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Young Martin Luther King Jr. on the Purpose of Education

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2024 //
5

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant speaker and a deeply educated thinker. He began his quest for understanding and meaning early in life. One of his earliest writings was published in 1947 in the campus newspaper at Morehouse College, where he was a student. It appears on the website of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. Please be sure to read footnote #2. It might make you believe in divine intervention.

The editor wrote this introduction:

Writing in the campus newspaper, the Maroon Tiger, King argues that education has both a utilitarian and a moral function.1 Citing the example of Georgia’s former governor Eugene Talmadge, he asserts that reasoning ability is not enough. He insists that character and moral development are necessary to give the critical intellect humane purposes. King, Sr., later recalled that his son told him, “Talmadge has a Phi Beta Kappa key, can you believe that? What did he use all that precious knowledge for? To accomplish what?” 2

Young Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!

1. In 1925, the Maroon Tiger succeeded the Athenaeum as the campus literary journal at Morehouse. In the first semester of the 1947–1948 academic year, it won a First Class Honor Rating from the Associated Collegiate Press at the University of Minnesota. The faculty adviser to the Maroon Tiger was King’s English professor, Gladstone Lewis Chandler. King’s “The Purpose of Education” was published with a companion piece, “English Majors All?” by a fellow student, William G. Pickens. Among the many prominent black academicians and journalists who served an apprenticeship on the Maroon Tiger staff were Lerone Bennett, Jr., editor of Ebony; Brailsford R. Brazeal, dean of Morehouse College; S. W. Garlington, city editor of New York’s Amsterdam News; Hugh Gloster, president of Morehouse College; Emory O. Jackson, editor of the Birmingham World; Robert E. Johnson, editor of Jet; King D. Reddick of the New York Age; Ira De A. Reid, chair of the Sociology Department at Atlanta University; and C. A. Scott, editor and general manager of the Atlanta Daily World. See The Morehouse Alumnus, July 1948, pp. 15–16; and Edward A. Jones, A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1967), pp. 174, 260, 289–292.

2. Martin Luther King, Sr., with Clayton Riley, Daddy King: An Autobiography (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 143. In an unpublished autobiographical statement, King, Sr., remembered a meeting between Governor Eugene Talmadge and a committee of blacks concerning the imposition of the death penalty on a young black man for making improper remarks to a white woman. King, Sr., reported that Talmadge “sent us away humiliated, frustrated, insulted, and without hope of redress” (“The Autobiography of Daddy King as Told to Edward A. Jones” [n.d.], p. 40; copy in CKFC). Six months before the publication of King’s article, Georgia’s race-baiting former governor Eugene Talmadge had declared in the midst of his campaign for a new term as governor that “the only issue in this race is White Supremacy.” On 12 November, the black General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia designated his inauguration date, 9 January 1947, as a day of prayer. Talmadge died three weeks before his inauguration. See William Anderson, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Political Career of Eugene Talmadge (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), pp. 226–237; Joseph L. Bernd, “White Supremacy and the Disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66 (Winter 1982): 492–501; Clarence M. Wagner, Profiles of Black Georgia Baptists (Atlanta: Bennett Brothers, 1980), p. 104; and Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 221–223.

Source: Maroon Tiger (January-February 1947): 10.

Categories Character, Ethics

Eugene Robinson: DeSantis and Haley are Pathetic Panderers

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2024 //
23

Eugene Robinson, a columnist for the Washington Post, watched the Iowa debate between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, sparing the rest of us of that burden. He reported on their despicable dodge about the recent killing of a sixth grade student in the school cafeteria.

He wrote:

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley did not just lose Wednesday night’s debate. They have lost their way.

At Perry High School in Iowa last week, 17-year-old Dylan Butler shot and killed a sixth-grader, wounded five other students and staff, and then killed himself. Surely, the Republican presidential candidates discussed the tragedy during their debate in Des Moines, right?

Wrong. Neither said a word about a school shooting that had happened just days earlier and barely 40 miles away.

