A Gentleman’s view.

Media Gets It Wrong, Komen Didn’t Actually Reverse Decision About Planned Parenthood

A Painful Betrayal

With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women’s health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world’s largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America’s nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women’s health and freedom.

Auction 2012: How The Bank Lobby Owns Washington

When Washington puts policy on the auction block, bankers are consistently the highest bidders.

The industry’s most striking victory has been the watering down of post-financial crisis reforms, to the point that banks are now bigger than ever and the bonuses keep flowing. But Wall Street’s campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them.

Why hasn’t the government done something about outrageous ATM fees? Or credit card interest rates up to 30 percent? Bankers’ clout is such that common-sense pro-consumer legislation is presumptively dead on arrival at Capitol Hill if it threatens banks’ revenue streams.

An epic recent battle between consumers and Wall Street was fought over a congressional proposal to give bankruptcy judges the legal authority to modify principal balances on mortgages in a way that is fair to both parties. Known as “cramdown,” it would have allowed more than a million ordinary Americans to keep their homes. But because it would have leveled the playing field between banks and debtors — and would have forced banks to officially recognize losses they don’t want to acknowledge — the financial services industry fought cramdown with everything it had.

In May 2009, toward the end of his futile battle for cramdown, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) famously told a radio host, “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Consider the numbers: The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector combined to spend $6.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions from 1998 through 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ examination of public records. That’s $1 billion more than any other sector spent on Washington.

A recent study by the Sunlight Foundation found that individuals within the FIRE sector were head and shoulders above those in other industries in making large campaign contributions.

Big banks’ undisclosed contributions also underwrite powerful trade groups like the American Bankers Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

And more than half of the lobbyists working for the FIRE sector are ex-government officials — in many cases, onetime lawmakers and staffers who helped write laws that deregulated the industry. When in need, the banks can call on the firepower of former Senate leaders like Phil Gramm, Trent Lott and Bob Dole and former House leaders like Dennis Hastert, Dick Armey and Dick Gephardt.

CONSUMERS LOSE

Despite widespread public support, an attempt by Durbin and firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to cap interest rates on credit cards in 2009 was doomed by industry opposition.

Starting in February of that year, reports emerged that millions of cardholders were being told their interest rates would go up — in some cases to 30 percent — if they missed even one payment. Then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) concluded that lenders were “gouging” customers to make up for losses. Readers told The Huffington Post their stories of woe.

By April, the backlash on Capitol Hill led Sanders to propose an interest rate cap of 15 percent. “We both want to reinstitute the notion of a usury law for the United States,” Durbin told HuffPost’s Ryan Grim.

The New York Times in May declared the bill a shoo-in. “Lawmakers say the industry’s time has come,” wrote reporter Carl Hulse. And President Barack Obama’s rousing May 14 town hall meeting excoriating the credit card companies played well in Albuquerque, N.M.

But that very same day, the Sanders amendment died in the Senate with only 33 votes. It needed 60.

The Times somberly explained, “The banking industry, which had some heavyweight representatives monitoring the vote, warned that an interest rate limit could cause a sour reaction in the financial markets.”

A year later, in May 2010, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) introduced an amendment that would have allowed individual states to cap credit card interest rates. The goal was to close a federal loophole that permitted credit card companies to headquarter in states with looser rules, like South Dakota and Delaware, and charge whatever they wanted to charge nationwide.

That proposal was defeated by a 60-35 vote.

Also in May 2010, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) launched a campaign to cap ATM transaction fees. Noting that ATM fees average $2.50 and can run as high as $5 — while the real cost of processing a transaction is about 35 cents — Harkin proposed to cap fees at 50 cents. “The burden falls more heavily on low-income and moderate-income people,” he noted. “That is grossly unfair.”

Banks opposed the idea, arguing that capping fees would just lead to fewer cash machines, including those owned by banks.

Harkin couldn’t even get a floor vote. Two weeks after he first put forth his proposed amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, he took to the Senate floor and asked to be heard. It was his own party chief, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who denied his request — because the Republicans hadn’t agreed to it.

“What kind of games are being played around here?” Harkin asked the Senate chamber. “I’ve had this amendment pending ever since the beginning. And I have not been allowed to bring it up.”

BANKS GET THEIR WAY

So what explains the banks’ ability time and again to kill bills that threaten their bottom line?

Georgetown Law School professor Adam Levitin, who closely followed the cramdown debate, observes that banks push all the levers in Washington.

“They make an awful lot of campaign contributions,” said Levitin. That “would be number one. They aren’t making those just out of the goodness of their heart. They’re hoping that it gets them some influence. It certainly gets them an audience at the very least.”

Then there are the “army of lobbyists,” Levitin said. “I think it’s hard for your average citizen to understand the intensity of lobbying of both people on the Hill and in government agencies.”

Alongside the professional lobbyists come actual bankers — but not necessarily the Wall Street crowd, even though they have the most at stake. The financial industry brings in local bankers, often from the lawmakers’ own districts.

“The banks that really had the big portfolios were not the face of the opposition,” recalled Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who championed cramdown on the House side. “The [American Bankers Association] always sends up the owner of some three-branch community bank instead.”

