Karen Francisco retired as editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. She grew up in Muncie and graduated from Ball State University. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. I invited her to write about what happened in Indiana to turn Republicans against public schools.
She wrote this article for the blog.
The corporate-controlled American Legislative Exchange Council in 2011 rolled out a set of model bills designed to weaken one of its primary targets: public schools. “The Indiana Education Reform Package” was patterned after the destructive legislation pushed through by Indiana’s Republican legislative supermajority and then-Gov. Mitch Daniels.
Indiana has been setting the bar for public-school carnage ever since, quietly advancing a near-universal voucher program and advancing education privatization efforts. But the newly introduced House Bill 1136 is designed to serve as a death blow for public education in Indiana. It would immediately dissolve five school districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools, and effectively set every other district in the state on a path to elimination.
The bill requires the dissolution of districts that have lost more than 50% of students within the district’s boundaries to other schools. The districts’ schools would be converted to charter schools by July 1, 2028. The first schools converted would be those with the lowest test scores.
The legislation cleverly builds on those “education reform” measures designed to cripple public school districts. Ever-changing assessment standards kept the schools chasing arbitrary benchmarks. Sky-high income limits allowed wealthy families to abandon neighborhood schools for parochial and private schools. Inadequate funding and legislation favoring charter schools left districts without the resources needed to serve the at-risk students who are not welcome at voucher or charter schools.
Indianapolis Public Schools, in particular, has been hammered by Republican lawmakers and the city’s Democratic mayors. From an enrollment of nearly 40,000 in 2005, IPS now serves only 21,055 students, having lost thousands of students to voucher schools, charters and poor-performing “innovation schools.”
Why is Indiana, known for its conservatism, such fertile ground for radical education policy? Blame it on a perfect storm of anti-democratic forces. Out-of-state billionaires like Netflix founder Reed Hastings and the heirs to the Walmart fortune have poured millions of dollars into the state to destroy teacher unions. Powerful Republican lawmakers have built careers off education privatization. Indiana’s strong evangelical community, including its newly elected lieutenant governor, has recognized the potential of expanding Christian Nationalist influence with taxpayer-supported schools.
The bigger mystery is why Indiana voters have allowed the continuing destruction of their public schools, electing and re-electing representatives actively working against the voters’ best interests.
I would like to believe House Bill 1136 is the proverbial bridge too far. But 40 years of newspaper experience in Indiana tells me most Hoosiers will show little interest in the imminent threat to two urban school districts and three small rural school corporations. Sadly, race and class play heavenly into opinions about Indiana public schools, and too many Hoosiers will dismiss the danger as “not my problem.”
House Bill 1136 starts the process of disbanding locally elected school boards, replacing them with boards filled by the governor, local officials and the director of the partisan Indiana Charter School Board. It’s only a matter of time before every elected school board in the state is eliminated.
Look for the American Legislative Exchange Council to update its 2011 “Indiana Education Reform Package” with this crowning piece of anti-democratic legislation and for ALEC’s disciples to carry it across the nation.
The New York Review of Books is offering a free review of a book about Jeff Bezos’ life, written a decade ago. Bezos didn’t like the book, so he forbade readers from preordering it on Amazon. It’s time for Brad Stone to update his book. The past decade has shown new sides to Bezos’ character.
Free from the Archives
Today is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s sixty-first birthday. For our July 10, 2014, issue, Steve Coll reviewed The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s account of both Bezos’s life and Amazon’s transformation from an upstart digital bookstore into the kind of corporate behemoth that saw fit to prevent customers from preordering Stone’s book in paperback, or from preordering other titles from Stone’s publisher.
“The real problem of ‘the Age of Amazon’…does not concern antitrust economics or consumer prices. It concerns the future of reading and writing. There is no evidence that high retail book prices today discourage reading. The problem is the opposite: because of the digital revolution, the price of information has collapsed in a very short time. Free news, stories, YouTube videos, games, and other content generated by users but enabled by online aggregators and pirates have undermined the leverage of authors and publishers who depend on copyright protection to make a living.”
It is my review of Trump’s plans for K-12 education.
