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Revive Unions to Celebrate Labor Day!

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2026 //
0

Economic inequality is greater today than in the 1950s. A tiny number of people enjoy fabulous wealth while millions of people live paycheck to paycheck.

One reason for the escalation of inequality is the declining number of people who are represented by unions. Big business has waged war on unions for more than a century.

But here is what we have learned about unions: Unions built the middle class. Unions were successful in raising wages, securing healthcare and pensions.

Big business continually complained that unions drove up their costs. But even as they have fought unions, they have raised their own compensation as CEOs and top management to staggering levels. Some CEOs are paid more than $100 million a year. But the f ed real minimum wage has languished at $7.25 an hour.

If workers want higher wages, good healthcare and pensions, they need unions.

Margaret Poydock of the Economic Polocy Institute has compiled important information about labor unions.

They are very popular.

Most working people would like to join a union.

People in unions make more money than people doing the same job but don’t belong to a union.

On behalf of the Economic Policy Institute, Poydock has reported:

New Gallup polling finds that 71% of people in the U.S. approve of unions, continuing the highest period of favorability in over 60 years. This coincides with the greatest number of workers represented by a union in 16 years.

The Gallup polling also showed that unions are favorable across generations and party lines.

  • 77% of adults ages 18–34, 74% of adults ages 35–54, and 67% of adults ages 55 and older approve of unions. 
  • 89% of Democrats, 70% of Independents, and 52% of Republicans approve of unions. 

This is just one of many recent surveys demonstrating the broad popularity of unions:  

  • Unions are more popular than big business. People in the U.S. favor unions over big business by more than 16 percentage points—the greatest gap ever recorded.
  • 56 million U.S. workers would join a union tomorrow if they could. 43% of nonunion workers would vote to unionize their workplace if given the opportunity. 
  • Majority views union decline as bad for U.S. Most people in the U.S. say the decline in union density is bad for the country (60%) and bad for working people (62%). 

It should be no surprise that the public views unions favorably: Unions help workers win higher wages, advocate for safer and healthier workplaces, support a thriving middle class, and strengthen democracy by boosting civic participation.  

Now is the time for policymakers to pass comprehensive legislation making it easier for workers to unionize. A new EPI report shows that tripling U.S. union membership would deliver: 

  • 14.5% wage increases for the typical worker, equal to more than $7,700 per year or nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. 
  • $1.2 trillion shifted into workers’ pockets every year, reversing a third of the growth in inequality since 1979.  
  • Health insurance for 6.8 million more people.  
  • Greater equality and smaller racial wage gaps. Unions raise wages for everyone and help prevent pay disparities, especially for Black and Hispanic workers.  

Read more about the benefits of rebuilding union power—and the roadmap to get there.

If you want a happier, healthier, fairer society, support the growth of unions.

Categories Ethics, Unions

Florida Couple Homeschooled Their Grandchildren While Confining Them to a Truck and Sexually Abusing Them

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2026 //
13

In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.

The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.

Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?

The New York Times reported:

A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.

Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.

One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.

“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.

The victims are the biological grandchildren of Keysha Monique Epps, 51, of Atlanta, according to Jae Williams, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, which filed charges against the suspects.

The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.

The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.

The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.

“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.

One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.

Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.

A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Home Schooling, Vouchers

ProPublica: Idaho Permits “Faith Healers” to Substitute for Medical Care for Children

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2026 //
9

Should states permit parents to trust “faith healers” for their children’s medical care? Should the state do so when the child is seriously ill? Should the state stand by idly when children tested by “faith healers” die?

That is what happens in Idaho. Under the protection of freedom of religion, parents may trust their sick children to “faith healers,” even at the cost of their lives.

Audrey Dutton writes about this quirk in the law, which was once widespread, but is now legal only in Idaho.

With the growth and political clout of old-time religions, this dangerous practice may spread to other states. When does freedom of religion become deadly?

Dutton writes:

In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for “traditional” Idaho values.

But from at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake, newspaper archives and historical documents show.

