The Huffington Post

Confessions of a Former Sinclair News Director

I was a Sinclair news director. For a few months, at least.

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Republican Leaders Aren't Even Trying to Hide Their Immorality Lately

Republican leaders claim that they are the party of family values. They are not. They also claim that they understand and respect hardworking Americans. They do not.

The Republican elite’s immorality goes well beyond Donald Trump, who has bragged about sexual assault, and has indeed been accused of it by over a dozen women. It goes well beyond Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was banned from a shopping mall to prevent him from preying on minors, and who has been credibly accused of the behavior for which he was banned.

The immorality and disdain of today’s Republican elites shine through in the policies that they embrace. They are embodied in the Republican budget, in their tax legislation, and in their relentless attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Those Republican policies benefit the ones they truly value – their super-wealthy donors.

Republicans in both chambers of Congress have now passed tax bills, which, when the smoke clears, involve the upward redistribution of income and wealth. As if today’s obscene level of income and wealth inequality weren’t bad enough, Republican elites want to increase it.

Both the Senate and House versions require millions of middle-class Americans to pay more, while requiring the richest of the rich to pay less. In 2027, taxpayers with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 will, as a group, pay $5.3 billion more in taxes, while those with annual incomes of $1 million or more will pay $5.8 billion less!

Moreover, hardworking Americans will be hurt in other ways. The increase in the deficit caused by the tax scam will automatically trigger $400 billion in cuts to Medicare. And even that isn’t enough for the party of immorality.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) have made it clear what comes next. Rubio recently claimed that we need to change the structure of Medicare and Social Security (code for making huge cuts) because of the deficit. Ryan was even clearer, saying that he is planning to push legislation to “reform” (code for destroy) Medicare and Medicaid because “it’s the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt.”

Republicans have made this bankrupt argument for decades, but it is especially audacious of them to do it at the exact same time that they are planning to add at least $1 trillion to the debt to pay for their tax giveaway to the wealthy. The announced plans to go after Medicare and Medicaid, as well as Social Security, are in addition to the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, a linchpin to the workability of the law. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the repeal of that key provision will result in an added 13 million Americans without health care, while millions of others will see their health insurance premiums go up by ten percent or more.

Taking away health care from disabled children and elderly Americans, among many others, in order to give a huge tax handout to billionaires and giant corporations is one of the most immoral policies imaginable. But that’s exactly what the self-proclaimed “moral values party” is proposing to do.

The truth is that Social Security does not add a single penny to the debt. Medicare and Medicaid are far more efficient than their private sector counterparts. Gutting them would make health care costs rise more quickly, not rein them in. It would, however, transfer the costs from the federal government to elderly, impoverished, and disabled Americans who can’t afford them. It would mean the wealthiest among us, who are not paying their fair share now, would pay even less. Like the tax scam, cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will transfer wealth upward.

Why are Republicans so hypocritical about the debt, constantly using it as an excuse to demand cuts to vital benefits while they happily add one trillion dollars or more to it by giving huge tax cuts to the wealthy? Because they never cared about the debt at all. It’s just a convenient bludgeon for them to use in their decades-long war against Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Indeed, they have opposed these programs ever since they came into existence.

That opposition comes from the fundamental immorality at the heart of the Republican Party. It is a political party united around the principle that only the wealthy have any value. It is a party that has disdain for everyone else. A party that believes hardworking Americans doing backbreaking work at less than subsistence wages are lazy freeloaders.

Republican politicians are usually careful enough to not reveal their true attitude publicly during election seasons. But in unguarded moments, they say what they really mean.

In case the policies are too subtle or opaque, their immorality and their contempt for the rest of us have been made completely transparent by recent public comments from Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA.)

Hatch, in a heated exchange with Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), explained why Republicans have failed to renew CHIP, which provides health insurance to poor children. Shockingly, he said: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Social Security and Medicare are benefits that are earned, just like Senator Hatch’s government salary. But his comments had to be referencing their beneficiaries. There is no other way to get to trillions of dollars.

Similarly, Grassley, explaining why the GOP wants to eliminate the estate tax, which only impacts the wealthiest 0.02 percent of Americans, stated: “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Apparently, if working and middle-class Americans didn’t spend money on alcohol, women (who Grassley tellingly refers to as commodities rather than people), or entertainment, they could have $5.49 million to leave to their heirs! And, because Donald Trump has led such a puritanical life, he should be free of paying taxes toward the common good!

Grassley and Hatch’s comments are both woefully out of touch and deeply immoral. But they are not out of step with their party. Ryan frequently talks about “makers and takers.” He has claimed that “we’re going to a majority of takers versus makers in America…They’ll be dependent on the government for their livelihoods [rather] than themselves.”

Ryan insists that Social Security and Medicare, earned benefits that he dismissively calls “safety nets”, are in danger of becoming “a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency,” turning them into slothful and lazy “takers.” More crudely and succinctly, former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) asserted that Social Security is “a milk cow with 310 million tits [sic]!”

These comments reveal the utter contempt Republican politicians have for hardworking Americans. It is ironic that the Republicans who are pushing to eliminate the estate tax apparently do not consider the heirs of billionaires to be “takers” but save that pejorative label for hardworking Americans who have the audacity to claim the Social Security and Medicare benefits they have earned.

Republican politicians speak of economic growth, “saving” Social Security and Medicare, and the need to rein in the deficit. But the truth is clear to anyone who is willing to really look. Today’s GOP is interested only in doing the bidding of their billionaire donors so that they can retain power. It is a party of politicians who, despite their claim to the contrary, are disdainful of hardworking Americans.

The American people did not vote for this morally bankrupt philosophy. None of the candidates in last year’s election ran on gutting Medicare and Medicaid, denying health care to poor children, or providing a massive tax transfer to billionaires. Republicans never do. Instead, they focus on trumped up scandals, personality, and divisiveness.

But next year, they are likely to find that their tax scam (regardless of if it ultimately becomes law) was a step too far — especially if Ryan acts on his plans to follow it with further attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. Voters will be furious, and they will not be distracted from their anger.

Democrats need to channel that anger by promising to govern in the exact opposite way that Republicans have. They should run hard on a pledge to protect and expand Social Security and Medicare. If they do, voters will know that the Democratic Party is the party of family values; they will know that Democrats are the politicians who respect all Americans, even those that happen not to be wealthy.

(Nancy Altman is President of Social Security Works, and Linda Benesch is Communications Director. Sign the petition to all members of Congress demanding that they reject a tax plan that cuts Medicare, and that they stop their war on seniors and working families. )

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The U.S. Is Shamelessly Silent as Iraq Crushed Our Allies, the Kurds

After seizing Kirkuk, Iraq’s Prime Minister Heider al-Abadi is doubling down in a bid to occupy all of Iraqi Kurdistan. He has enlisted Iraq’s neighbors, Iran and Turkey, in an insidious effort to subjugate the Iraqi Kurds. The United States barely responded to Iraq’s aggression, looking weak and irrelevant.

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Hurricane Harvey Exposes Danger of Tax Cuts, Deregulation, Aging Infrastructure, Ignoring the Environment and ‘Limited Government’

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, we need to tell the truth: While the storm’s devastation was unavoidable, it was made worse by too little government.

We need to say it loud and clear, because here come the snake oil salesmen.

Twelve years ago this month they invaded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Republican leaders used historic flooding as an opening to help corporations and private investors profit from tragedy. Following a blueprint called “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices,” they hired private mercenary corporations, cut taxes, weakened labor laws and eventually privatized the city’s public housing and most of its public schools.

There’s no doubt they’re salivating right this second over yet another crisis.

But the very “solutions” they’re sure to propose—charter schools, suspending prevailing wage standards, lower corporate taxes, etc.—are derived from the very ideology that made Harvey more destructive that it should have been.

Years of unchecked development and sprawl made Houston more prone to flooding. Private developers have made fortunes off the city’s lack of zoning laws, paving over acres of pastureland that once helped soak up floodwaters.

Decades of underinvestment in public infrastructure put more lives at risk. Both of Houston’s two major levees were built in the 1940s and need serious repairs—one breached under the pressure of Harvey’s heavy rains and the other is at full capacity.

Across Southern Texas, many people couldn’t evacuate simply because they couldn’t afford to. “I had some problems getting out of town, a little broke and stuff, so I had to come home and, you know, tough it out,” said one resident of Rockport, Texas.

Chronic inaction on carbon emissions—lobbied for by the oil and gas industry—is rapidly changing our climate. While climate change triggered by carbon emissions didn’t cause Harvey, it likely made the storm stronger, more unpredictable, and quicker to intensify.

For years, the Texas legislature has refused to pass any legislation to prepare for the impacts of climate change as long as it contained any reference to climate change. Just two weeks ago, President Donald Trump repealed an Obama-era executive order that had required infrastructure projects using federal dollars to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, like flooding.

We are decades into an all-out assault on democratic control of government. From rural towns to big cities, crucial public resources like water, public schools, and transit have slowly been handed over to the private sector. Roads, bridges, levees, and water systems have deteriorated without funding. Public budgets have gotten tighter as corporate taxes have been cut. The government, they say, is “too big,” and the “free market,” no matter the costs to poor and working people, reigns supreme.

The solutions in the coming weeks and months cannot be more of the same. No, American Enterprise Institute, removing price-gouging laws in the wake of Harvey to “let the market work” is evil and absurd. Enough is enough. The “free market” isn’t working.

America’s infrastructure needs direct federal funding with no strings attached that grease the wheels for privatization. Decisions about our communities need to be made by people, not private investors and developers. Those that make unimaginable wealth from a thriving economy need to pay more to keep it thriving, while those that profit from speeding up climate change need to pay more to clean up the mess.

The truth is, we need more democracy—government controlled by and for the people. Or Hurricane Harvey—and Hurricane Katrina, and Detroit, and Flint—will become the new normal.

