For-Profit Education Profits Everyone... Except Students, Teachers, Taxpayers And America

Bob Herbert’s piece in last week’s Politico Magazine, The Plot Against Public Education— How Millionaires And Billionaires Are Ruining Our Schools, casts Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, as the arch-villain of public education. Between 2000 and 2009 Gates spent $2 billion on his theory that smaller high schools would better educate students. He managed to break up 8% of America’s high schools. “Smaller schools,” wrote Herbert, “were supposed to attack the problems of low student achievement and high dropout rates by placing students in a more personal, easier-to-manage environment. Students, teachers and administrators would be more familiar with one another. Acts of violence and other criminal behavior would diminish as everybody got to know everybody else. Academic achievement would soar.” It didn’t work. “[H]is experiment was a flop. The size of a high school proved to have little or no effect on the achievement of its students. At the same time, fewer students made it more difficult to field athletic teams. Extracurricular activities withered. And the number of electives offered dwindled… There was very little media coverage of this experiment gone terribly wrong. A billionaire had had an idea. Many thousands had danced to his tune. It hadn’t worked out. C’est la vie.” That didn’t stop Gates. He then moved on to his relentless attack against American teachers.

I’ve covered Gates, and his desire to improve the quality of education in America seemed sincere. But his outsized influence on school policy has, to say the least, not always been helpful. Although he and his foundation were committed to the idea of putting a great teacher into every classroom, Gates acknowledged that there was not much of a road map for doing that. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know.”

This hit-or-miss attitude— let’s try this, let’s try that— has been a hallmark of school reform efforts in recent years. The experiments trotted out by the big-money crowd have been all over the map. But if there is one broad approach (in addition to the importance of testing) that the corporate-style reformers and privatization advocates have united around, it’s the efficacy of charter schools. Charter schools were supposed to prove beyond a doubt that poverty didn’t matter, that all you had to do was free up schools from the rigidities of the traditional public system and the kids would flourish, no matter how poor they were or how chaotic their home environments.

Corporate leaders, hedge fund managers and foundations with fabulous sums of money at their disposal lined up in support of charter schools, and politicians were quick to follow. They argued that charters would not only boost test scores and close achievement gaps but also make headway on the vexing problem of racial isolation in schools.

None of it was true. Charters never came close to living up to the hype. After several years of experimentation and the expenditure of billions of dollars, charter schools and their teachers proved, on the whole, to be no more effective than traditional schools. In many cases, the charters produced worse outcomes. And the levels of racial segregation and isolation in charter schools were often scandalous. While originally conceived a way for teachers to seek new ways to reach the kids who were having the most difficult time, the charter school system instead ended up leaving behind the most disadvantaged youngsters.

In her book Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch explains the problem: “Many studies show that charters enroll a disproportionately small share of students who are English-language learners or who have disabilities, as compared with their home district. A survey of expulsion rates in the District of Columbia found that the charters— which enroll nearly half the student population of the district— expel large numbers of children; the charters’ expulsion rate is seventy-two times the expulsion rate in the public schools. … As the charters shun these students, the local district gets a disproportionately large number of the students who are most expensive and most challenging to educate; when public students leave for charters, the budget of the public schools shrinks, leaving them less able to provide a quality education to the vast majority of students.”

…Few people would accuse Gates of acting out of greed. For other school reformers, however, a huge financial return has been the primary motivation. While schools and individual districts were being starved of resources, the system itself was viewed as a cash cow by so-called education entrepreneurs determined to make a killing. Even in the most trying economic times, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, earmarked for the education of children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade, are appropriated each year. For corporate types, especially for private equity and venture capital firms, that kind of money can prove irresistible. And the steadily increasing influence of free-market ideology in recent years made public education fair game.

Stephanie Simon, writing for Reuters in the summer of 2012, captured the excitement of investors eager to pounce: “The investors gathered in a tony private club in Manhattan were eager to hear about the next big thing, and education consultant Rob Lytle was happy to oblige. Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they’re as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.”

With billions to be reaped from the schools by proponents of online classes and entirely online charter schools— virtual schools— teachers would find that they, too, were expendable.

The foothold established by for-profit virtual schools was extremely disturbing. Their most fervent advocates spoke in the most glowing terms about getting rid of buildings, classroom teachers, playgrounds— everything most people associate with going to school. “Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” said Ronald Packard, a former Goldman Sachs banker who was the CEO of K12 Incorporated, the nation’s largest operator of online public schools, likes to say.

Packard was an operator, not an educator. When he founded K12 in 2000, one of his two primary financial backers was Michael Milken, the disgraced junk-bond king of the 1970s and 1980s. The other was Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle and the fourth-richest person in America. The first chairman and chief proselytizer of K12 was William Bennett, who had served as education secretary under Ronald Reagan and drug czar under George H. W. Bush. There was something odd about Bennett’s trumpeting the wonders of cyberschools. In his book The Educated Child, published just a year earlier, he had sounded less than enthralled about the potential of online schooling. “When you hear the next pitch about cyber-enriching your child’s education,” he wrote, “keep one thing in mind: so far, there is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning.”

