;)
The Commentariat -- August 12, 2015
Internal links removed.
American "Justice," Ctd. Abu Ghraib, Stateside. Michael Schwirtz & Michael Winerip of the New York Times: "For days after [two men escaped from an upstate New York prison], corrections officers carried out what seemed like a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates, particularly those on the honor block, an investigation by The New York Times found. In letters reviewed by The Times, as well as prison interviews, inmates described a strikingly similar catalog of abuses, including being beaten while handcuffed, choked and slammed against cell bars and walls. They were also subjected to harsh policies ordered by the State Department of Corrections.... More than 60 inmates have filed complaints with Prisoners' Legal Services of New York, an organization that assists indigent prisoners.... No prisoners have yet been linked to [the escapees]. Indeed, it is prison employees who have been implicated: One has pleaded guilty to aiding the escape; another faces criminal charges; nine officers have been suspended; and the leadership of the prison, in Dannemora, has been removed."
A New York Times reader named Barack Obama writes a letter to the editor in response to Jim Rutenberg's essay on the myriad attempts across the decades to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
David Lauter of the Los Angeles Times: "When the Affordable Care Act took effect in October 2013, there were 14 states in which more than 1 in 5 adults lacked health insurance; today only Texas remains, according to data released Monday.... Texas, whose officials have strongly resisted cooperation with the new law, had the highest level of residents lacking insurance before the law took effect and has made among the least progress of any state.... Most of the states that continue to have high levels of uninsured residents have declined Medicaid expansion, which many Republican governors and state legislators oppose."
Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "When the bipartisan advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran decided last week to mobilize opposition against the nuclear deal with Tehran, Gary Samore knew he could no longer serve as its president. The reason: After long study, Mr. Samore, a former nuclear adviser to President Obama, had concluded that the accord was in the United States' interest. 'I think President Obama's strategy succeeded,' said Mr. Samore, who left his post on Monday.... As soon as Mr. Samore left, the group announced a new standard-bearer with a decidedly different message: Joseph I. Lieberman.... Mr. Samore's quiet departure as president of the organization ... is resonating among the small community of experts who have pored over the agreement." ...
... CW: Steve M. tells us that Donald Trump has embraced the epithet "Donald the Whiner." Ha! The Donald will never, ever match Joe Lieberman's mastery of the Art of the Whine. ...
... Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "Three dozen retired generals and admirals released an open letter Tuesday supporting the Iran nuclear deal and urging Congress to do the same. Calling the agreement 'the most effective means currently available to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons,' the letter said that gaining international support for military action against Iran, should that ever become necessary, 'would only be possible if we have first given the diplomatic path a chance.' The release came as Secretary of State John F. Kerry said U.S. allies were 'going to look at us and laugh' if the United States were to abandon the deal and then ask them to back a more aggressive posture against Iran.'" The letter is here. ...
... John Brenahan of Politico: "... Sen. Chuck Schumer has been quietly reaching out to dozens of his colleagues to explain his decision and assure them he would not be whipping opposition to the deal, according to Democratic senators and aides." CW: Yeah, then he tells them all the reasons he'll vote against the deal. But that's not lobbying!
Sarah Latimer & Abby Phillips of the Washington Post: "... a citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers ... all of them white and heavily armed -- said they were in [Ferguson Monday night] to protect someone who worked for the Web site Infowars.com, which is affiliated with talk-radio conspiracy theorist and self-described 'thought criminal against Big Brother' Alex Jones.... The Southern Poverty Law Center ... describes the Oath Keepers as a 'fiercely antigovernment, militaristic group.' 'The core idea of the group is that its members vow to forever support the oaths they took on joining law enforcement or the military to defend the Constitution,' reads the SPLC site. 'But just as central is the group's list of 10 'Orders We Will Not Obey,' a compendium of much-feared but entirely imaginary threats from the government -- orders, for instance, to force Americans into concentration camps, confiscate their guns, or cooperate with foreign troops in the United States.'" ...
