Sirota: America’s dangerously removed elite

Friday, Jan 13, 2012 1:00 PM UTC

It's easy to cut public education funding when your kids go to private school. Just ask Christie and Emanuel
By David Sirota

Last week, my local Twittersphere momentarily erupted with allegations that Denver’s public school superintendent, Tom Boasberg, is sending his kids to a private school that eschews high-stakes testing. Boasberg, an icon of the national movement pushing high-stakes testing and undermining traditional public education, eventually defended himself by insisting that his kids attended that special school only during preschool and that they now attend a public school. Yet his spokesman admitted that the school is not in Denver but in Boulder, Colo., one of America’s wealthiest enclaves.

Boasberg, you see, refuses to live in the district that he governs. Though having no background in education administration, this longtime telecom executive used his connections to get appointed Denver superintendent, and he now acts like a king. From the confines of his distant castle in Boulder, he issues edicts to his low-income fiefdom — decrees demonizing teachers, shutting down neighborhood schools over community objections and promoting privately administered charter schools. Meanwhile, he makes sure his own royal family is insulated in a wealthy district that doesn’t experience his destructive policies.

No doubt this is but a microcosmic story in a country whose patrician overlords are regularly conjuring the feudalism of Europe circa the Middle Ages. Today, our mayors deploy police against homeless people and protesters; our governors demand crushing budget cuts from the confines of their taxpayer-funded mansions; our Congress exempts itself from insider-trading laws and provides itself healthcare benefits denied to others; and our nation’s capital has become one of the world’s wealthiest cities, despite the recession.

Taken together, we see that there really are “Two Americas,” as the saying goes — and that’s no accident. It’s the result of a permanent elite that is removing itself from the rest of the nation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in education — a realm in which this elite physically separates itself from us mere serfs. As the head of one of the country’s largest urban school districts, Boasberg is a perfect example of this — but he is only one example.

Read the entire piece at Salon.com

TPM: The Perfect Storm That Could Sink Romney’s Hispanic Vote Hopes

Pema Levy January 11, 2012, 5:26 AM

Romney may have just become the first Republican candidate to win both Iowa and New Hampshire — and is looking increasingly like the eventual nominee — but the primary is about to spread to the rest of the country where the Latino vote is significant. Once in the general election, that vote becomes crucial. But Romney is not on track to win over the requisite number of Latino voters, who will be key to winning swing states like Florida, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Moreover, the Democrats may have stumbled into a neat situation that could give them an unusual boost.

In the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney made what could prove a fatal error: as president, he said, he would veto the Dream Act. Designed to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, the Dream Act is so intensely popular that it’s hard to see Romney winning 40% of Latino voters, the crucial threshold Republican pollster Matthew Dowd said Bush had to hit in order to win crucial swing states in 2004. Bush, who pushed for immigration reform, barely hit 40% and won. McCain fell short.

Before the 2010 midterm elections, Latino voters ranked immigration reform as “one of the most important issues” on election day 2010.” Throughout 2011, about 85% of Latino voters supported the Dream Act and wanted to see it passed, a series of Latino Decisions poll found. Further, 59% of Latinos said they were less likely to vote for candidate whose economic views they agreed with if they used negative rhetoric about immigrants.

In addition to a growing population in crucial swing states, the Latino community is working hard to play a big role in the 2012 election. Tuesday, in one of many efforts to mobilize the Hispanic community, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition launched an initiative in the crucial I4 corridor in Florida to register young Hispanic evangelicals to vote. In the coming months, they intend to partner with churches and colleges in key swing states moving from Florida to Ohio, then Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. There are an estimated 10 million to 11 million young Latino evangelicals, many of voting age, and they want them to vote. For this evangelical community, their top issues are not abortion or gay marriage but immigration reform, as well as poverty and education. And they’re partnering with pro-Dream Act group Campaign for an American Dream. The GOP candidates’ stance on immigration “is a political error and deeply alienating to our community,” said the Gabriel Salguero, President of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. “They should reconsider their position. Any candidate who doesn’t see the writing on the wall is committing a serious, serious” error in judgment.

Read the entire piece at TPM.com

TPM: The Rapid Economic Recovery Republicans Are Praying Against

Brian Beutler January 9, 2012, 5:20 AM

Everything that’s supposed to happen in politics this year, and everything that has happened for the last several months, has been premised on the tacit, but seemingly safe assumption: The economy will remain weak for years.

This has underlined Congressional jobs bill theatrics, campaign rhetoric about Obama’s record, debates about who’s to blame for high unemployment, and which party best represents the interests of the middle class.

But what if that assumption is wrong?

A contrarian school of thought holds that it is wrong — and its proponents have a growing cache of evidence to back them up.

