Saturday Chores

Saturday Chores:

____ Order “Support Ukraine” yard signs and bumper stickers.”

____ Call my Republican Senators and Representative (202-224-3121 Capitol Switchboard) to urge support of Ukraine, rather than Russia.

____ Spend an hour at BlueSky commenting, reposting, learning.

____ Contact local Indivisible groups today to find out when we may expect an organized reply. 

____ Firm up plans for the next TESLA TAKEDOWN protest in Brentwood.

____ Text my friends to let them know what I did today. 

____ Clear calendars to prioritize outreach/planning/actions against authoritarian takeovers here and abroad.

____ Listen to music.

Trump Promises to End Voting

Sure, he was talking to his base yesterday, and he is spouting to them just what he plans to do:

 

Harris campaign response:

When Vice President Harris says this election is about freedom she means it. Our democracy is under assault by criminal Donald Trump: After the last election Trump lost, he sent a mob to overturn the results. 

This campaign, he has promised violence if he loses, the end of our elections if he wins, and the termination of the Constitution to empower him to be a dictator to enact his dangerous Project 2025 agenda on America. Donald Trump wants to take America backward, to a politics of hate, chaos, and fear - this November America will unite around Vice President Kamala Harris to stop him.

Snow Days

Snow days are good for lesson plans.

Lesson in Democracy 101.

How can we save our schools if grassroots education activists can't endorse or support candidates running for public office?

This in my in box from Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. The love fest is over. The high stakes have gotten too high.

If SOS can not support Network for Public Education which has political clout and candidates, it is worthless. Stop wasting your time people and start endorsing candidates who support public education like De Blasio in NY and other in your state, city, county, and town.

"NPE – Network for Public education                      SOS cannot endorse it because of our 501C3 status because it raises money and campaigns for individual people.  However, individuals are free to endorse."

Corporate Education's Anti-Democratic Effects

From the NEPC at the University of Colorado, Boulder:

BOULDER, CO  October 16, 2012 – “Local control” has been a bedrock principle of public schooling in America since its earliest days, but a new report concludes the concept “has all but disappeared” in discussions of education policy.

The report, Democracy Left Behind: How Recent Education Reforms Undermine Local School Governance and Democratic Education, by Kenneth Howe and David Meens of the University of Colorado Boulder, examines the impact on democratic ideals of vanishing local control over education. The report examines the making of education policy as well as the decisions about what schools teach and how they teach it.

The report is published today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

In a healthy democracy, schools play a key role in preparing citizens.  A healthy democracy also depends on citizens engaged in democratic governance. And since schools sit at the center of most communities, local democratic control over schooling has long been highly valued in the United States.

Howe and Meens describe local control as “the power of communities, made up of individuals bound together by common geography, resources, problems and interests, to collectively determine the policies that govern their lives.” As regards schooling, this typically refers to control by elected school boards and their constituents.

Yet the No Child Left Behind Act and subsequent federal policy has forced a surrender of local control. The local role under these systems is largely to be held accountable by state and federal officials. While local discretion is allowed for how to comply with state and federal mandates, the constraints imposed by those mandates have been enormous. Consequently, Howe and Meens contend, NCLB and its progeny have been fundamentally anti-democratic.

The same is true of the reform policies that have been advanced by President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan. “Despite Obama and Duncan’s rhetorical support for greater local control of schools, the reform instruments that their policies are based on are clearly antithetical to it,” the authors write.  They point in particular to Race to the Top, which puts states in competition with one another for federal funds to induce them to expand testing, including using student test scores as a substantial portion of teacher evaluation, and to expand the number of charter schools.

Howe and Meens explain the importance of a balance between local control and federal and state regulation. In a democracy, there is a presumption of local control, which may be overridden when it has undemocratic consequences, as in de jure segregation. But such a justification does not exist for the recent federal education policy take-over.

The authors also warn that current reform approaches are marginalizing community involvement. “Democratic reform should involve local stakeholders, especially marginalized members of society, because inclusion is a democratic value that increases not only the likelihood that policies will be just, but also the likelihood that reform will succeed,” Howe and Meens write. “Such inclusion also helps create the conditions in which all students can attain the democratic threshold.”

They conclude with a series of recommendations, urging schools and education policymakers to take three key steps.

• First, move away from a punitive model based on threats to withhold funding. This should be replaced by a participatory model – such as support and incentives for school employees, parents and community members to collaborate together on resolving educational problems.
• Second, encourage states and local communities to adopt curriculum standards “that include a conscious and substantive focus on developing the deliberative skill and dispositions required of democratic citizenship.”
• Third, curtail the privatization of public education resources. Instead, build up democratic values by holding schools receiving public funds accountable to the public through democratically elected school boards and other democratic institutions.

Find Democracy Left Behind: How Recent Education Reforms Undermine Local School Governance and Democratic Education, by Kenneth Howe and David Meens, on the web at

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/democracy-left-behind.

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence.  For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.

This policy brief was made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (greatlakescenter.org).

Buy This Book on January 9

This new book, Corporations Are Not People, by Jeff Clements has a foreword by Bill Moyers and has been praised in the highest terms by some of our nation's best activists and organizers.  No one can read it and not understand the pressing need to put an end to corporate personhood.

By making this book a bestseller on Amazon, we will get it in front of many more people and into many small and independent bookstores.  We can also put the issue in the news and help build toward actions on the January 21st second anniversary of Citizens United.

Please buy the book as close to January 9th as possible and share this link with everyone you know: http://amzn.to/u3VDuKAs a bonus, we'll bump Fox News's Andrew Napolitano's screed out of the #1 spot in Civil Rights and Liberties books.  In the larger category of Current Events, the #1 book is about how to arm yourself and defend your property with automatic weapons during the coming anarchy; what do you say we bump that one down a notch too? 

