Parodist and entertainer Randy Rainbow is at his best up iF this video, explaining how a disinfectant will kill the coronavirus, and kill you too!
Archives for category: Trump
John Thompson writes about the latest madness in his home state of Oklahoma:
The shocking headline was that the price of oil dropped to below $1 a barrel. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt was on the phone with Vice President Mike Pence when he heard the news. The legislature now faces “a loss of $1.3 billion in revenue for appropriation between FY 2020 and FY 2022.”
So, why has Gov. Stitt been talking with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about Oklahoma giving some of $40 million of new federal money to private school vouchers?
Even though the Equal Opportunity Education Scholarship Program, a tax credit that raises money for scholarships to private schools, was supposed to expand school choice for low-income students, it has long been known that “families who earn up to three times the income limits for free and reduced priced lunch (a family of four earning $139,000 a year) are eligible for scholarships.”
‘Tough decisions’: Stitt projects $1.3 billion drop, legislators want the math
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-governor-stitt-what-oklahoma-education-needs
Increasing the scholarship tax credit hurts public schools and benefits affluent Oklahomans
I’ll save non-Oklahomans the details regarding the range of bipartisan efforts to persuade Stitt to embrace reality. Before the COVID-19 shutdown, it seemed like the legislature, often led by the Teacher Caucus, might be able to counter the completely inexperienced governor’s infatuations with “reforms” that are disconnected from the real world. But, every time one government institution, or grassroots initiative, has successfully pushed back, Stitt finds another, now unguarded, door to Trumpism.
On one hand, Stitt’s effort to ban abortions during the pandemic, claiming that those services are nonessential, was reversed this week by a federal judge. On the other hand, he has ignored the “thousands of Oklahomans (who) have spoken out against the Governor’s health care proposal, which could restrict health care access for up to 200,000 Oklahomans.” Moreover, Stitt has been slow in scheduling the vote on Medicaid expansion. Frustrated by the state leaving billions of dollars of federal money on the table, Oklahomans launched SQ 802 to require the state to accept the Medicaid funding. Stitt hopes that his plan, which imposes a work requirement, will undermine the citizen-led initiative.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/federal-judge-oklahoma-abortion-ban-enforced-70267625
Thousands of Oklahomans speak out against Governor’s health care proposal
And Stitt hasn’t given up on his most hopeless fight; ignoring legal advice, he’s still fighting Oklahoma tribes, denying that the compact governing casino gambling automatically renewed in January. In doing so, he placed $130 million in education funding in jeopardy.
So, education is just one area where the politics of destruction are being ramped up so that no disadvantaged families are being left unpunished. Students, especially poor children, have lost months of learning. Schools face new costs for devising virtual learning, not to mention the time and money redesigning schools for a safe reopening. Especially in rural areas, where hospitals have been closing, the challenge of providing basic health services – not to mention virus-related costs – is worsening.
And, yet, the Stitt and the Trump administrations seem committed to a double-barreled blast: subsidizing the flight of families from traditional public schools while cutting their funding. Instead of timely interventions to prevent excessive deaths due to the pandemic, they are launching assaults of education, health, and social services that would hit home next year, when a resurgence of the virus is likely.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/childhood-in-an-anxious-age/609079/
I said I wouldn’t bother non-Oklahomans with the details of the Stitt administration’s version of Trumpism, but the headlines keep getting crazier. Because of Oklahomans’ preexisting health problems, our state is especially at risk from the virus. And the Oklahoman reports, “Oklahoma is in the bottom four states for testing for COVID-19, according to an email sent this week by the White House coronavirus task force.” But due to bipartisan leadership of mayors in the Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Norman and other communities, and the way that the public has supported their “shelter-in-place” policies, our confirmed cases and deaths have been lower than expected.
It had been predicted that COVID-19 would peak around April 21, but recent days have seen an increase in infections. So, how did Stitt react?
The next day, Stitt announced the reopening of numerous businesses on Friday, April 24, and more openings on May 1!?!? He implied that the state might try to force cities to comply with his order!
