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Thom Hartmann: Why Are Billionaires Funding Attacks on Black History and Trans People?

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2023 //
75

This is one of the most brilliant articles I have read in many years. It answers the question that constantly arises: why do poor people vote for a political party that offers them nothing but alarming narratives about the Other?

Thom Hartmann explains that if you get people to vote for racism, against trans people, and against other imaginary threats, they will ignore the facts of poverty, health care, and the extreme income inequality and wealth inequality that characterizes our nation today.

Hartmann writes:

There’s a popular internet meme going around that says:

“Say you’re in a room with 400 people. Thirty-six of them don’t have health insurance. Forty-eight of them live in poverty. Eighty-five are illiterate. Ninety have untreated mental illnesses. And every day, at least one person is shot. But two of them are trans, so you decide ruining their lives is your top priority.”

Consider some of the basic realities of life in modern America:

— Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.

— Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, almost a quarter of Americans — 23 percent — work for wages that can’t support a normal lifestyle. (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)

— More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools suffer from a sustained, two-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels.

— Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.

— Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in theworld.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s forty-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people.

— Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknownin any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).

— Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).

And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year.

— The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.

— Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.

Given all this, it’s reasonable to ask why Republicans across the nation insist that the country’s most severe problems are teaching Black History and trans kids wanting to be recognized for who they are.

If you give it a minute’s thought, though, the answer becomes pretty obvious. We have a billionaire problem, compounded by a bribery problem, and the combination of the two is tearing our republic apart.

The most visible feature of the Reagan Revolution was dropping the top income tax bracket for the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent and then shooting the tax code so full of loopholes that today’s average American billionaire pays only 3.4 percent income tax. Many, like Trump for decades, pay nothing or next to nothing at all. (How much do you pay?)

But for a few dozen, maybe a hundred, of America’s billionaires that’s not enough.

Afflicted with the hoarding syndrome variant of obsessive compulsive disorder, there is never enough money for them no matter how many billions they accumulate.

If they’d been born poor or hadn’t gotten a lucky break, they’d be living in apartments with old newspapers and tin cans stacked floor-to-ceiling; instead, they have mansions, yachts, and virtual money bins worthy of Scrooge McDuck.

That in and of itself wouldn’t be so problematic if those same billionaires hadn’t worked together to get Clarence Thomas to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Citizens United case a few billionaires helped bring before the Supreme Court.

After Thomas and his wife, Ginni, were showered with millions in gifts and lavish vacations, the corrupt Supreme Court justice joined four of his colleagues — several of whom (Scalia, Roberts) were similarly on thetake — to legalize political bribery of politicians and Supreme Court justices.

The rubric they used was to argue that money isn’t really money; it’s actually “free speech,” so the people with the most money get to have the loudest and most consequential voices in our political and judicial discourse.

To compound the crisis, they threw in thenotion that corporations aren’t corporations but, instead, are “persons” fully deserving of the human rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to theConstitution — including the First Amendment right of free speech (now redefined as money).

In the forty-two years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.

In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.

As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our children with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.

The price of all this largesse for America’s billionaires is defunding the social safety net, keeping the minimum wage absurdly low, and gutting support for education and public services.

While there are still a few Democrats who are openly and proudly on the take (Manchin, Sinema, the corporate “problem solvers” in Congress), most of the Democratic Party has figured out how severe the damage of these neoliberal policies has been.

In the last session of Congress, for example, the For The People Act passed the House of Representatives with near-united Democratic votes (and not a single Republican) and only died in the Senate when Manchin and Sinema refused to go along with breaking a Republican filibuster.

The Act would have rolled back large parts of Citizens United by limiting big money in politics, providing for publicly funded elections, restoring our political bribery laws, and ending many of the GOP’s favorite voter suppression tactics.

All of this, then, brings us back around to that meme that opened this article:

Why are rightwing billionaires funding “activist” groups and politicians who’re trying to end the teaching of Black History and make the lives of trans people miserable?

When you think about it a minute — and look at the headlines in the news — the answer becomes apparent: as long as we’re all fighting with each other about history or gender, the “hoarding syndrome billionaires” and their corporations are free to continue pillaging America while ripping off working people and their families.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, History, Hoax, Ignorance, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans

Florida: Vouchers Pay for TVs, Disney Passes, and Water Sports

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2023 //
21

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the $8,000 voucher handed out to every student in a non-public school may be used for non-educational purchases. Florida endorsed universal vouchers so family income doesn’t matter. Rich families get vouchers too just so long as their children do not attend a public school.

As Florida lawmakers expanded eligibility for school vouchers this year, they also gave parents more ways to spend the money.

Theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards are among the approved items that recipients can buy to use at home. The purchases can be made by parents who home-school their children or send them to private schools, if any voucher money remains after paying tuition and fees.

The items appear in a list of authorized expenses in a 13-page purchasing guide published this summer by Step Up For Students, the scholarship funding organization that manages the bulk of Florida’s vouchers. Many of the items are similar to what was permitted for vouchers to students with disabilities in the past, but now they’re available to anyone who receives an award of about $8,000.

The list quickly raised eyebrows as it circulated.

“If we saw school districts spending money like that, we would be outraged,” said Damaris Allen, executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, who recently started speaking out publicly on the issue. “We want to be conservative with our tax dollars. We want to be sure it is being used for worthwhile things.”

By comparison, Allen and others noted, teachers who want some of the same items for their classrooms would have to pay out-of-pocket or turn to other fundraising sources such as GoFundMe because schools won’t pay for them…

Supporters of the expansion don’t consider the program as wasting taxpayer money. They see it as allowing families to customize education according to their children’s interests.

“We need to stop thinking like it’s 1960 — that the only answer is four walls with traditional districts leading the charge,” Jeanne Allen, founder of the national Center for Education Reform, said in an email.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: How Trump Ate and Swallowed the GOP

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2023 //
51

Thom Hartman explains how Trump managed to devour the Republican Party, leaving nothing but an empty shell, without a platform or a philosophy. The internal collapse of the GOP started half a century ago….

He writes:

The Republican presidential debate wasn’t encouraging: Trump’s hold on the GOP appears stronger than ever. And that’s bad news for America.