Read the entire piece at TPM.com

Salon: Obama’s not-so “dangerous” Pentagon cuts

Saturday, Jan 7, 2012 2:00 PM UTC

Republicans pounced on Obama's proposed military cuts as endangering America, but, historically, the plan is modest

By Justin Elliott

In a presentation at the Pentagon Thursday, President Obama announced the results of a “comprehensive defense review” and some hints about how a proposed $487 billion in cuts over the next decade might be made.

Republicans quickly blasted Obama’s initiative as “dangerous,” with columnist Charles Krauthammer calling the plan “a road map to American decline.”

But are the proposed cuts really all that drastic? For an answer to that question and an explanation of how cuts might — or might not — ultimately be made, I spoke to Bill Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

Can you give the quick broad overview of what Obama actually announced yesterday in terms of the size of the military and its budget?

Going back to when Bob Gates was still secretary of defense, they started out talking about cuts of less than $100 billion over five years. At the meeting this week they talked about $487 billion over 10 years. But that’s against what the Pentagon would like to spend, not against what they’re spending now; and they had quite ambitious plans for increases. As President Obama pointed out, this new plan would basically slow the rate of increase. Given that we’re at the highest spending level since World War II, there shouldn’t be as much of an uproar as there has been in Congress. I think a lot of it is just turf wars protecting bureaucracies and contracts.

Read the entire piece at Salon.com

TPM: Romney’s Claim To Be A Job Creator Hits The Skids

TPM: Here’s What Romney’s Unreleased Tax Returns Almost Certainly Hide

Brian Beutler January 5, 2012, 5:32 AM

Mitt Romney still says he’s unlikely to publicly release his tax information, even if he clinches the Republican presidential nomination, and Democrats have a pretty good idea why.

Romney is a privileged poster child for the “Buffett Rule” — President Obama’s principle that the tax code should make it impossible for a person of great wealth to pay a lower share of their income in taxes as than ordinary people. The DNC knows it, policy wonks know it, Romney certainly knows it. But the reasons why are technical and illustrate just how different Romney is from the vast majority of Americans who will cast votes for him — in either the GOP primary or the general election.

One tax expert told TPM of “fairly sophisticated tax strategies” that would be “not available to ordinary tax payers.” A technique that puts you in a position that’s “like having an unlimited 401k account” sounds very attractive. But maybe not if you’re running for office, for Pete’s sake.

When Romney jokes that he’s been unemployed for years, he’s obscuring the fact that he’s still collecting millions of dollars of investment income, which is taxed at a much lower rate than it would be if he, like most taxpayers, took home a regular paycheck. He’s also obscuring the fact a great deal of that same income is only vaguely connected to his own underlying investments, and yet benefits from a key loophole in the tax code that allows him and other wealthy finance veterans to more than halve their effective tax rate.

Read the entire article at TPM.com

Joan Walsh: Rick Santorum, working class hero or free market fanatic?

Wednesday, Jan 4, 2012 1:25 PM UTC

The former Pennsylvania senator makes Romney look like the plutocrat he is, but he has no solutions for the economy
By Joan Walsh

For a modestly attended small-state caucus that ended with three candidates within four percent of one another, Iowa clarified a great deal about the GOP presidential campaign. Mitt Romney didn’t entirely shame himself; the man who once pondered skipping Iowa because of its conservative Christian caucus base wound up effectively tied for first place, ahead by eight votes when all the caucus reports were in. Most important, there’s already an official anti-Romney candidate, and it’s Rick Santorum. Two weeks ago, nobody saw that coming. He and Romney are going to fight a faux-battle over the role of class and the sputtering American economy that will ultimately offer no solutions for struggling Americans. But it might highlight issues that ought to matter in November.

Just as Ron Paul, who finished a slightly disappointing third, brings a welcome focus on the excesses of the American national security state, Santorum shows a concern for the casualties of the American economy that is rare for a Republican. It’s not that Santorum has answers, but it’s a little bit bracing even to hear the questions, in a race that has been mainly about destroying Iran and the evil socialism of Barack Obama. Don’t get me wrong: Santorum wants to destroy Iran, and Obama, and he has no solutions to the problems of income inequality and stalled economic mobility he professes to care about. But his election night speech established a huge empathy gulf between him and Romney that ought to rattle Romney in the weeks to come.

I found myself moved when Santorum talked about his Italian immigrant grandfather, a coal miner, who “worked in a mine in a company town, he lived in a shack.” Santorum described staring at his grandfather’s big, rough, workingman’s hands after he died, and realizing “those hands dug freedom for me.” I thought of that great Bill Withers song, “Grandma’s hands.” Mitt Romney will never make you think of Bill Withers.

And yet Santorum has nothing to offer the struggling, left-behind American worker. He gathered himself up to denounce his party for only talking about cutting taxes and regulations when people are hurting – and then he mainly talked about cutting taxes and regulations. Santorum’s answer to American economic insecurity is strengthening the American family. He offered the touching bromide, “When the family breaks down, the economy breaks down.” In fact, the reverse may be true.

Read the whole article at Salon.com