Houston Chronicle Editorial: Greg Abbott is the Captain Ahab of Texas

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
18

The Houston Chronicle’s editorial board excoriated Texas Governor Greg Abbott for making war on Republican legislators who opposed Abbott’s voucher proposal, and at the same time failing to meet his constitutional obligation to fund public schools.

The editorial board wrote:

Our own Captain Ahab, otherwise known as Gov. Greg Abbott, managed to plunge his harpoon into the belly of the great whale last week. After Super Tuesday, our public-school leviathan lists but is not dead yet. 

The captain’s uber-wealthy allies — lWest Texas oilmen who are avowed Christian nationalists — must be giving thanks to God for Super Tuesday’s results and preparing for the death blow the next time the Texas Legislature meets. In 2022, they funded Abbott’s primary opponent and now their obsession with school vouchers has become the governor’s. 

The aim of these “tycoon evangelicals” — to borrow Bekah McNeel’s label, writing in Texas Monthly — is to get their grappling hooks into our public schools, bleed them out and redirect public resources into private Christian education. So what if our hemorrhaging public school system washes ashore, a blanched skeleton left to the screeching gulls? As long as West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn of Midlandand the Wilks brothers from Cisco are for knocking down the wall — the one between church and state, that is, not the border between Texas and Mexico — how could their agent in the governor’s office be against it?

Abbott is more than halfway there already. Vowing revenge on members of his own party who helped deep-six school vouchers last fall, he relied on a $6 million donation from a Philadelphia billionaire, as well as overlapping donations from Dunn and Wilks, to knock off nine mostly rural representatives of his own party who opposed his obsession. More were forced into a runoff. Based on votes for the House voucher bill during multiple special sessions last fall, he needed to pick up 11 pro-voucher votes. The captain’s likely to reach his ocean’s 11 in the November general election.

“Republican primary voters have once again sent an unmistakable message that parents deserve the freedom to choose the best education pathway for their child,” Abbott said in a statement Tuesday evening. “We will continue to help true conservative candidates on the ballot who stand with the majority of their constituents in supporting education freedom for every Texas family.”

You’ll forgive dedicated public school teachers and administrators, as well as parents of school-age children, if they forgo standing. While Abbott exults, schools around the state — large and small, urban and rural — are grappling with massive budget deficits, thanks to Abbott’s voucher obsession and a Legislature diverted during four sessions last year from meeting its constitutional obligation to adequately fund public schools. 

Remember January of last year? Lawmakers convened in Austin for their regular session almost giddy with the prospect of writing the 2024-25 state budget with an astounding cash balance to work with of $33 billion. They staggered home nearly a year later, having for the most part stiffed the school children of Texas (and by extension, the state as a whole). Rather than using that massive surplus to increase base-level funding, they approved $18 billion in property tax cuts. Meanwhile, school districts were left to grapple with inflation, the loss of federal funding designed to help schools weather the COVID-19 pandemic and no new monies to increase teacher pay, hire additional teachers and make needed investments. 

Nearly every school district in Harris County is underfunded and in crisis, a recent Kinder Institute study determined. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, for example, is facing a budget shortfall of $73.6 million. For Spring ISD, the budget gap is an estimated $25 million. Spring Branch ISD announced recently that it plans to close two schools and charter programs in the face of a $35 million budget deficit.

Meanwhile, lawmakers continued their streak of penury last year: The last time they increased education funding was in 2019. 

They had the best of intentions, it seems, setting aside nearly $4 billion for public education, but those dollars were never allocated. The school finance bill passed by the House ended up in the drink when the Senate added Abbott’s (and the tycoon evangelicals’) voucher scheme, a scheme that would benefit a relative handful of students around the state (and practically none in rural and small-town Texas).

To be clear, school choice or vouchers or education savings accounts — whatever the label of choice — is a legitimate policy issue. It deserves vigorous debate. But we’ve had that debate. Abbott lost on the merits. Wide-scale voucher programs in other states, such as Arkansas, have failed to produce strong academic improvements while draining public schools of funding.

What’s disturbing about the governor’s voucher obsession is his naked obeisance to wealthy special interests who manifestly do not have the best interests of the people of Texas at heart. Their ultimate aim, even if it’s not necessarily the governor’s, is to transform Texas into a Christian-dominated, biblically based state. Those 21 House Republicans who joined with 63 Democrats to block last year’s voucher proposal understood who benefited and who didn’t. And on Tuesday, many paid the political price. It’s of little consolation, we realize, but we salute their courage. 

There will come a time when Texans have had enough of the mean-spiritedness and ideological narrowness of the current governor and his far-right cohorts, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton. There will come a time when they demand more from their elected public servants (emphasis on servants). 

Given our long history with Abbott, it’s hard to imagine that other states do have elected governors, Republicans and Democrats, who acknowledge that they represent every citizen of their state, not only those who voted for them, who seek to unite not divide. In the words of New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, “they focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain.” 

Bruni was writing about Democratic governors, among them Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen “fix the damn roads” Whitmer of Michigan, but the inclination toward moderation and practicality describes a handful of Republican governors, as well. Phil Scott of Vermont and Spencer Cox of Utah come to mind. 

