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Why Are Murdoch Veterans Taking Over the Washington Post?

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2024 //
6

I’m worried about what’s happening at The Washington Post. The newspaper has long been an icon for its integrity and its high journalistic standards. The Graham family owned it from 1933, when Eugene Meyer, father of Katherine Graham, bought it at a bankruptcy auction, until 2013, when the newspaper was sold to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

In 2021, the Post’s executive editor Marty Baron retired and was replaced by veteran journalist Sally Buzbee, who had spent her career at the Associated Press.

Bezos won plaudits for not injecting himself into the newspaper’s editorial decisions. He wanted the newspaper to grow from a regional newspaper to a global one.

The newspaper won Pulitzer Prizes, but it suffered a loss of $77 million in revenues in 2023, as well as declining readership.

Bezos decided to shake things up by cutting the staff of the Post and bringing in fresh blood. In October 2023, the buyouts affected 240 members of the staff (10% of all Post employees), including most of the research team, whose work was vital for investigative reporting. For those who remained, this was a stunning blow. They assumed that Bezos, currently the richest man in the world with a net worth of $209 billion, would ignore the losses to keep the historic newspaper strong.

They were wrong.

In late 2023, Bezos selected William Lewis to become publisher of the Post. Lewis was a veteran journalist who had worked for British newspapers, including Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, editor of the politically conservative Daily Telegraph, publisher of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and CEO of Murdoch’s Dow Jones.

In early June of this year, Buzbee resigned after clashing with Will Lewis and was replaced as executive editor by Matt Murphy, former editor-in-chief of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Lewis added fellow British journalist Robert Winnett as editor of the Post. Winnett spent 17 years at The Daily Telegraph.

With the new lineup, the trouble began.

In December 2023, David Folkenflip reported on NPR that Will Lewis helped Murdoch to navigate his way through the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News of the World and led to its demise. He wrote about Bezos’ choice of Will Lewis as the new publisher of The Washington Post:

The man picked to lead the Post — a paper with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — stands accused of helping to lead a massive cover-up of criminal activity when he was acting outside public view.

In lawsuits against News Corp.’s British newspapers, lawyers for Prince Harry and movie star Hugh Grant depict Lewis as a leader of a frenzied conspiracy to kneecap public officials hostile to a multibillion-dollar business deal and to delete millions of potentially damning emails. In addition, they allege, Lewis sought to shield the CEO of News Corp.’s British arm, News UK, from scrutiny and to conceal the extent of wrongdoing at News of the World’s more profitable sister tabloid, The Sun.

Folkenflik revealed in June that Will Lewis had offered him an interview if he would not write about his role in the phone hacking scandal. Lewis said that he had a conversation with a person at NPR before he assumed his duties at the Post.

And then all hell broke out.

The staff was demoralized and angry. They didn’t like the way Buzbee was sidelined, and they didn’t trust Lewis. Lewis told them about his plans for the future, and they were confused, not mollified.

Bezos took the unusual step of meeting with the newsroom staff. That was not enough to quell their anger about the layoffs and the new team at the top.

Media critic Dan Froomkin wrote about this meeting:

It was during a contentious, dismissive meeting he held with newsroom staffers a few hours after unceremoniously driving out executive editor Sally Buzbee and replacing her with two additional white male former Murdoch henchmen.

“If we keep doing the same things in the same ways,” the publisher said, according to one report, “we’re nuts,”

The big question, of course, is what he and his new Praetorian guard want to do differently. Thus far, he’s only shared the radical yet unformed idea of splitting the main newsroom in two and devoting the second one to the wildly enigmatic goals of “service and social media” to attract a new audience.  That’s the sort of plan you announce when you either have no plan or have one that you know won’t survive the scrutiny of your peers…. [Diane’s note: Other accounts of Lewis’ vision say that he plans for three newsrooms: one for opinions; one for the core daily news; and a third for social media and digital platforms geared toward younger audiences].

And given their previous affiliations with Murdoch and with the fiercely right-wing Telegraph newspaper – sometimes referred to as the Torygraph — there is a palpable fear in and out of the Post newsroom that the three men will drag the Post’s political coverage in a more pro-Trump direction.

Froomkin thought that the Post had a golden opportunity to be a forceful voice for the principles of democracy and truth, since the New York Times was committed to normalizing Trump and downplaying his threat to the nation.