... CW: Latimer & Phillips do mention the Oath Keepers' founder Stewart Rhodes, but they don't say that Rhodes is a former Ron Paul Congressional & campaign staffer, as Akhilleus noted in yesterday's thread. Rhodes founded the group in the spring of 2008 because he was worried about a President "'Hitlery' Clinton, in her 'Chairman Mao signature pantsuit.' Would readers [of his blog], he asked, obey orders from this 'dominatrix-in-chief' to hold militia members as enemy combatants, disarm citizens, and shoot all resisters?'" Justine Sharrock wrote in Mother Jones in 2010. ...
... CW: AND it's not as if this is all way-back-when & let's be fair, Ron Paul can't be blamed for the actions of some former staffer who went off the deep end. As Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch reported in April of this year, "... Ron Paul is starring in a new film about the threat of martial law in America which includes calls to join the extremist Oath Keepers militia." Oath Keepers is promoting & helping to finance the film. The film's director, James Jaeger, heads a "research institute" that "serves as a clearinghouse for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, blaming Jews for the Holocaust and accusing them of child murders." I'm certainly not into blaming the son for the sins of the father, but if you want to know whence Li'l Randy derives his enthusiasm for curbing the NSA & demilitarizing the police, it isn't coming from some liberal itch he's scratching; these are tenets of Oath Keepers like the fellows who showed up in Ferguson to "protect citizens." In addition, Li'l Randy & Oath Keepers were joint supporters of notorious rancher-outlaw Cliven Bundy, the Oath Keepers with firearms aimed at federal agents. Randy distanced himself from Bundy only after Bundy's racist comments came to light, but still -- months after that -- Randy initiated a 45-minute meeting with Bundy to discuss property rights.
Tom Lighty of the Chicago Tribune: "Sen. Mark Kirk, who has needed help with some everyday tasks such as preparing meals and physically getting around since suffering a debilitating stroke in 2012, put his live-in caregiver onto his campaign payroll, according to records and interviews. While on Kirk's payroll, the caregiver twice came under criminal investigation -- convicted in one case while the other is still pending in court. Kirk's placement of his caregiver -- who had no prior campaign experience -- onto his campaign staff raises questions about whether Kirk used political donations to pay for personal expenses. Campaign finance records show that Kirk for Senate had paid his caregiver a salary totaling more than $43,000 from August 2013 through the end of 2014. Federal law says campaign funds cannot be used for expenses that would occur regardless of whether the person were running for or holding office."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Gabriel Sherman of New York writes an amusing tale of how Roger Ailes chose Donald Trump over Fox "News"'s biggest star, Megyn Kelly. (Not amusing: "... Kelly has told Fox producers that she's been getting death threats from Trump supporters.") "Ailes offered Trump the chance to do a special on Kelly's prime-time show to clear the air -- an offer Trump flatly refused. 'Donald was sufficiently pissed off that there was no way that was happening,' a person familiar with the call told me. According to the source, Trump's ire was especially stoked after Howard Stern called to tell him about a 2010 interview in which Kelly joked about her breasts and her husband's penis." ...
... Josh Marshall of TPM: "Fox issues unconditional surrender." ...
... Roger's Dilemma. Jonathan Mahler of the New York Times: "To demonstrate its seriousness about vetting the Republican candidates, [Fox News] has to subject Mr. Trump to rigorous questioning, as Ms. Kelly did Thursday night. At the same time, Fox cannot afford to alienate Mr. Trump -- or, more important, the network's core audience. Fox News viewers view the channel as an alternative to a media they see as leaning left. If the network pushes too hard against Mr. Trump, it risks being seen as part of the mainstream media, rather than the antidote to it. In this sense, Fox is facing the same dilemma as the G.O.P. establishment with respect to the party's current front-runner."
"Are You Kidding Me?" Martin Longman of the Washington Monthly takes on WashPo columnist (and David Brooks' "liberal" friend) Ruth Marcus who today attacks a "hardened & embittered" President Obama for his "intolerance" of opposition of the Iran nuclear deal: "We need to freeze this Ruth Marcus column in amber so that it never perishes. Future generations will not believe that it actually existed if they can't see it with their own eyes. It is probably the purest form of wankery that has ever been constructed. I thought I had seen Peak Beltway Trolling, but I had not seen anything."
