Perry Bacon: Education Is Not a Partisan Issue–Or Is it?

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
10

Perry Bacon, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, paints a sunny view of the politics of education. He thinks that the public is so strongly united behind their public schools that Trump might back off his plan to turn federal funding into vouchers. Higher education, however, is a different story, he says, with a bipartisan coalition arrayed against student protests and debt relief.

I do not share his view that Republicans will relinquish their fealty to vouchers and privatization. No matter how determined the public is to defend their public schools, the billionaires who want vouchers are unrelenting. Bacon doesn’t see that the monied people don’t give a damn what the public wants. Betsy DeVos, the Koch machine, Jeff Yass, and Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks don’t care what the public wants. Perry Bacon would have written a different article if he had read Josh Cowen’s new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Started a Culture War …

Bacon writes:

The Biden years have featured some surprising bipartisan and cross-ideological coalitions on education issues, including school vouchers and protests on college campuses, that might extend into Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the rare policy area where the divides aren’t simply along party lines.


On K-12 education, Republican and Democratic voters have unified — against the desires of powerful conservative groups and Republican politicians. The political right has long been frustrated with American education and is pushing a number of major changes, most notably voucher programs that would put more kids in private schools and either shrink or, perhaps eventually, dismantle the public school system.


But a clear majority (57 percent) in Nebraska earlier this month voted to repeal a voucher initiative, nearly matching Trump’s support there (60 percent). In Kentucky, all 120 counties (and 62 percent of voters) rejected a proposal to start a voucher program.


The results from those two states aren’t outliers. States with huge Republican majorities in their legislatures have struggled to get voucher programs passed because lawmakers are hearing from wary constituents, including Republicans. Even when they are enacted, voucher programs so far have not resulted in a huge number of students flooding to private schools.

In another rejection of conservative education policy, Moms for Liberty, the group that backs right-wing candidates running in local school board races, has struggled electorally. Only about one-third of the candidates it backed won their races last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. (There hasn’t yet been a detailed analysis of the group’s election results in 2024.) There has been a strong backlash against Moms for Liberty and other conservative groups seeking to ban books on racial and LGBTQ+ issues from public schools.


Meanwhile, counties throughout Florida, where Trump won easily, voted to increase local property and sales taxes to boost public school funding.


What’s behind this strong support of public schools? Only 45 percent of all Americans and 31 percent of Republicans say they are satisfied with public schools nationally, according to Gallup polling. But 70 percent of all Americans and 62 percent of Republicans are satisfied with the schools their kids are attending. Education policy tends to reflect local dynamics, so schools in very conservative areas are probably cautious in speaking about racism or LGBTQ+ issues. But what I suspect is actually driving that strong support for public schools is that for Republicans, particularly in rural areas, public schools are a central, positive part of their lives, where their friends and relatives work and their kids play sports.


But on higher-education policy, the bipartisan coalition is against the left. Like their Republican counterparts, many Democratic politicians and prominent left-of-center leaders and activists think both that the United States became overly invested in recent decades in having people attend college and that campuses are too left-wing. (I disagree with both claims.)

So in the spring, Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden, joined Republicans in portraying on-campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza as antisemitic. Schools in both red and blue states, pushed by their centrist or conservative governing boards, have now created new limits on protests, particularly barring the kind of encampments that pro-Palestinian students created.


Biden himself was under fire from centrist Democrats and Republicans alike for trying to cancel student-loan debt, a policy strongly backed by many progressives. Many in either party argue that mass college attendance, unlike K-12 education, is not a necessity for the country and people who accrued debt during college knew the costs and should pay it back in full. The recent progressive pushes for both universal free college and mass debt cancellation seem stalled for now.


Prominent liberals have joined conservatives in questioning the value of humanities classes and departments and want colleges to focus more on graduating students ready to work in science, technology and other fields where jobs are growing. Nearly every day a Democratic politician says something along the lines of, “Our party is too influenced by the views and perspectives of professors and students on campuses and college graduates,” mirroring the rhetoric of conservatives such as Vice President-elect JD Vance.


How did we end up with Republican voters defending public schools and Democratic politicians criticizing colleges? Part of the explanation for why education policy hasn’t split on predictable partisan lines is that Biden hasn’t made the issue one of his major priorities. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has been more low-profile than Betsy DeVos and Arne Duncan. Biden didn’t have a major education initiative such as No Child Left Behind (President George W. Bush) or Race to the Top (President Barack Obama).