He was, nevertheless, the energetic public face of K12 until 2005, when he had to resign because of a controversy that erupted over a comment he’d made on his radio program. (In response to a caller, Bennett had offered what he described as a thought experiment, saying, “If you wanted to reduce crime … you could abort every black baby in the country, and your crime rate would go down.” He added, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”)

Virtual schools remained under the radar for several years before eventually becoming too big to ignore. There were close to a quarter of a million full-time students attending online charter schools in the United States in 2014, and that number was growing. The schools were heavily advertised, and the companies running them spent tens of millions of dollars on political lobbying. Very few taxpayers were aware that some of the money they thought was paying for schools of the brick-and-mortar variety was actually being used for advertising and politics and to fatten the portfolios of virtual school proselytizers and promoters.

Performance results have been uniformly abysmal for students— although the investors, the lobbyists and the crooked politicians who take their legalistic bribes have done spectacularly well. And the crooked politicians aren’t just Republicans. Corporate Democrats like Cory Booker might as well be Republicans when it comes to destroying the public school system for profit. Eli Broad and the Walton family have been particularly predatory when it come sot stealing taxpayer dollars and funneling them into initiatives that wreck public schools while making wealthy investors wealthier. Political hucksters like Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, sleazy lobbyists Lanny Davis and Ed Rendell and would-be president Jeb Bush have looked at education as a big fat honey pot to further enrich themselves.

“Those who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of education for all American youngsters,” concluded Herbert, “are faced with two fundamental questions: First, how long can school systems continue to pursue market-based reforms that have failed year after demoralizing year to improve the education of the nation’s most disadvantaged children? And second, why should a small group of America’s richest individuals, families, and foundations be allowed to exercise such overwhelming— and often such toxic— influence over the ways in which public school students are taught?

Despite the New Dems and other corrupt corporate Democrats looking to line their own pockets and advance their miserable careers, most Democrats do support public education as much as most Republicans want to abolish it. The Education Opportunity Network makes the case that Democrats can win electorally by standing up to the Jeb Bush profiteers and fighting to fund public education.

Both anecdotal information and empirical data drawn from surveys confirm that voters don’t just value public education; they want candidates who will support classroom teachers and oppose funding cuts to public schools. The evidence is strong that Democrats can make support for public education a winning issue— if they’re willing to take the advice.

Democrats looking to score points with the voting public should talk up public education. At least that’s the conclusion that can be drawn from new survey data from pollster Celinda Lake.

…Education is not often viewed as a hot button issue that will turn out voters. Thus, candidates often mouth virtually identical platitudes about education being “a way out of poverty” and “America’s great equalizer.” Then after the election, they proceed to cut funding for public schools and saddle classroom teachers with more and more burdensome “accountability.”

But 2014 may be different.

According to Lake’s research, “The top testing turnout message overall emphasizes education, specifically Republicans’ efforts to cut programs for students while giving tax cuts to the wealthy. This message is the strongest argument for coming out to vote in all of the states except Colorado (where it ranks second, just behind a message focused on how Republicans are working to turn back the clock on women’s rights).”

Taking a strong stance for “education and public schools” was far and away the message that most survey responders found “very convincing.”

Further, Lake found that the “turnout message” with the greatest “intensity was:

Education & Public Schools


Republicans keep cutting education and attacking public schools, hurting our ability to compete economically and taking away opportunities for our children. Republicans proposed cutting billions in public education, including programs like Head Start, to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. That hurts our children, as good teachers leave, class sizes increase, art and music programs disappear, and schools become less safe. Families are struggling, paying for basic supplies, and seeing their schools decline. Those priorities are just wrong.

Lake’s work also examined more closely a potential target of “individuals who shift to higher interest (‘10’) in voting in November.” This group is a significant part of the sample (39 percent), which tends to be women (62 percent), married (54 percent), and under the age of 40 (42 percent).

These voters are particularly moved by education messaging. They are concerned that a GOP takeover of the Senate would result in Republicans shutting down the government again (71 percent) and cutting funding for Head Start and K-12 education (71 percent).

“Two messages are particularly strong with this group,” Lake found. “A message focusing on the middle class falling behind (73 percent very convincing) and the education message (72 percent)” were “the most effective with these targets.”

After hearing messages that include strong support for public schools, 39 percent of these important voters say they are “very interested (rate ’10′) in voting this November.” After being told the election in their state would “determine control of the U.S. Senate, 50 percent say they are very interested in voting.”

The discovery that Americans are highly supportive of public schools is nothing new. Recent polling results from the annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Towards the Public Schools show that Americans overwhelmingly support their public schools and respect classroom teachers.

