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Donald Trump Really Likes to Drop Military Secrets Into His Conversations

by AdrienneWaterman Posted on May 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago The Intercept released a leaked transcript of President Trump’s recent phone call with President Duterte of the Philippines. Here’s a piece of it:

BuzzFeed’s Nancy Youssef got some feedback about this from folks in the Pentagon:

Pentagon officials are in shock after the release of a transcript between President Donald Trump and his Philippines counterpart reveals that the US military had moved two nuclear submarines towards North Korea. “We never talk about subs!” three officials told BuzzFeed News, referring to the military’s belief that keeping submarines’ movement stealth is key to their mission.

….By announcing the presence of nuclear submarines, the president, some Pentagon officials privately explained, gives away the element of surprise — an irony given his repeated declarations during the campaign that the US announces far too many of its military plans when it comes to combatting ISIS.

Moreover, some countries in the region, particularly China, seek to develop their anti-sub capability. Knowing that two US submarines are in the region could allow them to test their own military capabilities.

Needless to say, Trump wasn’t expecting that his conversation would be leaked. But these things happen—along with other ways that private conversations can end up in the wrong hands—which is why presidents don’t just casually drop military secrets into meetings with foreigners for no better reason than to make themselves look tough. This is now (at least) the second time Trump has done this, and there’s a price to pay:

We’re quickly reaching the point where intelligence agencies, both foreign and domestic, are going to start withholding information from Trump because they don’t trust him to keep his yap shut. We might already be there, for all I know.

From – 

Donald Trump Really Likes to Drop Military Secrets Into His Conversations

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The Genius Who Helped Unlock the Human Genome Is Taking On the Opioid Crisis

by KarinJoske6 Posted on May 20, 2017

Mother Jones

Francis Collins, the gregarious 67-year-old who directs the National Institutes of Health, doesn’t shy away from a challenge. Collins made a name for himself in the early 2000s when, as director of the Human Genome Project, he oversaw the completion of sequencing 3 billion genes. Now, as the head of the nation’s foremost biomedical research engine, Collins faces a new task: finding solutions to the opioid epidemic, which killed more than 33,000 Americans in 2015.

At the Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Conference last month, Collins announced a public-private partnership, in which the NIH will collaborate with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to the crisis. President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price “strongly supported” the idea, he said. This isn’t Collins’ first such partnership: During his tenure as director—Barack Obama appointed him in 2009—Collins has developed ongoing collaborations with pharmaceutical companies such as Lilly, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. For each partnership, the NIH and the companies pool tens of millions of dollars, with the agreement that the resulting data will be public and the companies will not immediately patent treatments. The jury’s still out on results—the partnerships are about halfway through their five-year timelines. But Collins, a self-described optimist, remains hopeful. “Traditionally it takes many years to go from an idea about a drug target to an approved drug,” said Collins at the conference. “Yet I believe…a vigorous public private partnership could cut that time maybe even in half.”

I talked to Collins about the partnership, potential treatments in the pipeline, and the NIH’s role in confronting the ongoing epidemic.

Mother Jones: Why is a public-private partnership needed?

Francis Collins: While NIH can do a lot of the good science, and we can accelerate it if we have resources, we aren’t going to be the ones making pills. Many of the large-scale clinical trials are not done generally by us but by the drug companies. A successful outcome here—in terms of ultimately getting rid of opioids and the deaths that they cause—would not happen without full engagement by the private sector.

MJ: Which companies will be involved?

FC: It will be a significant proportion of the largest companies. I can’t tell you the total list—as I said, the 15 largest were there. Certainly the groups that already have some drugs that are somewhere in the pipeline will be particularly interested in ways to speed that up.

MJ: What do you hope will come out of it in the short term?

FC: I think that we could increase the number of effective options to help people get over addiction, and the treatments for overdose, particularly when fentanyl is becoming such a prominent part of this dangerous situation. The current overdose treatments are not necessarily as strong as they need to be. We could make progress there pretty quickly, I think—in a matter of even a year or two—by coming up with formulations of drugs that we know work but in a fashion that would have new kinds of capabilities. The drugs would be stronger, as in the overdose situation, or have the potential of longer-acting effects, as in treating addiction. It’s not necessarily a different drug, but a different formulation of the drug. And drug companies are pretty good at that.

