Rachel Tabachnik at Talk to Action has a major examination of the drive to privatize public education in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Who’s behind it and what’s the end goal?
A new wave of school voucher bills is sweeping the nation, which would allow public education funds to be used in private or parochial schools. As with past waves of voucher initiatives, these new bills are largely promoted and funded by the billionaire DeVos family and a core group of wealthy pro-privatization supporters. They include Pennsylvania SB-1, soon coming to a vote in the PA Senate, and the “Vouchers-for-All” bill approved by the Florida Senate Education Committee on April 14. Betsy DeVos is at the helm of organizations that have set the stage for both bills, but you would never know it based on the propaganda being marketed to Pennsylvanians. Even if you are from another state, keep reading. Chances are a Betsy DeVos-led campaign is already at work in your state or will be there soon.
The DeVos family is recognized as one of the top national contributors to the Republican Party, free market policy institutes, and Religious Right organizations. Many of their previous attempts at using voucher initiatives to privatize the nation’s public schools have been transparent. Recent campaigns have been more covert and are camouflaged behind local efforts described as grass roots and bipartisan.
Pennsylvanians should not be deceived. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of school choice, behind the curtain of this effort is an interconnected network of right wing think tanks and billionaire donors, funded by foundations including those of the DeVos and Koch families and the Scaife, Allegheny, and Carthage Foundations of Pennsylvania’s own Richard MellonScaife. The leaders of many of these DeVos/Koch/Scaife-funded institutes openly voice their ideological objections to all forms of public education. Some even proudly display their support for a proclamation posted at the Alliance for Separation of School and State, which reads,
“I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.”
Years have been spent developing and promoting schemes to privatize public education. The report “Voucher Veneer: the Deeper Agenda to Privatize Public Education” by People For the American Way (PFAW), quotes Joseph Bast, President and CEO of the Koch/Scaife/Walton-funded Heartland Institute,
“The complete privatization of schooling might be desirable, but this objective is politically impossible for the time being. Vouchers are a type of reform that is possible now, and would put us on the path to further privatization.”
(Contributions from the DeVos, Scaife and Koch foundations are noted throughout this article, however, other family foundations including Olin, Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Walton – the Walmart heirs, also fund these same think tanks.)
Pennsylvania could be a case study for nationwide anti-public education partnerships, formed by Religious Right activists joining forces with radical free market think tanks and libertarian-minded investment and hedge fund managers. The movement is billed as the salvation of inner city students; and Democratic politicians, often African American, are portrayed as the heroic champions of children who desperately need access to better education. The need is real, but the claim that this about improving public schools is false advertising.
There’s much, much more. Read the whole thing if you want to understand the threat to public education.
Seriously. These are kids who’ve been removed from their families because of abuse or neglect, and his idea is that to make their lives just that little bit easier, they shouldn’t be able to just go to the store and get new clothes that fit them. They should go to the Salvation Army, and if there’s nothing that fits them there, they better hope there’s a Goodwill nearby that has better options.
Because being removed from your family isn’t hard enough, having a family that requires removal isn’t hard enough, going to a new school isn’t hard enough, having your entire life be temporary isn’t hard enough. Nope, under Casswell’s proposal these kids would have to go to school hoping their classmates don’t decide to take aim at their secondhand clothes.
Whatever you think of punitive measures (I’m opposed, in case you were wondering) against adults for the crime of poverty, or even of just not being rich enough, usually children get at least partially exempted from that. But in this year that has already seen proposals to weaken child labor laws in Maine and Missouri, have Republican state legislators decided it’s open season on kids, too?
As Balloon Juice’s mistermix notes, you have to ignore the cheesy production values, but even so it’s fantastic to see someone (Americans United for Change) holding Paul Ryan accountable for his evil budget plan.
In recent months, nurses, doctors, dentists, flight instructors, hair stylists, nail technicians, teachers, dining hall workers, bakers, and other workers have chosen to join unions.
Governors like John Kasich and Chris Christie talk a big game about turning down federal money rather than using it to help their states—but meanwhile, they’re looking for ways to quietly take federal money when no one is paying attention.
According to a Washington Post/ABC poll, 84% of people oppose the Republican plan for Medicare put together by Rep. Paul Ryan. And according to a McClatchy-Marist poll, 70% of tea partiers oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
Yesterday the AFL-CIO launched its Executive Paywatch. As Tula Connell writes at the AFL-CIO blog,
The 2011 Executive PayWatch features the compensation of 299 S&P 500 company CEOs and provides direct comparisons between those CEOs and the median pay of nurses, teachers, firefighters and others. For instance, while a secretary makes a median annual salary of $29,980, someone like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf rakes in $18,973,722 million—632 times the secretary’s salary. The pay gap between Wall Street and Main Street has widened egregiously—as recently as 1980, CEOs made 42 times that of blue-collar workers.
(Check out the 2011 Executive PayWatch to read case studies of six CEOs and find out how many firefighters it takes to make the salary of one CEO. You also can compare salaries of nurses, secretaries and others with CEOs and share the results with your friends on Facebook. Click here to share on Facebook.)
Eliminate the right to bargain collectively for public employees.
Privatizing economic development through the creation of JobsOhio. He was sued in the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday over that act.
Proposing a two-year, $55.5billion budget that addressed an $8billion deficit without raising taxes. The budget also includes the sale of five prisons, privatizing liquor sales, large-scale changes to education and Medicaid and more than $1billion in cuts to schools and local governments.
Privatize, privatize, privatize. And he hopes he’s just getting started with that.
House Bill 1, which Kasich signed into law in February, created a nonprofit headed by Kasich and eight board members he will appoint. JobsOhio will be responsible for reaching out to existing companies and firms thinking about expanding into Ohio, negotiating economic incentive packages and helping to commercialize research and technologies developed at the state’s universities.