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Rebuilding Our Country Should Boost Good Jobs, Not Privatization Schemes

Earlier this month, Trump spoke fervently about major goals to rebuild our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. It’s clear to us all that America’s roads, highways, bridges, hospitals, government buildings, airports, and sewers are in dire need of repair. Trump touted $200 billion in new spending, and additional incentives for private investment — which really boils down to privatizing American infrastructure.

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Billionaire Charter School Leader Says Black Politician Worse Than the KKK

The white supremacist violence in Charlottesville was the tragic result of the Republican Party’s racist politics, which have only intensified under President Donald Trump.

We must fight those politics, but we should also acknowledge that racism isn’t only angry people clutching guns and confederate flags.

A week ago, Daniel Loeb, the chairman of the board for New York City’s Success Academy Charter Schools network, accused New York State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins of being worse than the Ku Klux Klan:

Hypocrites like Stewart-Cousins who pay fealty to powerful union thugs and bosses do more damage to people of color than anyone who has ever donned a hood.

What had the African-American senator done wrong? Stewart-Cousins supports more transparency and accountability for charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated.

The billionaire hedge fund manager went on to praise charter school advocates “who stand for educational choice and support Charter funding that leads to economic mobility and opportunity for poor [black] kids.

Loeb’s remarks are unacceptable and should be condemned—but we shouldn’t miss the deeper lesson.

While Loeb has apologized, he’s refused to resign—and there’s very little New Yorkers can do about it. Even though Success Academy is funded with taxpayer dollars, taxpayers have no say over how the network operates. The investors, lawyers, PR professionals, and philanthropists that sit on its board get to spend public money to educate children with little accountability to the public.

That’s the problem with private control of public education. Charter schools are publicly funded schools run by private groups—some for-profit, some nonprofit, and some that use nonprofit status to hide behind for-profit schemes unaccountable to parents and the public who pay the bills.

For example, across the country from Success Academy, two charter schools in Livermore, California, managed by the nonprofit Tri-Valley Learning Corporation were recently found to have potentially funneled millions of dollars in public money to various private entities. The schools closed, leaving students scrambling for other options and parents with no way to hold Tri-Valley’s leaders accountable.

Many charter schools also raise additional money from private investors with little transparency about how that money is spent. Success Academy has received millions of dollars from billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Trump economic advisor John Paulson.

What Daniel Loeb said is not only racist, it’s also wrong. As the nation’s schools become increasingly segregated by race and class, many charter schools are making things worse.

Public schools should be in our hands, not billionaires who get to decide what’s best for “poor black kids.”

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As a Military Officer, I Know We Need Patriots - Not Nationalists - To Save Us From America's Murderous Path

One of the challenges of my teaching career was to encourage students to think critically about American history and actions.  Since I taught at conservative institutions (the Air Force Academy; a technical college in rural Pennsylvania), many of my students had a strong “America: love it or leave it” mentality.  They associated criticism with lack of patriotism. Fortunately, I had the advantage of wearing a military uniform (at the Air Force Academy) and later the status of a retired military officer (in Pennsylvania), so few students could readily dismiss my critiques as the work of a “libtard” leftist academic.

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The Shameful History Behind the School Vouchers Movement

At the exact time I was giving a speech last week to 1,400 educators about ensuring that all children have access to a powerful, purposeful public education, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was addressing the American Legislative Exchange Council—a group of corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators who are working to privatize and defund public education, and cloaking their efforts as school “choice.”

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5 Tips for a Sustainable, Eco-Friendly Fourth of July

With summer in full swing and the Fourth of July around the corner, everyone can benefit from a few tips on how to reduce the environmental footprint of their summer celebrations. Here are five tips to be more environmentally friendly for the Fourth of July (and all summer activities we take part in) and how we stay cool (as well as some motivating statistics to illustrate why its important to do so):

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Godzilla Amazon: The Amount of Power in Jeff Bezos' Hands Should Frighten All Americans

To understand the depth and breadth of Jeff Bezos’ ambitions for the company he built, type www.relentless.com into your browser. The domain Bezos registered in 1994 will redirect to Amazon, the company aptly, and ambitiously, nicknamed The Everything Store. He tells his shareholders that the company will act like an aggressive startup — that at Amazon, it is always Day One. 

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PBS Runs a Three-Hour Series Glorifying the Anti-Public School DeVos Education Agenda

Public education today faces an existential crisis. Over the past two decades, the movement to transfer public money to private organizations has expanded rapidly. The George W. Bush administration first wrote into federal law the proposal that privately managed charter schools were a remedy for low-scoring public schools, even though no such evidence existed. The Obama administration provided hundreds of millions each year to charter schools, under the control of private boards. Now, the Trump administration, under the leadership of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, wants to expand privatization to include vouchers, virtual schools, cyberschools, homeschooling, and every other possible alternative to public education. DeVos has said that public education is a “dead end,” and that “government sucks.”

DeVos’s agenda finds a ready audience in the majority of states now controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. Most states already have some form of voucher program that allow students to use public money to enroll in private and religious schools, even when their own state constitution prohibits it. The Republicans have skirted their own constitutions by asserting that the public money goes to the family, not the private or religious school. The longstanding tradition of separating church and state in K-12 education is crumbling. And Betsy DeVos can testify with a straight face that she will enforce federal law to “schools that receive federal funding,” because voucher schools allegedly do not receive the money, just the family that chooses religious schools.

Advocates of the privatization movement like DeVos claim that nonpublic schools will “save poor children from failing public schools,” but independent researchers have recently concurred that vouchers actually have had a negative effect on students in the District of Columbia, Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio. Charters, at best, have a mixed record, and many are known for excluding children with disabilities and English language learners and for pushing out students who are troublesome.

This is a time when honest, nonpartisan reporting is needed to inform the American public. But this month the Public Broadcasting System is broadcasting a “documentary” that tells a one-sided story, the story that Betsy DeVos herself would tell, based on the work of free-market advocate Andrew Coulson. Author of “Market Education,” Coulson narrates “School, Inc.,” a three-hour program, which airs this month nationwide in three weekly broadcasts on PBS.

Uninformed viewers who see this slickly produced program will learn about the glories of unregulated schooling, for-profit schools, teachers selling their lessons to students on the Internet. They will learn about the “success” of the free market in schooling in Chile, Sweden, and New Orleans. They will hear about the miraculous charter schools across America, and how public school officials selfishly refuse to encourage the transfer of public funds to private institutions. They will see a glowing portrait of South Korea, where students compete to get the highest possible scores on a college entry test that will define the rest of their lives and where families gladly pay for after-school tutoring programs and online lessons to boost test scores. They will hear that the free market is more innovative than public schools.

What they will not see or hear is the other side of the story. They will not hear scholars discuss the high levels of social segregation in Chile, nor will they learn that the students protesting the free-market schools in the streets are not all “Communists,” as Coulson suggests. They will not hear from scholars who blame Sweden’s choice system for the collapse of its international test scores. They will not see any reference to Finland, which far outperforms any other European nation on international tests yet has neither vouchers nor charter schools. They may not notice the absence of any students in wheelchairs or any other evidence of students with disabilities in the highly regarded KIPP charter schools. They will not learn that the acclaimed American Indian Model Charter Schools in Oakland does not enroll any American Indians, but has a student body that is 60 percent Asian American in a city where that group is 12.8 percent of the student population. Nor will they see any evidence of greater innovation in voucher schools or charter schools than in properly funded public schools.

Coulson has a nifty way of dismissing the fact that the free market system of schooling was imposed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. He says that Hitler liked the Hollywood movie “It Happened One Night” (with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable); should we stop showing or watching the movie? Is that a fair comparison? Pinochet was directly responsible for the free market system of schooling, including for-profit private schools. Hitler neither produced nor directed “It Happened One Night.” Thus does Coulson refer to criticisms (like Sweden’s collapsing scores on international tests) and dismisses them as irrelevant.

I watched the documentary twice, preparing to be interviewed by Channel 13, and was repelled by the partisan nature of the presentation. I googled the funders and discovered that the lead funder is the Rose Mary and Jack Anderson Foundation, a very conservative foundation that is a major contributor to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which advocates for vouchers. The Anderson Foundation is allied with Donors Trust, whose donors make contributions that cannot be traced to them. Mother Jones referred to this foundation as part of “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.” Other contributors to Donors Trust include the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation.

The second major funder is the Prometheus Foundation. Its public filings with the IRS show that its largest grant ($2.5 million) went to the Ayn Rand Institute. The third listed funder of  “School Inc.” is the Steve and Lana Hardy Foundation, which contributes to free-market libertarian think tanks. 

In other words, this program is paid propaganda. It does not search for the truth. It does not present opposing points of view. It is an advertisement for the demolition of public education and for an unregulated free market in education. PBS might have aired a program that debates these issues, but “School Inc.” does not.

It is puzzling that PBS would accept millions of dollars for this lavish and one-sided production from a group of foundations with a singular devotion to the privatization of public services. The decision to air this series is even stranger when you stop to consider that these kinds of anti-government political foundations are likely to advocate for the elimination of public funding for PBS. After all, in a free market of television, where there are so many choices available, why should the federal government pay for a television channel?

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Trumpcare Would be a Disaster for Tens of Millions of Americans, Especially Those Over Fifty

While cable news has been transfixed by James Comey and Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell has been busy. He is preparing to ram the disastrous health care repeal bill that House Republicans passed last month through the Senate and down the throats of the American people. McConnell isn’t holding hearings on the bill where Senate members get to debate openly and hear testimony from experts. Instead, Senate Republicans are writing the bill in secret. The public, the press, and their Democratic colleagues are all in the dark about the contents of a bill that would reshape one-sixth of the American economy. The only people they are bothering to get input from? The for-profit insurance industry.