“Every parent of any child who willfully omits, without lawful excuse, to furnish necessary food, clothing, shelter, or medical attendance for such child, is guilty of a misdemeanor,” reads the 1887 edition of Idaho territory statutes, published before statehood.

The statutes included no mention of spiritual belief as a “lawful excuse.” Three years later, the state constitution explicitly put limits on Idaho’s freedom of religion. It would not excuse “acts of licentiousness,” polygamy or other practices “inconsistent with morality or the peace or safety of the state.”

It wasn’t long before the law came down on members of the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect that arrived in Idaho in 1899 and remains active in the state. From 2015 to 2025, the sect’s congregations in Idaho experienced 15 preventable deaths of children, according to ProPublica’s reporting.

Pearl Annis was a 13-year-old girl whose parents had moved from Oklahoma to Idaho’s Magic Valley in the spring of 1915 with at least one other Followers family. The Annises and their 13 children shared “a two-room shack,” a local newspaper reported. An officer and a doctor visited the home after neighbors voiced concern. They found Pearl in bed, fully dressed and on the cusp of death.

Her father, Lurid P. “Lewis” Annis, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of refusing to provide medical attention. Pearl was taken to the hospital, according to the news story, and died there with what today would be described as septic shock from a bowel blockage. The newspaper, which didn’t appear to follow up on Annis’ criminal charge, called the Followers church “a religious cult” and Pearl’s death a consequence of “religious mania.”

News archives and historic records don’t say how many times Idaho acted on similar cases in the decades after.

But one legal battle over lifesaving care drew attention in the 1960s, as sickness made its way through a Followers family in a Boise suburb. The mother died in December 1965. Her 4-year-old daughter died the following June.

Days after the girl’s death, a judge ordered the state to take custody of her 10-year-old brother under Idaho’s child protection law. The boy was admitted to a local hospital with pneumonia, a complication of the measles. He spent days in critical condition but survived. The judge told the father that to regain custody, he would have to be willing to give the boy medical care as the law required.

A doctor testified that without the hospitalization, the child “almost certainly would have died,” a newspaper report said.

The father’s lawyer told the judge that his sect was rooted in “faith that God will heal the sick.” The law in the 1960s was clear, though: a parent had a duty to protect their child’s health, no exceptions. The judge told Samuel’s father: “The law governs conduct. Religion governs opinion.”

But the legal landscape was about to shift. It came with little public attention.

During a full-on rewrite of Idaho’s criminal code in 1971, the Legislature added a section that said the state could not bring endangerment charges against someone “who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.” Legislative records don’t make clear how the wording originated. The passage of another law one year later, affirming the “spiritual means” language and applying it to other crimes, has been credited to the Christian Science church, another Christian denomination with Idaho members.

(The Christian Science website says the church’s practice of “healing in the way Christ Jesus taught” is not “faith healing” and that members are free to choose any form of healthcare. The church also supported Oregon’s full removal of its faith-healing exemption in 2011.)

Faith-healing exemptions soon became widespread nationally. The trigger was the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which set out to standardize the nation’s child welfare system by giving states grants to more effectively investigate reports of child abuse.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare interpreted the law as requiring states to have a faith-healing exemption to qualify for the grants — an interpretation that records from the time don’t explain.

Open the link and keep reading to learn how federal law changed to deal with “faith healing.”

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Religion, Safety, Separation of church and state

Heather Cox Richardson: The Plot to Disenfranchise Millions of Voters This Fall

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

Trump is obsessed with stopping mail-in Voting, although he votes by mail. He has spent his time in office sowing doubt in our elections, which are the basis of our democracy. The very fact that this crooked con man was returned to the Presidency makes me doubt the security of our elections.

Nonetheless, a whistleblower at the United States Postal Service leaked a complaint claiming that the USPS is planning to take measures that will throw the midterms into chaos, thus giving Trump a reason to discredit the expected Blue Wave, which will sweep away Republican majorities in the House and possibly the Senate. In brief, Trump intends to use the USPS to determine which votes count. Bear in mind that the Cinstututuin explicitly assigns responsibility to the states, not the federal government.

