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Robert Kagan: Will Trump End Democracy?

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2023 //
36

Over the past week, there was a surge of articles about the danger that Donald Trump poses to our democracy. Trump ratcheted up his threats to punish his enemies and to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists. When his admirer Sean Hannity asked him point blank whether he intended to be a dictator—expecting he would say “of course not”—Trump responded he would be a dictator “only on the first day,” when he would command the completion of the border wall with Mexico and “drill, drill, drill.” Trump’s rhetoric no longer sounds like a normal candidate. But he was never a normal candidate.

Some commentators noted that his threats were unprecedented, yet they barely caused a ripple. He said that certain generals who served him yet denounced him deserved to be executed. What would the press have done if Obama had made such a statement? It would have been front-page news for days, not a blip. Trump has normalized threats of violence. His base has come to expect promises of violence from him. He doesn’t disappoint them.

In his first term, he reached out to some who were not in his personal orbit. He won’t make that mistake if there is a next time.

The article that generated the most attention was written by Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, titled “A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Ibrvitable. We Should Stop Pretending.”

Kagan was a noted neoconservative but left the GOP in 2016 because he couldn’t accept Trump. His recent article is 7,500 words. I read it late at night and couldn’t sleep. Kagan’s article laid out the case that Trump will win the nomination; that no elected Republican will stand up to him; that he stands a good chance of being re-elected; and that if he is, he will surround himself with toadies and wreak havoc on our democracy. He predicted, as the title says, that Trump would have no guardrails, no respect for the norms of the Presidency, and no regard for the Constitution.

He said that would use the Justice Department to harass and punish his enemies.

A few quotes from his article:

Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.

Once Trump sweeps Super Tuesday, he writes, Republicans will fall in line behind him and so will big donors. All of the other GOP candidates except Chris Christie will endorse him.

Meanwhile, Biden will have trouble unifying his party. The news media love to run stories about disenchanted Democratic voters who will stay home. Biden faces challenges from third-party candidates, including Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr., and possibly a No Labels candidate like Joe Manchin.

Trump “enjoys the usual advantage of non-incumbency, namely: the lack of any responsibility. Biden must carry the world’s problems like an albatross around his neck, like any incumbent, but most incumbents can at least claim that their opponent is too inexperienced to be entrusted with these crises. Biden cannot. On Trump’s watch, there was no full-scale invasion of Ukraine, no major attack on Israel, no runaway inflation, no disastrous retreat from Afghanistan. It is hard to make the case for Trump’s unfitness to anyone who does not already believe it.”

Trump enjoys some unusual advantages for a challenger, moreover. Even Ronald Reagan did not have Fox News and the speaker of the House in his pocket. To the degree there are structural advantages in the coming general election, in short, they are on Trump’s side. And that is before we even get to the problem that Biden can do nothing to solve: his age.

Trump also enjoys another advantage. The national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking. In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.

Today, Republicans might be responsible for Washington’s dysfunction, and they might pay a price for it in downballot races. But Trump benefits from dysfunction because he is the one who offers a simple answer: him. In this election, only one candidate is running on the platform of using unprecedented power to get things done, to hell with the rules. And a growing number of Americans claim to want that, in both parties. Trump is running against the system. Biden is the living embodiment of the system. Advantage: Trump…

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?
Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

Another traditional check on a president is the federal bureaucracy, that vast apparatus of career government officials who execute the laws and carry on the operations of government under every president. They are generally in the business of limiting any president’s options. As Harry S. Truman once put it, “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.” That was a problem for Trump is his first term, partly because he had no government team of his own to fill the administration. This time, he will. Those who choose to serve in his second administration will not be taking office with the unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes. If the Heritage Foundation has its way, and there is no reason to believe it won’t, many of those career bureaucrats will be gone, replaced by people carefully “vetted” to ensure their loyalty to Trump.

Trump might decide he wants a third term. Who will stop him? The Constitution? The 22nd Amendment? The Congress? Not likely.

Trump as President will pursue those who tried to stop him. He pledged in his Veterans Day speech to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Prepare for a new McCarthyism as Trump and his MAGA lackeys go after the “anti-American” Democrats whom he calls “”Communists,””Marxists,” “Fascists,” and “vermin.”