The health care repeal bill, often known as “Trumpcare”, would be a disaster for tens of millions of Americans, and especially those over fifty. Trumpcare would allow health insurance corporations to charge older Americans up to five time as much for coverage. Particularly for those just below Medicare age, this would be catastrophic. Currently, a 64-year-old with total income of $26,500 pays an average of $1,700 a year for health insurance bought in an Affordable Care Act exchange. Under Trumpcare, she would pay $16,100 a year! That’s more than the average Social Security benefit.

Even those who are over 65 would not be spared the ravages of Trumpcare. That’s because this bill doesn’t just repeal the Affordable Care Act – it also guts Medicaid, cutting it by a massive $834 billion in order to fund a tax giveaway to the ultra-rich. Millions of Americans, low-income seniors and people with disabilities, are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. Medicaid is particularly essential for those who require long-term care, which will be most of us one day. An estimated 70 percent of Americans 65 and older will someday require long-term care, and over three-quarters of long-stay nursing home residents will eventually be covered by Medicaid. Is there any way to stop this disaster in its tracks? Yes, but the window is quickly closing. To stop McConnell’s health care repeal bill, we need to convince three Republicans to vote no. That’s why we’ve spent the last few months traveling around the country on a “Hands Off Medicare and Medicaid Tour”, galvanizing opposition to Trumpcare in states with potentially persuadable Republican Senators.

But McConnell is currently in the midst of whipping his caucus, twisting arms to get the votes he needs. That’s why now is the moment to call your senators. Do it daily, until this monstrous bill is dead. If your Senators are Republicans, demand that they vote no. If they are Democrats, ask them to use any means possible to delay the vote. Even an extra two weeks, especially over the July recess, could give the resistance enough time to mobilize and scare vulnerable Republicans into voting no.

We are going to be doing everything we can to stop this monstrosity and are planning Hands Off Medicare and Medicaid events in West Virginia and Alaska in the next few weeks, keep an eye on our Facebook page for event details.

Just how terrible is this bill? Since McConnell has refused to release the Senate’s version of the health care repeal bill, we don’t know exactly what’s in it. But all reports indicate that it is very similar to the bill passed by the House of Representatives last month.

  • Rips health insurance away from 23 million Americans
  • Cuts dedicated Medicare funding by $59 billion over the next decade
  • Cuts federal funding for Medicaid by $834 billion over the next decade
  • Increases insurance costs for older Americans 55-64 by as much as 800%
  • Ends Medicaid’s new protections for older adults just below Medicare eligibility age by shifting costs of Medicaid expansion to the states
  • Fundamentally threatens Medicaid’s protections for low-income seniors and people with disabilities by taking away its guarantee and placing a per enrollee cap on federal funding
  • Threatens Medicaid’s long-term care protections for seniors and people with disabilities, including those also receiving Medicare
  • Removes critical funding for our national healthcare system to create a massive tax break for millionaires and billionaires
  • Significantly increases all out-of-pocket healthcare costs for older adults just below Medicare eligibility age
  • Paves the way for future, even more drastic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid

Below are some of the senators who, for a variety of reasons, might vote no on Trumpcare. If one of them represents your state, call today! And again tomorrow! And the next day! Ask your friends and family in those states to call as well. Don’t stop calling, and getting others to call, until the bill is defeated!

Lisa Murkowski (Alaska): 202-224-6665, 907-271-3735

Dan Sullivan (Alaska): 202-224-3004, 907-271-5915

Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia): 202-224-6472, 304-347-5372

Susan Collins (Maine): 202-224-2523, 207-780-3575

Dean Heller (Nevada): 202-224-6244, 702-388-6605

Rob Portman (Ohio): 202-224-3353, 614-469-6774

Cory Gardner (Colorado): 202-224-5941, 303-391-5777

Todd Young (Indiana): 202-224-5623, 317-226-6700

Jeff Flake (Arizona): 202-224-4521, 602-840-189

Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania): 202-224-4254, 412-803-3501

Rand Paul (Kentucky): 202-224-4343, 270-782-8303

Tom Cotton (Arkansas): 202-224-2353, 479-751-0879

Bill Cassidy (Louisiana): 202-224-5824, 225-929-7711

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Opioids: Now The Leading Cause of Death in Americans Under 50

The Unites States of America is facing the worst health care crisis of our nation’s history. Over the past two-year period, more Americans died of opiate addiction than died in the entire Vietnam War. Drug overdoses now cause more deaths than gun violence and car crashes. In fact, accidental opioid overdoses are responsible for more deaths in 2015 than HIV/AIDS did at the height of the epidemic in 1995.

However, the AIDS epidemic can be the blueprint for the United States approach to the opioid epidemic. Once America became mobilized against AIDS, Congress orchestrated intensive efforts devoted to training and supporting clinicians, many of whom were new to the treatment of viral infections in immunocompromised patients.

Immediately, a collaboration led to one standardized set of treatment guidelines that were implemented through newly formed AIDS Education and Training Centers. Funding was provided to connect patients with capable providers of wrap-around social services supported by grants from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program.

Once America becomes mobilized against the heroin epidemic, similarly, social workers, nurse care managers, and outreach workers could be deployed strategically to help obtain substance-abuse treatment in primary care settings, and funding incentives authorized by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), such as health homes and accountable care organizations, could help cover the costs.

The current treatment guidelines for opioid addiction just do not work. Today, thousands of patients receive medical treatment to relieve opioid withdrawal only during brief detoxification admissions, lose their tolerance to opioids and get discharged with referrals to medication-free residential or outpatient care. Of these patients, 70 to 90 percent quickly relapse and face a high risk of overdose death.

On June 5, 2017, the New York Times reported that drug overdose deaths in 2016 would most likely land someplace between 59,000 and 65,000 Americans. That is a 19 percent rise in deaths from the 52,404 recorded in 2015. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50.

But the solution is simple. We need treatment facilities, we need them now, and we need to create a radical model to accomplish the herculean task.

Tim Grover, a Lowell, Massachusetts businessman, buried his 26-year old daughter, Megan in 2014. On Christmas Eve, Megan had to leave a treatment center because of red tape. It is not clear exactly what happened that evening, but it had something to do with insurance mandates for the separation and clarification of detox facilities versus treatment centers.

No joke, it was something along the lines of my friend’s son who first detoxed himself off heroin in the basement of his mother’s house and then pounded the streets looking for a 30-day treatment facility. The only problem, he was shut-out because he had to be “referred by a licensed detox facility.”

He had no choice but to get high, go to a detox and then attempt long term treatment. Desperate, he did just that. But now his mother visits him in the cemetery. The first bag of heroin he bought was Fentanyl, and it ended his life.

Back to Tim Grover and his daughter, Megan. The Christmas Eve debacle wasn’t their first rodeo. After a serious automobile accident when Megan was 17, she was prescribed OxyContin to treat pain from her injuries. That, unfortunately, like so many countless others, rang the bell that sounded rehab after rehab and relapse after relapse.

But on the night of Dec. 29, 2014, Tim received a phone call from Megan. She was extremely happy. There was a bed available in a Boston treatment facility the next morning. Tim told Megan he loved her and went to bed at rest.

Tomorrow never came. Tim Grover buried Megan on Jan. 5, 2015, and 24 hours later, Tim purchased a vacant Riverside School in Lowell, Massachusetts and opened the residential treatment home for women, Megan’s House, on Sep. 30, 2015. Tim Grover was angry at God, angry at the system that failed his daughter, and felt socially responsible for helping other young women like Megan.

It is time to be socially responsible and mobilize America against this health crisis. We can never Make America Great Again if we just stand by and watch the impact heroin is having on poverty, joblessness, crime, and the deteriorating communities of the Heartland of our great nation.

As Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on America to do the right thing ― after they have tried everything else,” and now is the time to do the right thing. Treatment. Treatment. Treatment. We can not sit back any longer and watch 4,367 Americans die every month from an accidental overdose of heroin. That’s right, 144 people will die today from an accidental overdose of opioids.

Need help with substance abuse or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.

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President Trump Is Waging a War On Children

Our nation’s budget should reflect our nation’s professed values, but President Trump’s 2018 Federal Budget, “A New Foundation for America’s Greatness,” radically does the opposite. This immoral budget declares war on America’s children, our most vulnerable group, and the foundation of our nation’s current and future economic, military and leadership security. It cruelly dismantles and shreds America’s safety net laboriously woven over the past half century to help and give hope to the 14.5 million children struggling today in a sea of poverty, hunger, sickness, miseducation, homelessness and disabilities. It slashes trillions of dollars from health care, nutrition and other critical programs that give poor babies and children a decent foundation in life to assure trillions of dollars in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and powerful corporations who do not deserve massive doses of government support.

The cruel Trump budget invests more in our military — already the most costly in the world — but denies vulnerable children and youths the income, health care, food, housing and education supports they need to become strong future soldiers to defend our country. Seventy-one percent of our 17- to 24-year-olds are now ineligible for military service because of health and education deficits. It seeks to build a wall to keep immigrants out by slashing supports for those inside who can be counted on to help staff our businesses and factories and other services. This budget creates more inequality and less opportunity for those struggling to make ends meet and is a grave injustice.

President Trump invests in fighting those he sees as outside enemies through weapons and walls and turns his back on the internal enemies that threaten the basic domestic needs of our people — health care, housing, education and jobs that pay living wages. The Congress and the people of the United States must reject President Trump’s 2018 budget and the mean spirited values it reflects. It declares war on children and working people struggling to support their families by ignoring even their most basic needs and gives trillions to those who do not need massive government support — especially at a time of record wealth and income inequality.

