WEEKEND QUOTABLES -- 'Savages'

DT calls for "civil war" if he's impeached. 

I usually try and limit myself to only one hair-brained or fascist quote from Trump per week. But this weekend, there were two that creeped me out badly enough to warrant a second look.

First, there was DT referring to six members of the House of Representatives -- two Jews and four women of color -- as "savages" on Saturday morning. This, even though they were among at least 223 House Democrats who now support an impeachment inquiry.

Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 28, 2019

He went so far as to suggest that one of those Jewish "savages", Rep. Adam Schiff,  be arrested and charged with "treason". 

Speaking of violence, the second was him threating "civil war" if he's impeached.

....If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Pastor Robert Jeffress, @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

In my mind, each of these adds on to the long his of impeachable or criminal offenses in their own right. And I'm not the only one.

Harvard Law professor John Coates
...argued that the social media post itself is an "independent basis" for lawmakers to remove him from the White House.

This tweet is itself an independent basis for impeachment - a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally authorized power. https://t.co/JL9XzClGXf

— John Coates⚽️ (@jciv) September 30, 2019

Beto O'Rourke

When he calls 6 members of Congress—all women of color or Jewish—“savages,” he wants you to think of them as less than human. Like when he calls immigrants an “infestation” and says "no human being" would want to live in Baltimore. We can’t be surprised when violence follows. -- Twitter

Gabrielle Bruney

"Savage" has a long history as a racist term used to mark people of color as supposedly being less civilized than their white counterparts...In July, Trump called for this same group of congresswomen to "go back" to the "broken and crime infested places from which they came," despite the fact that all are American citizens and three were born in this country. -- Esquire

What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

Students wait for the bus in front of Bouchet Elementary Math & Science Academy in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. More than 74% of students whose neighborhood school is majority black schools are bussed to majority-black schools. (Manuel Martinez/WBEZ)

I'm reading Sarah Karp's WBEZ story about Chicago's experiment with school desegregation and recalling how Arne Duncan helped get a federal judge to quash the city's deseg consent decree.

Karp writes:

Most of the city’s 78 magnet and test-in schools — including classical, gifted and selective enrollment — were created under the decree as a way to lure in a diverse group of students. But even after the court order was lifted, school district officials said they believed integration was important, and they started integrating by the socioeconomic status of children.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

Since then, writes Karp, CPS has continued busing and spending extra funding on magnet and test-in schools and also added 13 new ones plus more charter schools that have been shown to contribute to segregation. This year, the school district plans to spend $50 million for bussing and extra positions at these schools, which serve 62,000 students.

But, says Karp, the WBEZ analysis finds only about 20% of magnet and test-in schools meet the racial makeup goal set out in the court order, compared to 35% a decade ago. Under that definition, the goal was for white students to make up between 15% and 35% of the student body and black, Latino and Asian students to make up between 65% and 85%.

Six schools of the 65 in existence 10 years ago went from being considered integrated to not, while only one of the new schools has that mix of students. Among the schools no longer meeting this definition of integrated are Skinner North Elementary School, which opened in the last decade, and Walter Payton College Prep High School — two schools often named as the best in the city and the state. They have both seen significant increases in white students. 

Magnet schools and busing programs that were created and funded for the purpose of encouraging racial desegregation have since been turned into their opposites. Now magnets have increasingly become privileged selective-enrollment schools, anchors for neighborhood gentrification with expensive busing programs taking children miles away from their neighborhood schools and into segregated ones.

Niketa Brar on Hitting Left

Niketa Brar, executive director of Chicago United for Equity, and a frequent guest on Hitting Left, says magnet and selective schools have been used as a way to allow families to avoid the problems of the public school system. This is especially true in gentrifying neighborhoods, she said, where parents put their children on buses to be driven away from their local schools.

Brar tells Karp:

“They become little havens of white people feeling like they are participating in the public school system while actually keeping their children segregated from the impacts of a local neighborhood school that have the same resources that every other child in their neighborhoods gets.”

It's worth recalling that it was Pres. Obama's Secretary of Education and former CPS school chief, Arne Duncan, along with Mayor Daley and Duncan's successor Ron Huberman, who pleaded with Judge Kocoras to scrap the decree a decade ago. They claimed that the city had done all it could do to desegregate its schools and that the deseg struggle was "futile and a drain on district funds".

This,  even though research has shown that the period in which school deseg was in full play was when the district had made the greatest gains in measurable student learning and closing the so-called achievement gap.

Duncan maintained that if the consent decree was lifted, CPS could save $300 million, mostly in eliminating bus service to magnet and selective enrollment schools. It was all a lie. Busing service and selective enrollment programs and charter schools have been expanded. Only their purposes have changed.

Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's selective-enrollment schools became even more exclusive.

During the period of 1981 to 2015, the total population of African-American students in CPS plummeted from close to 240,000, 60% of all CPS students, to 156,000 or 39% of CPS. The loss of so many poor and black children and an increase in wealthier white students have since been ignored as an explanation for claimed rising test scores and graduation rates.

I'd argue that they, along with school resegregation, have lots to do with it.

We'll see if and how things change over the next four years with a new mayor and city council. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Biggest climate protests in history. 

Climate activist Greta Thunberg 

"We are not just some young people skipping school,’ she told thousands of school strikers in Manhattan, on a day when millions around the world demonstrated for action. "We are a wave of change. Together, we are unstoppable." -- The Guardian

Nate Silver

He refers to Sanders supporters as "residue". Oops!
Not sure Bernie should get credit for having more diverse support than last time given that he has far less support than last time. A lot of voters have left him. White liberals have been particularly likely to leave him (for Warren) so the residue of what's left is more diverse. -- Tweet

The Hindu

The India of Mr. Modi’s Hindutva dreams, advancing rapidly under his rule, will be “one nation” with one people, one language, one religion, one election, one market, and one everything — a homogeneous, Hindu utopia. -- Commentary: One people, many countries

 Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. on U.S.-Saudi arms deal

 "A secretive monarchy that commits atrocities in Yemen, that murders dissidents and journalists and lies to the world about it, and that treats women as property is not one to which we should be giving some of our most sensitive military technology." -- NBC News

I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Chicago teachers making their voices heard to demand living wages, smaller class sizes, and all the things teachers need to do their jobs well. America's teachers take on powerful work every day, and we must treat them with respect. #1u

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 22, 2019

Happy 20th to @ProjExplore, an organization I founded in 1999 with the aspiration of bringing scientists together with Chicago young people least likely to have an opportunity to experience the wonders of science. Join me & @ProjexED 9/26 to celebrate! https://t.co/TUgBpwYUTT pic.twitter.com/TTwWZ8Xia8

— Gabrielle Lyon (@LyonGabrielle) September 23, 2019

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY--56 years ago, white supremacists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, killing four girls and injuring dozens more.

Gene Patterson, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution in 1963

A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand, she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in their hand. -- Tampa Bay Times

 Laura Washington

Let’s put another trope to rest: It’s the one about how these angry black women can’t get along. These two women don’t have to like each other. They probably never will. So what? -- Sun-Times

Stephen Colbert on the Democratic debate

Let the 'humble background games' begin. -- Guardian

Kamala Harris on Trump 

Donald Trump [on trade]… he reminds me of that guy in the Wizard of Oz, when you pull back the curtain, he’s a really small dude. -- The Hill

Donald Trump doing his best Don Quixote

"Goddamn windmills..."  -- Washington Post

Talk about privilege. Rich get to live longer. Poor & middle class don't.

"Poverty is a life-threatening issue for millions of people in this country, and this report confirms it."—Sen. Bernie Sanders

There are now around 100 million, or nearly a third of the U.S. population living in poverty or near poverty. This figure is missing from glowing news reports about the booming Trump economy. While there are millions of white people living in poverty, poverty rates among African-Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans run two to three times higher. 

A newly released report from the U.S. General Accounting Office on Retirement Security, commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders reveals that the rich are living longer lives, while poor and middle-income Americans are dying at a comparatively earlier age. Talk about privilege!

This from the report:

GAO found that among Americans aged 51-61 in 1992, fewer than half of those in the poorest 20 percent of America’s wealth distribution had survived by 2014—48 percent. Among the richest 20 percent, 75.5 percent were still alive. The poorest 20 percent were twice as likely to die over the 22-year period than the wealthiest 20 percent.

 GAO similarly observed this massive disparity in life expectancy when examining income and education: only half of those without college degrees and in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution survived to 2014. Among those with college degrees and in the top 20 percent, based on mid-career earnings, 80 percent were still alive.

There's some -- but not much -- mention of racial inequality in the report.

GAO also found that white households in the bottom two earnings groups had higher estimated median incomes, and white households in all earnings groups generally had greater estimated median wealth, than racial minority households in those earnings groups.

"We must put an end to the obscene income and wealth inequality in our country, and ensure living wages, quality healthcare, and retirement security for our seniors as human rights," said Sanders. "If we do not urgently act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation will be condemned to an early death."

Bernie never mentions race in his introduction to the report. It seems to be his perennial blindspot. But he deserves credit for being the only candidate speaking out forcefully on income and wealth inequality.

Cunningham's response to the devastation of black communities? Bring in 'new people'.