“The community banks and credit unions have outsized political influence relative to their role in the economy,” Levitin explained. Members of Congress will always make time for them.

In March 2009, after the House Democratic leadership made a “herculean effort,” Miller said, the cramdown measure passed the lower chamber 234-191.

But in the Senate, thanks to ferocious bank lobbying — and a puzzling lack of support, if not outright opposition, from the Obama administration — it was defeated by a wide margin, with the bill falling 15 votes short of the 60 needed to cut off debate and move to a final vote.

After the vote, Durbin despaired to HuffPost reporter Grim, “Frankly, I can’t match what the bankers are doing in terms of lobbying.”

Meanwhile, David Kittle, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, gleefully told the American News Project, “We led the way on this, and we are clearly responsible for defeating this for the third time in the last year.”

Durbin told Grim he still held out some hope for the future: “When the voters speak, some elected officials listen. So I hope that, if we fail on mortgage foreclosure and we fail on credit card reform, I hope that people in this country will stand up and say to Congress, ‘You’ve got the wrong friends.’”

Dylan Ratigan

By Chauncey DeVega

1. Newt Gingrich puts Juan Williams “in his place” for daring to ask an unpleasant question during the South Carolina debate. This was the most pernicious example of old-school white racism at work in the 2012 Republican primary campaign. Newt Gingrich, a son of the South who grew up in the shadow of legendary Jim Crow racist Lester Maddox, is an expert on the language and practice of white racism (in both its subtle and obvious forms). He has ridden high with Republican audiences by suggesting that black people are lazy, and their children should be given mops and brooms in order to learn the value of hard work. With condescending pride, Gingrich has also stated that he would lecture the NAACP–one of America’s most storied civil rights organizations–that they ought to demand jobs and not food stamps from Barack Obama.

On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, under the Confederate flag, in the state of South Carolina, Gingrich defended his racist contempt for African Americans by putting Juan Williams, “that boy,” in his place. During the debate, Juan Williams had gotten uppity and was insufficiently deferential to Newt.

This dynamic was not lost on the almost exclusively white audience in attendance (nor on the white woman who congratulated Gingrich the following day for his “brave” deed). They howled with glee at the sight of a black man, one who dared to sass, being reminded of his rightful place at Newt’s knee. In another time, not too long ago, Juan Williams would have been driven out of town for such an offense, if he was lucky — the lynching tree awaited many black folks who did not submit to white authority.

The symbolism of Newt Gingrich’s hostility to black folks, on King’s birthday, and the personal contempt he demonstrated for Juan Williams, was a classic moment in contemporary Republican politics. This was the “scene of instruction,” when a black man was a proxy for a whole community, a stand-in for the country’s first black president, as Newt Gingrich showed just what he thinks about Barack Obama, specifically and about people of color, in general. In that moment, white conservatism’s contempt was palatable, undeniable and unapologetic.

2. Herman Cain, in one of the most grotesque performances in post-civil rights-era politics to date, deftly plays his designated role as an African-American advocate for some of the Tea Party and New Right’s most racist policy positions. Most notably, in numerous interviews Cain alluded to the Democratic Party as keeping African Americans on a “plantation,” and that black conservatives were “runaway slaves” who were uniquely positioned to “free” the minds of their brothers and sisters. The implication of his ahistorical and bizarre allusion to the Democratic Party and chattel slavery was clear: black Americans are stupid, childlike and incapable of making their own political decisions, as Cain publicly observed that “only thirty percent of black people are thinking for themselves.”

Doubling down, as a black conservative mascot for the fantasies of the Tea Party faithful, Herman Cain also suggested that anyone who accuses them of “racism” (ignoring all available evidence in support of this claim) were in fact anti-white, and the real racists.

Herman Cain’s disdain was not limited to the black public. He also argued that undocumented immigrants should be electrocuted at the U.S. border by security fences, and that Muslim Americans are inherently treasonous and should be excluded from government. Perhaps most troubling, Herman Cain advocated for extreme forms of racial profiling in which Muslims would have to carry special identification cards.

Racism and anti-black sentiment know no boundaries. Herman Cain demonstrates that some of its most deft practioners are (ironically) people of color.

3. Ron Paul argues that the landmark federal legislation that dismantled Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s was a moral evil and a violation of white people’s liberty. Ron Paul’s claim that the rights of black Americans are secondary to the “freedom” of whites to discriminate, is an almost perfect mirror for the logic of apartheid. Ron Paul’s white supremacist ethic is more than a dismissal of one of the crowning legislative achievements of the 20th century: it is the endorsement of a principle that conveniently allows white people to hate and discriminate in the public sphere at will–and without consequence–against people of color. This “freedom” is the living and bleeding heart of white racism.

4. Rick Santorum tells conservative voters that black people are parasites who live off hard-working white people. Santorum’s claim that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” is problematic in a number of ways. First, Santorum channels the white supremacist classic Birth of a Nation and its imagery of childlike free blacks who are a burden on white society. In addition, Santorum’s assumption that black people are a dependent class is skewed at its root. Why? Santorum presupposes that African Americans are uniquely pathological and lack self-sufficiency, ignores the black middle-class, and directly race-baits a white conservative audience by telling them that “the blacks” are coming for their money, jobs and resources. There is no mention of Red State America’s disproportionate dependence on public tax dollars, or how the (white) middle-class and the rich are subsidized by the federal government.

