It is time for the Trump-appointed members of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be fired by Congress or to resign.
They have failed in their most fundamental duty, the duty to protect the function and reputation of the institution they serve.
Being a board member is not a perk. It’s a responsibility.
Above all, board members are responsible to safeguard the institution.
Before Trump, the Center had a bipartisan board and a nonpartisan reputation. It was dedicated to celebrating the best of American art and culture.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the reputation of an institution.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the finances of an institution.
The Kennedy Center was built as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. He had a singular interest in the arts. He frequently invited artists and poets to speak and perform in the White House.
The board of the Kennedy Center appointed by Trump has been slavishly devoted to turning the memorial into a center honoring both Trump and Kennedy.
They violated their oath and their fiduciary duty from the beginning.
Their rank politicization of the Center drove artists and performers away. It drove away the Washington National Opera. It drove the National Symphony Orchestra to financial ruin.
It drove away the audiences who loved the Center and never thought of it as a partisan performance space. Ticket sales plummeted.
The board fought in the courts to keep Trump’s name on memorial, where it did not belong.
The Trump board repeatedly lost in court; a federal judge concluded that Congress named the Center and only Congress could change its name.
So the board has now decided to close the Center, and Trump has said he will block funding for the Center’s renovation unless his name is put on the facade. He wants to share the Kennedy memorial.
It is not his to share, anymore than the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial.
The board has joined Trump in desecrating the Kennedy Center.
The members of the board appointed by Trump are responsible for this mess.
President Trump wants to put his name on the performing arts center established as a memorial to the assassinated President. A federal judge said no. Congress named the building and only Congress may change its name.
The board tried again, determined to acknowledge Trump for the work he had not yet performed to renovate and repair the building. Trump wants a legacy, even if it means adding his name to a memorial for another president. Trump was a young man when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Trump must have thought it would be impressive to make himself a co-equal of Kennedy.
Washington — A federal judge again blocked the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Board of Trustees from adding President Trump’s name on the building on Tuesday, finding that a proposed resolution to add Mr. Trump’s name to the building “bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with Rep. Joyce Beatty, a board member who sued last year over Mr. Trump’s changes to the Kennedy Center. Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, argued that the board’s recent efforts to recognize the president violate federal law, and her legal team asked Cooper to issue emergency relief blocking the changes.
“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing “renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump” on the main building or renaming the campus the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” Cooper wrote in a 22-page opinion. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing. The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts may go bankrupt as soon as tomorrow. The only way to avoid bankruptcy, the board says, is to put Trump’s name back on the building so he will save it.
The board was hand-picked by Trump right after he returned to office.
This is the definition of chutzpah. He destroyed the Kennedy Center by taking personal control of it, naming it for himself, and driving it into the ground, as he has repeatedly done to multiple businesses before he became president. He bankrupted six casinos, as well as Trump Airlines, Trump University, and a long list of Trump–branded items, like Trump wines, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump magazine, and various other failed ventures.
Make no mistake. No other president has packed the board with his cronies, who named him chair of the board. The board immediately put his name on the Center, making it the Trump-Kennedy Center.
As soon as he politicized the Kennedy Center, its reputation was tarnished. Artists and performers canceled, ticket sales plummeted, the National Opera moved out, the National Symphony went into financial crisis.
A federal judge ordered the board to remove Trump’s name. Congress named it; only Congress could change its name. The board reluctantly removed his name but has not removed the tarps covering the Center’s original name.
And now, the board says the Center will be bankrupt unless Trump’s name is restored!
He destroyed it. Only he can save it.
With the billions of dollars he and his family have friends have profited from crypto and other deals in the past year, maybe they will.
But as long as his name is attached to the Center and his board controls it, it will be shunned by the nation’s leading performers. It can’t buy back its tarnished reputation.
Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX
There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.
Shocked. Absolutely shocked.
The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis
Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.
For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.
The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.
Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.
The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.
Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.
The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories
Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:
Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.
Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told
Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion
Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated
The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.
That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.
$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh
And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.
Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.
Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.
To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.
The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?
The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure
Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.
The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:
Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data
They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.
None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.
The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:
Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.
The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.
The Bottom Line
The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.
Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.
The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.
Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.
All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about an important and devastating turn in Trump’s disastrous war on Iran. The Houthis have captured a key port that enables them to target the transit of oil from the Red Sea. This could drive the cost of oil even higher than it is today, which inflates the cost of most other products.
Think about it: Trump is unqualified to lead the nation into war. He never served, and he has no relevant knowledge or experience. He doesn’t trust American intelligence services, and he has fired top advisors. Pete Hegseth is totally unqualified for his position. He served, but his head is full of nonsense about “manliness” and “the warrior ethic.” He has fired the military’s top generals and admirals.
These two incompetents have dragged us into a war without end.