NYRB is the most distinguished literary-political journal in the nation. It has a huge readership. It reaches a different audience than education journals.
If you subscribe to NYRB, you can open it in full. If you don’t, it costs $10 for 10 issues. Or, if you wait, I will post it in full in a few weeks.
Sherrilyn Ifill is a veteran civil rights litigator and one of the most thoughtful leaders of the democratic resistance to authoritarianism. She is a former President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In this post, she offers sound advice about how to survive until the next election (in 2026) and then in 2028). Never give up!
She writes:
Sherrilyn Ifill
In one of the most important and climatic scenes in the 2006 film Titanic, Rose and her beau Jack are holding on as they stand on tiptoe outside the rails of the upside down ship. As the ship begins its final, rapid descent into the dark, cold waters of the Atlantic, Jack tells Rose, “This is it.” They have received instructions from the ship’s architect on how they might survive once they are in the water. They are both clear about the goals: survive and stay together.
This feels like the moment this country faces as we approach Trump 2.0. In just a few short weeks Donald Trump will return to the White House, bringing with him a coterie of some of the most incompetent and vile miscreants to serve in some of the highest and most consequential civil positions in our government. Their intentions are clear. Their penchant for lies and targeting has already been on display. Their ham-fisted approach to governance is clumsy, cruel, and unethical, but that won’t stop it from being effective. They are prepared to fight battles small and large. With the wind of a conservative Supreme Court and Republican-controlled Congress at their backs, Trump and his team are feeling bold and unstoppable. The outcome seems clear.
But like Rose and Jack, we have goals as well. To survive personally and nationally, with the remnants of democracy still in place so that we have a platform on which to build a new, stronger, healthier democracy. Our other goal is to stay together. We can and must do both.
The greatest obstacle to our fight to survive as a democracy (even a deeply flawed one) and to hold together a semblance of unity among those who believe in the fight for equality and justice in this country, is the inclination to give up – to believe that Trump’s plans cannot be stopped. I agree that they cannot be stopped in total. But I do believe that they can be upended in part, and we must use what powers we have to thwart as many of his harmful policies and plans as we can. It’s also critical for us to play for the future and not just for the present moment. That means it matters that we make a record – a record of Trump’s excesses and lies, but also of police, prosecutor, and judicial misconduct, of corruption – documents and money exchanged, of quid pro quos, and of collaboration with foreign enemies.
Many of us are fighting powerful exhaustion and an ongoing measure of shock that this giant, seemingly unsinkable state-of-the-art democracy (however flawed) can really be about to sink. That exhaustion and disbelief can lead to paralysis, something we can ill afford. I’m reminded that the first thing Jack and Rose did was take deep breaths before holding one long breath as the ship descended. And we must do the same. First pulling in as oxygen those things that nourish us and keep us going. I have encouraged people to lean-in to art, and nature and family and spiritual practice. Establishing a regimen of these things that you will engage and absorb regularly over the next four years is critical. An exercise schedule, morning meditation or prayer, monthly museum visits or concerts, a book club, monthly family dinners, Netflix nights, leaning into your favorite sports team. All of this can help ensure that you are regularly oxygenated throughout what I can guarantee will be moments that will take our breath away in their cruelty and audacity.
Lastly, like Jack and Rose, hold hands. Stay connected to our cohort of democratic survivors. Those determined to make it to shore. There’s room on the floating door for more than one if we don’t panic and if we understand that our fate is inextricably linked to those who share our vision for democracy, justice and equality.
Generosity and encouragement will be key. Our hands may come apart from time to time, but we can still stay close. Fight those who are opposed to democracy, equality and justice. Not those who are your allies. You can disagree with your allies. Correct them, edify them, firmly push back against them when necessary. But try to reserve your fight for your opponents.
Once we’ve established our oxygen routine, we will have to focus. There will be many things competing for our attention. But we must decide what are the things or areas to which we’ve committed ourselves. We cannot exhaust ourselves. There are civil rights and civil liberties organizations ready to file suit. Support them. There are representatives in Congress who know the rules and are ready to resist the excesses of the Republicans. We don’t have to do their work – but we must support them.