In the still larger category of Politics, a book on Catherine the Great is ready to be dethroned, and the overall bestselling book on Amazon until we have something to say about it is a biography of a CEO. Let's change things.

Coming Soon to An Oligarchy Near You

Thank You, Wisconsin, For Carrying the Fire

This is what democracy looks like as people begin to reclaim what is theirs.

Who Needs A Republican Party When You Have a Democrat Eager to Implement Your Plan?

For those who worry about the future of the two party system as the Tea Party ushers the Republicans into BozoLand, never fear. With a President intent upon occupying the Center-Right while hoping Center-Left, all the Republicans have to do is to continue to move further right with the Tea Partiers, and the former Republican agenda gets appropriated by the former Democrats as they chase westward. By 2012 Obama, himself, will likely be labeling the 2008 Obama a socialist. In the meantime, "Drill, Baby, Drill" becomes a "Democratic" priority as the world melts and the U. S. moves closer to fascism. From Raw Story:

"Drill, Baby, Drill," chanted conservatives at the 2008 Republican convention and at rallies across the country ever since. Now, they claim President Barack Obama's embrace of the idea doesn't quite meet their standards.

Republicans have reacted largely with derision to Obama's announcement to expand offshore drilling Wednesday, declaring that his move -- which adopts a key plank in their energy platform -- is flawed and insufficient.

Among the first to lay into him was none other then House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who alleged in a statement that the president "continues to defy the will of the American people" by permitting drilling in most -- but not all -- coastal areas.

"It's long past time for this Administration to stop delaying American energy production off all our shores and start listening to the American people who want an 'all of the above' strategy to produce more American energy and create more jobs," added the leading Republican in the House.

Sarah Palin, who took the GOP slogan "Drill, Baby, Drill" to a new prominence, dubbed Obama's decision "Stall, Baby, Stall" in a guest blog for The National Review.

"Fight Now or Kiss Your Country Goodbye"

Sign the petition at SaveDemocracy.net. From Raw Story:

WASHINGTON -- Responding to the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday to overturn corporate spending limits in federal elections, progressive firebrand Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) immediately highlighted a series of moves to "avoid the terrible consequences of the decision."

"If we do nothing then I think you can kiss your country goodbye," Grayson told Raw Story in an interview just hours after the decision was announced.

"You won't have any more senators from Kansas or Oregon, you'll have senators from Cheekies and Exxon. Maybe we'll have to wear corporate logos like Nascar drivers."

Grayson said the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling -- which removes decades of campaign spending limits on corporations -- "opens the floodgates for the purchases and sale of the law."

"It allows corporations to spend all the money they want to buy and sell elected officials through the campaign process," he said. "It allows them to reward political sellouts, and it allows them to punish elected officials who actually try to do what's right for the people."

Fearing this decision before it became official, Grayson last week filed five campaign finance bills and a sixth one on Thursday. Grayson said the bills are important to securing the people's "right to clean government."

The bills have names like the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act and the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act. The first slaps a 500 percent excise tax on corporate spending on elections, and the second mandates businesses to disclose their attempts to influence elections. More details are available on the congressman's Web site.

"These bills will save us from drowning in corporate money and special interest money," Grayson said. "They should have been passed a long time ago but after the Supreme Court opened those floodgates, I think it's imperative we get these things done."

Reforming campaign finance laws has been a daunting task, as senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) have made concerted attempts and failed.

"I'm very optimistic," Grayson said. "I discussed the bills with the leadership when I filed them, which was a week ago in the case of the first five."

"The bills are short and readable, which frankly is pretty unusual these days," he said. "The longest one is four pages long and there are six of them."

Grayson has created the Web site SaveDemocracy.net to gather petitions in support of his bills. On Friday at 8:30 AM EST there were nearly 40,000 signatories.

'Worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case'

The first-term congressman from Florida had an ominous view of the consequences of embracing the decision.

"Anytime Exxon feels like it, Exxon can go and claim one of the 435 Congressional districts in this country, and drop $100 million in cash to pay for ads to knock off anybody they don't like. To them, that's an insignificant amount of money."

Grayson even likened the ruling to the 1857 pro-slavery Dred Scott case, arguing the two are "bad for pretty much the same reasons."

"We now today have a Supreme Court decision that essentially says only corporations have Constitutional rights. The rights of the rest of us to clean government is somehow overlooked by the Founders, according to this Supreme Court.

The decision supports "this bizarre conception that the Constitution is for the benefit of the powerful, and nobody else."

Grayson's critique echoes the viewpoints of many others who believed campaign finance laws were already too permissive to special interests before Thursday's ruling.

"I think few people would say that what we really need in America is more corporate interference in the political process," he said.

Reforming campaign finance laws will be a tricky process for Congress because both Republicans and Democrats receive weighty campaign contributions from wealthy corporations.

While few Democrats have acted in recent years to change campaign finance laws, Grayson predicted his party will now be more interested in the issue.

"This just happened, that's why you're not hearing enough," he said. "You're going to hear a lot. I'm pretty confident that these bills will draw a tremendous amount of Democratic support.

Inviting his opponents to support his effort, Grayson said: "I'm hopeful that in the end there are principled Republicans who will actually join the effort, because nobody really wants to become the congressman from Wal-Mart."

GOP 'smiling' at the decision

Never one to pull a punch from Republicans, Grayson questioned the intentions of the ruling's backers.

"In the same way that Republicans always do their best to suppress voter turnout in elections, the Republicans are doing their best here to increase the amount of corporate cash," Grayson said. "They are, in essence, a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America."