The president’s 2018 budget:

  • Slashes $610 billion over 10 years from Medicaid, which nearly 37 million children rely on for a healthy start in life and which pays for nearly half of all births and ensures coverage for 40 percent of our children with special health care needs. The budget also assumes passage of the more than $800 billion additional cuts in Medicaid included in the American Health Care Act for a total Medicaid massacre of more than $1.4 trillion over 10 years.

  • Rips $5.7 billion from CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), which covers nearly 9 million children in working families ineligible for Medicaid. The proposed cap on CHIP funding for families at 250 percent of the poverty level threatens coverage for millions of children in the 24 states and the District of Columbia that have chosen to extend coverage to children in families with slightly higher incomes.

  • Snatches food out of the mouths and stomachs of hungry children by slicing $193 billion over 10 years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which some still call food stamps. SNAP feeds nearly 46 million people including nearly 20 million children. This cut is an unprecedented 25 percent reduction in a core safety net program that in 2014 lifted 4.7 million people, including 2.1 million children, out of poverty. For the 4.9 million households, 1.3 million with children, with no cash income who rely only on SNAP to keep the wolves of hunger from their doors, these cuts would be a catastrophic assault.

  • Chops $22 billion over 10 years from TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program) including $6 billion that eliminates the TANF Contingency Fund which helps support some of our neediest families.

  • Slashes programs to assist families with housing and end homelessness by $7.4 billion, a 15 percent cut for 2018 including $2.3 billion from Housing Choice Vouchers, which would leave more than 250,000 low income households without them; $1.8 billion — nearly 29 percent — from public housing already in desperate need of repair and expansion; and $133 million — 5.6 percent — from homeless assistance grants.

  • Whacks $72 billion over 10 years from the Supplemental Security Income Program (SSI), which more than 8 million children and adults with the most severe disabilities depend on to keep going. Despite the President’s promise not to cut Social Security, his budget cuts $48 billion from Social Security Disability Insurance which assists, among others, grandparents and other relatives raising children because their parents cannot care for them.

  • Cuts $40 billion over 10 years from the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) by barring tax-paying undocumented immigrant workers, many with American citizen children, from benefiting from the Child Tax Credit unless they have a Social Security number, and making it harder for them to benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit created to reward hard work and help parents support their children.

  • Slashes job training programs by $1.1 billion, or 40 percent, over 10 years for youths, adults and dislocated workers. It denigrates the concept of public service jobs by eliminating the Corporation for National and Community Service, and with it AmeriCorps, Vista and Senior Corps.

  • Cuts federal education funding $9.2 billion in 2018 alone at a time when a majority of children in all racial and economic groups cannot read or compute at grade level. It slashes $143 billion over 10 years from student loans by eliminating the loan program that encourages graduates to take public service jobs and restricts other programs that subsidize college education for first generation college students and others from low income families. And it proposes to add $1 billion in new funding for the Title I program for disadvantaged students, which has historically supplemented resources for students in schools in areas of concentrated poverty, but for the wrong reason. It proposes to fund a new school choice initiative to let children draw Title I funds away from schools in the neediest areas and take them to schools in higher income areas.

  • Shears $54 billion in 2018 ($1.6 trillion over 10 years) in non-defense discretionary programs which include a broad range of health, early childhood, education, child welfare and juvenile justice programs as well as environmental protection, foreign assistance, medical and scientific research and other federal government programs. The Trump budget would reduce spending for these important programs 2 percent a year for the next 10 years.

  • Zeroes out funding for the Legal Services Corporation to deny the poor their only option to defend themselves against injustice.

  • Eliminates core programs that offer extra assistance to low income children, families and communities including the Social Service Block Grant ($1.4 billion in 2018 alone, $16.3 billion over 10 years); the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to ward off heat in the summer and cold in winter months ($3.4 billion); the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOME, Community Development Block Grant, Indian Community Development Block Grant, and Choice Neighborhood programs ($4.1 billion), and the National Housing Trust Fund which provides funds to states and local communities to develop affordable rental housing; the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) programs that include CSBG ($723.6 million), Community Economic Development program ($29. 8 million) and Rural Community Facilities ($6.5 million).

  • Axes the 21st Century Community Learning Program that offers programs to curb summer learning loss and keep children safe and engaged through after school programs for 1.6 million children; the Preschool Development Grants which went to 18 states to improve and expand access to high-quality preschool for children in high-needs communities; and the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program for parents enrolled in college to assist in child care costs.

At the same time, President Trump’s 2018 Budget includes an estimated $5 trillion tax package for the wealthiest individuals and corporations who neither need nor deserve massive government support and dramatically increases spending on defense and border security. The Trump budget:

  • Increases base defense spending $54 billion in 2018 alone (and $489 billion over 10 years). That’s $147,945,205 a day, $6,164,384 an hour and $102,739 a minute. The U.S. military budget is already the largest military budget in the world. We spend more on the military than the next eight countries combined (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany).

  • Spends $2.6 billion new dollars on border security including $1.6 billion for a down payment on the President’s proposed obscene wall at the Mexican border estimated to cost $10 to $20 billion before completion and after false campaign promises that the Mexican government would pay.

This draconian budget slashes over $3 trillion dollars in the next decade and tramples America’s values and is anti-child, anti-poor, and anti-low-income working people. It erodes the security of our nation’s future.

President Dwight Eisenhower, a five star general and World War II hero, understood that throwing money at the military could not be an excuse for assaulting the poor and stealing from our children, saying, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies … a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hope of its children.”

The Trump budget would not pass the test of any great faith or standard of fairness. It must be rejected resoundingly by the Congress and the American people.

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Six Teachers Suspended for Standing Up for Students: Only in the Mayor Controlled Chicago Public Schools

My oldest son will be starting kindergarten in the fall. He is a introverted kid. He loves to learn, takes a while to warm up to new people, and is a loyal friend. He is however at times too passive, which could make him vulnerable to bullying or more prone withdraw from activities that he would otherwise be interested in. When I envision the type of teacher that I want for my son next year and going forward in CPS, I picture a teacher that will make him feel safe, inspire him to learn, bring him joy and push his learning. I want a teacher who will teach him to take a stand, will advocate for him if needed and also will teach him how to advocate for himself.

My wife and I are both CPS teachers and we know that the system of CPS is a mess, but also know that the educators who work in the buildings are amazing. As an educator in CPS for the past ten years, I have met many educators that I would love my son to have as teachers. One such educator is Sarah Chambers. 

Sarah, if you haven’t heard, is now in her 7th week of being suspended by CPS. She is an elementary special education teacher who has always received great ratings from her principals. She also vocally advocates for her students and special education students across the city. In addition, she also runs her schools LGBTQ club at her school. 

Her “crime” is holding accountable a school system in which the mayor controls schools, appoints school board members, and picks CEOs to “run” the schools without educational experience. People such as these are intimidated by vocal and outstanding educators, who call them out on their inexperience or short-comings.

Sarah has been an outstanding teacher and vocal advocate for her students for many years now. I wrote about her back in 2014 as she led her elementary school to protest the ridiculous amount of testing being forced onto our students. Her school and another school boycotted an unneeded standardized Illinois test. CPS threatened to revoke the teachers’ teaching licenses if they didn’t give the test. The teachers met with parents and explained why they were against giving the tests and gained parental support for the boycott. These teachers so loved their students and were committed to doing what was right for their students that they literally put their careers on the line for their students. Her work on this protest was featured in the book More Than A Score.

The actions by CPS to suspended a committed and vocal teacher are bigger than Sarah Chambers. This is how CPS has been operating for years. Once again, when you have mayoral control and people with no educational experience running schools they get scared when outstanding and vocal teachers speak up. Teachers like Xian Franzinger Barrett, Tim Meegan and other CPS teachers who have spoken up in years past quickly find their position cut. In many districts, educators would be lauded for their commitment to their students and schools, but CPS prefers its teachers quiet and complacent. The minute you are confident and vocal CPS comes for you or at least puts you on a troublemaker list.

Now this year, in addition to Sarah Chambers there are 5 other teachers currently suspended for being vocal advocates for their schools and students. Teachers like Kevin Triplett, Joseph Dunlap, Laura Sierra, and Jose Contreras. Their stories and “justification” for being suspended can be found here.

Now I know there may be someone somewhere thinking, “surely those teachers must have done something illegal or they wouldn’t be suspended”. If you have taught in CPS long enough you know that being vocal is a crime enough. To survive in the chaos of CPS system leadership teachers usually adopt 1 of 2 strategies. Either, 1) go along with the mess and just lay low; or 2) act like you are going along with the mess and then close your classroom door and do what is best for our students. There is another option. It is the option that has the potential of incredible highs and devastating lows. This third option is to teach effectively, develop critical-thinkers who question why things are they way they are and speak out against injustice. The possible high is that with a concerted and collaborated effort, over time real change will happen in CPS and the school system will improve. Mayoral control will end and school board members will be elected and no longer appointed. The low of this plan is exactly what is happening to the CTU Six, they are targeted and suspended for being too vocal.

As a parent I want a teacher who not only can teach my child, but is also willing to defend my child and teach society ways to improve our schools. By suspending these 6 teachers, CPS is robbing these teachers’ students of quality instruction. The students of these teachers are and have been taught by substitutes for weeks. That is not what is best for kids.

There are ways you can help. 1) Contact CPS and CEO Claypool and ask them to reinstate all of the CTU Six; 2) contact your Alderman and ask them to support the CTU Six. 11 Alderman have already publicly stated their support, shout out to Alderman Garza, Pawar, Waugespack, Cardenas, Rosa, Arena, Munoz, Mell, Lopez, Cappleman, and Reilley; and 3) get involved in your neighborhood schools, teachers need support.

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An Open Letter to President Trump Upon His Arrival in Rome

The first time I saw the painting of Andrew Jackson beside your desk in the White House, it felt like getting a punch in the stomach. I also assumed that it had been there before you took office. Now, I know it was your choice to have it put up in the Oval Office because Jackson is your favorite president. Now, I know who you have chosen to emulate.