He wrote:

So there is an extraordinary opportunity here for the Post to be the first elite newsroom to abandon the both-sides and pox-on-both-your-houses reporting style and instead actively warn readers that at this moment in our history, one party’s faults are wildly more dangerous than the other’s to both the free press and to a free country. That means relentless truth-telling along with remedial civics education and nonstop coverage of the stakes of the 2024 election

The Times’s egregiously restrained political coverage has left this lane wide open for the Post. And nothing could be more appropriate for the Post’s brand. The Post’s brand is bringing down a corrupt president; bold truth-telling that holds power to account. That’s an enormously powerful brand, both nationally and internationally, if the newsroom can deliver.

Was the ex-Murdoch team at the top likely to go in that direction?

The revelations about Will Lewis’s brand of Murdoch journalism kept coming, especially from NPR’s David Folkenflik. He wrote that Lewis and Winnett engaged in practices that might be okay in England but are considered unethical in the U.S. They paid people for stories (“checkbook journalism”), they used stolen records as the basis of scoops.

He wrote:

A vast chasm divides common practices in the fiercely competitive confines of British journalism, where Lewis and Winnett made their mark, and what passes muster in the American news media. In several instances, their alleged conduct would raise red flags at major U.S. outlets, including The Washington Post.

Among the episodes: a six-figure payment for a major scoop; planting a junior reporter in a government job to secure secret documents; and relying on a private investigator who used subterfuge to secure private documents from their computers and phones. The investigator was later arrested.

On Saturday evening, The New York Times disclosed a specific instance in which a former reporter implicated both Lewis and Winnett in reporting that he believed relied on documents that were fraudulently obtained by a private investigator…

Allegations in court that Lewis sought to cover up a wide-ranging phone hacking scandal more than a dozen years ago at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers are proving to be a flashpoint for the new Post publisher.

On at least four occasions since being named to lead the Post last fall, Lewis tried to head off unwelcome scrutiny from Post journalists — and from NPR.

In December, before he started the job, Lewis intensely pressured me not to report on the accusations, which arose in British suits against Murdoch’s newspapers in the U.K. He also repeatedly offered me an exclusive interview on his business plans for the Post if I dropped the story. I did not. The ensuing NPR piece offered the first detailed reports on new material underlying allegations from Prince Harry and others.

Immediately after that article ran, Lewis told then-Executive Editor Sally Buzbee it was not newsworthy and that her teams should not follow it, according to a person with contemporaneous knowledge. That intervention is being reported here for the first time. The Post did not run a story.

Eventually the Post did cover the scandalous behavior of its new leaders.

On June 20, CNN reported that two Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists blasted the leadership at their newspaper:

“I don’t know a single person at the Post who thinks the current situation with the publisher and supposed new editor can stand,” David Maraniss, an associate editor who has worked at The Post for nearly five decades and won two Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper, wrote in a candid Facebook post. “There might be a few, but very very few.”

Maraniss also zinged Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Post who installed Lewis, writing that he is “not of and for the Post or he would understand.”

Scott Higham, another Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Post, echoed Maraniss’ call for Lewis to exit the newspaper.

“Will Lewis needs to step down for the good of The Post and the public,” Higham replied in a comment on Maraniss’ post. “He has lost the newsroom and will never win it back.”

Spokespersons for Bezos and The Post did not immediately comment.

The backlash from The Post’s journalists comes after serious questions were raised about Lewis, who has been the subject of several explosive reports in recent days scrutinizing his journalistic integrity.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that, in his Fleet Street days, Lewis assigned an article that was based on stolen phone records. And The Post itself reported in a 3,000-word front page expose Sunday that a “thief” who used deceptive tactics to obtain private material had ties with Lewis’ hand-picked incoming top editor, Robert Winnett.

On June 21, Will Lewis announced that Robert Winnett had decided to stay in London and would not be joining the Post as editor.

It’s by no means clear that dropping Winnett will be enough to satisfy the newsroom.

Just yesterday, an article in the Post revealed that Will Lewis retains a financial interest in a small, digital-based firm that has contracts to work for The Post. The newspaper said the agreement does not violate its conflict-of-interest policy. But it smells funny.

Stay tuned. The fate of a great newspaper is at stake.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Media, Trump

North Carolina: GOP Plans to Approve Politically Connected Charter School Without Usual State Review

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
8

The Republicans in North Carolina have submitted legislation in the General Assembly to authorize a charter school with powerful political connections.

Ann Doss Helms of WFAE reported:

Buried deep in the 271-page House budget bill introduced Monday night, there’s a provision that would allow an unnamed charter school to bypass state review and open in August.

The description is very specific: The “expedited opening” would apply only to applications filed in 2024, for schools in the state’s largest statistical metropolitan area, in a fast-growing county and a school district serving fewer than 25,000 students.

Also, “the proposed charter school will be located in a fully furnished school facility purchased from a local board of education.”