5. In keeping with the class warfare narrative, and as a way of proving their conservative bona fides, Republican candidates have crafted a strategy in which they repeatedly refer to the unemployed as lazy, unproductive citizens who would “be rich if they just went out and got a job.” In fact, as suggested by Mitt Romney, any discussion of the wealth and income gap in the United States (and the destruction of the middle class), should be done in a “quiet room,” as such truth-telling stokes mean-spirited resentment against the rich. Conservatives have an almost Orwellian gift for manipulating language. The financier class is reframed as “job creators.” Programs that workers pay for such as Social Security are equated with “welfare.” Americans who are victims of robber baron capitalism and structural unemployment are painted as dregs who want nothing more than to “live off of the system.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, unions are painted as bastions for the weak, the greedy, and those who hate capitalism.

Race is central here: Conservatives seeded this ground with their assault on the black poor. The invention of the welfare queen by Ronald Reagan became code for lazy, fat, black women who game the system at the expense of hard-working whites. The Right uses the same framing in order to attack immigrants as people who want to destroy the country and steal the scarce resources of “productive” white Americans.

Efforts to shrink “big government” are closely related to the Right’s observation that the federal government employs “too many” blacks. The Republican Party refined its Ayn Rand-inspired shock doctrine and disaster capitalism through decades of practice on black and brown Americans. The racist tactics that were once used to justify the evisceration of programs aimed at helping the urban poor are now being applied to white folks on Main Street USA during the Great Recession.

6. Mitt Romney wants to “keep America America.” The dropping of one letter from the Ku Klux Klan’s slogan, “Keep America American,” does not remove the intent behind Romney’s repeated use of such a virulently bigoted phrase. While Mitt Romney can claim ignorance of the slogan’s origins, he is intentionally channeling its energy. In the Age of Obama, the Republican Party is drunk on the tonic of nativism. From remarks about “the real America,” to supporting the mass deportation of Latinos and Hispanics, a hostility to any designated Other is central to the 21st-century know-nothing politics of the Tea Party-driven GOP. Romney’s slogan, “Keep America America” begs the obvious question: just who is American? Who gets to decide? And should there be moats and electric fences to keep the undesirables out of the country?

7. Rick Perry’s nostalgic memories of his family’s ranch, “Niggerhead.” You cannot choose your parents (or decide what your ancestors will christen the family retreat before your birth). You can, however, choose to rename the family ranch something other than the ugliest word in the English language.

The world that spawned and nurtured Rick Perry’s Niggerhead was none too kind to black people. Jim and Jane Crow were the rule of the land; it was enforced through violence, threats and intimidation. Moreover, Rick Perry grew up in a “sundown town.” These were communities from which blacks were banished by violence, and where white authorities made sure that African Americans would never again be allowed in the area. The whiteness of memory and nostalgia is blinding. While he has finally dropped out of the race, the Niggerhead episode is emblematic of Rick Perry’s obsession with states’ rights, and a broader fondness for the Confederacy and secession. These are traits he shares in abundance with the remaining Republican presidential candidates.

8. Former candidate Michele Bachmann suggests that the black family was stronger during slavery than in freedom. Her claim is not just a simple misunderstanding of history and the importance of family in the Black Experience. No, she is signaling to a tired, white supremacist, slavery-apologist narrative which opines that African Americans were/are not yet ready for freedom, and could only “flourish” under the benign guidance of the Southern Slaveocracy.

In a moment when states such as Arizona and Texas are outlawing ethnic studies programs, and when the Tea Party and its allies are leading an assault on educational programs that are not sufficiently “pro-American,” Bachmann’s claims are part of a broader effort to literally whitewash U.S. history.

When married to her belief in a willful lie that the framers of the United States Constitution were abolitionists who fought tirelessly to eliminate slavery (in reality, both Jefferson and Washington were slaveowners), and a defense of slaveholding Christian whites who “loved their slaves,” Bachmann’s ignorance of the facts transcends mere stupidity and slips over to enabling white supremacy.

9. The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates’ near-silence about how the Great Recession has destroyed the African American and Latino middle-class. This speaks volumes about just how selectively inclusive the Republican Party—which markets itself as the defender of the “American Dream” and of an “opportunity society”—really is. During the Ronald Reagan-Politico debate, the Republican candidates were asked what they would do to address the gross and disparate impact of the Great Recession on black and brown communities. While whites are suffering with an official unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, African Americans have struggled with a rate that is almost two to three times as high. In addition, the black and brown middle-class has seen its income, assets and wealth gutted by the Great Recession, where in 2011, whites have almost 20 times the average net worth of African Americans. As always, when White America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu…or worse.

