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Thom Hartmann: Supreme Court Is Turning U.S. into a Banana Republic

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2024 //
9

Thom Hartmann explains here the importance of one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent cases, in which the extremist majority overturned what is known as “the Chevron Deference.” When I first read about this decision, it sounded bad—it basically strips federal agencies of their regulatory powers—but I didn’t realize how bad this decision was the future of the nation until I read Hartmann’s article. He summarized the decision in this way: “The billionaires and polluters who bribed SCOTUS Republicans just legalized poisoning our children and grandchildren.”

In 1904, O. Henry coined the phrase “banana republic” to describe a country where the government supports big business for the exclusive benefit of the morbidly rich. A government of, by, and for what that generation called the “fatcats” or the “robber barons.”

The banana republic-ication of America just kicked into high gear, and, curiously, there’s been a virtual mainstream media blackout about it.

Here’s how it’s happening.

When Steve Bannon was in the Trump White House, he declared one of their goals was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” That same type of language also appears in Project 2025.

Now, fewer than two weeks ago, the six Republicans on the Supreme Court began that process by kneecapping the ability of regulatory agencies to protect the American people from out-of-control polluters, rip-off banks and insurance companies, Big Pharma, and hundreds of other industries and massive corporations that put profits above humans.

They did it by blowing up the Chevron Deference. It’s part of their long-term commitment to turning America into a billionaire- and corporate-run banana republic with an autocrat as president.

The case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ends the power of most regulatory agencies that are so hated by America’s most exploitative industries and the rightwing billionaires they’ve made.

As Senators Whitehouse, Hirono, Feinstein, and Warren noted:

“This case is the product of a decades-long effort by pro-corporate interests to eviscerate the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, to the detriment of the American people.”

So, how did the Supreme Court put the EPA and other regulatory agencies functionally out of business?

It has to do with something called the Chevron deference, a policy established by the Court decades ago to protect just such agencies.

Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):

1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.

2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit airborne pollutants, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak or pour poisons into our atmosphere, waters, etc.

3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.

4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the deadly emissions begin to drop.

This is how it worked, for example, with regard to CO2 until June of last year, a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established the Chevron deference to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.

Functionally, this process dates back to 1887, when Congress established America’s first regulatory agency — the Interstate Commerce Commission — to prevent railroads from ripping off shippers and passengers.

It was nailed into law and doctrine with the Chevron deference, articulated by the Supreme Court in 1984, reflecting a century-and-a-half of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence. It says that once a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior, they then have the legal authority to regulate and the courts should “defer” to the agency (thus the “deference” in the doctrine that emerged from the ruling when Chevron tried to negate an EPA ruling in 1984).

Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.

Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch (the son of Reagan’s EPA Administrator, Anne Gorsuch, who resigned in disgrace after trying to destroy the agency — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision, taking the first big bite out of the Chevron deference.

Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2” but instead let the EPA itself determine what pollutants are dangerous to America and the planet, the agency lacks that power to regulate CO2. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision two years ago.

The coal, oil, and natural gas industries have been popping champagne corks for two years now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet and the violence of our weather.

In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others) that brought that case and then brought this year’s Loper v Raimondo.

And, of course, there’s Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but, since being wined and dined by rightwing billionaires, in 2020 wrote:

“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”

Giving us a clue to how this went down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 in West Virginia; all 3 Democratic appointees opposed the decision.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the Court:

“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change…yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency…the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must now be done by Congress and the courts rather than administrative regulatory agencies.

As if Congress and the courts had the time and staff. 

As if they was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings. 

As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action — or those billionaires wouldn’t lavish more gifts on Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh even if it did.

Republicans on the Supreme Court succeeded in dancing to the tune of the billionaire’s fossil fuel network in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.

In the Loper v Raimondo case, however, the Court explicitly expanded that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every decision by every regulatory agency established since the last decades of the 19th century.

They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress or the courts themselves.

A Congress where arcane rules and gerrymandering have given Republicans the ability to block pretty much any legislation their billionaire patrons pay them to block. And courts filled with lawyers who never set foot in a science classroom.

So now, starting just hours after the Loper Bright ruling, those industries and companies that have chafed under rules and regulations protecting us are on the march. They hope to rule the new banana republic the GOP envisions for us.