That description applies to Trinitas Academy, which bought the old Mt. Mourne School in Mooresville from Iredell-Statesville Schools in 2022.

Trinitas hasn’t even begun the state review process that ensures its board is ready to educate students and responsibly handle millions of dollars of public money.

But it does have a website describing it as a K-8 classical academy. It lists a board that includes:

  • Susan Tillis, wife of Republican U.S. Senator Thom Tillis and founder of the Susan M. Tillis Foundation. She’s described as having  “an extensive background in state and national politics.” (Her name was removed from the site Wednesday, after this story aired.)
  • Will Bowen, communications director for Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry.
  • Marcus Long of Mooresville, described as a retired chief circuit judge from Virginia.
  • Board Chair Mark Lockman, described as having been “part of the district leadership at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Iredell-Statesville Schools. Additionally, Mark was instrumental in building the State of North Carolina’s first data-based instructional growth model for public K-12.”

They couldn’t immediately be reached. Trinitas board member Mikail O. Clark, a Charlotte lawyer, confirmed that Trinitas plans to open in August, but said he didn’t know enough about the House Bill to discuss it. “We’ve obviously engaged counsel to assist us with this matter,” he said, and hung up before answering a question about the status of the Trinitas application…

State Charter Schools Director Ashley Baquero said Tuesday that she knew nothing about the plan to bypass the approval process.

Open the link to finish the story of cronyism.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, North Carolina

NYC: Why Retirees Turned Against Their Own Union Leadership

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2024 //
61

The United Federation of Teachers in New York City is the largest chapter in the American Federation of Teachers. The UFT was created in 1960. It represents nearly 200,000 city employees, including about 60,000 retirees.

Since 1960, the UFT has been run by the Unity Caucus, which controls the officers, the executive committee and the delegate assembly. The president of the UFT is a powerful figure in New York City, New York State, and national politics. Its best known leaders were and are Albert Shanker and Randi Weingarten (Sandra Feldman served between their tenures, first as UFT president, then AFT president; she died of cancer at age 65). Shanker was president of the UFT from 1964 to 1985, then president of the AFT from 1974 until his death in 1997. Randi Weingarten was president of the UFT from 1998-2008 and became president of the AFT in 2008. The NEA has term limits, the AFT does not.

Weingarten was succeeded as president of the UFT by Michael Mulgrew. Since the union’s founding, the Unity Caucus has won every internal union election by large margins. Splinter groups came and went. Some persisted, but none ever won an election.

Until last week. Until June 15.

The UFT retirees rebelled. At the union’s annual internal elections, a dissident faction called Retiree Advocate upset the Unity slate. The retirees are angry because Michael Mulgrew made a deal with former Mayor DeBlasio to switch the city’s 250,000 retirees from Medicare to the for-profit Medicare Advantage. This switch was supposed to save the city $600 million a year.

The city government and the UFT told the retirees that the MA plan was better than Medicare.

The retirees were skeptical. How does a for-profit deliver make a profit while delivering better care than Medicare, many wondered. The answer, they soon discovered, were these two tactics: One, the person cannot use a doctor who is out of network; but even more important, the healthcare company may deny services. MA is very profitable for its executives.

Medicare accepts all licensed doctors and does not require the patient to get prior approval before they can get the treatment or surgery recommended by their doctor.

The retirees found a leader in a retired Emergency Medical Technician in the Fire Department named Marianne Pizzitola. She began posting videos on YouTube against the switch and collected a large number of retirees who agreed with her. She founded the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, Inc. She posted more videos, explaining that the city had broken its promise to retirees. Their contract promised Medicare, not MA. She argued that the city and some (but not all) unions were collaborating to deceive retirees. The city’s two largest unions—UFT and DC 37, which represents the city’s lowest paid workers—agreed with the city.

Marianne and her allies met with elected officials, organized rallies, and most consequentially, filed lawsuits to block the switch from Medicare to MA. All this activity was funded by retirees’ donations. Despite the huge disparity in resources, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees won every lawsuit. Judges agreed with them that the city had broken its promises to provide Medicare and a low-cost secondary plan.

The Retiree Advocate slate won 63% of the vote at the June 15 meeting. A majority of the retirees voted against the Unity Caucus slate because of the Medicare/MA issue. They poked a hole in the ironclad dominance of the Unity Caucus (which still has all the officers, 94 of the 100 members of the executive committee, and the vast majority of the delegates. But the retirees now control the retiree caucus.