Heather Cox Richardson describes an ominous development:
We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
As Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in July, the Red Sea is one of the most important routes for global shipping. It carries twelve to fifteen percent of the global maritime trade every year, worth about $1 trillion. The waterway extends about 1,400 miles from the Suez Canal—which connects it to the Mediterranean Sea—at the northern end to the Bab El-Mandeb strait in the south.
The Iran-backed Houthis are in a struggle against the Saudi Arabia–backed Yemeni government. A fragile truce has been in place since 2022, but clashes between the two forces have escalated for weeks, and on Tuesday, September 8, Houthi attacks on Saudi targets started fires at oil facilities and wounded more than 70 people.
The Yemeni government told Reuters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have guided the Houthi advance, and according to Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, and Kylie Atwood of CNN, U.S. officials think that hundreds of IRGC officers are currently in Yemen working with the Houthis to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb. The journalists note that CNN has previously reported that in case U.S. negotiations were unsuccessful, Iran had planned an economic “nuclear option”: closing the Bab el-Mandeb.
Cohen, Lillis, and Atwood reported this afternoon that more than 100 U.S. military advisors are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint forces command, providing the Saudis with intelligence and helping them find Houthi targets.
The sources who told the journalists about the joint effort emphasized that the U.S. routinely shares intelligence with the Saudis and that it is neither participating directly in the strikes nor providing operational support. Still, U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others in Yemen in 2025.
The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.
GasBuddy issued a statement, saying: “While gasoline gets the headlines, diesel is the fuel that moves the economy, powering the freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. That means its impact reaches far beyond the transportation sector. As diesel climbs, higher supply chain costs work their way into the price of groceries, household goods, deliveries, and countless other products families rely on every day, even for households that never fuel a diesel vehicle.”
GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said the new record “will be a particularly painful one for the economy” and is “likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain.” He continued: “I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”
While all this was going on, tonight President Trump attended the second day of his Dallas rally to fire up his base before the midterm elections. There, a video from the Republican National Committee intoned: “And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”
An 18-year-old young woman asked ChatGPT about violence. The bot gave her information instead of questioning and discouraging her violent urges. Months later, she killed her mother and stepbrother, then went to the local school and killed students and a teacher. The families of the victims are suing OpenAI for helping the shooter and failing to warn officials to stop her.
OpenAI is facing 30 new lawsuits from victims of the devastating school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, who accuse the company of providing “substantial assistance and encouragement” to the shooter and failing to alert police about her alarming ChatGPT interactions during the run-up to the mass killing.
The AI company’s legal peril is growing: it’s now fighting more than 50 lawsuits alleging that extensive use of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, wrought psychological harm, physical injury, or even death on users or those around them.
The new lawsuits weee brought against OpenAI by teachers and students who survived the Tumbler Ridge Massacre in February, in which eight adults and children were killed and 27 more were wounded in a rural Canadian mining town. The shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, fatally shot her mother and younger stepbrother at their home before attacking the school with a modified rifle and long gun, where she murdered five students — all aged between 12 and 13 — and a teacher.
OpenAI flagged her account. Months before the shooting, they debated whether to alert local officials. They decided not to do so, but deactivated her account. She quickly got a new account using a different name.
The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of negligence and “aiding and abetting a mass shooting,” alleging that ChatGPT stoked Van Rootselaar’s violent fantasies. The shooter’s chat logs have not yet been made public.
OpenAI is also being sued by victims of other mass shootings, where the chat logs showed their interest in killing others.
This is a helpful turn of events. AI providers should have key words that raise red flags and invite human oversight and intervention. ChatGPT could be programmed to alert human review and to discourage violence. It should be programmed with values: respect for others; kindness; the joy of giving and helping; and love of life.
Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.
Did it make a difference?
Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.
But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.
It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…
At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.
I had read multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.
Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.
….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…
The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.
What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”
“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.
“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”
A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”
“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.
Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…
The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.
For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.
Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.
“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.
A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.
In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.
“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.
As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.
As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”
Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.
“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”
But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”
The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.
We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.
We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.
We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.
We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.
I wish I knew the identity of the commenter Quickwrit. He/she contributes remarkable insights. This blog is dedicated to education and democracy. But our leaders are so arrogant and irresponsible that they endanger education, democracy, and our survival.
Here is the latest from Quickwrit:
IT’S NOT JUST the USS Abraham Lincoln: MOST of the U.S. ships on patrol in the Iran war are in sad-to-dire condition. Recall that the USS Benfold, a key guided-missile ship, drifted without propulsion and internal power for four days, during which time it was a sitting duck for Iranian missiles. Inside the ship, the lack of internal power meant that the crew had no working toilets (most U.S. ships don’t have flush toilets and rely on vacuum power to suck waste away), no air conditioning in the cramped quarters below deck, and no way to prepare food for the crew.