So far in the past two weeks, federal courts have stripped over 4 million Texas workers (and soon to be all Americans) of Department of Labor rules requiring overtime payments. It happened hours after the SCOTUS ruling, specifically referencing that ruling.

In Kansas on July 2nd, a federal judge ruled that Title IX “gender identity” non-discrimination protections promulgated by the Department of Education no longer apply to queer students, with the judge specifically citing and quotingLoper Bright:

“The Supreme Court recently held that [this] court ‘need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.’ Loper Bright Enter. v. Raimondo. [This] court must exercise its ‘independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires.’”

It’s been fewer than two weeks since the Court accomplished what Trump and Project 2025 publicly aspired to, but the floodgates have opened.

Dozens of other challenges to protective regulations are already in the works, including, but not limited to: 

“[R]egulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), healthcare and product reimbursement, white collar enforcement and investigations, intellectual property, Federal Trade Commission and antitrust enforcement, international trade and national security regulation, public company disclosures, environmental regulation, government contracting, business transactions, and litigation….”

Thousands more will soon clog the federal courts (including the legal status of mifepristone and birth control). The six Republicans on the Supreme Court have unleashed a legal tsunami that, if not reversed by Congress or through expanding the Court, threatens to take Americans back to 1876, when morbidly rich robber barons, landlords, and employers could rip off and poison Americans with impunity.

It’s past time to stand up and speak out, and Dick Durbin’s Senate Judiciary Committee is the logical place to start with subpoeas to bare this Court’s naked corruption. If you agree, you can find Durbin’s phone numbers and addresses here and a list of the Committee’s members here.

And, of course, we must vote a straight Democratic ticket this November.

Every day that goes by without these corrupt judges being held to account by the Senate is another day closer to the end of the functional “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people,” and our final transition into a genuine, and perhaps irreversible, banana republic.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

Trump Assassination Attempt: Yes, This Is Who We Are

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2024 //
28

Public officials condemned the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and said as one, “There is no room for political violence in this country,” and some said “This is not who we are.”

Sadly, both sentiments are understandable, but as a matter of fact, they are not true.

There is a long history of political violence in this country, and yes, this is who we are.

Much as we try to cocoon our elected officials and aspirants for public office to protect them from would-be killers, time and again the killers have succeeded. Fortunately, former President Trump survived, but a bullet missed his head by far less than an inch. How close we came to another national tragedy.

This is who we are.

Four Presidents have been assassinated by killers with guns: President Abraham Lincoln, President James Garfield, President William McKinley, and President John F. Kennedy. Some survived assassination attempts: President Theodore Roosevelt, President Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford.

Other political muders shook the nation to its core: most recently, Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The list of political murders of civil rights leaders and workers is long, including not only Dr. King, but Medgar Evers, Violet Liuzzo, and the three men who were murdered as they were trying to register Black people to vote in Mississippi: Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

School children have been training for active shooters for years, yet the school massacres keep happening: most recently, in Uvalde, Texas, but unforgettably at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 5- and 6-year-olds were gunned down mercilessly; at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; at Columbine High School in Colorado, and more and more and more.

Guns are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, ages 1-19.

So many other massacres: in Las Vegas, where a lone gunman in a hotel high above a music festival slaughtered dozens of people; at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where a lone gunman gunned down dozens of people; in Monterrey, California, where a lone gunman murdered people at a dance club last year; in Maine, where a lone gunman went from spot to spot, killing people without warning.

And yet the U. S. Supreme Court recently struck down most restrictions on gun ownership and possession; the majority claimed that it was adhering to the original intent of the Second Amendment. The fact that assault weapons were banned by Congress from 1994 until 2004 did not give the Court majority pause.

One of our two major political parties is dedicated to preserving the right of almost every individual to buy and own guns, even high-powered assault weapons. Republicans will meet in a matter of days in Milwaukee and will undoubtedly reaffirm their strong, unwavering devotion to the rights of gun owners, but not to the “right to life” of their intended victims.

Some states under Republican control have eliminated any restriction on the right to carry guns openly in public.

Despite the attempted assassination of their Presidential candidate, the Republican Party will remain unwaveringly committed to gun rights.

There are more guns than people in this country.

Gun violence, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy reported recently, is a public health crisis in this country.