But there is work for every citizen to do. When your friends or family members get tired, and start thinking we can’t survive this, give them the number to call their Senator or House member. Remind them that it matters. And remind yourself. Never make it easy for those in power to trample our rights. Make them hear your voices, no matter what. Speak, write, call, march. If we stop doing those things, it won’t be long before we no longer remember where the line is for decency, truth, justice and democracy.
There’s another reason it matters. Remember that the fear of losing their jobs is the prime motivator of most elected representatives, and they are in constant fear that they have lost sight of which way the wind is blowing. The 2022 midterms loom large, and Republicans remain in disarray. They too, are exhausted just from trying to keep up with what Trump, or Musk have ordered in their most recent tweets.
So when you call, leave messages, send texts and emails, send postcards and letters. Trust me – they worry, and they waver. And if you are blessed to have terrific representatives, then they need the encouragement and the reminder of who they are fighting for. We must call our our elected representatives when they do wrong, but we must also pat them on the back when they do right.
Get engaged locally. Go with a friend or family member to the next school board meeting. Showing up at city council meetings. Visit your library as a way of showing your community who you are, and that you care. Do not cede the space to your opponents. They win whenever we fail to show up. Our presence is powerful and destabilizes the sense that we are intimidated. This is especially important if you live in a blue state or district. We need to hold the spaces, cities and states we have.
When you reel your resolve flagging, look at your children, your young cousin, your niece, or nephew and ask yourself if you are too intimidated to protect their future. If the answer is no, then act like it. Enter the space that is yours. Decide that in 2025 you will be come an active citizen, not an observer.
For my friends in media, many of you are already failing this preliminary moment. Tighten up your language. Stop conceding the rationality of things that are fundamentally irrational and the legality of things that are illegal. Musk and Ramaswamy are leading at best a “project on government accountability.” Maybe and “ad hoc committee” or study group. It is not a “Department” which is a legal term for federal agencies. The creation of federal departments requires an Act of Congress, not the mere whim of a president-elect and his benefactor. Think “Department of Homeland Security.” There is no “Department of Government Efficiency.” And if giving legal imprimatur to this ad hoc initiative is not reason enough to refrain from referring to it as DOGE, engaging in cost-free advertising for Elon Musk’s cryptocurrency (called DOGE) should be reason enough.
Restore your obligation to help your readers understand what is out-of-the-ordinary and antidemocratic. Trump’s stated plans to seize the Panama Canal, to make Canada the 51st state, and to “buy” Greenland is not “Trump being Trump.” It is not a “policy plan.” And it is certainly not an “approach to diplomacy.” If you had 11th grade social studies you know that it reflects imperialist ambitions, that it is an act of hostility towards those nations, and that is destabilizing to those nations, their people, and their markets. Report on it as such. Trump is the President-elect. When he makes these kinds of threats they should be treated seriously and presented as the threat they constitute. This is not normal behavior. It could and may yet lead to trade wars or armed conflict.
It is also critical that the media compel elected representatives to stand with or against Trump’s most excessive plans. I would have expected a responsible press to be camped outside of Senator Marco Rubio’s house who, as Trump’s Secretary of State nominee, would be charged with handling the fallout from Trump’s intemperate and menacing threats against sovereign nations. What are his views about Trump’s stated plan to seize the Panama Canal? There is a pretty healthy Panamanian American population in Florida. What is Rubio saying to that community?
The Matt Gaetz ethics report was an explosive revelation. Seems long ago. He has moved on to prime-time show on OANN. That does not mean the press should move on. This is the man Trump wanted as Attorney General – to represent the United States and lead the largest law enforcement force in the world. His selection of Gaetz is, in and of itself, disqualifying. But he has yet to be pressed on the Gaetz report and what he knew about it. If he didn’t know then he didn’t do basic due diligence before selecting a nominee. If he did, well then, the Senate has no reason to give any Trump nominee the benefit of the doubt -something one might remind those Democratic senators who have announced their willingness to consider voting for RFK, Jr. as HHS Secretary.
The public doesn’t sustain its outrage because the news moves on to something else. Stop letting Trump set the news cycle. Your job is to keep the citizenry educated so that we can make good decisions. Trump’s election is evidence that this has failed. But it’s never too late to do better.