Of course, that’s not Texas — not today’s Texas, that is. Our obsessive Ahab remains at the helm, steering ever more to the starboard, ignoring the risk to his fellow Texans that he’ll one day run aground. We can do better.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Education Industry, Elections, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

John Thompson: The Failure of “Fixing” Schools by Closing Them

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
10

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains what happened when “reformers,” led by Secretary of Educatuon Arne Duncan, advocated for school closures.

He writes:

When non-educators watch Abbott Elementary, the television comedy, they are likely to find it hilarious, but I suspect it takes a teacher to fully understand the accuracy of its portrayal of the weird corporate reforms imposed on Philadelphia schools. But, recent research helps explain why many of even the most fervent advocates for test-driven, competition-driven school turnarounds now acknowledge their failures (even though they don’t apologize for them.).

The third-year premiere of Abbott gave a shout out to the respected journal, Chalkbeat. And, Chalkbeat is again reporting on failed turnarounds in Philadelphia, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as well as why former supporters of school takeovers are repudiating the reward-and-punish method for rapid, transformative change.

Chalkbeat analyzed the Philadelphia mandate, the 2010 Renaissance Initiative. It “strove to turn around about 10% of Philadelphia’s low-performing district schools by ceding them to charter organizations that promised to do better.” By 2023, however, “the Renaissance charter schools as a group mostly performed worse in standardized tests for elementary and middle schoolers than the district averages.”

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First explained, “The goal was to prove that charters would work with any kid, not just about parents who were highly motivated to enter a lottery, and to show that a neighborhood school turned over to a charter organization would do better than if run by the school district.” But, “As far as I can tell, the data didn’t result in that.”

Similarly, “Chris McGinley, who served on both the School Reform Commission that oversaw the district while it was under state control and the Board of Education,” said “‘It was a bad idea poorly implemented.’”

Chalkbeat quoted a second-grade teacher who said, “All the disruption was even more unsettling for her students, … many of whom have already had to deal with trauma in their lives. The staff turnover, she feared, reinforced feelings that adults weren’t there for them.” And a Renaissance principal now says, “He is not a fan of charter conversion as a school reform strategy.” “‘I think it’s offensive … ‘A lot of these measures were experimenting with communities of color.”’

According to the Chalkbeat analysis, “these schools started out well below district and state averages in English Language Arts and math performance,” but “none of the schools are performing particularly well today. For instance, one charter school’s “achievement scores have remained persistently low;” its “math proficiency is at 1%.” 

Next, Chalkbeat told the story of the “high hopes, hard lessons” of Tennessee’s winning federal Race to the Top grant application.” It recalled:

Unlike incremental academic gains associated with school improvement, school turnaround calls for dramatic gains in a short period of time.

But overall, the district has not improved student outcomes, has struggled to retain teachers, and failed to catapult schools out of Tennessee’s bottom 5% as promised. 

It explained “Other takeaways include the importance of giving families an early seat at the table when making changes and seeking more collaboration among state and local officials throughout the process.” And, because of “its heavy-handed takeover of neighborhood schools and broken promises on performance, the ASD also hasn’t endeared itself to a city with a highly charged racial history.”

The quotes from Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) superintendent Chris Barbic were especially important. I’ve long been frustrated by the refusal of true-believers like Barbic who ignored the research which explained why those turnarounds were likely to fail. But Barbic says that “18 months in as he sat in a classroom and [he] saw the ASD’s systems weren’t working.”

Barbic told Chalkbeat, “’The way the ASD was set up, it had a lot more sticks than carrots.’” Moreover, “while the state-run district was positioned to act quickly, Barbic acknowledged ‘we were probably too aggressive on the sticks and not thinking about what other options there were besides doing nothing, using charters, or running the schools ourselves.’” He then “acknowledged that, ‘building grassroots support and collaborating with partners over time is ultimately more effective,’” and “’We’re in a world today where top-down just doesn’t work.’”

These massively funded bets on rapid turnarounds were based on the corporate reform hypothesis that creative destruction would lead to transformational improvements that could be scaled up. It earned the ridicule of Abbott Elementary, students, educators, and researchers. It’s good that more corporate reform advocates are admitting that their experiment failed. But that doesn’t undo the chaos which resulted in serious harm to the students it sought to help.

Today, however, the MAGA crowd is sowing discord and mistrust for political reasons. Extremists like Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters are using the worst of their punitive tactics to spread hatred. They are disrupting schools and other institutions in order to reelect Donald Trump. The rightwing seeks to burn down the barn without having any interest in rebuilding it. Their assault on public education is just one of their weapons for undermining democracy.

So, the history documented by Chalkbeat and satirized by Abbott Elementary is especially important today. It’s time to clearly spread the word about the inherent dangers of massive school closures and other punitive measures regardless of whether its goal is creative disruption, or disruption as a tool for destruction.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Tennessee

NPE Applauds President Biden’s Proposed Education Budget

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
2

The Network for Public Education was happy to see President Biden’s proposed education budget for the next year. In contrast to the Trump administration, which regularly tried to cut federal aid to education, especially to schools that enroll the neediest students, the Biden administration wants to strengthen the federal commitment to education.