Yes, this is who we are.

Yes, this is who we are.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

What will we do about it?

Thoughts and prayers won’t change anything.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Guns

Warning! Dangerous Hate Group Threatens the Future of Our Democracy!

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2024 //
15

Christopher Mathias wrote on Huffington Post about the latest warning of rising extremism. Another hate group has appeared to blight our nation, according to the Southern Poverty law Center. There are so many of them. Just a week or so ago, Nazis marched through the streets of Nashville. They call themselves the “Parriotic Front.” Their faces were covered, of course. Apparently they don’t object to face masks when they are acting as Nazis. It’s hard to distinguish them from the Ku Klux Klan, except the Klan wore masks and dressed in white hoods.

Mathias writes:

A growing Christian supremacist movement that labels its perceived enemies as “demonic” and enjoys close ties to major Republican figures is “the greatest threat to American democracy you’ve never heard of,” according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The SPLC, a civil rights organization that monitors extremist groups, released its “Year In Hate And Extremism 2023” report on Tuesday. A significant portion of the report, which tracked burgeoning anti-democratic and neo-fascist movements and actors across America, is devoted to the New Apostolic Reformation, “a new and powerful Christian supremacy movement that is attempting to transform culture and politics in the U.S. and countries across the world into a grim authoritarianism.” 

Emerging out of the charismatic evangelical tradition, the NAR adheres to a form of Christian dominionism, meaning its parishioners believe it’s their divine duty to seize control of every political and cultural institution in America, transforming them according to a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. 

NAR adherents also believe in the existence of modern-day “apostles” and “prophets” — church leaders endowed by God with supernatural abilities, including the power to heal. In 2022, a handful of these “apostles,” the report notes, issued what they called the Watchman Decree, an anti-democratic document envisioning the end of a pluralistic society in America. 

The apostles claimed they had been given “legal power and authority from Heaven” and are “God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth,” who “are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy.”

And who’s the enemy? Basically anyone who does not adhere to NAR beliefs. NAR adherents see their critics as being literally controlled by the devil.

“There are claims that whole neighborhoods, cities, even nations are under the sway of the demonic,” the report states. “Other religions, such as Islam, are also said to be demonically influenced. One cannot compromise with evil, and so if Democrats, liberals, LGBTQ+ people, and others are seen as demonic, political compromise — the heart of democratic life — becomes difficult if not impossible.” 

This rhetoric has become increasingly widespread among Republican lawmakers, including former President Donald Trump, who last year referred to Marxists and atheists as “evil demonic forces that want to destroy our country.”

That Trump would use NAR-inspired rhetoric is unsurprising considering his relationship with Paula White-Cain, an NAR figure who delivered the invocation at Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and at the kickoff of his 2020 reelection campaign, as noted by Paul Rosenberg in Salon. White-Cain also delivered the invocation at Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. — the event that eventually became the insurrection at the Capitol. 

The attack on the Capitol was largely inspired, the report suggests, by NAR’s theology of dominionism. “NAR prayer groups were mobilized at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as supporting prayer teams all over the country, to exorcise the demonic influence over the Capitol that adherents said was keeping Trump from his rightful, prophesized second term,” the report states. 

Major Republican figures took part in such events on or around the day of the attack. Mike Johnson, who is now the speaker of the House, joined the NAR’s “Global Prayer for Election Integrity,” which called for Trump’s reinstatement as president, in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol. Johnson has also stated that Jim Garlow, an NAR leader, has had a “profound influence” on his life.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has ties to the extremist New Apostolic Reformation movement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has ties to the extremist New Apostolic Reformation movement. 

Ultimately, the SPLC report is an attempt to ring the alarm bells about the NAR, ”the greatest threat to U.S. democracy that you have never heard of.

“It is already a powerful, wealthy and influential movement and composes a highly influential block of one of the two main political parties in the country,” the report continues. “So few people have heard of NAR that it is possible that, without resistance in our local communities, dominionism might win without ever having been truly opposed.” 

The SPLC’s report, according to a press release, also documents 595 hate groups and 835 antigovernment extremist groups in America, “including a growing wave of white nationalism increasingly motivated by theocratic beliefs and conspiracy theories.” 