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Billionaires Backing K-12 Privatization Win Majority on Los Angeles School Board, Setting Stage for Sweeping District Takeover

Once Nick Melvoin joins the Los Angeles Unified School District board, he’s going to require all high school civics teachers to add a new lesson plan to their curriculum: “How To Buy An Election.”

That’s what happened on Tuesday. Melvoin and his billionaire backers dramatically outspent school board president Steve Zimmer’s campaign, making the District 4 race the most expensive in LAUSD history.

Political pundits will spend the next few days and weeks analyzing the Los Angeles school board election, examining exit polls, spilling lots of ink over how different demographic groups — income, race, religious, union membership, gender, party affiliation, and others — voted on Tuesday.

But the real winner in the race was not Nick Melvoin, but Big Money. And the real loser was not Steve Zimmer, but democracy – and LA’s children.

Melvoin’s backers — particularly billionaires and multi-millionaires who donated directly to his campaign and to several front groups, especially the California Charter School Association (CCSA) — outspent Zimmer’s campaign by $6.6 million to $2.7 million. Melvoin got 30, 696 votes to Zimmer’s 22,766. In other words, Melvoin spent 71% of the money to get 57% of the vote.

Here’s another way of looking at the election results: Melvoin spent $215 for each vote he received, while Zimmer spent only $121 per vote.

There’s no doubt that if the Zimmer campaign had the same war-chest that Melvoin had, he would have been able to mount an even more formidable grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign and put more money into the TV and radio air war. Under those circumstances, it is likely that Zimmer would have prevailed.

Billionaires, many of whom live far from Los Angeles, bought this election for Melvoin. Their money paid for non-stop TV and radio ads, as well as phone calls, mailers and newspaper ads (including a huge wrap-around ad on the front of Sunday’s LA Times). Melvoin’s billionaire backers paid for 44 mailers and at least $1 million on negative TV ads against Zimmer.

The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin was funded by big oil, big tobacco, Enron and Walmart, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires. They paid for Melvoin’s ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer, a former teacher and current school board president. Melvoin is so devoted to the corporate agenda for our schools that during the campaign he said that the school district needed a “hostile takeover.”

Among the big donors behind Melvoin and the CCSA were members of the Walton family (Alice Walton, Jim Walton, and Carrie Walton Penner) ― heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune from Arkansas, who’ve donated over $2 million to CCSA. Alice Walton (net worth: $36.9 billion), who lives in Texas, was one of the biggest funders behind Melvoin’s campaign. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflicks (net worth: $1.9 billion), who lives in Santa Cruz, donated close to $5 million since last September to the CCSA’s political action committee, including $1 million a week before the election.

Other moguls behind Melvoin and the CCSA include Doris Fisher (net worth: $2.7 billion), co-founder of The Gap, who lives in San Francisco: Texas resident John Arnold (net worth: $2.9 billion), who made a fortune at Enron before the company collapsed, leaving its employees and stockholders in the lurch, then made another fortune as a hedge fund manager; Jeff Yass, who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, and runs the Susquahanna group, a hedge fund; Frank Baxter, former CEO of the global investment bank Jefferies and Company that specialized in “junk” bonds; and Michael Bloomberg (net worth: $48.5 billion), the former New York City mayor and charter champion. Eli Broad (net worth: $7.7 billion), who hatched a plan to put half of all LAUSD students in charter schools by 2023 — an idea that Zimmer fought — donated $400,000 to CCSA last Friday, on top of $50,000 he gave in November. He made his money in real estate and life insurance.

Not surprisingly, most of these billionaires are big backers of conservative Republican candidates and right-wing causes. Several are on the boards of charter school chains.

What do the corporate moguls and billionaires want? And what did Steve Zimmer do to make them so upset?

They want to turn public schools into educational Wal-marts run on the same corporate model. They want to expand charter schools that compete with each other and with public schools in an educational “market place.” (LA already has more charter schools than any other district in the country). They want to evaluate teachers and students like they evaluate new products — in this case, using the bottom-line of standardized test scores. Most teachers will tell you that over-emphasis on standardized testing turns the classroom into an assembly line, where teachers are pressured to “teach to the test,” and students are taught, robot-like, to define success as answering multiple-choice tests.

Not surprisingly, the billionaires want school employees — teachers — to do what they’re told, without having much of a voice in how their workplace functions or what is taught in the classroom. Rather than treat teachers like professionals, they view them as the out-sourced hired help.

The corporate big-wigs are part of an effort that they and the media misleadingly call “school reform.” What they’re really after is not “reform” (improving our schools for the sake of students) but “privatization” (business control of public education). They think public schools should be run like corporations, with teachers as compliant workers, students as products, and the school budget as a source of profitable contracts and subsidies for textbook companies, consultants, and others engaged in the big business of education.

Like most reasonable educators and education analysts, Zimmer has questioned the efficacy of charter schools as a panacea. When the billionaires unveiled their secret plan to put half of LAUSD students into charter schools within eight years, Zimmer led the opposition. In contrast, Melvoin is a big backer of charter schools and a big critic of the teachers union.

Now the billionaires and their charter school operators will have a majority on the school board. LA will become the epicenter of a major experiment in expanding charter schools – with the school children as the guinea pigs.

Pundits will have a field day pontificating about the LAUSD election, but in the end it’s about how Big Money hijacked democracy in LA.

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Did Trump Commit High Crimes and Misdemeanors?

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has responded to the crescendo of outrage by appointing former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump’’ and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation’’ as well as any other matters within the scope of the Department of Justice (DOJ) regulation on special counsel appointments.

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Who Are the Out-Of-Town Billionaires Wading into a City School Board Race?

Some of America’s most powerful corporate plutocrats want to take over the Los Angeles school system but Steve Zimmer, a former teacher and feisty school board member, is in their way. So they’ve hired Nick Melvoin to get rid of him. No, he’s not a hired assassin like the kind on “The Sopranos.” He’s a lawyer who the billionaires picked to defeat Zimmer.

The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin — funded by big oil, big tobacco, Walmart, Enron, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires — has included astonishingly ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer.

This morning (Friday) the Los Angeles Times reported that “Outside spending for Melvoin (and against Zimmer) has surpassed $4.65 million.” Why? Because he doesn’t agree with the corporatization of our public schools. Some of their donations have gone directly to Melvoin’s campaign, but much of it has been funneled through a corporate front group called the California Charter School Association.

To try to hoodwink voters, the billionaires invented another front group with the same initials as the well-respected Parent Teacher Association, but they are very different organizations. They called it the “Parent Teacher Alliance.” Pretty clever, huh? But this is notthe real PTA, which does not get involved with elections. In fact, the real PTA has demanded that this special interest PAC change their name and called the billionaires’ campaign Zimmer “misleading,” “deceptive practices,” and “false advertising.”

These out-of-town billionaire-funded groups can pay for everything from phone-banks, to mailers, to television ads. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez described the billionaires’ campaign to defeat Zimmer, which includes sending mails filled with outrageous lies about Zimmer, as “gutter politics.”

As a result, the race for the District 4 seat — which stretches from the Westside to the West San Fernando Valley — is ground zero in the battle over the corporate take-over of public education. The outcome of next Tuesday’s (May 16) election has national implications in terms of the billionaires’ battle to reconstruct public education in the corporate mold.

The contest between Melvoin and Zimmer is simple. Who should run our schools? Who knows what’s best for students? Out-of-town billionaires or parents, teachers, and community residents?

Before examining just who these corporate carpetbaggers are, let’s look at who Steve Zimmer is, what he’s accomplished, and what he stands for.

Zimmer grew up in a working class community and attended public schools. His father was a printer and his mother was a school teacher. After college, he became a teacher, beginning with Teach for America in 1992. 

He spent 17 years as a teacher and counselor at Marshall High School. When he taught English as a second language, he used an experiential approach that related to his students’ daily lives. He created Marshall’s Public Service Program to make public service intrinsic to the student experience. He founded Marshall’s Multilingual Teacher Career Academy, which was an early model for LAUSD’s Career Ladder Teacher Academy. 

To help address the concerns of at-risk youth, he founded the Comprehensive Student Support Center to provide health care services for students and their families. He helped create the Elysian Valley Community Services Center, a community owned-and-operated agency that provides after-school, recreational and enrichment programs, a library, and free Internet access.

He was elected to the school board in 2009 and re-elected in 2013 despite the onslaught of billionaire bucks against him. 

What are some of Zimmer’s most important accomplishments on the school board?

• Improving student success. Zimmer’s leadership helped increase local graduation rates into their highest level ever. LAUSD schools achieved across-the-board improvements in state testing and all measurable forms of student achievement.

• Balanced budgets. As school board president, Zimmer helped bring LAUSD’s budget into balance while simultaneously increasing funding to the classrooms. Zimmer helped lead the fight to get Congress to pass the Education Jobs Bill passed, which provided LAUSD with $300 million. He has fought for increased federal Special Education funding. He championed Proposition 30 and its extension, Proposition 55, which added more school funding for LAUSD. His stewardship has paid off. LAUSD has been awarded the highest credit rating of AAA.

• More schools, more opportunities. As a result of Zimmer’s leadership and in response to parent interest, LAUSD has added many more magnet schools, STEM programs and dual immersion language programs.

• Restoring arts education. Zimmer worked to restore arts programs not just in some schools but in all schools. He believes access to arts education needs to be a right for all students in every community. It is an essential component to a well-rounded education. Since he’s been in office, arts funding has increased by $18 million dollars and the Arts Equity Index that he championed, now ensures resources where they are needed the most.

