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Heather Cox Richardson: Florida’s Distorted Standards for African American Studies

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
78

The people in Florida who wrote the standards for African American studies had a challenge: how to write them to satisfy Governor DeSantis’ hatred for anything that speaks about racism and injustice. Admitting that whites who enslaved Blacks were racist might make whites today feel “uncomfortable” and would be “woke.” So how is it possible to paper over the brutality and inhumanity of slavery?

Heather Cox Richardson explains how they did it.

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

One senses the hand of advisors from Hillsdale College in this prettified version of U.S. history.

To read the standards, open the link and see the footnote.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Florida, History

Texas: How a Wealthy Conservative Bought His Own Government

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2023 //
4

Eric Dexheimer of The Houston Chronicle wrote an incredible—almost unbelievable—story about how political power works in Texas. You may recall that Disney has its own self-governing district in Florida. Florida has almost 2,000 “special districts.” Texas has more than 4,000. Read this story to see how the very rich and politically connected can frustrate public projects and expand their holdings.

Dexheimer wrote:

In 2019, the city of Dripping Springs was finalizing plans for a new pipeline to move wastewater from its busy north end to a regional treatment plant on the south. Half a decade in the making, planners said the line was essential to control development in the rapidly growing Austin suburb.

One of the dozen or so properties they identified for the pipeline to cross belonged to Bruce Bolbock, an anesthesiologist. Valued at more than $9 million, the bucolic Hill Country ranch rolls across 225 acres in Hays County, and he didn’t want a buried raw wastewater pipeline on even the narrow strip it required. In addition to having a delicate natural spring on the property, he raised bison and exotic toucans that “require a very consistent environment that’s free of noise [and] disturbance.”

With the looming threat of the city taking his land through eminent domain, Bolbock placed a phone call to a Dallas hotel magnate and generous supporter of conservative political causes named Monty Bennett. Bennett didn’t have a magic wand. But he did have a sort of superpower: his own government.

In 2011, then-state Sen. Lance Gooden — now a U.S. Congressman — whose candidacies Bennett supported financially and with whom he reportedly co-owned land, sponsored a new law forming the Lazy W District No. 1municipal utility district. Such special-purpose governments typically are created so developers can sell bonds to pay for water and sewer lines in new subdivisions. New residents then pay the MUD assessments to retire the loans.

But court records show the Lazy W was created at Bennett’s request and primarily for him; it is almost exclusively made up of his sprawling private family ranch in Henderson County, an hour-and-a-half drive southeast of Dallas. Although he has said he wanted to form the district to conserve its natural beauty, Bennett also was clear he wanted his own government to wage a personal battle against the Tarrant Regional Water District, which had proposed routing a pipeline across the ranch.

Broadly, Lazy W argued that one government can’t sue another for eminent domain. So once Bennett’s ranch became District No. 1, TRWD could not legally take its property. The water district ended up routing its line around Bennett’s ranch. Now the Bolbocks wondered if Bennett might be able to use his government — even though it was located 200 miles from their property — to protect their land, too.

They hit on a solution: Despite the distance, Bennett’s special district “purchased” a thin strip of land encircling the Bolbock’s spread. By surrounding the private ranch with a protective government moat, Lazy W, a special district based in an entirely different region of the state, has been able to prevent Dripping Springs from moving ahead on its preferred pipeline plan.

Bennett has used the district granted to him by the Legislature in other unusual ways. The Lazy W recently flexed its government muscle by seeking to condemn 55 acres of a neighbor’s private property against his will and absorbing it into the district. The neighbor argued Bennett simply wanted to add some land to his ranch.

“This taking is a sham whose sole purpose is to confer private benefits to private parties,” the neighbor, Arlis Jones, wrote in a legal filing.

While Jones tries to recover his property, however, Lazy W has already erected a fence around it.

‘The invisible government of Texas’

The Lazy W isn’t the only Texas special district to use its government powers in non-conventional ways unforeseen by the lawmakers who created them. Like tiny viruses unleashed on the state, some quietly mutate beyond their original purpose to upend local communities.

A 2014 legislative report on special districtscounted about 3,350 across Texas, including hospital, emergency services, utility, school and water districts, among others. There are hundreds in Harris County alone. In a recent hearing, Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) said the number of them has since surpassed 4,000. Lawmakers this year have filed bills that would create dozens more.

Because there are so many and they are so hyperlocal, the districts can operate far under the radar of public scrutiny, even though they are vested with powers that can affect the daily lives of citizens. “There are appropriate purposes for these,” said Rod Bordelon, distinguished senior fellow for public affairs at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who has studied the districts. “There’s just not a lot of oversight and review.”

