Getting all the kids infected so we can own the libs

Just in case the fast approaching benefits expiration and evictions cliff wasn't enough stress for everyone to handle at once, we've also got this.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will consider “minimum health and safety standards” for reopening Louisiana schools — triggered by a new law — during a special meeting Tuesday.

The public got a glimpse of what those standards will look like — and which could be up for debate — when Louisiana Department of Education State Superintendent Cade Brumley and BESE President Sandy Holloway spoke before the House Committee on Education Monday. The standards, drafted as emergency replacement bulletins for traditional schools and charter schools, include limits on class size, bus capacity, social distancing and cleaning requirements and largely reflect guidelines previously released by the LDOE.

The "standards" are, like the rules under which everything else has been operating under these circumstances, deliberately loose. Because we really are all just making this up as we go along.

Face coverings — which are, for now, required in businesses and public buildings for anyone over the age of eight as part of an executive order effective Monday — are a point of major political contention in the state and around the country. BESE’s draft language stops short of a mask mandate. It appears to offer schools some flexibility, saying children older than eight and adults inside a school building “must wear a face covering to the greatest extent possible and practical within the local community context.”

All of which is completely understandable. Everyone really is trying to feel their way through this. It might be a bit easier to figure out what is "possible and practical within the local community context," if we hadn't designed such a convoluted context to begin with.

Until this point, local and state guidelines have been largely based on federal guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and have been packaged as suggestions, not mandates. Local Education Agencies, or LEAs, are in charge of their own plans. In New Orleans, most charter schools are considered their own LEAs and it’s been unclear what role the district might play in reviewing or authorizing any reopening plans.

The district did not respond to inquiries regarding whether it would be approving individual charter group plans.

The thing is, though, a virus doesn't care about any of this stuff.  So while it's fine for state agencies and charter boards to differentiate their "local contexts" and spheres of authority, ideally their plans for containing the virus should all be relatively uniform.  This is precisely the reason the governor has had to issue a statewide mask mandate.  Exceptions and discretion are going to come into play as a matter of course, but the baseline rules need to have some clarity. Devolving all the authority to individual school districts and charter boards is just inviting more chaos.

Keep in mind, also, inviting chaos may actually be the point.  At least from Betsy DeVos's perspective.

BASH: You're the Secretary of Education. So why do you not have guidance on what schools should do if there's a coronavirus outbreak just weeks before you want them to reopen?

DeVOS: There are really good examples that have been utilized in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/RBFxZ5OeFw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2020

All the schools MUST OPEN...  and, you know, we're sure they will figure out how.  Why would they be so deliberately cruel and disruptive? The short answer is, screw you, that is why.

Every push to "reopen" anything right now, be it a school or a hotel or a fish tank, or whatever is a push by the bosses to blame the workers they subject to unsafe conditions for their own peril.  A bill John Bel just signed into law protects certain employers, including school districts from liability if their workers or the people they serve get sick.  The Trump administration is pushing for similar measures to go into the next round of  federal "relief" legislation.

What is your company or organization telling you right now about leave time? What are the mixed messages they are sending you about "safety" on the job vs. your obligation to show up and put yourself and others in danger? That kind of chaos is happening in every workplace forced by policy makers in Washington to "reopen" with minimal guidance or support. The goal of the policy, as always, is a more frightened and compliant labor pool.

And it is being implemented with little or no regard for your safety or the safety of your children. 

QOTD

Karen Carter Peterson:

The Louisiana Senate is urging new federal Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to tour the state's public schools.

A resolution asking her to visit passed 24-0 Thursday (Feb. 16). Fifteen members of the state Senate were absent.

DeVos has raised unprecedented opposition on the left and center, in part, as a result of her limited experience in traditional education and emphasis on providing private school vouchers to students in sub-par public schools. U.S. Senate Democrats opposed her nomination across the board, joined by two Republicans. Her first visit to a public school was met by protests.

State Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, head of the Louisiana Democratic Party, was wary of the resolution. She asked, acerbically, "Is it commending her for all the great work that she might have done that I'm not aware of?"

All they care about is being 'Merican

Every top level Trump adviser or cabinet member is somewhere on the scale of criminal-to-supervillain. But it's interesting that the "Resistance" only cares about the "traitor."

Puzder is a sexual abuser who is part of a pro-slavery lobby.

DeVos wants to eliminate public schools. Her brother owns a private army.

Sessions is pretty much a Klansman.

Mnuchin financed Batman vs Superman

But the one that establishment Democrats really want to focus on is the "traitor" so they can all puff up and be super 'Merican about it. Why is this the thing they care about?


It's because their actual constituency is comprised of millionaires and billionaires who care about "stability" and "security" (for themselves and their money anyway) but not so much about basic rights for working people. But you knew that. 

Plans

Senator Cassidy has plans.