Just when you think we've heard the last from the disastrous duo of Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, they become media go-to guys on (of all things) gun violence and community development.

Remember, this was the pair that ran the Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. Dept. of Education for years, promoting austerity, mass school closings, privatization and uncapped expansion of privately-run charter schools in black communities. Their policies helped lead to the devastation of urban school districts and contributed to school re-segregation and the push-out of thousands of black and poor families from cities like Chicago.

Why media would turn to them for meaningful solutions to the problems they helped create is beyond me. But here we are.

Cunningham's Sun-Times commentary yesterday (To revive declining South and West Side neighborhoods, import people) was the most egregious. The headline says it all. Now that 300,000 African-Americans have been pushed out of Chicago over the past few decades, Cunningham sees their replacement with thousands of "new, middle-class people" as the city's salvation.

How unoriginal. I have referred to it as the whitenization of the cities. But it's deeper than that.

CUNNINGHAM QUOTES VITO...

Cunningham asks, just how do you attract the gentrifiers into formerly segregated, disinvested and isolated neighborhoods like Englewood? He turns to Godfather mobster character Vito Corleone for an answer. "Make them an offer they can't refuse."

So, what would it take to get 4,000 young middle-class families to move into these neighborhoods? The answer, or at least part of it, is affordable, high-quality housing. Sell the houses at cost.

If that’s too high, help cover the down-payment. Still no takers? Help pay their college debt or give them a 10-year property tax exemption, something Philadelphia has done.

Welp, where has that been? Why wasn't that offer made to the families who lived there before, the ones who built those neighborhoods and went to the now-closed neighborhood schools? The ones whose homes were foreclosed upon during the subprime crisis?

As for Duncan, who now runs Chicago CRED—a counseling and job placement service (not exactly what he was primed for by the Emerson Collective), he's cited as an expert on neighborhood gun violence in a Crain's column by Joe Warren. 

There, he carefully avoids any mention of gun control. Instead, Duncan appeals directly to his corporate pals, asking them to hire some gun offenders.

"My selfish interest is that the business community own this and see this as an economic problem, not a crime problem," Duncan says. "We have to hire our way out of this, not arrest our way out of this."

Yes, hire more and arrest less. But this doesn't even begin to deal with the enormous scope of the problem, as Mayor Lightfoot has pointed out in her recent jousting with Ted Cruz. 

But how do we stop the flow of guns and drugs into the city? What do we do about mass youth unemployment, disinvestment, and under-resourcing of public schools? The notion that the answer to Chicago's gun violence epidemic rests simply with more counseling and job placement is absurd on its face.

To quote the mayor:

“There’s a great need across this country for federal leadership in particular to step up and come forward with a real plan to deal with the gun violence that we’re seeing not only in cities like Chicago but really across the country.”

Duncan hasn't a clue.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Chris Christie and Rahm Emanuel share a laugh during a segment attacking Medicare for All on ABC's "This Week." 

MapLight reporter Andrew Perez

"Rahm says no one at a bunch of Michigan and Wisconsin diners told him to take their health care away which is probably somewhat true since who in a diner would start talking to him at all." -- Common Dreams

Lori Lightfoot to Ted Cruz

But don’t you dare lecture us with half-truths, cherry-picked statistics and debunked rhetoric designed to score political points with your base and your donors while you, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the other Republicans in charge of the Senate sit in dereliction of your duty day after day, shooting after shooting. -- Washington Post

Amanda Kass

 “I think highlighting that there are lots of police and fire pension systems that are underfunded is accurate,” said Amanda Kass, associate director of the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “I don’t think it’s accurate to indicate that the majority are on the brink of insolvency.” -- Sun-Times

Rich Miller

But President Donald Trump, who had problems everywhere in suburbia, only won McSweeney’s district by a mere 1.6 percentage points in 2016. And then Democratic Comptroller Susana Mendoza won it last year by 2 points. Trump isn’t doing much to improve his popularity in the suburbs, so 2020 could be even worse for Republicans in that part of the world. -- Capitol Fax

Tom McNamee, Sun-Times Editorial Page Editor

The last sentence of the editorial made the point. The words were mine, but the clarity of thought was all Marca’s: “When we fully understand, as a society, that school nurses are not ‘extras’ — because kids with disabilities are not ‘extras’ — we predict this chronic shortage of nurses will magically disappear.” -- Marca Bristo made us all listen...

As Democrats increasingly unite around solutions as big as the problems we face, the media still puts up panels featuring politicians with little relevance like Rahm Emanuel and Chris Christie solely to attack the progressive energy in our party. pic.twitter.com/oJmLQI4N7j

— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) September 8, 2019

Trump: “Who will pay for the Wall?”
Audience: “Mexico will pay for the Wall!!” “Mexico!!”#BrokenPromise

— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) September 6, 2019

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mayor Lori Lightfoot greets supporters Saturday ahead of the Southeast Side Labor Day parade.