MJ: And in the long term?

FC: The goal really needs to be to find nonaddictive but highly potent pain medicines that can replace the use of opioids given the terrible consequences that surround their use. This will be particularly important for people who have chronic pain, where we really don’t have effective treatments now. The good news is that there’s a lot of really interesting science pointing us to new alternatives, like the idea of coming up with something that interacts with that opioid receptor but only activates the pathway that results in pain relief—not the somewhat different pathway that results in addiction. That’s a pretty new discovery that could actually be workable, and a lot of effort ought to be put into that.

I’d like all of us, the academics, the government, and the private sector, to think about this the way we thought about HIV/AIDs in the early 1990s, where people were dying all around us in tens of thousands. Well, that’s what’s happening now with opioids. This ought to be all hands on deck—what could we do to accelerate what otherwise might take a lot longer? It’s interesting talking to the drug companies, who have really gotten quite motivated and seem to be determined to make a real contribution here. There are quite a number of new drugs that are in the pipeline somewhere, and they haven’t been moving very quickly, because companies haven’t been convinced there was enough of a market—opioids are relatively cheap. And also they’ve been worried that it would be hard to get new pain medicines approved if they had any side effects at all. Now that we’ve seen opioids have the most terrible side effect of all—namely, death—it would seem that as new analgesics come along, that the ability to approve some that might give you a stomachache now and then would probably be better.

MJ: There’s a lot of wariness of big pharmaceutical companies right now, given Big Pharma’s role in creating this problem to begin with. How do you make sure that whatever treatments are developed are affordable?

FC: That’s a very big concern for everybody right now. It’s front and center in these discussions about development of new drugs and pricing of existing drugs. And I don’t know the full answer to that. This is just part of a larger discussion about drug pricing which applies across the board, whether we’re talking about drugs for cardiovascular disease or cancer or, in this case, alternatives for opioids. But we need them. As much as people might want to say, “Oh, pharmaceutical companies, they’re all just out to make money,” they also have the scientific capabilities and they spend about twice what the government does on research and development. If they weren’t there, we’d be completely hopeless as far as new treatment.

MJ: Trump’s latest budget proposes a 20 percent cut to the NIH for 2018. Are you worried about having enough funding?

FC: Of course I am. And not just for this, but for all the other things that NIH is called upon to do as part of our mission. I’m an optimist, and what I have seen in my 24 years at NIH is that opportunity in medical research is not a partisan issue—it’s not something that’s caught up in politics most of the time. And having seen the enthusiasm represented by the Congress in their passage of the 21st Century Cures Act just four months ago with incredible positive bipartisan margins, I think when the dust all settles, people will look at these kinds of investments and see them as a high priority for our nation. But of course, that’s my optimistic view.

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The Genius Who Helped Unlock the Human Genome Is Taking On the Opioid Crisis

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How America Treats Working Moms Like Shit

by AmandaFabinyi1 Posted on May 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Mothers have always worked in this country, whether out of desire or necessity. But America’s relationship with these employed moms has been fraught from the start. In 1873, a Harvard medical professor claimed that higher education would make young women infertile. During the 1950s, writers, psychiatrists, and psychologists argued that career women had “penis envy,” while John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” was widely misconstrued to mean that moms spending time apart from their kids would cause permanent psychological damage.

Where the emotional appeals haven’t worked, opponents have outright or effectively blocked moms from clocking in by cutting day care programs, firing them for breastfeeding, and refusing them family leave. To this day, the United States remains the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate maternity leave.

As many have pointed out, all moms are working moms, regardless of whether they are paid for their work. But as sociologist Arlie Hochschild put it in her book The Second Shift, mothers juggling housework with a day job enjoy a “double burden.” In time for Mother’s Day, here’s a short history of some of America’s most underappreciated employees.