I am especially delighted to see an increase in funding for full-service community schools.

NPE released the following statement:

For Immediate Release

The Network for Public Education Applauds President Biden’s FY 2025 Education Budget 

 Given the mandated fiscal restraints, the White House has presented a responsible budget with increases to programs that best serve American children.

Contact: Carol Burris

cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org

(646) 678-4477

The Network for Public Education (NPE) applauds President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget for the U.S. Department of Education.  At a time when all federal agencies are fiscally restrained, the budget adds welcome increases to programs that benefit American children.

According to NPE’s Executive Director Carol Burris, “This budget is the mirror opposite of budget proposals by the present House leadership that slash funding to children served by critical programs like Title I while proposing an increase to the already bloated Federal Charter School Programs.”

Highlights of the President’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget include:

  • An increase of $200 million for Title I, which provides supplemental financial assistance to schools with a high percentage of children from low-income families.
  • An increase of $200 million to IDEA to support the needs of students with disabilities.
  • An additional $50 million for grants to full-service Community Schools (FSCS).

Building on the recent State of the Union Address, the budget also includes more funding for high-quality learning time, such as high-dose tutoring, preschool grants, career and technical education, and mental health services in schools. It also includes additional funds for programs to increase the number of teachers at a time of unprecedented teacher shortages.

The Federal Charter School Program (CSP), which has seen a decrease in applications since 2016, was cut by $40 million. In its rationale, the Department notes that both State Entities and Charter Management Organizations did not deliver the number of schools promised in their applications.

The Network for Public Education fully supports the decreased funding for the CSP program, which has far outlived its usefulness. The growth in the demand for charter schools during the Bush and Obama years has ended. As the program rapidly expanded, so did the opportunity for grift and fraud. “The Department’s recent demand that the IDEA charter chain return $28 million is just the latest example of how the CSP has been abused,” said Burris. This is the first time an administration has recommended a decrease in the CSP since the program began.

We thank the President and Secretary Cardona for preparing a sound budget that puts students first in a time of fiscal restraint.

The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.

                                                                   ###

Categories Biden, Charter Schools, Community Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Supporting public schools, Tutoring, U.S. Department of Education

Texas: Evangelical Billionaires Score Big Wins in State Elections

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2024 //
80

The oil-and-gas Christian nationalists swamped a number of Republican primary races in Texas with millions of dollars. One big issue was vouchers; the other was payback for trying to oust the state’s corrupt Attotney General, Ken Paxton.. They managed to defeat rural Republicans who are conservative but voted against vouchers for religious schools and/or voted to impeach the state’s corrupt Stste Attorney General. And of course, Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass and Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos tossed in more millions.

Having Trump’s name at the top of the ticket made have made a difference too.

The Texas Tribune reported that the billionaires won 11 of the 28 races they paid for:

West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks entered the 2024 primary election cycle wounded.

Their political network was in the middle of a scandal over its ties to white supremacists. Republicans were calling on each other to reject the billionaires’ campaign money. And their enemies believed they were vulnerable — one bad election day from losing their grip on the state.

Instead, Dunn and Wilks emerged from Tuesday perhaps stronger than ever — vanquishing old political foes, positioning their allies for a November takeover of the state Legislature, and leaving little doubt as to who is winning a vicious civil war to control the state party.

In race after race, more moderate conservative incumbents were trounced by candidates backed by Dunn and Wilks. Their political network made good on its vows for vengeance against House Republicans who voted to impeach their key state ally, Attorney General Ken Paxton, advancing more firebrands who campaigned against bipartisanship and backed anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Tuesday’s election also paved the way for the likely passage of legislation that would allow taxpayer money to fund private and religious schools — a key policy goal for a movement that seeks to infuse more Christianity into public life.

All told, 11 of the 28 House candidates supported by the two billionaires won their primaries outright, and another eight are headed to runoffs this May. And, in a sign of how much the state party has moved rightward, five of their candidates beat incumbents in rematches from 2022 or 2020 — with some House districts swinging by double-digits in their favor. Of the candidates they backed, they donated $75,000 or more to 11 of them — six who won, and four who went to runoffs.

Tuesday was a stark contrast from just two years ago, when Dunn and Wilks’ top political fundraising group poured $5.2 million into a host of longshot candidates — much more than what they spent in the current election cycle. They lost badly that year — 18 of the 19 challengers to Texas House members they backed were defeated. Their only successful House candidate that year was Stan Kitzman of Pattison, who toppled former Rep. Phil Stephenson of Wharton in a runoff.

Among the triumphant on Tuesday was Mitch Little, aided by at least $153,000 in Dunn and Wilks cash, who defeated Rep. Kronda Thimesch in a campaign that focused on Little’s defense of Paxton from impeachment charges in the Senate trial last summer. Three days before he won, Little appeared at an eventin Denton County with Paxton and, among others, Steve Bannon, the political operative who helped rally the far right behind then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

And another Dunn and Wilks candidate, David Covey, stunned the state by winning more votes than House Speaker Dade Phelan — the No. 1 target of the state’s far-right in part because of his role in the Paxton impeachment and refusal to ban Democrats from House leadership positions. Phelan now faces a runoff from Covey and the prospect of being the first Texas Speaker since 1972 to lose his primary.