While government leaders are elected by the people they represent, for example, special district officials generally are appointed, and often are the same developers — or their hand-picked representatives — who formed the district. “In general, most citizens know comparatively little about the jurisdiction, structure, functions, and governance of special purpose districts,” the 2014 report concluded, “thus making them the invisible government of Texas.”

Operating so far out of sight can lead to misuse, said Bettencourt. “They’re set up opaquely where things can happen that are at best poor policy, and at times borderline corrupt. It can become weaponized,” he said.

Last year, Hearst Newspapers detailed how a small group of Travis County developers were using their special district consisting of bare farmland to collect millions of dollars off taxpayers who in some cases lived far away.

The SH130 Municipal Management District No. 1 was established by the Legislature in 2019 to help develop a community near the Austin airport. But its directors discovered they could leverage the district’s status as a government entity to obtain generous property tax breaks for other developers even if the projects were nowhere near the district. In exchange, the developers paid SH130 millions of dollars in fees.

Local taxpayers must make up the difference in foregone property tax revenue. That meant citizens where the tax-break properties were located effectively have had to pay more to backfill the revenue lost to projects that neither they, nor their elected leaders had any say in, said Williamson County Treasurer Scott Heselmeyer. SH130 “is trying to fund its own development off the backs of taxpayers in other parts of the state,” he said.

When they learn of such unintended uses, lawmakers must scramble to fix them by amending the laws that created the districts. This year lawmakers proposed no fewer than three bills to rein in the SH130 Municipal Management District. Earlier this month, the Texas Senate voted to dissolve the district it helped create just three years ago.

Yet with so many special districts across the state, lawmakers concede it can feel like a game of legislative Whac-A-Mole. “It’s very rare that a taxing unit gets dissolved around here,” Bettencourt said.

Rep. Glenn Rogers (R-Mineral Wells), meanwhile, introduced a bill to protect cities such as Dripping Springs from, say, having to wage battle against a far-away a conservation district over their local development plans. It sought to remove the governmental immunity from eminent domain lawsuits of “certain water districts.”

“I was troubled by the abuse of special district powers I saw in this case,” Rogers said in a statement. The House Committee on Land & Resource Management “is determined to ensure that special districts serve their intended public purposes, and aren’t used improperly as personal fiefdoms to accomplish private purposes.”

Public park not so well-known

Bennett made his fortune acquiring and operating hotels and is a Texas political heavyweight, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to support primarily conservative causes and candidates. But he’s also known as a dogged and creative legal opponent willing to wage long and expensive court battles to protect against what he sees as threats to his interests.

In addition to turning his ranch into a governmental entity, he buried the cremated remains of two family acquaintances on the Lazy W in the path of the proposed pipeline route, using the cemetery to help create another legal obstacle to the Tarrant water district’s plans. He supported candidates to replace the district’s incumbent board, as well.

Dissatisfied with media coverage of his business operations and politics, he resurrected the name of an old African-American newspaper, the Dallas Express. With Bennett as its publisher, it has produced friendlier coverage. When the Dallas Weekly labeled it a “right-wing propaganda site” he sued the paper for libel. After a Texas appeals court dismissed the lawsuit last summer, Bennett took it to the Texas Supreme Court, where it is currently pending.

The designated contact for the Lazy W, Traci Merritt, an employee of Bennett’s Remington Hotels, did not respond to emails or phone messages seeking to interview Bennett.

According to Henderson County court documents, Lazy W said it moved to absorb its neighbor’s 55.8 acres of private property because the land was needed to fulfill the special district’s mission of protecting nature. (The Lazy W changed itself from a MUD into a conservation district in 2013, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Qualify, which registers the districts.) “The board of directors has determined that the current land is necessary for the provision of additional habitat for wildlife,” according to the September 2019 condemnation filing.

The neighbor responded that Bennett simply wanted his land for his own and so was using the government he controlled to take it.

“The sole purpose of this attempted condemnation is to add Mr. Jones’ 55 acres to the Lazy W Conservation District (and, by extension, to Bennett’s Lazy W Ranch),” Jones’s legal team wrote in a filing. “The public has no access to the 55 acres, legal or otherwise … Further, no plans or documents exist showing any access to or uses for the property by the public.”

Jones and his attorney, Andrew Cox, declined comment. Lazy W attorney Stephen Christy noted there was long-simmering tension between the property owners.

