Month: August 2016

Grifters gonna grift
by Tom Sullivan

John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight back-to-school segment on charter schools Sunday was a welcome window into the world of education “reform” grifters. (I just found time to watch it last night.) Griftopia, as Matt Taibbi defined it:

There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

Only Taibbi’s focus on financial firms was a bit narrow. That grifter philosophy has traveled far beyond Wall Street. Corruption has trickled down.

Anyone who has been reading my posts already knows what a con I think the charter school industry is. Still, it was gratifying to see Oliver give it the prime-time mistreatment it deserves.*

Ryan Reed at Rolling Stone writes:

“Charters are basically public schools that are taxpayer-funded but privately run,” Oliver explained. “The first ones emerged 25 years ago as places to experiment with new educational approaches.” Today, over 6,700 charter schools educate nearly 3 million students. But many of these institutions fail at an alarming rate: In 2014, Naples Daily News found that, since 2008, 119 charter schools had closed in Florida – 14 of which didn’t finish their first year.

Oliver focused much of his attention on Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, three states with especially depressing charter track records – including negligence in the approval process and school executives embezzling funds.

I wrote in 2011:

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

Aside from the happy talk about experimentation and free-market competition (you may genuflect now), the smokescreen that obscures some of the worst results of lax oversight is the notion that these schools run as non-profits. But nonprofit doesn’t mean no cash flow. Oliver points out (and this is not unique) how the president of the Richard Allen charter chain in Ohio contracted oversight of its schools to a nonprofit she founded and who contracted $1 million in management and consulting firms she also founded.

That is, some nonprofit charter schools operate with tax money the way Donald Trump funnels campaign expenditures back into his family-run businesses. Nearly a fifth of what the campaign spent in May, according to the New York Times.

* For the sake of the few good, parent-organized and community run charters out there, I make a distinction between charter schools and the charter school movement or industry. Oliver sets aside discussion of whether charters are a good idea in principle to examine how they operate in fact.

Yes, he’s a bigot

by digby

I caught this exchange last night and it was epic:

Via Mother Jones:

Donald Trump is a bigot, there’s no other way to get around it,” Blow said. “Anybody who accepts that, supports it. Anybody supports it is promoting it and that makes you a part of the bigotry itself. You have to decide whether or not you want to be part of the bigotry that is Donald Trump. You have to decide whether you want to be part of the sexism and misogyny that is Donald Trump.”

Levell responded by accusing Hillary Clinton’s campaign of creating the “false facade” that Trump is a racist.

“I’m not part of the Clinton campaign,” Blow interjected. “I’m a black man in America and I know a bigot when I see a bigot.”

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This is where we are people

by digby

I think I’m going to puke:

ROGER STONE: I think she’s a Saudi asset. The media keeps saying her mother’s a prominent feminist. No. Her mother’s a prominent advocate for genital mutilation. She has written extensively about genital mutilation.

ALEX JONES: Did Huma have her genitals cut off?

STONE: That I cannot tell you. But what I can tell you is —

JONES: I mean it’s fair, I don’t mean that to be crass!

Trump has been mainlining Jones and Stone’s garbage for years, starting with the birther bullshit.

He’s right in there with him. This is as low as it gets.

Note that they also call Chelsea Clinton Webb Hubbel’s daughter.

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The “sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult”

by digby

Bill O’Reilly famously once settled a massive sexual harassment claim, the details of which made it into the mainstream. It didn’t hurt his career at Fox (and now we know why.) But you would have thought he’d have kept his sexual thoughts about female co-workers to himself after that. Apparently not.

[C]ommencing in February 2016, Bill O’Reilly (“O’Reilly”), whom Tantaros had considered to be a good friend and a person from whom she sought career guidance, started sexually harassing her by, inter alia, (a) asking her to come to stay with him on Long Island where it would be “very private,” and (b) telling her on more than one occasion that he could “see [her] as a wild girl,” and that he believed that she had a “wild side.” Fox News did take one action: plainly because of O’Reilly’s rumored prior sexual harassment issues and in recognition of Tantaros’s complaints, Brandi informed Cane that Tantaros would no longer be appearing on O’Reilly’s Fox News show, The O’Reilly Factor.