The actions Trump is taking to discredit the midterm elections are unprecedented. But then so was his demolition of the East Wing of the White House, so are his efforts to control the media, universities, and law firms. So are his efforts to overturn civil rights laws. So is his defunding of medical and scientific research. So are his attacks on freedom of the press. So are his efforts to control the curriculum of the nation’s schools.

Heather Cox Richardson explains:

Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.

The majority said it was not resolving the issue of whether the project is legal.

It was Chief Justice John Roberts who covered that aspect of the controversy. He wrote in dissent that the project is “likely unlawful.” “The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote. He wrote that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Nonetheless, as Josh Gerstein of Politico reported, the project will likely be completed before the question of its legality is resolved.

Trump’s behavior in his second term is a logical outcome of the theory of the “unitary executive.” Under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, those eager to stop Congress from passing legislation that benefited the American people at the expense of businessmen began to argue for the idea that because the president was the head of one of the three branches of the U.S. government, he could not be checked by either of the other two branches: the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts).

On July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, took this theory to a conclusion that overturned the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.

It decided that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.

This permission structure appears to have convinced Trump he can do whatever he wishes, including rigging elections so he cannot lose.

Yesterday Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exposed what appears to be a plot to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Blumenthal released a letter he had written to Postmaster General David Steiner calling attention to an official whistleblower report, which he attached to the letter.

It’s eye-popping.

The whistleblower warns that there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” According to the whistleblower, the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

The whistleblower says “the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

The complaint continues: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.” But the rushed IT development of the new system means it “will almost certainly have significant operating problems when released to the public.” The whistleblower notes that multiple officials from the USPS have described the development process for the system as “a sh*t show.”

The whistleblower said that work on the “USPS election ballot mail IT project” began in June 2026 and has continued despite an injunction from a federal court ordering work on it to stop. Normally, it would take “nine months to a year or more” to roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude, and importance.” Considering the rush and the consequences, the whistleblower wondered “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”

The complaint says: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk. Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

Blumenthal noted that the USPS has a restrained role as a mail carrier. It has never before played a gatekeeping function and yet is now building an entirely new system to put itself “in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.” He called for Postmaster General Steiner to “to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

Blumenthal demanded Steiner answer no later than Friday whether the USPS has stopped work on the project as ordered by the courts, as well as provide the names of those who worked on the project and the dates they were active. By September 8, he wants to see all records about the project.

Blumenthal told reporters: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

The administration’s attack on elections is especially concerning considering the recent suggestions that Trump is spending most of his time on his legacy projects like the ballroom, leaving him largely unaware of what is going on in the administration. Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic reported yesterday that when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went directly to Trump with his concerns about what Hegseth is doing to the Army, Trump was surprised to learn “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth” and “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”

Driscoll resigned yesterday.

As for the plan to sabotage mail-in voting? Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration, which oversees the administration of federal elections, posted: “These whistleblower allegations are extraordinary. If Trump Administration officials knowingly built a system designed to prevent Americans from receiving their ballots, that is not election security. It is a betrayal of our Constitution and the American people.”

—

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/31/supreme-court-white-house-ballroom-john-roberts-dissent-01057685

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/driscoll-hegseth-military-resignation/688479/

Categories Cheating, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Scandal, Trump

Paul Krugman: The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2026 //
3

I spend some time every day reading the discussions on Twitter and BlueSky. Given the perilous state of America’s role in the world–our failed war on Iran, our abandonment of Ukraine, the absurd trade war with Canada, Trump’s insults to our European allies, his admiration for Russia and North Korea, the cost of fuel–I am curious about how his supporters defend him.

No matter what happens, his most loyal fans believe he is wise and all-knowing. When anyone complains about the cost of gasoline, which affects everyone, they have a new answer. Trump just made a deal to get billions of gallons of oil from Venezuela! In a matter of days or weeks, the price of oil will plummet, not only to $3 a gallon but maybe lower. Take that, libtards!

If only they would read what Paul Krugman wrote about that deal! But I know they won’t.