• Protecting vulnerable students. As a school board member, Zimmer has been the leading advocate for vulnerable students. He authored the school board resolution in support of the Dream Act, federal legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented students who do well in school and attend college. He authored the resolution ensuring schools are safe zones where students and families faced immigration enforcement actions can find safety and seek assistance and information. He helped create Student Recovery Day, a twice-yearly event that takes scores of district staff into students’ homes to support students who have dropped out. Hundreds of students have returned to class after being sought out and connected with the support services they need. He has ensured that the school district supports the needs of students living in poverty, students facing trauma, special education students, undocumented students, LGBT students, English Learners, standard English learners and foster children.

• Healthy food. Zimmer’s commitment to making sure students eat healthy meals is unparalleled. His Good Food Purchasing resolution has been a model around the country for making sure student lunches have met the highest nutritional, environmental and animal welfare standards.

As a member of the Board, and his last two years as President, Zimmer led the school district through difficult times, weathering a recession, dealing with tragedies, and transitions in leadership. He used his skills to resolve challenges by working collaboratively.

Zimmer has received numerous awards for his work with children and families, including the LA’s Commission of Children, Youth and their Families “Angel Over Los Angeles” award, El Centro Del Pueblo’s “Carino” award and the LACER Foundation’s “Jackie Goldberg Public Service Award.”

Nick Melvoin is the candidate completely sponsored by the 1 percent. His extreme lack of experience clearly doesn’t bother them. Melvoin is so devoted to the corporate agenda for our schools that he claims a “hostile takeover” is needed. 

Who are some of the billionaires and corporate lobby groups that want to defeat Steve Zimmer and elect Nick Melvoin?

• Members of the Walton family (Alice Walton, Jim Walton, and Carrie Walton Penner) — heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune from Arkansas — have contributed $2.2 million to the PAC attacking Zimmer in the last two years. Alice Walton (net worth: $36.9 billion) lives in Texas and is one of the biggest funders behind Melvoin’s campaign. She and other members of her family also donated to the Super PAC that worked to elect Donald Trump, donated to Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and to the Alliance for School Choice, an organization that Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos helped to lead. 

• Oil and Enron executives from Texas and Oklahoma have contributed more than $1 million to the same committee.

• JOBSPAC — a PAC “largely funded by oil and tobacco companies,” according to the Los Angeles Times – contributed $35,000 to the same committee funding the attacks on Zimmer. 

• Doris Fisher, co-founder of The Gap who has a net worth of $2.7 billion, has given $4.1 million to the California Charter School Association’s political action committee in 2015 and 2016. She lives in San Francisco.

• John Arnold made a fortune at Enron before the company collapsed, leaving its employees and stockholders in the lurch. Then he made another fortune as a hedge fund manager. His net worth is $2.9 billion. He and his wife Laura donated $1 million last year to CCSA’s political committee and $4400 directly to Melvoin. They live in Houston, Texas.

• Jeff Yass, who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, has given the maximum allowed contribution to Melvoin. He runs the Susquahanna group, a hedge fund. He has close ties to Betsy DeVos’ efforts to privatize public school. Yass donated $2.3 million to a Super PAC supporting Rand Paul’s presidential candidacy.

• Frank Baxter and his wife Kathrine donated $100,000 to CCSA’s political committee in the past two years and $3,300 directly to Melvoin. Frank Baxter is former CEO of the global investment bank Jefferies and Company that specialized in “junk” bonds. He is a major Republican fundraiser and was appointed ambassador to Uruguay by George W. Bush. He is one of at least five donors to Melvoin’s campaign who sit on the board of charter schools. He is also a big financial backer of Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Cong. Devin Nunes of California, and Cong. Steve King of Iowa (a Tea Party favorite).

What do these corporate moguls and billionaires want and what has Zimmer done to make them so upset?

They want to turn public schools into educational Wal-marts run on the same corporate model. They want to expand charter schools that compete with each other and with public schools in an educational “market place.” (LA already has more charter schools than any other district in the country). They want to evaluate teachers and students like they evaluate new products — in this case, using the bottom-line of standardized test scores. Most teachers will tell you that over-emphasis on standardized testing turns the classroom into an assembly line, where teachers are pressured to “teach to the test,” and students are taught, robot-like, to define success as answering multiple-choice tests.

Not surprisingly, the billionaires want school employees — teachers — to do what they’re told, without having much of a voice in how their workplace functions or what is taught in the classroom. Rather than treat teachers like professionals, they view them as the out-sourced hired help.

The corporate big-wigs are part of an effort that they and the media misleadingly call “school reform.” What they’re really after is not “reform” (improving our schools for the sake of students) but “privatization” (business control of public education). They think public schools should be run like corporations, with teachers as compliant workers, students as products, and the school budget as a source of profitable contracts and subsidies for textbook companies, consultants, and others engaged in the big business of education.

Like most reasonable educators and education analysts, Zimmer has questioned the efficacy of charter schools as a panacea. When the billionaires unveiled their secret plan to put half of LAUSD students into charter schools within eight years, Zimmer led the opposition. Zimmer isn’t against all charter schools but he doesn’t want the board to rubber-stamp every charter proposal. He wants LAUSD to carefully review each charter proposal to see if its backers have a track record of success and inclusion. And he wants LAUSD to hold charters accountable. This kind of reasonable approach doesn’t sit well with the billionaires behind their front group, the California Charter School Association. 

Zimmer has also questioned the over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing as the primary tool for assessing student and teacher performance. Testing has its place but it can also become an excuse to avoid more useful and holistic ways to evaluate students and teachers — and to avoid the “teach to the test” obsession that hampers learning and creative teaching. Zimmer has called for — and helped negotiate the deal for — some portion of teacher evaluations to include test scores. But that’s not what the billionaires want.

As a former LAUSD teacher with 17 years in the classroom, Zimmer respects teachers as professionals. He understands the jobs and frustrations of teaching. He wants LAUSD to create schools that are truly partnerships between teachers, parents, students and the district. He is often allied with United Teachers Los Angeles, but he is nobody’s lapdog. He has always been an independent voice and has disagreed with UTLA on some significant matters.

In fact, four years ago, Times’ columnist Lopez wrote that Zimmer “... has tried to bridge differences among the warring parties, winning supporters and making enemies on both sides in the process.”

But the billionaires don’t want a bridge-builder. They want a compliant rubber stamp, and that’s what they’ve found in Nick Melvoin, the advocate for a “hostile takeover.”

Zimmer is endorsed by many LAUSD parents and community activists as well as Mayor Eric Garcetti, Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressmembers Karen Bass, Judy Chu and Maxine Waters, City Attorney Mike Feuer and the Councilmembers serving the neighborhoods in his 4th School Board District. At the state level, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, Secretary of State Alex Padilla, State Controller Betty Yee, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon, and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon have all endorsed Zimmer. At the County level, he’s backed by Supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl along with former Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

In his endorsement of Zimmer, Mayor Garcetti said: “The campaign against Steve has turned vicious, and I feel compelled to reach out on behalf of a champion for all our kids. I’ve worked closely with Steve Zimmer for more than 15 years. I’ve watched him make change in the lives of kids and in the fabric of our communities. Under Steve’s leadership, Los Angeles Unified schools have shown impressive progress. Steve’s collaborative, ‘all kids, all families’ approach is what we need on the School Board.” 

The Los Angeles Unified School District is the second largest school system in the country with over 700,000 students. So gaining control of its board — and its budget — is a good “investment” for the billionaires who want to reshape education in this country.

Melvoin’s campaign and backers have outspent Zimmer by a huge margin. Their battle has turned into a remarkable David vs. Goliath contest. But let’s recall who won that Biblical battle. Goliath had the big weapons but the feisty David had the slingshot. That’s how Zimmer beat another hand-picked billionaire-backed candidate four years ago, with a grassroots campaign that relied on parents, teachers, and neighborhood residents, and he’s hoping to do it again next Tuesday.

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School Vouchers Will Indoctrinate a Generation in Alternative Truths

My middle school students are good at telling the difference between facts and opinions.

Facts, they’ll tell you, are things that can be proven.

They don’t even have to be true. They just have to be provable – one way or the other.

For instance: “I’m 6 feet tall.” It’s not true, but you could conceivably measure me and determine my height.

Opinions, on the other hand, are statements that have no way of being proven. They are value judgements: That is good. This is bad. Mr. Singer is short. Mr. Singer is tall.

It doesn’t make them less important – in fact, their relative importance to facts is, itself, an opinion.

But today the very ability to prove facts has been called into question.

Our government has put forward statements that are demonstrably false: The Bowling Green Massacre. Undocumented immigrants commit massive amounts of crime. Donald Trump had the largest electoral college victory of modern times.

All of these should objectively be viewed as facts. They’re false, but they are provable. Yet when we resort to the kinds of things that should count as proof, we refuse to agree, we come to a clash of epistemologies.

Today, your truth depends more on your political affiliation than your commitment to objective reality.

There was no Bowling Green Massacre. No one was killed in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Certainly there was no large scale mass death perpetrated by terrorists. There were two Iraqi nationals arrested who had been planning an attack outside of the U.S. They had been buying guns and materials here because they were easier to get.

However, many conservatives refuse to accept this. They believe there was a Bowling Green Massacre. And they believe that it justifies Trump’s immigration ban.

The same goes for undocumented immigrants committing crime. They do NOT actually commit more crime than U.S. citizens. In fact, they commit less. They don’t want to attract unnecessary attention and risk deportation.

But once again many conservatives refuse to believe it. With no hard evidence, maybe some anecdotal evidence blown way out of proportion, they simply accept what they’re told by their government and their chosen media.

And Trump’s electoral college victory? He won 306 of 538 electoral votes and lost the popular vote. Forty-five times Presidents won by a greater margin. And only two Presidents had a lower popular vote tally.