“Mr. Jones has a long history of aggravating his neighbors,” he wrote in an emailed response to questions. He added that “The purpose for the district to condemn land is for a public park, which is how it’s currently being utilized.”

It’s not a well-known public park.

“I know there’s a Lazy W Ranch, but it’s definitely not public land that’s available” for public access, said Mark Anderson, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden assigned to the area. “It’s not publicized, for sure. I’ve never heard of it.”

Internet and newspaper postings show a Frisbee golf tournament was held on the Lazy W last October. Christy said the course is available by reservation. Dwight Robson, who manages the 18-hole course, said it was built last fall, and while it is considered public, the only access is via Bennett’s private land so arrangements to play there must be made through him.

In March 2022, a jury found in Jones’s favor, concluding Lazy W’s taking of Jones’s property served no public purpose. Yet in what legal experts say is a near unheard-of event, the verdict was tossed when Lazy W appealed and the court reporter could not produce a full transcript of the trial.

With no official record of the trial, the 12thCourt of Appeals in January ordered the entire case to be re-heard back in Henderson County. The new trial is scheduled for the end of the year.

Project stopped in its tracks

A 3.5-hour drive away, Dripping Springs, too, has found that battles with the Lazy W can be protracted.

With its population soaring in recent years, the city has worked hard to keep up with infrastructure demand, said public works Director Aaron Reed. The state’s regional water plans prefer more pipelines running to fewer treatment plants, and planning for the new wastewater pipeline running along the eastern side of the city began in 2014.

Although attention was given to mapping a direct route, Reed said the 3-mile pipeline’s pathway was determined mostly by topography. Planners wanted a gravity-fed line, which doesn’t move liquids under pressure so produces fewer leaks and tends to last longer. The east side was selected because it was less developed and so would need to cross fewer individual properties, Reed said.

By 2019, Dripping Springs had a state permit and began contacting about a dozen landowners seeking their permission for a 30-foot-wide easement to lay the pipe through their properties. Mayor Bill Foulds said negotiations were proceeding well with the Bolbocks, until “Suddenly Lazy W is involved.”

Bruce Bolbock, who purchased his property in 1989, said he isn’t anti-development, but he was frantic to shield his land and its wildlife from a pipeline project that could harm them. “If it leaks, then what?” he said. “As just an individual landowner, you have zero protection.”

Bennett, who he learned of by reading articles about him, “was very sympathetic. He said, ‘I think I can help.’” With their shared commitment to conservation, “He offered to allow us to join the Lazy W.”

Foulds described the outline of property Bennett’s conservation district acquired surrounding the Bolbock’s ranch as a 30-foot-wide “picture frame.” Records show the land was conveyed to the Henderson County conservation district in February 2020. The Bolbocks maintain it, use it and have the right to buy it back for $10 if the city succeeds in condemning it, legal filings show.

Dripping Springs filed a condemnation notice in 2021. But last May, Hays County Court-at-Law Judge Chris Johnson concluded the Lazy W Conservation District had governmental immunity and Dripping Springs could not take any of its land, grinding the project to a halt.

The city has appealed, arguing Bennett’s North Texas special district is not being used to benefit Texas citizens, but only to preserve one family’s Hill Country estate. “The Lazy W Strip is being used to protect private property interests, not any public interest,” it wrote in a filing last summer. If this were allowed, Foulds warned, there was nothing to prevent any special district in any part of the state from inserting itself into a local government’s affairs.

Christopher Johns, the Bolbock’s attorney, said he understood the concern. But “The Legislature set up the rules,” he said. “And we played by the rules.”

eric.dexheimer@houstonchronicle.com

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Politics, Texas

Jennifer Rubin: Florida Is the State Where Kindness and Decency Go to Die

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
47

Jennifer Rubin is a super-smart journalist-lawyer who became a regular columnist for The Washington Post, where she was supposed to express conservative views. However, the election of Trump changed her political outlook. Here, she writes about how Ron DeSantis’ hate policies are hurting the state of Florida.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his obedient Republican legislature have made bullying and attacking the vulnerable the hallmarks of their governance. Whether it is “don’t say gay” legislation (and retribution against Disney for supporting inclusion), denying medical care to transgender youths, muzzling teachers and professors who address systemic racism in the United States, firing a county prosecutor who dared object to DeSantis’s refusal to protect women’s bodily autonomy, or shipping unwary immigrants to other states, Florida has become not where “woke” died but rather where empathy, decency and kindness go to die.


DeSantis’s stunts frequently fail in court and cost taxpayers money. But his MAGA war on diversity and tolerance might be negatively impacting the state in other ways.


DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.

Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”

In addition, evidence points to a brain drain from Florida universities and colleges, although data is hard to come by. Records show “an upward tick in staff departures at some of Florida’s largest universities. … Across the State University System, the murmurs are getting louder: Some Florida schools are having trouble filling positions,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. “At the University of Florida, 1,087 employees resigned in 2022 — the only time in the last five years that the number exceeded 1,000.” Record numbers of faculty are not returning to University of Central Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida. This is hardly surprising, given DeSantis’s assault on academic independence and his suggestion that students go out of state if they want to study topics such as African American studies.

In addition, some businesses might be getting cold feet about spending convention dollars in the Sunshine State. The Sun Sentinel reported, “Broward County has lost more than a half-dozen conventions as their organizers cite the divisive political climate as their reason to stay out of Florida.” If the trend continues, the significant share of jobs and state revenue attributable to convention business could shrink. DeSantis and his supporters counter that tourism is still booming. They insist low taxes will continue to attract the wealthy and businesses.

There is little sign that the rest of the country is enamored of censorship, book bans or anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. The question remains whether DeSantis’s act wears thin at home.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Character, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Higher Education, History, Injustice

Trump Plans to Increase Power of the President If Re-Elected

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2023 //
54

The New York Times describes a frightening plan developed by Donald Trump’s administration-in-waiting to consolidate power in the President’s hands. The plan would give the President direct control of independent agencies. Trump believes he didn’t accomplish his goals because the “deep state” restrained him.

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

In addition, every federal employee would serve at the pleasure of the President.

He intends to strip employment protectionsfrom tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country…”

Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.

“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Crazies Sabotage the Defense Budget

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2023 //
51

Heather Cox Richardson wrote early today about the GOP’s irresponsible politicization of the defense budget. Typically the defense budget passes with a bipartisan vote. But not this year because the House GOP majority is completely cowed by the hard-right extremists. The Republican crazies inserted all their anti-WOKE priorities into the bill, which will not be passed by the Senate. Marjorie Taylor Greene owns House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Richardson writes:

Traditionally, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the annual budget and appropriations of the Department of Defense, passes Congress on a bipartisan basis. Since 1961 it has been considered must-pass legislation, as it provides the funding for our national security. For all that there is grumbling on both sides over one thing or another in the measure, it is generally kept outside partisanship.

Late last night, House Republicans broke that tradition by loading the bill with a wish list from the far right. Republicans added amendments that eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the Defense Department; end the Defense Department program that reimburses military personnel who must travel for abortion services; bar healthcare for gender transition; prevent the military academies from using affirmative action in admissions (an exception the recent Supreme Court decision allowed); block the Pentagon from putting in place President Biden’s executive orders on climate change; prevent schools associated with the Defense Department from teaching that the United States of America is racist; and block military schools from having “pornographic and radical gender ideology books” in their libraries.

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted: “We don’t want Disneyland to train our military. House Republicans just passed a bill that ENDS the wokism in the military and gives our troops their biggest pay raise in decades.”

In fact, the events of last night were a victory for right-wing extremists, demonstrating that they hold the upper hand in the House. Representatives Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), both military veterans, expressed shock that so many Republicans voted to strip abortion protections from military personnel. “[T]hey will say, ‘this is a really bad idea,’ ‘this is not where the party should be going,’ ‘this is a mistake,’” Sherill said. “[W]ell then why did everyone but two people in the Republican conference vote for this really bad amendment?”

The bill passed by a vote of 219 to 210, largely along partisan lines. This year’s budget is $886 billion as the U.S. modernizes the military to compete with new threats such as the rise of China, and it provides a 5.2% increase in pay for military personnel.

But Senate Democrats will not vote for it with the new partisan amendments and are working on their own measure. While there will be a conference committee to hammer out the differences between the two versions, McCarthy has offered a position on that committee to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of the extremists. This is an unusual offer, as she is not on the House Armed Services Committee.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: “Extreme MAGA Republicans have hijacked a bipartisan bill that is essential to our national security and taken it over and weaponized it in order to jam their extreme right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

“We are not going to relent, we are not going to back down, we’re not going to give up on the cause that is righteous,” Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) said.

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) summed up the vote today on Twitter. “The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the bill that funds all of our military operations. It is typically bipartisan and is about as serious as Congress gets. What weapons of war we fund, which allies we share them with, how we recruit. National security is a BFD. We can have our political debates about any number of issues but it is generally understood that when Americans are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend us, it’s time to check the crazies at the door. But today, the crazies won.