How will Americans respond to the first signs of a regime of political persecution? Will they rise up in outrage? Don’t count on it. Those who found no reason to oppose Trump in the primaries and no reason to oppose him in the general are unlikely to experience a sudden awakening when some former Trump-adjacent official such as Milley finds himself under investigation for goodness knows what. They will know only that Justice Department prosecutors, the IRS, the FBI and several congressional committees are looking into it. And who is to say that those being hounded are not in fact tax cheaters, or Chinese spies, or perverts, or whatever they might be accused of? Will the great body of Americans even recognize these accusations as persecution and the first stage of shutting down opposition to Trump across the country?

Kagan says that the odds of a Trump dictatorship are growing by the day. In 2016, it was completely improbable that a man such as trump would win the Republican nomination, and completely unlikely that he would win the Presidency. And it was unthinkable that when he lost in 2020, he would insist that he won in a landslide, and even crazier that his base would believe the Big Lie. Republicans will cower in fear before him; Democrats will protest, maybe take to the streets, but Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to shut them down.

Who will have the courage to stand up to Trump when the risk is not just losing your political office but arrest, detention, public humiliation, and the loss of your freedom?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Character, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Republicans, Trump

Leonard Leo Is Pushing for Public Funding of Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
11

Leonard Leo is one of the most powerful people in the nation. Get to know him. He led the conservative lawyer’s group The Federalist Society. He personally prepared the list of judges for Trump’s selection to the Supreme Court. He can take credit for the appointment of dozens of federal judges in district courts and appellate courts. In tribute to his effectiveness, a Chicago businessman gifted him with $1.6 billion to use as he wished to advance conservatism.

Politico reports that Leonard Leo’s latest cause is promoting religious charter schools, which would be fully funded by the public. The target, which he hopes to demolish, is separation of church and state.

At issue is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s push to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the nation’s first religious school entirely funded by taxpayers. The school received preliminary approval from the state’s charter school board in June. If it survives legal challenges, it would open the door for state legislatures across the country to direct taxpayer funding to the creation of Christian or other sectarian schools.

Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, acknowledges that public funding of St. Isidore is at odds with over 150 years of Supreme Court decisions. He said the justices have misunderstood Thomas Jefferson’s intent when he said there should be a wall separating church and state, but that the current conservative-dominated court seems prepared to change course.

“Jefferson didn’t mean that the government shouldn’t be giving public benefits to religious communities toward a common goal,” he said. “The court rightly over the last decade or so has been saying, ‘No, look, we’ve got this wrong and we’re gonna right the ship here.’ ”

Behind the effort to change the law are Christian conservative groups and legal teams who, over the past decade, have been beneficiaries of the billion-dollar network of nonprofits largely built by Leo, the Federalist Society co-chairman.

Leo’s network organized multi-million-dollar campaigns to support the confirmation of most of the court’s six conservative justices. Leo himself served as adviser to President Donald Trump on judicial nominations, including those of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett…

“The Christian conservative legal movement, which has its fingerprints all over what’s going on in Oklahoma, is a pretty small, tight knit group of individuals,” said Paul Collins, a legal studies and politics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “They recognize the opportunity to get a state to fund a religious institution is a watershed moment,” said Collins, author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making, adding that“They have a very, very sympathetic audience at the Supreme Court. When you have that on the Supreme Court you’re going to put a lot of resources into bringing these cases quickly.”

In Oklahoma, the legal team representing the state’s virtual charter school board, the Alliance Defending Freedom, helped develop arguments that led to the end of Roe v. Wade. It is significantly funded by donor-advised funds that allow their patrons to keep their identities secret but which receive large amounts of money from Leo-aligned groups.

They include Donors Trust, often called the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. In recent years, Donors Trust has been the largest single beneficiary of Leo’s primary dark money group, the Judicial Education Project. Donors Trust, in turn, gave $4 million to Leo’s Federalist Society in 2022, according to the IRS filings.

Since 2020, when Leo received a $1.6 billion windfall from Chicago electronics magnate Barre Seid, among the largest contributions to a political advocacy group in history, other groups funded by Leo’s network have become substantial contributors to ADF. For instance, Schwab Charitable Fund, which has given at least $4 million to ADF, received $153 million in 2021 from a new Leo-aligned nonprofit that received the Seid funding.

ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler said in an emailed statement that his group is defending the board “in order to ensure people of faith are not treated like second-class citizens.” Sechler, who said he “cannot predict” whether the case will land at the Supreme Court, did not comment on the group’s funding.