As a private entity, the group will not be subject to the state’s open meetings and records laws, ethics and conflict of interest rules or other requirements that generally affect state agencies. Instead, JobsOhio will be required to have four public meetings annually and will have to disclose contract information, employee salaries and other details in an annual report.
So JobsOhio replaces the Ohio Department of Development with something completely under the governor’s personal control, and their actions remain secret. I can’t think of anything that could go wrong with that! Can you? I mean, it’s not like Gov. Kasich is known as an abusive jerk intent on trampling anyone who gets in his way.
thrice referred to a Columbus police officer who issued him a traffic ticket in 2008 as “an idiot.”
Even rocking a 30% approval rating, Kasich can do a lot of damage as long as he doesn’t care what the people of his state think. And he obviously doesn’t. But that fact should be liberating—if there’s no chance of compromise, there’s no reason to do anything but fight tooth and nail to block his agenda.
This tax day, one of the big Republican talking points is that cutting taxes raises revenue. The theory is that if businesses and the wealthy pay less in taxes, they have more to spend on creating jobs.
But even conservative economists have cast doubt on this claim.
“Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There’s really no dispute among economists about that,” said Alan D. Viard, a former White House economist under George W. Bush, in a 2006 Washington Post article.
Robert Carroll, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax analysis, also said that no one in the administration believes tax cuts created a surge in revenue. “As a matter of principle, we do not think tax cuts pay for themselves,” Carroll said.
Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan economist who became a strong critic of the Bush administration’s policies, used data from the Office of Management and Budget in a blog post last year to illustrate how “the Bush tax cuts reduced revenue rather significantly.”
Ronald Reagan, in fact, demonstrated how untrue it is that cutting taxes raises revenue:
Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.
Reagan—Ronald Reagan, the icon of today’s Republican party!—realized that cutting taxes decreased revenues and increased the debt. And he responded by raising taxes. He raised them in regressive ways that didn’t fix the mess he had made, but in comparison to politicians like Paul Ryan and John Boehner, whose response to creating a mess is to see if they can’t turn it into a disaster, he was practically a moderate.
Sarah Palin visited Madison, Wisconsin for a tax day-themed tea party rally. But even with a celebrity like Palin, the tea partiers couldn’t outnumber the pro-worker crowd.
An estimated crowd of 6,500 people sat through sleet and wind to wait for conservative favorite Sarah Palin to take the stage Saturday at a tax day tea party rally.
But not everyone was waiting for the same reasons. A solid core of tea partiers were near the stage, but they were flanked on all sides by union protesters who have dominated protests at the Capitol for months.
The tea party folks had the microphone, but the crowd had the volume, literally and figuratively. They made it difficult to hear unless you were with a hundred feet of the speakers.
It’s refreshing to see news coverage that reflects the reality, rather than pumping up tea party numbers and downplaying pro-worker ones. Weirdly enough, Palin may have done Wisconsin’s workers a favor by drawing attention to their protest. John Nichols writes:
But the crowd that surrounded the Tea Party event knew how things played out Saturday on Palin’s “frontlines.” They were declaring victory as the Alaskan was jetting out of town. “Who would have thought that Sarah Palin would give this movement a boost?” joked Terry Fritter, a veteran United Food and Commercial Workers union activist who has attended most of the anti-Walker rallies at the Capitol.
KUCINICH: Let me ask you about some of the specific provisions in your proposals to strip collective bargaining rights. First, your proposal would require unions to hold annual votes to continue representing their own members. Can you please explain to me and members of this committee how much money this provision saves for your state budget?
WALKER: That and a number of other provisions we put in because if you’re going to ask, if you’re going to put in place a change like that, we wanted to make sure we protected the workers of our state, so they got value out of that. [...]
KUCINICH: Would you answer the question? How much money does it save, Governor?
WALKER: It doesn’t save any. [...]
KUCINICH: I want to ask about another one of your proposals. Under your plan you would prohibit paying union member dues from their paychecks. How much money would this provision save your state budget?
WALKER: It would save employees a thousand dollars a year they could use to pay for their pensions and health care contributions.
Facing a similar deficit level to the U.S., Britain has opted for “austerity,” ie massive cuts to services. The result, after a year? (NYT link)
Retail sales plunged 3.5 percent in March, the sharpest monthly downturn in Britain in 15 years. And a new report by the Center for Economic and Business Research, an independent research group based here, forecasts that real household income will fall by 2 percent this year. That would make Britain’s income squeeze the worst for two consecutive years since the 1930s.
All of which has challenged the view of Britain’s top economic official, George Osborne, that during a time of high deficits and economic weakness, the best approach is to aggressively attack the deficit first, through rapid-fire cuts aimed at the heart of Britain’s welfare state.
But the British plan isn’t as extreme as what Republicans are proposing here, and
To strike a political balance, the coalition government led by Prime Minister David Cameron of the Conservative Party, Mr. Osborne — himself a Conservative — has retained a 50 percent income tax rate on the wealthiest individuals.
Can you imagine the screaming from the Washington conservative establishment if anyone pushed that here?
No, here we have Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN), claiming “we have too much revenue” when revenues are in fact at a 60-year low.
Pennsylvanians should not be deceived. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of school choice, behind the curtain of this effort is an interconnected network of right wing think tanks and billionaire donors, funded by foundations including those of the DeVos and Koch families and the Scaife, Allegheny, and Carthage Foundations of Pennsylvania’s own Richard MellonScaife. The leaders of many of these DeVos/Koch/Scaife-funded institutes openly voice their ideological objections to all forms of public education. Some even proudly display their support for a proclamation posted at the Alliance for Separation of School and State, which reads,