The deal that Trump made will take years, even decades, to have any effect on the price of oil. American firms have to invest billions to develop the infrastructure needed to pump oil from the ground. And in the meanwhile, the Venezuelan government must be willing to honor the deal, which is deeply unpopular in that country. There are many “ifs” in the deal, and it will have no impact on the price of oil in the near future.

Krugman wrote:

The United States has an ugly reputation in Latin America — a reputation that, I’m sorry to say, is mostly well deserved. Our government has a long track record of supporting dictators, assisting in the overthrow of democratic governments, and sometimes even sending in the Marines, often on behalf of American corporations trying to pillage other nations’ natural resources.

Excluding the Trump II presidency, we have, I think, behaved better in the recent past. And this was largely due to the role of enlightened self-interest.

The fact is that old-fashioned, extractive imperialism doesn’t pay. In fact, it hasn’t paid for well over a century. In the modern world nations grow rich through innovation and productivity, not conquest. In 1909 Norman Angell’s book The Great Illusion argued that even victorious wars cost far more than they can possibly yield in tribute, documenting his case with what was already extensive historical evidence. His argument has even more force now.

Let me give you a recent historical example. Portugal was the last European nation to maintain a large overseas empire. As late as 1973 Lisbon still ruled vast African territories — some of them rich in natural resources — with many times the home country’s population. It was also the poorest nation in Western Europe, its resources drained by the endless wars it fought in an attempt to keep its colonies subjugated.

Finally, in 1974, junior officers in the Portuguese military, fed up with the fighting and dying, rose up in the Carnation Revolution and overthrew the fascist government. A newly democratic Portugal quickly abandoned its empire, eventually joining the European Union — and while it’s still poorer than some of its peers, it is far closer than before to the standard of living in, say, France.

In short, at this point only someone deeply ignorant of both the realities of modern economies and of the lessons of history can believe that there are big payoffs to seizing other nations’ natural resources. In other words:

For those who need a refresher, in January U.S. forces raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the nation’s brutal, corrupt dictator. Maduro surely deserved his fate. But the Trump administration made no move to help Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Instead, it made a deal with former members of the Maduro cabal,effectively installing a new regime that may well be even more brutal and corrupt than its predecessor. (There’s widespread suspicion that the kidnapping of Maduro was in part an inside job, engineered by his fellow cabalistas.)

In return, Trump got an agreement — details are scarce — that apparently will allow U.S. oil companies to extract and sell large quantities of Venezuelan oil but only if they put tens of billions of dollars into investments in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure.

So the Venezuela venture had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It seems safe to say that it had nothing to do with crime or terrorism, which were the other excuses the administration offered. What happened in Venezuela was simply an old-fashioned, 19th-century-style resource grab, a sort of Caribbean version of the Belgian Congo.

In one stroke, Trump has just validated everything the Latin American left has ever said about U.S. imperialism. And we’ll be paying for that, diplomatically and strategically, for decades to come.

Now, it’s highly unlikely that this deal will hold. By all accounts, just about every faction in Venezuelan politics except the current ruling clique hates the deal. Since it will take years, maybe even decades, to realize the putative benefits of oil-company investments in Venezuela, how likely is it that whoever is running that country in the future will want to honor Trump’s terms? What are the odds that Venezuela will eventually expropriate U.S. oil-company investments? Or do we imagine a future in which the U.S. military maintains a permanent occupation of Venezuela, using force to prop up a puppet government the nation’s citizens hate?

Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela appears on paper to have huge oil reserves. But much of these reserves are what I called a “black, sticky fantasy,” created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, when he reclassified oil in the OrinocoBasin that will be difficult if not impossible to recover as “proved” reserves.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Trump really does manage to seize 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. That sounds like a big number. Is it?

Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets. But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expertput it, “it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.”

So the profit margin on Venezuelan oil will be at most a small fraction of its market price. Surely $20 a barrel would be a highly generous estimate. So let’s go with that, in which case Trump’s deal might be worth $20*65 billion barrels = $1.3 trillion, a sum extracted over many years.