Anyone still searching for a meaningful difference between today’s Democratic Party and the GOP need only take note of their very different reactions to this latest tragedy.

Deadly shootings, even in our schools, are an inevitable feature of our daily lives — according to the Republican Party. In comments and appearances before the debate, the leading GOP candidates all reacted to the Perry shooting by washing their hands of any duty to act. And, of course, by offering thoughts and prayers.

DeSantis, the Florida governor, said during an interview with NBC News and the Des Moines Register that while officials have a responsibility to guarantee safety at our schools, the federal government “is probably not going to be leading that effort.” As though to underscore the point, he later said, according to Reuters, that as president he would sign a bill eliminating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Haley posted her condolences on X, formerly known as Twitter, shortly after the shooting, saying in part that, “My heart aches for the victims of Perry, Iowa and the entire community.” Later that day, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor said that “we have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” called for more security officers at schools and went ahead with her campaign schedule.

Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump — expected to trounce DeSantis, Haley and all other comers in Monday’s Iowa caucuses — addressed school violence during a campaign stop on Friday.

The callousness was breathtaking, even for Trump.
“I want to send our support and our deepest sympathies to the victims and families touched by the terrible school shooting yesterday in Perry, Iowa,” he said in Sioux City. “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”

Get over it. Imagine the comfort that must have brought to the family of 11-year-old Ahmir Jolliff, who was killed in the shooting.

The Republican Party’s lack of empathy after a tragedy such as this gives the country a real chance to see why that matters for our country’s leadership — and what a real difference the Democrats offer.

On Thursday, the day after Republicans’ dismal debate, Vice President Harris visited a middle school in Charlotte to join a roundtable discussion on gun violence with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. That’s where she announced the administration’s plan to invest a new round of funding ($285 million) for schools to find and train mental health professionals, per a White House official.

Harris shared her reaction to the Perry shooting on X the day it occurred, highlighting some of the proposals Democrats have been trying to pass:
“As we begin a new year, we must resolve to finally end this epidemic of gun violence that has become the leading cause of death for children in America. We know the solutions: making background checks universal, passing red flag laws, and renewing the assault weapons ban. Now, Congress and state legislators across the country must have the courage to act.”

Open the link to read the rest of the column.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Guns, Guns in Schools, Iowa, Librarians, Trump

The Text Messages Between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2024 //
10

The text messages between Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, show how determined Ginni Thomas was to keep Trump in office. She was certain that Democrats were stealing the election. She urged Meadows to listen closely to lawyer Sidney Powell. She urged Meadows to “release the kraken,” Powell’s words. Even when Meadows told her that Powell had no evidence of voter fraud, Ginni Thomas was undeterred.

Note: Sidney Powell subsequently claimed that no reasonable person would believe what she said about the election. When indicted in Atlanta for lying about the election, she pleaded guilty. But Ginni Thomas believed her. This suggests that Ginni Thomas is not a “reasonable person.”

If you listen to the text exchanges, you are likely to conclude that Justice Thomas must recuse himself from any case brought to the Supreme Court about the 2020 election. He is not impartial.

This message was tweeted by Denver Riggleman, a former Republican Congressman from Virginia who served as a technical advisor to the January 6 Committee.

Denver Riggleman⁦‪@RepRiggleman‬⁩On the 3-year anniversary of #Jan6, I read aloud all 29 texts between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows.

It’s a reminder of the delusion that fueled the J6 attack- all the way to the top. Listen to the Bourbon texts because you’ll need a drink. youtu.be/UeDqnuSlrCA?si… via ⁦‪@YouTube‬⁩ 1/6/24, 9:12 PM

Categories Accountability, Bias, Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

The Hill: Conservatives See Takedown of Two University Presidents as “Just the Beginning”

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2024 //
7

You might well wonder, as I did, why Republicans in Congress were conducting hearings about anti-Semitism in our nation’s elite private universities. That is normally the job of the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Historically and recently, Republicans have not been known as a party that worries overmuch about anti-Semitism or other forms of bigotry.

