Back before the Illinois Supreme Court had yet to confirm our contractual and constitutional right to our retirement pension – and the state public employee union leaders backed a Democratic Party plan to cut our cost of living benefit (COLA) – I drew what I knew what Santa would say.
Happy holidays.
My blog postings will be on an irregular schedule for a couple of weeks.
Anne and I are going to spend the holidays with our children and grandchildren.
Sunday evening we will celebrate what I call fishmas.
A few years ago our family adopted and adapted the Italian-American tradition of The Feast of the Seven Fishes celebrated on Christmas eve. We will have the dinner on the night of the 25th and it may or may not have seven fish courses.
So, that is the adapted part.
Last year I made a scallop ceviche. This year I am preparing a shrimp and roasted corn chowder.
I love my daughter-in-law Candy’s Clams Casino. Nothing isn’t better with bacon.
I love our family traditions.
So it pains – no, angers – me to hear Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin talking up a new nuclear arms race.
They directly threaten the future of all grandchildren. It is a threat to the very existence of our planet in way that exceeds any others. As a kid I grew up with all that. I don’t want that for my grandchildren. I don’t want it for anyone’s grandchildren.
We have to stop it.
Of all that Donald Trump has done and said, nothing angers me more than this latest threat.
Plus, the world is a different place since the United States and the old Soviet Union had a monopoly on nuclear tactical and strategic weapons.
An expanded nuclear arsenal is not just a choice for Trump and Putin anymore. Others can choose to join in.
And they will if this isn’t stopped.
President Obama has some responsibility for this. He may have talked the talk of nuclear reduction, but he walked the walk of expanded nuclear weapons capability.
Still, the new figures and private analysis underscored the striking gap between Mr. Obama’s soaring vision of a world without nuclear arms, which he laid out during the first months of his presidency, and the tough geopolitical and bureaucratic realities of actually getting rid of those weapons.
The lack of recent progress in both arms control and warhead dismantlement also seems to coincide with the administration’s push for sweeping nuclear modernizations that include improved weapons, bombers, missiles and submarines. Those upgrades are estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over the next three decades.
There are those who try to downplay the Trump tweet with one excuse or another.
I don’t want to hear that.
The world doesn’t need or want the Russians or the United States engaging in nuclear warfare modernization costing trillions of dollars and threatening our grandchildren’s future.
Peace.
Rahm’s email dump can be found here. You can search by subject. For example, put Rauner in the search box.
Former Exelon CEO John Rowe to Emanuel on public school reform efforts.
Rahm introduces donor to Noble charter.
Alderman Joe Moore complains opposition to charters is “getting ugly” in the 49th.
Testing CPS teachers.
The wine club.
Rahm wears a white hat on charter schools.
A good friend of mine worked for the City of Chicago for 30 years and retired a few years ago. He now must pay over $30,000 a year for health insurance for his family because the Mayor cut off his pension health care benefit.
In one of the private emails that Rahm Emanuel was forced to release as a result of a Better Government Association law suit, the Mayor gloats about the pain he is visiting on thousands of Chicago public employees.
On Dec. 31, Mayor Rahm Emanuel will complete a 3-year phaseout of the city’s retiree health care program, including a 55 percent subsidy.
10,000 city employees who started working for the city before April 1, 1986, and do not qualify for Medicare will have to search for coverage that will be difficult to find or too expensive.
Like my friend, the retired city workers will have choose between crazy expensive premiums that are double their retirement checks or go without health insurance coverage at a time of declining health and old age.
“We have people who are 75 years old who worked for the city for 30 years and more and none of them qualified for Medicare coverage. They’re being dumped into an abyss,” said Clint Krislov, lawyer for the retirees.
But the Mayor gloats. Nobody has screwed public employees like he has.
He is king of the world.
Good morning.
We have just finished the longest night of the year.
There is a story on the Better Government Association site about how the CPS board of education is blocking the Inspector General’s investigation into kickbacks involving Forest Claypool, CPS attorney Ronald Marmer and the high-powered law firm of Jenner & Block.
This problem is pervasive, and it needs to be addressed.
In 2013, members of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus and other aldermen attempted to do just that. The caucus introduced a series of municipal code revisions attempting to clarify and strengthen the OIG’s role. Some were ultimately adopted, but many were left to wither and die in the Council’s Rules Committee. Among them was a proposal that would permit independent subpoena enforcement, as well as an ordinance that would address attorney-client privilege as it relates to the OIG’s work.
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Charter shill Peter Cunningham was not happy with my post yesterday.
@GetUpStandUp2@fklonsky Did you notice how I stood up for unions in that debate? Or maybe your hearing aid wasn’t working? Oh well.
— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) December 20, 2016
The truth is I didn’t notice, but it was no fault of my hearing loss.
It was because it didn’t happen. As Cunningham himself admits in a followup tweet.
@fklonsky I did defend it. I don’t require it. But, of course, nothing I say would satisfy you.
— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) December 20, 2016
As someone who worked in a senior position at Arne Duncan’s Department of Education for years Cunningham knows full well that what he calls a defense of unions (Look Peter, it’s either a “union shop” or it’s not) is a Right to Work position.
If union membership is “not required” either the teacher is receiving the benefits of a bargained contract without paying their share for representation, or they are working outside the collective bargaining agreement, which undermines the union.
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Forbes reports that seniors are finding their Social Security checks garnished for unpaid student loans, leaving those over 65 in poverty.