How big a deal would that be for the United States? Since this would be a many-year process if it happens at all, you want to compare it with U.S. wealth, not GDP (which is only the value created in a single year.) And total U.S. wealth is about $167 trillion.

So the chart at the top of this post shows how Trump’s triumphant Venezuela deal stacks up for the U.S. economy. Even if we make the most favorable assumptions — above all the assumption that the Venezuelan regime, unlike the Trump administration, can be trusted to honor its promises — the value of this deal to the United States is, to a first approximation … nothing.

Oh, and what about Trump’s claim that this will “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans”? Since any significant rise in Venezuelan production would take a long time, even crude oil prices won’t show any effects from this deal for years at best. And in any case the prices of gasoline and diesel — which are what people actually burn — have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude.

So Trump’s Venezuela deal will do nothing for ordinary Americans, while solidifying our reputation for rapacious, short-sighted imperialism.

Thank you for wasting your attention on this matter.

Categories Economy, Ethics, History, International, Lies, Scandals, Trump

Mary Trump: Will No One Stop Trump’s Unhinged Behavior?

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2026 //
7

Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump, notes that Trump behavior in increasingly unhinged, narcissistic, and frankly, ridiculous. Yet no one in his inner circle will tell him the truth. No one will tell him that he has humiliated America in the eyes of the world. Mary is a psychologist and the son of Trump’s older brother. She judges him by his actions and his words, not his braggadocio’

She writes:

Donald rushed the White House press corps into the Oval Office saying he had a big announcement, which is that, effective immediately, he is going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.

One of his flunkies, when asked, “Do you have anything to say about it, Ben?” said, “Yes, sir,” before explaining that this was a straightforward but important executive order. It directs Secretary Burgum and the Department of the Interior to update the Geographic Names Information System to reflect that the lake once known as Lake Ontario will from this time forward be known as Lake America. According to him, this is a lake that has most of its volume in the United States and the deepest parts of the lake sit in United States territory, so this will reflect that this is an American lake. Thankfully, all of the necessary papers and documents were filed to make this official.

In case you were thinking, “Oh, well, okay, maybe he’s finally done renaming bodies of water,” you would be wrong.

This is what Donald said:

The lake change, Lake of America, was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, actually. As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico. We changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America. So if you think about it, we have a Gulf and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.

That’s the President of the United States of America who currently has us involved in an illegal, unconstitutional war of choice, who is currently engaged in an unprovoked trade war with our closest ally and second largest trading partner, which will wreak havoc on both the economies of Canada and the United States of America, creating even more hardship for Americans given the fact that the economy, thanks to Donald’s completely stupid economic policies and the aforementioned war of choice, is in shambles.

American farmers are going bankrupt by the score, up to 77 per day. America is divided. America’s reputation across the world is cratering. America is a shadow of its once relatively respectable self, all because of that man and the fascist Republican Party that continues to enable him.

And it’s not because they don’t know what’s going on. They can see clearly that he is in serious, serious cognitive decline. There is overwhelming evidence of this.

They see clearly his toddler like levels of self involvement, his delusions of godhood, and his grasping need for attention. They see that his only priority is his wealth, his power, his megalomania, and yet Republicans continue to go along with his demands, which are increasingly insane, detached from reality, and utterly humiliating.

It’s not an accident, or maybe it is an accident, but it’s a convenient one, that by renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, the acronym for the Great Lakes, Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, and Erie, is now SHAME.

And I have begun to wonder if America will ever, ever be able to get out from under the weight of the shame Donald Trump and the Republicans have heaped upon us.

It is clear to any sentient being who isn’t lying to him or herself that Donald is increasingly unfit, increasingly just a prisoner to his psychopathologies. And now so too are we because not only has there been no pushback, he continues to be enabled. He continues to be told that he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to, because he’s him.

As you may have heard, Donald had wanted to close the Kennedy Center for two years because it needed such extensive renovations, according to him. Howard Lutnick is claiming that Donald is the only person in the world great enough to renovate the Kennedy Center. He also said that when the renovation project started, Donald, the great master builder, should be the project manager because being President is just another part time job.