In that awkward moment, only Rick Perry chimed in and proceeded to recycle the same tired rhetoric about “growing the economy” as a vague cure for all ills. One must ask: how would the Republican candidates have responded if the white middle-class had been devastated in the same manner, and to the same degree, as the black and brown middle-class? I would suggest that for the former, it would be treated as a crisis of epic proportions; for the latter, it is a mere curiosity and inconvenient fact.

Politics is about a sense of imagined community. The Ronald Reagan-Politico debate made clear that while the African American and Latino middle-class is being destroyed, the Republican Party has little concern or interest in remedying such a tragic event. It would seem that the Republican Party’s “big tent” has no room for “those people.”

10. The echo chamber that is Fox News, right-wing talk radio, the conservative blogosphere, and Republican elected officials daily stoke the politics of white racial resentment, bigotry and fear. Ultimately, the Republican candidates would not use racism as a weapon if it were not rewarded by their voters, and encouraged by the party’s leadership. An army travels on its stomach; it needs foot soldiers and shock troops to advance its aims. From the ugly, race-based conspiracy fantasies of Birtherism to the astroturf politics of the Tea Party to a news network whose guests routinely disparage Barack Obama with such labels as “ghetto crackhead” to the bloviating racist utterances by opinion leaders such as Rush Limbaugh, to the common bigotry on display at right-wing Web sites that use monkey, ape, gorilla, pimp, and watermelon imagery to depict the United States’ first black president and his family, it is clear that racism “works” for the Republican Party. To ignore the attraction of rank-and-file white conservatives to such ugliness is to overlook the driving force behind the Republican nominees’ behavior.

1. It’s not about racial justice and equal opportunity.

In fact, school choice often makes inequality worse. But because public schools have not solved the achievement gap between white and black children in America, proponents of school choice dishonestly take up the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement.

It isn’t that all aspects of school choice are objectionable to educators. Dennis van Roekel, president of America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), acknowledges that school choice can benefit underserved populations some of the time. He says magnet schools – that is, schools in poor neighborhoods that provide a range of diverse classes for students not usually offered in public schools – are a good model for school choice. Such schools draw students who are attracted, for example, to advanced arts or sciences programs. The extra funding ensures that magnet schools, located in poor areas, become a district’s best schools. Van Roekel sees this as a worthy innovation that furthers equity, and says the NEA supports it.

His organization also supports teacher-led schools that empower teachers to administer schools and tailor them to the needs of students. He even says that some charter schools – that is, independent public schools designed to fill a specific community’s needs and are less regulated that other public schools – are good ones. He thinks there is room in public education for some charter schools.

But he doesn’t think they’re a viable answer to inequality everywhere. He cites a 2009 Stanford study, which found that only 17% of charter schools provided better education than regular public schools. And that, he says, is not acceptable to the NEA because “it ought to be better than that. It needs to be 100 percent.”

He is not as open to school vouchers, which divert public money away from public schools and allot it to parents to assist with private school tuition. Ultimately, Van Roekel says, vouchers disproportionately serve the wealthy. Less funding for public schools is just not good for poor communities, which usually have to rely on the public system.

Karey Hardwood, an ethics professor at NC State University and public school advocate, is also concerned about how school choice affects poor children. She is an activist with Great Schools in Wake, an organization that formed in 2009 to oppose a school choice platform pushed by a newly elected right-wing school board in Wake County, North Carolina. The state chapter of the NAACP has also opposed school choice, arguing that it will lead to the re-segregation of schools in Raleigh, North Carolina and its surrounding suburbs.

Harwood asks: “When they talk about choice, whose choices are they referring to? Are the children of people who are savvy enough to get out of the public schools the only children who are worth educating in our society? What happens to the children who don’t get out? It seems the [people behind School Choice Week] knowingly embrace the idea of creating a second tier of schools for those American citizens who don’t or can’t ‘choose’ – and they are perfectly okay with a divided society of winners and losers.”

Carrie Rogers, a Wake County parent and former teacher who describes herself as a moderate Republican, agrees. She says school choice largely benefits well-educated middle and upper-middle class students. Rogers notes that she devoted 12 hours per week for six months to investigating her children’s options, and says that working class parents who work multiple jobs do not have that kind of free time on their hands. She adds that poor children, who most need access to excellent schools, will end up in the worst schools as a result. Ultimately, she says, “I think ‘school choice movement’ is a misnomer. I view it a movement based on prejudice, xenophobia and racism. The idea sounds good, and we all hate the idea of bussing our children [to outside communities to enforce Wake County’s former economic diversity policy]. But if you don’t want your child bussed, don’t break the entire system. We’ve allowed a very small group of vocal opponents to ruin our schools for everybody.”

Brian Jones is a New York City teacher and activist with the Grassroots Education Movement, an organization that supports progressive school policies. He says, “I think [racial and economic] segregation is the sinister subtext [of school choice]. Very wealthy benefactors are going into Harlem and promoting segregated schools as a solution. But the Civil Rights movement saw racial justice as bound up with economic justice. The school choice movement claims to be about racial justice, but distances itself from questions of economic justice. Under the banner of ‘school excellence,’ school choice advocates would like for us to forget about equity.”