Certainly, Tuesday’s dark-red wave can’t be attributed solely to Dunn and Wilks. Texas GOP primaries have historically been decided by small shares of voters, many of them further to the right of even the party’s mainstream. This election cycle, the billionaires’ targets also overlapped with an unlikely ally, Gov. Greg Abbott, who poured more than $6 million into his quest to rid the Texas House of Republicans who defied his calls for school voucher legislation last year. (Dunn and Wilks’ political groups supported Abbott’s opponent in his 2022 gubernatorial primary.)

Meanwhile, Paxton barnstormed the state as he sought retribution against incumbents who supported his impeachment. And, perhaps most importantly, former President Donald Trump was active in many contests — following the lead of Paxton and his other ally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and offering late endorsements that bolstered right-wing candidates.

Even so, the billionaires’ fingerprints appear all over the outcomes. Since January, they spent more than $3 million to support candidates through a new political action committee, Texans United For a Conservative Majority. That PAC is a rebrand of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, which has been at the center of a political maelstrom since early October…

Jonathan Stickland, then the president of Defend Texas Liberty, was caught hosting Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite and white supremacist, prompting Dunn to issue a rare public statement through the lieutenant governor. Stickland was quietly removed from his position with the PAC.

Subsequent reporting by The Texas Tribune revealed other ties between white supremacists and groups funded by Dunn and Wilks, prompting outcry from some Republicans and calls for the Texas GOP to distance itself from Stickland’s groups.

As votes continued to tally in the far right’s favor this week, Stickland returned from a post-scandal social media sabbatical to gloat.

“We warned them,” Stickland wrote Wednesday on X, one of the handful of posts he’s made since shrinking from the public eye after the Fuentes meeting. “They chose not to listen. Now many are gone.”

Dunn and Wilks both made their fortunes in West Texas oil and, in the last 15 years, have poured more than $100 million into a constellation of political action committees, dark money groups, nonprofits and media websites that they have used to push the state GOP further to the right.

Their strategy has been to incrementally move the party toward their hardline views by painting fellow conservatives as weak and ineffectual — as “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only — and promising well-funded primary challengers to lawmakers who defy their network and its aims. With almost endless wealth, they have poured millions of dollars into inexperienced candidates who often lose but advance the far right’s long-term goals by slowly normalizing once-fringe positions, bruising incumbents, depleting their campaign coffers and making them more vulnerable in the next election cycle.

For years, many Republicans have denounced the strategy, noting that the state Legislature is routinely ranked as the most conservative in the country and warning that Dunn and Wilks’ no-enemies-to-our-right approach to politics would eventually cost the party elections and open the doors to outright extremists.

This year’s elections show just how successful the billionaires have been in pulling the party toward their hardline views.

Open the link to finish the story and read about the extremists installed by the billionaires to promote “Christian values,” like no gun control.

Did Jesus advocate for open carry?

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Elections, Texas, Vouchers

Watch A Remarkable Interview of Former Ambassador Michael McFaul

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2024 //
4

I have recently been watching online interviews conducted by veteran reporters at The Washington Post.

The best of them so far was the interview of Michael McFaul, former Ambassador to Russia by David Ignatius.

McFaul speaks with great authority about Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin, and the war in Ukraine. McFaul talks about the importance of passing new aid to Ukraine and appeals directly to Speaker Mike Johnson to let the funding bill come to a vote.

Ignatius asks him what additional sanctions might be imposed on Russia to deter its brutal invasion of Ukraine. He says the U.S. and Europe should transfer to Ukraine the billions of Russian assets that are now frozen.

When asked about the future of Russia, McFaul says that Russia is in decline now because it has driven out a million of its “best and brightest,” who have fled to other countries. If Putin had turned to democracy in 2000, he said, Russia would now be one of the richest nations in the world.

Michael McFaul on Russian presidential election and Alexei Navalny’s legacy  

The death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has sparked worldwide condemnation and renewed questions about political freedom in Russia. On Monday, March 4 at 1:00 p.m. ET, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul joins The Post’s David Ignatius to assess Navalny’s legacy, Russia’s upcoming presidential election and the ongoing war in Ukraine.  

By Washington Post Live

https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2024/03/04/michael-mcfaul-russian-presidential-election-alexei-navalnys-legacy/

Download The Washington Post app.

Transcript: World Stage: The Future of Russia with Michael McFaul

https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2024/03/04/transcript-world-stage-future-russia-with-michael-mcfaul/

Categories Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Innovation, International, Justice

Jay Kuo: Katie Britt’s Disgusting Lie about Border Security

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2024 //
33

Blogger Jay Kuo provides context and detail for Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s lie about a woman who was sex-trafficked in Mexico twenty years ago, which Senator Britt blamed on Biden. Kuo does not mention the irony of pinning sex crimes on President Biden when her own party’s nominee was convicted of sexual assault and accused of sexual assault by another twenty women. Trump just posted a bond of $100 million for the woman whom he sexually assaulted and repeatedly defamed.