That survey also found that a majority of Americans do not support current public education initiatives— such as new standards and teacher evaluations based on test scores— that most political candidates are touting as “reform.” When asked what they think are the biggest problems that public schools in their community deal with, Americans of all political persuasions cite “lack of financial support” number one.

This strong support for public schools is having an impact on upcoming elections. As an experienced education journalist at Education Week recently observed, education is top issue in most important senate races in November.

“In North Carolina, candidates are locking horns over education spending and teacher pay; in Georgia, the Common Core State Standards are taking center stage; and in Iowa, higher education and student loans are the subject of the latest skirmish between Senate hopefuls.”

The results of many of the gubernatorial races around the country also hinge on education.

In Georgia, education funding and the role of charter schools in the state’s system have come to the fore in the contest between incumbent Republican Nathan Deal and Democratic challenger Jason Carter, a state senator and grandson of former President Jimmy Carter.

In Kansas, widespread voter anger over school closures and funding cuts have imperiled the reelection of Republican Governor Sam Brownback.

In Florida, Republican incumbent Rick Scott’s support for new Common Core standards and his cuts in education spending have put him in hot water with a range of voters, from conservative Tea Party activists, to Independents, and Democratic Party voters alike.

In Pennsylvania, voters rank education as the most important issue, and current Republican Governor Tom Corbett has been rated “the most vulnerable governor in America” due in part to his support for severe cuts to education funding.

Whether Democrats can overcome the staggering odds against them this election remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Democratic candidates in these contests and others need to make support for public education front-and-center of their campaigns.

One of Blue America’s most ardent supporters of public education is former ACLU-Executive Director and current candidate for the Senate from Maine, Shenna Bellows. Her opponent, Susan Collins, is a lockstep Republican zombie who consistently votes for the for-profit education complex agenda. If you’d like to help Shenna beat her, you can do that here on the Blue America Senate 2014 page. Shenna:

I wouldn’t be running for US Senate today if it were not for good public schools. We are in a vicious cycle of testing and austerity that is hurting our schools and our children’s future. The only people who benefit from some of these testing schemes are private testing companies. Schools are not businesses, and our children are not a commodity. Susan Collins, has been on the wrong side. So-called bipartisan reforms like No Child Left Behind, which Collins voted for, are being implemented in such a way that is hurting our local schools and good teaching. In my husband’s hometown of Skowhegan, Maine, the local public schools are reeling from the diversion of much needed public funds to a new charter school with questionable civil rights practices. We need to get back to basics, and that means investing in good teachers and adequate infrastructure in a community-based system that strengthens our local public schools instead of tearing them apart and diverting students and resources into a profit-driven model.

No one in Congress has a worse record on education than the man John Boehner appointed chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, right-wing ideologue John Kline (R-MN). Since 1990 the for-profit education industry has handed out $10,453,60 to Members of Congress in legalistic bribes. The number one recipient— not just among House Members but among senators as well— was Kline: $441,258, significantly more than Speaker Boehner, who they gave $183,000. This cycle alone Kline is raking in more than anyone else in Congress: $168,849. The runner-up, another anti-education lunatic on his committee, Virginia Foxx (R-NC) “only” got $86,380 and Boehner only took in $34,800 from these predatory operators. In return, Kline has done more than anyone else in government to further their toxic agenda.

Last week, following an endorsement of Kline’s progressive Democratic opponent, Mike Obermueller, by the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association (NEA) also came out for Obermueller against Kline. "When you consider the number of votes Kline has taken against the best interest of students, teachers, and education support staff, it's not hard to figure out why these groups are tired of having Kline in Congress," said Obermueller. "We have problems to address in education, and we don't have an education chair willing to do what's necessary to solve those problems. People are tired of inaction, and it's time for change… "We need to be doing everything we can to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible. That means supporting our teachers in the classroom, making sure our young people are in safe learning environments, and prioritizing education above special interests."

Kline wrote and passed the #1 priority of the for-profit education industry, an amendment to prevent “the use of funds by the Department of Education to implement and enforce the gainful employment rule, which would prohibit college programs from receiving Federal student loans unless new complicated loan repayment criteria are met.” It passed 289-136, only 4 Republicans joining 132 Democrats sticking up for students and for public education. 58 mostly corrupt Democrats crossed the aisle and voted with the Republicans, including almost all the corporately-owned New Dems and Blue Dogs, reactionaries and bribe-takers like Steve Israel (Blue Dog-NY), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem-FL), Gary Peters (New Dem-MI), John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Joe Crowley (New Dem-NY), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), and Ron Kind (New Dem-WI).