Presidential Race
Ben Jacobs of the Guardian: "For the first time a poll has Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ahead in the crucial early primary state of New Hampshire. A poll released by Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald shows Sanders leading former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by 44% to 37% in New Hampshire among Democratic primary voters." ...
... ** Dara Lind of Vox has an excellent piece explaining why BlackLivesMatter has attacked Bernie Sanders (& Martin O'Malley) -- and why they're not getting to Hillary Clinton. Lind covers all the bases. CW: I still oppose the BlackLivesMatter tactic of stifling Sanders, but I do understand -- and would support -- the group's motivation in targeting Sanders. This is similar to women's criticism of the civil rights movement -- black women (in fact women of every color) actively supported the fight for racial equality, but when it came to gender equality, leaders of the civil rights movement were mostly silent or blatantly sexist. The idea that a rising tide floats all boats is just as noxious to marginalized groups, who want more than the crumbs from the tables of progressive policymakers, as it is to opponents of GOP trickle-down oligarchonomics.
Carol Leonnig, et al., of the Washington Post: "Hillary Rodham Clinton's attorney has agreed to provide the FBI with the private server that housed her e-mail during her four years as secretary of state, Clinton's presidential campaign said Tuesday. Her attorney also has agreed to give agents a thumb drive containing copies of thousands of e-mails that Clinton had previously turned over to the State Department.... The development ... came the same day that a top intelligence official whose office has been reviewing some of Clinton's e-mails informed congressional leaders that top-secret information had been contained in two e-mails that traveled across the server. The finding, contained in a letter sent to leaders of key oversight committees, marked the first indication from government officials that information regarded as top secret ... may have passed across Clinton's server.... A State Department spokesman late Tuesday described the top-secret designation as a recommendation and said they had not been marked classified at the time, but said staffers 'circulated these e-mails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton.'" ...
... Groundhog Day. Steve M.: Hillary Clinton is having a bad day. In fact, every day until Election Day 2016 may be a a bad day: "Where's the passionate base of support to push back against negative coverage?"
Larry Lessig's Challenge: "Make Democracy Possible"
Jared Bernstein, in the Washington Post: During the GOP debate, the only candidate who had anything substantive to say about improving the economic prospects of poor & middle-class Americans was Ohio Gov. John Kasich. And no wonder: "Dress it up any way you like, the heart of conservative economic policy is still 'trickle-down,' exactly the wrong prescription in the age of inequality. Apparently, there's no debating that point."
Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation in a Washington Post op-ed: "Three years after [Mitt] Romney lost the women's vote by a double-digit margin, in part because of his support for defunding Planned Parenthood, the presidential debates last week made clear Republicans have only become more disrespectful toward women's bodies, more deranged in their hatred of Planned Parenthood and more dismissive of female voters.... The position that was once a liability for Romney has now become a litmus test for GOP contenders."
Kyle Cheney, et al., of Politico on how superPACS allow unpopular candidates to stay in the race. CW: For Republicans, this may be a case of "be careful what you wish for."
I gave to many people before this/ When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. -- Donald Trump, during the GOP presidential debate last week
... independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption. -- Justice Anthony Kennedy, Citizens United majority opinion, 2010
... Vulgarians at the Gate. Charles Pierce: "How is anything Donald Trump said as purely vulgar as watching presidential candidates audition for the Koch Brothers or for international vice lord, Sheldon Adelson?How is anything he has said about the country more vulgar than the fact that we now judge the success or failure of a campaign by how much money it has raised from how many places?... How is anything he's done more vulgar than watching Jeb (!) Bush delay the announcement of his candidacy because he needed more time to work the thin edges of what remains of the law regarding political fundraising. Vulgar? Donald Trump had a thirty year head start on most of these clowns."
... Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: "After days in which Donald J. Trump engaged in a tense war of words with Megyn Kelly over her questioning of him at last week's Fox News debate, he spent Tuesday trying to steer the campaign conversation toward policy issues." ...