By the way, the New York Times reported that the Oklahoma rightwingers demonstrating for a reopening of business denied any connection with the Trump campaign. But to understand what Attorney General William Barr, Stephen Moore, and Tea Partiers want, the Times says we need to:
Look no further than the first protest organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund — whose chairman manages the vast financial investments of Dick and Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary — to see that the campaign to “open” America flows from the superrich and their front groups.
It’s gotten to the point where the fights picked by Stitt, a few other Republican governors. and the President are incomprehensible even in a time of Trumpism. It’s hard to understand how those policies are anything but Social Darwinism tantrums on steroids, as well as an attempt to reelect Trump, regardless of the human costs.
The Trump administration is the most anti-science federal government in modern history. In every department and agency, Trump minions have pushed out scientists and replaced them with religious fanatics, Trump loyalists, or incompetents, is some combination thereof.
Vicki Cobb, author of science books for children, explains here why science matters.
She begins like this:
This quote from the Washington Post is very frightening, “In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump’s reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak, calling warnings on corona virus a kind of “hoax” meant to undermine him.”
For these ignorant people let me try to explain the most important aspect of science as far as life and death is concerned. Our understanding of weather and violent storms has been growing incrementally and exponentially over the years. First, we used science to understand the properties and behavior of water and air– the physical components of weather. We had to understand the effect of temperature on the volume and pressure of gases, the effect of heat energy on the evaporation of water and wind speed. There were many variables to measure.
Trump, who is not a medical doctor, suggested at his daily campaign rally yesterday, that his experts should study the effects of ingesting disinfectants, since they are known to kill coronavirus. Or inserting ultraviolet light inside the body or staying in bright sunshine.
The manufacturer of Lysol, a leading disinfectant, released a warning to the public: Do not ingest Lysol.
Anderson Cooper asked two doctors on CNN, including Dr. Sanjay Gupta, about Trump’s recommendations, and they said no responsible doctor would consider Trump’s recommendations. COVID affects people in hot and sunny climates. Disinfectants should not be ingested.
Perhaps his cabinet or Mitch McConnell should offer themselves as subjects for a trial recommended by the man they adore.
The New York Times reported that Alex Azar, the head of Health and Human Services, had chosen a former labradoodle breeder to lead the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. No, this is not a story from the Onion.
This one takes the cake. Lincoln, said historian Doris Kearns, was surrounded by a “team of rivals.” Trump has surrounded himself with a team of incompetents.
WASHINGTON — On January 21, the day the first U.S. case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared.
“We developed a diagnostic test at the CDC, so we can confirm if somebody has this,” Azar said. “We will be spreading that diagnostic around the country so that we are able to do rapid testing on site.”
While coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was “potentially serious,” Azar assured viewers in America, it “was one for which we have a playbook.”
Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness.
As is now widely known, two agencies Azar oversaw as HHS secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, wouldn’t come up with viable tests for five and half weeks, even as other countries and the World Health Organization had already prepared their own.
Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”
Azar’s optimistic public pronouncement and choice of an inexperienced manager are emblematic of his agency’s oft-troubled response to the crisis. His HHS is a behemoth department, overseeing almost every federal public health agency in the country, with a $1.3 trillion budget that exceeds the gross national product of most countries.
Azar and his top deputies oversaw health agencies that were slow to alert the public to the magnitude of the crisis, to produce a test to tell patients if they were sick, and to provide protective masks to hospitals even as physicians pleaded for them.
The first test created by the CDC, meant to be used by other labs, was plagued by a glitch that rendered it useless and wasn’t fixed for weeks. It wasn’t until March that tests by other labs went into production. The lack of tests “limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients.
A promised virus surveillance program failed to take root, despite assurances Azar gave to Congress. Rather than share information, three current and three former government officials told Reuters, Azar and top staff sidelined key agencies that could have played a higher-profile role in addressing the pandemic. “It was a mess,” said a White House official who worked with HHS.
