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Nation’s Largest Coal Company Declares Bankruptcy, Will Shed Workers’ Pensions

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2019 //
8

Remember that Trump likes to boast of his love for “clean, beautiful” coal.

Now Murray Energy is filing for bankruptcy and will shed $8 billion in pension and health-care liabilities owed to miners.

NPR reports that Murray was one of Trump’s biggest funders:

The Trump administration has spent three years trying to help the coal industry by rolling back environmental regulations and pushing for subsidies for coal-fired power plants. Still, the long list of coal company bankruptcies has continued, and dozens more plants have announced their retirement since President Trump took office.

Now the list of bankruptcies includes a company headed by one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. Murray Energy Corp. filed for Chapter 11 on Tuesday morning.

The company says it reached an agreement to restructure and continue operating. As part of that, Bob Murray — the chairman, president and CEO — will relinquish two of his roles. His nephew, Robert Moore, will become president and CEO while Murray will stay on as chairman.

“When you’re a private company and you’re in financial failure, the first person that loses everything is the owner. And that’s what will happen,” Murray tells NPR.

Murray has had a close relationship with the Trump administration. He donated $300,000 to Trump’s inauguration and has met with administration officials to advance the coal industry’s interests.

Dino Grandoni of the Washington Post writes:

Murray Energy Corp., the nation’s largest private coal giant, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday, Taylor Telford and I reported Tuesday. That move makes it the fifth coal company to land in bankruptcy court in 2019 as coal is being being squeezed out of the U.S. power market by cheaper options such as natural gas, solar and wind power.

The long-anticipated bankruptcy proceedings also put the United Mine Workers of America’s already fragile and underfunded pension plan on even shakier ground, The situation could potentially spur a divided Congress and Trump, who has championed coal workers, to bail out the miners. Currently, Murray Energy pays into the pension plan for UMWA, which represents a large chunk of the company’s full-time employees…

But it is underfunded also because other coal companies have shed their pension obligations through bankruptcy. Among the billions of dollars of debt Murray Energy wants to restructure — or get rid of entirely — are its contributions to the pension plan. Excluding one of its subsidies that is not part of the bankruptcy proceedings, Murray Energy with about $2.7 billion in funded debt, as well about $8 billion in actual or potential obligations to fund pension and benefit plans, according to court filings.

Robert Moore, the company’s new CEO, hinted in a court filing that Murray Energy may seek relief from its pension obligations.

“Murray’s employees are its lifeblood… Nonetheless, the cost of servicing its funded debt, together with the myriad of obligations Murray has to current and former employees, including to a pension fund that has been abandoned by other employers, have substantially reduced liquidity,” Moore wrote to the bankruptcy court. a court filing….

Manchin and some other senators, including Republicans Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Rob Portman (Ohio), have pushed for legislation that would transfer certain federal funds into the pension plan.

“We’re talking about 82,000 miners who are going to lose their pensions, and we’re fighting this,” Manchin, whose state is home to large Murray Energy operations, said in a radio interview on West Virginia MetroNews on Tuesday.

But the idea of the federal government bailing out the union miners has divided Senate Republicans. Other budget-minded senators from coal-mining states, such as Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), have objected to using federal appropriations to bail out a private pension plan.

Standing in the middle of that divided Republican caucus is the most powerful coal-state senator of all: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Manchin accuses McConnell of “still sitting on” his bill. McConnell met with UMWA members from Kentucky earlier this year and shares their concerns about the potential insolvency, according to McConnell spokesman Robert Steurer. While his office added that McConnell “supports the ongoing process to find a bipartisan solution for pension reform,” it did not commit to bringing any particular legislation to the floor.

Categories Environment, Pensions, Trump, Unions

Law Professor: Impeachment Does Not Require a Crime

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2019 //
59

Trump’s defenders say that he committed no actual crime. Professor Frank O. Bowman III it the University of Missouri Law School says that the Founding Fathers debated the issue of impeachment and purposely chose language that does not require an ordinary crime (like shooting someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, the sort of crime that Trump’s lawyers now say he can’t be prosecuted for).