That’s from former Fox personality Andrea Tantaros’s sexual harassment complaint against the network. It’s ugly. O’Reilly, of course, is the second big name in her suit. The first is Roger Ailes, of course. She also claims that the new head honcho, Bill Shine was aware and told her to keep her mouth shut.

She describes the place this way:

“Fox News masquerades as defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency, and misogyny.”

You know, this is not surprising to most women.  It comes through loud and clear to me anyway. I worked in Hollywood for many years and this was … the way it worked. I think many workplaces have changed, particularly as women have ascended into positions of power. Clearly not all, however. In fact, I’d guess it’s still more common than you’d think.

Ailes took it to a twisted level far beyond anything I ever saw, however.

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Those Syrian refugees have ruined everything

by digby

Eric “the spare” Trump:

“I mean, they should come first. You were born in this country. You were born here legally. You’re here legally. I mean, wages have been stagnant for the last 15 years and it’s because you have, you know, Syrian refugees coming in. It’s because you have, you know, thousands of people coming over the border. I mean, and Americans are suffering because of it and that’s his point.”

Jason Linkins at Huffington Post does the tedious work of refuting that daft on its face statement:

[W]age stagnation is not something that started 15 years ago, despite what Eric Trump thinks. Rather, as the Economic Policy Institute notes, it’s been a going concern for about four decades now. But we’ve not had masses of Syrian refugees coming to this country for 15 years, either. The Syrian refugee crisis has only heated up since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. During that time, the United States has endeavored to provide refuge for Syrians fleeing certain death. But of the some 5 million Syrians who have left their country, very few have made it to these shores… 

“Syrian refugees have contributed to decades of stagnant wages” is a new one. (To be honest, the Trump campaign criticizing the lack of wage growth is a new one, as well.) Suffice it to say, as the Economic Policy Institute points out, “wage stagnation is largely the result of policy choices that boosted the bargaining power of those with the most wealth and power,” and that “better policy choices, made with low- and moderate-wage earners in mind, can lead to more widespread wage growth and strengthen and expand the middle class.”

If a politician has “better policy choices” in mind, they will say so. Otherwise, they will blame immigrants and foreigners.

Trump’s going to teach them all a lesson. And they’re not going to “mess with America” ever again. Believe me.

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Whither the movement?

by digby

I wrote about the sad state of the conservative movement as we’ve known it for Salon this morning:

One of the more interesting story lines of this election season has been watching the conservative movement we’ve known for more than 50 years try to figure out what to do about Trump voters who seems to be coming from a very different direction. Through the primaries we anticipated that we’d see traditional battle lines forming as the establishment types like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio faced off against the movement doctrinaire right winger Ted Cruz who was the perfect avatar of movement conservatism. Trump completely shuffled the deck, drawing his support from a large subset of Republicans who had formed themselves into a new faction.

The establishment and the movement engaged in an elaborate kabuki dance for many years which had them working together to elect Republicans while allowing the movement leaders to maintain plausible deniability when someone such as George W. Bush runs into trouble when conservative governance failed (as it usually does.) Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.  And they don’t mind losing as much as you might think. It can be very good for business. This quote from movement leader Richard Viguerie says it all:

Sometimes a loss for the Republican Party is a gain for conservatives. Often, a little taste of liberal Democrats in power is enough to remind the voters what they don’t like about liberal Democrats and to focus the minds of Republicans on the principles that really matter. That’s why the conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the first two years of the Clinton White House. 

Conservatives are, by nature, insurgents, and it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends, or people you thought were your friends, are in power.