Officials across the government, from President Trump on down, have been blasted for America’s halting response to the pandemic. Critics inside and outside the administration say a meaningful share of the responsibility lies with HHS and Trump appointee Azar.
“You have to blame the problem on the virus, but it’s Azar’s operation,” said Lynn Goldman, the dean of the public health school at George Washington University, who has served on advisory boards of the FDA and CDC. “And the buck stops there.”
HHS declined to make Azar available for an interview. Michael Caputo, the new chief HHS spokesman, declined to answer Reuters questions about Azar’s stewardship, saying in a statement: “We are communicating to the American public during a deadly pandemic.”
DALLAS LABRADOODLES
Azar is a Republican lawyer who once clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and counts current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a friend. Under George W. Bush, Azar worked for HHS as general counsel and deputy secretary. During the Obama years, he cycled through the private sector as a pharmaceutical company lobbyist and executive for Eli Lilly. After Trump’s first HHS secretary was forced out in a travel corruption scandal, Azar stepped in, in January 2018.
Two years later, at the dawn of the coronavirus crisis, Azar appointed his most trusted aide and chief of staff, Harrison, as HHS’s main coordinator for the government’s response to the virus.
Harrison, 37, was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields. In 2006, he joined HHS in a one-year stint as a “Confidential Assistant” to Azar, who was then deputy secretary. He also had posts working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the Department of Defense and a Washington public relations company.
Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.
The company sells Australian Labradoodles, a breed that is a cross between a Labrador Retriever and a Poodle. He sold it in April 2018, his financial disclosure form said. HHS emailed Reuters that the sales price was $225,000.
At HHS, Harrison was initially deputy chief of staff before being promoted, in the summer of 2019, to replace Azar’s first chief of staff, Peter Urbanowicz, an experienced hospital executive with decades of experience in public health.
This January, Harrison became a key manager of the HHS virus response. “Everyone had to report up through him,” said one HHS official.
One questionable decision, three sources say, came that month, after the White House announced it was convening a coronavirus task force. The HHS role was to muster resources from key public health agencies: the CDC, FDA, National Institutes of Health, Office of Global Affairs and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
Harrison decided, the sources say, to exclude FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn from the task force. “He said he didn’t need to be included,” said one official with knowledge of the matter.
When task force members were announced January 29, neither Hahn nor the FDA were included. Hahn wasn’t put on the task force until Vice President Mike Pence took over in February. Two of Hahn’s high-profile counterparts were on it from the start: CDC director Robert Redfield and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The HHS denied it was Harrison’s decision to leave out Hahn and the FDA, but declined to say who made the call. The agency lauded Harrison’s work on the task force.
In a statement, Hahn said the FDA was focused on the coronavirus epidemic, “not on when we were added to the task force,” and that the agency was not “excluded.”
Fauci, who has become a public face of the Trump Administration’s COVID-19 effort, said he wasn’t sure including the FDA was necessary at the start. Initially, the Chinese government was saying the virus spread through animals, not human to human, he said. “You would include the FDA when you want to expedite drugs or devices,” Fauci said.
Others said the lack of a strong FDA role early on had direct consequences. Two sources familiar with events say the White House wasn’t getting information from the FDA about the state of the testing effort, a crucial element of the coronavirus response.
Reached by phone, Harrison declined to answer Reuters’ questions. In a later statement, he did not address questions about the task force but said he was proud of his work history. “Americans would be well served by having more government officials who have started and worked in small family businesses and fewer trying to use that experience to attack them and distort the record,” he wrote.
In a statement to Reuters, Azar said Harrison has been an asset. “From day one, Brian has demonstrated remarkable leadership and managerial talents,” Azar wrote.
For several weeks, Trump has been promoting an anti-malaria drug called hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. FOX News has enthusiastically echoed Trump’s claims, disregarding the judgment of medical doctors who warned that the drug’s effectiveness had not been proven in clinical trials.
The Washington Post reporters Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi explained.