St. Isidore is represented by the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative, a legal clinic created by the law school at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett has worked with St. Isidore from the start of its application process.

In the same timeframe, Garnett joined the board of the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chairman. She also joined the advisory council of a Catholic University law school initiative funded by a $4.25 million anonymous gift directed by Leo, according to a March 2021 press release. Justice Samuel Alito is its honorary chairman.

The Notre Dame clinic’s director is another alumni of Leo’s network, Stephanie Barclay, an attorney who spent multiple years at another legal nonprofit named after a Catholic martyr where Leo sits on the board: the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The clinic itself was announced a few monthsbefore the confirmation of Barrett, who was a Notre Dame law professor for 15 years. The June, 2020, announcement of the clinic’s creation stated that Barclay would take a leave of absence to clerk for Gorsuch during the same time period — 2021 and 2022 — that the group was working with the Oklahoma archdiocese on its St. Isidore application. In June of 2022, the court also overturned Roe; a month later, the clinic funded a trip for Justice Alito to be feted at a gala in Rome.

Clinic spokeswoman Kate Monaghan Connolly declined to say if Barclay has done any work on behalf of St. Isidore, including before, during or after her clerkship. The clinic declined comment on its funders.

The clinic “has defended the freedom of religion or belief for all people across a wide variety of projects,” including Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and an Apache tribe, said Monaghan.

As St. Isidore and its allies readied for legal battle, Farley said, Notre Dame brought in a corporate team at the law firm Dechert LLP, including Michael McGinley, who worked on selecting judicial nominees at the Trump White House at the time Leo was advising the president. McGinley clerked for Gorsuch when he was a 10th Circuit appeals judge and for Alito at the Supreme Court. He accompanied Gorsuch to his confirmation hearings. He is not employed by Notre Dame, said Connolly. He is working “pro bono” for St. Isidore, Farley said….

Those backing the St. Isidore application face a formidable array of critics and opponents. Charter schools are required by Oklahoma statute to be non-sectarian, and in its application, the archdiocese says the school would be part of the “evangelizing mission of the Church.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, says the proposed school violates both the U.S. and the state Constitution, and he is suing to stop it. Separately, a group of 10 plaintiffs including public school parents and faith leaders represented by groups including Americans for Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit warning that the creation of the school will erode a pillar of American democracy: the wall of separation between church and state.

The plaintiffs in that case are calling on the Oklahoma judge presiding over it, C. Brent Dishman, to recuse himself. Dishman sits on the board of the College of the Ozarks, an evangelical college that was represented by ADF in a suit against the Biden administrationover transgender bathroom policy.

The school’s detractors say the national implications of the dispute are not getting enough attention. They include Melissa Abdo, a practicing Catholic and school board member in Jenks, Oklahoma, and Robert Franklin, a Republican-appointed member of a state virtual charter school board who last summer voted against the school’s application.

If the law were to allow public funding of religious schools, legislatures in conservative states would come under immediate pressure to help bail out troubled religious school systems: Catholic and Protestant churches are shuttering due to significant declines in church attendance and financial support as Americans become increasingly secular.

The 1.8 million-student Catholic education system received a lifeline through the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the case of Carson v. Makin, which required states with voucher systems to help students afford private schools to allow the money to be spent on religious academies. The influx of public money was already helping the Catholic Church to stave off parish closings, according to a 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research studythat called vouchers “a dominant source of funding for many churches.”

“It’s not about the 500 kids. The game is to get this to the Supreme Court,” said Franklin. “If the court approves this, it changes everything” about public education in America, he said.

“It’s been extremely unsettling,” said Franklin, noting that the state already has six virtual schools to serve children of all faiths and that some of the school’s biggest backers, including Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, had previously bashed virtual learning as ineffective.

Please open the link to read the full article.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump, Vouchers

Why Did Americans Abandon the Greatest Economy in History?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2023 //
43

This excellent article in The Atlantic by Rogé Karma should be widely read. Something changed radically in our economy and our society in the past several decades, limiting access to “the American Dream.” He explores the reasons why.

He writes:

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition…

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes…

The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

In the remainder of the article, the author says that the nation is at an inflection point, ready for a change. But what that change will be determined by voters next year.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Deregulation, Economy, Elections, History, Racism, Republicans

Pennsylvania: New School Board President Sworn in on a Stack of Banned Books!