Trump and his incoming administration could make this issue super-partisan. The activist right is unified around the idea that both K-12 schools and colleges are using taxpayer dollars to force liberal ideas on young people, particularly on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. So, the Trump administration could push hard to get more K-12 students enrolled in private schools, stop K-12 schools and colleges from offering classes out of line with conservative ideology, and limit on-campus protests for left-wing causes.


Trump, in his post on Truth Social announcing that Linda McMahon would be education secretary, emphasized his support for vouchers.
But in that statement, Trump also said that education policy should be left largely to states. (It’s not clear that Trump can or would fully eliminate the federal Education Department, as he suggested during the campaign.) So perhaps his administration will take a more hands-off approach, aware that many Republican voters like how their schools are run locally.


Looking forward, it’s possible that Republican voters fall in love with voucher programs if the Trump administration pushes them hard. Or perhaps Democratic politicians will feel more compelled to defend colleges if they become a target of Trump.

But if I had to guess, I would predict that education policy continues to be an issue that doesn’t break down simply along party lines. After all, it’s personal for so many Americans, who vividly remember their time in grade school or college. And it’s complicated — exactly how should colleges have handled the Gaza protests? The happy middle for America might be a robust public school system, more of a Democratic goal, along with less liberal colleges that fewer people attend, more in line with Republican preferences.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Vouchers

“Democracy”: How Pam Bondi Protected Foreclosure Fraud

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
3

Our reader, self-named “Democracy,” wrote an introduction to an article about Pam Bondi that appeared in The American Prospect. Please read the introduction and the article. We are only now learning about Bondi’s record as Florida Attorney General. Perhaps Trump nominated Matt Gaetz first to enable Bindi to skate through as everyone breathed a sigh of relief that Gaetz was out.

Democracy wrote:

More on Pam Bondi here:

“June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards were attorneys in the Economic Crimes division of the Florida attorney general’s office, based in Fort Lauderdale. They joined the government to prevent companies from ripping off their customers. In 2010, they heard from an oncology nurse named Lisa Epstein, who delivered information about how law firms across the state were using hundreds of thousands of phony documents to foreclose on homeowners. Lisa knew this because the banks tried to do it to her.

A group of foreclosure victims had found documents that were literally signed ‘Bogus Assignee.’ They had documents dated 9/9/9999. They had documents notarized on dates before they were allegedly created. They traced these documents back to Florida’s ‘foreclosure mills,’ law firms that churned out foreclosures the way a factory churns out sweaters. The false documents were necessary because banks and lenders, striving during the housing bubble to sell mortgages and deliver them to investors, securitized the loans without maintaining chain of title, botching the true ownership records. Instead of rectifying the situation, the banks had the foreclosure mills concoct false evidence and present it in courts to dispossess people.

Within months, the attorney general’s office had opened investigations into Lender Processing Services, Florida Default Law Group, the Law Office of David J. Stern, Marshall C. Watson, Shapiro & Fishman, and other components of Florida’s great foreclosure machine. In the course of the investigation, Clarkson and Edwards deposed Tammie Lou Kapusta, a former paralegal with David J. Stern, who testified that the firm employed offshore foreclosure document shops in Guam and the Philippines, receiving fake documents that the paralegals would sign. Notary stamps were sitting around the office, and anyone on the team would use them and forge the signatures of the notaries.

By October 2010, all of the leading banks stopped pursuing foreclosures in Florida and across the country, because they could no longer do it legally. It was an incredible example of citizen activism making a real difference, aided by Clarkson and Edwards, the first two law enforcement officials who were actually willing to investigate the fraud.

The system was working, until Pam Bondi came to town.”

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-11-22-when-pam-bondi-protected-foreclosure-fraudsters/

Categories Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Florida, Fraud, Trump

Trump Nominates MAGA Warrior Kash Patel to Lead the FBI

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
23

Trump is demonstrating his intention to purge the FBI by naming his close associate Kash Patel as FBI Director. Patel has said repeatedly that the FBI is loaded with “Deep State” enemies, and he plans to fire them.

The FBI is supposed to be an independent agency, not a vengeance weapon belonging to the President. Patel has made clear that he will find and punish Trump’s enemies. He will run the FBI, if confirmed, as Trump’s man, serving Trump, not justice and not the American people. He will be Trump’s avenger, as he destroys the reputation of the FBI.

Politico described him:

President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Patel as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.

The New York Times wrote:

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”

Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.

Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post….

Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.

He served in a series of administration positions at the tail end of Mr. Trump’s first term, including posts on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon. Before leaving office in early 2021, Mr. Trump floated the idea of making Mr. Patel deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. William P. Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir that Mr. Patel would have become deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body.”

FBI directors are appointed for a 10-year term, so their tenure is allegedly nonpolitical. Although Trump appointed Christopher Wray as FBI Director, Trump soured on him after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover hundreds of top/secret documents. Trump made clear to Director Wray that he should resign or be fired.

Current and former law enforcement officials have worried that a second Trump term would feature an assault on the independence and authority of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and for many of them, Mr. Patel’s ascension to the director’s role would confirm the worst of those fears.

Mr. Patel laid out his vision for wreaking vengeance on the F.B.I. and Justice Department in a book, “Government Gangsters,” calling for clearing out the top ranks of the bureau, which he called “a threat to the people.” He also wrote a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” telling through fantasy the story of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s possible ties to Russians.

He has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute journalists once he is back in government, adding that he would “follow the facts and the law.”

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

An article in the New York Times in October described how deeply hated Patel was by other high-level members of the Trump administration. He was considered a boastful self-promoter.

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and staff members began an exodus from the White House, Mr. Patel’s upward trajectory continued. Mr. Trump named him to one of the most important jobs at the Pentagon: chief of staff to Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was shocked when Mr. Patel presented him a document signed in Sharpie by the outgoing Mr. Trump ordering a full withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. General Milley, the top military adviser to the president, had never even seen the order, and neither had several other senior advisers. It turned out it was drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel named as an adviser to the Pentagon after he impressed Mr. Trump with his appearances on Fox News, according to an account in “The Divider,” a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Mr. Trump backed away from the Afghanistan plan, but soon sought to again elevate Mr. Patel by making him deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. Only after Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, and William P. Barr, the attorney general, both threatened to quit — Mr. Barr vowed that Mr. Patel would become F.B.I. deputy only “over my dead body”— did Mr. Trump abandon the idea.

Mr. Patel stayed at the Pentagon for three months, crediting himself in his book with leading “the biggest transition’’ of the Defense Department “in U.S. history.”

Categories Bias, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

Trump Names Jared Kushner’s Father as Ambassador to France: All in the Family

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
4

Donald Trump believes in nepotism. He has never hesitatated to shower favors on the members of his family. In his first term, he issued a pardon to son-in-law Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, who spent two years in federal prison. Now, Kushner goes from ex-felon to Ambassador to France, if confirmed.

Does Mr. Kushner know anything about France or NATO or Europe? Probably not. Who cares?

The New York Times reported:

President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Saturday that he would name Charles Kushner, the wealthy real estate executive and father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France, handing one of his earliest and most high-profile ambassador appointments to a close family associate.

The announcement was the latest step in a long-running exchange of political support between the two men. Mr. Kushner received a pardon from Mr. Trump in the final days of his first term for a variety of violations and then emerged as a major donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.

“I am pleased to nominate Charles Kushner, of New Jersey, to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to France,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post announcing his choice. “He is a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests.”

Mr. Kushner, 70, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission in a case that became a lasting source of embarrassment for the family. As part of the plea, Mr. Kushner admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, a witness in a federal campaign finance investigation, and sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Trump

Trump’s Director of FDA Warns Senate Not to Confirm RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
7

One of Trump’s appointees in his first administration urged the U.S. Senate not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human services because of his ignorant hostility to vaccines. He warned that a variety of contagious diseases would break out, and people would die. It’s worthwhile to recall that before RFK endorsed Trump, RFK was generally viewed by the press and by medical experts as a crackpot.

Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Hechinger Report: Rural Students Lose Options, as Universities Cut Majors

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
19

A team of reporters at The Hechinger Report describe the damages of budget cuts at rural universities. The universities respond to declining enrollments and declining revenues by eliminating majors; students who want those majors are left in the lurch. Chemistry, science, math, foreign languages, philosophy, physics—Almost everything is on the chopping block somewhere.

The Hechinger Report team limns in the details:

Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.

But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduateswho go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.

St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.

The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.

The states could intervene but so far they have not. The federal government could help, but under Trump, it won’t.

.

Categories Higher Education, Rural Schools

Chris Tomlinson: Texas Republicans Want to Drive Out Free-Thinkers. They Will Be Sorry.