... Donald Trump, New Feminist. Eliza Collins of Politico: "After saying last week it's worth having Congress shut down the federal government unless Planned Parenthood is stripped of its $528 million in government funding..., [Donald Trump] changed his tune. Speaking on CNN's 'New Day' Tuesday morning, Trump said that before defunding Planned Parenthood entirely, he would look at the positive aspects of the organization. 'I would look at the good aspects of it, and I would also look because I'm sure they do some things properly and good for women. I would look at that, and I would look at other aspects also, but we have to take care of women,' he said. 'The abortion aspect of Planned Parenthood should absolutely not be funded.'" The federal government does not fund the "abortion aspects." ...
... CW: This would make Donald the only GOP presidential candidate who is not screaming bloody murder about Planned Parenthood. So I say, thanks, Megyn, for creating a feminist.
Adam Nagourney of the New York Times: "Jeb Bush ... issued a blistering attack on Tuesday on the Obama administration's handling of Iraq and terrorism issues, asserting that Hillary Rodham Clinton..., had 'stood by' as secretary of state as the situation in Iraq deteriorated." CW: See Peter Beinart's "legend of the surge," linked yesterday. ...
... Eli Stokols of Politico: on why "Jeb's bid to blame Hillary for the rise of the Islamic State is fraught with peril." Here's one: "Richard LeBaron, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Kuwait under George W. Bush, called [Jeb!'s] argument 'disingenuous.'... 'The notion that the surge worked is belied by facts after it,' said LeBaron, now a Middle East policy expert at the Atlantic Council. 'It gave us some political space to say "we're not leaving a total fiasco" when we probably were; it was really just a period in which we were able to placate and buy off some of the Sunni tribes who took our money and just waited for us to leave. The Bush administration was looking for an exit strategy; the whole country was looking to get out,' LeBaron said. 'The surge was designed to get us out of Iraq, not to keep us involved there.'"
Marco Rubio may not be a scientist, man, but he knows that a human embryo cannot turn into a cat. Marco is so impressed by his brilliant insight that he has turned it into a campaign petition/fundraiser. The quality of our presidential candidates is abysmal. Prof. Marco teaches a university course. I'm not sure if I'd trust him to teach preschoolers the ABCs.
Beyond the Beltway
Patrick McGee & Manny Fernandez of the New York Times: "A white rookie police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black college football player who had broken into a car dealership in this Dallas suburb was fired Tuesday for 'inappropriate judgment' in his handling of the situation, officials said. The Arlington police chief, Will D. Johnson, said that the officer, Brad Miller, 49, had been fired for making mistakes in the fatal shooting of Christian Taylor, 19, which included entering the building without his more experienced partner and which led to an 'an environment of cascading consequences.' Mr. Miller was hired last fall and was still in training when the shooting occurred early Friday morning."
Jim Salter & Alan Zagier of the AP: "About 100 protesters gathered along West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson late Tuesday in a demonstration that was decidedly smaller and calmer than others on recent nights."
News Lede
Washington Post: "China's currency slid for a second day on Wednesday sending more shockwaves through global financial markets and raising fresh questions about the credibility of the country's economic management."
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Reader Comments (7)
Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota who threw his hat in the presidential race in 2008, has been making appearances on a few programs on MSNBC and PBS. Like Howard Dean he has a lot to say, I guess. He makes the point that voters don't seem to realize that when Bernie Sanders describes himself as a Socialist, he is saying "I am a Socialist and that means I am for the political and economic theory that advocates the means of production, distribution, and exchange which is to be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." Well, certainly, the interviewer says, we have a mixed system–-some socialistic programs like Social security, Medicare, Medicaid...along with our capitalistic system––and here Pawlenty breaks in and says, yes, but we pay into those social systems––-but Pawlenty never gets to finish because time is up––gotta go says the interviewer and poor Tim, looking grim gives us a wan smile and says thanks. His point is if people actually understood what a Socialist means they wouldn't be cheering so loudly for Bernie. "We are NEVER going to vote for a Socialist for President." I'm waiting for
Pawlenty to have an opportunity to flesh out his theory on some program that doesn't cut him off at the knees and say, "gotta go." I'd love to listen to him have a discussion with the Sanders man himself.
