Billionaires v teachers: the Koch brothers' plan to starve public education
Arizona has become the hotbed for an experiment rightwing activists hope will redefine America’s schools – an experiment that has pitched the conservative billionaires the Koch brothers and Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary, Betsy DeVos, against teachers’ unions, teachers and parents. Neither side is giving up without a fight. With groups funded by the Koch brothers and DeVos nudging things along, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s broadest school vouchers law, state-funded vouchers that are supposed to give parents more school choice and can be spent on private or religiously affiliated schools.
Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do
Sometimes a simple story is all it takes to capture complex issues, or so it seems. Take this one. A few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter.
Stories from American Experience
In November of 1924, two women pose for a picture outside the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Mother and daughter, they were separated some dozen years before, when municipal authorities decided that Emma Buck couldn’t provide adequate care for her little girl, Carrie, no more than six at the time. Despite the years apart, their relationship seems affectionate.
Trump participated in ‘dubious’ tax schemes in the 1990s, explosive NYT report says
NEW YORK — The New York Times reported Tuesday that President Donald Trump received at least $413 million from his father over the decades, much of that through dubious tax dodges, including outright fraud. The 15,000-word Times report contradicts Trump’s portrayal of himself as a self-made billionaire who started with just a $1 million loan from his father. The Times says Trump and his father, Fred, avoided gift and inheritance taxes by setting up a sham corporation and undervaluing assets to tax authorities. The Times says its report is based on more than 100,000 pages of financial documents, including confidential tax returns from the father and his companies. A lawyer for Trump, Charles J.
Across the West powerful firms are becoming even more powerful - Competition
ONE BRIGHT morning earlier this year your correspondent travelled from New York to the University of Chicago to attend a conference on the threat to prosperity posed by monopolies. The journey began with an alarm beeping on a handset made by Apple (which has a 62% market share in America), then a bumpy taxi ride to the airport paid for using a piece of plastic issued by one of the three firms, American Express, MasterCard and Visa, that control 95% of the credit-card market. In the terminal, breakfast was scoffed from a supersized fast-food chain, while emails were checked using Google, which has 60% of the browser market. The mobile signal was transmitted on one of the three networks that control 78% of the telecoms market. The flight was with one of the four airlines that control 69% of journeys within America. Get our daily newsletter
The policing of black Americans is racial harassment funded by the state
The rap group Public Enemy famously stated that “911 is a joke”. But that was in 1990. These days 911 is dead serious.
Nearly half of tenants who make complaint face 'revenge eviction'
Nearly half of all tenants who make a formal complaint about their housing suffer a “revenge eviction” by private landlords, according to research by Citizens Advice. It estimated that 141,000 tenants have been subject to “complain and you’re out” evictions since 2015. The evictions are possible because section 21 notices under the 1988 Housing Act allow landlords to force out tenants on a no-fault basis. Citizens Advice found that tenants who had received a section 21 notice were twice as likely to have complained to their landlord – and eight times more likely to have complained to an official redress scheme. Gillian Guy, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “The chance of a family being evicted from their home for complaining about a problem shouldn’t carry the same odds as the toss of a coin. “There are serious question marks over the existence of a power that allows landlords to unilaterally evict tenants without reason.”
The Dominican Republic Erased Birthright Citizenship
The Dominican Republic also has a long, brutal history of anti-Haitian racism. During his rule from 1930 to 1961, the fascist dictator Rafael Trujillo built a racialized concept of Dominican national identity on the fuzzy idea that the descendants of Spanish slavery on the eastern part of the island had higher levels of European ancestry than, and thus were superior to, the descendants of French slavery on the western part of the island. This rhetoric led to a 1937 rampage in which Dominican soldiers and allied citizens massacred thousands of people who they identified as Haitians. They forcibly separated people who’d long mixed together in vaguely delineated borderlands, consecrating a new national boundary that had been set largely by the occupying U.S. military a few years earlier, but which until then existed mostly on paper. Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship