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
10

Chris Tomlinson is an opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle and one of the best critics of the state’s loony leadership. In this column, he warns of the perils of pushing out the free-thinkers. As Forrest Gump famously said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

He writes:

Texas lawmakers are targeting colleges and universities in the next culture war battle, putting our most vital economic drivers at risk.

Our public universities are why Texas outperforms, whether it’s petroleum engineering at Texas A&M, electrical engineering at UT-Austin or transportation at Prairie View A&M University. Multi-disciplinary research universities produce diverse workforces and innovative entrepreneurs that benefit state and local economies.

The right-wing thought police, though, are fed up with freethinkers. Recent laws and proposed bills aim to restrict what ideas faculty and students can explore. The brightest minds will not stick around if the GOP limits intellectual freedom.

Republicans spent the 2023 legislative session protecting white supremacy by attacking programs intended to help historically under-represented students succeed. GOP lawmakers worried that fragile white students may feel uncomfortable discussing the nation’s history of slavery and oppression.

State Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Conroe Republican who leads the Senate Education Committee, passed a law banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities. In a stunning example of Orwellian doublethink, Creighton said his law would boost diversity.

However, when UT Austin complied with Senate Bill 17, a third of the 49 people laid off were Black, even though African-Americans make up only 7% of employees. Roughly three-fourths of the employees let go were women, though they make up just 55% of the total staff.

Across all campuses, the University of Texas System eliminated more than 300 jobs to comply with the law, arguing it was a cost-saving measure.

“Why is it that you must save costs on the backs of Black and brown employees and female employees?” Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe asked.

Not only do Republican leaders want to wipe out programs trying to reverse the lingering effects of white supremacist rule, but they also want to stop research into how racism and bigotry have harmed our society.

The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, recently cut 52 academic programs, including global culture and society, LGBTQ studies, global health, Asian studies and a certificate in performing social activism in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. Regent Michael J. Plank echoed UT officials, saying the board has a duty to “eliminate waste.”

Across the country, conservatives are using “cost saving” as a fig leaf for suppressing ideas they don’t like. For example, A&M had only offered the LGBTQ studies minor for three semesters before declaring it wasteful.

The University of North Texas made 78 changes to its course schedule, removing words such as race, gender, class and equity from titles and descriptions, the Dallas Morning News reported. Freedom of speech group PEN America accused university leaders of abusing SB17.

“UNT seems to be arguing that the principle of academic freedom only exists when state law allows it,” Jeremy Young, PEN’s Freedom to Learn project director, said. “This ludicrous interpretation effectively nullifies academic freedom as a protection against government censorship, setting a perilous precedent for higher education institutions across Texas and potentially beyond.”

Texas A&M and UNT may have only been obeying in advance of more restrictive laws to come.

“While DEI-related curriculum and course content does not explicitly violate the letter of the law, it indeed contradicts its spirit,” Creighton said during a Texas Senate Higher Education Subcommittee hearing. “The curriculum does not reflect the expectations of Texas taxpayers and students who fund our public universities.”

Newly elected state Rep. Carl Tepper, a Lubbock Republican, has introduced a bill requiring the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to calculate a ratio of student debt to annual salary for every degree or certificate offered. The board would then assign a rating: reward, monitor, sanction or sunset. The goal is to shut down programs in the latter categories.

Learning for learning’s sake would not be tolerated under House Bill 281.

Political leaders have long interfered with colleges and universities. Texas lawmakers started using professors as political scapegoats within three years of establishing UT. Institutions have long offered tenure to protect underpaid professors from political interference.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has repeatedly said he wants to ban tenure and make it easier to remove professors who teach or study ideas the Legislature doesn’t like.

Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of the 950 Texas faculty surveyed by the American Association of University Professors said they would not recommend teaching in Texas to colleagues.

Texas Republicans may feel a mandate to drive free thinkers out of public universities, but Texas employers looking for an educated workforce will pay the price.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Creativity, Extremism, Higher Education, Ignorance, Innovation, Texas

Trump Selects Financier With No Military Experience as Secretary of the Navy

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
11

Trump paid off a major campaign donor by naming John Phelan as Secretary of the Navy. Phelannwas never in the Navy. Phelan never served in any branch of the military. But Phelan gave a lot of money to the Trump campaign. Phelan founded the private investment firm Rugger Management LLC.

Apparently, no one ever explained to Trump that you reward your campaign donors by making them Ambassadors to other countries. Phelan might have been thrilled to be Ambassador to The Court of St. James (England) or Italy or Ireland or Japan or Australia. But no, Trump named him as Secretary of the Navy, whose decisions affect the lives of large numbers of servicemen and women, as well as national security.