Bowman analyzes the meaning of the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” to demonstrate that the Founders has a much broader concept than ordinary criminal actions.

He writes:

There are two strong arguments against the idea that the phrase requires criminal behavior: a historical one and a practical one. The history of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” and of how it entered our Constitution establishes beyond serious dispute that it extends far beyond mere criminal conduct. The practical reasoning is in some ways more important: A standard that permitted the removal of presidents only for indictable crimes would leave the nation defenseless against the most dangerous kinds of presidential behavior.

Read his essay to understand the history and meaning of this crucial term.

 

Categories Accountability, History, Trump

Teresa Hanafin Updates the Ukrainian Investigation

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2019 //
34

Teresa Hanafin, who writes “Fast Forward” for the Boston Globe, offers some new information:

 

> Tim Morrison, who works in the White House on the National Security staff as a top adviser on Russia, is scheduled to give a deposition to House impeachment investigators next week, and is expected to corroborate much of what Ukraine diplomat William Taylor told lawmakers earlier this week.

Taylor testified that Trump refused to release $400 million in desperately needed military aid to help Ukraine fend off Russian incursions unless Ukraine’s president publicly announced that his country was investigating the Bidens. Trump also refused to invite the new Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to the White House.

Morrison is significant for a few reasons: He’s the first White House employee to testify. He listened in on that infamous phone call in which Trump told Zelensky he wanted him to investigate Joe Bidenand his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, while his father was VP. He also was mentioned in Taylor’s testimony several times.

> Trump’s former national security adviser (which one, you may ask), John Bolton, reportedly is in negotiations with Democrats to testify as well. Bolton, ousted in September, supposedly raised alarms repeatedly about the shadow diplomacy in Ukraine being carried out by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and others.

> Trump and his bootlickers are focusing on the quid pro quo aspect of the Ukraine affair, even though it’s kind of irrelevant: The simple fact that Trump asked a foreign leader to investigate one of his political rivals is the problem. Adding pressure by withholding military funds is just icing on the cake.

Nonetheless, the Trumpsters have been claiming that no quid pro quo could have existed with Ukraine because Ukrainian officials had no idea that Trump was withholding the military aid that Congress had allocated. (That’s a little like saying that attempted murder isn’t wrong because the victim didn’t die.) But The New York Times reports that Ukraine knew about the aid block as early as the first week of August. Time for another excuse!

Categories Accountability, Trump

Jennifer Berkshire: Could Betsy DeVos Cost Trump the Election?

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2019 //
16

Jennifer Berkshire writes in the New Republic that Betsy DeVos is deeply unpopular in swing-state Michigan. Voters in Detroit can see a district disrupted by a generation of failed reforms. Suburban voters like their public schools and don’t want charters or vouchers.  Berkshire notes that the Democrats are picking up unlikely victories in districts where education is a big issue.

In 2016, Darrin Camilleri was 24 and teaching at a Detroit charter school 20 miles from where he grew up, when Michigan lawmakers took up a measure to implement more rigorous oversight of the city’s charter schools. Seemingly anyone could open a charter in Detroit, and the schools closed just as suddenly as they opened. From his classroom on the city’s southwest side, Camilleri watched the reform effort fail. “Watching that play out really showed me the downside of deregulation,” he told me. “No one is holding anyone accountable.” That year, he decided to run for state representative in southern Wayne County, a largely blue-collar area that shades rural at its edges. Rather than hewing to standard Democratic talking points—health care, for instance, or Donald Trump’s erratic comments—Camilleri made charter school oversight and school funding his central issues, and in 2016, he became the only Democrat to flip a Republican state house seat in Michigan.

In the three years since Trump turned Michigan red, education has emerged as a potent political issue in the state, thanks to a steady stream of grim studies and embarrassing news stories. Between 2003 and 2015, the state ranked last out of all 50 for improvement in math and reading. According to a recent study, Michigan now spends less on its schools than it did in 1994. Republicans have slashed funding to give tax cuts to big businesses. And the number of people who choose to become teachers has fallen dramatically….