Another area I'd like to hear the BLM take up is the influx of segregated schools in this country. If they think their aggressive methods are more effective, then lasso Arnie Duncan and drill him on the ABC's of effective integration in our schools. Ask him, loudly, why the most effective teachers teach in the best run schools while the least effective (some without certification) teach in poor, inner-city all-black communities.
Listened to the Kennedy presser tapes (from yesterday) today ––it took me back to those days when I loved watching them. One gets the feeling–– the old footage, sepia colored, clear language all contribute, of course––that the atmosphere was more congenial–-more humane–- and people like Ms Craig were not only welcomed but gave the whole thing an extra buzz and lots of laughs thanks to a president who was clever, witty and appeared to enjoy himself. Obama, like Kennedy, has the same attributes, but his audience isn't the same and the difference is palpable.
@PD Pepe: Thanks for the input on Pawlenty. He's just playing the tried-and-true GOP Fear Word Game. It's fun & laughable. Pawlenty says socialism "means I am for the political and economic theory that advocates the means of production, distribution, and exchange which is to be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
Here's a better description of Sanders' "socialism" by Jason Wilson of the Guardian:
"Judging him by his stated policies and public positions, socialism Sanders-style has a mild, Nordic flavor: capitalism will go on on but with more stringent regulation, higher taxes will be introduced, and greater responsiveness to democratically elected governments will be sought. His 12-point plan envisions building infrastructure, ensuring equal pay for women, making it easier to create worker cooperatives, introducing a carbon tax and reducing the cost of college." That's not exactly urging the the government -- or "the community as a whole" -- to "take over" all aspects of commerce, as Pawlenty pretends.
Maybe Pawlenty is appalled that the Green Bay Packers -- not his favorite team -- are a "socialist" team: the only team in the league not owned by fat cats (an ownership model that the NFL now requires). Maybe Maybe Pawlenty finds the local farmers' market disgusting. Maybe when Pawlenty vacations in Florida, he refuses to shop at employee-owned Publix supermarkets (probably the most popular grocery stores in the state). Maybe credit unions tick him off. Or co-op apartments!
The U.S. has had Bernie-style socialism for more than a century (or since the 18th century, to a lesser extent), a century in which the U.S. became a world power. Most of our roads are socialized, & people like it that way. Our parks & open spaces are socialized. What? You want to pay a toll to walk down the sidewalk? Much of our educational system is socialized.
If the country suddenly went all Pawlenty (or all Li'l Randy), there really would be a New American Revolution. And business leaders -- large beneficiaries of socialism -- would want to be the generals.
Marie
The rape of Greece is about to begin. The power grid, port facilities and airports are to be sold off and privatized. The Germans already have a fire sale deal on the airports.
Poor Greece. Though there are almost as many Greek Americans as Jewish Americans the Greeks have no GAPAC. Nor, apparently, do they have much financial, media and lobbying power.
A surge of refugees is leaving Greece. Recession, inflation, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, rising infant mortality ARE the future for Greece.
And we in the US are obsessed with a bunch of obnoxious Zionists.
Though the game is far from over, an early morning scorecard:
We have little Randy entertaining us with his peculiar brand of American grotesque, running with the crazies, those Ayn Randian supermen (and women) so psychologically deficient they need to arm themselves with assault weapons to feel their white lives still matter (and it is true that no one would pay attention to the Oath Keepers if they did not publicly display their big guns). When Randy gets together with these morons, what could he possibly say? Certainly not teaching, not leading them out of their paranoid wilderness. I see him pursing his lips, trying to appear thoughtful, not smugly impish as he often does, nodding his head in wise agreement: Yeah, gummint is bad. But then he couldn't argue with them. They have the guns after all, and if he did argue, if they didn't shoot him, they still wouldn't give him any money.
Trump, whose strategy seems limited to and by his personality, simply saying loudly, with absolute conviction, whatever pops into his head, making full use of the media which has been promoting, fawning over, and fattening on him for years. Trading on his familiarity, he is this season's Presidential Celebrity Apprentice. He will be fired; just not yet; his poll numbers are high enough to have already earned him renewal for one more. The show will go on as long as there's money in it for the networks. He will not be cancelled soon.