If you'd like to help replace Kline with Mike Obermueller, you can do that on this ActBlue page. Not sure? Watch the forum on this video and I think you will be:

Bob Herbert takes a closer look at that so-called Cadillac tax on supposed fat cats' health insurance policies

UPDATE: WaPo's Ezra Klein responds


"The tax on health benefits is being sold to the public dishonestly as something that will affect only the rich, and it makes a mockery of President Obama’s repeated pledge that if you like the health coverage you have now, you can keep it."

-- Bob Herbert, in his NYT column today,

"A Less Than Honest Policy"

by Ken

The subject of the "Cadillac tax" on supposedly exclusive-to-the-super-execs health care insurance plans has been questioned frequently. I have a bad feeling that my own plan, which I consider "adequate," and is my one real employment "perk," and maybe the thing that most ties me to a job I'm far from crazy about, either qualifies or is going to, and believe me, I'm not any kind of fat cat.

It would have been easier for me to know back in the days when, at each year's benefits meeting, we were told both the old and new figures for the portion coming out of our paychecks as well as the percentages of the total costs our contributions represented. In recent years, curiously, we've been told only our new contribution amount, meaning we have to dig out an old pay stub just to compare it with our previous year's contribution. I'm guessing we're paying a significantly higher percentage of the total cost than we used to, but considering the skyrocketing total cost, I worry that the amount of the company's contribution is going to put us in that "Cadillac" class.

Today Bob Herbert devotes a whole column to the subject, and it's not exactly reassuring.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

A Less Than Honest Policy

by BOB HERBERT

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate's version of President Obama's effort to reform health care.

The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it's a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.

Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do.

The tax would kick in on plans exceeding $23,000 annually for family coverage and $8,500 for individuals, starting in 2013. In the first year it would affect relatively few people in the middle class. But because of the steadily rising costs of health care in the U.S., more and more plans would reach the taxation threshold each year.

Within three years of its implementation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax would apply to nearly 20 percent of all workers with employer-provided health coverage in the country, affecting some 31 million people. Within six years, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax would reach a fifth of all households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 annually. Those families can hardly be considered very wealthy.

Proponents say the tax will raise nearly $150 billion over 10 years, but there's a catch. It's not expected to raise this money directly. The dirty little secret behind this onerous tax is that no one expects very many people to pay it. The idea is that rather than fork over 40 percent in taxes on the amount by which policies exceed the threshold, employers (and individuals who purchase health insurance on their own) will have little choice but to ratchet down the quality of their health plans.

These lower-value plans would have higher out-of-pocket costs, thus increasing the very things that are so maddening to so many policyholders right now: higher and higher co-payments, soaring deductibles and so forth. Some of the benefits of higher-end policies can be expected in many cases to go by the boards: dental and vision care, for example, and expensive mental health coverage.

Proponents say this is a terrific way to hold down health care costs. If policyholders have to pay more out of their own pockets, they will be more careful -- that is to say, more reluctant -- to access health services. On the other hand, people with very serious illnesses will be saddled with much higher out-of-pocket costs. And a reluctance to seek treatment for something that might seem relatively minor at first could well have terrible (and terribly expensive) consequences in the long run.

If even the plan's proponents do not expect policyholders to pay the tax, how will it raise $150 billion in a decade? Great question.

We all remember learning in school about the suspension of disbelief. This part of the Senate's health benefits taxation scheme requires a monumental suspension of disbelief. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, less than 18 percent of the revenue will come from the tax itself. The rest of the $150 billion, more than 82 percent of it, will come from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans.

Can you believe it?

I asked Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., about this. (Labor unions are outraged at the very thought of a health benefits tax.) I had to wait for him to stop laughing to get his answer. “If you believe that,” he said, “I have some oceanfront property in southwestern Pennsylvania that I will sell you at a great price.”

A survey of business executives by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, found that only 16 percent of respondents said they would convert the savings from a reduction in health benefits into higher wages for employees. Yet proponents of the tax are holding steadfast to the belief that nearly all would do so.

“In the real world, companies cut costs and they pocket the money,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America and a leader of the opposition to the tax. “Executives tell the shareholders: ‘Hey, higher profits without any revenue growth. Great!' ”

The tax on health benefits is being sold to the public dishonestly as something that will affect only the rich, and it makes a mockery of President Obama's repeated pledge that if you like the health coverage you have now, you can keep it.

Those who believe this is a good idea should at least have the courage to be straight about it with the American people.

UPDATE: THE WAPO'S EZRA KLEIN
RESPONDS TO BOB HERBERT'S COLUMN

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein has posted a response to Bob Herbert's column. Here are some excerpts:

Bob Herbert's column today isn't so much a good argument against the excise tax as it is an example of why cost control will be virtually impossible, and thus national bankruptcy -- a real decrease in wages -- is a near-certainty.