“They won first because [McCarthy] put the crazies in positions of power. But second because none of the “moderate” Republicans had the courage to stay the hell out of KrazyTown…. Is every member of the [House Republican Conference] a homophobic, racist, science denying lunatic? No. But the lesson of today is that the ones who aren’t are massive cowards completely unfit for any position of leadership.

“There is space—and demand—for reasonable differences of opinion in our democracy. This isn’t about whether we agree. It’s about whether we can trust that—differences aside—we trust that we’ve got each other’s back if we ever find ourselves in a foxhole together. That’s usually a metaphor, conflating the horrors of war with the much lower-stakes lives that most of us are fortunate enough to lead. But today, the entire [House Republican Conference] told us—both literally and metaphorically—that they don’t give a damn about the rest of the unit.”

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Funding, Stupid

Florida: Veterans Drop Out of DeSantis’ State Guard After It Turns Militaristic

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2023 //
23

The Miami Herald reported that military veterans are dropping out of the Florida State Guard after learning that they were preparing for military work. Given DeSantis’ authoritarian instincts, many critics were concerned that he might use it for illegitimate purposes.

When the first recruiting class of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new Florida State Guard showed up for training last month, they had varied experiences and expectations.

Over 30 days in June, teenagers out of high school and retired military veterans came to Camp Blanding, the National Guard base near Jacksonville.

Many were told they would volunteer for a revived State Guard with a non-military mission: help Floridians in times of need or disaster.

Instead, the state’s National Guard trained the volunteers for combat. Khakis and polos were replaced by camouflaged uniforms. Volunteers assured they could keep their facial hair were ordered to shave. And they were drilled on how to rappel with ropes, navigate through the woods and respond to incidents under military command.

When DeSantis announced in 2021 he wanted to revive the long-dormant State Guard, he vowed it would help Floridians during emergencies. But in the year since its launch, key personnel and a defined mission remain elusive. The state is looking for the program’s third leader in eight months. According to records reviewed by the Herald/Times and interviews with program volunteers, a number of recruits quit after the first training class last month because they feared it was becoming too militaristic.

Weeks into that inaugural June training, one volunteer, a disabled retired Marine Corps captain, called the local sheriff’s office to report he was battered by Florida National Guard instructors when they forcibly shoved him into a van after he questioned the program and its leadership…

In a statement, Haas said the State Guard was a “military organization” that will be used not just for emergencies but for “aiding law enforcement with riots and illegal immigration.”

“We are aware that some trainees who were removed are dissatisfied,” Haas said. “This is to be expected with any course that demands rigor and discipline.”

Three former members told the Herald/Times the program veered from its original mission.

“The program got hijacked and turned into something that we were trying to stay away from: a militia,” said Brian Newhouse, a retired 20-year Navy veteran who was chosen to lead one of the State Guard’s three divisions. The original leadership team envisioned a disaster response team of veterans and civilians with a variety of practical skills, according to Newhouse. Two other former military veterans, who asked not to be named for fear of potential consequences and later quit, expressed similar concerns over a change in the State Guard’s mission.

The Florida legislature gave DeSantis $10 million to hire and train 400 members of the state guard. Unlike the National Guard, which can be called up for federal duties, the state guard answers only to the governor.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article277245833.html#storylink=cpy

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article277245833.html#storylink=cpy

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article277245833.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Democracy, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Hoax

Peter Greene: Oklahoma Superintendent Tries to Define “Woke,” But Can’t

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
86

Peter Greene discovered that Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent of Education in Oklahoma, attempted to define “Woke” on a far-right website. WOKE is one of those new terms of opprobrium, like “critical race theory,” that Republicans despise but can’t define. Peter eagerly read Walters’ effort to defund Woke, but came away disappointed. It seems that Woke is whatever you don’t like. You may have seen the stories recently about Walters insisting that the Tulsa race massacre of 2021 had nothing to do with skin color, although as the Daily Beast reported, “white mobs killed as many as 300 Black residents and burned some 1,600 homes and businesses in what was known as Black Wall Street.”

Peter Greene writes:

Oklahoma’s head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question–what the heck does “woke” mean? (I’ll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don’t recommend clicking through).

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I’m a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the “to wit” and remember that “restore back” is more clearly “restore.”

But he’s right. The term “woke” does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, “restore American education back to its foundation” is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don’t Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn’t. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at “opponents of this movement.” If we don’t know what the movement is, we don’t know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let’s press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they’re terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It’s a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it’s okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what “woke” actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well….