Modern conservative movement philosophy was laid out back in the 50s and 60s with books and articles by the original generation of intellectuals and activists such as Phyllis Schlafly whose book “A Choice Not an Echo” was a seminal volume that informed the right for decades. It spelled out the ideology of small government, martial patriotism, “freedom” and traditional values and sold Goldwater as the brave cowboy who would make it happen.  Since Ronald Reagan, those ideas have been sold as the “Republican brand” as well.

And frankly, the notion that disagreements over strategy and purity (“people you thought were your friends”) which have fueled the conservative movement for decades, is overblown as well.  For instance, both movement and establishment leaders had no problem with the dogwhistle strategy of mining the racist white id for votes. Neither did they disagree about the ridiculous low tax and trickle down economic policies that only benefit the wealthy. They had no problem with the hypocrisy of their own leadership when it came to personal morals even as they excoriated their enemies for their moral lapses.  These were all strategic decisions the coalition tolerated quite easily.  What fueled the movement was betrayal and failure.

Recently some of those Tea Party insurgents actually believed the Republican leadership should be willing to bring down the state in order to bring on the conservative Rapture and leaders like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, who had up until then been the poster boys of movement conservatism were deemed sell-outs to The Man. Ted Cruz had planned to lead that insurgency to victory or martyrdom. The stage was set for another round of recriminations and fundraising for the movement.

Then along came Donald Trump, a man so completely outside this cozy little system that he isn’t even a member of the party. He’s a militant, authoritarian, white nationalist who demands that our foreign allies pay protection or prepare to watch the world burn. He rarely even mentions the words “freedom” or “liberty” even when he’s extolling the Second Amendment, which he tends to do in moments like the one where he leads the crowd in chanting “Death Wish! Death Wish!” after a vigilante movie of the 1970s.

Although the right wing antecedents to Trump are not hard to find, nobody like him has ever come this far. The establishment is treading lightly, trying to keep a distance without angering his followers. And the movement that spent so many years creating and nurturing their ideology is very off balance. This is an insurgency they don’t control and it’s very difficult to see how they can reclaim their place in this carefully nurtured ecosystem when the man who leads it doesn’t know or care about their philosophy. And neither, it turns out, do his voters, most of whom have been voting Republican for years.

Phyllis Schlafly, now 92 years old,  is gamely trying to fit Trump into the old mold with her new book called “The Conservative Case for Trump” in which she apparently compares him to, you guessed it, Barry Goldwater  the man for whom she made the case in “A Choice Not an Echo.” The book isn’t out yet so it’s hard to say how she makes that leap but it can’t be on a philosophical basis.

Schlafly’s fellow traveler Richard Viguerie’s associate George Rasley is digging deeply for a rationale to support Trump by claiming that he represents the anti-establishment ethos that first animated the movement back in the 60s, which isn’t entirely absurd. Trump is certainly anti-establishment.  And he says that Trump is a leader in opposition to what he calls the “New Puritanism” as represented by the #NeverTrump faction who refuse to vote for someone they believe so badly fails the test of decency, competence and conservatism. This is perversely considered a betrayal of the movement because of its lack of ideological pragmatism. (One assumes Paul Ryan would have a good laugh over that one.)

The bottom line is that the conservative movement as we’ve known it is empty and confused and it may not be able to recover. Indeed, they should start looking over their shoulders because there are some new kids in town and they are speaking a language the right wing evidently wants to hear these days. It’s the openly authoritarian white nationalist Alt-Right. When Donald Trump said “I am your voice” at the Republican Convention that’s who he was talking to.

QOTD: Joe Biden

by digby

As much as the right likes to throw their aprons over their heads and run around in circles screaming “radical Islamic terrorism” like some magical incantation, it’s not a serious set of words that means anything.

There are some words that do mean something, however, that it would be nice to hear from sane people everywhere.  Joe Biden says them:

“Terrorism is a real threat but it’s not an existential threat.” 

No Sharia law is not taking over and ISIS is not staging a Normandy landing. Islamic terrorism is terrible but it’s not taking over America.