In Robert Hubbell’s excellent Today’s Edition Newsletter on Substack, he made the point… that Trump’s relationship to the GOP is like that of one of those parasitic wasps that puts an egg into a caterpillar or spider and when the wasp larvae hatches it eats its host, leaving behind only a husk.


I’d take the metaphor a step farther: there’s a fungus, cordyceps, that infects ants and seizes control of their brains to alter their behavior ooto the fungus’ advantage. Another example is the toxoplasma parasite that’s often spread by cats: when mice are infected with the parasite, they no longer fear the smell of cats (and sometimes even want to play with them!), thus becoming easy prey. Scientists call it “fatal attraction.”


What Trump has done to the GOP is really quite impressive, worthy of either cordyceps or toxoplasma. And, frankly, it’s amazing that they didn’t even see it coming or try to stop him. (More on that in a moment.)


A registered Democrat and donor to the Democratic Party his entire life, Trump appropriated much of Bernie Sanders’ platform in 2016 to ingratiate himself with working class Americans.


He promised universal healthcare “cheaper than Obamacare,” taxes so high on the morbidly rich that “my friends won’t speak to me,” said he would bring America’s factories back home from overseas, and pledged to strengthen and expand Social Security and Medicare.


All, it turns out, were lies, although most in his base believe to this day that he did or nearly did all those things.


Having used Bernie’s policy positions (and a healthy dose of dog-whistle racism, essential for the Republican base) to win office in 2016, he proceeded to step into, take over, and then — like cordyceps or toxoplasma — alter top-to-bottom the behavior of the GOP.


Trump’s no idiot. He saw how the GOP was weakened, first by the Nixon scandals, then by Reagan’s neoliberalism that gutted the middle class, then by Bush and Cheney lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. The party was in a state of crisis when the nation elected our country’s first Black president, which gave Trump his opening.


Fifty years earlier, Nixon had injected the first “egg” of racism and white supremacy into the GOP with his “silent majority” and “war on drugs.”
The former was an explicit shout-out to white racists abandoned by the Democrats in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed through and signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the latter an explicit technique to disrupt the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Abandoning all subtlety, Nixon called it his “Southern Strategy.”


A decade later, Reagan pulled southern racists even deeper into the GOP by kicking off his 1980 election campaign with a speech about “states’ rights” to an all-white audience at an obscure Mississippi county fair near the site where three Civil Rights workers were brutally slaughtered in June, 1964. While most Americans — and all major American newspapers and TV networks — missed the significance of the event, southerners heard the whistle loud and clear.


Reagan amplified it with his “welfare queen” comments and his sympathy for white people offended by a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”


With the ground laid by Nixon and Reagan, that singular event of Obama’s presidency gave Trump the lever he needed to inject the larvae of his sociopathy into the moribund GOP.


He began with his claim that Obama wasn’t even a US citizen but had been born in Kenya, as clear a reference to race as his assertion earlier this week that the Black prosecutor Fani Willis and the Black judge Tanya Chutkan are both “Riggers.”


But Trump was only able to finally take over the GOP in 2016 because a group of corrupt politicians and rightwing billionaires got there first, setting up the party’s faithful to believe absurd lies and step into alternate realities.


It started with Nixon claiming he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War when, in fact, he’d reached out to the Vietnamese and scuttled an actual peace treaty that LBJ had negotiated in the summer of 1968.


When President Johnson called Republican Senator Everett Dirksen to tell him about it just days before the election, Dirksen accused Nixon of “treason.”
Reagan then convinced America’s Republican voters that if they’d just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would “trickle down” to average middle class people because it would “unleash” the “job creators.”


His cutting the top tax bracket from 74 percent to 27 percent unleashed them, all right: it unleashed them to buy thousands of politicians at both the state and federal level; to flip more radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers hard right; to purchase yachts and mansions around the world, and even to build their own spaceships.


Reagan told Republicans if they stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws that Republicans had fought for in the 1890s and Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Robert Taft had used, prices would drop and America’s small towns would prosper. Instead, the average American family pays $5,000 a year more than citizens of countries that still enforce their anti-monopoly laws and small-town America has been gutted, with literally millions of local retailers and small employers put out of business by Big Box stores.


Reagan sold Republicans (and a few Democrats) on the idea that “free trade” would lower costs for Americans and, to some extent, it did: our stores were quickly filled with cheap, disposable junk. But the price we paid was 50,000+ factories and over 16 million good-paying union jobs moving to Asia and Mexico.


Reagan promised us if we’d just follow Milton Friedman’s advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.


Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up America’s housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and tent cities.
Reagan promised us if we’d just end “oppressive regulations” — designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms — the “magic of the free market” would provide all those things in spades.


Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.
Reagan promised us if we’d just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.
Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with our American republic.


The next Republican president, George W. Bush, nakedly lied to America about the “threat” presented by Saddam Hussein and Iraq to justify a war that cost our nation dearly in both blood and treasure, just to enrich the failing Halliburton (former CEO: Dick Cheney) and other oil companies in Bush and Cheney’s orbit.


Bush also pushed through a plan to clear-cut forests he called the “Healthy Forests Initiative,” and a plan to deregulate pollution controls he called the “Clear Skies” legislation.


By 2010, Republican voters were primed to believe pretty much anything party politicians told them. That was the year the billionaires really got busy taking control of the party’s base.


They started by funding the Tea Party, theoretically a response to President Obama’s effort to provide affordable healthcare for all Americans. Tri-cornered hats and bizarre signs saying things like “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare” popped up all over America, as the billionaires’ Astroturf movement rented high-end busses to bring gullible retired boomers to staged media events across the nation.


That morphed into the “freedom agenda,” branding everything in sight with the word. From trashing queer people, to calls for more tax cuts for billionaires, intimidation of teachers and librarians, massive Red-state-by-Red-state voter purges, legalizing open carry of assault weapons, criminalizing abortion, and a campaign to end the teaching of Black History, “freedom” has spread across the GOP.


This week we even learned that the billionaire-funded Freedom Caucus in the House intends to try to crash the US economy just in time for the election (knowing Biden will get the blame) by refusing to fund the government for the 2024 fiscal year.


Republicans have taken their “freedom agenda” to such extremes that they’re actively suppressing dissent to promote it. When a group of moms of children who died or barely survived a mass shooting at the Covenant Elementary School wanted to testify before the Tennessee General Assembly, they were escorted out by state police the Republican leader, Rep. Lowell Russell, had called.