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don’t even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he’s talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he’s not going to do that. He’s going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that “naturally, this faction of individuals” is after schools to spread their “radical propaganda.” Still no definition of woke in sight. No–wait. This next start looks promising–

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That’s not helping, either. “Projection” is an odd choice–when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn’t change. There’s “projection” when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here (“I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world”) but that’s probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one “forces” projection. “Inaccurately-held” is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they’re being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple “inaccurate” would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are “anti-education,” because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect “education” means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of “nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means” which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Gender, History, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Attacks the Military and Officers of the Law

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
39

Heather Cox Richardson describes the bitter factionalism among Republicans. They are going ever more extreme; the Freedom Caucus expelled Marjorie Taylor Greene for not being extreme enough. They spend their time attacking the military, the FBI, and the CIA. In addition to the time they spend attacking the integrity of elections. The Republican Party has become a wrecking ball for democratic institutions.

For the first time since 1859, the Marine Corps does not have a confirmed commandant. For five months, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has held up the confirmation of about 250 Pentagon officers in protest of the Defense Department’s policy of enabling military personnel to travel to obtain abortion care. So when Commandant General David Berger retired today, there was no confirmed commandant to replace him. Assistant Commandant General Eric Smith will serve as the acting commandant until the Senate once again takes up military confirmations.

That a Republican is undermining the military belies the party’s traditional claim to be stronger on military issues than the Democrats. So does the attack of House Republicans on our nation’s key law enforcement entities—the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—after traditionally insisting their party works to defend “law and order.”

David Smith of The Guardian this weekend noted that those attacks are linked to former president Trump’s increasing legal trouble.

MAGA Republicans are seeking to protect Trump by calling for impeaching President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee), and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, who has prosecuted those who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), and a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan, have been out in front in the attacks on the DOJ and the FBI. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has been trying to dig up proof that Biden has “weaponized” the DOJ, the FBI, and the Department of Education against Republicans, especially those supporting former president Trump.

They have not turned up any official whistleblowers—the word “whistleblower” in government context means someone whose allegations have been found to be credible by an inspector general, but House Republicans seem to be using the word in a generic sense of someone with complaints—to support the idea that Biden has weaponized the government.

But Trump did. Last summer the New York Times reported that under Trump, the IRS launched a rare and invasive audit of former FBI director James Comey and Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, and Trump talked of using the IRS and the DOJ to harass Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post.

On Thursday, a sworn statement from Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly confirmed that Trump asked about using the IRS and other agencies to investigate Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI agents looking into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.

Another investigation has also backfired on the Trump Republicans. The House Ways and Means Committee has highlighted the testimony of Gary Shapley, a “whistleblower” from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland interfered with the investigation into Hunter Biden. Shapley said that Garland denied a request from U.S. attorney David Weiss, who was in charge of the case, to be appointed special counsel, which would officially have made him independent. On June 22 the committee released a transcript of Shapley’s testimony.

Garland promptly denied the allegation, but on June 28, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to David Weiss, U.S. attorney for Delaware, repeating the allegations. Weiss, a Trump appointee, replied today, saying he never requested special counsel status. Representative Jordan got around this direct contradiction of Shapley’s testimony by lumping Weiss in with those he’s attacking: “Do you trust Biden’s DOJ to tell the truth?” he asked.

And while the radical right has claimed that Biden is on the take for millions of dollars from foreign countries, today the key witness to that allegation was indicted for being a Chinese agent. Also today, LIV Golf, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced it is moving its $50 million team championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump National Doral in Miami this October.

In May, LIV Golf allied with the nonprofit PGA Tour to create a new for-profit company in May, but today a prominent member of the PGA board, Randall Stephenson, resigned, saying he and most of the rest of the board were not involved in the deal and that he cannot “in good conscience support” it, “particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.” (The report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Khashoggi.) Stephenson had delayed his resignation at the request of the board’s chair while the PGA Tour commissioner was on medical leave.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to start hearings on that merger tomorrow, but they are having trouble lining up witnesses who were involved in making the deal, which was achieved in secret negotiations and has infuriated many of the PGA Tour players.

The MAGA attacks on the Biden administration are part of a larger story. Trump supporters are consolidating around the former president and so-called Christian democracy. They are enforcing loyalty so tightly that the far-right House Freedom Caucus recently expelled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) either because she is too close to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) or because she called Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” on the floor of Congress, or both. Like the far-right Southern Baptist Convention, which is hemorrhaging members but which nonetheless recently expelled one of its largest churches for permitting a female pastor, the MAGAs are purging their members for purity.