Cassidy is also planning to host a townhall in Metairie on February 22 just in case you want to go ask him about his plans for that $70,200 from the DeVos family.  

Obvious things are obvious

Bill Cassidy received $70,200 in campaign contributions from the DeVos family. 

The massive outpouring from concerned constituents in recent days wasn't enough to outweigh it. It's a long while before Cassidy faces the voters again. But maybe if we make note of the obvious now, we'll remember when the time comes.

Can't do this halfway

If there is going to be a sustained and effective #resistance to Trumpistas it must also rid us of the rot and corruption that allowed them to rise in the first place.  That resistance, then, can't be half-assed.    

An anti-Trump resistance movement must be broad, but it must direct its anger and energy not just at the enemy in the White House, but the failed leadership that let him get there. The Tea Party movement couldn’t have emerged with Bob Dole and George W Bush among their leaders. We can’t build our anti-Trump resistance, settled with generations of unpopular Democratic party leaders either.

The alternative must come from below – and certainly protests like the Women’s March are inspiring starts. Millions marched, many of whom had never attended a political protest before. It was hopefully a sign of things to come. Yet it is crucial that we know what this broad movement is for, as well as what it is against.

Once we are finished punching out the Nazis, we have to replace them with a kind of politics that responds directly to the concerns of poor and working people rather than pretends to do so in order to ease the conscience of upper middle class voters.  If this means a better and more robust Democratic Party, then let's work on making that happen.  If it means we have to replace the Democrats altogether, then we have to be ready to do that too.  It could go either way.  But to that fork in the road is clear.  People have to keep after them.  It's the only thing that has worked so far.

The obstruction, defiance and stiff opposition came after a week of progressive outrage at Democratic elected officials, who activists said were too quick to cave to and normalize Trump’s presidency. Progressive activists, of course, have been criticizing elected Democrats for being too weak for decades. But this time the charge is actually landing, and it’s changing the way the party is positioning itself against Trump.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), in an interview with the L.A. Times editorial board, said the energy coming from the base is “different in kind, certainly different in intensity, than I think we’ve ever seen after an election.”

"The energy is coming from the base." When is the last time anyone can remember such a description of the behavior of congressional Democrats?  These are positive developments even when they are not enough to overcome the dire circumstances. Even if, for example, they don't manage to flip that one last Republican vote necessary to stop the DeVos nomination, it matters that Democrats are learning to listen.

This probably won't prevent any of Trump's cabinet nominees from being confirmed but that's not really what this exercise is for. Instead, it is about reconnecting the broken circuit between the voters, the party's source of power, and its implements, the elected stooges charged with wielding power.  They aren't quite where we'd like them to be yet. The scorecard shows every single one of them (including Bernie Sanders) has failed on at least one vote so far. It's going to be a long hard slog to make them all behave. But they're getting better.

Or, more accurately, we're getting better at applying pressure. The electeds themselves don't really deserve any credit.  In a healthy democracy engaged voters and citizens are the only parties that have legitimate agency. Without their sustained participation, the pols just revert to their natural state doing favors for their peers in the ruling classes.

This doesn't mean we can't get better pols, though.  A successful movement to established a better politics should seek to elect at least marginally better office holders. That's what has to come next. It's what's at the heart of the debate over who should be the next DNC chair. It's an attempt to institutionalize the insurgent energy and grass roots principles that animated the 2016 primaries. The institution is resisting this, though.

Still, it’s a fight that some progressives, emboldened by Sanders’s surprisingly successful run and energetic protests against President Trump, are eager to have.

“Bernie was right,” said Jonathan Tasini, a prominent progressive organizer who is backing Ellison. “The party is in a shambles. For the people who were at the helm to pretend like that isn’t the case is just whistling past the graveyard. This is a fight for the soul of the party and two very different views about what the party should do and stand for. It’s not a bad thing to have that debate.”

There are numerous voices on the institutional Democratic side who deny this is what the chair debate is even about.  Some of them are lying. Other are just oblivious. All are making the mistake of wishing away potentially productive debate in the cause of maintaining their ever-unhelpful retrograde notion of "unity." Remember Mitch Landrieu's oppressive "One City One Voice" campaign?  This is what establishment Democrats gravitate towards.  It is not politics. It is useless and it has to go the way of the dodo. And those among them who cling to it will have to go as well.

Speaking of Mitch, the mayor himself is a prime example of the kind of Democrat we can no longer expect to fight our battles for us.  It's fine if they want to come along with us. For example, when the mayor follows the lead of hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting Trump's travel ban, we should welcome his statement of support. But when he goes to work every day on a program that limits your access to affordable housing or presumes to place us under a regime of intrusive surveillance and arbitrary curfews we should recognize that we are being condescended to rather than represented.

