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European Workers Are Fighting Elon Musk, Richest Man in the World

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2024 //
13

Forbes magazine regularly reports on the wealth of the richest people in the world. Elon Musk is #1, with assets of $250 billion. Despite his fortune, Musk despises unions.

In Europe, unions are taking action against Musk by refusing to deliver or service his Teslas.

The Washington Post reports:

MALMÖ, Sweden — Every day, port workers here in Sweden’s third-largest city unload shipping containers, oil, chemicals and building materials destined for places across the country. But there’s one thing they won’t touch: Tesla cars.

For six weeks, dockworkers at Swedish ports have refused to load or unload the electric cars made by billionaire Elon Musk. They’re part of a growing movement of workers across Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark who are protesting in support of striking Swedish Tesla technicians and their demand for a collective agreement on the terms of their employment.

“We’re going to take the fight all the way,” Curt Hansson, a 55-year-old dockworker here said in an interview during a break from unloading ships on a cold, gray December day. “Either he leaves or signs an agreement.”

Since October, when a subset of Tesla’s 130 technicians in Sweden first went on strike, tens of thousands of workers in Northern Europe have joined the largest coordinated labor action against Tesla since its founding in 2003. Norwegian and Finnish ports have likewise closed to Tesla shipments. Danish truck drivers won’t transport Teslas through their country. Postal workers have refused to deliver license plates to new Tesla drivers in Sweden, cleaners won’t work in the company’s Swedish offices and electricians won’t service its charging points here. On Friday, Swedish waste collectors added their support, refusing to pick up from Tesla’s repair shops across the country.

The solidarity blockades have the potential to disrupt Tesla sales in Northern Europe — a relatively small market compared with the United States and China, but a wealthy and environmentally conscious one, with some of the most electric vehicles per capita in the world. Even more, though, the labor actions are being watched as a test case for global efforts to crack Musk’s strict no-unions policy.

“Elon Musk isn’t making an agreement in Sweden because he’s afraid … it will create follow-ups in other countries, even the U.S.,” said Jan Villadsen, chairman of a Danish union that represents 50,000 transport workers, including truck drivers and dock workers blockading Teslas.

At Tesla’s super factory near Berlin, the company’s second production hub outside the United States, a growing number of the roughly 11,000 workers want to organize, German union officials say. And the United Auto Workers, fresh off its victory in strikes against Ford, General Motors and Chrysler-owner Stellantis, has said Tesla would be one of its next organizing targets.

“If Tesla gives in to the unions around this ongoing dispute, it could create a growing brush fire in Europe that eventually gets to the UAW and U.S. in 2024,” said Dan Ives, a New York-based analyst with Wedbush Securities. “It’s an important lightning rod issue around unions globally.”

Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to requests for comment. But Musk has weighed in publicly on the labor actions in Sweden. On his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, he replied to a post about mail carriers refusing to deliver license plates to his customers by writing, “This is insane.”
He has also been clear about his attitude toward unions.

“I don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants kind of thing, and I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company,” he said at a conference in November. “If Tesla gets unionized, it will be because we deserve it, and it failed in some way.”

“Lords and peasants” is exactly the kind of relationship Tesla insists on having with its workers in Sweden, said Jānis Kuzma, 37, one of the striking technicians.

Kuzma said he joined Tesla in 2021 because he wanted to work on electric vehicles. He and his wife own a Tesla Model Y themselves. But as the company sold more cars in Sweden, the burden on its technicians increased, he said. He and the others at the Malmö service center had to take on a lot more work. The next-closest Tesla workshop was 170 miles away, so not a realistic alternative for most drivers.

After Tesla refused to give him a raise, Kuzma said, he decided to join the push for a collective agreement. The management didn’t seem to care that such agreements between companies and their employees are a central part of the Swedish labor market model, relied on in the absence of regulations such as a statutory minimum wage and credited with making strikes and other labor disruptions so rare. Kuzma said he was told, “Maybe Tesla is not for everybody.”

Several weeks into the strike, he said his manager called and accused him of leaking company secrets. The issue: Kuzma’s wife had criticized Tesla on X. “The craziest part is they were monitoring, they were checking my wife’s profile,” he said.

Kuzma pushed back with the help of a union lawyer, who argued that Tesla’s employee confidentiality provision, originally written for its U.S. workforce, could not trump Swedish free speech protections, which allow workers — and their partners — to talk about work conditions.

Today, about 65 percent of Swedish workers are part of unions, one of the highest rates in the world, and nearly 90 percent are covered by a collective agreement, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…

It is not yet clear how the strike and sympathy actions will affect Tesla sales. The company’s Model Y crossover SUV was the best-selling car in Europe this year. In Sweden, it beat out Swedish-founded Volvo’s competing XC40, according to Mobility Sweden, an association of automakers and importers.