John Wilson, former president of the NEA who now resides in Raleigh, says it is a “travesty that we are allowing our schools to be re-segregated” in the name of social justice. “If you really want to help poor children,” he insists, you have to desegregate your schools.” A native of the South who spends half of his time in North Carolina, Wilson says his background “absolutely informs” his perspective on school choice. When Southern schools were forced to integrate, he remembers, educators ultimately realized that integration was the best way to promote equity.” In other words, it brought home the lesson of Brown v. Board of Education – the groundbreaking 1954 Supreme Court decision mandating school integration on the basis that segregated “separate but equal” schooling always privileged white students and could never be equal in practice.

2. It’s not about making public education stronger

The school choice movement promotes the dismantling of public education at every turn.

Van Roekel says that, for school choice to benefit public education, it must prioritize the needs of students. The problem is that this rarely happens. Instead, school choice is too often a mechanism of privatizing education and defunding public schools. When funds are diverted away from public schools, they are not strengthened, but starved. Teachers end up with so many students per classroom that it is impossible to give every child the attention she needs. Van Roekel says attempts to profit on the back of public education are unacceptable.

Wilson tells AlterNet that he thinks School Choice Week’s primary aim is to promote vouchers at the expense of public education. He says, “Private schools undermine the public school system,” and adds that no evidence suggests they are better than public schools. School Choice Week, he says, is promoting the demise of public education under the guise “excellence.” In the end, he says, they are “doing a disservice to children.”

Judith Armfield, who retired from the Wake County Public School System in 2004 after 31 years in teaching, agrees. She opposes the privatization of education because she thinks diversity is an important aspect of learning. According to Armfield, private schools “encourage withdrawal from reality” such that “students…are not as well-prepared for success in a diverse world. My boys began their school experience in private school in [segregationist George Wallace’s] Alabama, but we realized that they were being sheltered and put them in public school classrooms” where they had access to better school curriculum and learned to coexist with people different from themselves.

Harwood is also concerned about the privatization trend, noting, “One of the most problematic aspects [of it] is the idea of ‘choice’ itself. What the [people behind School Choice Week] seem to be saying…is that, rather than strengthen a weakened public school system because we believe in public schools as the foundation of a democratic society, the solution is to abandon public schools altogether, let them deteriorate, and replace them with alternative private schools and charter schools that can claim they cater to every possible parental preference.”

Harwood has seen this happen firsthand in North Carolina, where wealthy conservatives like Art Pope and the Koch brothers are promoting the privatization of education as a way of shoring up profits for themselves and other large corporations. She says applying this business model to education results in a system that “pits schools against each other in a competitive market…, [and] that’s really not the best way to go about improving school quality. In fact, it’s very counterproductive.” Rogers agrees, saying it creates a system in which “there has to be a school that’s the worst school in the country. We have decided [under the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act], that, if you’re the worst school in the country, we will shut you down. We’re not looking at whether that school is working” within the confines of limitations like large class size or high homeless rates.

Jones tells AlterNet that the same kinds of corporate interests that promote school choice in North Carolina are at work in New York City. He says, “We have a lot of Wall Street Money involved. We recently learned that Goldman Sachs was backing [one prominent charter school in New York City]. Wall Street bankers and hedge fund executives run that school. They seem to believe that you don’t need to know anything about education in order to run schools.” And this is the sort of hubris, Van Roekel and Wilson say, that is unlikely to benefit students.

3. It’s not about supporting teachers.

School choice often results in a punitive atmosphere for teachers. Why? Well, parents choose schools for their children at least partly on the basis of high-stakes standardized test scores. And the quality of teachers is usually reduced to a zero-sum question about how well a school’s students score on standardized tests. As a result, teachers are blamed when students score poorly on standardized tests, and advocates for school choice use the numbers – and the bogeyman of bad teachers – to advance their cause.

Radical right-wing bigwigs like Rush Limbaugh have also contributed to the demonization of teachers, casting them as “socialists” working to “indoctrinate” students. And though the scapegoating of teachers gets particularly ugly on the far right, anger at teachers is not reduced to the fringe elements of the conservative movement. For example, Jones notes that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says that up to half of the city’s school teachers may be so incompetent they have to be replaced.

But why teachers? Wilson thinks the school choice movement is particularly hostile to teachers because the NEA is a strong opponent of school vouchers. Jones agrees, telling AlterNet he sees the proliferation of non-union charter schools in New York City as a tool to punish public school teachers. Why? Well, precisely because charter schools are usually non-union schools. In New York, he says, non-union charter schools are promoted because they act as “a significant wedge against the teachers’ union.” He says the rise in numbers of non-union teachers leads to the union being pitted against workers who have fewer bargaining rights and worker protections. And it becomes harder for teachers to organize effectively against vouchers.

Rogers agrees that the impetus behind the school choice movement’s call for teacher accountability is to punish teachers, not make them better. She notes, “teacher accountability is [a way of scapegoating teachers in spite of the fact that] problems in education are usually systemic – and not the fault of individual teachers. It hurts morale,” she says, and is counterproductive given that low morale is rarely conducive to outstanding job performance. “When people say teachers are overpaid or should be fired,” she says, “I just don’t believe that… If a school is doing really badly, it’s not because the teachers, administrators and support staff have all gotten together and said, ‘Who cares?’ Educators do try to make it work. We become educators because we are committed to the personal and academic growth of our students.”