1800s
Women are legally barred from jobs such as lawyering and working underground based on the notion of “separate spheres“—a women’s should be at home with her children.
1850
The popular magazine Godey’s Lady Book touts piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity as the traits of “true womanhood,” and notes that women “step out of their own path when they attempt to encroach on the proper masculine pursuits.”
1851
Abolitionist Sojourner Truth points out that Godey’s definition excludes black women, who are often obliged to work outside the home to feed their children. “Ain’t I a woman?” she asks.
1869
A shorthanded Treasury Department hires married women including moms to fill positions vacated by Union soldiers. At war’s end, some widows are allowed to keep their jobs—at half the pay men get.
1873
Harvard Medical School professor Edward Clarke argues that higher education makes women infertile.
Turn of the 20th Century postcard

1888
Josephine Jewell Dodge establishes an early nursery school in a New York City slum that is later featured at Chicago’s World Fair. She goes on to start the country’s first national day care organization. Her critics propose an alternative strategy—”mothers’ pensions“—to keep women at home.
1930s
The Depression forces white middle-class moms to look for jobs—the number of married women in the workforce jumps 50 percent—while women of color solicit day labor in so-called slave markets. But “no one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep,” the White House declares.
1943
World War II shortages of male workers inspire the first federally funded day care program. But the armistice marks a return to traditional gender attitudes: The day care initiative lapses and career-driven women are described by popular writers as “lost,” “man-hating” or “suffering from penis envy.”

1950s
Employers phase out the “marriage bar“—the legal practice of firing (or not hiring) women who get married. It will be nearly three decades before federal law forbids the boss from firing women for being pregnant.
1951
Psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” posits that separating a mother from her child causes long-term behavioral difficulties—short separations are fine, he says, but his theory is twisted to make the case that mothers shouldn’t work.
1952
Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy is written into an episode of the sitcom I Love Lucy, but the actors are not allowed to use the word “pregnant” on air—too vulgar, says CBS.

1963
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique gives voice to “the problem that has no name”—the frustrations and disappointments of housewives. Friedan had conceived of her idea as a magazine piece, but no magazine would take it.
Betty Friedan AP Photo/Anthony Camerano

1969
Under disability laws, five states allow female workers paid maternity leave, while others specifically exclude pregnancy as a temporary disability. A federal family-leave law remains decades away.
1970
“I have no objection of a pediatric or psychiatric nature about women going to work,” writes child-development guru Dr. Benjamin Spock: “What I say is that the children are going to have to be reared, and you ought to have women growing up feeling this is important, womanly work.”
Dr. Spock Associated Press

1971
Congress votes to establish federally funded child care centers nationwide, but President Richard Nixon vetoes the bill, saying it works against “the family-centered approach.”
1972
The Equal Rights Amendment, which outlaws sex discrimination, is attacked by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly on the grounds that a women’s place is in the home. (The bill flops.) Betty Freidan dubs Schlafly “Aunt Tom.”
1978
An ad for Enjoli perfume croons, “I can put the wash on the line. Feed the kids. Get dressed. Pass out the kisses and get to work by five of nine. ‘Cuz I’m a wooooman!” Congress passes the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, making it illegal to fire a woman for being pregnant—employers must offer her medical benefits equivalent to what other workers get.

1979
Working Mother magazine targets America’s 16 million working moms: “We would like to share in your problems, your concerns for your family—and in your pride.” (It’s still around.)
Working Mother magazine

1989
In The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes the “double burden” of mothers juggling housework with a day job. Also Child magazine coins the phrase “mommy wars” to describe tensions between working and stay-at-home mothers.
1992
Vice President Dan Quayle attacks TV show Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers” after the eponymous character, a working journalist, decides to raise her baby alone.