And among all the ships on Iran patrol that are in need of repair, the one that’s most likely to fail next is also the most critical in the blockade: The USS Boxer. Boxer is far overdue for a two-year complete overhaul. It was supposed to be in dry dock in San Diego through October of this year, but was instead deployed in March to Iran.
Dry dock overhauls aren’t just like going in for an oil change — the ships are virtually gutted and rebuilt from the inside out because of the tremendous wear and tear on the machinery during deployment at sea. USS Boxer is in sad shape right now and the current photos of the rust all over her hull only hint at that band aids being applied to the equipment inside to keep her somewhat combat ready. Her crew had expected to be on leave with their families during the dry dock period; instead, they just turned around and went to Iran. They and their families are justifiably furious.
Many other U.S. ships and crews are near the breaking point, mechanically and psychologically.
The food situation for the entire fleet in Iranian waters is critical because of TRUMP’S RETREAT that has had nearly zero coverage by U.S. media —
TRUMP RETREATS — The U.S. has been forced by Iran to move resupply operations from Bahrain to Diego Garcia, a U.S. base more than 2,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean, making it more difficult and dangerous to resupply U.S. ships and bases. Some supply lines are even longer than that now.
THE REASON FOR THE RETREAT, just at a time when the difficulties of resupplying U.S. carriers and other ships has made headlines, is because China has armed Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can easily penetrate U.S. defenses, and because of the critical shortage of U.S. defensive missiles.
CHINA has declared that “China is A STRONG STRATEGIC PARTNER” of Iran, and “China STRONGLY SUPPORTS IRAN on safeguarding its sovereignty, security, and national dignity.”
So, during the cease-fire, China has supplied Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can evade U.S. missiles and electronic countermeasures
Iran’s new missiles from China operate with China’s own “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A global positioning system (GPS) to guide missiles accurately to hit U.S. and Israeli targets.
The Chinese BDS-3 military-tier B3A system makes U.S. targeting and electronic countermeasures basically useless because “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A is based on highly-complex frequency-hopping technology and incorporates Navigation Message Authentication (NMA) that prevents “spoofing”.
Before Iran switched to Chinese BDS-3/B3A technology, when Iran fired missiles or sent drones at U.S. bases and ships or at Israel and other nations, the Iranian missiles and drones could be electronically jammed or “spoofed” with false target coordinates.
But, now the U.S. and Israel must rely on old-fashioned radar and fire volleys of large numbers of defensive missiles in the hopes of hitting an incoming Iranian target. THAT’S WHY the U.S. and Israel are depleting their stocks of defensive missiles.
All this information about Iran’s DBS-3/D3A missiles/drone guidance system was available in the Pentagon before Trump’s Iran war, but He-Man Hegseth fired any general who tried to tell him this and tell him that it was a bad idea to launch a war against Iran.
MEANWHILE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have just signed a mutual defense agreement that LEAVES OUT THE U.S. because Saudi Arabia and Turkey have come to recognize that America’s military can’t defend them and so they have joined with Pakistan, which is a nuclear power and is no friend of America. That spells a BIG LOSS of influence for the United States.
AND NOW desperate Trump is flailing around and attacking U.S. allies — he told Fox News host Trey Yingst that “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them!” Oman has been trying to negotiate a settlement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, acting on America’s behalf at Trump’s request. The Middle East nations are now all asking who Trump will abandon and target next in his desperation.
PLUS — China has been watching and counting as Hegseth has been stripping defensive missiles from U.S. bases and ships in Asia, to the point that the U.S. Asian bases and ships have barely enough missiles left to defend themselves, let alone challenge China when it invades Taiwan.
AND NOW, Trump has announced that he is withdrawing America’s last supercarrier from Asia and sending it to the Iran war. China must be very pleased.
When China invades Taiwan soon, the entire U.S. economy will crash because U.S. industry — as well as the U.S. defense industry — depends on computer chips made in Taiwan.
This is a disaster that has been caused by Trump thinking that by winning a quick war against Iran, he could distract American voters from his continuing withholding of the Epstein papers.
(Share this strategic information because the public isn’t receiving it from the media.)
The Washington Postobtained internal financial documents of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The documents confirm what many suspected: the Trump takeover was a financial disaster.
Before Trump, the Center was decidedly nonpartisan. Its board contained members of different political parties and no political party. When Trump took over, he cleaned out the entire board, excepting members of Congress whom he could not fire. He replaced the board with Trump loyalists, who tried to turn the institution into a monument to Dear Leader Trump. And the board fired the key members of the staff, who were professionals.
Once Trump’s name was added to the facade, artists and performances canceled, and ticket sales dropped precipitously.
Trump’s people said that any problems were inherited from the previous board and pretended that the Trump-Kennedy Center was better, more successful than ever.
