Teachers, Educators, ACT Now- Linda McMahon

 

Hi Educator,  At her Senate confirmation hearing today, Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon: Pledged to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and Promised to support vouchers, stripping resources from 90% of U.S. students. Our students deserve an education secretary that will fight for them and the resources they need to learn, not gut public education to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.   Please email your senators and tell them to vote NO on Linda McMahon’s confirmation.

Email Your Senators  ➤

All of our students—each and every one of them—deserve the resources, support, and opportunities that will help them to live their wildest dreams.  Dismantling the Department of Education will hurt our students, especially those in lower-income families in rural, suburban, and urban areas, and those with disabilities.   It will increase class sizes, take away services for students with disabilities, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach, and slash student civil rights protections.    Linda McMahon has promised to gut public education and has spent years pushing policies that would defund and destroy public schools.  Message your senators right now and tell them to reject Linda McMahon as secretary of education.  Together, we will stand up to Linda McMahon and every other anti-public education politician who tries to harm our students, our educators, and our communities.   For our students,  Becky Pringle  President  National Education Association

Defeat DeVos- Call Your Senator Now

The Senate education committee just voted to advance Betsy DeVos’ nomination for secretary of education. Next she’ll face the real test: a vote of the entire senate. It's taken almost a month for her nomination to get this far, and the fight isn’t nearly over yet. You've sent more than 1 million emails, and called senators more than 50,000 times, and believe me - they are taking notice. In explaining why she'll vote no, Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) said that 95 percent of the people that contacted her office opposed DeVos. Ninety-five percent! At the vote this morning, Senator Murkowski (R-AK) said she is still undecided, and that she is listening to the serious concerns of the thousands of her constituents who have called. And they're not the only ones. We've heard from senate staff that they're getting more emails and calls from our members and allies about stopping DeVos than they've ever had about a nominee.  Trust me - you are making a difference. We have to keep the pressure on. Keep calling. Keep emailing. Keep telling your senators that Betsy DeVos cannot be put in charge of our nation’s schools.  Call 1-855-882-6229 to speak to your senators. Click here to email them. Our senators need to know that we will never back down when our students and public education are on the line. Let’s keep up the fight.  - Lily Lily Eskelsen García President National Education Association

Betsy DeVos and Blackwater

 By Marc Norton

Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who has been called “America’s most notorious mercenary” by author and journalist Jeremy Scahill, has emerged as an influential advisor to the incoming Donald Trump regime.

Prince is also the brother of Betsy DeVos, who is in the process of being confirmed as secretary of education — and an advocate for the privatization of public schools.

The connection between these two reactionary political players is no secret, but is one of those barely-known facts that has remained mostly hidden in plain sight.  Despite significant press around the confirmation hearings for DeVos, the corporate media has not called the public’s attention to her relationship to Prince.  Plaudits go to the The Intercept for publishing an article on January 17 by Scahill about Prince's connection to Trump, and highlighting his connection to DeVos.

Prince’s biggest claim to infamy is as the founder of Blackwater, a private security firm that hired mercenaries to augment US military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, among many other places.  Blackwater, now transformed into a company called Academi, had an intimate relationship with the CIA, and was regarded by many as one of the CIA’s go to organizations when it wanted to contract out its dirty work.  Blackwater got into hot water more than once, particularly in 2007 when some of its mercenaries gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians, including a 9-year old boy, in Baghdad.

Scahill reports that trusted sources tell him Prince has been giving Trump advice on his staff picks for the Defense Department and the State Department.  Nothing like having friends in high places if you want work.

Prince is close to another Trump advisor, the racist Steve Bannon.  Prince has often appeared on Bannon’s Breitbart Radio.  Last July, Prince told Bannon that a Trump administration could and should create a new version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination program during the Vietnam War that “neutralized” tens of thousands of alleged Viet Cong leaders.  The new assassination program would presumably target “radical Islamic extremists,” and who knows who else.

DeVos, while not a public advocate of murder like her brother, has worked for decades in an effort to undermine and assassinate public education.  A billionaire heir to the Amway fortune, she is a prominent Republican donor and fund-raiser.  Her political efforts have centered around campaigns to give parents taxpayer-funded “vouchers” so they can pull their children out of the public education system and send them to private schools, including religious schools.  She has also campaigned to expand charter schools, which are publicly funded but run by private companies.

She isn’t responsible for her brother, of course, but the two are closely linked politically, as described in a 2014 Mother Jones article — and there’s no sign anywhere that she has said she doesn’t approve of his actions.

DeVos hails from Michigan, where she is a political force to be reckoned with.  She has been credited with creating a network of charter schools in Michigan that are virtually unregulated, despite the abysmal test scores of their students.  Dick DeVos, Betsy’s husband, led and funded the successful campaign in 2012 that turned Michigan into a so-called “right to work” state, effectively outlawing the union shop.  That includes, of course, public schools.