But their posturing worries Republicans from less safe districts who know such extremism is unpopular. Today, 21 members of the far right in the House wrote a letter to McCarthy saying they would oppose any appropriations bills that did not reject the June debt ceiling deal that kept the U.S. from defaulting on its debts, threatening to shut down the government. They also rejected any further support for Ukraine.

Larry Jacobs, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian’s Smith: “Independent voters, who tend to swing US elections that have become so close, don’t buy into the Trump line. You don’t see support for this unhinged view that the justice department and the FBI are somehow corrupt. There’s not support for that except in the fringe of the Republican party. The question, though, is does the fringe of the Republican party have enough leverage, particularly in the House of Representatives, to force impeachment votes and other measures?”

Alex Isenstadt of Politico wrote today that a new group called Win It Back, tied to the right-wing Club for Growth, which has ties to the Koch network, will run anti-Trump ads starting tomorrow. Americans for Prosperity, linked to billionaire Charles Koch, will also run ads opposing Trump.

Meanwhile, President Biden is on his way to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the 74th North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATO was formed in 1949 to stand against the Soviet Union, and now it stands against an expanding Russia. Today, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced that Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. Hungary, which had also been a holdout, said earlier this month it would back Sweden’s entry as soon as Turkey did.

This means that the key issues before NATO will be Ukraine’s defense, and climate change, a reality that U.S. politicians can no longer ignore (although MAGA Republicans later this month will start hearings to stop corporations from incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals into their future plans). Currently, forty-two million people in the U.S. South are locked in a devastating heat dome, and Vermont and New York are facing catastrophic flash floods.

President Biden told CNN yesterday that he does not support NATO membership for Ukraine while it is at war, noting that since NATO’s security pact means that a war on one automatically includes all, admitting Ukraine would commit U.S. troops to a war with Russia. Instead, NATO members will likely consider continuing significant military support for Ukraine.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans

Arthur Goldstein: NYC Retirees Are Fighting Their Union and the City to Stay on Medicare

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
37

New York City’s retired municipal employees are battling the Eric Adams administration and their own unions, who want the retirees to switch from Medicare to a for-profit Medicare advantage program run by Aetna. The city expects to save $600 million a year by switching its employees to Aetna. (Aetna’s CEO is the highest paid person in the health insurance industry at $27.9 million per annum.)

Arthur Goldstein recently retired after a teaching career of nearly forty years, mostly teaching English language learners in high school. He is outraged that the city and his union want to take away the health insurance that he worked for and substitute an inferior Medicare Advantage plan. The city claims that MA is better than Medicare, but where will that $600 million in savings come from? Where will Aetna’s profit come from?

Two sources of savings and profits:

1. Denial of service. If Aetna does not approve a major procedure recommended by your doctor, you won’t get it. You can appeal; maybe your appeal will win. Maybe not. Medicare does not question your doctor’s medical advice.

2. If your doctor is not in network, he or she won’t be paid.

Arthur Goldstein writes:

I need a union to protect me, along with my brothers and sisters, from our adversaries. Our number one adversary is our employer, currently embodied in Mayor Eric Adams. When Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to degrade our health benefits, I’m glad to stand with my union to fight. When Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to give us a compensation increase barely one-third of inflation, I’m ready to descend upon City Hall with all my union brothers and sisters.

Our leadership, though, has asked for neither. Instead of that, they’ve asked me to stand up for a “fair contract.” The contract, though, contained both of the glaring flaws noted above. Leadership wanted me to go to Starbucks and have people there see me work. I don’t set foot in Starbucks unless one of my students gives me a gift card. Starbucks is virulently anti-union, and I have better coffee at home.

I’ve been writing for months about how our leadership has sold out our retirees (and now I am one). I have been quite active opposing private corporate insurance for retirees. I don’t want some clerk at Aetna determining I don’t need care my doctors deem necessary. In service members do not need a plan that’s 10% cheaper than GHI-CBP. How many more doctors need to drop our plan before Mulgrew climbs out of bed with Adams?

Last week, on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood outside with both retirees and active members while the independent Organization of NYC Retirees went to court to stand for us. By the next day, there was a ruling that this downgrade could cause us “irreparable harm.” They embodied not only activism, but successful activism.

Let me ask you this—if our union leadership supports things that cause us irreparable harm, why should we be at their beck and call? Why should we get out there and demand a sub-inflation raise? Why should we demand a contract that does nothing to address the downgrade of our health care?