Jay Kuo writes:

By now you’ve probably heard the news: Sen. Katie Britt’s rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union was not just a painfully bad theatrical performance, one worthy of an SNL cold open by none other than Scarlett Johansson. It also contained at its core a bold-faced lie: that a sex trafficking victim, who was raped repeatedly at age 12, had met with Sen. Britt and was a stark example of Biden’s failed border policies.

The lie was surfaced quickly by freelance journalist Jonathan Katz, a reporter with “years of experience as an Associated Press foreign correspondent in Haiti and Mexico, where he covered things that would make Katie Britt cry real tears,” according to reporting by AL.com. Katz quickly proved that the sexual trafficking and rapes referenced by Senator Britt took place 20 years ago—during the George W. Bush administration. They also took place not in the United States, as Britt had all but declared, but rather in Mexico, and far from the border.

It took a bit of asking from folks online why mainstream media had not picked up such an important story, but in a report finally published on Saturday, the Washington Post was able to confirm the gist of Katz’s reporting. The woman whose story was relayed by Sen. Britt before the entire nation was Karla Jacinto Romero, according to a confirmation by Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director. 

Romero is a sexual trafficking victims’ rights advocate. Her story is widely known. In fact, she testified before Congress in 2015 about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008—again, back when George W. Bush was president. Yet Sen. Britt took that story and made it one about the border, which it most certainly was not.

In today’s piece, I’ll focus on three things: 

  • A breakdown of the dangerous deception perpetrated by Sen. Britt, following the analysis of Katz and the Washington Post;
  • The moral depravity it takes not just to lie this way but to actually exploit the story of a sexual trafficking victim for political gain; and
  • The deep irony at the heart of Sen. Britt’s emotional plea that we pay attention to stories like the one she told America.

Sen. Britt willfully scammed the American public

It’s hard to forget the moment when Sen. Britt first brought up the story of a woman who, at the age of 12, had been repeatedly raped by cartels. Here were her words on Thursday night before a national audience of millions, fake emotion crackling in her voice:

We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

After Sen. Britt was called out for connecting this story somehow to President Biden, reporters began asking her office to confirm a few things. Even with some pressing, her communications director insisted in a written statement that the “story Senator Britt told was 100% correct.” 

That’s why we need to unpack the rhetorical jujitsu Sen. Britt deployed to achieve this deception.

As the Washington Post observed, the story above unfolds in five parts.

• She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.

• Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.

• At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”

• She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”

• She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

And yet, Biden, the border and the cartels had nothing to do with Romero. According to her testimony, cited by the Post, after her mother threw her out of the house, a pimp took advantage of her, and she spent four years in a brothel, escaping at age 16. 

Nor was Romero ever trafficked across the border to the U.S. Instead, she was the victim of sexual tourism, with “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.” That is horrifying in its own way, but decidedly not about the border.

As Jonathan Katz noted in his now viral TikTok video about Britt’s lies, the senator had made it seem like she had met the woman “sitting by the banks of the Rio Grande, … holding her hand … getting her to tell her the story that she won’t tell anyone else.” In fact, Britt met Romero at a press conference organized by three GOP women senators, including Britt, and a Fox News reporter known for inflammatory pieces on immigration.

Sen. Britt tried to scam the entire nation by trying to spin a story from two decades ago about a child victim of sexual tourism into a story today about Biden’s failed policies, sex trafficking across the border, and cartels. For that, the Washington Post gave her four Pinocchios—its worst rating, a real whopper.

Stolen pain and fear-mongering

It takes a complete absence of a moral compass to leverage someone else’s tragic story—one she has carried for decades and made her life’s mission to tell others—into a tool for raw and cynical political gain. But that’s what Sen. Britt did, perhaps because, as the New York Times observed in its follow-up piece, “As a rhetorical device, it would be hard [to] conjure up a more powerful and resonant example.”

The Times found Romero and interviewed her directly about how she felt knowing her story was being leveraged by Britt for entirely different, political purposes. Because we as a nation owe Romero an apology for allowing our dysfunctional politics to overtake and derail her important work, I want to highlight what she told the paper:

Ms. Jacinto, who spoke with the Times Saturday from Mexico, said she had not been informed ahead of time that Ms. Britt would be discussing her in the speech and only learned about it after a video pointing out the deceptive framing of the senator’s speech was posted by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday.

“I only found out via social media,” said Ms. Jacinto, who continues to speak frequently about human trafficking and who is supported by a U.S.-based nonprofit, Reintegra, that provides educational grants to victims of sex trafficking in Latin America. “I thought it was very strange.”

She said she preferred to keep politics out of the question of human trafficking. “I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking and I don’t think it should be political,” she said. “The work I do is not a game.” 

Not a game, indeed. U.S. voters, particularly suburbanites who are looking at the question of immigration more closely now and assessing the positions of both parties, may begin to understand the extent to which the GOP is sensationalizing the issue. 