Last week, Mitch participated in a demonstration of TransDev's "driverless bus." The mayor positively beamed at the possibilities of a technology that is, in all practical terms, still very much "vaporware." More to the point, though, he also failed to exhibit even the slightest semblance of concern over the dark implications of such a prodcut if it ever does work well enough to implement.  Kudos to Gambit for picking up on it, at least.

Autonomous vehicles could very well be one of these solutions. Optimistic futurists have speculated self-driving cars could release people from the burden, expense and hassle of car ownership; they could completely change the way urban planners envision cities by eliminating parking lots. As public transit, the technology could help expand routes, increasing the geographic range and frequency of stops on existing transit systems. (There's also a dark side: self-driving cars may put some 5 million jobs at risk over the next several years by eliminating the need for drivers in many sectors.)

TransDev isn't experimenting robot busses in order to offer more efficient service or "make us an ascendant city" as the mayor mused. It's trying to figure out how to fire as many employees as possible.   We can no longer afford to live in a political environment where our representatives lie to us about the profit motives of their "public-private partners."

The same principle which tells us we cannot abide Donald Trump's and Betsy DeVos' privatized vision for education is the same principle that tells us we cannot abide the techno-solutionist non-politics of figures like Mitch Landrieu and the centrist wing of the Democratic Party.  If we're going to knock back some of it we have to aim for all of it.  Doing it halfway is not going to work.

The charter school con

There are multiple reasons people have gotten on board with "school reform" over the years. Most of them are bad. For many it is an end run around integration. For others it is an ideological experiment with "market princilples." For others, still, it is a desire to use public institutions as a vehicle for promoting and enforcing  their religious practices.   For Donald Trump's incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos it is a little bit of all three.

DeVos is married to Amway scion Dick DeVos (whose father, Richard DeVos, is worth more than $5 billion, according to Forbes) and is seen as a controversial choice due to her track record of supporting vouchers for private, religious schools; right-wing Christian groups like the Foundation for Traditional Values, which has pushed to soften the separation of church and state; and organizations like Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which has championed the privatization of the education system.

This week, Bobby Jindal praised Trump's choice of DeVos  calling her, "the breath of fresh air we needed."

Beyond the larger politics of it, the internal impetus behind the charter movement is economic.  Its implementation has meant a direct transfer of income away from teachers and toward administrators.

That's according to a report the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released Tuesday (Jan. 17) that's sure to make waves.

New Orleans public schools now spend $1,358 more per student than a 17-district comparison group. But they spend $706 per student less on instruction, including teacher salaries and benefits

There are more administrators, and they typically earn higher salaries than they would have without the reforms," authors Christian Buerger and Doug Harris write.

New Orleanians apprehensive about the coming vicissitudes of Trump's America at least have the advantage of familiarity as they are already living a lot of it.

Bobby would have fit right in

Poor Bobby Jindal. He did everything an aspiring GOP big timer has to do to get elected or appointed to national office these days.  He always flanked to the right of the field no matter the issue. He took the Norquist pledge. He refused to see any problem that couldn't be solved by privatizing state assets away to cronies or at least cutting taxes for rich people.  He even got in on the racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant fervor that animates so much of the GOP base these days which was a bold move for a non-white son of immigrants to make.

None of this got him elected but, under different circumstances, it could have gotten him a role in the new Trump Administration. He would have fit right in.

In nominating billionaire activist Betsy DeVos for education secretary, Trump has signaled that, like Jindal, abandoning public schools is one promise he hopes to keep. Trump proposes using $20 billion in federal funds as block grants to encourage states to fund private-school vouchers. That would mean diverting another $110 billion in state and local funds to send students to private schools that conservatives like DeVos claim are superior to their so-called "government school" counterparts.

However, Trump and DeVos -- who has spent $1.6 million trying to influence Louisiana elections -- must persuade cash-strapped governors and legislators to spend scarce resources on a scheme that's failed wherever it's been tried.

This is where the disappointment of Jindal's voucher program enters the picture, as policy makers and the media will inevitably examine its dismal performance. At Jindal's urging, in 2008 lawmakers created the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), enabling some disadvantaged students to leave public schools graded a C or lower and enroll in a participating private school. By 2014, more than 6,000 public school students attended one of 126 private schools.

Mann goes on to argue in that column that the negative example of Jindal's "failed" voucher program might prove to be a problem for Trump and DeVos's schemes moving forward.  

In a paper published last year by the National Bureau for Economic Research, three scholars documented "the large negative effects" and the reduced academic achievements of scholarship program students in 2013, the first year after the program's expansion.

"Our results show that LSP vouchers reduce academic achievement," the researchers concluded, explaining, "attendance at an LSP-eligible private school is estimated to lower math scores" and "reduce reading, science and social studies scores."

Why? "We find evidence," the researchers wrote, "that the negative effects of the LSP may be linked to selection of low-quality private schools into the program."