For all of us, even when the media fails, we are still obligated to stay informed. Start following the terrific lawyers, journalists, activists, and writers who have shown that they have the ability to meet the moment and who can share with you information you are unlikely to get other places.
Faith leaders who believe in democracy and justice? There’s work for you to do, and it is urgent. Now is the time to reach out to your local police precinct captains. Make sure they know who you are. Ask for a cell number where you can reach them. Invite them to your places of worship and let them know what you expect. When and if we see our neighbors being targeted, taken away by ICE or other law enforcement, faith leaders should be on-call for their communities, with a direct high level point of contact to find out where individuals have been taken and how they can be reached. Let your local police know that you expect humane treatment of arrestees and detainees.
Finally, we all end the year with a little less money than we would like but make a decision once your finances stabilize about which two or three public, non-profit sources of information or advocacy you will support. PBS? Democracy Now? Pro Publica? Wikipedia (now under threat from Elon)? Your library? Black press? Your town’s alternative weekly? Then do it. Do it now.
Begin printing out articles that contain important information and social media posts that shed important light on controversial issues. There’s a great deal of “scrubbing” happening on the internet right now and many of the most nefarious figures of this time that have stayed under the radar will reappear in the days of our future rebuilding, espousing brand-new positions and ideas.
I intend to use this space to shed light and do some deep dives on the meaning and context behind the anti-democratic plans and proposals that are unfolding, especially those that strike at the heart of our constitution’s guarantee of equality, so please tune in. As I always say, I don’t have all the answers. I’m only absolutely clear about the need to fight.
The Indianapolis Public School District is approaching a red zone: the total elimination of public schools. A bill sponsored by a Republican legislator would require the dissolution of the district, the conversion of every public school into a privately-managed charter school, and the replacement of the elected board by an appointed one.
“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.
She wrote:
The Indianapolis Public Schools board is strongly opposing a bill that would dissolve the district and force it to convert to charter schools, a proposal that has spurred calls for an organized campaign against it.
The pushback against HB 1136 at the first meeting of the new school board on Tuesday comes as IPS faces the start of yet another legislative session Wednesday that could leave the district more financially strapped and struggling to stay alive.
The bill also became the focus at Tuesday’s meeting, where new board members were sworn in at a historic moment for IPS — for the first time, a board made up entirely of women of color leads a district overseen by its first Black female superintendent.
“This legislation is not student focused, and fails to reflect the community’s input on how they envision their public schools thriving,” board President Angelia Moore said in a statement on behalf of the board at the meeting. “Instead of fostering growth and innovation, HB 1136 risks dismantling the very foundation that supports student success and community collaboration.”
The bill would require Indiana districts to dissolve and transition into charter schools if more than half of students living in the district boundary enroll in a school outside the district. Under the proposal, IPS would dissolve, and 50 of its schools would convert to charters, according to the bill’s latest fiscal impact statement.
Four other districts — Gary Community School Corp., Union School Corp. in east-central Indiana, Tri-Township Consolidated School Corp. in the north, and Cannelton City Schools in the south — would also dissolve.
The bill, proposed by Republican State Rep. Jake Teshka of North Liberty, would also dissolve the IPS’ elected board and replace it with a seven-member board appointed by the governor, the mayor, the president of the city-county council, and the executive director of the Indiana Charter School Board.
IPS to face challenging legislative session
In addition to this bill, a number of other proposals could spell financial ruin for the district, at a time when it faces mounting pressure to share more resources with charter schools. Amid mounting competition from the charter sector, the district has already tried to right-size itself through its Rebuilding Stronger reorganization, which closed several schools last school year and reconfigured grades districtwide this school year.
A new charter advocacy group, the Indiana Charter Innovation Center, will push for charters to receive the same amount of funding from property taxes that traditional districts receive. That would require IPS to give more than the $4 million in property tax revenues it is estimated to give to charters this year, in accordance with a law passed last year.
And incoming Gov. Mike Braun has pushed for capping increases in property taxes, which could further restrict funding for traditional public schools.