In today’s GOP, fully in the thrall of Donald Trump and his authoritarianism, dissent is not allowed. Just ask Justin Amash or Liz Cheney.


Trump has done his work, and the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political party. Like a cat with a toxoplasma-infected mouse, he’s eaten the party whole.


It has no platform, no moral compass, and no loyalty to the Constitution or America’s historic ideals. Instead, it does whatever the billionaires who own it tell it to do (with the ability to bribe given them by five Republicans on the Supreme Court who legalized political bribery in Citizens United).


This grift, started by Richard Nixon’s treason and lies and exploited over the years by the morbidly rich, has now so completely absorbed the party that it’s hard to see it returning to the conservative-but-willing-to-compromise entity it was during the Eisenhower presidency. Hell, most Republican voters today don’t even remember Eisenhower, much less venerate him.


As the esteemed Republican activist and constitutional scholar J. Michael Luttig told CNN a few weeks ago:

“A political party is a collection and assemblage of individuals who share a set of beliefs and principles and policy views about the United States of America. Today, there is no such shared set of beliefs and values and principles or even policy views as within the Republican party for America.”

Mourning the loss of the party he was once proud to be part of, Luttig added:

“American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties. So today, in my view, there is no Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party in the country. And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.”

A return to some semblance of normalcy in theGOP is essential to restoring a normal, functioning government to our nation, as Luttig points out. Odds are, however, it’s first going to take a widespread destruction of that party — provoked by huge Democratic wins in 2024 — to come about.

And, given the bizarre spectacle we witnessed in the Republican presidential debate, that can’t come soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Environment, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Lies, Republicans, Trump

The Man Who Won Billions of Tax Dollars for Home Schoolers

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
18

Emma Brown and Peter Jamison wrote in The Washington Post about Michael Farris, the conservative Christian lawyer who led the campaign to spend tax dollars on home schooling and prevailed. The reporters got hold of a recorded phone call in which Farris told his funders that the time has come to take down public education. The recording was obtained by an organization called “Documented.”

The message Michael Farris had come to deliver was a simple one: The time to act was now.

For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced.

Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.

The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

The 50-minute recording, whose details Farris did not dispute in a series of interviews with The Post, is a remarkable demonstration of how the ideology he has long championed has moved from the partisan fringe to the center of the nation’s bitter debates over public education.

A deeply religious evangelical from Washington state, Farris began his career facing off with social workers over the rights of home-schoolers and representing Christian parents who objected to “Rumpelstiltskin” being read in class.

In recent years, he has reached the pinnacle of the conservative legal establishment. From 2017 to 2022, he was the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse Christian legal groupthat helped draft and defend the restrictive Mississippi abortion law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ADF and its allieshave filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits over the past two years alleging that public schools are violating parental and religious rights.

Yet it is outside the courtroom that Farris’s influence has arguably been most profound. No single figure has been more instrumental in transforming the parental rights cause from an obscure concern of Christian home-schoolers into a GOP rallying cry.

When former president Donald Trump called for a federal parental bill of rights in a 2023 campaign video, saying secular public school instruction had become a “new religion,” he was invoking arguments Farris first made 40 years ago. The executive order targeting school mask mandates that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed on his first day in office cited a 2013 state law guaranteeing “fundamental” parental rights that Farris helped write.

In Florida, a home-schooling mom introduced Farris’s ideas to a state lawmaker, setting in motion the passage of the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021. The law, repeatedly touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the presidential campaign trail, laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by its critics the “don’t say gay” bill.

“He is our hero,” Patti Sullivan, the home-schooler involved in Florida’s 2021 law, said of Farris. “He is the father of the modern movement in parental rights.”

Fundamental parental rights measures have been proposed or enacted this year in more than two dozen other states, according to a Post analysis using the legislation-tracking database Quorum, and in March, a federal parents’ bill of rights passed the Republican-controlled House.

Farris has not been personally involved in pushing the most recent bills, which have been fueled by anger over covid-19 mask mandates and how schools are handling Black history, sexual orientation and gender identity. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing groupMoms for Liberty, which has become a powerful force in the parental rights movement since its launch less than three years ago, said it would be a mistake to overemphasize the impact of conservative Christian home-schoolers on the battles now playing out across the country.

Justice said she has met Farris but that the arguments he was making in the 1980s haven’t strongly influenced her organization, whose members have pushed to remove some books with LGBTQ+ themes from schools and to restrict what teachers can say about race and gender.

“It’s 2023,” she said. “There are a lot of things that people thought 40 years ago.”

Yet to those who have followed Farris’s career, the adoption of his arguments by so many families unconnected to home schooling is a measure of his success. In the eyes of his critics, he has masterfully imported an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights. Some argue that it has always been the goal of the most radical Christian home-schoolers not merely to opt out of the public schools but to transform them, either by diverting their funding or allowing religion back into the classroom.

“Everyone should be aware of Michael Farris and his influence on the Christian right,” said R.L. Stollar, a children’s rights advocate who was home-schooled and has long warned of the conservative home-schooling movement’s political goals. “To Farris’s credit, he is really good at what he does. He is really good at taking these more extreme positions and presenting them as if they are something that would just be based on common sense.”

The story continues in extensive detail about Farris’s battles to win acceptance and public funding for home schooling.

He tried but failed to criminalize gay sex. His biggest victories have been in his demands to expand home schooling. He and his wife have 10 children. They enrolled her in a public school, bur removed her after two months. They put her in a Christian school but withdrew her after concluding she was being influenced by other 6-year-olds.

Farris wrote that public schools are “a godless monstrosity.”

And he wrote that by their very nature, public schools indoctrinate:

“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” he said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”

My view: public schools unite us as a nation, a people, and a democracy. While there are some highly-educated people like Michael Farris who homeschool their children, many uneducated people are following their lead and their children will be indoctrinated into their religion and be poorly educated.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans

Thom Hartmann: Why You Should NOT Vote Third Party

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
147

Thom Hartmann is one of the best political bloggers in the nation and a superb journalist. This is a very important article. In 2016, I pleaded with readers not to vote third party because Trump was clearly unhinged and ignorant. Jill Stein siphoned off enough votes to elect him. I’m still haunted by the infamous photo of Jill Stein sitting at Putin’s table with Michael Flynn before the election.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates…

One of the most fashionable statements these days among progressive-leaning voters who pretend to great political insight is:

“I want to vote for the person I like themost, not some party or candidate that I only half-agree with.”