We’ve also learned recently that Donald wants to make the midterms about himself. So here’s what holier than thou, sick of it Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had to say about it.

This is what Mike Johnson said:

The president is going to look right into the camera and say, I am on the ballot, okay? Because even though his name isn’t, it’s his administration, his legacy.

No, that isn’t how any of this works.

By continuing to enable him, by continuing to spread the wild, unhinged, untethered from reality narratives, Donald is trapped with it. They continue to act as if it is normal for a president at war to spend his time giving tours of the White House construction projects, to spend millions of dollars renovating a reflecting pool and then arresting people because the job was done so incompetently it made him look bad.

This is the President of the United States spending his time changing the names of bodies of water. First the Gulf of Mexico becomes the Gulf of America. Now Lake Ontario becomes Lake America. And apparently, having secured a gulf and a lake, Donald is considering moving on to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans because, as he explained, “Now all we need is an ocean.”

This is happening while America is at war. It is happening while farmers are going bankrupt. It is happening while we are engaged in a trade war with Canada. It is happening while the economy is in shambles and America’s reputation around the world continues to crater.

Yet the people surrounding Donald continue to treat his increasingly bizarre demands as if they are perfectly normal acts of presidential leadership. Nobody apparently has the courage to tell him that changing the name of Lake Ontario is not an important presidential accomplishment, just as nobody seems willing to tell him that being President of the United States is not a part time job that leaves plenty of room for managing the renovation of the Kennedy Center.

Instead, they flatter him. They indulge him. They tell him that he is the only person in the world capable of doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with the job the American people elected him to perform.

As long as we have people like Mike Johnson and everybody else in Donald’s inner circle trying to normalize this deviance, we are all part of this psychopathological system that will lead inevitably to our destruction.

To which I say, is there not one sane adult who knows where this is going to lead? Is there not one person in the Trump regime who can send up the signal flare to the rest of us that some of them are willing to start speaking out against this insanity?

Because this isn’t simply about renaming Lake Ontario. It isn’t simply about whether Donald decides tomorrow that the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean needs to have America stamped across its name, too. It is about the fact that there seems to be nobody around him willing to say no. There is nobody willing to stop indulging his grasping need for attention, his delusions of godhood, his megalomania, and his increasingly insane demands.

The Republican Party sees what the rest of us see. They know what is happening. They see the same behavior. They hear the same words. They watch him make the same increasingly detached demands, and rather than push back, they continue enabling him. They continue pretending that this is normal because Donald is Donald and therefore, apparently, he gets to do whatever he wants whenever he wants.

And that is how we get here. We have a President of the United States involved in an illegal and unconstitutional war of choice, an unprovoked trade war with one of our closest allies, and an economy that is creating extraordinary hardship for Americans, while he summons the White House press corps to announce that Lake Ontario is now Lake America.

And everybody around him plays along.

Donald said that now that America has a gulf and a lake, all we need is an ocean. Maybe he’ll change the Atlantic. Maybe he’ll change the Pacific. Maybe he’ll change both.

Meanwhile, the Great Lakes are now, conveniently enough, Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, and Erie.

SHAME.

That may be the most appropriate thing Donald has named yet.

This is unsustainable. He is unsustainable. And the sooner somebody is willing to stand up against the depredations that continue to be made against the American people by Donald and those who are perpetuating this, the better.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Trump

Confidential Records Reveal: Trump’s Takeover of Kennedy Center Was a Financial Disaster

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2026 //
2

The Washington Post obtained internal financial documents of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The documents confirm what many suspected: the Trump takeover was a financial disaster.

Before Trump, the Center was decidedly nonpartisan. Its board contained members of different political parties and no political party. When Trump took over, he cleaned out the entire board, excepting members of Congress whom he could not fire. He replaced the board with Trump loyalists, who tried to turn the institution into a monument to Dear Leader Trump. And the board fired the key members of the staff, who were professionals.