I have a personal connection to this battle. I wrote an affidavit for the court case. In 2021, I was told by my cardiologist that I had to have open heart surgery to repair a damaged valve. People with this condition are walking time-bombs. I arranged to have my surgery done at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell by an excellent surgeon. I got a second and third opinion. I did not need prior approval because I was covered by Medicare and my wife’s secondary (she is a retired NYC teacher, principal, and administrator). If I had been on Medicare Advantage, I would have been denied coverage because I was asymptomatic. I had no pain, no shortness of breath, none of the symptoms associated with a serious heart problem. But without surgery, I would have died. (P.S.: Al Shanker was a close personal friend. Randi Weingarten is a close personal friend.)

I wrote about the retirees’ most important victory in court here. Just a month ago, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees won a unanimous decision in the New York Appellate Division. The city will likely appeal to the State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. I wrote “The NYC retirees’ group sued the City, on the grounds that the City was withdrawing benefits that were promised to its members when they were hired. Many had accepted lower pay because of the excellent benefits, especially the healthcare.”

The NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees summarized their victory:

NEW YORK, May 21, 2024 — Today, the New York Appellate Division issued a unanimous decision holding that the City of New York cannot force its roughly 250,000 elderly and disabled retired municipal workers off of their
longstanding Medicare insurance and onto an inferior type of insurance called
“Medicare Advantage.” Unlike Medicare—a public program that has protected City retirees for the past 57 years—the City’s proposed new Medicare Advantage plan was a private, for-profit endeavor that would have limited
retirees’ access to medical providers, prevented retirees from receiving care prescribed by their doctors, and exposed retirees to increased healthcarecosts.


The Court confirmed what retirees have been arguing for months: that they are entitled to the healthcare they were promised for over 50 years. The Court wrote: “The City has made clear, consistent, unambiguous representations – oral and written – over the course of more than 50 years, that New York City municipal worker-retirees would have the option of receiving health care in the form of traditional Medicare with a City-paid supplemental plan. Consequently, the City cannot now mandate the proposed change eliminating that choice.”

The Court permanently enjoined the city from forcing the retirees to leave traditional Medicare and to transfer to a MA plan.

Here is a brief explanation of why the retirees fought against privatization of their healthcare.

Arthur Goldstein, who worked as a high school teacher for 39 years, celebrated the victory in a post called A New Dawn. He followed up with a description of the meeting where Randi spoke and the Retiree Advocate group won control of their caucus. He is a long-time critic of Unity; he’s now vice-president of the UFT Retiree Caucus.

The members and leaders of the Retiree Advocate group are passionately pro-union. They wanted their voices to be heard. The UFT’s acquiescence in the Medicare-to-MA was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. They could not believe that the Union would join with the city government to save money by puttting them into a for-profit plan.

Here is Marianne Pizzitola rejoicing on the day of the Retiree Advocate in the UFT meeting.

Here is Marianne Pizzitola talking about the ramifications of this victory on “Medicare for All.” About half of the nation’s retirees are in Medicare Advantage plans. MA represents the privatization of Medicare and will block Medicare for All.

It’s a shame that the retirees had to fight their own union to preserve their health care. It’s rumored that the city (and the unions?) might go to Albany to try to change the law. The unions should pay attention to their retirees. They may be old, but they are smart and relentless. They will not give up. And I will be with them every step of the way.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, For-Profit, Health, New York City, Teachers, Unions

Thom Hartmann: The Billionaires Supporting Trump Are Digging Their Own Graves

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2024 //
20

Thom Hartmann has a warning for the billionaires supporting Trump: You endanger yourself if he wins.

He writes:

America’s rightwing billionaires are freaked out about communism and, in their paranoia, they are funding and encouraging the rise of a form of fascism that will eventually turn on them, too. Will they wake up in time?

Louise and I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat (he was a count) is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil.

It flashed me back to the 1960s and a number of conversations I had as a young teenager with my father and heard on TV shows that we watched together like those moderated by William F. BuckleyJr. and Joe Pyne. The fear those days was that Soviet-style communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia.

It was a fear that, at the time, seemed rational to many Americans.

Fred Koch, the founder of the Koch dynasty, had made his first big money “building refineries, training Communist engineers, and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure” for Stalin. He saw up close and personal how violent the USSR really was, and apparently never forgot it.

Koch Industries — and thus the Tea Party and the best of today’s Republican infrastructure — would never have happened were it not for the money Stalin gave Fred Koch for his services. Neither would the John Birch Society, which Koch heavily fundedin the wake of the “communist” Brown v BoardSupreme Court decision, have ever acquired the influence it did.

The Republican Party fully embraced anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s in a misplaced effort to regain political power after being shattered by the Republican Great Depression.  Republican rule (and Harding’s massive tax cuts) during the 1920-1932 era led directly to the Great Crash and everybody back then knew it; the GOP didn’t regain serious control of Congress until the 1990s, when most who could have remembered were dead.