These are just numbers. I don’t know how they’re controversial or how anyone can disagree, but many conservatives do.

Don’t get me wrong. Liberals do it, too, though to a lesser degree. Ask most liberals about President Barack Obama’s education policy and you’ll get a gooey story about support and progressivism. It isn’t true.

One popular meme shows Obama lecturing a tiny Trump about how he should invest in education and respect parents and teachers. Yet Obama never really did those things, himself. He held federal education funding hostage unless districts increased standardized testing, Common Core and charter schools. THAT’S not what parents and teachers wanted! It’s what huge corporations wanted so they could profit off our public schools!

But to many liberals Obama is some kind of saint, and any evidence to the contrary will be accepted only with great reluctance.

THIS is our modern world. A world of alternative facts and competing narratives. Part of it is due to the Internet and the way knowledge has been democratized. Part of it is due to the media conglomerates where almost all traditional news is disseminated by a handful of biased corporations that slant the story to maximize their profits.

People end up picking the sources of information they think are trustworthy and shutting themselves off to other viewpoints. There is no more news. There is conservative news and liberal news. And the one you consume determines what you’ll accept as a fact.

As bad as that is, Trump’s education policy is poised to make it much worse.

He wants to radically increase the amount of school vouchers given to students. These allow federal dollars to be used to send children to private and parochial schools. As if the fly-by-night charter schools weren’t enough.

It’s a scam. A get-rich-quick scheme for corporations at the expense of students. But perhaps the worst part is how it exacerbates our world of alternative facts.

Students at private and parochial schools don’t learn the same things as public school students. At many religious schools they are indoctrinated in conservative market theory and a Biblical view of history and science.

You think we can’t agree on the truth or falsity of facts now? Just wait! What counts as a source will be radically different for the first generation of kids sent to such disparate schools.

This isn’t just about cashing in on education dollars today. It’s about creating a generation of adults educated with school vouchers who accept far right ideas about the world as bedrock truths. Climate change and evolution are hoaxes. Trickle down economics works. Slavery benefited slave and master alike.

These are the false truths the Trump administration hopes to seed into a larger portion of the next generation. And when you indoctrinate children so young, there is little hope they’ll ever be able to see beyond what they’ve been taught.

Conservatives counter that liberals are doing the same thing today in our public schools. That’s why they want to send their children to the private and parochial schools. They don’t want their kids taught about modern science without reference to God. They don’t want them to learn history that puts socialistic policies in a positive light. They don’t want them to learn that white people were ever inhuman to people of color.

And how do you argue with them? How do you have a productive conversation when you can’t agree on what proves a fact true or false?

This is the challenge of our generation.

I don’t know how to solve it, but I know that school vouchers will make it exponentially worse.

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Good That France Didn't Elect a Fascist, But Not So Good That They Elected a Guy Who Will Impose Austerity

The media response to the French election reads like some people had too much cannabis. From the first paragraph of a front page news analysis of the New York Times: “It was globalization against nationalism. It was the future versus the past. Open versus closed.”

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Trump Administration’s Attack on Free Speech Sets a Dangerous Precedent

On Sunday, in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Reince Priebus, President Trump’s Chief of Staff, said that the administration is considering pushing to change the First Amendment to make it easier for the White House to sue media organizations, and that the media needs “to be more responsible with how they report the news.” Apparently not satisfied with using the President’s Twitter feed to attack the media, the White House is continuing the most sustained attack on the media by an administration in decades. The issue isn’t libel – it’s whether we can criticize our government and important political leaders without fear of crushing legal liability. The issue, in other words, is American democracy.

Priebus’ profoundly troubling statement runs against core American values of free speech and press freedom. During his Presidential campaign, Donald Trump famously promised that, if elected he would look into “opening up” libel laws. Priebus’ statement quickly drew bipartisan rebuke, as Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike spoke out about the need to protect freedom of the press. And like many remarks from this White House, the statement seemed off the cuff. Priebus did not necessarily seem to know what he was suggesting (though as a lawyer, presumably he’s familiar with the First Amendment). However, in Monday's press briefing, White House spokesperson Sean Spicer reiterated that a change to libel law “is being looked into.”

One of these fundamental principles is that, under the First Amendment, media outlets and the public are free to criticize elected officials. The U.S. Supreme Court articulated this protection in the landmark case “New York Times v. Sullivan,” holding that media organizations cannot be convicted of defamation and libel without a showing of “actual malice.” That is, unless a media organization knowingly publishes false information, or operates with reckless disregard for truth, the First Amendment protects the speech. This case created the space for wide open and fearless political debate in the United States.

The remarks by the president, his spokesperson, his chief of staff betray ignorance of our guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There are no federal libel laws to “open up,” and the Supreme Court has made clear that the First Amendment offers robust protection to news organizations. There are very important reasons we allow for a free press that can criticize our leaders. A free press is a crucial bulwark against authoritarianism, and is necessary for informed public debate. And if it were easier to win libel claims against media organizations, we would likely see small and independent media outlets struggle, as only the large corporations would be able to afford the risk of publication.

And the First Amendment protects individual speech as well. Without the principle established in “New York Times v. Sullivan,” Donald Trump could have been sued by then-President Obama for Trump’s tweets questioning the President’s citizenship. In our society, each individual’s right to tweet, blog, or stand on a soapbox and criticize the government is integral to our democracy. And the First Amendment also protects the President’s right to tweet, and the right of conservative provocateurs such as Breitbart and the Drudge Report to publish without fear of government retaliation. The administration should be careful what they wish for.

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13 Questions That Scare Charter School Advocates

The Network for Public Education is challenging the Trump/DeVos anti-public school agenda. According to NPE, “DeVos and her allies have worked for decades pushing charters, vouchers and neo-vouchers such as education tax credits. DeVos even supports virtual charter schools that have a horrific track record when it comes to student success.”

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'Massive Electoral Fraud' in Turkey's Referendum

A Turkish election analyst wrote a private email describing “massive electoral fraud” in Turkey’s referendum yesterday. It is no surprise that followers of President Tayyip Erdogan rigged the vote. It is surprising, however, that his “yes” campaign only received 51.3 percent of the vote.

International monitors, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe (COE), issued scathing reports on the referendum to create an executive presidency and eliminate checks and balances.

The referendum occurred in a climate of fear. Under Turkey’s current state of emergency, Erdogan arrested 45,000 oppositionists and dismissed 130,000 civil servants. Purges negatively affected the political environment. “No” campaigners were threatened and called “terrorist sympathizers.”

According to OSCE media monitors, the “yes” campaign dominated the state-run media. Intimidation led to widespread self-censorship. About 150 journalists are in jail, more than any other country, and about 160 media outlets were shut down.

Kurdish voters were disenfranchised. Approximately 500,000 Kurds in the Southeast are displaced and homeless as a result of attacks by Turkey’s security services. They were ineligible to vote because they could not register at an address.

The Turkish government jailed 13 Kurdish members of parliament on terrorism charges and took direct control of 82 Kurdish municipalities, incarcerating elected mayors. As many as 5,000 local Kurdish activists were also arrested.

The COE said the “legal framework was inadequate for a genuinely democratic referendum.” It criticized the misuse of state resources in favor of the “yes” campaign, as well as the active involvement of the president and senior officials.

The Supreme Electoral Council, controlled by Erdogan appointees, abruptly changed the legal criteria for certifying ballots on election day, removing an important safeguard against voter fraud.

A leading opposition party will challenge 37 percent of the ballots, which were improperly sealed and uncertified. Its appeal is unlikely to find recourse. Qualified judges have already been replaced with party loyalists.

Voting lacked transparency. International and non-partisan domestic election monitors were denied permission to conduct effective monitoring in violation of best practices adopted by the OSCE, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, and the Venice Commission.

Eighteen constitutional reforms were presented as a package. On the ballot, voters did not have the option of voting on each distinct amendment, which is standard international practice.

Police and local officials denied “no” campaigners access to public facilities and permits to rally. The presence of police was widespread inside the voting stations and outside. Police were checking identification cards, which deterred “no” voters. There were violent scuffles at several polling stations.

Reports of voter suppression are not surprising. Erdogan organized a sham ballot, using tactics familiar among dictators. The authorities manipulated both the casting and counting of ballots. Erdogan quickly declared victory, creating a fait accomplis.

The referendum marks the death of Turkish democracy. Erdogan endorsed the death penalty, signaling the demise of Turkey’s EU candidacy.

If NATO was being formed today, Turkey would not qualify as a member because it is Islamist, undemocratic, and anti-American.

What effect will the sham referendum have on US-Turkey relations?

Turkey wants the Trump administration to endorse the referendum’s result. Turkey has a formidable advocacy machine. It lavishes contracts on lobbyists. It uses surrogates to fund political campaigns. It throws money at think-tanks and influence peddlers like Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani.

Turkey’s hired hands emphasize Turkey as an indispensable security partner, ignoring its well-documented support for jihadists including ISIS. Turkey is at best an uncertain ally. Pentagon planners should diversify air combat operations. Alternatives to Incirlik Air Force base exist in Cyprus, Jordan Kuwait, and Iraqi Kurdistan.

If the US is serious about defeating ISIS in Syria, it should increase support for Syrian Kurds in the Battle for Raqqa. It will also work with Syrian Kurds to enforce a safe zone on the Turkish-Syrian border. Additionally, the US should formalize its security cooperation with Syrian Kurds who comprise a majority of Syrian Defense Forces.

Prosecutors should proceed with zeal to try Reza Zarrab, who holds secrets about Erdogan’s corruption including a systematic effort to evade US sanctions by laundering funds for Iran. In phone intercepts on December 17, 2013, Erdogan is heard conspiring with his son, Bilal, to evade a police investigation by disposing of tens of millions of dollars.