But Tesla no doubt is facing a public relations problem. The strike has been one of the biggest news stories in Sweden over several months, and opinion polls show the public is broadly supportive.

The unions are not backing down. Neither is Musk.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the United Auto Workers announced its plans to organize workers at Tesla, Toyota, and other non-union factories. The UAW won big pay increases at the Big Three factories in Detroit. In the past, efforts to organize auto workers have failed because many factories are located in the South, where anti-union sentiment is strong.

In a video announcing the campaign, UAW President Shawn Fain made the same arguments he did to Big Three workers this year as he rallied them to strike: Companies are making big profits while workers fall behind, he said.

“You don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. You don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay your rent or feed your family while the company makes billions,” Fain said. “A better life is out there. It starts with you: UAW.”

Many of the non-unionized companies, including Honda, Toyota, Hyundai and Volkswagen, have given their U.S. workers double-digit pay increases in recent weeks in what analysts call a clear attempt to ward off any unionization drive.

Categories Ethics, International, Unions

Billy Townsend on Chris Rufo’s Inflated Credentials

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2024 //
60

Billy Townsend is a Florida blogger who specializes in exposing grifters, especially in education. He calls his blog “Public Enemy #1.” He served on the Polk County school board and has been relentless in pursuing the scams perpetrated by Governor DeSantis and former state Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, now president of New College, a position for which he is uniquely unqualified. Someone on Twitter noted recently that the university presidents appointed by DeSantis won’t have to worry about plagiarism charges, because few if any of them have ever published a peer-reviewed article or book.

Chris Rufo is the attack dog of the far-right, who literally manufactured and sold a public panic attack over “critical race theory,” a concept debated in law school classes. As a result of his publicity campaign, any teaching about race and racism in American schools became suspect, enabling some states to suppress honest discussion of those subjects. Most recently, Rufo hounded Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay, until she resigned over charges of plagiarism.

Townsend writes here about Rufo’s inflated academic credentials:

In the least surprising revelation ever, Christopher Rufo does not have a Masters of Arts degree from Harvard, as he once claimed in his Manhattan Institute bio. He has, instead, a Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) from Harvard Extension School.

Indeed, this anti-woke grifter is continuing to misstate his educational credentials, even after very very quietly correcting one aspect of his misstatement — as I’ll show you in a moment.

As anyone who remotely follows Rufo knows, this is the kind of credential misstatement he would summon the New York Times to pursue if the person doing the misstating was black or a woman. And the useless NYT would dutifully obey. I’m sure they will find a way to avoid this particular misstatement.

But Rufo’s fellow trustees can and should confront him with this at the next meeting.

Rufo claims undergraduate achievement he did not earn

Harvard instructs graduates of Harvard University Extension School to spell out “Harvard University Extension School” on resumes and bios because its sees a meaningful distinction between “Harvard University Extension School” and Harvard’s traditional graduate schools…

Selectivity of admission is the core difference in these Harvard graduate programs. It’s a lot easier to get into “Harvard University Extension School” than traditional Harvard.

Thus, Rufo’s conflation of degree credentials claims a level of achievement in admission that he did not earn.

It misrepresents the quality of Rufo’s undergraduate performance, suggesting that it was strong enough to earn admission to Harvard’s highly selective graduate schools. It was not.

Rufo’s misleading claim dilutes Harvard’s brand, which is why Harvard cares about how graduates claim this credential, I suspect. I’ve posted Harvard’s direction in how to refer to the extension school below.

The “never admit” grifter admits to something

Is this a big deal? Rufo, a bombastic Bad Ken 99.9 percent of the time, seems to think so. He very very quietly acknowledged that his Manhattan Institute bio misstated his education credential by very very quietly having it altered.

In doing so, Rufo violated the #1 tenet of the modern “conservative” and “anti-woke” grifts — the #1 tenet of Rufoism: always loudly refuse to admit or acknowledge anything damaging to the grift. And yet, here Rufo is admitting….

Billy Townsend goes on to portray Rufo’s bio—before and after—on the Manhattan Institute website, where he is a senior fellow. And he shows that Rufo’s misleading claim to am MA at Harvard persists on the New College website, where DeSantis named him as a trustee as part of the governor’s plan to turn the progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South.

Townsend writes:

Ride it while it lasts, Chris

Ironically, considering the time and effort I’ve spent on these two Rufo articles, I’m thoroughly uninterested in him. He’s just another grifter, a little farther down the grift value chain than young Austin Hurst, who I introduced you to earlier today.