Herbert argues that the excise tax will push people toward less expensive insurance premiums and begin to tax some portion of some health-care plans. Both are true. I'd say this is a good thing. He says it's a bad one. Distilled to its essentials, Herbert is arguing that, even at the high end, more expensive insurance policies are better insurance policies, and that the government should be subsidizing their purchase. Does that sound like a world in which we're going to control costs? . . .

[T]he people who receive that subsidy like receiving it. But the unemployed don't get any of that money, nor do people whose employers don't offer them insurance. The tax preference is huge, regressive, and encourages more spending on health-care insurance. And beyond all that, it separates workers from the cost of their health-care insurance, which is one of the main drivers of our cost problems. . . .

There is no way to sharply cut costs in a fifth of the economy without there being losers. And those losers won't all be Goldman Sachs executives. They won't all be providers (indeed, if you cut provider costs too much, they stop accepting patients, and then the patients lose). There's really no way around it. Even single-payer would bring a lot of losers with it, taking people in Cadillac plans and downgrading them to the same Camry as everyone else. . . .

[A]t some point, we need to start trying cost control. If the policy doesn't work, if it hits people too hard and falls on the wrong plans, well, little is easier to repair than an unpopular tax. But little is harder to do in the first place than cost control. Those who would kill this attempt should think really hard about what their counter-policy is, and who will lose from that policy, and why that is preferable, and whether it can actually pass, and where we're left if it doesn't, and who loses from that. Cost control has losers, unfortunately. Herbert's column is proof of that. But not controlling costs has the most losers of all.

I wish I were equipped to evaluate this, but as with so much of the health care debate, we're stuck choosing mostly blindly among our "experts." One thing I do know is that when E.K. suggests, "If the policy doesn't work, if it hits people too hard and falls on the wrong plans, well, little is easier to repair than an unpopular tax," I assume he's kidding. Because I'm sure he knows as well as anybody that once my health care benefits are dismantled, I'm never getting them back.

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Fighting wars without pain might be OK if it were possible, but merely ghetto-izing the pain is unacceptable

"The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again -- for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours -- is obscene. All decent people should object. . . .

"The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. . . .

"What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it."

-- Bob Herbert, in his Tuesday NYT column, "A Fearful Price"

by Ken

I've been content to let Howie do the heavy lifting on Afghanistan. I don't disagree with the strong position he's taken against increased American involvement in a war there, but I still feel conflicted about it.

As Hendrik Hertzberg begins his "Comment" piece in this week's New Yorker, "Bad Choices": "There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true."

Later Hertzberg writes, "The principal virtue of [the president's] choice remains the vices of the others." He writes further:

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems.

However, one thing about the war in Afghanistan -- and indeed the last war in Iraq, and the ones currently being lined up for Iran et al. by the enthusiasts -- needs to be flagged down. As Bob Herbert wrote Tuesday, it "is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it." It was an innovation of the Bush-Cheney regime, and unfortunately like so many other innovations that expand the power of the executive branch, the chances of its being reversed by succeeding administrations, even those run by less despicable, megalomaniacal leaders, are slim. Giving up power one finds oneself heir to isn't something politicians do a lot of.

Nothing characterizes the hypocrisy and general doodyheadedness of Movement Conservative thuggery more surely than what has come to be known as its "chickenhawkishness" -- the truly astonishing percentage of these Bombs-Away Bozos, screeching to start a new war every day, who have never served in the military and are offended by the mere suggestion that they should.

When our friend Max Blumenthal was honing his videographer's skills, he took his video camera to one of those conclaves of Daring Young Doodyheads (Values Voter Summit, perhaps?) and put the question to all those blood-thirsty doodyheads frothing at the mouth for more invasions, more wars: Would you fight in those wars? Not only wouldn't they, most of them were clearly mystified, or offended, by the fact that someone would ask them such a question.

One especially irritating far-right doodyhead said simply that he could contribute to the war better in other ways. I wonder whether those delicate geniuses (as I hope George Costanza won't mind my calling them) are aware that they get to make that choice because of the elimination of the draft, under which previous American wars, both declared and undeclared, were fought. But can the delicate geniuses really not see how philosophically and ethically repulsive it is to advocate a war in which neither you nor your family, friends, and associates is put at risk of any sort?

Of course this point has been made before, but it never seems to stick, and each time it's brought up, it's as if nobody's ever said it before. I'm not sure anyone's said it as well, though, as Bob Herbert did the Tuesday column from which I've quoted above.

To drive the point home, the column begins with Herbert's encounter with a Columbia University student "who was enthusiastic about the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan," and "argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way to truly win the war."

He was a very bright young man: thoughtful and eager and polite. I asked him if he had any plans to join the military and help make this grand mission a success. He said no.

Hmm. Is there a cognitive-dissonance monitor in the house?

Herbert relates this to a RAND Corp. study --

showing that the eight years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking an emotional toll on the children of service members and that the difficulties increased the longer parents were deployed.