Consider the political climate in Michigan’s suburban districts. In 2018, when Padma Kuppa challenged a Republican state representative, she homed in on the GOP’s role in undermining public education and won, claiming a seat in Troy, an affluent suburban district north of Detroit that Democrats had never held before. Suburban districts like the one in Troy regularly top “best schools in Michigan” lists, with high test scores and graduation rates, and loads of AP offerings. “People here like their public schools, regardless of what party they belong to,” Kuppa said. The GOP’s steady expansion of a largely unregulated charter school sector has very little to offer voters in communities like hers.

Matt Koleszar, a high school social studies and English teacher, won his race for state representative in suburban Plymouth with a message of what he describes as “tenacious support for public schools.” His call for adequate school funding resonated in this “purple” district, he told me, but so did tying his opponent, Jeff Noble, to Betsy DeVos. Noble had scored an endorsement from the education advocacy group DeVos founded, and raised thousands from her extended family. In 2018, he even backed a controversial law to give charter schools a cut of any property tax increases at the county level. “When I went door to door, explaining to people that this meant that their taxes were going to some for-profit charter school headquarters that’s not even in the district, they were outraged,” Koleszar said….

That relationship could backfire on Trump not only in Michigan’s suburbs, but also in rural areas, where the GOP’s education policies have even less to offer voters. There, the local schools are foundational community institutions, and the conservative push to privatize public services has transferred bus drivers, janitors, cafeteria workers, and even some coaches on to the payroll of private contractors that pay less than the state does while providing fewer benefits. “When you’ve gutted all of the insurance for these jobs, they’re not that attractive,” said Keith Smith, the superintendent of schools in rural Kingsley, Michigan. Cuts have forced school districts like his to ax “extras,” such as music, counseling, and the vocational programs that prepare students to work in skilled trades….

The success of candidates who yoked their opponents to DeVos in 2018 should provide valuable lessons for the eventual Democratic nominee, not only in Michigan but also in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, where the GOP has embraced her agenda. For Democrats who have spent much of the last decade teaming up with the GOP to expand charter schools, a new strategy could prove fruitful. Trump, after all, may have trouble distancing himself from DeVos’s legacy: He announced his reelection bid at Orlando’s Amway Center, named for the multilevel marketing company that has so enriched her family.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice, Trump

William Milliken: Once Upon a Time, There Were Moderate Republicans

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2019 //
37

Here is the obituary of former Michigan Governor William Milliken, a man who reminds us of what the Republican Party was like before it was captured by a ragtag coalition of religious extremists and bigots. It appeared in the New York Times. Donald Trump had worked to destroy this wing of his party and transform it into the party of selfishness, greed, and racism.

William G. Milliken, a moderate Republican who as governor led Michigan through a period of profound transformation in the 1970s, as it went from being an economically scarred industrial state to one that embraced technology, business diversity and environmental quality, died on Friday at his home in Traverse City, Mich. He was 97.

His son and only immediate survivor, Bill Jr., confirmed the death.

Mr. Milliken was the longest-serving governor in Michigan’s history, a 14-year tenure that began in January 1969, when, as the state’s lieutenant governor, he succeeded George Romney, who had left office in the middle of his term to join President Richard M. Nixon’s cabinet. Mr. Milliken went on to be elected to three full four-year terms.

Days before he became governor in 1969, he told a joint legislative session, “It is my greatest hope that this administration will be known for its compassion, its idealism, its candor, and its toughness in the pursuit of public ends.”

That vision was largely borne out. His administration invested in urban housing and education, defended auto industry jobs and profits in the wake of the 1974 Arab oil embargo, strengthened higher education and put innovative environmental protections in place.

Categories Education Reform, Michigan, Republicans, Trump

ProPublica Reviews Trump’s Tax Documents and Finds Troubling Practices

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2019 //
12

 

Heather Vogeli of ProPublica reports on property tax documents of Trump properties and reports some troubling discrepancies.

The story begins:

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.

Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.

New York City’s property tax forms state that the person signing them “affirms the truth of the statements made” and that “false filings are subject to all applicable civil and criminal penalties.”