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“You have to be a lot tougher”

by digby

This is Trump the authoritarian thug in all his glory. When Trump is asked how he would curb violent crime as he promises in his speech, this is what he said to Bill O’Reilly:

Pushed by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly to provide specifics on curbing violent crime in cities like Chicago, Donald Trump said Monday that he would simply put “tough” cops in charge.

“So, specifically, specifically. How do you do it? How do you do it?” O’Reilly asked.

“I know police in Chicago,” Trump replied. “If they were given the authority to do it, they would get it done.”

“How? How?” O’Reilly pressed.

“You have unbelievable—how? By being very much tougher than they are right now,” Trump said. “They are right now not tough. I mean, I could tell you this very long and quite boring story but when I was in Chicago, I got to meet a couple of very top police. I said, ‘How do you stop this? How do you stop this? If you were put in charge,’ to a specific person, ‘Do you think you could stop it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, I would be able to stop it in one week.’ And I believed him 100 percent.”

Further efforts to clarify what exactly this “specific person” would do and what “tough police tactics” are did not get far.

“You have to have a warrant to arrest people,” O’Reilly said. “You can’t beat them up.”

Trump replied that he didn’t ask for an exact plan because he’s “not the mayor of Chicago.”

The conversation then turned to attacks on police officers.

Trump, who has actively courted the endorsement of the national Fraternal Order of Police union and campaigned as the “law and order” candidate said that he would serve as a “cheerleader for the police” as president.

“They are not being respected by our leadership and they literally—they don’t have spirit,” the Republican nominee said. “They lose their spirit. Every time something happens, it’s the police’s fault.”

“Alright. So your tone is pro-police,” O’Reilly said.

“You have to give them back their spirit,” Trump insisted.

“How do you stop the bad guys from attacking them?” O’Reilly asked.

“By giving them back your spirit and by allowing them to go and counterattack,” Trump said.

I guess that’s more of his outreach to urban communities. Kellyanne must be so proud.

The idea that he’s actually trying to do outreach to people of color is insulting to our intelligence.

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Massive heat wave in the Middle East: Is it an emergency yet?

by Gaius Publius

This is a brief follow-up to this piece about the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2:

There I wrote:

[I]f atmospheric CO2 growth suddenly zooms to +4 ppm/year starting with this year’s 406 ppm, we’re at 450 ppm in 11 years.

Eleven years from now is 2027, and 450 ppm is a game-over scenario. Partly because global warming will have shot well past +2°C, producing enough social, political, economic and military chaos to make a global solution impossible; and partly because if we haven’t stopped Exxon et al before then, we never will, and the process will go to termination. That is, we won’t stop until we’re once more pre-industrial, or worse.

I take 2027 as an early “game-over” date (meaning “game-over” could happen sooner), since this analysis doesn’t factor in any of the other ways climate could change suddenly — via unexpected ice sheet collapse, for example.

Here’s what the current acceleration looks like on the ground.

“Stepping outside is like walking into a fire”

The Washington Post (my emphasis):

An epic Middle East heat wave could be global warming’s hellish curtain-raiser

BAGHDAD — Record-shattering temperatures this summer have scorched countries from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and beyond, as climate experts warn that the severe weather could be a harbinger of worse to come.

In coming decades, U.N. officials and climate scientists predict that the mushrooming populations of the Middle East and North Africa will face extreme water scarcity, temperatures almost too hot for human survival and other consequences of global warming.

If that happens, conflicts and refugee crises far greater than those now underway are probable, said Adel Abdellatif, a senior adviser at the U.N. Development Program’s Regional Bureau for Arab States who has worked on studies about the effect of climate change on the region.

“This incredible weather shows that climate change is already taking a toll now and that it is — by far — one of the biggest challenges ever faced by this region,” he said.

Consider the flood of economic and conflict-zone refugees now entering Europe, then imagine that flood swollen further by an endless stream of climate refugees. The world is changing before our eyes, the physical world and the human world, the world of human society. Climate change, global warming, will drive this change until we stop it.