There is no way that the findings of this study should be a surprise to anyone. It just confirms that the children of those being sent into combat are among that tiny percentage of the population that is unfairly shouldering the entire burden of these wars.

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again -- for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours -- is obscene. All decent people should object.

We already knew that in addition to the many thousands who have been killed or physically wounded, hundreds of thousands have returned with very serious psychological wounds: deep depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and so on. Other problems are also widespread: alcohol and drug abuse, family strife, homelessness.

The new study, by the RAND Corporation, was published in the journal Pediatrics. The children surveyed were found to have higher levels of emotional difficulties than their peers in the general population.

According to the study:

"Older youth and girls of all ages reported significantly more school, family and peer-related difficulties with parental deployment. Length of parental deployment and poorer non-deployed caregiver mental health were significantly associated with a greater number of challenges for children, both during deployment and deployed parent reintegration."

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

To say that this is a national disgrace is to wallow in the shallowest understatement. The nation will always give lip-service to support for the troops, but for the most part Americans do not really care about the men and women we so blithely ship off to war, and the families they leave behind.

The National Military Family Association, which commissioned the RAND study, has poignant comments from the children of military personnel on its Web site.

You can tell immediately how much more real the wars are to those youngsters than to most Americans:

"I hope it’s not him on the news getting hurt."

"Most of my grades dropped because I was thinking about my dad, because my dad’s more important than school."

"Mom will be in her room and we hear her crying."

Which brings Herbert to the point that I made my second extract above, and eventually the third:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

I don’t think our current way of waging war, which is pretty easy-breezy for most citizens, is what the architects of America had in mind. Here’s George Washington’s view, for example: "It must be laid down as a primary position and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal service to the defense of it."

What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it.

A cruel irony in this new way of waging war is that the 1 percent of the country doing the fighting, which tends toi support these military adventures, seems largely ignorant of the way the way they are used by militarily adventurous pols to shield them from the proper scrutiny of the American people at large.

If it turns out that there is an afterlife that involves rewards and punishments for earthly deeds, you have to hope that there is a sufficiently fierce punishment for sending other people's children off to die.

#

The Grand Obstructionist Party Has Some Plans Too

Despite a barrage of high volume screeching and obfuscation from Hate Talk Radio, Fox and Wall Street's television shows and networks, it isn't complicated or mentally challenging to figure out what's been happening in our country over the past couple of decades. To put it simply, harebrained right-wing ideology has been unleashed on our country by a series of venal regimes dedicated not to public service but to public fleecing (with an 8-year interregnum, the Clinton years, where a compromised and gutless president was fighting for his political survival against these same venal forces instead of for his constituents). The Bush II years were a kind of apogee as a time of plunder and pillage during which the class the Regime represented was gigantically and systematically enriched and empowered at the expense of society as a whole and at the expense of every other family and individual in the country.

And now we've awoken from the nightmare and elected someone who has promised to reverse that trend, rejecting someone who had been promising-- and still promises-- to perpetuate it. The venal forces are attacking him with all their considerable might, on every front and with every weapon available to them. As Bob Herbert reminded us in Friday's NY Times, Miracles Take Time.

Barack Obama has only been president for six weeks, but there is a surprising amount of ire, anger, even outrage that he hasn’t yet solved the problems of the U.S. economy, that he hasn’t saved us from the increasingly tragic devastation wrought by the clownish ideas of right-wing conservatives and the many long years of radical Republican misrule.

This intense, impatient, often self-righteous, frequently wrongheaded and at times willfully destructive criticism has come in waves, and not just from the right. Mr. Obama is as legitimate a target for criticism as any president. But there is a weird hysterical quality to some of the recent attacks that suggests an underlying fear or barely suppressed rage. It’s a quality that seems not just unhelpful but unhealthy.

Mr. Obama is being hammered-- depending on the point of view of the critics-- for the continuing collapse of the stock market, for not moving fast enough to revive the suicidal financial industry, for trying to stem the flood tide of home foreclosures, for trying to bring health insurance coverage to some of the millions of Americans who don’t have any, for running up huge budget deficits as he tries to fend off the worst economic emergency since World War II and for not taking time out from all of the above to deal with-- get this-- earmarks.

On CNN yesterday, Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, made much the same point about how miracles don't happen overnight. How many years of Reagan, and two Bushes did it take to bring the country to where it is now? Boehner, Cantor, Kyl, DeMint, Limbaugh, McConnell, Vitter and the rest of the hard-core obstructionists may be working 24/7 on how to bring down Obama, but the administration is just moving forward with its plans to rescue the country from all that the Republicans (and the sold out and/or cowardly reactionary Democrats who allied with them-- Max Baucus comes quickly to mind) have wrought.