The punishments for lying to tax officials, or to lenders, can be significant, ranging from fines to criminal fraud charges. Two former Trump associates, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, are serving prison time for offenses that include falsifying tax and bank records, some of them related to real estate.

This explains why Trump is so determined to hide his tax returns and is marshaling the resources of the Justice Department to conceal his business affairs. This may be the first time in history that the Justice Department shielded potentially criminal behavior.

 

Categories Accountability, Fraud, Trump

Jack Hassard: Trump’s Outrageous War on Science

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2019 //
58

Jack Hassard Taught science education for many years. He used to write a blog called “The Art of Teaching Science,” but became so upset about current events that he renamed his blog “Jack Hassard’s Blog.”

In this post, he excoriates Trump’s war on science.

He begins:

Science was under assault last week by an un-educated President and his staff who believe that they can supercede the findings of science when the findings don’t agree with their personal and political views.

When Hurricane Harvey inflicted its wrath on Houston and most of East Texas, I painted an art series of 4 canvases showing how hurricanes harm not only property, but the people who endure the storm. This may be a family or community of friends who are wading through flooded streets to find shelter. I believe that science should be in the service of people. In this case, it was in the service of these people by providing the most up-to-date forecast, and warnings about the storm and its aftermath. When narcissistic politicians intrude into the nature of how science is done, they corrupt the findings, and lend support to the distrust of science and scientists.

Assault on Science

Science has been under assault during the entire period of time Trump has been in office. Scientists in several departments, especially the EPA, and Commerce Dept. have come under dire consequences because of the administration’s anti-science views, and their attempt to oversee and obstruct the process of science.

It’s not the first time. Republicans have had a field day trying to influence the nature of the science that is produced by United States government agencies. Chris Mooney documented this in his book, The Republican War on Science, published 2005, midstream in the George W. Bush administration. In Bush’s assault on science, the principle underpinning of his war was to please political and religious groups.

In Trump’s case, not only has politics and religion played a part, but the most egregious sin committed by Trump is his form of narcissism that is of the loud kind. He brags, he boasts, I’m smart, I’m really smart, he insults, and is obsessed with numbers (see Craig Malkin’s chapter, Pathological Narcissism and Politics in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, edited by Bandy Lee, M.D.). Trump simply can never be wrong or corrected because he’s such an “extremely stable genius.”

Categories Science, Trump

The Heiress Who Funded the Anti-Immigration Movement

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2019 //
26

 

The New York Times published a fascinating story about the heiress who became obsessed with stopping immigration and limiting population, especially in poor countries.

Reporters Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire rely on the personal letters and writings of Cordelia Scaife May, the most significant funder of anti-immigration groups, to examine her views.

Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon family’s banking and industrial fortune, was far and away the most important donor to the modern anti-immigration movement during her lifetime. Now, more than a decade after her death, her money still funds the leading organizations fighting to reduce migration.

Her Colcom Foundation has poured $180 million into groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration and prioritizing skills over family ties for entry. And language she used — about the threat of an “immigrant invasion,” for instance, and environmental strain — echoes in today’s anti-immigration rhetoric, most recently in the words of the killer in the El Paso mass shooting.

May funded not only anti-immigration groups but Planned Parenthood and other groups devoted to population control.

Mrs. May’s efforts on immigration grew out of a progressive interest in protecting the environment and reducing the population through birth control. Long before her views became more radical and took root in the Trump administration, Mrs. May was a nature-loving Roosevelt Republican, and a friend and admirer of the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

In time, however, she became a radical proponent of racist views and stopping immigration became her all-consuming passion. She advocated sealing the border with Mexico.

Mrs. May’s confidence in birth control would give way to abortion advocacy. And she would be among the first, and most financially influential, to set her sights on immigration as an alarming source of population growth in the United States…

In her writings, Mrs. May contended that the country was being “invaded on all fronts by immigrants.” Complaining about the Cubans who arrived in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlift, she cited their “criminal habits, radical political thought, exotic diseases, neighborhood disruption,” but said their “most dangerous contribution” was their high birthrate, “far higher than that of our native population.”