Lies. Lies. Lies.
Someone handed the Center’s financial documents to The Washington Post.
Reporter Jonathan Edwards wrote:
““The center took a huge hit when the takeover happened,” and then appeared to stabilize, according to an official familiar with the center’s financial situation. But after the name change, “it was just an absolute fiscal cliff. Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared — like it was doomsday.”
One outside observer said that the fallout after the name change was catastrophic. A spokesman for the Kennedy Center said that any financial problems were the fault of the previous management.
But common sense suggests that putting Trump’s name on a memorial to John F. Kennedy was disastrous, not only because patrons were repelled by the name change and by the politicization of a beloved arts institution, but because the new, inexperienced staff was incompetent.
As is often said, whatever Trump touches soon dies.
Judd Legum at Popular Information excels at exposing scandals, many of which are in plain view. In this post, he reveals what many people have long suspected: About 10% of the employees at Walmart and Amazon qualify for public subsidies for Medicaid because they are so poorly paid. Meanwhile, the owners of Walmart and Amazon are multi-billionaires. Why don’t they pay wages that are enough to keep their employees off public subsidies?
Judd writes:
American taxpayers are spending billions every year providing Medicaid benefits to hundreds of thousands of employees of Amazon and Walmart, a new analysis by Popular Information reveals.
Amazon and Walmart are two of the largest and most profitable companies in the country — collectivelygenerating $100 billion in profits in 2025 — but many of their employees still qualify for Medicaid because their take-home pay hovers around (or below) the poverty line.
As taxpayers keep their workers afloat, the wealth of the two companies’ largest shareholders is increasing exponentially. The Walton family, the largest shareholders of Walmart, saw their collective wealth increase from $238 billion in 2021 to $513 billion at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, Amazon founder and current executive chairman Jeff Bezos saw his net worth increase from $187 billion to $255 billion over roughly the same time period.
Popular Information calculated the public subsidy to Amazon and Walmart by cross-referencing several publicly available data sources. Last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report examining the top 25 employers of Medicaid enrollees in six states: Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. This provided state-level Medicaid enrollment for Amazon and Walmart workers in all six states, with the exception of Amazon in Maine.
Popular Information compared these figures to the total number of employees working for Walmart and Amazon in each state, sourced from company disclosures, to establish an average Medicaid enrollment rate for each company. The average Medicaid enrollment rate was then used to establish an estimated Medicaid enrollment for employees of each company in the remaining states.
Finally, the estimated number of employees receiving Medicaid in each state was multiplied by that state’s average annual cost of a non-elderly, non-disabled Medicaid enrollee, as published by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC).
Using this methodology, Popular Information estimates that, nationwide, over 156,000 Walmart employees are enrolled in Medicaid at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $1.04 billion.
This figure significantly understates the true cost of Medicaid for Walmart employees to taxpayers. First, the calculation only includes the direct cost of Medicaid for the employees themselves. But Walmart’s low wages for these employees also makes their families eligible for Medicaid. Taking into account dependents, the cost to taxpayers would roughly double. Further, the most recent data on Medicaid cost per enrollee from MACPAC is from fiscal year 2023. Costs for 2025 and 2026 are likely significantly higher.
In Walmart’s 2026 fiscal year, then-CEO Doug McMillon was paid over $29.2 million in total compensation while the median Walmart worker earned $30,520 — a ratio of 958 to 1. The earnings of an average worker put them well below the cutoff for Medicaid eligibility for a family of three.
For Amazon, the same methodology finds that an estimated 123,000 Amazon employees are enrolled in Medicaid at a cost to taxpayers of $927 million.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was given a massive compensation package of $212 million in 2021, mostly in stock that vests over 10 years. Jassy’s compensation has been smaller since; he was paid another $2.1 million in 2024. Meanwhile, the median Amazon employee earned $40,206 that year. This global number includes the many higher-paid technical employees who work at Amazon. Warehouse workers in the United States, and others in blue collar positions, make much less, making them eligible for Medicaid.
“Amazon is one of the largest job creators in the country, so looking at raw numbers instead of percentages is misleading,” an Amazon spokesman said in response to Popular Information’s request for comment. “Also, eligibility for both SNAP and Medicaid is based on total household income and family size, not individual wages or benefits – so employers that offer part-time options for those who want them, like we do, are likely to have more people who are eligible.”
While Walmart ranked first in terms of “raw numbers” of employees on Medicaid, Amazon had a higher percentage of its workforce on Medicaid (11.7%) than Walmart (9.4%).
Not everyone who works parttime does so by choice. In June 2026, 4.7 million “individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, according to the GAO, 66.1% of employed individuals on Medicaid work full-time.
Walmart declined to comment on the record. According to the company’s corporate website, starting wages at Walmart have increased by 93% since 2015.
Diane Ravitch's blog 