IPS grapples annually with competition from Indiana’s strong school choice environment, which state lawmakers have bolstered in previous sessions. The district faces a fiscal cliff once additional property taxes from the 2018 operating referendum expire in 2026. Federal pandemic relief funds have also expired.
“Urban education systems face complex and nuanced challenges that may be unfamiliar to some policymakers,” Moore said at the meeting. “We invite legislators who are genuinely interested in public education to visit our district, gain firsthand insight on our unique mission and vision, and work alongside us to ensure sustainable and meaningful outcomes for students, educators, and families.”
Community members raise opposition to bill
Parents and staff also voiced their opposition to HB 1136 at the meeting Tuesday and called on the board to loudly protest it. Four people spoke against the bill, while three others suggested the board partner with charters, respond to the demand for educational choice, or work with lawmakers to improve the district.
The public support follows a separate call from a group of community leaders who last week called on IPS to consider how to remain operational amid “strong financial headwinds.”
“The legislature has taken notice and seems ready to act if needed,” read the statement from former mayors Bart Peterson and Greg Ballard; former IPS board president Mary Ann Sullivan; and city-county councilors Maggie Lewis, Carlos Perkins, and Leroy Robinson. “It is preferable, however, that any structural changes in IPS are driven locally and to the benefit of our Indianapolis students and community.”
“Rebuilding Stronger shut down schools. The loss this community felt cannot be overstated. Don’t let their loss be in vain,” parent Kristen Phair told the board in between sobs. “I am asking each of you commissioners to take a united stand and be loud in advocating against this bill. Please help us organize. Our families want to organize against this.”
The group urged IPS to share more property tax funding with charter schools.
But Noah Leninger, a teacher at Robert Frost School 106, urged the board not to accept any such compromises.
“More charter schools will not save IPS,” he said. “No matter what they’re called — if we’re honest and we call them charter schools, if we lie to ourselves and our community and call them Innovation Network schools — whatever the name, the rapid and unchecked expansion of these unaccountable grift mills has not gotten IPS out of this mess.”
“My definition of partner does not include any entity that is actively seeking to destroy or dissolve our district, as noted in the proposed legislation,” she said.
Board member Nicole Carey said the challenging times will require courage from district leaders.
“To everyone tonight, I want to say stand with us, stay engaged, hold us accountable to this promise of prioritizing the needs of our students,” she said. “It is going to take all of us.”
Yesterday was a day jam-packed with news, which Heather Cox Richardson puts into perspective. We can look forward to–or dread– four years of non-stop lying and bragging and insulting and threatening by Convicted Felon Trump. Among other crazy things he said yesterday, he claimed that Hezbollah terrorists were part of the Jan 6 mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Were they carrying Trump banners? Will he pardon them?
She writes:
Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”
Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.
The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.
While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.
Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.
Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”
In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.
Those eager to get their hands on the land use the word “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”
But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.
Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.
Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.
In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.
In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.
Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.
Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.
Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.
But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.
Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.
But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.
Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”
The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.
Call it a zombie school, one more piece of predictable detritus washed up on the wave of voucher laws. Here’s an instructive tale.
ARCHES Academy was a charter school operating in Apache Junction, Arizona. But in March of 2024, the state board that oversees Arizona charters voted unanimously to shut the place down. Mind you, the board in Arizona is pretty charter friendly, but ARCHES had so many problems. Under 50 students were left at a K-8 school dinged for soooo many problems.
Chartered in 2020, promising a “holistic” approach that grouped students by ability rather than age, then put on an Assessment Consent Agreement in 2023. Financial mismanagement. Poor record-keeping. IRS violations. Violations of state and federal law. Academic results in the basement. State rating of D. Founder and principal Michelle Edwards told the board “Mistakes were made and compounded over time.” So, general incompetence rather than active fraudster work.
So ARCHES the charter school was shut down, because charters still have to answer to the state for their performance and competence.
But you know who doesn’t have any oversight at all in Arizona?
Private schools that accept taxpayer-funded vouchers.
So Edwards simply re-launched her school as the Title of Liberty (a name taken from a verse in the Book of Mormon). Some of her pitch was visible in a piece in The Arizona Beehive, a Mormon-flavored newsmagazine, in the summer of 2024.