1992
Asked by reporters about allegations that her husband directed business to her law firm while governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton responds, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” Homemakers are furious.
John Sykes/Liason

1993
The Family Medical Leave Act guarantees maternity leave—but it’s unpaid, and more than half of working women are excluded thanks to exceptions for small businesses and part-timers
1994
Asked how he feels about then-wife Marla Maples (top) working, Donald Trump tells ABC, “I have days where I think it’s great. And then I have days where, if I come home—and I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist—but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.”
1996
Amid backlash against mythical “welfare queens,” President Bill Clinton overhauls the system, forcing single mothers to get a job within two years or lose their federal benefits.
1997
Future Indiana Gov. Mike Pence argues in an op-ed that “day care kids get the short end of the emotional stick” and that children with two working parents suffer “stunted emotional growth.” Also the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, a bill to end discrimination against nursing moms and make companies give women a place they can pump breast milk, dies in committee.
1999

The proportion of moms staying at home rather than working hits a low point of 23 percent. (By 2012, it’s up to 29 percent.)

2003
The New York Times Magazine describes the “opt-out revolution”—highly educated women scaling back their careers to stay home with their kids.
2008
The VP nomination of Sarah Palin, a mother of five, renews debate over work-life balance. “You can juggle a BlackBerry and a breast pump in a lot of jobs, but not in the vice presidency,” one Obama supporter tells the New York Times.
2009
Modern Family premieres on ABC—none of its fictional moms have jobs. Also a Texas woman is fired for asking her boss to let her pump breast milk at work. A (male) federal judge rules the firing is permissible because “lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition” protected by law.

2010
The Affordable Care Act mandates work breaks and a private space for new moms to pump breast milk.
April 2012
Mitt Romney defends his homemaker wife: “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.” Yet earlier, talking about the welfare-work requirements Massachusetts enacted while he was governor, Romney said that even moms with two-year-olds “need to go to work…I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”
July 2012
Anne Marie Slaughter argues in The Atlantic that women cannot, in fact, “have it all”—kids and a fulfilling career. The problem, she writes, isn’t an “ambition gap,” but rather that America’s workplace culture still doesn’t value families.
Sept. 2012
“At the end of the day,” Michelle Obama tells the Democratic National Convention crowd, “My most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief.'”

2013
In her best-selling book, Facebook bigwig Sheryl Sandberg exhorts women to “lean in” at work. Cultural critic bell hooks eviscerates the book as “faux feminism…brought to us by a corporate executive who does not recognize the needs of pregnant women until it’s happening to her.”
2014
Apple and Facebook offer to freeze employees’ eggs in what critics call a cynical bid to delay childbearing. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, claims she has it harder than office moms who “can come home in the evening.” Retorts a New York Post columnist, “Thank God I don’t make millions filming one movie per year.”
2016
America remains the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave—only 14 percent of working moms can get it through their employers. In a September interview, Ivanka Trump brags to Cosmopolitan about her dad’s maternity-leave plan, calling him “a great advocate for women in the workforce.” But it turns out many Trump Hotels, including Mar-a-Lago, don’t offer paid maternity leave.
Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

2017
President Trump proposes a child care plan and asks Congress to “help ensure new parents have paid family leave.” But a Tax Policy Center analysis concludes that 70 percent of the plan’s benefits would go to families making $100,000 or more. “The devil,” the ACLU notes, “is in the details“—the plan applies only to married birth mothers, making it “as inadequate as it is discriminatory.”

Excerpt from – 

How America Treats Working Moms Like Shit

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This Mississippi Sheriff’s Department Is Completely Out of Control, Lawsuit Alleges

by EdwinFULak Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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In racially segregated Madison County, Mississippi, black residents live in fear of the police. According to a federal lawsuit filed Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, the Madison County Sheriff’s Department has been using illegal tactics and subjecting people who live in majority-black towns to unreasonable searches of their bodies, their homes, and their cars. The purpose of these stops, the ACLU alleges, is to generate revenue by collecting unpaid fees and fines from those who are detained.

“There is a decades-old policy of methodically and systematically targeting black people with Fourth Amendment violations that are unheard of in white communities and in most of the United States,” says Paloma Wu, the legal director of the ACLU of Mississippi.