But they’re essentially the same person — lazy bros trolling for rich guy money by owning the libs. Rufo’s need to overstate both undergrad and grad school credentials is a pretty good example of that.

Rufos, like Zieglers, always come and go. This one will too.

Townsend then quotes a Harvard document explaining how graduates of the Harvard Extension School should refer to their degrees, advice that Rufo ignored until he was caught.

I urge you to open the link to read the material I did not reproduce here. It’s fascinating.

Billy Townsend, by the way, is a graduate of Amherst College, whose admission standards are as rigorous as those of Harvard.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cheating, Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, Hypocrisy

Jamelle Bouie: If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
55

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best opinion writers at the New York Times. In addition to reading his regular columns, I subscribe to the newsletter he writes, where he shares ideas, tells you what he is reading and what he is cooking.

In this post, he wrote persuasively about why Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and should not be allowed to run for the office he defiled.

Bouie wrote:

Last month the states of Colorado and Maine moved to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In response, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the Colorado case, and he has appealed Maine’s decision.

There is a real question of whether this attempt to protect American democracy — by removing a would-be authoritarian from the ballot — is itself a threat to American democracy. Will proponents and supporters of the 14th Amendment option effectively destroy the village in order to save it?

It may seem obvious, but we should remember that Trump is not an ordinary political figure. And try as some commentators might, there is no amount of smoke one could create — through strained counterfactuals, dire warnings of a slippery slope or outright dismissal of the events that make the Trump of 2024 a figure very different from the Trump of 2020 — that can obscure or occlude this basic fact.

In 2020, President Trump went to the voting public of the United States and asked for another four years in office. By 51 percent to 47 percent, the voting public of the United States said no. More important, Trump lost the Electoral College, 306 to 232, meaning there were enough of those voters in just the right states to deny him a second term.

The people decided. And Trump said, in so many words, that he didn’t care. What followed, according to the final report of the House select committee on Jan. 6, was an effort to overturn the result of the election.

Trump, the committee wrote, “unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.” He “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.” He “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6,” the day Congress was slated to certify the election results, and “instructed them to march to the Capitol” so that they could “‘take back’ their country.’” He even sent a message on Twitter attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, knowing full well that “a violent attack on the Capitol was underway.”

In the face of this violence, Trump “refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.” He did not deploy the National Guard, nor did he “instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Trump sought and actively tried to subvert constitutional government and overturn the results of the presidential election. And what he could not do through the arcane rules and procedures of the Electoral College, he tried to do through the threat of brute force, carried out by an actual mob.

Looked at this way, the case for disqualifying Trump through the 14th Amendment is straightforward. Section 3 states that “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

As the legal scholar Mark A. Graber writes in an amicus brief submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court, “American jurists understood an insurrection against the United States to be an attempt by two or more persons for public reasons to obstruct by force or intimidation the implementation of federal law.” There was also a legal consensus at the time of the amendment’s drafting and ratification that an individual “engaged in insurrection whenever they knowingly incited, assisted or otherwise participated in an insurrection.”

We also know that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not aim or intend to exclude the president of the United States from its terms. In 1870 the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, the former Confederate governor of North Carolina. It strains credulity to think that the same Republicans would have sat silent if the Democratic Party had, in 1872, nominated a former Confederate leader for the presidency.

Under a plain reading of Section 3 — and given the evidence uncovered by the Jan. 6 committee — Trump cannot stand for the presidency of the United States or any other federal office, for that matter.

The real issue with disqualifying Trump is less constitutional than political. Disqualification, goes the argument, would bring American democracy to the breaking point.

In this line of thinking, to deny Americans their choice of presidential candidate would destroy any remaining confidence in the American political system. It would also invite Trump’s allies in the Republican Party to do the same to Democrats, weaponizing Section 3 and disqualifying candidates for any number of reasons. Disqualification would also give far more power to the courts, when the only appropriate venue for the question of Trump is the voting booth.

But these objections rest on a poor foundation. They treat Trump as an ordinary candidate and Jan. 6 as a variation on ordinary politics. But as the House select committee established, Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it were nothing of the sort. And while many Americans still contest the meaning of the attack on the Capitol, many Americans also contested, in the wake of the Civil War, the meaning of secession and rebellion. That those Americans viewed Confederate military and political leaders as heroes did not somehow delegitimize the Republican effort to keep them, as much as possible, out of formal political life.

What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election.

Trump is not simply a candidate who does not believe in the norms, values and institutions we call American democracy — although that is troubling enough. Trump is all that and a former president who used the power of his office to try to overturn constitutional government in the United States.