Republican Senator Joe McCarthy led the charge in the 1950s, warning America that “communists” had infiltrated the Army and the State Department and were preparing to take over our country on behalf of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

When I was 13, my father gave me a just-published book he’d gotten from a friend in the John Birch Society titled None Dare Call It Treason. A major national bestseller and political bible for Republicans and Birchers, it posited that the US State Department was riddled with communist sympathizers, largely based on circumstantial evidence and the “investigations” conducted a decade earlier by Senator Joe McCarthy.

There was no such conspiracy: the failures of communism were becoming evident, and Americans who publicly proclaimed the need for Soviet-style communism in the United States were few and far between. 

But that didn’t stop the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, from frequently and loudly suggesting to the press that there were millions of American communists just waiting to be activated by the right leader. It was one of his favorite ways to label, target, and disempower people like Martin Luther King Jr. and union leaders who were simply petitioning for civil or workers’ rights.

While today there may still be a few actual advocates of Soviet-style communism in the US, to quote Eisenhower about rich rightwingers, “their numbers are small and they are stupid.” But that reality hasn’t stopped as many as a hundred of America’s roughly 800 billionaires from claiming — and probably sincerely believing — that calls for social and economic justice really mean that one day liberals will rise up, come out about their secretly harbored communism, and do to the American rich what Lenin did to the wealthy in Russia in the second decade of the 20th century.

Their kneejerk reaction to progressive policies like high income taxes on the rich and strong social safety net policies for poor and working-class people has been to label those efforts as, essentially, early stage or camel’s-nose-under-the-tent communism. Out of that fear, they fund reactionary rightwing politicians like Trump and Johnson who promise to end the social safety net and keep their taxes below those of average working people.

This is an old model. Hitler rose to power promising to end the “threat of communism” in Germany: he went after communists before he went after Jews. As Pastor Niemöller famously wrote, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”

Tragically, the result of the policies pushed by these reactionary, radical Republicans has been the opposite of what they say is their goal of stabilizing American society to ensure their own safety. Republican tax cuts have thrown the nation into over $34 trillion of debt, gutted the middle class, and produced a reactionary embrace of classical fascism as a solution to the crises of debt, offshoring jobs, and a lack of social and economic mobility.

Donald Trump is now promising to turn America into a “unified Reich.” 

As Les Leopold brilliantly points out, the main result of the 1980s Republican (and, to some extent, Democratic) embrace of neoliberal policies — driven in large part by the billionaire Davos set — has been to destabilize the American working class and drive them into the arms of the racist and neofascist movement that rose up and took over the GOP with the Trump presidency.

In that regard, the billionaires funding the Trump movement, Project 2025, etc., are now working against their own best interest. While Republican tax cuts and deregulation have produced an explosion of wealth at the top, they’ve also produced wealth inequality that’s led to an armed insurrectionist movement that threatens the kind of social and political instability that actually could lead to a civil war and a resulting Lenin-style backlash against the rich.

Robert Reich points out:

“813 US billionaires control a record $5.7 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth. When ~800 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.”

In fact, the period from the end of WWII to the 1980s Reagan Revolution was one of the most stable — and successful — for American capitalism in our nation’s history. A top income tax bracket ranging from 91% to 74% that kicked in after a few million a year in today’s dollars, and clear laws against stock and wealth manipulation schemes like stock buybacks and private equity, caused a general and widely shared prosperity.

The working class grew in wealth at about the same rate as did the top one percent during that period before Reaganism gutted the union movement and thus the middle class; average workers with a good union job could buy a home and car, take an annual vacation, and put their kids through school with ease. When they reached old age, they had a good pension to supplement their Social Security, making retirement safe and comfortable.

That was, in fact, the story of my father, who spent his life working in a unionized tool and die shop in Lansing, Michigan. It was the story of every family I knew growing up in a working class neighborhood that was rapidly transitioning into a healthy middle class.

Nonetheless, Reagan and the billionaires financing him were convinced the union movement and calls to expand anti-poverty programs initiated by LBJ’s Great Society were the leading edge of a communist takeover that would ruin America and endanger the lives of the morbidly rich. The result of their paranoid policies is the social and economic wreckage of the middle class that drives today’s militia movements and is exploited by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” and similar outlets.

It’s not like we weren’t warned. Back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote in his remarkable tome on economics, The Wealth of Nations, exactly how rich people following their own greed inevitably destroy the very society from which they extract profits unless that society establishes strong guardrails to protect itself from them.