Once Trump’s name was added to the facade, artists and performances canceled, and ticket sales dropped precipitously.

Trump’s people said that any problems were inherited from the previous board and pretended that the Trump-Kennedy Center was better, more successful than ever.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

Someone handed the Center’s financial documents to The Washington Post.

Reporter Jonathan Edwards wrote:

““The center took a huge hit when the takeover happened,” and then appeared to stabilize, according to an official familiar with the center’s financial situation. But after the name change, “it was just an absolute fiscal cliff. Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared — like it was doomsday.”

One outside observer said that the fallout after the name change was catastrophic. A spokesman for the Kennedy Center said that any financial problems were the fault of the previous management.

But common sense suggests that putting Trump’s name on a memorial to John F. Kennedy was disastrous, not only because patrons were repelled by the name change and by the politicization of a beloved arts institution, but because the new, inexperienced staff was incompetent.

As is often said, whatever Trump touches soon dies.

Categories Art, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Trump

Trump Threatens to Demolish Kennedy Center If He Is Not Allowed to Renovate It

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2026 //
14

Trump’s lawyers yesterday threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he is not allowed to close it for two years and renovate it. His “expertise” as a builder makes him uniquely qualified to rebuild the Kennedy Center, his lawyers said.

He forgets that his full-time job is President. He has no time to manage construction, although he is very good at destruction. In New York City, he was never known as a “master builder.” He cut corners. He hired undocumented workers to save money. He stiffed subcontractors.

When he built Trump Tower, he saved money by not installing fire detectors. An apartment owner died a few years ago because he didn’t get out in time no fire detector or smoke alarm). He promised to donate the elegant friezes at the front of Bonwit Teller to the Metropolitan Museum, but he demolished these priceless items because it would cost too much to preserve them.

After he became President in January 2025, Trump has been determined to remake the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into one of his possessions.

He fired the bipartisan board and replaced it with his trusted associates. His board immediately named him chairman of the board and voted to put his name on the building, which was named in 1964 to honor the memory of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

In response to the addition of Trump’s name, performers and major productions began canceling, the Washington National Opera moved out, and ticket sales sharply declined. The Center’s revenues plummeted.

The board’s response to the wreckage they created was to propose to close the Center for two years for renovations.

Joyce Beatty, a board member and a member of Congress from Ohio, sued to restore the building’s original name and to prevent the board from closing it for two years. She prevailed in court, and a federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name from the building, the website and all other places and to stop plans to close the Center without providing a reasonable explanation.

In court yesterday, the Trump administration’s lawyer said that the President would demolish the building if he was not allowed to close it and renovate it.

The Washington Post reported:

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will eventually have to be demolished unless President Donald Trump is allowed to save it, Justice Department lawyers representing the center argued in a court filing posted late Monday.

The center, which the lawyers described as “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital,” faces “terminal decline” without Trump’s experience as a real estate developer and fundraising prowess, assistant attorney general Brett Shumate and two other department lawyers wrote.

“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” Shumate wrote. It could be replaced by a structure “such as a large outdoor amphitheater,” he added.

Trump is a big baby. If he can’t put his name on the Kennedy memorial, he will tear down the Center altogether, as he tore down the East Wing of the White House without seeking permission to do so. He is determined to put his name on the Kennedy Center, and the board recently voted to try again.

He is a model of stolen honor. The world knows that he is obsessed with Obama and Biden, but neither of them has a monument that Trump can deface. Next best: Put his name on Kennedy’s memorial center. He was admired, revered, and idolized as Trump has never been and never will be. So, of course, Trump has to slap his name on the Kennedy Center.

What else will Trump rename to honor himself? The Lincoln-Trump Memorial? The Washington-Trump Monument?

Categories Art, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Trump

Farewell to an Icon: Dolly Parton Reminds Us That There is Goodness in the World

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2026 //
11

The death of Dolly Parton was a blow to millions of people who never met her but loved her for her spirit, her kindness, her humor, and of course, her music.

In a time of meanness, she was steadfastly kind.