Is it antidemocratic to disqualify Trump from office and deny him a place on the ballot? Does it violate the spirit of democratic life to deny voters the choice of a onetime officeholder who tried, under threat of violence, to deny them their right to choose? Does it threaten the constitutional order to use the clear text of the Constitution to hold a former constitutional officer accountable for his efforts to overturn that order?

The answer is no, of course not. There is no rule that says democracies must give endless and unlimited grace to those who used the public trust to conspire, for all the world to see, against them. Voters are free to choose a Republican candidate for president; they are free to choose a Republican with Trump’s politics. But if we take the Constitution seriously, then Trump, by dint of his own actions, should be off the board.

Not that he will be. The best odds are that the Supreme Court of the United States will punt the issue of Section 3 in a way that allows Trump to run on every ballot in every state. And while it will be tempting to attribute this outcome to the ideological composition of the court — as well as the fact that Trump appointed three of its nine members — I think it will, if it happens, have as much to do with the zone of exception that exists around the former president.

If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.

Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Yes! The Supreme Court Should Disqualify Trump from Appearing on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
36

I wrote a few days ago that Trump should not be removed from the ballot even though he unequivocally plotted to overturn the election he lost and provoked an insurrection against the orderly transfer of power. I was wrong. For me, it was a close call: I wanted him to lose convincingly at the hands of the voters; I predicted he would lose by 10 million votes in 2024.

But it should not have been a close call. Trump should not be allowed to run again. He violated his oath of office. I was persuaded I was wrong by the many comments by readers on this blog, by reading the new insider books by Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson, and by continuing to read other opinions, like that of Jamelle Bouie, whose columns will follow this one today.

Trump was exactly the kind of office-holder described in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In the lower federal court in Colorado, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021, but concluded that the President of the U.S. was not an “officer” as defined in the amendment. This was a bizarre conclusion, and the Supreme Court of Colorado ruled by a vote of 4-3 that Trump should not be allowed to run for President because he did take an oath to support the Constitution, he served as the highest officer of the nation, and he did engage in an insurrection against the Constitution to which he swore an oath. It’s no more complicated than that.

The Supreme Court will review that decision.

Trump continues to tell the Big Lie. Despite the fact that he lost 60 court decisions, including decisions by judges he appointed, including two decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court; despite the fact that his own Attorney General and his White House Counsel told him he lost, he continues to lie.

Trump continues to praise the insurrectionists. He has promised to pardon all of them who were convicted and sent to prison. He calls them “patriots” even though they defiled the U.S. Capitol, the seat of our government, and threatened the lives of Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence and the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and violently attacked police officers.

The members of Congress escaped the chamber where they were counting the electoral vote only minutes before Trump’s devoted followers broke through the doors. Had they broken through only five minutes sooner, there might have been a bloodbath, a massacre of our elected representatives. Some “patriots”!

Judges should not reach a decision based on fear of Trump’s mob.

Either the Constitution means what it says or it means whatever a politically appointed group of justices decide it says in contravention of the words themselves.

Either “no man is above the law” or only one man—named Donald Trump—is above the law.

Trump betrayed Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. He betrayed his oath of office. He incited, provoked, and engaged in an insurrection against the Constitution and the government that he swore to support.

Donald Trump should be removed from the ballot.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Justice, Lies, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Mary L. Trump: Why Does “Meet the Press” Love MAGA?

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
55

Mary L. Trump is Donald’s niece, the daughter of his older brother. She is the author of the best-selling tell-all about her family and her uncle: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. She wrote this article after watching Elise Stefanik bulldoze Kristen Welner on “Meet the Press.”

Shameful… Today, Elise Stefanik used NBC’s Meet The Press as her MAGA bullhorn, and “journalist” Kristen Welker just let her get away with it. But we now have tools to fight back.Read on. 👇

Become Paying Supporter Now

I could only watch the clips in short bursts, because each was worse than the last… one of the most egregious (and dangerous) displays of journalistic incompetence I’ve ever seen.

Elise Stefanik Called Jan 6 Insurrections… What??

Elise Stefanik, an opportunistic traitor desperately angling to be Donald’s VP pick with every lie she spews, declared those convicted of January 6 crimes to be “hostages”.

”I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” Stefanik stated.

Welker’s response? Crickets. 🦗 No demand for an explanation, e.g. Who is holding them hostage? How is holding people accountable for crimes a hostage situation?

At least Welker could have shown Stefanik this chart from the NY Times:

As former GOP Comms Director Tara Stetmayer (and guest of my latest Deep Dive) put it so eloquently, “No journalist should ever allow any of these MAGAs to call Jan 6th justly-prosecuted thugs, ‘hostages’. What an affront to our rule of law.”