In depressing contrast, we have the automaton-like, careful-stepping, triangulating Clinton whose every move and every utterance are so obviously planned in advance you can hear the machinery at work. She says nothing earth-shaking, just enough to distinguish herself from all her rivals on the Right. Still short on personality, she is long on hints at policy that just might improve our lives but nonetheless possess the political consistency of pablum. She lost to Obama because she couldn't sell herself as a person and in a general election that inability continues to worry me, inspires fear in fact for our future.
Then there's Bernie. Have to love the guy, but he'll never get Wall Street behind him. The suits don't have the guns, but they do have the money, and in the Age of Citizens United money counts more than ever.
Skipped over the rest (Jeb, though, might be a subject for later musings) because I don't believe they count. They will never be President. They are just running. It occurs to me that in the era of the perpetual campaign in which we live, if the Dictionary of Occupational Titles still exists, its latest edition should feature Presidential Candidate as one of its jobs. Currently at least twelve candidates are proving that candidacy is a job in itself, one potentially lucrative enough to attract an increasingly large field.
GB Shaw said something about teaching being the default occupation for those who can't do anything. With all the money floating around elections, running for office is obviously a much better gig, at least for the vacuous and venal.
"When Randy gets together with these morons, what could he possibly say? Certainly not teaching, not leading them out of their paranoid wilderness."
Ken's question is an important one for anyone presenting him or herself as a leader. But his answer is even more illustrative of the dearth of actual leadership on offer from the Right.
These people are panderers. Not leaders. They side, if not openly, at least underhandedly with many who support idiots like the Oaf Keepers and those talking about secession and secret conspiracies against them.
Here's how a true leader handled a very similar situation.
In March of 1783, the Revolution was winding down. Many in the Continental Army, especially officers, were upset that they had not been paid in months. They were outraged at what they saw as congressional food dragging and there was talk of an uprising, of a military coup. Word of this unrest reached General Washington who made a surprise visit to the location of a meeting, in Newburgh, NY, to discuss whether to go ahead with the coup. Washington was granted the floor but was met with surly faces. He advocated for patience and warned that the sort of civil disruption being considered would sully the honor they had gained in battle and overturn the grand ideas that prompted the revolution in the first place. Finally he pulled a letter from his pocket, sent to him by a member of congress, communicating the terms of a new deal for the army, an attempt to set things aright.
As he fumbled with the letter, he pulled out a pair of spectacles, which stunned many who had never seen him wearing glasses. He apologized and said "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."
Accounts of those who were there state that a good number of battle hardened soldiers broke down in tears.
That was an end to all talk of conspiracy and insurrection.
Can you picture any of the current candidates showing this kind of leadership? Trump would be promising them millions if only they agreed to make him king. Li'l Randy would talk about how important it was for the soldiers to make sure they got was coming to them. Cruz would call for immediate revolution from the revolution. Walker would say it was members of congress who had conspired to screw these righteous soldiers.
These people aren't leaders. They're demagogues and sycophants.
Imposters who would be king.
In her comment this morning, P.D. brought up the problem of schools and how the allocation of good teachers and resources tend to drift toward the best schools and away from the schools and students who are in most of need of such superior resources.
This reminded me that I heard a piece on the Marketplace segment of NPR's Morning Edition while driving to work today. This piece looked at the charter school experiment forced on New Orleans students, families, and teachers, an experiment that has failed to deliver on its promises but Bobby Jindal and Confederates see the charter schools scam as an excellent way of hamstringing public schools, public school teachers, and teacher unions while at the same time siphoning off public funds to enrich private corporations who run these schools, corporations who bring in unqualified, untrained "teachers" and whose goals is profit, not education.
One former NO teacher describes the fallout from the charter school debacle this way:
"Holley Bendtsen, a 10th grade teacher at Landry-Walker high school with decades of experience, sees herself as a career educator, in contrast to this new, more transient teacher population. [She says] '...many good veteran teachers who have stayed in the system left'. She says one of her former colleagues is now a school superintendent back East, another is a teacher of the year several times over in North Carolina. Bendtsen says the brain drain she witnessed from New Orleans was a real loss.
'They found a way to get rid of the union,' Bendtsen says, who left teaching for a few years after the storm before returning to New Orleans' schools. 'They got rid of such a huge part of the black middle class, those female teachers, head of households, well-educated people.'"