Already, the Republicans have pressed the tragic story of Georgia student Laken Riley, who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant, as far as they can, mentioning her at every opportunity and even inviting her family to meet with Trump at his recent rally in the state. The point of this is clear: The GOP now seeks to paint all migrants with the same broad unfair brush of criminality. This of course defies government statistics showing that migrants commit fewer crimes than non-migrants and that there is no evidence of the “migrant crime wave” that the Republicans and Fox have raised repeatedly. Instead, crime rates in cities where migrants have been heading are actually down, which would be an inconvenient fact for the GOP narrative if facts actually ever mattered to their base.

Republicans also appear to care far more about this one death, horrific as it is, than about the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by their other policies, from vaccine denialism to their failure to enact sensible gun restrictions. It means, simply put, that they don’t really care about Riley. They just find her death at the hands of a migrant useful.

The cynicism and hypocrisy is breathtaking.

The ultimate irony

I want to close by highlighting a glaring contradiction within Sen. Britt’s rebuttal. On the one hand, she begs us to think of victims like Romero who are suffering, she claims, from being trafficked across our border and sexually assaulted and exploited.

But the logical conclusion of that plea is that we should show more compassion in our asylum laws for women like she described. Instead, Britt supports the kinds of draconian policies that would deny legal protection to sex trafficking victims. 

As former Congressmember Tom Malinowski noted,

It’s not just that Katie Britt’s story was false (since the woman she cited was trafficked by cartels within Mexico). 

It’s that the border policy she supports would be to send victims like that back to Mexico into the hands of the cartels, with no chance to seek asylum.

The recent House election in NY-3, where the positions of the parties on immigration were tested before voters, proved that Republicans don’t automatically have a winning hand when it comes to the border. This is especially true now that the GOP has rejected the only bipartisan solution to the issue, all because Donald Trump wants to keep wielding it as a political weapon. 

It is incumbent upon the media, the public, and our Democratic leaders to call out the cheap ploys and race-baiting that Trump, Britt and the rest of the GOP deploy to rile up the public, all while doing nothing to actually fix the problem.

As President Biden said in his State of the Union, we can fight about fixing the border, or we can fix it. All that GOP officials like Sen. Britt offer are more lies, rank hypocrisy and fear. And those have never led to sound policies or solutions, just more division and anxiety

Categories Biden, Elections, Lies, Trump

Justin Parmenter: North Carolina Taxpayers Are Funding Bible-Thumping Bigots

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2024 //
4

NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter has been reviewing the religious schools that now receive public funding and frequently posts his findings on Twitter (X is banned here).

He posted some of the horrifying stories on his blog, Notes from the Chalkboard.

Taxpayers in North Carolina should be outraged to learn where their dollars are going.

He writes:

A Union County pastor is under fire for saying from the pulpit that he would not convict a rapist if his victim were wearing shorts. And if you’re a taxpayer in North Carolina, you are funding his organization….

Under the leadership of Bobby Leonard, Bible Tabernacle Church opened a private school called Tabernacle Christian School in 1972. This school receives public tax dollars via the Opportunity Scholarship school voucher program which was created by the North Carolina General Assembly in 2014.

Tabernacle Christian School has received voucher dollars every school year since 2014-15 for a grand total of $3,649,766 in public taxpayer funds (that data available here). 

In the past two years alone, Bobby Leonard’s organization has received nearly $2,000,000 ($902,315 in 2023-24 and $923,328 in 2022-23).

In 2023 North Carolina’s state legislature achieved a veto-proof supermajority by flipping a legislator, then tripled funding for school vouchers, the vast majority of which to go private religious schools. By 2031 more than half a billion dollars a year in public funding will be going to these organizations…

I would venture to say that the vast majority of North Carolinians would prefer NOT to have their hard-earned tax dollars subsidizing institutions that espouse hateful and violent philosophies like Bobby Leonard’s.

Unfortunately, private schools are legally permitted to discriminate against students based on factors like religious beliefs and sexual orientation, even when they’re receiving public funding.

And discriminate they do.

This voucher-receiving school in Fayetteville, NC specifically bans “Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, non Messianic Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists” and refers to homosexuality as “deviate [sic] and perverted.”

Please open the link and see how well compensated these religious schools are by North Carolina’s taxpayers.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Extremism, Funding, North Carolina, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Dark Brandon Proves He’s Strong and Sharp

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2024 //
37

I loved President Biden’s State of the Union speech. He was feisty and sharp. It eas gratifying to see President Biden engage the loud-mouth Republicans who interrupted him. That’s always a risky move in a nationally televised speech, because you never know how it will turn out. But Biden pounced at the opportunity to engage in repartee with his challengers from the Republican side. He showed his quick intelligence and mental sharpness. And did it with a smile.