Rather than blaming teachers, my sources all suggest that systemic factors like poverty and class size need to be taken into account in assessing school performance. Rogers thinks high teacher-to-student ratio is a major reason why some schools perform poorly, and Jones agrees. He adds, “When you have growing numbers of homeless students, increasing economic inequality and waves of budget cuts year after year,” it is unrealistic to blame failure on the teachers. “It’s nonsensical that they would promote this demand for excellence” even though they have presided over the depletion of public school resources. At the end of the day, teacher accountability is usually bound up with the push for privatization, and it rarely improves teacher performance.

4. It’s not about giving parents what they want.

To the contrary, many of my sources point out, school choice seduces parents by making hollow promises they think will resonate with parents. Jones says many parents are drawn to the idea of school choice – and the accompanying promotion of private education – at first. Plus, the inflammatory rhetoric that school choice advocates use against teachers helps the school choice movement divide and conquer teachers and parents. In other words, it pits parents and teachers against one another, and as a result, the quality of public education suffers.

At first, Jones says, “Historically underserved groups may see it as a solution to inequality. I can understand why some parents buy into it at first. If you feel like your child’s education has been neglected or if you’re a member of a group that has historically been underserved, you feel like finally someone is paying attention. But, in fact, school choice often disempowers parents.” It restricts their level of involvement, for example, in Parent/Teacher Associations. They are afforded less influence over school policy. A bit ironically, then, school “choice” may actually result in less choice for parents.

Jones says, “What we’ve seen over and over again is that many of the parents [who initially pushed for school choice] will switch to our side after they experience it. They realize that school choice does not promote equality or benefit them. Not to mention, what happens when parents have no good choices available?” In any case, he says, “as school choice plays out, parents begin to see that it crushes genuine learning. For example, it reduces literature to a main idea and education to a chore [that is organized around high-stakes standardized multiple choice tests]. The real lesson is that school is not a place where you investigate your own questions, but where you learn to answer someone else’s questions the way they want you to answer them. It makes education a chore rather than a joy.”

Rogers sees may parents becoming disillusioned with school choice in the Raleigh area as well. She says many parents are overwhelmed with complicated school application forms and the imperative to choose the best schools for their children. They must also make ample time to visit schools holding open houses where teachers and administrators and charged with “selling” their schools. Sometimes, she says, the parents who get burnt out are the very same people who welcomed school choice at the beginning. In practice, she says, they find the process taxing and stressful, recognizing that they may be unqualified to determine which school is best for a specific child.

Jones thinks that the alienation of parents and teachers means that school choice advocates are “in danger of creating a very strong alliance of teachers and parents to challenge their agenda.” Jones says one example of this is New York City Public School Parents, an organization through which parents advocate for more parental involvement in schools by way of strengthening public education. Organizations like this facilitate cooperation between parents and teachers, who often begin to side with teachers’ unions opposing vouchers. When that happens, it’s a significant boon to public education.

5. It’s not a bipartisan, secular movement.

School choice is a deeply partisan fight, and one which many – but not all – private church schools have taken up. Don’t get me wrong. This myth, like any successful political narrative, is at least partly true. Moderate conservatives and a range of liberals often lend their support, obscuring the rightwing ideology behind the movement.

So, yes, choice does have a modicum of bipartisan support across party lines. Rogers notes, “I know several parents who are very liberal and

who are pro-school choice… As someone who is kind of hard to pin down politically, I shy away from putting a political label on this, but I know it isn’t only about the Tea Party. There are a lot of very liberal people out there who are in favor of school choice.”

Rogers believes this is due, at least in Wake County, to the pervasiveness of racism across party lines. She stresses that “Republicans are not the only racists. Of course liberals are theoretically less likely to embrace school choice and support public initiatives in education, but then they often get down to it, and go, ‘oh wait, we have to send our kids to schools with the black kids or the poor kids?’” She says she knows many liberals who fail to live up to their high-minded ideals when it comes to school choice.

Though she argues that this is largely motivated by racism, Rogers thinks that some parents – on both the right and left – may not understand that the consequences of school choice – and that includes negative consequences like re-segregation and greater inequality. She says, “Parenthood gives you a very narrow focus… We want to protect our children. If we feel that a school is not doing what it needs to do, we’ll fight to send our children to another one. These parents sometimes don’t realize that what they’re advocating is not fair to everybody.”

Because of this, school choice maintains enough bipartisan support to appeal believably to bipartisanship. Jones points out that President Obama has consistently supported school choice despite a campaign platform that involved overturning No Child Left Behind. In fact, he says, “Obama applauded the mass firing of teachers in a poor school district in Rhode Island that was deemed a failure. And he supports the proliferation of charter schools” that has so negatively affected teachers unions’ in places like New York.

