candidates scowl. The Democrats are happy, joyous, and excited; their candidates laugh and are enjoying the experience.

One party is fading, the other is energized.

Hope is in the air.

Categories Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Trump, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim
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