Thom Hartman agreed. He wrote:

— State of the Union: Dark Brandon shows up & proves he’s still capable of kicking Republican ass. With the exception of rightwing hate media, reviews of President Biden’s SOTU speech Thursday night have been universally positive. He was on fire, filled with energy, and repeatedly went off-script to take on the classless Republicans who heckled and harassed him throughout the speech. Most amazing was how Republicans in the audience refused to applaud lines like, “We will not bow down to Putin” and his call for removing lead pipes to “stop the brain damage they’re causing our children.” The GOP has nearly totally become the party of Putin, and appears to even love lead poisoning America’s kids. They even booed their own legislation to secure the southern border! This is way beyond partisanship: something is really wrong, corrupt, rotten, and bizarre within the party now that it’s been completely taken over by a racist, hateful, orange-faced psychopath. And Senator Katie Britt’s effort to rehearse her tryout for the Scarlett O’Hara role in a high-school performance of Gone With The Wind just made the crisis within the party even clearer: did she really expect people to believe her “American carnage” riff and lies about the border? Now it’s up to us normal people to take our country back and restore sanity to our political processes. Double-check your voter registration, particularly if you live in a Red state, at vote.org. 

In case you missed the story, Alabama Senator Katie Britt was caught in a big fat lie when she gave the Republican response to Biden’s address. She claimed that she met a Mexican woman who had been the victim of sex-trafficking since she was 12, and this happened on Biden’s watch in the United States. An independent journalist named Jonathan Katz did the research on when Britt went to the border and whom she met with. He documented that the Mexican woman she met described events that happened in MEXICO, not the U.S., between 2004-2008, when George W. Bush was president. Why did she lie? She made no mention of the recent Alabama state court decision making it a crime to dispose of frozen IVF specimens, on the grounds that these embryos are unborn children.

— Russians are intervening in the election! The New York Times is reporting on a series of new “newspaper” sites that are popping up across America. With names like D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and the Miami Chronicle, Russian disinformation experts have put up what are pretending to be American newspapers. They steal content from local papers and national news sites like Reuters, then toss in the occasional pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, anti-Democrat articles. So far, there’s been no response from our government to this blatant attempt to influence the 2024 election by misleading American voters, and doing anything may be difficult as they’re hosted on Russian servers and outside the reach of US law. Putin was deeply involved in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump — to the point that Robert Mueller indicted nearly two dozen Russians for election interference — and they tried again with a major social media presence in 2020. With Ukraine in the balance (and Medvedev saying last week that they would be taking part of Poland next) expect Moscow to be vigorous in their efforts to get their agent, Trump, back into the White House. 

Categories Biden, Character, Democracy, Elections

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Why Trump Humiliates Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2024 //
17

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor at New York University who specializes in the study of authoritarian leaders. Here she writes about how Trump enjoys humiliating those he has defeated. The more he insults them, the more they grovel. Cases in point: Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham.

She writes:

Authoritarian politicians are fragile and insecure creatures, always looking over their shoulders to see who is after them. To build themselves up and deter potential challengers, they take others down in public, letting them know exactly where they stand. They apply this same vicious treatment even to their most loyal collaborators, so that no one ever feels safe and thus everyone continues to act in a slavish manner. Throughout history, such leaders have never lacked a steady supply of opportunists and profiteers who are all too willing to play this game, even to the detriment of their dignity. The Donald Trump-era GOP is the latest example.

Trump has used ritual humiliation to make the GOP his personal tool, and the list of Republicans he has mocked publicly is long. In classic autocratic tradition, the more submissive Republican elites are with Trump — supporting him through impeachments, indictments and a coup attempt that sent them running for their lives — the more he openly scorns them, losing few opportunities to cut them down.

Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight.

When Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the former GOP presidential candidate, showed up at Trump’s victory rally after a January campaign stop in New Hampshire, he might have thought he would earn points. Instead, Trump scorned him: “Did you ever think [Haley] actually supported you, Tim?” a smirking Trump said, referring to Nikki Haley’s pledge to support Trump if he becomes the GOP nominee. “And you’re the senator of her state. … You must really hate her,” Scott’s response? “I just love you,” he told Trump.

“That’s why he’s a great politician,” Trump declared with a self-satisfied smile.

Since then, Scott has been performing self-abasement spontaneously, likely to Trump’s delight. “I’m far better encouraging and being excited and motivated for President Trump than I was for myself,” Scott said after voting in the South Carolina primary. And at the post-primary rally, he assured the audience that he would keep his speech short because “the longer I speak, the less you hear of him.”

Scott might seem to win the award for bowing and scraping. But his fellow senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, is giving him some stiff competition. Graham is forever paying for the sin of criticizing Trump in 2016. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed……and we will deserve it,” Grahamtweeted in May 2016; he also called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.”

Scholars use the term “hollowed out” to describe institutions that lose their independence in autocracies when they have been purged of anyone who is not loyal to the leader. But individuals who collaborate with authoritarians can end up hollowed out, too, bereft of their morals and their self-esteem. This is what has happened to Graham.

Graham is a former military lawyer and national security hawk (including on Russia), but his main cause now seems to be defending Trump, to the point of reversing his view expressed after Jan. 6 that presidential conduct is subject to American law. Since that opinion clashed with Trump’s claim that he should have presidential immunity for everything and anything he has done, including inciting an insurrection, Graham’s opinion could not stand.

Politicians who play the leader’s ritual humiliation game may think that if they show him enough public support, at the right moments, their past indiscretions will be forgotten. That is never the case. Even worse, the politician can find that he or she has become the enemy of the leader’s rabid followers, as well.