Its corollary is:

“You’re just trying to get me to vote Democratic because you support that party’s corruption. I won’t be intimidated: I’m going to vote for the best person to run the country!”

Often these types of statements are followed by:

“People in France and Israel can vote for any one of a dozen parties and nobody complains that they’re ‘throwing away their vote.’ This is America: we’re even better! So, I should be able to vote for anybody I want!”

Some people pushing this line simply don’t understand the difference between thepolitical systems of France/Israel and theUS. 

Others are cynical hustlers (this is true mostly of the talk-show and YouTube hosts trying to differentiate themselves by pushing this), trying to grab and hold an audience by being “edgy,” “iconoclastic,” or “a rebel with a cause.”

So, let’s review some political basics.

Whatever its genesis, this opinion — that ignoring our two-party system and “voting for the best candidate is a good thing” — is widespread. After all, intuitively it seems to make perfect sense. 

In a rational world, who would want to vote for anyone less than the best candidate? Unfortunately, though, America’s political system is not as rational as that of countries with proportional representation or ranked choice voting.

A 2022 Pew poll found people’s unfavorable view of both parties has gone from 6 percent in 1994 to 27 percent today. Similarly, 38 percent of Americans “wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country” and may be persuaded to vote for a third-party candidate.

So why is it that third parties don’t work in America, but they do in France?

The United States, in 1789, became the first modern democratic republic founded on thenotion of the leaders of a government, through elections, “deriving their just powers from theconsent of the governed.”

The Framers of the Constitution had never heard of proportional representation or themodern parliamentary system (more on that in a minute), so they went with a simple strategy that’s today referred to by political scientists as “first-past-the-post winner-take-all” (FPTP) or, sometimes, as “majoritarian” or “plurality” election systems.

Whoever gets the most votes becomes theelected politician, and everybody else gets nothing. If you voted with the majority, you’re represented; if not, you’re not at all represented by a person or party that shares your view.

America was an English-speaking country and, as a result, this system spread mostly throughout the English-speaking world and in former British or American colonies. Majoritarian FPTP systems like ours are used in Canada, the UK, India, Jamaica, Liberia, Singapore, Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Bangladesh.

As a result, most all of these countries are dominated by two parties who tend to pass control of the nation back-and-forth over time. (Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland use Ranked Choice Voting, an even more recent innovation which allows for more political parties; more on that in a moment.)

In such a system, third parties almost always act as spoilers, drawing votes away from the major party to which they’re most closely aligned. People who vote Green, for example, generally would have voted Democratic, thus reducing that party’s vote; people who vote Libertarian would have voted Republican with the same effect.

For example, in Florida in 2000, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes. 

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for John Kerry instead.

Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in theElectoral College over Hillary Clinton, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had liberals not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president and we never would have been lied into a war; had people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared thetrauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths and the ongoing assault to our democracy.

This is apparently not lost on sour-grapes Jill Stein, by the way; she’s reportedly helping run Cornell West’s 2024 Green Party candidacy. It’s also not lost on the Democrat-hating folks at No Labels, who have pledged to put up a candidate for president (presumably Joe Manchin) in 2024.

In the 1950s, French sociologist Maurice Duverger published several papers on this odd quirk of FPTP systems and the way they turn aligned third-party candidacies into agents for the opposition party.

This simple reality — apparently unknown to those who advocate third party candidates — has since come to be known as Duverger’s Law.

So, why can France have so many political parties without damaging their political system but here in America third parties harm those they’re most closely aligned with?

This goes to the invention of what’s called “proportional representation.”

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on. 

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in thedaily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to theextreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties. 

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at thepolitics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for thehigher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Pretty much every democracy in the world not listed above under the FPTP label are using Mill’s proportional representation. But we don’t, which is why we’re stuck with a two-party system.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to themain, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Ralph Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Al Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by thesystem and my vote for Gore becomes theone that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining theDemocratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and elect more progressives, something that can only be done within theDemocratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the institution that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, and that built America’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens Uniteddecision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers.” 

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP. 

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying America.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within theDemocratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, we must first take over the DNC.

In other words, get inside the Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party movement, and it’s what progressives must do with the Democratic Party.

Cornell West is a great guy, but with our FPTP election system a vote for him for president in a swing state is effectively a vote for theRepublican nominee. No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind themovement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates

Categories Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Jim Hightower: The GOP Plans to Eliminate Federal Programs to Mitigate Climate Change

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2023 //
6

Jim Hightower, an outspoken liberal voice in Texas, posts a warning about the Republicans’ strategy to wipe out environmental regulations if they regain the presidency in 2025. Despite the climate disasters occurring all over the world and in every corner of this nation, the GOP puts greed over survival.

Hightower writes:

When your political opponents push extremist public policies that would be disastrous for America, should you wring your hands in dread… or applaud?

Consider “Project 2025,” put together by former Trump officials and the Koch brothers’ network of billionaire plutocrats. Their strategy is to win the presidency next year by demonizing all environmental protections and promising to halt all national efforts to cope with the obvious crises of climate change. Their proposals include repealing regulations that curb fossil fuel pollution, terminating our nation’s transition to renewable energy, shutting down all environmental protection agencies, encouraging more oil and gas drilling and use, and promoting the deadly delusion that global warming is not a real problem.

Moreover, they intend to implement Project 2025 in the first 180 days of a right-wing Republican’s presidential term – obviously anticipating that Donald Trump will be that president. “We are not tinkering at the edges,” brags a far-out right-wing group that instigated the scheme, “We are writing a battle plan and we are marshalling our forces.” They’ve already drawn up a list of agencies and policies they’ll begin eliminating on Day One, and they’ve readied a list of some 20,000 right-wing henchmen to put on the federal payroll immediately to enforce their plan.

If this sounds ludicrous, it is. But it’s actually happening, for the Republican Party has decided to be ludicrous. As the director of Project 2025 told the New York Times, “[This is] where the conservative movement sits at this time.”