“With a historic election just months away, this year, more than any other, we must act to preserve our democracy,” Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center and SPLC Action Fund, said in a statement. “That will require us to directly address the danger of hate and extremism from our schools to our statehouses. Our report exposes these far-right extremists and serves as a tool for advocates and communities working to counter disinformation, false conspiracies and threats to voters and election workers.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Fascism, Religion

Florida Turns Down $259 Million in Federal Funds to Feed Hungry Children

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2024 //
12

The Orlando Sentinel reported that Florida has rejected $259 million in federal funds to feed hungry children. The reasons of the DeSantis administration: we don’t need the money, and besides, it would cost $22 million to administer the program.

TALLAHASSEE– State officials said they passed up millions of dollars in new federal food assistance money because they have more than enough programs to feed Florida’s hungry children this summer.

But advocates for the hungry say the numbers tell a different story.

“The perception put forward by the state is that there is no need for other programs in the state,” said Sky Beard, the Florida director for the non-profit No Kid Hungry organization. “I wish it were true!”

While it’s too late for Florida to change course in time to affect kids this summer, 185 groups that seek to end hunger recently sent a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state leaders urging Florida to apply for the money by the Aug. 15 deadline for 2025.

“Every summer is a hungry time for kids.” Beard said.

One in five children in Florida are experiencing hunger because their families cannot afford enough groceries to make up for the free meals they got at school during the academic year, according to a recent report by Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, pantries and community organizations dedicated to ending hunger.

Fewer than 10% of the 672,324 elementary school children in Florida who get free or reduced-price lunches during the school year receive a summer lunch, says a report by the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit organization working to end poverty-related hunger.

Categories Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Injustice

Peter Greene Debunks the Leading Evangelist for the School Choice Movement

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2024 //
5

Peter Greene, who taught for 39 years in Pennsylvania, wrote recently in The Progressive about Corey DeAngelis, who travels the nation to trash public schools and to advocate for vouchers. If you hate public schools and unions, he’s your guy. If you adore Betsy DeVos and her plans to destroy local communities and to get more children into discriminatory religious schools, he’s your guy.

Greene writes:

Corey DeAngelis is an influential, if not the most influential, voice in the rightwing campaign to demonize public schools and privatize public education. The guy’s résuméhits all the bases in the libertarian gameplan. After earning a doctorate at the University of Arkansas’s education reform program (funded bythe pro-school choice Walton family), DeAngelis helped found the Education Freedom Institute, became a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation, worked as an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, took up an appointment as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and was hired on as a senior fellow at Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.

He still holds all of those jobs, but his more common title is “school choice evangelist.” As the recent school voucher wave has surged in state after state, DeAngelis has been there to spread the word. While on tour in support of his new book, he distills the current pro-voucher argument.

In a recent talk at the Heritage Foundation, DeAngelis touched on most of the main arguments for vouchers (many of them false) and revealed a few truths about the pro-voucher strategy.

1. The Evil Unions and COVID

The villainy of the teachers union is a thread that runs through much of DeAngelis’s argument, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic narrative. DeAngelis blames the unions (and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten) for “fear mongering” and accuses them of extorting ransom payments by holding schools hostage. The unions, he charged, used the pandemic to empower themselves and the “government schools” that he calls “a jobs program for adults.”

There’s no recognition that teachers had a legitimate fear during the pandemic or that hundreds of educators died of COVID-19. Nor did he mention the many private and non-union charter schools that also closed their doors. Every problematic decision that he cited from pandemic times is blamed on the union, with no mention that Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education provided little or no guidance to districts facing difficult decisions in an evolving situation.  

DeAngelis’s narrative argues that parents viewing Zoom school were appalled and awakened by what they saw. That oft-repeated tale stands in contrast to polls that show the vast majority of parents were satisfied with how their schools handled COVID-19. A 2022 Gallup poll found that, while the general public’s opinion of public schools is “souring,” parents’ favorable opinion of their own school matched pre-pandemic levels. The common sense conclusion to draw from this data is that people who don’t have first-hand experience with public schools are developing a low opinion of them based on some other source of information.

DeAngelis’s argument has other flaws. He claimed that the unions extracted a huge ransom from schools. But he also argued that pandemic relief funds given to schools never reached teachers and were, instead, soaked up by administrative bloat, which would seem to be a big tactical blunder on the unions’ part.