Don Villar, Chicago Federation of Labor

"We're here today because of you, workers. You know, 125 years ago, not far from here, just down the road, is where we had the massive Pullman Strike. They were fighting for the same thing you’re fighting for. They’re fighting for fairness, equality, respect, dignity, the same thing, it seems like 125 years later we’re still fighting the same fight. So this is for you this Labor Day." -- At Southeast Side Labor Day March

Trump

...causes confusion by saying record storm will hit Alabama, forcing national weather service to issue correction. Trump says he has ‘never heard of a category 5’ storm before - a remark he has made repeatedly in recent years. -- Independent

Natascha Elena Uhlmann, author of Abolish Ice

The US spends more than $7bn a year on an agency so universally reviled that even its own agents want to be distanced. What could an alternative vision of justice look like? -- Guardian

Thoughts and prayers have done nothing to stop the epidemic of gun violence. Yes, this is fucked up; and if we don't call it out for what it is, we will continue to have this bloodshed in America. pic.twitter.com/Z4jgzpz6Ur

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 1, 2019

Prayers are good. They’ve helped me get through some very tough times. But we don’t elect people to Congress to pray in the face of a national crisis. We send them there to pass some damn legislation that can address the problem. Get off your asses and do your job! https://t.co/RAHJMRZK1u

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) September 1, 2019

Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx

— NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) September 1, 2019

Good riddance to the Charter School Commission

Acero teachers in Chicago won the first charter school strike in U.S. history last year. (Labor Notes pic)

Congratulations to all of us who worked so hard to finally get rid of the Illinois State Charter School Commission. We count our victories one by one.

A new law that goes into effect next year, will abolish the Commission and hopefully limit the wild expansion of privately-operated charter schools. That's the result of Senate Bill 1226, which Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law Aug. 23, over the objections of INCS and charter school lobbyists.  Gov. Rauner vetoed a similar bill last year.

The measure was sponsored by state Sen. Linda Holmes, an Aurora Democrat. Holmes made the case that decisions about charter schools, "belong in the community, not at the state level."

I agree. But even with the new law, we're not quite there yet.

Since 2011, when the Commision was established and signed into law by former Gov. Pat Quinn (yes a Democrat), I've worked with several struggling school districts around the state when they've  had to go before the Commission to plead their case. Together we built a research base which was used to debunk the false claims of the charter operators in an effort to stop invasions by powerful, charter school networks. In some cases we were successful and others we weren't.

I found the decisions by commission members to be be completely arbitrary and biased. Keep in mind that the commission was originally the dream of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and that the money for the commission’s original staffing and other expenses came from the pro-charter Walton Foundation. The Commission has been riddled with conflicts of interest from the start.

Commission members have been generally charter-friendly political appointees chosen by the governor and approved by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). In the eight years prior to Pritzker's election, commission members were handpicked by Rauner, a right-wing governor hellbent on starving and ultimately taking over local school systems, including CPS, using charters and school vouchers as weapons.

But Rauner wasn't the only problem. You might remember when the Commission, acting under pressure from House Speaker Mike Madigan, reversed CPS's rejection of Concept (Gulen) charter schools' application at a time when the FBI was investigating Concept's operations. Records show that the Commission’s Springfield lobbyist, Liz Brown-Reeves, a former Madigan aide, accompanied him on his Gulen sponsored trip to Turkey in 2012.

Earlier this year, the commission approved two Chicago schools: Urban Prep, which the district had ordered closed, and the new citywide school run by Intrinsic.

Currently, there are 140 charter schools in Illinois, 126 of which operate within Chicago Public Schools diverting money, students and teachers away from regular CPS schools. So far there is no evidence that these charters outperform the CPS schools they are trying to replace. In the CPS budget for next year, the district expects to receive $4 million less funding than expected from the state this past school year because “diversions to schools approved by the Illinois State Charter School Commission (SCSC) were higher than expected.”

There are still problems with the new bill. While effectively ending the Commission, the bill shifts its power to reverse local district decisions back over to ISBE, which is also a governor-appointed board.

According to Chalkbeat:

The state board will take over the responsibility of hearing appeals on charter school openings, closings and extensions. The state also will dole out funds it had collected to oversee the schools that the commission had approved. Once the state board takes over the commission’s role, the board will be able to levy a 3% fee on any state-approved charter school to help cover the cost of oversight.

But hopefully, local districts will fare better under the new law and under this governor than under the previous one.

In any case, the struggle continues.