“They breed like hamsters,” she wrote…

The anti-immigration movement funded by Mrs. May’s money extends far beyond the three best-known groups, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. Her fortune has nurtured an entire ecosystem, including more oblique efforts like a movement to make English the nation’s official language, and a publishing house and television productions that advocate limiting immigration.

The sheer number of these groups helped the anti-immigration movement succeed by giving it the appearance of broad-based support.

Since Mr. Trump’s election, former staff members from groups like FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies have assumed key roles in the administration’s immigration apparatus, working with Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s immigration agenda…

 

 

Categories Accountability, Racism, Trump

Trump Is Incapable of Consoling Anyone in Their Grief

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2019 //
81

Trump cannot perform one of the basic roles of a president: Showing empathy for others who are in pain.

He cannot console anyone.

Consolation and empathy are not part of his emotional makeup.

He can insult, he can sneer, he can boast, he can ridicule, but he cannot console.

When he went to El Paso, he told the hospital staff about the large crowd he had when he last visited the city.

He mocked Beto O’Rourke.

He came to visit those who were hospitalized but he could not stop talking about himself.

Richard Parker wrote in the New York Times about the disaster that Trump created with his narcissism and self-absorption.

From his flight on Wednesday to Dayton, Ohio, to this sprawling high-desert city on the Mexican border, the 45th occupant of the White House not only littered his consolation tour with petty insults — but just to rub salt in the wound, doses of renewed racism. Yet most striking was how alone and outnumbered the president was: rejected, ostracized and told to go home.

The people who streamed the scene of the terrorist attack here — brown, black, white and every hue in between — defiantly defended the nation’s diversity. With no public appearances, the president seemed to shrink, ever more alone as he clung to his white nationalist politics and governance. But he and his supporters were grossly outnumbered. For perhaps the first time in his angry, racist and cruel presidency, the tables were turned in smoldering, righteous popular anger — and he was on the receiving end.

You have to give this to Mr. Trump: He never backs off. He doubles down like a wild gambler in a casino, raising the stakes one more time demanding just a few more chips from the house. Leaving the White House on Wednesday morning, he said, “I think my rhetoric brings people together,” adding he was “concerned about the rise of any group of hate. I don’t like it, whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy.”

Is there some other form of supremacy that escaped the public view?

The man has no manners, no decency, no grace, no dignity, no kindness, no empathy, no moral core.

He is an empty vessel whose only reflex is to lash out at others, as he lashed out at the mayor of Dayton, because she dared to ask him to “do something” to stop the gun violence. Evidently she was not sufficiently deferential.

This man’s need for approval is so vast that no amount of cheering can fill that vacuum. He is a vast sucking sound all by himself. He wants to fill our consciousness at every moment, prevent us from thinking about anything else other than him and his faux grandeur.

He always looks angry. He has money, family, the highest office in the land, yet he is angry. Very angry. Bitter.

He will never find peace. He cannot feel anyone else’s pain nor offer comfort.

He is doomed to walk the earth in search of applause. He cannot live without it.

Not being at peace with himself, he cannot offer it to others.

He will never find peace.

 

 

 

Categories Trump

Joe Biden Gave a Great Speech in Iowa Today

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2019 //
33

 

I was driving home from a friend’s memorial service held in Salisbury, Connecticut, and I tuned in to CNN, where I heard the live broadcast of a speech by Joe Biden. He was in Burlington, Iowa.

It was about American values, what we stand for, what our ideals are, and how Trump has betrayed those ideals and appealed to the darkest forces in our society. Trump is a propagandist and apologist for racism and White Supremacy, he said. The biggest applause line was when he said that Trump was like George Wallace, not George Washington.

He spoke of the stain of racism that runs through our history. And he spoke of the constant struggle to extend our ideals and overcome our history of slavery and racism.

He tore into Trump with passion and vigor. He described as clearly as possible why this accidental president is unfit for the office he holds, Why he is a threat to our democracy, and why he must not be re-elected.

The link from NBC.

 

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Guns, Justice, Racism, Trump
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