2. The Evil Unions and the Democratic Party

DeAngelis made the unusual claim that Democrats aren’t having kids, but Republicans are. But that, he said, won’t save conservatives because schools are fully “infiltrated by radical leftist union teachers.” The left uses schools as a way to control other people’s children. The Democratic Party, he added, is a fully owned subsidiary of the teachers’ union.

DeAngelis also repeated a false narrative of the National School Board Association’s supposed campaign to muzzle parents. In fall 2021, local school boards found their usually sleepy meetings had turned into wild, threatening, and even violent chaos. The NSBA turned to the Biden Administration for help, calling some of the actions “the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” This was quickly and inaccurately cast as the Democratic administration calling parents domestic terrorists.

The resulting controversy caused the NSBA to lose some members, which DeAngelis seemed happy about. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” he said.

This narrative that smears public school-friendly groups fits a general pattern of conservative attacks on groups seen as Democratic Party supporters.

Open the link to read more about the DeVos-funded public school hater who is spreading his propaganda across the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Privatization, Propaganda, Segregation, Shame, Unions, Vouchers

Chris Hayes: What Is Project 2025? A Frightening Plan for Trump’s Next Term: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
50

It occasionally happens that I forget to add a link. I forgot to add the link for this great segment by Chris Hayes. I was embroiled in a computer glitch all day (my computer and printer are not communicating). Please watch the segment to learn what horrors Trump has in store for us.

Chris Hayes has a regular evening news program on MSNBC.

In this short video, he explains Project 2025, which spells out plans for major changes in the government and in our freedoms.

It’s a short video. Please watch.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Civil Rights, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Privatization, Shame, Trump

Robert Reich: Project 2025 Gives Evangelicals All They Want

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
25

It’s one of the great ironies of our time that Trump—a completely irreligious man—is serving the interests of the most evangelical Christians. Ban abortion? Done. End LGBT rights? Certainly. Ban contraception? Soon. Crush unions? Soon. Eliminate any climate regulations? On the way. Defund public schools? Yes. Send public money to religious schools with no accountability? Yes.

Robert Reich describes Project 2025 and demonstrates that—no matter how much he pretends otherwise—it is Trump’s blueprint for the long-sought goals of far-right extremists.

Reich writes:

“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.

After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.

But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.

So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.

This is another in a long line of Trump lies…

Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.

Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s re-elected.

Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Gender, Hoax, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump

The New Republic: If Joe Biden Were as Ruthless as Trump

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2024 //
46

The New Republic published a hypothetical speech by Sidney Blumenthal that Joe Biden might give if were as ruthless as Trump. However, he won’t because he is an institutionalist. He believes in the law and the Constitution. He believes, despite the Roberts Court, that no one is above the law, not even the President.

Here is the hypothetical Biden speech:

Good evening, my fellow Americans. With the close of the current session of the Supreme Court, I want to report to you on my compliance with their decisions, especially in the case involving presidential immunity, United States v. Trump.

When I took the oath of office, I swore that I would “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Supreme Court has now reinterpreted that document. The court, for all intents and purposes, has also reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” to replace the “absolute tyranny” of a king. 

I have read the court’s majority opinion that an official act of the president is “presumptively” immune from all prosecution during and after his term, and that the president’s motive cannot be questioned. I have read, according to the majority, that a president who orders the Department of Justice and his vice president to commit election fraud is immune. I have read that a president who incites a mob to attempt to assassinate the vice president for failing to follow those instructions is immune. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Fellow Americans, I have taken the court’s opinion to heart. I am not one to defy the court. I am, as many have remarked, an institutionalist. I believe with all my soul in our institutions. And now, following the letter and the spirit of the court’s ruling, I have acted swiftly, decisively, and enthusiastically to enforce it. I will not, I cannot, shirk my constitutional duty. As Justice Sotomayor states, “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.” 

To begin with, certain “gratuities,” as we shall call them, have been paid to the court majority as a token of appreciation. In their ruling in the case of Snyder v. United States, the majority decided that James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, who cajoled $13,000 from a trucking company after he granted it a city contract, was not liable for bribery. The court stated that it was a “gratuity.” “Gratuities are typically payments made to a public official after an official act as a reward or token of appreciation,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the majority opinion.