Military.com described the appointment:

John Phelan is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, the first service leadership position that the incoming administration has announced as it prepares to put its stamp on the military.

In a post to his social media site, Truth Social, Trump said that he is naming Phelan, a financier who appears to have no military experience or experience working on military policy and has never worked for a large defense contractor, to lead the Navy.

The Navy secretary serves as the civilian leader of the military’s second-largest branch and is responsible for the health and well-being of more than 1 million sailors, Marines, reservists and civilian personnel, as well as managing an annual budget of more than $250 billion while ensuring the Navy is able to execute critical national security missions.

Phelan was a massive donor to Trump and Republicans in 2024.

Federal Election Commission records show that, among his many political contributions, Phelan donated $834,600 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee in April. Days after the election, on Nov. 10, he would donate another $93,300, records show.

Phelan also donated $371,700 to the Republican National Committee and another $370,000 to 37 different Republican state committees all on a single day in April.

Phelan hosted Trump at one of his homes for a private fundraiser over the summer where, according to The Guardian, the then-candidate for president went on a expletive-laced rant about immigration and threatened that the 2024 election “could be the last election we ever have” if Vice President Kamala Harris won.

While it is not unusual for service secretaries to have been major fundraisers or donors prior to assuming their duties, what is unusual about Phelan is his lack of any military experience.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Ignorance, Shame, Trump

Dr. Oz Has Investments in Health Sector, Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
15

Dr. Mehmet Oz has significant investments in the healthcare industry that Trump appointed him to regulate. The hits just keep coming.

His investments predispose him to promote for-profit Medicare Advantage plans and to reduce the number of enrollees in Medicare.

The LA Times reported:

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the sprawling government agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace — celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz — recently held broad investments in healthcare, tech and food companies that would pose significant conflicts of interest.


Oz’s holdings, some shared with family, included a stake in UnitedHealth Group worth as much as $600,000, as well as shares of pharmaceutical firms and tech companies with business in the healthcare sector, such as Amazon. Collectively, Oz’s investments total tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosures he filed during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat.


Trump said Tuesday he would nominate Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency’s scope is huge: CMS oversees coverage for more than 160 million Americans, nearly half the population. Medicare alone accounts for approximately $1 trillion in annual spending, with more than 67 million enrollees.


UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest healthcare companies in the nation and arguably the most important business partner of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, through which it is the leading provider of commercial health plans available to Medicare beneficiaries.

UnitedHealth also offers managed-care plans under Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for low-income people, and sells plans on government-run marketplaces set up via the Affordable Care Act. Oz also had smaller stakes in CVS Health, which now includes the insurer Aetna, and in the insurer Cigna.


It’s not clear if Oz, a heart surgeon by training, still holds investments in healthcare companies, or if he would divest his shares or otherwise seek to mitigate conflicts of interest should he be confirmed by the Senate. Reached by phone on Wednesday, he said he was in a Zoom meeting and declined to comment.


An assistant did not reply to an email message with detailed questions.


“It’s obvious that over the years he’s cultivated an interest in the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry,” said Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a watchdog group. “That raises a question of whether he can be trusted to act on behalf of the American people.” (The publisher of KFF Health News, David Rousseau, is on the Center for Science in the Public Interest board.)

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Health, Science, Trump

Brian Deer: RFK Jr. Spreads Misinformation and Lies

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
17

Brian Deer is a journalist who recently published a book about anti-vaccine activists. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he described how very dangerous Robert F. Kennedy is. If he should be confirmed as leader of the department of Health and Human Services, Deer predicts, he will surround himself with other quacks and vaccine deniers. Recently, he writes, Kennedy has been trying to obscure his radical views against vaccines by talking about food safety. Don’t be fooled. He does not trust science, and his stance on vaccines is dangerous.

He writes:

In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.

He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.

I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had had the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in The New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to fewer than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.

Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic.

In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud.

Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Mr. Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in 2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief.

In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. This research was retracted in 2010. Mr. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa.

Reports say Mr. Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services Department empire. He’s reportedlyeyeing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. But there are plenty of others in Mr. Kennedy’s circle whose claims ought to concern everyone.

Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from Mr. Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists.

In recent days, Mr. Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets. But his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a Covid vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again.

“If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.”

His audience laughed. But it’s not funny.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Science, Trump
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