Planning the Next Coup

Welker asked, “Will you certify the results of the 2024 election, no matter what they show?”

Stefanik responded with obfuscation and lies about the 2020 election, before admitting she will NOT certify the election, unless – in her eyes – “it’s constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional.”

Welker pushed back briefly, citing that even two firms hired by Donald said there was NO evidence of election fraud, and Donald’s own officials said it was the most secure election in history. Two points for sanity.

But then Welker allowed Stefanik to negate it all by simply saying, “The American people understand it was not a fair election.” 

And the response from Welker? No follow up. No pushback. Just the classic dreadful tactic used by incompetent journalists… basically, ”Let’s move on.”

No, Ms. Welker. Stefanik just admitted on live television she will attempt another coup after the election if Biden wins – and she will use a string of lies to create her own “facts” to justify her treason. 

Now is NOT the time to move on. Grill Stefanik and other Republicans who continue to lie, obfuscate, and gaslight the American people. Demand evidence. Call out the lies. Force them to disprove officials and independent firms that declared 2020 the most secure election in history. 

Show your audience that the person calling these this traitors “hostages” has zero integrity. Don’t just hand her a fucking bullhorn.

But Kristen Welker will continue to give MAGA the bullhorn.

Here’s why:

Corporate Media vs Substack

Stefanik and right-wing politicians choose to be interviewed by people like Kristen Welker and Chuck Todd for a reason. 

Truth seeking is not high on the priority list for most corporate journalists who see getting clicks as their goal. Corporate media only cares about ratings. 

Insanity sells; negativity sells; and LIES sell. The more viewers these MAGA guests bring, the more ad revenue comes in… enriching both media executives and their advertisers – all at the expense of facts, justice, and American democracy. 

But now, you have an alternative.

The Substack community only serves one person – you. 

From Joyce Vance, to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, to my work here – you have a place where MAGA is called out for their lies – with facts, analysis, and powerful tools that inform your friends & family during a critical election year. 

You can count on me, for one, to do ANYTHING to get out the truth, and thus help get lying traitors like Elise Stefanik and my uncle out of power… no weekends off.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Media, Trump

Thom Hartmann: How Reagan’s Tax Cuts Expanded Inequality

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
21

One of the most memorable books I have read is The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that the happiest societies are the ones with the most equality. If this is true, and the authors persuaded me that it is, then our economic policies should aim to reduce income inequality and wealth inequality. But we have gone in the other direction, with government policy increasing inequality. Lobbyists for the 1% have funded political campaigns to lower their taxes, gut unions, and protect inherited wealth. Their campaigns on the surface are about culture war issues (abortion, drugs, race, gay rights), but what they are really promoting are tax cuts for the rich.

Thom Hartmann posted this chapter from his book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream.

He writes:

As productivity continued to rise, due to increasing automation and better technology, so too would everyone’s wages. Or so went the theory.

The glue holding this logic together was the then-top marginal income tax rate. In 1963, just before the Time article was written, the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. What that did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses: to invest in new technology, to pay their workers more, to hire new workers and expand.

After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 90% (or even the 74% that President Lyndon Johnson lowered it to in 1966)?

According to this line of reasoning, if businesses were suddenly to become way more profitable and efficient thanks to automation, then that money would flow throughout the business—raising everyone’s standard of living and increasing everyone’s leisure time, from the CEO to the janitor.

But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28%, everything changed. Now, as businesses became far more profitable, there was a far greater incentive for CEOs to pull those profits out of the company and pocket them, because they were suddenly paying an incredibly low tax rate.

And that’s exactly what they did.

All those new profits, thanks to automation, that were supposed to go to everyone, giving us all bigger paychecks and more time off, went to the top.

Suddenly, the symmetry in the productivity/wages chart broke down. Productivity continued increasing, since technology continued improving, and revenues and profits kept increasing with it.

But wages stayed flat.

And, again, since greater and greater profits could be sucked out of the company and taxed at lower levels, there was no incentive to reduce the number of hours everyone had to work.

In the 1950s, before that Time magazine article predicting the Leisure Society was written, the average American working in manufacturing put in about 42 hours of work a week. Today, the average American working in manufacturing puts in about 40 hours of work a week. This means that even though productivity has increased 400% since 1950, Americans in manufacturing are working, on average, only two fewer hours a week.

If productivity is four times higher today than in 1950, then Americans should be able to work four times less, or just 10 hours a week, to afford the same 1950s lifestyle when a family of four could get by on just one paycheck, own a home, own a car, put their kids through school, take a vacation every now and then, and retire comfortably.