As I’m asking this, a lot of members have more fundamental issues. A few years back, I was chapter leader of the largest school in Queens (an odd position for someone who opposes activism). I was ready to strike for safety. Members announced, with no shame whatsoever, that they’d be scabs. This tells me they don’t even know what union is.

Whose fault is that? We, as a society, don’t really teach about labor and union. I kind of learned as I went along. There is a great book called Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse. If you read it, you’ll get a laundry list of things that UFT does NOT do. We could strike, or we could do a whole lot of things short of that. But that’s not how our leadership thinks. I’ll bet you dimes to dollars Michael Mulgrew, except possibly when he read my blog, has never even heard of this book.

That’s why we are asleep. We call Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus “the union,” as though we aren’t even part of it. Whole swaths of us think of Mulgrew as our mommy, and think he should come around and personally help when we are in trouble. Mulgrew’s caucus encourages that false dependency.

In fact, they are the ones who don’t want activism. The very notion of it makes them quake in their boots. If we were truly active, we would not stand for their sellouts. We would not stand for diminished health care. We would not stand for wholly insufficient compensation increases. We would not have 20% participation in union elections. Crucially, we would not have a caucus that doesn’t even know what union is running our union.

I wholly support activism. What I just saw in union leadership was a carefully choreographed rush to a contract. There were few opportunities to examine, discuss or question it. There was a kabuki dance of demonstrations to support whatever leadership wanted, and we were all supposed to believe that these petty actions had something to do with realizing a contract. The fact is the contract was set once DC37 agreed. We had absolutely nothing to say about compensation or health care, our most critical issues.

Leadership thinks we are stupid. Leadership hires people solely for the quality of obsequiousness, and many of these hires may indeed be stupid. But I know a whole lot of smart teachers. They can’t fool all of us. A lot of us who won’t be fooled are, in fact, the most active members they have.

I admire activism. That’s why I contributed to NYC Retirees, who went out and protected us from the machinations of Mulgrew and his fellow union bosses. You should do so as well, and here is how.

Let’s be active. Let’s promote activism. And let’s be done with the delusion activism what current leadership wants from us. We are union, we will stand up, and we will protect ourselves.

And very soon, we will vote those bastards out and take charge.

Open the link to read in full.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ethics, Health, New York City, Unions

Carol Hillman: Some Suggestions to Share with Teachers Everywhere

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2023 //
29

Carol Hillman was a teacher for many years in Pennsylvania, and she ran a consulting service that encouraged rural youth to attend college. When she and her husband Arnold retired (he is also an educator), they moved to South Carolina. They must have expected to lead a quiet life, but they immediately became involved with rural high schools, where the students are Black and impoverished. They worked tirelessly to help students set their sights on going to college.

Carol wanted to share some of her life’s lessons with other teachers.

She wrote:

To teachers everywhere……..

Regardless of what subject we teach we share the responsibility to help our students prepare for their futures. Middle school students need to begin to think about, and high school students must further explore, the ways in which they shape their futures through their own actions.

Each of these prompts provide a topic you might invite your students to consider. Students will appreciate the opportunity to share their own opinions and need to learn to consider the opinions of their peers. In examining these ideas students will be using abstract thinking and higher orders of thinking.

You can limit discussion to a set day and/or time or invite students to address concepts in a journal you are willing to read.

If you have a school newspaper or yearbook you might include student comments on different topics.

Do they agree that a particular idea is valuable? If so, why or why not?

Class discussion will help students give examples of how the concepts apply to real life.

•Enjoy change because it’s the only thing we can predict.

•Have the courage to face new challenges.

•Accept that you can control your own behavior.

•Surround yourself with people who value you.

•Embrace diversity so you can enjoy other people, places and things.

•Understand that the world needs good followers and good leaders.

•Define and redefine your personal goals.

•Know when to accept help and when to say, “I can do this myself.”

•Show that you value others so you can keep old friends and make new ones.

•Know the joy of celebrating small accomplishments as they are the building blocks of a good life.

•Welcome new experiences to expand your knowledge and interests.

•Cooperate so you can become a constructive member of your community.

•Keep your promises so people can trust you.

•Understand that successful people know when to quit and move on.

•Take pride in your accomplishments.

•Accept that while you can’t always control what happens to you, you can control how you react to it.

•Understand that the best motivation comes from within.

•Recognize that you can make the world a better place.

If you have questions about these prompts and how to present them, feel to contact me at carol@scorsweb.org

Thank you,

Carol Hillman

Categories Character, Citizenship, Discipline, Education Reform, Ethics, Students, Teachers
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