Hmm....another benefit for Confederates. Screw unions AND blah people. A two-fer!
Still another is that there are no restrictions on the teaching of the most extreme and whacko religious dogma in what used to be public schools. Textbooks come from Bob Jones Publishing. Here are just some of the gems kids now learn at these wonderful, far-right, for-profit schools in Louisiana:
Humans hung out with dinosaurs. Dragons were real (this nugget is in the Bob Jones "Lifescience" textbook!!) Slaveowners were good guys and the KKK is just a local civic group. Also gays are equated with child molesters and rapists. This in a Bob Jones teachers' guide. There are more but this stuff is puke material and I can only take so much. And taxpayers, whether Cuckoo Christian or not, pay for this shit!!!!
And the best part? New Orleans residents have no say in any of this. All of these decisions were made behind closed doors and presented as a fait accompli (as is the case with most charter school takeovers). The Right Wing Way. Wingers are quick to scream in outrage at false representations of impositions by fiat (the ACA), but they have no problem with programs being imposed on Americans against their will as long as they and their allies benefit.
The genesis of this horrific state of affairs was the Katrina disaster. Wingers see situations like this, not as an opportunity to help, to give to beleaguered residents, but to take. It's called "Disaster Capitalism":
"...officials take advantage of a crisis or natural disaster to push through unpopular economic reforms. Just a few months after Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, conservative economist Milton Friedman argued in the Wall Street Journal that the tragedy was 'an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.'"
Friedman also reminded his acolytes to make sure that no one could undo their changes after the disaster period had passed, to make certain that their changes became permanent.
Charter schools have never delivered on any of their promises. They've sucked plenty of money out of taxpayers' pockets, but what education they have supplied (see above list) is often negligible at best and outrageously bad at worst. But it all benefits their goal of killing public education and unions and benefiting corporate schemes like the ones the Bush family grifters are always hawking. And now Bobby Jindal wants to see this clusterfuck of an educational horror show repeated all across the country.
These people really do have a lot to answer for.
Thanks for the charter school post, Akhilleus. Of course, you have it exactly correct.
The old saw about the the road to hell being paved with good intentions certainly applies. Some behind the charter school movement genuinely believed that ridding schools of cumbersome regulations and requirements offered a shortcut to superior education. As anyone who has labored in the public school system(s) knows, there's a nugget of truth in that, but no more a nugget. Of course, there was also an element of truth in the original Tea Party movement. Remember the one that was anti-Wall Street and all for Main Street, the one that was rapidly co-opted by the very corporate forces they thought they were rising against, so that now they and the Congressional members they elected act more on behalf of the Kochs as they do for the Confederates.
The 90's zeitgeist, in which thanks to the fallout from the silicon chip business interests and the mythology we have always attached to their supposed efficiency (given a boost during the mindless Reagan years), were in the ascendance. Make school more like businesses we said, the business model can only improve them--we even went so far as to choose superintendents for many large districts from the business class, an experiment that seldom worked out--and that is what we are still doing.
Of course, at the beginning only a few noticed that business is and must necessarily be about far more than efficiency. It is first of all about profit, and since unions have always gotten in the way of that goal, they are anathema to the business mind.
Furthermore, teachers with the power of a union or any professional organization behind them, are in a position to cause trouble. They can call on their expertise to dispute over curricula, acceptable achievement standards and, as mentioned, the level and kind of their recompense. If teacher unions disappear, all the trouble teachers might cause goes away, and nothing will interfere with the preferred autocratic business model.
Whether originally intended or not, what the charter school movement has become--and let us not forgot "home" schooling, which in many if not most cases is oxymoronic--is a growing salient in the class war that is being fought between those who have and those who don't. By sidestepping the real issues of segregation and poverty, which both experience and volumes of research say are the primary causes of low educational achievement, the charter movement presents only a cheap (and often profitable) pretense of what real school reform would look like.
Unfortunately, real school reform would first require social reform and that costs money those who have it are not willing to spend, especially when they can make a few bucks (vide, Jeb Bush's educational ideas and interests) feeding on the public school carcass they are busy creating.