Maybe, but it damn sure won’t sit well with the American people, who’re presently suffering the hellish ravages of our rapidly overheating climate. Indeed, here’s a great chance for Democrats to demonstrate their bipartisan spirit by doing all they can to publicize the Republicans’ let-it-burn global warming policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Deregulation, Environment, Koch Brothers, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Thom Hartmann’s Debate Prep: Biden’s Accomplishments in Three Years

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
44

The Republican debates, starting tonight, will attack President Biden relentlessly. Thom Hartmann has compiled a list of Biden’s accomplishments to counter the lies and exaggerations of Republican contenders for the nomination.

He writes:

The first Republican debate of the 2024 election cycle is tonight, and while all the drama seems focused on whether or not anybody beyond Chris Christie will take a serious swing at Trump, odds are most of the evening’s time will be devoted to trashing President Joe Biden.

So, to help keep you sane through all the lies and BS — and the fog you may be in by the end of the debate if your drinking game involved the word “woke” — here’s a quick summary* of the things that Biden has accomplished (with a little help from Democrats in Congress) in his first two-and-a-half years in office.

First of all, Joe Biden has restored trust, confidence, and faith in the honesty, credibility, and integrity of America. He doesn’t suck up to dictators like Trump did, and doesn’t lie to Americans or our allies. He’s restored independence to the Department of Justice and funding and support to regulatory agencies like the EPA.

Over united Republican opposition, the Biden administration has succeeded in lowering most Americans’ cost of living. The Inflation Reduction Act has reduced inflation to a full point lower than it was when Reagan was running his “Morning in America” ads in 1984 (unemployment is several points lower, too!).

Because of that law, for the first time, Medicare is able to negotiate the price of certain high-cost drugs: a month’s supply of insulin for seniors is capped at $35, Medicare beneficiaries pay $0 out of pocket for recommended adult vaccines, and seniors’ out of pocket expenses at the pharmacy will be capped at $2,000 a year.

America has just completed the strongest two years of job growth in the history of our country. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office — including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and a record number of small businesses have started since Biden took office. Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have near record low unemployment rates and people with disabilities are experiencing record low unemployment.

We’re experiencing a boom in manufacturing and the construction of manufacturing facilities like we haven’t seen since before the Reagan Revolution began offshoring American factories and jobs. Companies have invested more than $300 billion in good jobs, many of them unionized, as America’s technical capabilities sharpen along with this job growth.

Biden has expanded services available to our veterans (after Trump cut them), including 31 new clinical sites and a comprehensive program to help the estimated 5 million veterans who, like President Biden’s son Beau, have been exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of their service to our country.

President Biden brought together Democrats and Republicans to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major piece of gun safety legislation in three decades. The law will save lives by:

— requiring young people ages 18 to 21 to undergo enhanced background checks; 
—narrowing the “boyfriend loophole” to keep guns out of the hands of convicted dating partners;
— funding crisis interventions, including extreme risk protection orders (“red flag”) laws; 
— making significant investments to address the mental health crisis in America, including in our schools; 
— clarifying who needs to register as a federally licensed gun dealer and run background checks before selling a single weapon; 
— and making gun trafficking and straw purchases distinct federal crimes.

Over ten years ago, President Biden announced his support for marriage equality, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. government official to do so. Building on his longstanding support and generations of civil rights advocacy, President Biden signed historic bipartisan legislation protecting marriage for same-sex and interracial couples.

And the President took historic steps to advance full equality for LGBTQI+ Americans, including reversing the discriminatory ban on transgender servicemembers in the military, strengthening non-discrimination protections in health care, housing, education, and employment, and ensuring that transgender Americans can access government support and services.

Biden has put a more diverse group of people on the federal judiciary than any president in history. Sixty-six percent of his nominees have been women and 65 percent were people of color, including the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

After Putin declared war on democracy and launched a terrorist invasion of Ukraine, targeting civilians and using rape as a weapon of war, President Biden has brought the world together to stand up to a fascist autocracy and defend Europe’s largest democracy.

Following Trump’s humiliating groveling before Putin and attacks on NATO, the European Union, and our democratic allies around the world, President Biden has rebuilt the American alliances that have, in some cases, stood for over two centuries. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, and China appears to be re-thinking their belligerent attitude toward Taiwan after last week’s meeting and agreements between the leaders of the US, South Korea, and Japan.

After Trump unilaterally closed all but one of our air bases in Afghanistan to maliciously make his successor’s job more difficult, the Biden administration ended the war in Afghanistan that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had lied us into. He’s also decapitated the leadership of ISIS and El Qaeda.

Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted American women’s right to abortion (and multiple Republicans are now trying to ban birth control), President Biden has stood up for women’s healthcare rights. He’s signed several Executive Orders to protect access to reproductive healthcare (including for our military). When 19 Republican state attorneys general demanded the healthcare records of women who’ve sought abortions in more than thirty states, Biden signed an Executive Order strengthening patient privacy.

The Biden administration rolled out a plan to cut as much as $20,000 from the debt carried by America’s student borrowers (student debt of these proportions, the direct result of the Reagan Revolution, does not exist in any other nation on Earth). When a Republican lawsuit before the Supreme Court blocked his efforts, he announced a plan to provide millions of borrowers with more affordable monthly student loan payments through changes to income-driven repayment plans.

While Red states still put people in prison for years for possessing a single marijuana cigarette, President Biden pardoned allAmericans who’ve ever been convicted of a federal pot offense. He’s more recently initiated a multi-agency review of the drug’s Schedule 1 status, with an eye to decriminalizing it nationwide.

After centuries of police violence against Black people and other minorities, Biden signed a landmark executive order on safe, effective, and accountable policing that mandated federal reforms such as banning chokeholds, restricting no-knock entries, creating a national police accountability database, and restricting the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

Through over a hundred executive actions and the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden has finally put America on course to cut our emissions in half by 2030 and to get to net-zero by 2050. He also protected more lands and waters in his first year than any President since John F. Kennedy.

While Republicans continue to strip people off Red state Medicaid rolls in their pursuit of cruelty, Biden expanded the Affordable Care Act. Millions can now find healthcare for $10 a month or less, and most Americans will see an Obamacare saving of an average of $800 a year.

Since he took office, there has been a combined 50 percent increase in enrollment in states that use HealthCare.gov and the nation’s uninsured rate is historically low at 8 percent. Over 16 million Americans signed up for quality, affordable health coverage, the highest number ever produced in an Obamacare open enrollment period.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of President Biden has been re-aligning the Democratic Party with its progressive base. Biden worked hand-in-hand with Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders to put forward a sweeping progressive agenda involving an investment of over $5 trillion in America and American working people.

Although united opposition from Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats (including Manchin, Sinema, and the “corporate problem solvers”) forced him to cut the program back, it is still revolutionary given the past 40 years of bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism. 

Reversing the anti-organized-labor trend started by Reagan that continued through the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, President Biden has aggressively promoted unions and unionization as essential to the future of working people in America.

President Biden also worked with and helped Nancy Pelosi pass through the House the For The People Act, which would have rolled back much of Citizens United and ended most Republican voter suppression by asserting Americans’ absolute right to vote. Had he not been betrayed by Manchin and Sinema, it would now be law.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (founded by Bernie) has gone from the handful of members (fewer than 10) it was when I did fundraisers for them more than a decade ago to being one of the strongest and largest in Congress (104 members right now). While this isn’t Biden’s doing and much credit goes to its members, Biden is the first Democratic president since LBJ to fully embrace progressives in Congress and fast-track their legislation. 

Biden has also:

— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Advanced cutting-edge research on cancer and other diseases through the ARPA-H initiative
— Signed legislation to put more cops on the beat and invest in community policing
— Signed the Electoral Count Act, which takes long overdue steps to protect the integrity of our elections
— Lowered the cost of hearing aids by making them available over the counter
— Created more manufacturing jobs in 2022 than in any single year in nearly 30 years
— Signed an Executive Order to encourage competition across industries
— Took action to lower energy costs for families
— Lowered seniors’ health care expenses, including by capping out of pocket expenses on prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 per year, ensuring that people enrolled in Medicare will not pay more than $35 for a month’s supply of insulin, and recipients will receive free vaccines
— Accelerated adoption of electric vehicles by reducing costs for families, jumpstarted the first national EV charging network, and made historic investments into EV batteries and materials
— Rejoined the Paris Agreement on day one to reassert the United States’ global leadership to combat the climate crisis
— Jumpstarted the American offshore wind industry and convened the nation’s first federal-state offshore wind partnership
— Set new policies to reduce super pollutants like HFCs and methane to protect communities and reduce emissions fueling climate change
— Lowered the deficit with the single largest annual reduction in American history
— Secured commitments from 20 leading internet providers to increase speeds and cut prices
— Signed legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act
— Awarded the most ever federal contracting dollars to small businesses and disadvantaged small businesses
— Reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next 25 years
— Appointed a record number of women and people of color to serve in his Administration
— Hosted the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years and released a National Strategy to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities by 2030
— Awarded more than $1 billion to initiate cleanup and clear the backlog of 49 previously unfunded Superfund sites, over $250 million to clean up hundreds of contaminated brownfield sites, and $725 million for abandoned mine lands
— Restored protections for Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments and designated Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument to conserve our lands and waters, honor our nation’s veterans, protect Tribal cultural resources, and support jobs and America’s outdoor recreation economy
— Signed an Executive Order on Improving Public Safety and Criminal Justice for Native Americans and Addressing the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People
— Invested historic funding for Tribal governments and Native communities, and
— Mailed over 740 million free COVID-19 tests directly to tens of millions of Americans

Below are a set of handy memes you can copy and paste into social media if any of these accomplishments resonate with you or you want to back up claims you’re making online. Just right-click and choose to save, copy, or download them: they’re copyright free. 

Here’s to a fascinating (and, no doubt, infuriating) debate!

OPEN THE LINK TO SEE HARTMANN’S MEMES.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Funding, Health, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Texas: Big Government Seizes Power from Municipalities

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
4

Something weird has happened to the Republican Party. It used to favor local control. Not any more. Now Republicans think it okay to seize control of school districts instead of helping them with resources, as happened in Michigan, Ohio and Texas. And Texas just passed a law called “the Death Star” that allows the state to cancel local laws. No more local control in Texas!

Why have Republicans doubled down on suppressing the vote, gerrymandering legislatures to crush opposition, and undermining democracy whenever possible?

Gus Bova of The Texas Observer has the story here:

On November 3, 2020, as America watched the first results of a fateful presidential contest roll in, voters in a North Texas suburb struck a blow for workers’ rights. Euless residents approved a proposition limiting some large companies’ ability to force employees to work overtime if they didn’t want to.

The “fair workweek” initiative, comparable to measures passed recently in a handful of other cities, was led in Euless by employees of LSG Sky Chefs, an airline catering giant and meal-supplier for American Airlines. These workers, unionized with Unite Here, said they were being overwhelmed with mandatory overtime hours, often announced at the last minute, as American Airlines, headquartered near the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth airport, sought to dramatically increase flight volume.

“You can have a wife and children, and yet every day you are forced to stay at work, and you have no time to even go back and sit and relax and play and take care of children,” said Samuel Tandankwa, a Sky Chefs driver and Unite Here member, recalling the conditions in 2019 and leading up to the COVID pandemic.

Despite getting voters’ approval, the initiative faced legal troubles from the first. Some city officials doubted it could be enforced. Sky Chefs told the Texas Observer it didn’t apply to them since they maintain a national contract with Unite Here. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already written a letter stating the policy would violate a state law that bans cities from setting minimum wages. Nevertheless, Tandankwa told the Observer in July that since the campaign, the company actually has turned away from using mandatory overtime, freeing up workers to meet family obligations, and neither he nor local worker advocates want to lose the ordinance.

But Euless’ overtime measure is among the local ordinances that will be vaporized by Texas’ House Bill 2127, dubbed the “Death Star” bill by critics, which was signed by GOP Governor Greg Abbott last month and takes effect in September. It’s causing uproar around the state, as city officials, workers, and others try to figure out what parts of municipal law and regulation the bill will nullify.

The bill’s sweeping, alleged purpose is stated in its opening sections: “returning sovereign regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong.” However, closer examination suggests that the legislation’s real intent is both narrower and potentially more profound than just upending city ordinance-making powers. First, it is a laser beam aimed at a small group of progressive ordinances improving worker and tenant protections—local victories won through hard-fought campaigns over the course of more than a decade. Second, and more importantly, it’s a bid to permanently hamstring municipal democracy in Texas, especially in its big blue cities. Cities are where most Texans live; they are increasingly liberal, their populations often majority nonwhite, and they are the level of government most responsive to ordinary citizens. In essence, the Legislature decided there was too much Democracy afoot in Texas, so it did something about it.

“To me, that’s the will of the people being taken away,” said Tevita Uhatafe, a Euless resident who works for American Airlines and is also a vice president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “We voted for it … and here we are, we’re going to get it taken away because people who claim to hate big government are acting just like [it].”

“There is no precedent for what they did this time,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “It was not a measured response to a given policy that corporate interests didn’t like; it was a wholesale transfer of power from cities to politicians in Austin.”

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Texas

Thom Hartmann: Has the GOP Become a Party of Hate and Trolls?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
29

Thom Hartmann, journalist and blogger, describes the loathsome identity of the Republican Party. It was once a sensibly Conservative Party that believed in local control and minimal government. It boasted leaders like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Howard Baker, Leverett Saltonstall, and Margaret Chase Smith.

What does the GOP believe today, other than cutting taxes for the richest?

Today, the GOP leaders peddle lies and conspiracy theories. On social media, they take turns smearing Biden (“the Biden crime family”) and retailing any charges they stumble across on the internet. I am appalled whoever I read any Tweet (X) posted by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, or other current GOP leaders.

You will not hear from any of them a hint of bipartisanship. It’s all hate, hate, hate. They call their opposition whatever names come to mind: socialists, Communists, radical left, fascists. Their words have no substantive meaning. They are intended to spread hate and fear.

Hartman explains why they stoke hate: They have no substantive ideas to improve people’s lives.

Hartmann writes:

So, Donald Trump says that if Judge Tanya Chutkan orders him not to reveal details of the prosecution’s case before they can be presented to a jury, including the names, addresses, and testimony of witnesses against him, he’s going to do it anyway and challenge the court.

And there’s little reason to believe he won’t do it: he’ll take what he’s asserting as his First Amendment right to troll and threaten witnesses against him all the way to the Supreme Court he packed with three rightwing crackpots. If nothing else, it may buy him enough time to get elected president and pardon himself before he’s convicted.

In this, Trump has raised vicious social media trolling into a form of electoral performance art. He’s become our troll-in-chief.

America has been under the sway of rightwing trolls before. When I was a child in the 1950s, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting an active witch-hunt for “communists” in the federal government. This was the era when Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for, in part, declaring himself a “New Deal Democrat” and standing up to the witch hunters, as characterized in the new movie about his making the bomb.

McCarthy destroyed the lives of thousands of people, and many were imprisoned because of his efforts. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates his victims at over 10,000. He — and his right hand man, Roy Cohn (who went on to be Trump’s mentor) — were classic trolls in the worst sense of the word.

Some of McCarthy’s efforts live to this day, including his insistence throughout the Army-McCarthy hearings on never saying “Democratic Party” but, instead, always saying, “Democrat Party.”

Similarly, McCarthy echoed the John Birch Society’s (JBS) argument that America is not a democracy but a republic, an argument that James Madison made — and then refuted — when he was trying to sell the US Constitution. McCarthy’s and the JBS’s apparent rationale was that “democracy” sounds too much like Democratic while “republic” evokes good feelings for the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller, who would become Gerald Ford’s Vice President, got a dose of this with the John Birch Society-pushed Goldwater sweep of the Republican Party at their 1964 convention.

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” he said over boos and chants, “any doctrinaire, militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher (pause for ‘republic not democracy!’ chants set off by his attacking the John Birch Society)…”

Today’s trolling, however, has gone beyond the fringes defined in that era by the JBS, Cohn, and the occasional McCarthyite wannabee. It’s become the core, the essential identity, of the post-Trump GOP.

From “rolling coal” trucks blowing poisonous smoke at Prius and EV drivers, to “Free helicopter rides for liberals” tee shirts invoking Pinochet’s murders, to hate groups and militia members showing up at school board meetings, today’s Republican Party has fully embraced hate and trolling.

“Owning the libs” is the main online sport of many Republicans today, as you can see by following the social media feeds or reading the hate mail of any high-profile progressives or Democrats.

In large part that’s because Republicans don’t have anything else to present to Americans as a positive national governing agenda.

Please open the link to read the rest of this excellent post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

The Notorious John Eastman Explains Why He Plotted a Coup

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
25

Laura K. Field writes about John Eastman, once a prominent lawyer, who advised Trump and his team about how to overturn the 2020 election. Her post appears at The Bulwark, a place created by Republican Never Trumpers. Eastman is involved in disbarment proceedings for his role in the failed coup.

FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS NOW, since he was revealed in September 2021 to be the author of the notorious “coup memos,” John Eastman has been walking a bizarre legal and political tightrope.

On the one hand, we have the man who filed a legal claim on behalf of President Donald Trump in Texas in December 2020 seeking to invalidate millions of votes. The man who was invited to join Trump’s unofficial legal team later that month, where he wrote the two elaborate memos delineating various paths that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence could take to delay or overturn the election count. Who tried in person to persuade Pence that, at the very least, he had the authority to delay the vote count; who spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6th, repeating conspiratorial lies about election fraud; whose emails that same day reveal that during the siege of the Capitol that he blamed Pence for not acting as he had advised; who was caught on video (by an undercover activist) boastingabout working to overturn the election; who lost his academic appointments in the aftermath of these events; whom a federal judge concluded had “more likely than not” broken the law; who may soon be disbarred in the state of California; and who is so worried about being indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith that he has requested a postponement of those disbarment proceedings.

On the other hand we have a man who has tried to distance himself from his own memos, at one point calling himself “the white knight here, talking [Trump] down from the more aggressive position” in advance of January 6th. This other Eastman has consistently maintained that his recommendations to Pence and Trump were narrow, sensible, and moderate. That he had merely recommended “hitting pause” on the vote count on January 6th, so that the relevant election controversies could be adjudicated by the states. That to follow the other paths articulated in his memos would have been reckless.