The Trump administration should take Turkey to task, joining other countries and international organizations. Failing will do so will cause long-term damage to US-Turkey relations.

While most international monitors have scathing criticism of the referendum, the EU used diplomatic language, urging Erdogan to move slowly. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel called for “respectful dialog with all the country’s political and societal groups.” The EU’s criticism comes with Erdogan holding Europe hostage, threatening to release a flood of refugees.

Erdogan rejects criticism, insisting that Turkey will ignore international monitors. “Know your place,” he said. “We won’t see or hear the politically motivated reports you prepare.” His supporters rallied in the streets chanting: “Tell us to kill; we will kill. Tell us to die; we will die.”

Turkey is deeply divided and in crisis. Peace and stability hangs in precarious balance.

Mr. Phillips is Director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. He served as a Senior Adviser and Foreign Affairs Experts at the State Department under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama. His recent book is An Uncertain Ally: Turkey Under Erdogan’s Dictatorship.

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If Democrats Cave on Gorsuch, They’ll Be Sorry

The day the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died Appeals Court Judge and Scalia’s nominated replacement, Neil Gorsuch, said he could barely get down a ski run in Colorado because he was so blinded by tears at his death. This was not a private utterance or personal feeling of deep emotion that he shared with friends and family. He told of his profound sorrow in a speech in April 2016 at Case Western University. Gorsuch wanted the world to know that Scalia was more than just a heartfelt friend. He was a man and a judge whose legal and judicial ideas he was in total lockstep with.

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Gutting Obamacare: Opening Salvo in the Republican War on Seniors, Middle-Aged and Poor Americans

If Republican elites in Congress were honest about their agenda, no senior would ever vote Republican.

While Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans campaigned on undoing the Affordable Care Act, no one ran on undermining Medicare or Medicaid. No one ran on undermining the health security of seniors. But the so-called repeal and replacement of the ACA would do just that.

Let’s start with Medicare. Seniors aged 65 and over, as well as people with serious disabilities, rely on Medicare for their basic health insurance. That program will be seriously weakened if the Republican plan to gut the ACA is enacted. It is estimated that Medicare’s revenue will drop by $346 billion. The Republican bill to repeal the ACA drains Medicare to gives tax breaks to wealthy Americans and corporations. In fact, even before Republicans pass a so-called “tax reform bill,” this bill’s giveaway amounts to a whopping $525 billion tax break for the wealthiest among us.

For those who have been paying attention, this weakening of Medicare is not surprising. In fact, it is just the first step in the eventual dismantling of this vital program, which Speaker Paul Ryan has been advocating for years. Consistent with that goal, as soon as the election ended, Ryan announced his intention to voucherize Medicare. He falsely claimed that Republicans had to “address” [code for dismantle] Medicare, saying, “because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.”

That is an enormous lie. The ACA strengthened Medicare’s finances. It is the Republican bill that would weaken Medicare. The next step will be undoing Medicare, by replacing its guaranteed insurance with vouchers. In that way, Republicans will shift Medicare’s costs from the government balance sheet to the shoulders of seniors, who will be on their own.

Medicaid is another program vital to seniors and people with disabilities. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has found that at least 70 percent of seniors will need long-term care at some point. Medicaid currently pays for the long-term care of more than 60 percent of nursing home residents.

The GOP’s bill, if enacted, will place caps on Medicaid spending, again shifting costs away from the federal balance sheet and to the balance sheets of states and individuals. If that is enacted, seniors needing long term care and their families may find themselves out of luck, since nursing home care is extremely expensive. It is estimated that the typical annual cost of a semi-private room in a nursing home is $80,300. Very few families can afford that huge cost on their own.

And the impact on seniors not yet 65, and so, not yet on Medicare, will be the harshest of all. They will have more difficulty obtaining insurance and will face higher health care costs if this legislation is enacted and implemented.

(Editor's note: As Vox reported in its Tuesday analysis, "In general, the impact of the Republican bill would be particularly severe for older individuals, ages 55 to 64. Their costs [of annual premiums] would increase by $5,269 if the bill went into effect today and by $6,971 in 2020. Individuals with income below 250 percent of the federal poverty line would see their costs increase by $2,945 today and by $4,061 in 2020.")

In addition to slowing the cost of health care generally, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) limited the amount that insurance companies could charge seniors for healthcare. Upon repeal, insurance companies will be free to implement the ageist policy that charges even healthy seniors five times more for no reason other than their age. Not only that, the bill reduces what services insurance is required to cover. The result: people will be paying far more money for much worse coverage. This will be devastating for people in their fifties and early sixties, who aren’t yet eligible for Medicare.

The truth is that all of these cuts are entirely unnecessary. In fact, Medicare should be expanded to cover all of us. Medicare and Medicaid are more efficient than private insurance. Other nations are able to provide health care as a right, at a fraction of the cost with better health outcomes. We should be building on the successes of Medicare and Medicaid and the cost savings measures of the ACA. But instead, Republicans in Congress want to take us backwards.

Their reasons? Ideology, power, and greed. By proving that government can play a positive role in people’s lives, and provide wage and health insurance better and more efficiently than the private sector, Medicare and Medicaid, together with Social Security, disprove the GOP’s radical anti-government philosophy. Who would benefit from a nation without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or the ACA? Wealthy donors.

While the top one percent has most of the nation’s wealth, we still are a nation of one person, one vote. Seniors and their families have the numbers to defeat this attack. But it will demand that all of us make our voices heard.

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Samuel L. Jackson On Ben Carson’s Slavery Comment: ‘Mothaf***a Please’

Ben Carson gave a speech on Monday that raised a lot of eyebrows, including Samuel L. Jackson’s.

In his debut as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Carson told agency employees about the virtues of the “can-do” American society and used “immigrants” who “came here in the bottom of slave ships” as the examples of that virtue.

“That’s what America is about,” Carson said. “A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Naturally, Twitter was up in arms about Carson’s comments. This is what actor Samuel L. Jackson had to say about it:

And the NAACP...

And Charlamagne Tha God...

And a few others:

Ben Carson, sit down.

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The Search for Trump's Smoking Gun

Much of the pre-election alliance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is hidden in plain view. We know that Putin resented Obama’s Russia policy and feared a harder-line Hillary Clinton presidency even more. We know that Putin deliberately engaged in cyber-warfare to embarrass the Clinton campaign.  We know that Trump ― loudly and publicly ― urged the Russians to keep leaking.

We also know that Trump and his family ― a single commercial entity ― had extensive business relationships with Russia. We know that Trump campaign officials had repeated contacts with senior Russian officials, both during the campaign and in the interregnum between the election and Trump’s Inauguration. We know that Trump has been extremely flattering in his descriptions of Putin, and is drastically changing American foreign policy to back away from the Atlantic Alliance and give Russia a freer hand in Europe and elsewhere.

None of this is quite enough to convict Trump of violating the Constitution, either for outright treason or for personally profiting from Putin’s favors, which transgresses both the Emoluments Clause and statutory law.

So what would be sufficient?

One thing would be evidence of an explicit deal. We know that intensive investigations by the FBI and CIA, with help from the NSA, are continuing, to determine the exact extent and specificity of contacts and mutual commitments between the Trump campaign and Putin. It obviously enrages Trump, as an autocratic CEO accustomed to total power, that he can’t turn these off; and that the more he tries, the more leaks he invites.

But it will not be sufficient for these investigations to document more winks and nods and tacit bargains. What’s needed is some kind of smoking gun, in the form of an explicit quid pro quo.

The trouble is that deals like this are seldom put in writing, and that even transcripts of conversations rarely reveal explicit quid pro quos. Even if some of Trump’s campaign surrogates, such as Michael Flynn, made deals, Trump could say that they were freelancing and that this was done without his knowledge. We will not know just how explicit these deals were until the investigations are wrapped up.

Another possibility that could put Trump’s presidency at risk is a bungled cover-up.

It may be that Trump digs himself a bigger hole by trying to suppress the investigations, as he came close to doing when White House aides tried to enlist the FBI to rebut an accurate New York Times story about pending investigations.

But there is one other potential set of revelations that could endanger Trump’s presidency: As Deep Throat didn’t quite say, except in the movie version of All the President’s Men, “Follow the money.”

Follow the money. Trump’s entire career has been about money ― making as much money as possible, often in smarmy ways.

So the other set of revelations that Trump must be fearing are disclosures that the Russians either put money into Trump’s pocket or found ways to put money into his campaign. This also has to be a focus of ongoing investigation.

The Russians have been helping to finance the campaign of the French ultra-nationalist Marine LePen, whose revisionist views on Russia and flattering comments on Putin are eerily reminiscent of Trump’s.

The Russians, famously, not only use disinformation and disruption and attempted blackmail. They use money.

No wonder Trump is coming unglued, worrying that Obama bugged his office. The security agencies didn’t need to bug Trump. They bugged the Russians. If they stumbled on Americans doing political deals with the Russians, it was by accident.

Stay tuned.

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It Is Time to Recognize Iraq as a Failed State

Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan — The battle for Mosul is underway. It will be bloody, but the Islamic State will be defeated. Beyond Mosul, a political plan is needed to defeat Islamism in Iraq and prevent ISIS from morphing into a new, even more murderous movement.

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Death Eaters Not Only Walk Among Us - Now They Occupy the White House

Last January, after Katrina Pierson, Donald Trump's spokeswoman at the time, Tweeted a blatantly racist message about President Obama and Mitt Romney, J.K. Rowling Tweeted back, "Death Eaters walk among us."

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The Massive Media False Equivalence Scam Between Democrats and Republicans

One of the most riveting narratives released in recent weeks was not a tweet issued by the president elect, but a transcript chronicling the tragic final hours of 33 crew members who died on the El Faro, a merchant ship that sank in the midst of Hurricane Joaquin near the Bahamas in October of 2015.

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