"It's very clear the economy is facing some tough times. We are inheriting the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Job loss began in January 2008. It's going to take some time for us to work our way out of this. But we acted quickly. Within the first month after the president took office, [we] enacted a recovery act to start back on the path to economic growth. But we acted quickly... The money is starting to flow. Let's give it some time to work."

He challenged host John King "to invite the Republicans on this show and ask for their specifics, and then compare them head-to-head... [W]e are proposing a change in course in which we are not only fiscally responsible, but we are investing in education, we are investing in energy, and we're investing in health care.” But all we get from the right are dangerously accelerating attacks on President Obama and his policies, on behalf of the special interests unwilling to give up their exalted positions-- despite leading the country to the brink of catastrophe-- are coming from their well-bribed handmaidens of our political class. The Republicans have now transformed themselves, once again, into the Grand Obstructionist Party and their shameless and treacherous leaders will stop at nothing-- no matter how much harm it does to the nation and to their own constituents-- to sabotage the president's rescue operations. They will continue to toss out every kind of attack they can think of until they find one that sticks. As citizens it's our duty to be ever vigilant and to always push back against their deprecations and lies.

To hear conservatives tell it, you'd think mobs of shiftless welfare moms were marauding through the streets of Greenwich and Palm Springs, lynching bankers and hedge-fund managers, stringing up shopkeepers, and herding lawyers into internment camps. President Obama and his budgeteers, they say, have declared war on the rich.

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist (and former Bush speechwriter) Michael Gerson argued in an op-ed that "Obama chose a time of recession to propose a massive increase in progressivity—a 10-year, trillion-dollar haul from the rich, already being punished by the stock market collapse and the housing market decline." The plans are so radical, "there will not be enough wealthy people left to bleed." CNBC's Larry Kudlow wrote that "Obama is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds." Other segments on the financial news network warn of a tax on the rich, a war on the wealthy. My personal favorite was a piece from ABCNews.com, which had to be rewritten and reposted because the original was so poorly done. (The revised version isn't much better.) It quotes a dentist who is contemplating reducing "her income from her current $320,000 to under $250,000 by having her dental hygienist work fewer days and by treating fewer patients. [That way, she] would avoid paying higher taxes on the $70,000 that would be subject to increased taxation if Obama's proposal is signed into law."

It's hard to overstate how absurd these claims are. First, let's talk about the "massive increase in progressivity" that Gerson deplores. It consists largely (but not exclusively) of returning marginal tax rates to their levels of 2001, before Gerson and the epically incompetent Bush administration of which he was a part got their hands on the reins of power. Obama wants to let marginal rates for families with taxable income (not total income, but taxable income) of more than $250,000 revert from 33 percent to 36 percent, and to let the top rate-- currently 35 percent on family income above $357,000-- revert to 39 percent. (Here are the current tax tables.) There's also talk of capping-- not eliminating, but capping-- deductions on charitable giving and mortgage interest.
 
Obama's proposals don't mean the government would steal every penny you make above the $250,000 threshold, or that making more than $250,000 would somehow subject all of your income to higher taxes. Rather, you'd pay 36 cents to the government in income taxes on every dollar over the threshold, rather than 33 cents.

...[T]here has been a near total absence of discussion of what higher rates will mean in the real world. Say you're a CNBC anchor, or a Washington Post columnist with a seat at the Council on Foreign Relations, or a dentist, and you managed to cobble together $350,000 a year in income. You're doing quite well. If you subtract deductions for state and property taxes, mortgage interest and charitable deductions, and other deductions, the amount on which tax rates are calculated might total $300,000. What would happen if the marginal rate on the portion of your income above $250,000 were to rise from 33 percent to 36 percent? Under the old regime, you'd pay $16,500 in federal taxes on that amount. Under the new one, you'd pay $18,000. The difference is $1,500 per year, or $4.10 per day. Obviously, the numbers rise as you make more. But is $4.10 a day bleeding the rich, a war on the wealthy, a killer of innovation and enterprise? That dentist eager to slash her income from $320,000 to $250,000 would avoid the pain of paying an extra $2,100 in federal taxes. But she'd also deprive herself of an additional $70,000 in income!

Can she, or we, really be that stupid?

"An epidemic of violence that's sickening the soul of this nation": We learn a lot about people from the way we allow our children to be treated

"I asked to come here because I wanted to talk with you about the spate of violence that's been robbing the city's children of their future. In this last school year, 32 Chicago public school students were killed, and even more since the school year ended. This past week alone, two teens were shot in a South Side schoolyard."
--Sen. Barack Obama at Vernon Park Church of God in Chicago on Sunday, quoted by Bob Herbert in his NYT column today, "A Voice Raised in Chicago"

In his column, Bob Herbert quotes Senator Obama saying: "From South-Central L.A. to Newark, New Jersey, there's an epidemic of violence that's sickening the soul of this nation. For the third year in a row, violent crime and murder are on the rise nationwide." And in numbers that should make us stare in mute horror, the victims are children.