She was born into dire poverty, one of 12 children in a one-room house. She was never bitter or angry about her meager beginnings. She marveled at where her talent took her.

Over the course of her long career, she amassed a huge fortune but she did not aspire to be a billionaire. She was a philanthropist. She gave her money away, unlike Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the Trump family. Is there a hospital or library or public space named for them because of their generosity? None that I know of. People will remember Dolly for her generosity; the others and their ilk will be remembered for their avarice.

She was not political but she spoke up for Black Lives Matter and for LGBT people. When she was interviewed by Johnny Carson in 1977, she spoke up for LGBT people in her straightforward way. She loved drag queens; she knew that they liked to mimic her style, her hair, her dress. She said it was God’s role to judge, not ours. Hers was the voice of love and compassion.

Peter Greene wrote about Dolly here:

I wrote this four years ago when the twins aged out of her Imagination Library, one of the best things any wealthy person ever did. How cramped and meager some of our leaders look in comparison.

After five great years, the Board of Directors has aged out of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
I have been plugging this program for years (my first post was in 2014, back before the Board of Directors was even a sparkle in our eyes). Parton has engineered putting a book a month into the hands of families all across the country–we’re talking (currently) 184 million books in millions of households meeting no requirement other than they have a child between the ages of born and five. It costs the family nothing.

The quality of the books is great. Over the years we have received classics, newer books, books featuring every sort of family, every sort of kid. They are filled with wonder, kindness, beauty, excitement. This is one of the best examples of thoughtful, useful, not-trying-to-take-over-a-government function philanthropy you’ll find.

The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It’s still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child’s name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).

I am not, I’ll confess, a huge fan of Parton’s music, but she is the very best example of what good a person can do with their giant pile of money you can find. Not trying to shape the world to her own requirements, not trying to buy a good name, not trying to make herself the unelected boss of whatever. And the little PR that Imagination Library does is to get itself out into the hands of students, not to raise Parton’s profile. She doesn’t pay people to promote it, and it has spread largely through word of mouth or through the local organizations that co-sponsor it and help make the connections to local families.

Once a month, the boys received a book, addressed to them personally. We love books in this house, and the arrival of the monthly “book from Dolly” was an event. We will miss it.

The last book to arrive is Kindergarten, Here I Come, and the first page inside the front cover is a letter from Parton, that I’ll quote in part:

My, how time flies. It seems only yesterday when your family and friends read you your first story. You were just a baby. Now you’re five years old and about to go to school. How exciting!

This may be your last book from my Imagination Library but you have to promise me you will keep on reading…Every book is a treasure and every time you open one you will meet new friends and take wonderful journeys to magical places.

I hope you have a great time in school. I bet your school will even have a library where you can check out books. You and all your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go.

The board of directors examines a position paper

Her signature, a simple Dolly, is at the end. The first time we read the message together I was apparently having a bad allergy day.

None of the rich amateurs who want to change the face of education are doing anything of this value on this scale–both intensely personal and yet broadly across the globe. I mean, imagine if Bill Gates had said, “I want to give every child a book” instead of “I want to give every child a test.”

And if there is a tiny human in your life, and they aren’t signed up, go to the program website and see if it’s operating in your neighborhood, and if so, then sign up that child.

What a fabulous, generous, powerful program. God bless Dolly Parton. We are going to miss here at this house.

Categories Character, Creativity, Ethics, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Goodness, Joy, Love

Paul Krugman: Reality and Evidence Are Not to Be Trusted!

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Paul Krugman is the Nobel-Prize winning economist who was a columnist for The New York Times for many years. He here captures brilliantly the MAGA refusal to accept reality and evidence. How was the mainstream of the Republican Party either captured or cowed by this delusional mindset?

Krugman writes:

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rakeits 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.

I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.

If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.

Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.

Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.

George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.

Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:

If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.

If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet, anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between fantasy and reality.

But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.

The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a subject to be delved into another day.

What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.

Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge.

Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.

And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.

But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.

Categories Accountability, Hoax, Trump, Ethics, Bigotry, Lies, Fascism, Extremism
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