DeVos was called the “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee” for the office of Secretary of Education ever by Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers. (See below)

Sequester + austerity = stupid budget cuts

Take Action: The Senate will vote Thursday on legislation to prevent harmful cuts.  Please tell your Senators to vote for the American Family Economic Protection Act, S. 388 and for more information on how your state would be affected by the cuts, see our state fact sheets.

 In economics austerity is the  policy of reducing government spending by cutting social services such as health care, education, food assistance, and other welfare assistance.   At the federal level, Republicans and some Democrats  seek austerity by cutting social Security and Medicare. Republicans also are insisting on massive budget cuts known as the sequester.  By any name, these cuts are bad.  In the case of state governments  public tax money is used for police, fire fighters, park services, nurses, doctors, social workers and health assistants.  State  and local austerity efforts cut these services.

In the current economic crisis, the governments of Ireland, Greece, Italy, the UK, Spain and Portugal have implemented austerity programs and cut their budgets  creating  more unemployment and making  the recessions in these countries worse.

Why and how health care is stalled

The Real Problem with The Senate's Small-State Bias
by Nate Silver
Five Thirty Eight: Politics Done Right
8/3/2009


As you all surely know, the Senate is not a terribly
democratic institution. A voter in Wyoming -- population
533,000 -- has about 70 times more ability to influence
the Senate's direction than one in California --
population 36.8 million. And the lack of
representativeness can be particularly acute when the
Senate is conducting business at the committee level.
Max Baucus's Table for Six, for instance, which may very
well determine the fate of efforts to reform health
care, is made up of members who collectively represent
about 6.5 million people, or around one-fiftieth of the
country's population.

This in and of itself is problematic for Democrats,
since there is a correlation between the size of a state
and how Democratic it tends to vote in elections for
national office, although the relationship is not as
strong as you might posit (Rhode Island, Delaware and
Hawaii are small states too). The bigger and more
structural problem, however, may have to do with the
ways that small-state senators raise funds, and in turn,
whose interests they are beholden to.

The chart below details the 20 current senators who have
received the highest percentage of their campaign
contributions since 2003 from corporate PACs, based on
data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
This data focuses on corporate PAC contributions and
individual contributions only; other, usually minor
sources of income (self-financing, transfers from other
campaign committees, contributions from ideological and
labor PACs) are treated as ambiguous and are ignored.
Data should be current through roughly May of this year.

What do these senators have in common? All 20 come from
states with below-median populations. In fact, you have
to go to #26 (John McCain) to find a senator from a
state with an above-median population, and #30 (Saxby
Chambliss) to find one from a state with an above-
average population.

The reason this occurs is because individual
contributions are easier to obtain in states with larger
populations. Although some people make campaign
contributions to candidates from outside their states,
most do not, and so a senator from Texas ought to have
an easier time eliciting funds than one from Idaho. On
the other hand, there is no relationship between the
amount of PAC contributions and the population of a
senator's state; PACs know that one senator's vote is
just as good as another.

What this means is that senators from small states tend
to be relatively more dependant on special-interest
money -- it makes up a larger share of their overall
take. Senators from the ten smallest states have
received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign
funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the
ten largest. There is a tendency to think of senators
from small states as being populists, and there are a
few instances in which this is accurate -- Jon Tester of
Montana and John Thune of South Dakota, for instance,
are relatively non-dependant on PAC money. But for the
most part, something the opposite is true, and senators
from small states in fact have more incentive to placate
special interests.

It is worth noting, by the way, that the six senators on
Baucus's mini-committee are especially egregious in this
regard. They rank #1 (Mike Enzi), #6 (Chuck Grassley),
#11 (Kent Conrad), #13 (Baucus), #14 (Jeff Bingaman) and
#20 (Olympia Snowe) in the share of contributions
received from corporate PACs (an average of 47.5 percent
of their funds overall).

One can think of several plausible reforms to redress
this imbalance. For instance, corporations might be
restricted from donating PAC money to a senator unless
they do a material amount of business in her state. In
addition, the proliferation of the Internet as a
fundraising tool has probably leveled the playing field
some, making it easier for populist-ish candidates like
Tester or Jim Webb to receive contributions from
activists all over the country.

This goes a long way toward explaining, however, why the
Senate tends to be more protective than the House of
corporate interests -- be they in the form of bank
bailouts, tax breaks, or whatever else (consider, for
instance, that H.R. 1424 -- the second take on the bank
bailout -- was approved with the votes of 74 percent of
the Senate but just 60 percent of the House). We don't
need vague notions about the "cultural" differences
between the two chambers to explain this -- they have
mostly to do with where the money is flowing in from.

A complete list of the source of campaign funds for all
100 senators follows below.

-- Ira Cohen

Nevada brothel offers free passes to Senators

The Keith Olberman video below is powerful. Please view it.
If Republicans and Blue Dogs are going to sell their souls; they might as well enjoy it.
A famous Nevada brothel is offering free passes to the legislators. This is far less corrupting than taking millions for campaign finance efforts as the Republicans are doing; and several Blue Dogs.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/08/nevada-brothel-offers-free-passes-to-lawmakers.php

Healthcare and corruption of our legislature

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Keith Olberman