He argued that in “rich” countries — where the public good is well administered and there’s a more general prosperity — profits are ample to satisfy the business owners needs, but not excessive. When the rich seize control of most of the profits and wealth, however, and thus have the power to exploit society, he said, they always drive nations into poverty and ruin:

“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”

This year, America saw the highest level of corporate profit in the history of this country, and perhaps in the history of capitalism in developed countries worldwide. 

A few sentences later, Smith elaborates:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this [wealthy] order [of men], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.

“It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

The simple reality is that markets, like traffic, work best when they’re appropriately well-regulated. The idea of a “free market” is as absurd as the idea of “free traffic” where everybody is welcome to ignore red lights, traffic lanes, and stop signs. It’s a rhetorical device designed to make average Americans accept changes in the rules regulating capitalism that will benefit the profits of the top one percent and nobody else. 

And it’s killing us.

The European, Asian, and Canadian experience of the past 80 years or so has shown that strong union movements, a healthy social safety net (Medicare for All, free or inexpensive college, support for the deeply poor), and legislatures that answer to voters instead of donors (with strict regulation of money in politics) almost always produce general prosperity and social stability.

It’s why the “socialist” nations of Scandinavia — with the strongest union movements, highest income taxes on the rich, and most all-inclusive social safety nets — consistently rate among the happiest nations in the world. None are considering flipping into the Soviet model that fills the nightmares of so many of America’s rightwing billionaires.

While the rise of authoritarianism in post-revolutionary Russia is usually posited as a warning against communism’s forcible redistribution of wealth, in fact it’s a warning against any sort of authoritarianism. It proves that both the extreme left and the extreme right — communists and fascists — must embrace violence and terror to impose their will on a nation’s people.

In that regard, America’s billionaires — along with the rest of us — should be every bit as frightened of the avatars of fascism like Trump, Bannon, and Orbán as they are of the ghosts of the long-dead USSR.

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Trump

States Are Spending Billions on Vouchers, Mostly for Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2024 //
28

In the past few years, Republican-controlled states have established or expanded expensive voucher programs. The so-called “wall of separation” between church and state—a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson—is crumbling. Republicans and the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court are taking a sledgehammer to that wall, to make sure that public money underwrites tuition at private and religious schools. Public schools enroll the vast majority of American K-12 students, from 80-90%. They are being stripped of resources so that a small minority can go private.

Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein wrote in The Washington Post:

Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.


School vouchers can be used at almost any private school, but the vast majority of the money is being directed to religious schools, according to a Washington Post examination of the nation’s largest voucher programs.


Vouchers, government money that covers education costs for families outside the public schools, vary by state but offer up to $16,000 per student per year, and in many cases fully cover the cost of tuition at private schools. In some schools, a large share of the student body is benefiting from a voucher, meaning a significant portion of the school’s funding is coming directly from the government.

In just five states with expansive programs, more than 700,000 students benefited from vouchers this school year. (Those same states had a total of about 935,000 private school students in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available.) An additional 200,000 were subsidized in the rest of the country, according to tracking by EdChoice, a voucher advocacy group. That suggests a substantial share of about 4.7 million students attending private school nationwide are benefiting from vouchers — a number that is expected to grow.

The programs, popular with conservatives, are rapidly growing in GOP-run states, with a total of 29 states plus D.C. operating some sort of voucher system. Eight states created or expanded voucher programs last year, and this year, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri have approved or expanded voucher-type programs. Some recently enacted plans are just starting to take effect or will be phased in over the next few years…

In Ohio, the GOP legislature last year significantly expanded its voucher program to make almost every student eligible for thousands of dollars to attend private school. As a result, more than 150,000 students are paying tuition with vouchers this year — up from about 61,000 in 2020. About 91 percent of this year’s voucher recipients attend religious schools, the Post analysis found. When vouchers for students with autism and other disabilities — who typically seek specific services — are removed from the list, the portion going toward religious education rises to 98 percent. (Unless otherwise noted, the Post calculations exclude schools for students with disabilities.)

In Wisconsin, 96 percent of about 55,000 vouchers given this school year went toward religious schools, The Post found. In Indiana, 98 percent of vouchers go to religious schools. (Indiana state data only specifies the number of vouchers for schools with at least 10 recipients.)
In Florida, several programs combine to make every student in the state eligible for vouchers, with more than 400,000 participating this year. At least 82 percent of students attend religious schools, The Post found. Florida is first in the nation in both the number of enrolled students and total cost of the voucher program — more than $3 billion this year.


And in Arizona, more than 75,000 students are benefiting from the Empowerment Scholarship Program, which pays for any educational expense. In 2022-2023, three-fourths of the money — about $229 million — went to 184 vendors. Most of that money went for tuition, 87 percent of it to religious schools.