That’s the situation of Graham, booed regularly at Trump rallies by MAGA members, including in his home state, as though all of his slavish behavior to Trump has meant nothing to them. At a July rally with Trump, Graham was jeered and called a “traitor” by the crowd, prompting Trump to give him a halfhearted compliment (“he’s there when you need him”) while also promising the crowd he would get Graham “straightened up.”

And lest there be any doubts that Trump intended this display of debasement, he pulled the same move after Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Though Graham called Trump “the most qualified man to be president,” audience members booed him. The former president, playing the enlightened despot, once again assured his minions that “I love him, he’s a good man.” 

Scott may have mastered the philosophy of ritual humiliation — I am nothing, my leader is everything, and everyone should know it — but Graham’s journey provides the stuff of a morality tale.

Please open the link to finish reading the post.

Categories Cruelty, Elections, Trump

Chris Tomlinson: Houston’s Economy Needs Immigrants

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2024 //
14

Chris Tomlinson is a regular opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle. I tuned in to a zoom with him yesterday and learned that he is known for his fierce independence. I signed up for his column and discovered his thoughts about “the immigration crisis,” which Americans tell pollsters these days is the most serious problem facing the nation. Tomlinson thinks both parties have failed to tell the truth, so he did. Trump, in particular, has demagogued the issue with his fear-mongering.

Tomlinson writes:

The two-ring presidential circus performed along Texas’ border on Thursday, injecting cash into the local economy but adding little to the national debate over one of the year’s most consequential issues. 

President Joe Biden met with local officials in Brownsville and blamed Republicans in Congress for blocking new border security spending for political advantage. He correctly stated the broken asylum system encourages desperate people to gamble their life savings for a chance to live in the United States.

“If they get by the first day, they’ve got another five, seven, eight years before they have to do anything because they know (the immigration courts) cannot handle the caseloads quickly, and they’ll be able to stay in this country,” Biden said.

“With the new policies in this bill and the addition of 4,300 additional asylum officers, we’ll be able to reduce that process to less than six months,” he added.

Former President Donald Trump paraded before U.S. flags and uniformed National Guard troops in Eagle Pass. He renewed themes popularized by the Ku Klux Klan a century ago, sowing fear of foreigners and painting his opponent as a friend of dark-skinned criminals.

“They’re coming from jails, and they’re coming from prisons, and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums. And they’re terrorists. They’re being let into our, our country,” Trump said in a rambling, bigoted speech. “It’s not just South America. It’s all over the world. The Congo, very big population coming in from jails from the Congo.”

Immigration is the most critical problem facing the nation, Americans told a recent Gallup poll. The issue was top of mind for 57% of Republicans, 22% of independents and 10% of Democrats.

“A separate question in the survey finds a record-high 55% of U.S. adults, up eight points from last year, saying that ‘large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally’ is a critical threat to U.S. vital interests,” Gallup added.

Most voters believe Trump would do a better job on border security, while only 28% of Americans approve of Biden’s immigration policies. Biden is in deep trouble, with only a 38% approval rating and a base already angry over his Middle East policies.

Anyone who’s spent time along the border will tell you most Americans don’t understand what goes on there. For example, asylum seekers are not invading the country; they turn themselves in as quickly as possible. Most of the $29 billion worth of drugs smuggled into the United States crosses at commercial entry points, which are the arterial roads keeping our economy going.

Migrants, documented or not, are critical for our workforce and society. I know people like to draw distinctions between documented and undocumented migrants, but both contribute more to the United States economy than they take. Most undocumented workers would happily pay a fine to get right with the government.

In Houston, immigrants make up almost a quarter of the population and 31% of the workforce, U.S. census data analyzed by the American Immigration Council, the Texas Association of Business and the Center for Houston’s Future found. Immigrants in the Houston statistical area earned $66.5 billion and paid $11.1 billion in federal taxes.

If Trump rounded these people up and deported them, as he promised, the construction, hospitality and hospital services would collapse.

Houston is home to more than 572,000 undocumented migrants whose households earned $13 billion in 2021. Most have fake documents and paid $794.8 million in federal taxes and $595.6 million in state and local taxes, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office reported.

Meanwhile, Biden must come up with a new approach to processing asylum seekers after Congress made it clear they will not help. But he must overcome opposition from within his party and federal courts.

Federal and international law requires the United States to grant asylum to anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution. However, establishing which claims meet that high standard under current policies can take years.

Opinions differ on what he can do without new laws. Seventy-seven Democratic lawmakers sent Biden a letter in January objecting to the deal he offered Republicans. A federal judge in San Diego has forbidden authorities from separating families at the border, and an earlier ruling limits how long Immigration and Customs Enforcement can detain families with children.

Trump’s speech on Thursday was craven but likely effective. Biden’s blame-shifting onto Republicans in Congress is disingenuous and ineffective.

While the campaigns play political games, though, people suffer, something too many overlook.

Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.

[Note from Diane: I added the bold emphasis.]

Categories Bigotry, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Houston, Immigration, Propaganda, Texas
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