According to the lawsuit, roadblocks are one of the main tactics used by the MCSD. Deputies allegedly set up checkpoints in black neighborhoods and towns, near places of employment, and near black-owned businesses. The department’s written roadblock policy is short, vague, and does not include any restrictions on how and when deputies may use them, according to the ACLU.

The MCSD did not respond to requests for comment.

The use of systematic arrests to generate revenue wouldn’t be unique to Mississippi. The US Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson, Missouri—published after a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014—found that the city’s police force was using a similar strategy. The protests in Ferguson catalyzed a wave of police reform efforts during the Obama administration, but the Mississippi case comes at a time when civil rights advocates are worried that President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions will undo much of that progress.

Madison County is the wealthiest county in Mississippi. Of its 105,000 residents, 58 percent are white and 38 percent are black. Most of the wealth is concentrated in white areas. The plaintiffs, 10 black people who all reside in the county, allege that white residents are not subject to the same policing strategies. According to the suit, between May and September 2016, 81 percent of roadblock arrests and 82 percent of pedestrian arrests were of black individuals.

According to the complaint, MCSD has conducted thousands of unreasonable searches of black residents of the county. As a result of these traumatic experiences, many black residents experience fear and anxiety over the simple act of leaving their homes or driving their cars. The Madison County Sheriff Department’s policing tactics impact “virtually every aspect of Black residents’ lives,” says the complaint, adding that “the very real possibility of unlawful and humiliating searches and seizures, as well as the attendant prospect of arrest and jail time for unpaid fines and fees” looms over their heads.

The suit alleges that Marvin McField, one of the plaintiffs, has been stopped multiple times at different roadblocks in the past few years. The 37-year-old has lived in predominantly black Flora, Mississippi, his entire life and uses a pacemaker because he suffers from a serious heart condition.

At one such roadblock several years ago, according to the complaint, McField was ordered to exit his vehicle, after which deputies handcuffed and searched him and then threw him onto the hood of the car. The deputies then allegedly left him in the back of a patrol car with the windows rolled up on a hot summer day for approximately 15 to 20 minutes. The deputies drove off with him in custody but stopped a few minutes later and beat him in the chest until McField told them he could not breathe, according to the suit.

Next, deputies took McField to the Madison County Detention Center, “where the deputies beat him again—this time hitting him in the head instead of in his chest,” the complaint says. He was held in jail for more than two weeks without being charged with a crime, a clear violation of the right to due process, according to the suit. He was also not permitted to make any phone calls. After 19 days, McField was brought before a judge—without a lawyer. The judge, who is unnamed in the suit, simply told him that he had served his time and was free to go, according to the complaint.

In addition to stopping residents in their cars, the complaint alleges that deputies also stop and search pedestrians walking past the designated checkpoints. In January 2017, plaintiff Steven Smith was walking into the affordable housing complex where he lives. Deputies searched him, even though there was no probable cause, the suit states.

After deputies ran Smith’s identification, they discovered he had unpaid fines and court fees. He couldn’t afford to pay the overdue money and was jailed for 29 days.

Quinnetta Manning, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Madison County Sheriff’s Department ACLU of Mississippi

The searches allegedly extend to residents’ private homes, as well. “There are a lot of warrantless invasions of black people’s houses and lots of excessive force, which is just a fancy way of saying they physically hurt people,” says Wu. In June 2016, Khadafy and Quinnetta Manning were at home when six deputies began banging on their door. When Quinnetta Manning opened the door, the suit alleges, the deputies pushed past her and began demanding that she sign a false witness statement implicating her neighbor’s boyfriend in a burglary. She told the deputies that she had not witnessed a burglary.