As a matter of fact, as this article in The Hill shows, the Republicans’ real concern is to stamp out DEI programs (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in higher education. Two of the three elite university presidents who were grilled by Rep. Elise Stefanik resigned, and she crowed about her victory. The conservative media treated Harvard University President Claudine Gay as an unqualified diversity hire. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania also resigned after the hearing.

From the article:

Republicans say their departures are just the beginning of needed reforms at the schools.

“This is only among the very first steps on a very long road to recovering or returning to higher education its true and original purposes, which is truth-seeking,” said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Conservatives cheered the departures, which came after the two, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth, faced questions on campus antisemitism before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Neither Elise Stefanik nor Jay Greene has shown interest in anti-Semitism in the past, to my knowledge. Neither issued statements to denounce the young fascists who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville and chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” If they reacted to the slaughter of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I am not aware of it.

An even bigger joke is for anyone at the Heritage Foundation to celebrate “truth-seeking,” when Heritage oversaw planning for the next term of Donald Trump, who has a well-documented record of telling thousands of lies. Heritage Foundation, clean your own house. Before you lecture others about “truth-seeking,” look in the mirror.

“Two down. One to go,” tweeted committee member Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). “Accountability is coming.”

“The long overdue forced resignations of former Presidents Claudine Gay and Liz Magill are just the beginning of the tectonic consequences from their historic morally bankrupt testimony to my questions,” Stefanik added in a statement to The Hill, mentioning an official probe into the schools that the panel has announced.

“The investigation will address all aspects of a fundamentally broken and corrupt higher education system — antisemitism on campus, taxpayer funded aid, foreign aid, DEI, accreditation, academic integrity, and governance,” she said, using an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion programs…

But their biggest target recently has been DEI programs, making the case that they have been more harmful than helpful to students…

Greene said he is hopeful “additional people are going to have to be removed, both leaders of universities and their underlings, because they’re also significant actors in this. It’s not just at the top, but it’s kind of throughout these institutions.”

He also specifically called for the dismantling of DEI efforts on campus and disciplines such as gender studies, another popular GOP target.

Such efforts have been in motion long before the shake-ups at UPenn and Harvard.

In Texas, a law banning diversity programs at public universities took effect in the new year. And last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also signed a bill to defund DEI programs at public universities. …

A tracker by the Chronicle of Higher Education last year found 40 bills had been introduced in states across the country to try to restrict DEI programs, diversity statements and mandatory diversity training at schools.

It’s disgusting to see a feigned concern about anti-Semitism used as a stalking horse to dismantle DEI programs and as a pretext for inserting Big government into the policy making process in private higher education.

As long as Republicans control either House of Congress, we can anticipate the rise of a new McCarthyism, purging the curriculum and professors.

At last, Rep. Stefanik, have you no shame?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Higher Education, Race, Racism, Religion

Arthur Camins: The Lies That Protect the 1%

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2024 //
28

Arthur Camins is a retired educator. This post appeared in The Daily Kos.

Open the link to read the article in full.

He writes:

Liar, Liar. Pants on Fire. The lies from the powerful, especially Republicans, have risen to stunningly Orwellian 2 + 2 = 5 levels. The lies that protect their wealth and power have been quite successful at gaining wide acceptance. They keep at it because they know most of us reject a grossly inequitable society in which only some people enjoy a stable secure life. Inevitably, the truth seeps through the cracks in their wall of deceptions. Most Americans want fairness and access to decisions that affect our lives. The purveyors of self-protecting fabrications are afraid of the truth. Increasingly, they resort to authoritarianism, outlawing truth-telling, spreading misinformation, and blocking democratic processes.

The well-trod lies are designed to sound like common sense but are demonstrably false. They include:

Providing parents with choices through school vouchers and charter schools improves achievement and equity.

No, they support the privileged, starve and undermine public education, and get the rest of us to fight amongst ourselves for scraps.

The competitive free market will reduce costs and provide choices to consumers to improve education, healthcare, and housing.