This is because school choice is, at its heart, about the kind of “bootstraps” ideology in which some people win and some lose, as Harwood pointed out. School Choice Week is backed by many private schools associated with the Christian Right, which have an interest in steering children away from public schools that they believe will “indoctrinate” their children with liberal ideology, tolerance for LGBT people, and instruction that recognizes evolution as a viable scientific concept. Because Fox News caters to this audience, coverage of school choice is most prominent there. As a result, religious institutions often favor vouchers as a way of promoting their own political agenda.

Perhaps even more significant are the corporate sponsors of School Choice Week. Morna McDermott of the Baltimore Education Reform Examiner writes that corporate backers, perhaps more than private schools, are interested in the complete dismantling of education. She says “corporate-led [conservative] reformers must have gotten wind that there were billions of dollars to be made by funneling federal dollars through these schools” because they “have since taken the lead to legislate policies to their benefit.” And, she points out, most of the organizations affiliated with School Choice Week “have direct connections with, or strong ties to, a right-wing agenda to privatize many American institutions including education.”

The most powerful, she says, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which brags of helping introduce more than one thousand pieces of school choice-related legislation to legislators every year. She explains, “ALEC describes itself as a ‘unique,’ ‘unparalleled’ and ‘unmatched’ organization,” and adds, “Their largest contributing members include the tobacco industry and big oil.”

But ALEC isn’t the only right-wing supporter of School Choice Week. Conservative organizations like the Goldwater Institute, New Jersey Tea Party Caucus, Heritage Foundation, Alliance for School Choice, Friedman Foundation, Heartland Institute, Reason Institute, and many other right-wing groups are also behind this week’s school choice celebrations. Despite some liberal support, its primary backers are deeply conservative activists whose goal is to dissolve public education in the United States. That’s why school choice bipartisanship is a myth – that is, its advocates use their few liberal supporters to obscure the real political base.

It is crucial to debunk these kinds of myths because, as Harwood says, “School choice is not the panacea that [its supporters are] making it out to be. There is plenty of room for creativity and innovation within public schools. There should be plenty of motivation to strive for excellence. To rely always on this free market ideology as the solution to problems in the public schools [signals] a very limited way of thinking. When students are healthy and well-fed and schools are well-resourced, the results in American schools are excellent. Poverty and extreme social inequality are the real” barriers to adequate education. And as all of my sources confirm, school choice is an unsuitable one-size-fits-all solution that often marginalizes poor children and children of color rather than fixing their schools.

Public education itself is not the lost cause that advocates of School Choice Week would have you believe. The effects of inequality undoubtedly undermine the progress many marginalized students, but this does not require that we do away entirely with public schools. A woman from an Eastern European immigrant family recently told me that, until recently, she thought the United States had largely figured out how to do education well. But causes like school choice now undermine progress our education system has achieved, and that is why its propaganda has to be disputed.

Will Jean-Claude Duvalier Ever Stand Trial for His Crimes Against Haiti? By Fran Quigley

Judging Duvalier has become an opportunity to send a message, but prosecuting old crimes in a neglected justice system has its challenges.

Myrtha Jean-Baptiste was thirteen years old the first time that Jean-Claude Duvalier’s army arrested her. In August, 1979, a special intelligence unit based out of the Casernes Dessalines barracks on the grounds of Haiti’s Presidential Palace burst into Jean-Baptiste’s family home in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood and seized her, along with her mother, sister, three brothers, and a brother-in-law.

The family crime was membership in the Haitian Christian Democrat Party which opposed Duvalier. Jean-Baptiste was interrogated and released, but the rest of her family stayed behind bars. Her brothers were held for over two years without ever going to court, and were beaten and tortured by army jailers until the young men bled from their ears. “When they came back, their bodies were broken,” Jean-Baptiste says. The brothers died within a few months after their release from prison. Jean-Baptiste herself was arrested again at age 15 and brought to the National Penitentiary, where she was held—also without trial—for one year and 21 days.

Stories like Jean-Baptiste’s were common in Haiti during Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s presidency from 1971 to 1986. After assuming control of the country at age 19 after the death of his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the son followed in a bloody family tradition.  The Haitian military and the notorious paramilitary tonton macoutes created by the senior Duvalier squelched dissent by jailing, torturing, and killing hundreds of political opponents and journalists. Investigations by groups including Human Rights Watch show Jean-Claude Duvalier was fully aware of and supported the abuses committed under his command.

Newspapers and radio stations that dared to criticize the Duvalier government were shut down, and millions of dollars in government funds were diverted to Duvalier’s personal use. At one point in 1982, Duvalier’s own finance minister reported that $15 million per month in public funds was being directed to “extraordinary expenses,” including deposits to Duvalier’s personal Swiss bank account.  The finance minister was quickly fired, but increasing public outcry finally led to Duvalier fleeing into exile in 1986.

Twenty five years later, Myrtha Jean-Baptiste sits in the office of a human rights organization in Port-au-Prince recounting her memories from the era. Now a woman of 45, she has high cheekbones and wears a white lace blouse, but she is unsmiling and declines to be photographed. Her story gained renewed relevance on January 16, 2011, when Duvalier suddenly returned to Haiti. Although he has been charged with political and financial crimes and is periodically called in for questioning by an investigating judge, Duvalier enjoys a remarkably liberal definition of house arrest, meeting with political leaders and moving about the more expensive restaurants and clubs of Port-au-Prince. Jean-Baptiste is among many Duvalier-era victims who were stunned to learn that the former “President for Life” had dared to return to Haiti, and even more shocked to see that he remains a free man, with no trial set. “There is only one way to stop him,” she says in Creole. “Jije li.”