That’s the definition of the Leisure Society: 10 hours of work a week, and the rest of the time spent with family, with travel, with creativity, with whatever you want. And if our tax laws and our corporate anti-monopoly laws that restrained the worst corporate bad behavior had stayed the same as they were in 1966, we might well be either working 10 hours a week for around $50,000 a year in income, or working 40-hour weeks for over $200,000 a year.

But all of this was washed away by the Reagan tax cuts. Those trillions of dollars that would have gone to workers? They went into the estates and stock portfolios of the top 1%. Combine this with Reagan’s brutal crackdown on striking PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) members that kicked off a three-decades-long assault on another substantial pillar of the middle class—organized labor—and life today is anything but leisurely for working people in America.

More Unequal than Rome

Instead of leisure, working people got feudalism.

From 1947 to 1981, all classes of Americans saw their incomes grow together; as a result of the Reagan tax cuts, that era ended and a new era of Reaganomics began. Since then, only the wealthiest among us have gotten rich from economic boom times.

Today, workers’ wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low. Yet, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high.

The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth. In fact, just 4 Americans own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined, and they pay lower taxes than anybody in the bottom half of American families economically.30

Walmart, Inc., the world’s largest private employer, personifies this inequality best. It’s a corporation that in 2011 gained more revenue than any other corporation in America. It raked in $16.4 billion in profits. It pays its employees minimum wage.

And the Walmart heirs, the Walton family, who occupy positions six through nine on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list, own roughly $100 billion in wealth, which is more than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. The average Walmart employee would have to work 76 million 40-hour weeks to have as much wealth as one Walmart heir.

Through some interesting historical analysis, historians Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen calculated that inequality in America today is worse than what was seen during the Roman era.31 Thus the top 1%, just like the Roman emperors, got their Leisure Society, and they’ve used their financial power to capture the US government to protect their Leisure Society.

Categories Accountability, Economics, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding

Why the Supreme Court Should Let Trump Stay on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2024 //
174

Two states, Colorado and Maine, have ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified to appear on their state ballot for President because of Section Three of the 14th Amendment.

That section, written after the Civil War, says:

Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Trump did take an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” and he did incite and encourage a mob to invade the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes and thereby “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution. In addition, he spent months trying to block the orderly transition of power from himself to Joseph Biden, who won the Presidential election of 2020.

His speech on January 6 was incendiary. Just as bad were his efforts to pressure state officials to change the results in their states and to create slates of fake electors. All of his actions were aimed at remaining in power despite the fact that he lost both the popular vote and the vote of the electoral college. Because he is a SORE LOSER, he summoned a mob to Washington, D.C. on January 6 and urged them to “fight like hell” to overturn the election and to march on the Capitol and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Nothing like this happened before in the history of the United States.

All of these facts, including the video footage of the horrific events of January 6, are evidence that he should be disqualified from the ballot.

The Supreme Court is dominated by conservative jurists who claim to be Originalists, who read the Constitution in light of its original intent. The original intent of Section Three of the 14th Amendment is unambiguous. Trump disqualified himself.

Somehow, I expect, the Court will find a way to avoid ruling against Trump. They might say that the case involves politics and is not in the judicial realm, as some state courts have ruled. That is an evasion, of course, but it may suffice to get them off the hook. How many judges want death threats, a frequent tactic of the Trump mob?

But I disagree. I want Trump on the ballot.

My reason for wanting Trump ON the ballot has nothing to do with the Constitution. I believe that his role in the insurrection is indisputable. The Biden campaign should run ads featuring the mob overrunning the Capitol and attacking police officers again and again. They should remind the public that Trump did nothing for three hours while the seat of our government was ransacked.

I want him to be defeated by vote of the American people. I believe he will lose in 2024. I can’t be certain. But if he is taken off the ballot, a significant part of the population will believe that he was removed for partisan reasons.

For the rest of his life, he will rail about the “rigged” election and how he was cheated.

I want him to be beaten fair and square as he was in 2020.

I do not believe that the American people will again vote into the presidency a man of no character, a man facing multiple indictments, a man whose motive for running is to pardon himself of federal crimes and to wreak vengeance on his critics, , a man who has no respect for the Constitution, a man who can’t be trusted to leave office ever.

He lost the popular vote by almost three million in 2016. He lost it by 7 million votes in 2024, along with a decisive defeat in the Electoral College. His behavior since he lost in 2020 has been undignified and loathsome. I predict he will lose by 10 million votes in 2024.