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2023 //
9

On Twitter (“X”), The Recount reports that the newly elected president of the Central Bucks County school board, Karen Smith, was sworn into office on a stack of banned books, not the Bible.

https://x.com/therecount/status/1732425364675203121?s=42&t=9ko2QEoKmRIlvHb1PdtjSw

The new board swept out a board of rightwing zealots.

Categories Censorship, Education Reform, Elections, Freedom to Read, Literacy, Literature, Pennsylvania

Tennessee: Dark Money Targets Critics of School Choice, Republicans and Democrats

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2023 //
6

Adam Friedman of Tennessee Outlook wrote about the flood of dark money pouring into Tennessee to defeat legislators who oppose school choice, both moderate Republicans and Democrats. The biggest money is coming from Charles Koch (Americans for Prosperity).

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Koch Brothers, Republicans, Tennessee, Vouchers

Pennsylvania: New School Board Tosses Out Rightwing Policies

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
6

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, voters elected a new school board pledged to reverse the policies of their Moms-for-Liberty style predecessors. That meant ending censorship of library books and ending the ban on gay-friendly displays, among other things. The old school board gave the retiring superintendent a $700,000 going-away gift; the new one is trying to recover the gift.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

The new Democrat-controlled Central Bucks school board moved quickly Monday to roll back some of its GOP-led predecessors’ most controversial actions — from suspending policies restricting library books to authorizing potential legal action into the former superintendent’s $700,000 payout.

What shape the new board’s actions will ultimately take isn’t yet clear. The board’s new solicitor, for instance, said earlier Monday that he needed to learn more about the separation agreement reached between the prior board and now-resigned superintendent Abram Lucabaugh before pursuing a lawsuit.

But the crowd that lined up outside the Central Bucks administrative building to witness the swearing-in of new members Monday was ready to celebrate regardless — cheering new leadership after what numerous speakers described as two years of “chaos,” bookended by highly contentious, big-money elections.

Republicans who cemented their majority in 2021 enacted bans on teacher “advocacy” in classrooms — including the display of Pride flags — and “sexualized content” in library books, and faced a federal complaint alleging the district had discriminated against LGBTQ students.

But Democrats swept the Nov. 7 school board elections — as they did in a number of area districts where culture-war issues had dominated debate.

“Two years ago, I stood in this room a broken woman,” said Silvi Haldepur, a district parent. But “this community banded together and stood up against the hate.”

Keith Willard, a social studies teacher, told the board it was “incredibly difficult” to work for the district when the previous board had “actively marginalized people” and pushed the “belief that staff are indoctrinating kids.”

“What I ask of this board is that you help steer the ship… and return the stewardship to the people that do the real work every day” — teachers and staff, said Willard, who drew a standing ovation.

The room again broke into applause as the board voted to suspend the library and advocacy policies,as well as a policy banning transgender students from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities — a measure the former board passed at its final meeting in the wake of last month’s elections.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Curriculum, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Gender, Pennsylvania

Scott Maxwell: Politicians Don’t Want You to Vote—Except for Them

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2023 //
27

It’s worth subscribing to the Orlando Sentinel just to read Scott Maxwell. His commentary on Florida politics is priceless. This one asks: “Why not ban voting altogether?”

He writes:

A common trait among Florida legislators, especially those in positions of power, is that they think they’re really smart. Usually smarter than they are. And definitely smarter than you.

It’s not completely their fault. Many live inside bubbles filled with staffers and lobbyists who constantly tell them they’re brilliant. (And attractive. And hilarious joke-tellers.) Plus, they’re surrounded by a bunch of other politicians. So it’s a low bar.

I mention all this because Republican legislators are resuming one of their long-running crusades, trying to make it harder for you to set the policies and priorities you want in the state in which you live. And they do so because they think you’re too dumb to be trusted — at least when it comes to changing state laws.

See, if 50.1% of voters put a politician into office, that politician usually believes voters have demonstrated the wisdom of Solomon.

But if 60% of you vote for something they dislike — like medical marijuana or a higher minimum wage — then they’re convinced you don’t understand what you’re doing. You’re an idiot. So the politicians want to protect you from yourself.

Republican lawmakers began this crusade about two decades ago. Florida voters had already used the constitutional amendment process to demand things like smaller class sizes — and it really ticked off lawmakers.

So the politicians teamed up with deep-pocketed donors, like Publix and the Florida Association of Realtors, to fund a campaign to raise the threshold for future amendments from 50% to 60%. And it worked.

