Stephan: Betsy DeVos was appointed by Trump, and confirmed by a Republican senate with the explicit intention that she work to dismantle public education in the United States and privatize it so that profit not education could become the system's first priority. Therefore, this story should come as no surprise. That doesn't make it any less despicable, or destructive of the nation's wellbeing.
From right, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, and Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia listen during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing the U.S. Department of Education on July 8, 2020, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
Charter schools across the country tapped the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for what could have been more than $1 billion, according to a preliminary analysis of Treasury Department data.
One network alone, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), appears to have pulled somewhere between $28 million and $69 million in taxpayer dollars.
Another network of publicly-funded, privately-run schools, Achievement First, appears to have taken in between $7 million and $17 million in PPP loans. The network also received $3.5 million from a special $65 million federal grant that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos awarded to 10 charter management organizations in April, weeks after the PPP was passed, to “fund the creation and expansion of more than 100 high-quality public charter schools in underserved communities across the country.
Citizens of the World Charter Schools in Los Angeles received […]
Stephan: Trumper hate groups, of course, got a good chunk of your tax money. Got to keep your homies happy. Here's the story.
A number of hate groups received loans from the government’s small business coronavirus relief fund. Credit: Getty
At least 10 groups with a history of making anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ or anti-immigrant statements received loans from the government’s small business coronavirus relief fund.
The Center for Immigration Studies, for instance, a Washington, D.C.-based organization described as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, got as much as $1 million from the Paycheck Protection Program, with the loan made by United Bank. The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017 documented more than 2,000 instances in which the Center for Immigration Studies “circulated the writings of white nationalists and antisemitic writers.”
The 10 policy groups received a total of as much as $10 million in assistance from the Paycheck Protection Program. Eight of those groups are identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Another group is headed by James Dobson, whom Southern Poverty Law Center has said “is well known for his anti-LGBT views,” claiming that homosexuals will “destroy the earth.”
Stephan: The Roman Catholic Church took a $1.4 billion payout of your tax dollars. There are so many things wrong with that. First, the Founders very specifically did not want tax money used to support religions. Any religion. They could not have been clearer about this. Second, what this money is really about is bailing out a church in desperate financial trouble because of the hundreds of millions it has had to pay out as recompense for the sexual molestation its clergy perpetrated with parishioners, particularly children. And, third, because the point of the payoff was to try to influence how Catholics will vote in November.
St. Patrick’s gets police protection and at least $1 million for pandemic.
This isn’t the kind of news Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Marco Rubio want to see about the continually problematic Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) they got into this spring’s coronavirus relief bill: The U.S. Roman Catholic Church got at least $1.4 billion in those loans “with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.” (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)
The AP has found that the Catholic Church got between $1.4 billion and at least $3.5 billion from the program, split among at least 3,500 forgivable loans to dioceses, parishes, schools, and other church programs. The report found that the church, by “aggressively promoting the payroll program and marshaling resources to help affiliates navigate its shifting rules,” became the biggest winner of all from the PPP loan programs. The legislation made an allowance for faith groups and other nonprofits to get the loans, which, being tax-payer funded, are not normally […]
Stephan: This is what really concerns me about the upcoming election. Not enough Democrats will register, or if they register, won't come out to vote, or will vote for some obscure third-party candidate who has no chance of winning. A repeat of the Jill Stein or Ralph Nader screw-up.
It was a flicker of hope for Donald Trump in an otherwise dismal summer.
Late last month, the Democratic data firm TargetSmart found that while new voter registrations had plummeted amid the coronavirus pandemic, those who were registering in competitive states tended to be whiter, older and less Democratic than before.
When he saw the numbers, Ben Wessel, executive director of NextGen America, said he “got nervous,” and other Democratic-leaning groups felt the same.
The report seemed to confirm what state elections officials and voter registration groups had been seeing in the field for weeks: Neither Democrats nor Republicans had been registering many voters during the pandemic. But Democrats were suffering disproportionately from the slowdown.
Last month in Iowa, where the race between Trump and Joe Biden is surprisingly close, Republicans nosed back ahead of Democrats in active registrations after ceding the lead to Democrats for the first time in years.
“In some states, before the pandemic, you were seeing a net edge for Democrats,” said Page Gardner, founder and president of the Voter Participation Center, which works […]
Stephan: If you, like me, are seeing the daily figures arising from this pandemic, you know that we have 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's Covid-19 cases. The United States thanks to the Trump administration at the federal level and Republican governors at the state level has made a catastrophic hash of the pandemic. What I find particularly disgusting is the danger in which these corrupt incompetent morons have put the very people working to save the lives of their fellow Americans. Five months into this crisis and they still can't get enough gear to do their jobs without stress. These men and women, many working double shifts seven days a week, day after day, can't even get fundamental protective gear. How is that possible?
A member of the medical staff listens as Montefiore Medical Center nurses call for N95 masks and other critical PPE to handle the coronavirus pandemic on April 1, 2020, in New York. Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty
A survey from the National Nurses Union found that 85 percent of nurses reported being asked to reuse personal protective equipment that’s meant to be single-use. At one private clinic in Arizona, medical workers are treating Covid-19 patients without being given any N95 masks, according to the New York Times. The shortage is […]