At the height of Fox News’s coverage of a would-be treatment for the novel coronavirus, the network’s medical correspondent, Marc Siegel, offered a remarkable testimonial during Tucker Carlson’s show.
Siegel said his 96-year-old father, suffering from symptoms of the virus and fearing he would die, made a full recovery thanks to the drug, hydroxychloroquine, and a course of antibiotics. “He got up the next day and was fine,” Siegel told an astonished Carlson.
Siegel’s miraculous-recovery story was part of a near-campaign for hydroxychloroquine by Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business.
Echoing President Trump’s description of the drug as a “game changer,” Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and “Fox & Friends” hosts spoke of its potential benefits in dozens of segments from mid-March to mid-April.
They also criticized those in the media and the medical establishment who raised concerns, turning a debate among researchers and scientists into another front in the culture wars.
But in the past week or so, Trump has all but stopped talking about hydroxychloroquine. And so have Fox News’s hosts.
The relative silence follows disappointing, even alarming, new research about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. A study released this week on 368 male Veterans Affairs patients with the disease showed that the death rate among those given the drug, both in combination with another drug and alone, was higher than for those who were not. Researchers also said its use made no difference in the need for ventilators.
Like other fast-moving research about covid-19 treatments, the study by VA and academic researchers hasn’t undergone the typical peer-review process and isn’t the kind of formal clinical trial, like those underway elsewhere, that will offer more definitive answers. However, it was based on one of the largest collections of data about the drug’s use.
Claims about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 have gained traction despite a lack of scientific evidence. How did this happen? (Elyse Samuels, Meg Kelly, Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)
Another study, released by French researchers last week, offered more discouraging clues. It found no statistically significant difference in the death rates among 181 covid-19 patients who had taken hydroxychloroquine within 48 hours of being admitted to a hospital and those who hadn’t. The study also highlighted dangerous side effects; eight developed arrhythmia, or abnormal heart rhythms, and had to stop taking it.
On Tuesday, an expert panel convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases advised physicians against prescribing hydroxychloroquine with the antibiotic azithromycin because of the potential side effects. The panel said there wasn’t enough evidence yet to recommend for or against hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. The agency is headed by Trump’s top infectious disease adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, who has repeatedly tempered Trump’s upbeat commentary about the drug.
All of which raises a question about the Fox News hosts’ advocacy of hydroxychloroquine: Were they pushing a potentially ineffective, even dangerous, remedy in the absence of sound science and well in excess of their expertise or knowledge?
For Fox News hosts, the hydroxychloroquine controversy is fuel for the culture war
A Fox spokeswoman declined to comment directly on any prime-time commentary but mentioned recent segments that “show the network’s attention to all sides of this story from a news and opinion perspective.”
Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham didn’t mention the new research on their programs on Tuesday. The topic was replaced by rhetoric about China’s culpability for the pandemic and advocacy for reopening the country, again seemingly as part of a feedback loop with Trump’s own comments.
Ingraham, who met with Trump in early April to urge him to push the drug, hadn’t discussed hydroxychloroquine since April 15. But on Wednesday, Ingraham devoted the beginning of her show to address the study of VA patients, calling it a “shockingly irresponsible” survey and “perhaps even agenda-driven.” She also criticized the media coverage around the study.
She said the study lacked methodological rigor and that the drug works best on patients who aren’t yet severely sick, unlike in the survey.
“What’s driving this? It’s a blind obsession to disprove the effectiveness of a drug that’s being used right now tonight in medical centers across America,” Ingraham said. “Is this a mad impulse to discount any benefit from the therapy? Is it triggered by pure hatred of Trump, Fox or me? I don’t know. Is it motivated by a secret desire to keep America hopeless?”
Syndicated TV host Mehmet Oz — an enthusiastic promoter of the drug in his many guest appearances on Fox News — seemed to backpedal from his usual advocacy on Wednesday’s “Fox & Friends.”