But the politicians and special interests had a problem: You people — the annoying voters — kept on voting for things they disliked by margins of 60% or more.

So now GOP lawmakers want to raise the bar to 66.7%.

You already live in a state where the minority rules. Now they want to make it the superminority.

This is why I think it would be simpler if these guys were just honest about what they really want — for you people not to vote at all.

Just let them run the show. They’re smarter. And they will protect you from your own bad ideas … like quality pre-K programs for all.

Voters should play as little of a role as possible in democracy. That’s the basic idea from Rep. Rick Roth, a Republican from Palm Beach, perhaps by way of Pyongyang or Havana.

Roth is the sponsor of the bill to raise the amendment threshold to 66.67%. And he has a lot of support within his party. Almost all of the Republicans in the State House supported Roth’s bill last year. It was the Senate that said no.

House Republicans called their 67% bill an effort to demand “broader support.” Yet would you like to guess who didn’t receive “broader support” at the polls? Most of the legislators who supported this bill.

Local reps Doug Bankson, Tom Leek, Rachel Plakon, Susan Plasencia, Tyler Sirois and David Smith were all among the House Republicans who voted for the supermajority requirement for issues but fell short of that in their own personal campaigns. They, of course, still felt quite comfortable taking office.

Give those guys a 51% victory, and they consider it a mandate. But a 63% vote for Fair Districts? Well, you dumb voters just didn’t understand what you were doing.

Many lawmakers also claim the amendment process should be tougher because the Florida Constitution is some sort of sacred document whose hallowed words should not be altered by mortal men — an argument that is a total crock. The Florida Constitution wasn’t handed down to Moses on a mountaintop thousands of years ago. It was last ratified in 1968 when the Beverly Hillbillies was still on TV.

And lawmakers themselves have tried to ram all sorts of half-baked ideas into the constitution in recent years,  including a non-binding rant against Obamacare they wanted to insert in 2012.

That they find worthy of inserting into our state’s supposedly sacred constitution. But not restoring civil rights to former felons.

The reason Roth’s push to make the amendment process tougher is getting extra attention this year is that GOP lawmakers are extra nervous about abortion. All over America, moderate Republicans are uniting with Democrats and independents to pass laws guaranteeing the right to abortion access.

Kansas particularly freaked these guys out. When they saw that nearly 60% of voters in that very conservative state supported abortion rights, they knew they needed to change the rules in Florida so that 60% would no longer be considered a victory.

If you can’t win the game on the field, move the goal posts.

But again, it seems like it’d be simpler for these politicians just to ban voting altogether.

Instead of moving the threshold of victory from 50% plus one — which it’s been since the beginning of time — to 60% and then 67% and then who-knows-what later on, just tell citizens they can’t vote anymore.

After all, the politicians are obviously smarter than the rest of us. Just look at the deft way they’ve handled property insurance and things like unemployment benefits.

Citizens, with their silly notions about democracy, fairness, civil rights and quality education, just tend to get in the way.

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

Categories Democracy, Elections, Florida, Stupid

The Netherlands: Party of Far-Right Islamophobe Wins Parliamentary Elections

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
19

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has espoused anti-Islamic views for many years. He has campaigned on a platform of putting Dutch people first and blocking immigration from Muslim countries. He has been called the Dutch Trump. In the recent parliamentary elections, his party came in first among a field of 15 parties. It won 37 of 150 seats and will need to persuade other parties to join in a coalition in order to govern. In the past, Wilders has promised to close mosques and Islamic schools, but he is already moderating his hardline views to win over partners. Wilders will need 76 votes—39 more than he has now— to form a new government.

The BBC reported:

Veteran anti-Islam populist leader Geert Wilders has won a dramatic victory in the Dutch general election, with almost all votes counted.

After 25 years in parliament, his Freedom party (PVV) is set to win 37 seats, well ahead of his nearest rival, a left-wing alliance.

“The PVV can no longer be ignored,” he said. “We will govern.”

His win has shaken Dutch politics and it will send a shock across Europe too…

He told the BBC that “of course” he was willing to negotiate and compromise with other parties to become prime minister.

The PVV leader won after harnessing widespread frustration about migration, promising “borders closed” and putting on hold his promise to ban the Koran…

A Wilders victory will send shockwaves around Europe, as the Netherlands is one of the founding members of what became the European Union.