Arizona also has an older voucher program, funded by tax credits, which last year subsidized tuition for at least 30,000 students. (The state tracks only the number of scholarships given, and one student can receive multiple scholarships.) Since this program was created in 1998, 19 of the 20 schools that received the most money were religious, according to a state report. Those 19 schools received about 96 percent of the $767 million spent between 1998 and 2023 at the top 20 schools.

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nevada: MAGA Locals Demand Recall of Republican Elections Clerk

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2024 //
7

This story is deeply worrisome, frightening, alarming. An avid fan of Trump initiated a recall of the elections clerk, Cindy Elgan, of Esmeralda County and two other county officials. 82% of the county’s 620 voters went for Trump. The county uses Dominion Voting machines.

The angry Trump supporter, Mary Jane Zakas, listens to rightwing media exclusively. She is certain that the election was rigged, even though Trump won more than 82% in the county. She believes the Dominion machines were programmed to steal votes. She accuses Elgan of rigging the vote. She has traversed the county collecting signatures of registered voters to recall Elgan.

Elgan is baffled. She is a Republican. She voted for Trump. She knows almost every one of the 620 voters in the sparsely setttled county. But Trump supporters think she’s part of the deep state.

They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China. They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada’s voter rolls. They blamed “undercover activists” for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs. They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to “flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.” They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand.

And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too — the most unlikely scapegoat of all. She had served as the clerk without controversy for two decades as an elected Republican, and she flew a flag at her own home that read: “Trump 2024 — Take America Back.” But lately some local Republicans had begun referring to her as “Luciferinda” or as the “clerk of the deep state cabal.” They accused her of being paid off by Dominion and skimming votes away from Trump, and even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.

When Zakas brought in a recall petition, Elgan saw the names of friends, people who knew her well but now are convinced the election was stolen from Trump, and she let it happen. The more Elgan defended the accuracy of the vote, the more Zakas was convinced that Elgan was part of the Deep State.

She [Zakas] listened to a self-proclaimed cybersecurity expert from Colorado named Mark Cook, who claimed that voting machines could be hacked with a cellphone. She heard Jim Marchant, then the Republican nominee for Nevada’s secretary of state, say that Nevada’s election officials had been “installed by a deep state cabal.” She heard local Republican leaders say Dominion machines had stolen votes, even though Fox News had agreed to pay Dominion nearly $800 million to settle a lawsuit for spreading the same lies. And most of all she continued to listen to Trump as his election denialism intensified. “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” he said during a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire last year.

Zakas came up short on the numbers who signed the recall petition. She will appeal to the courts.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Nevada, Republicans, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The “Madman” Planning Trump’s Second Term in Office

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2024 //
23

Heather Cox Richardson relies on her experience and knowledge of history to debunk the demented ideas of the quacks and madmen planning for Trump’s next term in office. They believe that every change in the U.S. Constitution was part of a left wing plot, rather than a natural evolution to adapt to societal change. Please open the link to read her analysis in full.

She writes:

Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. 

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on. 

Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.

Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign. 

While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship. 

The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing….

Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence. 

A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence. 

And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience. 

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. 

Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said. 

In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it. 

On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, History, Republicans, Trump

Texas: Republican Party Agrees on Plan to Kill Democracy

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2024 //
16

The usual understanding of democracy is “one man [person], one vote.” No matter how rich or powerful you are, your vote counts the same as that of the poorest person in the same district. We know from experience that the very rich win power by making lavish political donations, but at the ballot box each person has only one vote and all votes are counted equally.

At its recent convention, The Texas Republican Party endorsed an outrageous scheme to cancel the foundation of democracy. It’s not enough for them that billionaires are funding pliable politicians. The state Republicans want to cancel the principle of “one person, one vote.”

They adopted a plank that imposes a sort of electoral college on statewide elections. The winner will not be the candidate with the most votes, but the candidates who win a majority of counties. “The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county,” the new plank says.

Democrats are concentrated in big cities; Republicans are the majority in large numbers of small rural counties. If this plank weee to become part of the State Constitution, Democrats would never again be elected Governor, Lieutenant Governor, or U.S. Senator. Democrats might win the popular vote by a large majority, yet still lose the election if they don’t win a majority of the counties in the state.

This proposed Constitutional Amendment is a stake in the heart of democracy. Democrats must organize and elect candidates who want to strength of our society, not destroy it.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Fascism, Texas

“Democracy”: Setting the Record Straight, Part 2: Yes, Putin Did Interfere in 2016 to Help Trump

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2024 //
65

When a commenter belittled Russian interference in the 2016 election, Democracy returned to provide the evidence of Russia’s active and considerable interference in the election of 2016. The election of Trump was a major coup for Putin.