“The fact of the matter is, we don’t know,” he told co-host Brian Kilmeade, adding, “There’s a lot of variables. Brian, I gotta say at this point there is so much data coming from so many places, we are better off waiting for the randomized trials Dr. Fauci has been asking for. Otherwise, we keep reacting back and forth to studies that show opposite results, and a lot of it might have to do with when you get the medication.”
Oz, a cardiac surgeon with limited expertise in pharmacology or virology, had previously said on Fox News that Fauci — the government’s leading infectious-disease expert — needed to “respect” the positive results of studies conducted to date, even if they were small.
Given the new data, Fox News has an obligation to give equal time to the doubts and potential dangers of hydroxychloroquine, said William Haseltine, the eminent biologist and biotech entrepreneur.
“That’s just public responsibility,” said Haseltine, who is chairman and president of Access Health International, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand access to health care. “They have a duty to inform their [viewers] that they made a mistake. It’s not a crime to make a mistake, but they do need to correct it.”
In contrast to the network’s popular commentators, Fox’s news programs and website have been more cautious and have reported on the new research.
The network on Tuesday played clips from a White House press briefing in which Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, urged waiting for randomized clinical trials “to actually make a definitive decision around safety and efficacy.”
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Trump sounded a bit less enthusiastic about hydroxychloroquine during the same briefing. He said he was unaware of the VA study. He also said, “Obviously, there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one is not a good report. But we’ll be looking at it.”
Teresa Hanafin in Fast Forward in the Boston Globe:
Some interesting quotes for your reading pleasure:
CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield to The Washington Post: “There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through. We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”
Trump at the daily [campaign rally] coronavirus briefing: “Dr. Robert Redfield was totally misquoted in the media on a statement about the fall season and the virus.”
Redfield: “I’m accurately quoted in The Washington Post.”
Trump: The coronavirus “may not come back at all. And if it does come back, it’s not going to come back … like it was. Also, we have much better containment now. Now, if we have pockets, a little pocket here or there, we’re going to have it put out. It goes out, and it’s going to go out fast. We’re going to be watching for it. But it’s also possible it doesn’t come back at all.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIH: “We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that because of the degree of transmissibility that it has, the global nature.”
So let’s hear from the leader of the free world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country has been hit hard by the epidemic yet has one of the lowest death rates around. Why?
— Early and widespread testing
— Exhaustive contact tracing
— A robust public health system with plenty of ICU beds
— The cooperation of German citizens who are putting societal good ahead of personal inconvenience and financial difficulties
— Trust in Merkel, a trained scientist (doctorate in quantum chemistry) who has communicated clearly, rationally, and calmly throughout the crisis, sending her approval ratings soaring.
Here’s what she said earlier today:
“Nobody likes to hear this, but it is the truth. We are not living through the final phase of this crisis; we are still at its beginning. We will still have to live with this virus for a long time.”
Kind of refreshing, no?
For the entirety of Trump’s time in office, he has ridiculed the claim that Russia intervened in the 2016 election. He called this the “Russia hoax” and has attempted repeatedly to discredit the government intelligence agencies that reached this conclusion. He portrays himself as the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine the legitimacy of his election. He even tasked Attorney General William Barr to launch an investigation of the perpetrators behind the “Russia hoax” and to see that they are punished. And he has fired leaders of the intelligence agencies who might resist his views.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, controlled by Republicans, released a report this week supporting the conclusion that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election, specifically to help Trump and hurt Clinton. The committee was unanimous.
The New York Times reported:
A three-year review by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found that the intelligence community assessment, pinning blame on Russia and outlining its goals to undercut American democracy, was fundamentally sound and untainted by politics.
“The I.C.A. reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the panel’s chairman. “The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions.”
The endorsement by Mr. Burr’s committee comes at a key moment for the intelligence agencies. Not only has Mr. Trump moved in recent months to install a loyalist in the top spy position, but Attorney General William P. Barr has also blessed a broad review of possible misconduct by investigators examining the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, apparently including work by intelligence officials…
“The case is closed,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine. “I don’t know how you could have a much more credible source than a three-year study by a bipartisan committee that came to a unanimous conclusion…”
Senators said their inquiry found that intelligence analysts who worked on the assessment were “under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.”