As changes happen in the public education system, many families who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have become more concerned about the potential influence of conflicting ideologies expressed in their children’s classrooms.
In the article, Edwards addresses her own concerns.
Principal Michelle Edwards, an early childhood specialist, has been in the education system for many years. The academy is a culmination of a dream of hers. “I recently had one student who was really struggling,” says Michelle, “and I couldn’t tell her about her divine abilities, that she’s a child of God, or who her father in heaven is.”
The article promises a Personal Learning Plan and notes that if tuition is an issue, the school will help parents apply for the Arizona ESA voucher to cover costs.
What the article doesn’t mention is that Edwards just had the school, under another name and as a charter, shut down by the state. But then, nobody, not even the state itself, told anyone.
Edwards’s new school went heavily with the religious pitch, with the website announcing “Christ-centered, constitutionally-based, education for all….”
Why doesn’t Arizona have anything in place to help apparently well-meaning folks like Edwards get into the education biz? Why doesn’t it exert even the slightest bit of oversight of the vendors cashing in on taxpayer-funded vouchers? I suspect it hints at what programs like Arizona’s voucher extravaganza are really about– and it’s not about a robust, choice-filled education environment. It’s about defunding and dismantling public education (and the tax burdens that go with it). But you can’t just tell folks, “We’re going to end public education.” So instead, hand them a pittance of a voucher and announce that you’re giving them freedom! And after that, you’ve washed your hands of them. The wealthy can still afford a top-notch education for their kids, and if Those People end up wasting their kids time in sub-prime, fraudulent, or incompetent pop up schools, well, that’s their problem.
If folks like the Arizona voucher crowd were serious about choice, they would provide transparency and oversight, rather than letting any shmoe rent a storefront and call it a school. But Arizona isn’t serious about choice. It’s serious about dismantling public education. It’s serious about getting public tax dollars into private hands and funding religious groups. And people like the families at Title of Liberty and even Edwards herself will just keep paying the price.
Today is the fourth anniversary of the worst act of insurrection in our nation’s history. Urged on by President Donald Trump, who insisted that he actually won the election of 2020, a large mob stormed the United States Capitol in hopes of stopping the certification of the election of Joe Biden.
To be clear, Trump is a world-class liar and a very sore loser. He simply refused to admit that he lost the election, fair and square. Biden won the electoral vote and the popular vote. Trump’s lawyer challenged the voting results in multiple states. They filed more than 60 lawsuits, appealed twice to the U.S. Supreme Court, and lost every time. They lost in courts where the judge was appointed by Trump, as well as by other Presidents.
Still, he refused to concede his loss. He spent the past four years claiming that he had been cheated, even though he never produced a scintilla of evidence to support his lies. Several of his lawyers were disciplined or disbarred. His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was disbarred and also fined $148 million for defaming two election workers in Georgia. Although he had declared that he is bankrupt, Giuliani continues to turn over his assets to the women he defamed. Trump cannot pardon civil judgments, so Giuliani is likely to lose not only his law license but all of his assets.
Yet Trump survived, having persuaded his faithful base that he had been cheated in 2020, despite his lack of evidence and multiple indictments and convictions.
History will say this about Trump:
He was the first President who refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power to the winner of the election.
He was the first President to inspire an insurrection against the government.
He will be the first convicted felon ever to serve as President.
His insurrection and his name will live forever in infamy.
Quite an ignominious legacy.
To read an excellent article by Robert Reich on the same topic, open this link.
Scott Tomlinson, opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle, predicts that MAGA voters, especially in Texas, are soon to have an unwelcome surprise, thanks to the DOGE commission of Elon and Vivek. They voted for deep budget cuts. They voted to downsize the federal government, aka the “Deep State.”
He writes:
President-elect Donald Trump’s coalition splintered over visas for specially skilled workers in recent weeks, which turned especially ugly on Twitter, now known as X.
Elon Musk told critics of the program, including Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, to “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Solving the immigration crisis is relatively easy compared to balancing the budget, which Musk is supposed to be focusing on. When Trump voters find out what must be cut or whose taxes must rise to stop deficit spending, they’ll start grabbing pitchforks.