Nationalist and far-right leaders around Europe praised his achievement. In France, Marine Le Pen said it “confirms the growing attachment to the defence of national identities”.

Mr Wilders wants to hold a “Nexit” referendum to leave the EU, although he recognises there is no national mood to do so. He will have a hard time convincing any major prospective coalition partner to sign up to that.

He tempered his anti-Islam rhetoric in the run-up to the vote, saying there were more pressing issues at the moment and he was prepared to “put in the fridge” his policies on banning mosques and Islamic schools.

The strategy was a success, more than doubling his PVV party’s numbers in parliament.

For Americans, the elections in the Netherlands and Argentina raise an urgent question: are these elections a portent of the persistence of far-right politics or are they the after-effects of the Trump era? Are they the future or an echo of the past?

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, International, Trump

Thom Hartmann: Argentina Elects Wild-Eyed Libertarian as Its New President

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2023 //
16

Thom Hartmann analyzes the implications of the recent presidential election in Argentina. The victor was an unconventional candidate with bizarre ideas and minimal experience in office. We have already had our Trump. Now it’s Argentina’s turn.

Hartmann writes:

I hope I’m wrong, but I think I just saw the future of America if Republicans manage to sweep the 2024 elections, Trump or no Trump.

Argentina just embarked on a Grand Experiment, untried before in any developed country in the world; it’s one that multiple American billionaires have been pushing in the US ever since David Koch ran for VP on the Libertarian ticket in 1980.
When I arrived at the airport in Buenos Aires on Sunday morning this week, Election Day, I asked my cab driver who he’d be voting for and why.

The cab driver said he would assuredly vote for Javier Milei, because inglation was out of control and things couldn’t get worse.

I asked him about the Libertarian Congressman’s (and now newly elected president’s) plans to replace the national “Medicare for All” type of healthcare system Argentina has with American-style private, for-profit health insurance plans that people must finance out of their paychecks (if they have a job, otherwise they’re SOL); to end the nation’s free colleges; and his plan to turn all the nation’s public schools and prisons over to “entrepreneurs” to run for profit.

And what about his promise to end all government support for average people, including disability payments, unemployment insurance, and all forms of welfare? His saying that abortion is murder and he’ll re-criminalize it, along with ending women’s and queer rights?

He shrugged.

“Things can’t get any worse,” was his terse reply, adding that he’s driving an airport car as a second job because inflation has wiped out the income from his regular job. This working two and three jobs, he said, has become common across the country.

Argentina has been suffering from an ongoing economic crisis for decades, but it got really bad when the “currency crisis” hit the nation in 2018 after they complied with IMF demands, wiping out half the purchasing power of the peso virtually overnight.

Much like the United States, up until the 1960s Argentina had a top income tax bracket of 90%, which stabilized the economy and prevented massive wealth inequality. Subsequent administrations, including the military dictatorship, cut that down to 35%, like today’s US, with enough loopholes that, like America, most billionaires pay virtually nothing.

Like the US, they also cut taxation on capital gains (although they’ve taken them all the way down to zero), giving a huge boost to Argentina’s morbidly rich and stripping massive amounts of revenue from the federal government.

Their draconian tax cuts, like Reagan’s, drove huge federal deficits. Right wingers, citing the deficits, demanded cuts in social programs, but, until now, weren’t successful in gutting Social Security and other social programs in either country.

In part, because the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, we can sell debt (treasuries) to finance our deficits; Argentina has a much harder time, because nobody else uses the peso and international investors are wary, so they’ve been pursuing a policy of printing money and borrowing from the IMF, which has debased their currency leading, in part, to today’s massive inflation.
Inflation this year has been over 100%, exacerbated by previous presidents experimenting with neoliberalism as demanded by the IMF, irresponsible borrowing, along with several years of climate change-induced drought which have badly damaged Argentina’s agricultural production, driving up food prices.

Milei’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff election was the nation’s finance minister, so he took much of the blame for the state of things while Milei — often referred to as “Argentina’s Trump” because he’s a wealthy former TV star, tantric sex instructor, and crackpot economist with no governmental experience other than his first year in parliament — promised to dump the rapidly devaluing peso and replace it with the US dollar. (He campaigned carrying around a chainsaw, saying he was going to take it to “welfare,” the “deep state,” and the nation’s social programs.)