As of September 2015, 114,000 Americans who were 50 and older had their Social Security benefits reduced to offset defaulted student loans, according to the report. Since 2002, that figure has increased by 440%.
Typically, a borrower 50 and older had about $140 in Social Security income taken out each month. However, it is important to note that those whose checks were garnished are in default—meaning they haven’t made a payment on their student loans in at least a year, according to the GAO.Although the government has the ability to garnish Social Security checks (up to 15% of an individual’s benefits—a figure that hasn’t been adjusted for current living costs), some congressional Democrats—like Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—believe the government’s tactics to do so have become too aggressive, setting its sites on those who will never be able to repay
Betsy DeVos.
It is odd the way corporate school reformers obsess about the tone of conversations.
I know that I have been known to raise my voice now and then. But that has more to do with the fact that I frequently forget to put in my hearing aids and I talk louder when that happens.
There are things I am passionate about, however. I am for preserving public education, which many of us consider a basic component of a democratic society.
Defending and expanding democracy seems more important than ever these days.
There is this debate between the corporate reform Fordham Foundation’s Robert Pondisco and former Arne Duncan advisor Peter Cunningham. It’s appears in Education Next, a website that promotes privatization and is run by the usual corporate reform suspects like Frederick Hess, Michael Petrilli, and Chester Finn.
Peter Cunningham runs a site of his own, funded with more corporate money (there seems to be an endless supply), that supports charters and “choice.” Cunningham’s shtick is to decry loud voices when neighborhood schools get shuttered. Can’t we all just get along?
And so in the Education Next debate, he criticizes Pondisco for pitting charters against vouchers.
Given President-elect Trump’s stated desire to radically expand school choice, a robust debate about charters and vouchers is needed and welcome, but let’s begin by remembering that movements grow through addition, not division. Manufacturing a battle between charter and voucher supporters doesn’t help the school choice movement or kids.
With Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, neighborhood public schools aren’t even in the equation. Why get into a fight over charters versus vouchers? We can have it all! Don’t manufacture a debate between vouchers and charters, whispers Cunningham, when the real target is the neighborhood public school.
Neighborhood schools are what the right-wingers like to call government schools. Y’know. Like government cops and government roads and government health care (which the rest of the industrialized world seems to enjoy, but not us).
Another corporate reform heavyweight, Frederick Hess of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, is also outraged at those loud voices that oppose the Betsy DeVos pick to be Education Secretary.
To appreciate fully the tenor of the response to DeVos, one should know that the national education debate usually proceeds with a modicum of civility. A year ago, when President Obama nominated former New York commissioner of education John King to be secretary of education, King was greeted courteously and approved rapidly by the Republican Senate — despite King’s troubled tenure in New York, one that featured a disastrous rollout of the Common Core. In fact, King’s warm reception followed seven years of troubling activity at the Obama Department of Education itself
.It’s worth recalling, also, the greeting how Arne Duncan, Obama’s first secretary of education, was greeted when nominated in 2008. Duncan, who had never taught, had served for seven years as superintendent of schools in Chicago — where he presided over some of the nation’s highest-paid teachers, mediocre student outcomes, and a massively underfunded pension fund. As a basketball-playing buddy of Obama’s, Duncan could have been attacked as nothing more than a Chicago crony. Instead, the response to Duncan was glowing. In the New York Times, reporter Sam Dillon wrote: “Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools superintendent known for taking tough steps to improve schools while maintaining respectful relations with teachers and their unions, is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as secretary of education.” The Wall Street Journal’s Collin Levy termed Duncan “the CEO of the Chicago public schools and the ultimate diplomat.” Levy wrote: “Fans also note that he helped raise the cap on charter schools to 30 from 15. . . . He’s known for a flexibility that allows him to float between the traditional Democratic strongholds and the new wave of reformers in the party.”
A revisionist history if there ever was one.
The reaction to the Duncan and King choices by Obama for Education Secretary may have been smiles from the New York Times, but not from those of us who fight for democratic control of public schools.
Education progressives battled Duncan and King for eight years.
In fact, it was Frederick Hess and the AEI that were in love with Arne Duncan.
Back in 2010, Hess and Petrilli penned a love letter to Arne Duncan.
Duncan’s was a speech unlike any we have heard from a U.S. Secretary of Education-Republican or Democrat. He said resources are limited, embraced the need to make tough choices, urged states and districts to contemplate boosting some class sizes and consolidating schools, and didn’t spend much time trying to throw bones to the status quo.
Duncan called for wide-ranging reforms in the name of cost-effectiveness. He said, “The legacy of the factory model of schooling is that tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school finance systems.” He rightly argued that schooling had to abandon the notion that reform is always bought and paid for with new dollars and argued that it’s essential to think of technology as a “force multiplier” rather than a pleasing add-on. His to-do list was comprehensive and spot on. He said, “Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.”
In one speech, this (Democratic) Secretary of Education came out swinging against last hired, first fired, seniority-based pay raises, smaller class sizes, seat time, pay bonuses for master’s degrees, and over-bloated special education budgets. Which means he declared war on the teachers unions, parents groups, education schools, and special education lobby. Not a bad day’s work!
To be sure, Duncan has control over almost none of this. Still, this is classic bully-pulpit stuff, and we expect it will resonate big-time in state capitols all over the country. When the unions start busing in kids, parents, and teachers to rally against increases in class size or pay freezes, expect a lot of Republican governors to start quoting their good friend Arne Duncan.
So I am saying that Peter Cunningham and the rest of them notwithstanding this is no time to lower our voices.
Yell louder.