Let him run.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Trump

My View: Harvard Should Support President Claudine Gay

By dianeravitch
December 27, 2023 //
43

Since the infamous day when a hostile Congressional committee grilled three female university presidents about anti-Semitism on their campuses, one of the three (from the University of Pennsylvania) resigned, and pressure has been building to force out Harvard’s President Claudine Gay.

The three were asked by a pugnacious Rep. Elise Stefanik if a call for genocide against Jews on their campus would violate college policy against bullying and harassment. They all answered that it depended on the context.

Rep. Stefanik and her fellow Republicans were appalled and treated their responses as an outrage. The three women tried to backtrack, but they faced a disastrous backlash, as though they endorsed genocide against Jews.

Stefanik tweeted her triumph over the three presidents of prestigious universities:

“One down. Two to go,” Stefanik wrote in a post on X after Magill announced her resignation.

“@Harvard and @MIT, do the right thing,” Stefanik added. “The world is watching.”

Now the rightwing hate machine has trained its guns on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president. Led by the infamous Chris Rufo, who knows how to manufacture crises and smear campaigns, the effort to oust President Gay has focused on allegations of plagiarism in her 1997 dissertation and her published articles.

Apparently the House Committee will now investigate Dr. Gay for plagiarism. I truly don’t understand how the question of plagiarism became a fit subject for a Congressional investigation.

The charges thus far have come from Rufo, the rightwing Washington Free Beacon, and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The Washington Free Beacon gave concrete examples from her work, but without putting them into context (I.e., did she name the authors whose work she was citing in the body of the text?).

Having reviewed the allegations, I concluded that they were surely embarrassing to Gay, but none was so egregious as to destroy her career. In a few instances, she cited the authors of a paper, then took a quote from the cited work without inserting quotation marks. She is making corrections and adding quotation marks.

The campaign against Claudine Gay shows rightwing cancel culture at its zenith.

My view: any decision about Dr. Gay should be made by the Harvard Corporation, not by a rightwing lynch mob and not by a vengeful Congressional committee. Rufo and his friends would like nothing better than to claim victory over America’s most prestigious institution of higher education.

If I were a member of the Harvard Corporation, I would vote to support her.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Censorship, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education

Newly Surfaced “Moms for Liberty” Video Shows Their Religious Extremist Agenda

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2023 //
11

Moms for Liberty pretends to be about freedom, idealism, and parental rights. What could be more American than respecting the right of everyone to practice the religious faith of their choice or none at all?

That’s not what M4L wants.

This recently discovered video reveals their religious agenda.

Jennifer Cohn reported in The Bucks County Beacon:

On February 14, 2021 (Valentine’s Day), Moms for Liberty (M4L) advisory board member Erika Donalds stood with her husband, Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL), on a brightly lit stage inside a darkened Florida church. Clutching a microphone, Erika declared that, “We will … rise up as the most powerful voting bloc and political force in the entire world as Christians!”

The event was hosted by Truth and Liberty Coalition, a Colorado-based Christian Right nonprofit that seeks to take over public school boards in Colorado and beyond. The video from the event (which I recently unearthed) began with an announcement: “We believe we have a mandate to bring godly change to our nation and the world through the seven spheres or mountains of influence.”

M4L is a nationwide “parental rights” organization. Like Truth and Liberty, M4L strives to take over and transform public school boards in their own Christian “conservative” image. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated M4L as an extremist group due to their anti-LGBTQ+ policies and ties to the Proud Boys, which led the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The organization’s ties to religious zealotry, however, have received less attention. 

“Truth and Liberty,” the nonprofit that hosted Mr. and Mrs. Donalds, was founded by pastor Andrew Wommack, who has said that gay people should wear warning labels on their foreheads. Its board of directors includes Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist, who said in 2020 that America “must destroy the public education system before it destroys us.”

Wallnau also popularized the “seven mountains” mandate trumpeted by Truth and Liberty. The mandate is a supposedly divine strategy used by Christian supremacists in order to achieve societal dominion for God, as I’ve reported previously. They seek control over these seven “mountains” or “spheres”: business, government, family, religion, media, entertainment, and education.

In addition to Wallnau, Truth and Liberty’s board of directors includes David Barton, a “seven mountains” proponent with a dubious “doctorate” whose books and lectures teach that the separation between church and state is a myth. Barton had one of his books pulled in 2012 because the “basic truths just were not there,” according to the publisher.

Barton interviewed M4L co-founder Tina Descovich last year. His son, Tim Barton, spoke during M4L’s 2023 summit.

The younger Barton has said that “God never intended education to be secular.”

How does Tim Barton know what God intended?