U.S. politicians from both parties have unintentionally experimented with the global economy. By running up huge deficits, they tested Modern Monetary Theory, an idea put forward by the left.
MMT was a hot topic during the Obama administration, with proponents arguing that economic powerhouses like the United States don’t have to worry about deficits. Governments can print as much money as they want through borrowing as long as inflation doesn’t rise.
Conventional macroeconomic theory recommends governments spend money, cut taxes and raise deficits during recessions. When the economy grows, governments should spend less, raise taxes and build surpluses. Governments should act as economic shock absorbers. We’re good at spending but not taxing.
Musk promises to cut federal spending by a third, or $2 trillion. The Texas Legislature ranks 10th in the nation for dependency on the federal government to pay for state spending, according to economists at Wallet Hub.
Imagine what would happen to Texas if the Legislature had to come up with $30 billion to make up for federal spending cuts?
Every dollar the federal government spends has a champion somewhere. If Musk tries to cut popular programs, the backlash over H1-B visas will seem like a walk in the park.
In a recent issue of The New Yorker, physician Dhruv Khullar writes about what happened to the practice of medicine when private equity began buying up hospitals and group practices. The result of privatization of healthcare was not surprising: the desire for profit became more important that the drive to improve patients’ health. Private equity was very successful in squeezing handsome profits out of community hospitals, but all too often those hospitals went bankrupt, leaving the communities without a hospital. Dr. Khullar says we are now in “the Gilded Age” of medicine, where wealth and corporate power are in charge.
Dr. Khullar is a physician and associate professor of health policy and economics at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Dr. Khullar wrote:
In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the underworld, bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts and christened the chain Steward Health Care. The state’s attorney general blessed the deal on multiple conditions, including that, during a five-year review period, the hospitals stayed open and their workers stayed employed. A few months after the period ended, however, Steward started selling the land on which the hospitals stood. A $1.25-billion-dollar deal, in 2016, helped to finance more acquisitions. Many facilities, asked to pay rent on land they’d previously owned, struggled.
According to a recent report published by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s office, which covers the period between 2017 and 2024, some Steward facilities had to forgo key investments in staffing, surgical equipment, elevator repairs, and even clean linens. Patients increasingly languished in emergency rooms; many left without receiving care; and mortality rates for common conditions climbed sharply. (Steward has argued that its death rates were better than expected, given the underlying health status of the patients it cared for.) A hospital in Florida developed a bat infestation, and another, in Texas, was cited for placing potentially suicidal patients in rooms with materials with which they could hang themselves. Employees at Steward’s Carney Hospital, in Massachusetts, began calling their workplace “Carnage” hospital. (Cerberus’s ownership ended in 2020, and the firm claims that the quality issues at Steward are “overwhelmingly related to the post-Cerberus ownership period.”)
In May, Steward filed for bankruptcy. It has closed two hospitals and plans to sell thirty-one others. Steward’s C.E.O., Ralph de la Torre, who in 2011 purchased a forty-million-dollar superyacht, was subpoenaed by a Senate committee but failed to show up; he was held in contempt of Congress and resigned from his position. (De la Torre, in turn, sued the committee for violating his right against self-incrimination.) Nonetheless, Cerberus realized a profit of seven hundred and ninety million dollars from its investment in Steward. Meanwhile, in some places in the U.S., private-equity firms now own more than half of all medical practices within certain specialties. “We are being picked clean by private equity,” a New Jersey-based radiologist said at a recent meeting of the American Medical Association. “There are people who don’t know where their next paycheck is even going to come from because their groups have been flipped so often.”
2024 was arguably the year that the mortal dangers of corporate medicine finally became undeniable and inescapable. A study published in JAMA found that, after hospitals were acquired by private-equity firms, Medicare patients were more likely to suffer falls and contract bloodstream infections; another study found that if private equity acquired a nursing home its residents became eleven per cent more likely to die. Although private-equity firms often argue that they infuse hospitals with capital, a recent analysis found that hospital assets tend to decrease after acquisition. Yet P.E. now oversees nearly a third of staffing in U.S. emergency departments and owns more than four hundred and fifty hospitals. In some of them, patients were “forced to sleep in hallways, and doctors who spoke out were threatened with termination,” according to Jonathan Jones, a former president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine.