Herbert writes:

[Senator Obama] noted that there was tremendous grief across the country when the massacre at Virginia Tech happened last April, "and rightfully so." But with 34 schoolkids dead in Chicago since the beginning of the last school year, he said, "for the most part, there has been silence."

The senator points fingers in several directions, starting with government, which has failed to recognize and deal with the epidemic of violence. We need better gun-control laws (and enforcement, of course) and more attention to gang violence. We also need to "invest more in after-school activities that provide an alternative to the streets for vulnerable youngsters."

But [Obama] added, "There is only so much government can do." There is also a need, he said, "for a change in attitude."

The senator talked about the young men and boys who have gone down "the wrong path." And he said one of the main reasons they are wreaking havoc and shooting one another is that they had not received enough attention while growing up from responsible adults.

"We're not reading to them," he said. "We're not sitting down with them and talking to them. We're not guiding them. We're not disciplining them."

I don't suppose you can raise much campaign cash, or grab much face time on the Sunday gabfests, by sounding the alarm for the children being routinely murdered and maimed. But since the "family values" phonies seem to care about our children about as much as the Bush regime cares about the troops it sends so casually to slaughter and mayhem and then abandons to the tender mercies of the free market, somebody has to say something.

Don't they?

Here's the full text of the Herbert column. It's important.

July 17, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

A Voice Raised in Chicago

By BOB HERBERT

Senator Barack Obama took his presidential campaign to Chicago Sunday, where he addressed an agonizing issue that has been largely overlooked by the national media--the murder of dozens of the city's public school students since last September.

Speaking to an overflow crowd of worshipers at the Vernon Park Church of God, Mr. Obama, a resident of Chicago, said:

"I asked to come here because I wanted to talk with you about the spate of violence that's been robbing the city's children of their future. In this last school year, 32 Chicago public school students were killed, and even more since the school year ended. This past week alone, two teens were shot in a South Side schoolyard."

You've probably heard more than you wanted to about David Beckham and Posh Spice in recent days, but not a lot about the deaths of these children and teenagers in Chicago. Black, Latino and poor, they are America's invisible children.

"In one Chicago public school," said Mr. Obama, "a teacher was calling attendance, and when she got to the name of a particular student who wasn't there and had missed a lot of classes, she asked if anyone knew where he was. And the answer she got was, ‘He's dead.' "

He mentioned another school: "In Room 104 at Avalon Park Elementary School, an empty chair is pushed against the wall in memory of Quinton Jackson, the eighth grader who used to sit there, and who was stabbed to death a few months ago."

And he mentioned Blair Holt, 16, who was riding home from school on a city bus when a gunman opened fire. "As the bullets flew, and Blair was shot," the senator said, "he pulled a friend onto a seat and saved her life. And as he was driven to the hospital, where he would pass away a short time later, he asked the paramedics to tell his parents that he loved them."

Over the past school year, Mr. Obama said, the number of public school students killed in Chicago was higher than the number of soldiers from the entire state of Illinois who were killed in Iraq during that period.

As I mentioned in a previous column on this issue, Chicago is hardly alone when it comes to the slaughter of youngsters who are living in conditions that can fairly be compared to combat.

"From South-Central L.A. to Newark, New Jersey," said Senator Obama, "there's an epidemic of violence that's sickening the soul of this nation. For the third year in a row, violent crime and murder are on the rise nationwide. As we've all borne witness to here in Chicago, this is partly due to the rise of gang violence. The F.B.I. says there are now more gang members on our nation's streets than police officers."

The senator talked about the need for more stringent gun control laws, and he criticized the Bush administration for "decimating" a Clinton administration initiative that had added more than 100,000 police officers to local departments.

He said governments need to do more to combat gangs and gang violence and invest more in after-school programs that provide an alternative to the streets for vulnerable youngsters.

But he added, "There is only so much government can do." There is also a need, he said, "for a change in attitude."

The senator talked about the young men and boys who have gone down "the wrong path." And he said one of the main reasons they are wreaking havoc and shooting one another is that they had not received enough attention while growing up from responsible adults.

"We're not reading to them," he said. "We're not sitting down with them and talking to them. We're not guiding them. We're not disciplining them."

In a conversation yesterday, he stressed that the plight of young people struggling in tough environments demands both governmental attention and a heightened sense of individual responsibility. Both are essential.

He said in his speech that he will keep fighting in Washington for more money and more programs. "But that money and those programs," he said, "will not make any difference unless we have a change of heart."

He also noted that there was tremendous grief across the country when the massacre at Virginia Tech happened last April, "and rightfully so." But with 34 schoolkids dead in Chicago since the beginning of the last school year, he said, "for the most part, there has been silence."

It's important, he said, that Americans reach a mind-set in which "we care just as much" about the children slain in Chicago as those killed at Virginia Tech.