When Milei won the top slot in the runoff election a few months ago, his victory caused the peso to fall further, as markets anticipated mass chaos resulting from the possible implementation of his plan to abandon the Argentinian currency if he won the general election. (It’s going to require huge cooperation from the IMF, and they don’t seem inclined to want to help.)

His primary win set off a run on the peso and produced a further currency devaluation (inflation is at 143% today) which, in turn, caused greater voter discontent. Ironically, that funneled more votes to Milei, who overwhelmingly (55%) won Sunday’s election.

The Libertarianism that Milei and American politicians like Rand Paul and Mike Lee embrace, as I’ve noted previously, is a political/economic system that was invented and named in the 1950s by a front group for the real estate lobby to rationalize their opposition to rent control, which was then spreading out of New York City and across America.

It basically argues, as Koch did in his 1980 campaign, that the only “commons” (things publicly owned and administered) a country can legitimately claim are the police and the courts.
They, in turn, have the primary job of making sure that property rights of wealthy people supersede all other rights, including the rights to healthcare, education, clean air and water, protection from abuse by employers, housing, and anti-poverty programs (including Social Security). All of these, Libertarians will tell you, are simply vestigial forms of socialism (or communism) and should be turned over to billionaires or giant corporations.
Libertarians’ key rationalization for this is that “private industry is always more efficient than government,” an argument that, while false, anybody who’s ever stood in line for an hour at the DMV can understand.

Ever since the 1980s, when Reagan embraced the libertarian worldview claiming that, “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” the GOP has increasingly embraced Libertarian policies. Republican presidential candidates now compete for who can gut or shut down the most federal government agencies, from the EPA to the DOE to, well, ask Rick Perry.
Milei haș taken it so far as to say that poor people should feel free to sell their body parts, children, and organs to wealthy people on private, unregulated exchanges to pay their rent and medical expenses.

Billionaires and big corporations love Libertarianism because they end up with all the formerly-government-run sectors that they can then turn into profit centers to rip off the public. And shutting down regulatory agencies like the EPA, Interior, and USDA means they no longer have to pay for pollution controls, food safety systems, and other pesky protections for the “little people.”

Probably the example most Americans would recognize is Medicare Advantage, a privatized health insurance scam for seniors that makes billions in profits every week for our largest insurance companies while routinely refusing to pay for doctor’s visits, procedures, and even hospitalizations. It’s literally killing people by denying them care.

Milei ran on the promise of shutting down 10 of Argentina’s 18 federal agencies, throwing most of his countrymen, women, and children into the arms of the nation’s largest and richest corporations and the billionaires who own them.
He’s also a climate change denier, winning him — like Trump — the support of the nation’s fossil fuel industry, claiming the country’s drought and wildfire problems are part of natural climate variations.

Milei is a climate change denier, so count on Argentina to do nothing to mitigate climate change.

Milei claims that any attempts to “fix the problem of hunger” or “fix the problem of poverty,” or even deal with unemployment is “communism or socialism”; all of these problems should be left to billionaires and giant corporations to solve through private charity or minimum wage work.

Programs like public schools, the free college system that Argentina has that allows any capable student to become a doctor or lawyer at no cost, their national healthcare system, housing supports, Social Security, and even a minimum wage and unemployment insurance are “abhorrent,” Milei says. He claims that “social justice” is simply another word for “theft from rich people.”

Rightwing Republicans were giddy about Argentina’s new president.

Trump posted to his vanity Nazi-infested social media site, “MAKE ARGENTINA GREAT AGAIN!” while Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted, “May the spirits of {neoliberalism’s founders] Mises & Hayek be with you…”

Because Milei doesn’t have a parliamentary majority, it’s unlikely any effort to replace the peso with the dollar will to go anywhere, but all bets are off on his reconfiguring the federal government to trash the poor, gut social services, and privatize the nation’s schools, colleges, and medical system. Converting the country to dollars, however, would require a massive stock of the US currency that is simply unavailable within the country; the World Bank is suggesting they are unlikely to finance necessary reserves…

His victory is an international marker, of sorts, for America’s billionaires and largest corporations who share Milei’s desire to end liberal democracy and the so-called “welfare state” both in Argentina and around the world.

In its wake, expect to see the GOP double down on Milei-like language and policies as they try to drive America back toward their own libertarian ideal, which hundreds of years ago in Europe was simply known as “feudalism.”