Khadafy Manning, who is disabled and walks with a cane, had just woken up and was not dressed. When he told deputies that his wife didn’t have to provide a statement, a deputy handcuffed him, swore at him, and began choking him, according to the complaint. The deputies allegedly threatened to arrest the Mannings if they didn’t comply. According to the suit, Quinnetta Manning agreed to write the statement out of fear, but deputies dragged Khadafy Manning out the door anyway. The deputies placed him in a car and began to beat him inside the vehicle, according to the complaint. “Mr. Manning was humiliated that his neighbors saw him being forcibly taken out of his family’s home while wearing only his underwear,” the suit says. The couple ended up writing false witness statements, according to the suit.

After the incident, Khadafy Manning sought legal remedies for the physical and emotional pain that he and his family suffered. Several months later in, February 2017, a deputy handcuffed Khadafy Manning and searched his car after telling him that he knew Manning had been “having people come around here asking questions,” the complaint alleges.

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This Mississippi Sheriff’s Department Is Completely Out of Control, Lawsuit Alleges

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Trumpcare Will Make the Opioid Crisis Worse

by london Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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There are plenty of reasons why the Obamacare repeal bill that House Republicans passed Thursday afternoon is so controversial. It slashes funding for Medicaid, threatens to raise health insurance premiums for older Americans, and allows states to roll back protections for people with preexisting medical conditions.

But there’s another, less publicized, way in which the GOP’s American Health Care Act could disrupt health care throughout the country. In the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in US history, the legislation could disrupt addiction coverage for millions of Americans. And thanks to a provision added to the bill last week, insurance companies in some states might no longer include mental health and substance abuse coverage in their health plans.

Because of the speed with which Republicans rushed the bill through the House, the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t yet had time to estimate the number of Americans who would lose their health insurance or how premiums would be affected. But according to a CBO report from March, an earlier version of legislation would have resulted in 24 million fewer people having coverage than under Obamacare. The current legislation will likely result in a similar number of uninsured Americans, says Richard Frank, a professor of health economics at Harvard University. Frank and his colleague, Sherry Glied of New York University, estimate that if Obamacare is repealed, 3 million Americans with addiction disorders would lose some or all of their coverage.

Many of the states that voted Trump into office are among the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic—and are the most dependent on Obamacare for substance abuse treatment. The maps below, produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the last days of the Obama administration, show this overlap: Red states on the left have the highest overdose rates per capita; red states on the right have the highest rate of residents who would lose coverage if Obamacare is repealed.

US Department of Health and Human Services

Obamacare was particularly important for those seeking addiction treatment, according to Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University psychiatry professor who advised the Obama administration on drug policy. “It was designed to be very broad, but at the same time we knew that if there was anything that this would help a lot for, it’s addiction,” he told me in February.

That’s largely because of two big changes that Obamacare made to insurance markets—changes that the GOP legislation would roll back or undo completely.

First, Obamacare required insurance companies to cover certain “essential benefits,” including substance abuse and mental health treatment. In order to sell insurance in the individual marketplaces, companies would have to cover addiction treatment, as well as other care such as contraception, emergency services, and pediatric services. (Here‘s the full list of essential benefits.) This was a significant change. In 2011, before Obamacare went into effect, “somewhere close to 40 percent of individual and small group market plans didn’t offer substance abuse and mental health coverage,” says Frank. “And when they did, it was quite limited.”

The bill passed by the House would allow states to opt out of the essential benefits requirements, which means that insurers might once again refuse to cover treatment for mental health and addiction.

The second big Obamacare change for substance abuse treatment was the expansion of Medicaid coverage to millions of additional poor Americans. As I wrote earlier this year:

Under the Affordable Care Act, those who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for this government-funded insurance program. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that states could choose whether or not they wanted to participate in the program, and 31 states have done so—resulting in health coverage for an additional 11 million Americans through Medicaid expansion. Of those, an estimated 1.3 million used their newly acquired insurance for substance abuse or mental health services, according to an analysis by researchers Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School and Sherry Glied of New York University. In states that expanded Medicaid, 20 percent of hospital admissions for substance abuse and mental health disorders were uninsured in 2013, before the bulk of the expansion provisions kicked in. By the middle of 2015, the uninsured rate had fallen to five percent.