Please open the link and read the article, then watch the video.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Pennsylvania, Religion, Separation of church and state

North Carolina: Sampson County’s Environmental Nightmare

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2023 //
3

Billy Ball’s blog, “Cardinal & Pine,” tells the horrifying story of the poisoning of people in Sampson County, North Carolina, and the malign neglect of the state’s officials. Most of those poisoned by the foul environment are Black and poor.

He writes:

NORTH CAROLINA — A dead vulture hangs by its feet, tied to a street sign on Chesters Road in Sampson County.

It’s there because locals believe the decomposing scavenger will deter other vultures. Sometimes, especially in the summer, the carrion birds descend like a plague on the Snow Hill area of Sampson County, a predominantly Black community that’s within retching distance of the largest landfill in NC. When it’s hot and humid in the summer, the vultures are so thick that the trees look black.

The birds are the least of locals’ worries.

The 85-acre landfill smells like hell. It gets in your lungs and steals your breath. On a bright, clear day, it can give you a headache and make you nauseous. When it’s hot, humid, or rainy, the smell is overwhelming.

Worse still, the landfill—which ranks second in the nation for emissions of the greenhouse gas methane—is contaminated with PFAS. PFAS are synthetic compounds used in nonstick pans, firefighter foam, cosmetics, and other products. It’s linked to cancers, birth abnormalities, high cholesterol and other ailments, but until this year, the US Environmental Protection Agency was silent on regulating it.

In March, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who’s from NC, called it “one of the most pressing environmental and public health concerns in the modern world.”

The federal regulations, which wouldn’t go into effect until 2026, are late but not unwelcome. Testing in almost 50 water systems in NC has reportedly found high levels of PFAS over the last five years. That’s the case in about 45% of the nation’s drinking water, according to federal regulators. It attacks your thyroid, your liver, and your kidneys. And it’s an open question what treatment systems are best for filtering out this “forever chemical,” so named because it doesn’t break down in the human body or the environment.

PFAS pollution is just one of the crises here. Sampson County—population 58,000— is beset by environmental nightmares, locals say. There’s the landfill, the poultry and pork farms (including the massive Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods plant), and multiple industrial operations that locals say are noisy, ugly, and making them sick.

There are a few dozen hogs per person. To dispose of the waste, farms have been spraying it onto fields. Neighbors say it’s giving them respiratory problems. There’s science behind it, including studies from 2018 and 2022 that found people living close to animal farming operations are more likely to get sick, sometimes very sick.

A small UNC-Chapel Hill study published in 2020also found PFAS in surface water around the landfill.

The well water that thousands of people here depend on—particularly in the poorer, rural areas—is making them sick too, locals say. But unlike other areas of the county, which have gradually been connected to the county water system, most of the low-income folks have been left to protect themselves against rust, iron, arsenic, and other harmful things that are turning up in their well water.

Michigan has Flint. North Carolina has a lot of Flints, and the biggest might be Sampson County.

‘You can’t win for losing’

“We have a story to tell in Sampson County and nobody’s paying any attention to us,” says Sherri White-Williamson.

White-Williamson is a native of the area, the daughter of two high school teachers—one a World War II veteran who taught her to get involved in her community. She worked for the EPA and other federal offices before returning to Sampson County. Now, she leads a local nonprofit called Environmental Justice Community Action Network (EJCAN). She has her work cut out for her.

EJCAN is helping state officials find locals in the Snow Hill area—not to be confused with the incorporated town of the same name in nearby Greene County—who could benefit from a $1 million grant from President Biden’s administration. The grant’s meant to test the well water and, possibly, help find a solution. If anything, it’s just a start.

Testing in this broad, eastern NC county has been slow. State officials are looking for volunteers. They’ve gone door-to-door. But many don’t trust the scientists and regulators showing up. They also don’t trust what comes out of their taps. If they have the money, which many of them don’t, they rely on bottled water.

The NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and researchers have confirmed PFAS contamination in the area, although state regulators have not made a final determination on the source. Most are pointing at the privately-operated landfill, which is known to have PFAS in it. For now, the state’s administering bottled water to homeowners with polluted water, although PFAS contaminants aren’t just harmful in drinking water. They can also travel through the air.

Then there are the pigs. Smithfield Foods and other hog farms make up a powerful economic force around here. Pork accounts for more than 6,100 jobsin Sampson County and Smithfield is the largest single employer in the county.

The people who live next to hog farms might be miserable, but the political pull of pork is immense. When locals began winning huge multi-million dollar jury awards from hog farmers working for Chinese-owned Smithfield, Republican state legislators intervened on the farmers’ behalf, rewriting statutes to all but ban such lawsuits.

“You can’t win for losing,” White-Williamson says when talking about the state legislature.

Please open the link and keep reading to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Failure, North Carolina, Racism
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