Judge him.

That is precisely the aim of the Haitian human rights organization Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, known as BAI. Along with its U.S.-based partner, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, BAI represents Jean-Baptiste and a group of other Duvalier-era victims who call themselves the Citizens Coalition for Prosecuting Duvalier. Employing the partie civile mechanism in the Haitian justice system, which allows crime victims to actively participate in the prosecution of an alleged criminal, the lawyers have filed several individual claims on behalf of Duvalier’s victims, and provided the investigating judge with piles of evidence of financial and political crimes.  “A Duvalier process and trial would mean so much for Haiti,” says attorney Mario Joseph, director of BAI. “It will help people believe in the system of justice if they see a defendant held accountable who stole our country’s money and killed and imprisoned people.”

Yet many within Haiti and in the international community believe Jean-Claude Duvalier will never be put on trial. Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, elected in April of 2011, is on record supporting amnesty for Duvalier and has several former “Duvalierists” in his administration and circle of aides, including the former president’s 28-year-old son, Francois Nicolas Duvalier. Most Haitians alive today are too young to remember much about the Duvalier era, and some even look back nostalgically at a time when the desperately poor country may have seemed a little less poor. In a few spots around Port-au-Prince, one can see graffiti spray-painted on concrete walls: “JC Duvalier. Nou tann pou ou”—we are waiting for you. The message is one of welcome, not vengeance.

If not quite as welcoming, the Obama administration’s reaction to Duvalier’s return to Haiti contains no note of disapproval, despite the U.S. record of vigorous support for prosecution of human rights violators from Slobodan Milosevic to Saddam Hussein. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have called on Haiti to prosecute Duvalier, the U.S., which provided significant financial support to Duvalier during the Cold War, has remained silent. When Duvalier returned to Haiti, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley said “As to his [Duvalier's] status in the country and what happens, this is a matter for the government of Haiti and the people of Haiti.”

One Capitol Hill official who agrees with the State Department stance defends the U.S. position. “People in Haiti need food, they need clean water, they need houses to live in,” the official said. “The new President needs a chance to succeed and our support in doing so. Wouldn’t you rather put U.S. pressure and resources into those essentials rather than a very difficult and complicated prosecution of someone who has not been in power for a quarter century?”

Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says this view is short-sighted. “If you look at the long term, Haiti is never going to become a successful and prosperous country until we have the kind of accountability that the Duvalier trial would allow us to have.” Concannon says. “It is accountability for political violence crimes, and perhaps even more important, it is accountability for stealing the Haitian people’s money. And if the lesson is that Duvalier, who did not even try to hide how he stole government funds, is allowed to be going around to the fancy restaurants and clubs in Petionville (the wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince where Duvalier now lives), that is a lesson to current officials that there are no consequences to stealing money.”

Human Rights Watch’s Reed Brody acknowledges the difficulty in prosecuting crimes that occurred decades ago, especially when that prosecution would be brought in a Haitian justice system weakened by neglect, underfunding, and the 2010 earthquake that destroyed so much infrastructure. But a Duvalier prosecution can be done, Brody insists, pointing to a previous Haiti prosecution also spurred by the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux that established a precedent for a leader to be held accountable for human rights abuses committed by others under his command. Plus, Brody says, there is plenty of international precedent for bringing a country leader to justice many years after the repression and corruption occurred. “Countries from Argentina to Uruguay to Bangladesh to Cambodia are prosecuting human rights crimes from decades ago,” he says. “There is no reason why Haiti cannot do the same.”

Raymond Davius hopes that is true. A broad-shouldered 55 year-old with a round face and receding gray hair, he leans out of his chair to mimic his hands being tied behind his ankles and a stick pushed between his legs and arms so that he is drawn into a ball, the preferred position for Duvalier’s army when they would beat him with a baton gayak, a two-foot long rod.  A former Haitian army officer, Davius left the forces in 1978 to join the same Christian Democrat party to which Myrtha Jean-Baptiste’s family belonged. He was seized by government officials soon after, the first in a series of arrests that would total seventeen in all, including imprisonment in the notorious Casernes Dessalines barracks and National Penitentiary. Davius was eventually able to escape to asylum in Venezuela. Now, he has some scars on his head from the beatings, but the deepest wounds are harder to see. “The effects of this are inside me all the time,” he says. The large man’s eyes fill as he talks about family and job troubles. “My comportment is not normal compared to other people, and I have problems in my life. People think I am crazy.”

He pauses to collect himself. “The problem is not as much about Duvalier himself as it is what he represents. If Haiti does not judge Duvalier, we have lost the opportunity to send a message to Haitian leaders who think they can kill whoever they want and steal whatever they want, and not be judged.

“We have a proverb in Creole: Si pa gen sitire pa ka gen vole.”

Translation: If there is no tolerance there would be no thieves.

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