More from the Post, with some stunning numbers:

These countries have grappled with remarkably warm summers in recent years, but this year has been particularly brutal.

Parts of the United Arab Emirates and Iran experienced a heat index — a measurement that factors in humidity as well as temperature — that soared to 140 degrees in July, and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, recorded an all-time high temperature of nearly 126 degrees. Southern Morocco’s relatively cooler climate suddenly sizzled last month, with temperatures surging to highs between 109 and 116 degrees. In May, record-breaking temperatures in Israel led to a surge in ­heat-related illnesses.

Temperatures in Kuwait and Iraq startled observers. On July 22, the mercury climbed to 129 degrees in the southern Iraqi
city of Basra. A day earlier, it reached 129.2 in Mitribah, Kuwait. If confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization, the two temperatures would be the hottest ever recorded in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The bad news isn’t over, either. Iraq’s heat wave is expected to continue this week.

Stepping outside is like “walking into a fire,” said Zainab Guman, a 26-year-old university student who lives in Basra. “It’s like everything on your body — your skin, your eyes, your nose — starts to burn,” she said.

A taste of things to come. Soon this will be Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Southern California, including the breadbasket Central Valley … and Mexico, even further south, with yet another reason for an increased north-moving wave of refugee migration.

A World War II-style mobilization is the only answer

Are we in an emergency yet? If you think so, say so.

That’s genuinely important, and it’s also useful, whether your personal reach is great or small. The more “normalized” the need for a World War II-style mobilization becomes — the more that people agree that we need it — the faster we’ll get one. We really do have to give fire back to Prometheus. There’s time to avoid the worst as I see it, but not much. We could be essentially carbon-free in ten years with a strong and enforced emergency mobilization. We could also be over the hill in the next ten years and picking up speed at an alarming rate.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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“He speaks without thinking.”
by Tom Sullivan

The notion that this country will hit rock bottom and turn itself around, that people’s basic goodness and decency will reassert itself and America will reinvent itself once again has always seemed a feeble hope. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen in small ways. As Digby pointed out yesterday, Trump’s supporters are defecting.

The line she cited from the Toronto Star that most caught my attention was the former Donald Trump supporter who said, “There was just something off about him.” It reminded me of a strategy for resisting a high-pressure car salesman. Whatever your reasons for not buying now, he’s got an answer. Don’t like the color? Don’t have the money? Whatever. He can fix it. He’s got a comeback to keep you from walking. But if the buyer cannot say why she/he won’t buy today (“I don’t know. I just don’t want to.”), the salesman has no comeback, nothing to latch on to. “Something just off” falls into that category. The voter has given himself leave to walk away.

It appears that’s happening to a lot of Trump’s former fans. At Raw Story, Sarah Burris reviewed a Frank Luntz focus group (emphasis mine):

“He was my first choice. But just along the way, he has — I guess you can say he’s lost me,” one focus grouper told Luntz in a video that aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday. “I’m not saying there’s no chance of turning but he’s become outrageous. I mean, we all have thoughts, but I think he speaks without thinking.”

No, there is no turning back. Her support for Trump is over. Because something about Trump is “just off.”

There was more:

“When he initially began to run, he gave voice to a lot of the frustrations that I was feeling about how government is working or more to the point not working,” focus group member Michael said. “But since then, he’s been running as a 12-year-old and changes his positions every news cycle, so you don’t even know where he stands on the issues.”

Mark jumps in, saying, “I think we’re looking for leadership that inspires all of us to be greater than ourselves.” They’ve enjoyed eating their dessert first, but are now looking for the meat and potatoes.

“I want his best foot forward,” says Janice. “It’s a job interview. This is not how you would behave when you’re going to a job interview, by throwing tantrums and calling the interviewer names. Or the other applicants.”

It doesn’t exactly make the heart swell or Sousa play in your head, but it seems Trump’s new car smell has worn off. Now people just want a model that doesn’t start erratically and won’t leave then stranded along the highway.