The gulf between these two Eastmans—the eager-to-act conspiratorial Eastman and the reticent lawyerly one—shrunk a bit last week, with the release of the third and final installment of an Eastman interview with the Claremont Institute’s main financial backer, chairman of the board, and gonzo anti-woke warrior, Thomas D. Klingenstein. In this interview, Eastman comes close to saying that his own electoral shenanigans and legal wrangling have been a sideshow. In sentiments reminiscent of Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” essay and subsequent writing, Eastman makes it clear—without fully dropping his lawyerly persona—that for him, the deeper reason for standing by Trump through his January 6th saga was that he thinks Democrats are destroying the country.

LAST WEEK, I WROTE about the first and second parts of Eastman’s interview with Klingenstein. In the first, they trot through a long list of disproven allegations of 2020 election fraud. The second is about January 6th and the question of Pence’s legal authority to delay or overturn the election.

Now comes the concluding installment, which begins by focusing on the question of prudence: Given all the complex considerations involved in the 2020 election, was it prudent for Eastman and Trump to pursue the course of action that they did?

The interview is full of odd claims and intriguing revelations. For example, at one point Eastman says that in his considerations of prudence he did not take into account the possibility of mob violence, because he was working in “a different department,” that “Trump himself had authorized the call-up of 20,000 members of the National Guard for January 6th” (not true), and that Eastman just assumed that “those things were handled.”

Eastman also suggests in this segment that he believed there was a “fair prospect” that he would have been able to win “a majority of the [Supreme] Court” in support of Pence’s right “merely to delay,” or at least to get the Court not to touch the issue as nonjusticiable.

But the interview really gets disturbing in its last ten or so minutes, when it turns to the question of Eastman’s deepest motives. Why was it so important to Eastman to see Trump re-elected? Klingenstein suggests that the “biggest” factor motivating Eastman “is the current circumstances in the country, the political and social condition.”

Eastman agrees. After some discussion about how the legal situation surrounding the 2020 election was different from the legal situation in two other close elections, those of 1960 and 2000, Eastman makes clear that the more important distinction he sees among those three elections is that “the stakes” in 2020 were higher—that they were literally life or death:

Certainly not in 1960, but also not in 2000, were the stakes about the very existential threat that the country is under as great as they are.

We’re not talking about, you know, handing over to John Kennedy, instead of Richard Nixon, who’s gonna deal with the Cold War. We’re talking about whether we are going to, as a nation, completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, which is what the modern left wing which is in control of the Democrat party believes—that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated.

This is an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world. That’s the stakes.

Obviously, when the stakes are this high, you do whatever you can to fight back. As Anton put it about the 2016 election, you “charge the cockpit or you die.” So when the opportunity came along to be part of a challenge to the normal election processes, Eastman was eager to join the fight.

The interview does not, it seems to me, involve a moment where Eastman fully “comes clean” about trying to overthrow a legitimate election (as Josh Marshall has suggested). Rather, what Eastman does is zoom in and out between what we might call the deeper cause of his actions—his belief, entirely consonant with Anton’s original “Flight 93 Election” bullshit, that liberals and the left pose an existential threat to the country and are traitors to the country’s founding principles—and the immediate rationale or pretext for his behavior, which is the premise of the stolen election.

In the very next part of the interview, Eastman zooms out:

Trump seems to understand that [i.e., the stakes] in a way a lot of Republican establishment types in Washington don’t, and it’s a reason he gets so much support in the hinterland and the ‘flyover country.’ People are fed up with folks, you know, get-along-go-along while the country is being destroyed.

And then Eastman zooms back in to argue that these high stakes justified his involvement in Trump’s post-election machinations:

And so I think the stakes are much bigger, and that means a stolen election that thwarts the will of the people trying to correct course, and get back on a path that understands the significance and the nobility of America and the American experiment is really at stake and we ought to fight for it.

Eastman and Klingenstein seem almost to suggest that stolen elections are a dime a dozen in American history, but only in this instance was it worth the fight.

At this point in the interview, Eastman all but drops the façade, and zooms out all the way. When asked by Klingenstein once again whether he maybe would have made a different prudential calculation in 1960 or 2020, Eastman says yes, “I may have come to a different conclusion.” Then he proceeds to explain:

Look, our founders lay this case out. The prudential judgment they make in the Declaration of Independence is the same one. There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that says, you know, a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable—or tolerable, while they remain tolerable—but at some point the abuses have become so intolerable that it is not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.

So that’s the question. Have the abuses and the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back.

This is an extraordinary thing to admit. For one thing, by the time you’re appealing to the Declaration of Independence in that way you are in effect admitting that you were trying to overthrow your government.

It may be obvious but it’s worth saying this out loud: Violence is implicit in this line of argument. Lincoln understood this when he spoke of Americans’ “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” their own government. The men and women who charged the Capitol understood this. Eastman and Klingenstein, sitting in their suits and ties in an elegant study lined with books, may deny having violent intentions, may even abjure the use of force, but implicit in their rhetoric in this interview and elsewhere (Klingenstein’s website: “The essential thing is for Republicans to understand we are in a war and then act accordingly”) is a justification for violence.

AS THE INTERVIEW CONCLUDES, Eastman goes on to maintain, again, that supposed Democratic election-stealing played a part in his prudential calculation. But he says plainly enough throughout that the more fundamental motive concerned the basic state of the country and his political and philosophical disagreements with Democrats. A few minutes after his appeal to the Declaration, Eastman will claim that Democratic efforts to destroy the country have accelerated rapidly—“it’s been an exponential increase in the last few years”—and as an example he quotes the culture wars: “You’re gonna let 50-year-old-men naked into teenage girls’ showers at public pools, or drag queens doing story hours to 6-year-olds.”

Of course. The trans people and drag queens left Eastman no choice. The Democrats made him do it.

The Klingenstein-Eastman interview is, in the main, situated squarely in the muck of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and obtuse speculative reasoning about the vice president’s proper role in the congressional counting of Electoral College votes. In this third installment, however, as Eastman goes on about Democratic bogeymen and the higher “stakes” of the 2020 election, it becomes quite clear that, at some point, for these men and in this fight, anything goes. Pretexts and premises be damned.

Given the overall sham quality of Eastman and Trump’s political and legal arguments to date, it seems quite likely that they both reached that point a long time ago. At this point the two men have gone all in. Nothing’s going to stop them now.

Except, maybe, in Eastman’s case at least, the American courts and rule of law.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Republicans, Scandals, Trump
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