No, the free market never reduced the cost of any of these or made these necessities affordable to everyone. Instead, the free market continues to make profits for a few, provides higher quality for those with money to spare, and leaves the rest of us with lower quality or nothing at all.

People are poor because they are lazy or stupid, so social support is a waste of money.

No, our economic and social systems ensure that there are haves and have-nots, haves pass on unearned wealth to their children, that taxes on the rich remain unfair, while trying to convince the rest of us that our struggles are our fault.

Taxing wealth reduces the incentive to innovate and slows economic growth.

No, the United States taxed wealth at far higher rates in the past without stopping us from becoming the world’s largest and most innovative economy. Increasing inequity disincentivizes and slows innovation by keeping too many of us struggling to make ends meet.

These are the lies that the powerful repeat again-and-again, wherever and whenever they can. They assume we are gullible, will fall back, and accept our fate. Our lives do not need to be this way if we organize and if we vote.

The 2024 election is a critical test for voters. Will we accept our inequitable, powerless fate or fight back? Report after report tells us that so many people will, in disgust, stay home that the authoritarian, wealth-protecting, anti-democratic liars will win control of Congress and the presidency. Life’s necessities still cost too damn much, so hearing from Democrats that the inflation, employment, and average wages are getting better falls on deaf ears. Voters–especially the young adults and people of color who Democrats need to win– see that in 2023, our country once again finds money for war but too little to help people. The enduring perception is that no one is on their side.

If Democrats want to win elections, they need to tell the unvarnished truth: The biggest, most enduring lie is that inequity is inevitable. Democrats: Don’t tell people to trust you. Tell them to organize! Tell them:

Do you want to know what Democrats should say? Open the link.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Cruelty, Economy, Equity, Ethics, Inequality

PEN America: Escambia County, Florida, Banned More than 1,600 Books,Including 5 Dictionaries!

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2024 //
38

Governor Ron DeSantis claims that Florida isn’t banning books, which may be technically true, yet demonstrably false. Librarians and school district officials are removing books from school and classroom libraries to comply with state law, until the books have been screened for any offensive sexual or racial language.

PEN America reported that more than 1,600 books have been removed from circulation until they have received approval from school officials. The big joke in Escambia County is that a dictionary is in the Escambia list of books that possibly violate the law. Actually, five dictionaries!

But many other books are on Escambia’s list that have been read by generations of students.

Is it fair to say that such lists are censorship or banning? I say yes. What do you think?

PEN America posted this statement:

It has come to this: Escambia County, Florida, schools have banned the dictionary.

Five dictionaries are on the district’s list of more than 1,600 books banned pending investigation in December 2023, along with eight different encyclopedias, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not – all due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning materials with “sexual conduct” from schools.

Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshallare on the list, alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Black Panther comics by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Feminism Book was banned along with The Teen Vogue Handbook: An Insider’s Guide to Careers in Fashion.

The list obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project also includes Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. The Princess Diaries and 14 other books by Meg Cabot have been taken from libraries, alongside books by David Baldacci, Lee Child, Michael Crichton, Carl Hiassen, Jonathan Franzen, John Green, John Grisham, Stephen King (23 of them), Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Celeste Ng, James Patterson, Jodi Picoult,and Nicholas Sparks. Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly’s two books, Killing Jesus and Killing Reagan, were also banned pending investigation.

PEN America, Penguin Random House, and a diverse group of authors joined with parents and students in Escambia County for a first of its kind federal lawsuit alleging that an earlier set of book bans and restrictions violate their rights to free speech and equal protection under the law. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 10.

If you open the link, you can see the list of banned books in Escambia County.

Here are a few that caught my eye:

Books of Greek and Roman myths

Baroque and Rococo Art

Five books by Maya Angelou

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Sixteen books by Meg Cabot

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

Multiple books about sexually transmitted diseases

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield -Adapted for Young Readers

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Five novels by William Faulkner

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

I’m stopping here. You get the drift. Scan the rest of the list and see what you think.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Literacy, Literature

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
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