Democracy wrote:

“Whatever meager influence Russian may have had …”

I suppose this is an improvement over “The fact remains that there is no evidence for Russian involvement in the U.S. election at all.”

This, written at a time when there was — IN FACT – LOTS of evidence of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, from virtually every intelligence agency in the United States government:

US Intelligence news release on October 7, 2016:  

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-press-releases-2016/1423-joint-dhs-odni-election-security-statement

Reuters:  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of Director of National Intelligence agree that Russia was behind hacks into Democratic Party organizations and operatives ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. There is also agreement, according to U.S. officials, that Russia sought to intervene in the election to help Trump, a Republican, defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-cyber-idUSKBN14H1SR

There are some people who apply the Trumpian tactic on Michael Cohen to this information, suggesting that because, at certain times in the past, some of these agencies have had credibility issues.

Except, here, private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the information. As The Daily Beast reported in 2017,

“it was a respected computer security company called Crowdstrike that examined the servers, and publicly revealed Russian’s involvement in the DNC hacks last year. It backed up the claim with specific technical information far more useful than anything in the DHS report. Crowdstrike competitors, including Symantec and FireEye, have examined the forensic data from the DNC hack themeselves, and endorsed Crowdstrike’s conclusion that two particular hacking groups were the culprits: ‘Fancy Bear’ and ‘The Dukes.’

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/06/how-the-u-s-enabled-russian-hack-truthers.html

Here’s how Thomas Rid, formerly at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, and now the Director of the Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, and who studies and writes about technology and cyber warfare, puts it:

“the evidence is so rich that there are only two reasons not to accept it — one, because you don’t understand the technical details, or because you don’t want to understand it for political reasons… It’s really not controversial that we’re looking at a major Russian campaign.”

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum summarized the whole sordid affair well:

“the outline of the case is no mystery…Democratic and Republican Party servers were hacked by foreign agents, yet the Moscow-friendly folks at Wikileaks somehow only obtained the contents of Democratic servers…Meanwhile, Donald Trump ran a campaign that seemed almost designed to please Russian President Vladimir Putin…The campaign then rewrote the Republican platform in ways sure to please Putin. Trump selected as his principal foreign-policy adviser a retired general previously paid by Russia’s English-language propaganda network, RT…Trump himself publicly urged the Russians to do more hacking of his opponent’s email…Trump endorsed Putin’s war aims in Syria…He suggested he would not honor NATO commitments against Russia…He condoned the invasion and annexation of Crimea…Do Americans really need secret information from the CIA to discern the pattern here?”

Yet there DO appear to be SOME people who still try to play off the Russian ratf*cking as some kind of climate-change-like “hoax.”

Some of them even think that they’re “smart.”

But, hey, I got some news.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Trump

Disgusting! Pennsylvania GOP Legislators Jeer 2 Capitol Police Officers Who Defended Capitol on Jan. 6

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2024 //
21

There is something about the MAGA movement that is corroding the moral and ethical standards of our country. Evidence occurred when two members of the Capitol Police who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, appeared before the Pennsylvania legislature recently. Some members of the GOP booed; some walked out.

What kind of lawmakers are they? Don’t they take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution? Did they want the mob to seize the Capitol and take hostages? Did they want the mob to hang Mike Pence? Does the oath allow disgruntled people to try to overthrow the government?

No, this is what the Pennsylvania Constiturion says: 

 "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, obey
     and defend the Constitution of the United States and the
     Constitution of this Commonwealth and that I will discharge the
     duties of my office with fidelity."

The Washington Post reported:

Two former law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol from rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were jeered by state GOP lawmakers as they visited Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives on Wednesday, according to several Democratic lawmakers present.


Former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and former sergeant Aquilino Gonell were introduced on the floor Wednesday as “heroes” by House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D) for having “bravely defended democracy in the United States Capitol against rioters and insurrection on January 6.”
As the two men — both of whom were injured by rioters on Jan. 6 — were introduced, the House floor descended into chaos. According to Democratic lawmakers, several GOP lawmakers hissed and booed, with a number of Republicans walking out of the chamber in protest.


“I heard some hissing and I saw about eight to 10 of my Republican colleagues walk out angrily as they were announced as police officers from the U.S. Capitol on January 6,” state Rep. Arvind Venkat (D) said in a phone interview Thursday. “I was shocked and appalled,” he added. According to Venkat, the commotion lasted about five minutes. Fewer than 100 lawmakers, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, were present in the chamber before the chaotic scene unfolded, he said.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump
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