“All analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper for the analytic process,” the report said.
In an illuminating article in The Atlantic, George Packer argues that America is a failed state. Trump didn’t “make America great again.” He took its weaknesses, frailties, fault lines, and failures and deepened them. He didn’t create them. They were there, the bullies, the racists, the white nationalists, the haters. He gave them license to come into the daylight. He encouraged them.
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos…
Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.
Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
In 1994, the Clinton administration started a small federal program and funded it with $4.5 million to help launch new charter schools. At the time, charter schools were a new idea, and there were not many of them. The first charter school had opened in Minnesota in 1991, and six states passed laws authorizing charters in 1992. In 1994, the idea was too new to have produced results or research. So Congress allocated a measly $4.5 million.
In the 26 years since the federal Charter Schools Program started, the charter idea has burgeoned into an industry with state charter school associations, lobbyists in D.C. and in state capitols, and support from numerous foundations, billionaires, corporations, and Wall Street. There is considerable research about charters as well as controversy surrounding their methods of selecting and retaining or excluding students. Charters now enroll 6% of the nation’s students.
Two things are clear:
1. The charter sector today is very well funded by billionaire patrons such as the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe abroad Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings. It has no need of federal funding.
2. Some charters get high test scores (and are accused of skimming to get the “best” students), some get the worst scores in their states, and most get scores about the same as public schools with similar demographics. In the one all-charter district in the nation, New Orleans, about half the schools are rated D or F by the state. Although the charter industry sings their praises, it’s clear that charters have no secret sauce to lift up every child.
Yet despite the fact that charters have a huge number of financial angels with very deep pockets, despite the fact that they do not solve the deep-seated problems of American education, despite their spotty academic record, funding for the Federal Charter Schools Program has grown to $440 million per year.
Under Betsy DeVos, the CSP has become her personal slush fund to help The expansion of large corporate charter chains, like KIPP and IDEA. The original idea that the federal funds would launch entrepreneurial start-ups is long forgotten.
About two weeks ago, DeVos released the latest CSP funds and again favored the big corporate charter chains, which have many millions in reserve and long lists of billionaire patrons.
DeVos handed out the first $200 million to her favorite chain, IDEA, which has no financial need. IDEA won $72 million, having previously received more than $200 million from DeVos. IDEA, you may recall, is known for its lavish spending. Its board approved the lease of a private jet for nearly $2 million a year, but had to cancel the lease because of adverse publicity in Texas, where the chain is based. Its CEO hired a private jet to take him to meet with DeVos in Florida; he was the only passenger. The chain’s executives,lacking their own jet, are allowed to fly first class with their families, not exactly like public school employees on official travel.
The second biggest winner was Mater Academy, which won $57 million. It is affiliated with the for-profit (and very rich) Florida for-profit chain Academica.
The Network for Public Education published two reports about the CSP in 2019, documenting that the program is shot through with waste, fraud, and abuse. About 40% of the charters funded by CSP either never opened or closed not long after opening. The loss of federal funds was $1 billion. The first report—Asleep at the Wheel— is here. The second report—Still Asleep at the Wheel—is here.
Tom Ultican reviewed the two NPE reports and recounted Betsy DeVos’s unsurprising hostile response to them. Why would she relinquish control over $440 million, which helps corporate chains that divert money from public schools and advances DeVos’s long-term goal of wrecking the foundations of public education?
It is ironic that the Trump administration in its now forgotten budget for the coming year proposed to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program by folding it and 28 other federal programs into a bloc grant to the states. At the same time, Trump and DeVos proposed The creation of a multi-billion dollar voucher program. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives made clear that these proposals were Dead on Arrival. Nonetheless, the charter lobbyists were shocked to discover that charter schools are just a stepping-stone to vouchers for DeVos.