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, International, Trump

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Oilmen Spreading Hate and Lies

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2023 //
5

Chris Tomlinson is an award-winning columnist for the Houston Chronicle. He uses his space to combat bigotry, stupidity, and lies. He is not a “both sides” kind of journalist.

He writes here about the infamous oil billionaires who use their money to spread their religious views, attack public schools, and encourage indoctrination.

He writes:

Texas oilman H.L. Hunt may have been the first to spend millions to promote right-wing media and extremist ideas, but he was far from the last.

Most Texans, let alone Americans, had never heard of Farris and Dan Wilks or Tim Dunn before this year. But journalists have revealed them as key supporters of some of the most controversial figures in Texas politics and bankrollers of political action committees staffed by Christian nationalists and antisemites.

The reclusive billionaires and their allies rarely respond to requests for comment from mainstream media and did not respond to my messages.

Farris Wilks, fracking billionaire and pastor of the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day) Church, preaches that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and that abortion, homosexuality and drunkenness are serious crimes, according to the church’s doctrinal statement, the Reuters news agency reported.

Dan Wilks attends church with his brother, with whom he co-founded Frac Tech, a company they sold for $3.5 billion. They have since become some of the largest donors in Texas GOP politics, giving $15 million in 2016 to a political action committee backing Sen. Ted Cruz.

Like Hunt, who broadcast his extremist commentary on radio stations nationwide, the Wilks brothers have also invested in media, supporting conservative mouthpieces like The Daily Wire and Prager University. Their PAC bought ads disguised as articles in the Metric Media news network, which includes 59 pseudo-local news sites in Texas, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

The Wilks brothers have enjoyed their greatest success by joining Dunn to move the Republican Party of Texas as far right as possible through Empower Texans, one of the most influential dark-money political action committees.

Empower Texans shuttered in 2020 after spinning off operations into Texans for Fiscal Responsibility and Texas Scorecard, which rank politicians by their adherence to the group’s ideology. Dunn and the Wilks brothers have provided most of the financing and set the agenda for conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who has led all three organizations.

In 2016, the groups opposed Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, whom they considered too moderate. They also ran ultra-conservative candidates against Republicans who ranked poorly on their scorecard. When Straus, who is Jewish, invited Dunn for a breakfast meeting, he reportedly said only Christians should have leadership positions, Texas Monthly reported in 2018. This is a sentiment he’d previously expressed in a 2016 Christian radio interview.

Republicans have long struggled with antisemitism. In 2010, State Republican Executive Chairman John Cooke wrote an email proclaiming, “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it,” the Texas Observer reported.

Dunn and the Wilkses also finance special interest PACs. In 2017, Empower Texans supported and advised Texans for Vaccine Choice, an early anti-vaccination movement, former state Rep. Jonathan Stickland told the Washington Post.

Stickland left elected office to start Pale Horse Strategies, a political consulting firm that ran a new Dunn and Wilks PAC, Defend Texas Liberty. The PAC defended Attorney General Ken Paxton against corruption allegations and provided $3 million to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick weeks before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial, where he was acquitted.

Fresh from that victory, a Texas Tribune reporter observed Stickland, Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes and Black Lives Matter shooter Kyle Rittenhouse enter the Pale Horse Strategies office in Fort Worth on Oct. 6.

Fuentes was driven to the meeting by Chris Russo, who used Dunn and Wilks money to found Texans For Strong Borders PAC. Russo has past ties to Fuentes, the Tribune reported.

When current GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan demanded Patrick give away the $3 million donation, Patrick said Dunn had called him to apologize.

Dunn “is certain that Mr. Stickland and all PAC personnel will not have any future contact with Mr. Fuentes,” Patrick explained.

Yet, when the Tribune’s Robert Downen kept digging, he found that Pale Horse’s social media manager, Elle Maulding, had called Fuentes the “greatest civil rights leader in history” and shared photos of them together. Shelby Griesinger, Defend Texas Liberty’s treasurer, has said Jews worship a false god and depicted them as the enemy on social media.

Dunn and the Wilks brothers have spent $100 million on ultra-conservative candidates, political action committees in Texas, and radical nonprofits. They finance a movement staffed by publicly antisemitic foot soldiers.

Conservatives considered H.L. Hunt a crackpot in his day. But this new generation has the GOP falling into a goose step.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Ignorance, Lies, Religion, Stupid, Texas
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