Erin Fuse Brown, a professor at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me that private-equity firms have learned that they “don’t have to make things better or make them more efficient. You can just change one small thing and make a ton more money.” They are hardly the only corporations to learn this lesson. Increasingly, health insurers, private hospitals, and even nonprofits are behaving as though they aim first to extract revenue, and only second to care for people. Patients often are viewed less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit.
In 1873, Mark Twain co-wrote the novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” which satirized an era that was marked by inequality, greed, and moral decay but was painted in a veneer of abundance and progress. Industrialists made fortunes in oil, steel, and shipping even as millions suffered poverty and exploitation. Today, health care is where the money is. New technologies and treatments sustain the impression that patients have never been healthier, but corporations and conglomerates wield immense power at the expense of the people they’re meant to serve. Welcome to the Gilded Age of medicine.
In recent years, health-care corporations have embraced an approach that can only be described as gamification. In the U.S., all seniors over sixty-five are entitled to health insurance through Medicare, and, for several decades, private companies have offered plans through programs such as Medicare Advantage. The government pays insurance companies a fixed sum based partly on how sick those patients are. The sicker the patients, the bigger the potential payments. But who’s to say, really, how sick a patient is? Let the games begin.
This year, the health-news site STAT revealed that UnitedHealth, the country’s largest private insurer, had set up dashboards for practices to compete on how many conditions they could diagnose in patients. Doctors who completed the most appointments with seniors in Medicare Advantage were eligible for ten-thousand-dollar bonuses, and patients were offered seventy-five-dollar gift cards for getting checkups at which their medical histories could be recorded. At the height of the covid-19 pandemic, an e-mail sent to one practice told clinicians that documenting chronic illnesses was the “#1 priority.”
Insurance companies have even started to scour medical records for possible diagnoses, and to send nurses to patients’ homes to perform “health-risk assessments.” These strategies rack up so many additional diagnoses that, in 2023 alone, the federal government made $7.5 billion in “overpayments” to insurers, according to the U.S. Office of the Inspector General. Insurers are “pouring tremendous resources into developing the capacity to code patients in a way that nets more money from Medicare,” Donald Berwick, a former head of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told me. “That’s taxpayer money being siphoned away from people who need it.”
Berwick said that his own physician’s practice had recently been acquired by UnitedHealth. One day, he asked his doctor, “Anything different now?”
“Two things,” the doctor replied. “I have to see more patients each day. And my patients have new diagnoses that I didn’t put there.” Many patients with atrial fibrillation, for example, were now coded as having another condition known as “hypercoagulable state”—which was technically accurate, but didn’t change patients’ care in any way. It did, however, generate higher payments from Medicare. Ask not what your insurer can do for you—ask how much revenue you can generate for your insurer.
The insurance companies in Medicare Advantage tend to argue that they’re simply recording diagnoses, not making them up; that they offer vision and dental benefits that traditional Medicare doesn’t offer; and that they rein in unnecessary care, such as by requiring prior authorization for certain tests and procedures. But according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a nonpartisan agency that counsels Congress, private Medicare Advantage plans will cost the federal government eighty billion dollars more per year than if those patients had been in the traditional Medicare program. “You might as well flush most of that eighty billion dollars down the toilet,” Berwick told me.
On December 4th, after I drafted this piece, Brian Thompson, the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot in midtown Manhattan. In the days that followed, the public response was not just one of shock but also of frustration and even rage against the health-insurance industry. Someone posted in a subreddit for nurses, “Honestly, I’m not wishing anyone harm, but when you’ve spent so much time and made so much money by increasing the suffering of the humanity around you, it’s hard for me to summon empathy that you died.” The comedian Bill Burr compared C.E.O.s like Thompson to gangsters. “It’s a dirty game,” he said. “Health care—dirty game.” I was saddened by the callousness of these comments. Thompson had become a symbol of a broken system; people who devalued his life, it seemed to me, were engaging in a version of the dehumanizing behavior that they found objectionable within the health-care industry.
Please open the link to finish reading the article.
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