Payment of “gratuities” to the justices who ruled in the majority in y follows the court’s decision in Snyder. It cannot be considered a bribe because it was not promised beforehand. But I do hope, as Justice Kavanaugh wrote, that there is “appreciation.” 

Now, following my strict construction of the court’s ruling on immunity, I can report to the nation that the threat to national security posed by my former political opponent, my late predecessor, has been eliminated. It was an official act. It was, to quote the court, “presumptive.”

The reasons for his removal do not need to be explained. Under the court’s decision, as an official act, it is more than privileged. I hope you understand that I need not disclose the reasons. I must respect the Supreme Court. I can assure the American people that there will be a thorough report that is currently being written by the intelligence community. It is classified. The substance cannot be disclosed—and never can be.

But I do want to tell you that he did have sex with a porn star. She didn’t like it. And he lied about his golf handicap.

Why am I doing this? That’s not admissible. The state of mind of the president, according to the court, is not admissible. My state of mind falls under an official act, so it’s nobody’s business but my own. I am proud of my official acts. I must respect the precedent of keeping secret all my reasons. Otherwise, I would be damaging the presidency for others who might follow in this office.

I regret to inform you that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been arrested. A number of other members of the House Republican Conference have been taken into custody. Jim Jordan, unfortunately, attempted to resist arrest. After wrestling with an FBI agent, he met a tragic fate. In the sudden absence of those members, there is a new majority in the House. I look forward to a long and cooperative relationship. I can say proudly, gridlock is at last broken. And we can all give thanks to the Supreme Court.

I further regret to inform you that 10 members of the Republican Senate caucus have been arrested. Again, unfortunately, Josh Hawley attempted to run away and was wounded in the leg. The incident was entirely his fault: if only he had submitted to the authorities. Lindsey Graham was arrested in his office. He has renounced all of his former allegiances, and I have issued him a pardon—a conditional pardon. There will be no more obstruction from filibusters. Again, we can thank the court. 

Now, about the court itself, with the present available members of the Congress, I have proposed that the Supreme Court be expanded by 26 justices. I can report that those new justices have already been nominated and approved. Advise and consent is on the fast track. All 26 will be here tomorrow. A longer bench is already under construction.

Tragically, Chief Justice John Roberts has been arrested for his treasonous comment that the president is doing something illegal, based on his very own opinion. I will name a new chief justice after the new 26 members take their posts.

More reform is on the way. The Twenty-Second Amendment prohibiting the president from holding more than two terms will be replaced by the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, which rescinds it. The new amendment has been proposed in the states. I have no doubt that three-quarters of the states, through their legislatures, will be cooperative. In fact, I can promise you that I expect 100 percent cooperation from each and every state legislature on a bipartisan basis. I have alerted FBI offices in every state to assist in our plan to extend democracy. 

To that end, I am creating a new Cabinet department, the Department of Official Acts, to coordinate, simplify, and centralize the far-flung activities of the Department of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Defense, and other departments and agencies. I am committed to eliminating waste and abuse in official acts.

Moreover, the vice president will head a new office here at the White House, the Office of Reimagining Official Acts, to spur innovation, creativity, and efficiency, and above all the execution of justice. That office will review all of the acts that I take so that they qualify as official.

The Office of Reimagining Official Acts has already held a Zoom conference this morning with all of the Fortune 500 CEOs. Each and every executive without exception has released a statement in support of my official acts and promised full cooperation, with gusto. By the way, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee will hold a press conference to announce the details of the amazing news that our campaign has just received new contributions of $43 billion and counting. 

I can also report that Rupert Murdoch has been arrested for seditious conspiracy, along with his accomplices at Fox News, who have previously been liable for defamation. They have been spewing libels every hour of every day since. That’s as much as I can say. I cannot give another reason without breaking the strictures laid down by the court.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision has also had a big impact on international relations. I have had a conversation with Vladimir Putin, who told me that he misunderstood me all along, and that after the day’s events here at home, he has decided to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine. He told me he has the greatest admiration for our form of government now. He said, we can do business, strongman to strongman. 

As for the rest of the campaign, when the Republican National Committee decides on its candidate, I would consider a debate with the ground rules that candidates adhere to national security guidelines, which will be presented as needed—before, during, and after such an event, consistent as official acts.