But, no, none of that matters. The whole point of the exercise is an ideologically driven assault on the very idea of universal public education.  In that respect, Jindal's Louisiana experiment and DeVos's in Michigan have been big successes. And now it's time to push that program at the national level. 

Bobby could have fit right in with Trump.  But he made that one fatal mistake of publicly attacking the boss that one time.  And, well, now he's got to go find something else to do.
 

The end of the democratic social contract

The Trump years are gonna be fun. Which of these are we going to decide we're no longer going to even go through the motions of attempting to provide for people?

Health care?

If House Speaker Paul Ryan has his way, the 115th Congress won’t just repeal Obamacare, it will dramatically reform Medicare, turning the program into a form of private insurance.

Ryan has long supported the controversial idea and, immediately after the election, he suggested that any Obamacare reform should include Medicare reform. Another key player, House Budget Chairman Tom Price, said Medicare reform was a top priority for the unified Republican government.

President-elect Donald Trump has yet to commit to further privatization of Medicare—which could cause a tidal wave of unease among senior citizens—and a Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. At a minimum, though, Ryan’s Medicare plans are a topic of negotiation between the speaker and the president-elect.

It's hard to know if we should even count health care given the sorry state of what even our puny somewhat public programs actually provide. But it's clear we're not moving that ball in the right direction.

How about public education? 

Donald Trump’s choice to be secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a woman who never went to public school, nor sent her children to public school, nor worked for public schools. She does, however, come from a wealthy family that has donated millions to the Republican Party. And she would be terrible for public education in this country.

As AlterNet explained in a 2011 profile on the DeVos family, the DeVos family is a prominent right-wing donor. Betsy Prince DeVos’ father-in-law co-founded Amway, while her brother, Erik Prince, founded the notorious private military contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater USA).

While many wealthy campaign donors have pet causes, the DeVoses have been particularly driven to promote school vouchers.

In 2000, the DeVoses launched one of their most ambitious campaigns, spending millions of dollars on an unsuccessful effort to convince Michigan voters to support a voucher initiative, which would have let parents steer tax dollars to private schools instead of public ones.

The 2000 ballot initiative was voted down by 68 percent of Michiganders.

After the loss, the DeVoses shifted gears, focusing instead on pushing voucher bills through state legislatures, which they have been doing ever since. They founded a group, All Children Matter, devoted to pushing vouchers. In 2013, the group, now known as the American Federation of Children, was fined $5.2 million in Ohio for breaking campaign finance laws, which it has not yet paid. The PAC was never registered in Wisconsin, where it was hammered by the press.

American Federation for Children has worked closely with Religious Right groups that can motivate voters from their homes and churches. It also coordinates its planning through the Council for National Policy, a secretive right-wing group that meets several times a year and gives members of the Christian right access to sympathetic donors.

Betsy also serves on the board of the Acton Institute, which merges corporate interests with dominion theology, or the belief that Christians should take control of political and social institutions. Earlier this month, the Acton Institute published a blog post titled, “Bring back child labor: Work is a gift our kids can handle.”

Not gonna spend our education dollar on your poor kids anymore unless they pray real good the way we tell them.  Failing that, it's send them down into the mines or whatever.  Doesn't matter anyway since we aren't expecting to develop an informed and educated citizenry anymore. Who needs that when we're not going to let anybody vote anyway? Which brings us to...

The basic right to vote? 

Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional law scholar at Yale University, tells me he worries it could all amount to the “beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction.” This is the name some historians use to describe the sustained 20th Century effort to codify civil rights and full equality for African Americans after decades of voting and institutionalized discrimination, just as the original Reconstruction period tried to expand democracy after the end of slavery — an effort that was followed by the sort of retreat that could conceivably happen again.

“The rest of the Voting Rights Act will become a dead letter,” Ackerman suggested, adding that he expects nothing less than a wholesale rollback of “the fundamental achievements of the Second Reconstruction."

One memory I have from the (later) heyday of the Rush Limbaugh radio program comes from  Election Day 2004.  Those of you who were alive back then might remember some mid-day exit poll reports being circulated which seemed to suggest that John Kerry could maybe possibly have been in the process of ousting George W. Bush.  Turns out these must have been "fake news" or something.  It's a good thing everyone avoids these errors today by just using Facebook.

Anyway, Rush, under the impression that Kerry might win, was in full panic mode and launched into a long loud diatribe about the need to seriously consider bringing back the property requirement for voters.  It was funny at the time because 1) that's crazy and 2) I was as hopeful at that point in the day as Rush was despondent and was getting a kick out of listening to him whine.   But it's also an indicator of where the right wing mind goes when it decides the democratic process needs "fixing."

And when a radical right wing party controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and very nearly enough state houses to amend the Constitution, this stuff gets less funny and more scary.