If any reader of this column can show where anything described here would be illegal under the Supreme Court immunity ruling, please turn yourself in to the nearest FBI bureau to avoid yet another tragic result. Thought is mother to the deed. Thought must be included among the potential threats to be countered by presidential official acts. “Presumptive,” as the court stated, must mean presumptive. And the reason? The president does not need to explain. 

As we celebrate this Fourth of July, in a fervent prayer that the court’s ruling will work out for the best of all possible worlds, I want to say in conclusion, what goes around comes around.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Justice, Trump

Senator Sanders Releases Report Assailing Billionaire-Funded Voucher Movement

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2024 //
24

Senator Bernie Sanders issued a report lambasting the billionaires who are funding the voucher movement. It’s good that someone in Washington, D.C., is paying attention to this mean spirited effort to shift public money to private and religious schools. As scholar Josh. Owen has repeatedly demonstrated, voucher schools have been a disaster for low-performing kids. The main beneficiaries are students from wealthy families whose children are already enrolled in no public schools. Texas is not mentioned in the Sanders release, but billionaires DeVos, Yass, and native Texan billionaires used their wealth to oust anti-voucher Republicans.

Common Dreams reports:

Sen. Bernie Sanders released a report Tuesday detailing how right-wing billionaires are bankrolling coordinated efforts to privatize U.S. public education by promoting voucher programs that siphon critical funding away from already-underresourced public schools.

The report notes that last year, the American Federation for Children (AFC)—an organization funded by former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—”ousted state lawmakers in Iowa and Arkansas who resisted proposals to subsidize private education in states and passed expansive private school vouchers.”

Aided by millions of dollars in funding from DeVos and her husband, “AFC’s political affiliates and allies spent $9 million to win 277 out of 368 races to remove at least 40 incumbent lawmakers,” the report adds.

The DeVos family is hardly alone in using its wealth to undercut U.S. public education. The Bradley Foundation, which has been knee-deep in efforts to privatize education in Wisconsin and across the country, spent $7.5 million in 2022 “to fund 34 state affiliates of the State Policy Network to push conservative policy agendas, including privatizing education, and $8.3 million to building a youth movement to ‘win the American Culture War.'”

“The Koch-sponsored group, American Encore, has funneled substantial amounts into state governor races and ballot initiatives around the country, including more than $1.4 million to elect Arizona’s former governor Doug Ducey in 2014 (who led the efforts to create the nation’s first universal private school voucher),” the report adds.

“For too long, there’s been a coordinated effort to sabotage our public schools and privatize our education system. Unacceptable.”

The analysis also names billionaires Jess Yass of Susquehanna International Group, Richard Uihlein of Uline, and Bernard Marcus of Home Depot, all of whom have recently donated to the School Freedom Fund—a PAC that supports voucher programs and shuttering the U.S. Education Department.

School voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families, analyses have shown, while undercutting the goal of serving all students within a community.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Vouchers

This is How Democracy Ends: Trump Calls for Arrest and Conviction of His Political Enemies

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2024 //
123

The Supreme Court just ruled that the President has absolute immunity to do whatever he wants so long as it’s “official,” and Trump is giving the public a view of how he will use that power: to prosecute and jail his enemies, especially Liz Cheney. He could imprison them in Guantanamo and tried for treason by a military tribunal,

This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships, not in the USA. Right? In a Trump future, July 4 would be celebrated with a military parade of tanks and missiles. Do you think our men and women in the military can learn the goose step?

The New York Times reported:

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.

One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”

A separate post included photos of 15 former and current elected officials that said, in all-capital letters, “they should be going to jail on Monday not Steve Bannon!” Those officials included Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, Mr. Pence, Mr. Schumer and Mr. McConnell — the top leaders in the Senate — and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker.

The list in the second post also had members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, including Ms. Cheney and the former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, another Republican, and the Democratic Representatives Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Pete Aguilar, Zoe Lofgren and Bennie Thompson, who chaired the committee.

In a statement, the Trump campaign did not address Mr. Trump’s posts, instead repeating allegations of misconduct by members of the committee, saying “Liz Cheney and the sham January 6th committee banned key witnesses, shielded important evidence, and destroyed documents” related to their investigation.

To think that this vile man might be re-elected ruins my day.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Insane, Trump
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