The Republicans’ health care plan would freeze Medicaid expansion, cutting off funds for states adding new enrollees starting in 2020. Those already enrolled in Medicaid expansion plans by 2020 would continue to receive the benefits, but they would be at constant risk of losing that insurance. Anyone who has a gap in insurance coverage of more a month—say because they miss a deadline or their income temporarily changes—would lose eligibility. (A lack of private health insurance would be penalized too: Going more than 63 days without coverage would increase premiums by 30 percent for a year.) These provisions have a lot of public health advocates worried. It’s not uncommon for people, particularly those with serious mental health and addiction problems, to drift in and out of insurance coverage.

Without Obamacare, said Humphreys, “We’re back where we were before: bad access, low quality of care, and a lot of patients being turned away.”

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Trumpcare Will Make the Opioid Crisis Worse

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This Report Card for Betsy DeVos’ Favorite Education Policy Is Pretty Bad

by AhmadCurtin Posted on April 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Students in Washington, DC’s federally funded voucher program performed worse academically, particularly on math test scores, after a year of private school, according to a new federal analysis released Thursday.

The study, conducted by the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, found that students who left public schools as part of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program performed significantly lower on math scores than those who did not. (They also scored lower in reading, but researchers noted that those results were not statistically significant.) In 2010, when the DOE’s research division previously evaluated the voucher program, it found that it had no significant impact on reading and math scores but a significant increase in high school graduation. Notably, Thursday’s study found that parents in the voucher program were more likely to feel like their child’s school was safe.

US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences

The analysis comes as President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continue to promote the expansion of school choice at the national level. The administration has proposed a $1.4 billion investment toward school choice programs for the coming fiscal year, including $168 million in spending for charter schools and $250 million in school vouchers for families.

While decades of research has shown voucher programs have had little to no effect on student achievement, studies of newer programs in the last two years have mostly revealed worse academic outcomes for participating students:

A November 2015 study of Indiana’s voucher program determined that students who attended private school through the program scored lower on math and reading tests than kids in public school.
In Louisiana, students who attend private schools through the voucher program showed significant drops in both math and reading in the first two years of the program’s operation, according to a February 2016 study by researchers at the Education Research Alliance of New Orleans. The program had no impact on students’ non-academic skills.
Researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, concluded in a July 2016 study of Ohio’s voucher program that students who took part in the voucher program fared worse academically than those who attended public schools.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program, created by Congress in 2004, provides tuition vouchers for 1,100 low-income students who transfer from public schools to private ones in the nation’s capital. Earlier this year, House Republicans filed legislation to renew the DC voucher program, even as a majority of city council members submitted a letter in March expressing “serious concerns” about the use of public funds to send kids to private school. Mayor Muriel Bowser split from the council, saying at the time she supported the program’s extension. Last year, Sen. Ted Cruz filed a bill that would expand the voucher program to cover the entire school district.

In response to the study, DeVos said in a statement that people should look beyond its one-year assessment, arguing that voucher programs didn’t hurt public schools. “When school choice policies are fully implemented,” she said, “there should be no differences in achievement among the various types of schools.” But Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who serves as ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, slammed the DC voucher program in a statement to the Associated Press. “We know that these failed programs drain public schools of limited resources,” he said, “only to deliver broken promises of academic success to parents and students.”

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This Report Card for Betsy DeVos’ Favorite Education Policy Is Pretty Bad

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Obama Lays Out Plans in His First Post-Presidency Public Appearance

by christoperschone Posted on April 24, 2017

Mother Jones

In his first public appearance since leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama said that empowering young people to take on leadership roles would be the “single most important” issue in his post-presidency life.

“What I’m convinced of is that although there are all kinds of issues I care about, and all kinds of issues I can work on, the single most important thing I can do is to help prepare the next generation of leadership to take up the baton and to take their own crack at changing the world,” Obama said at a panel discussion on civic engagement that he led at the University of Chicago on Monday.

Obama made no direct mention of President Donald Trump or the 2016 presidential election, but he pointed to the divisive nature of US politics as the most significant barrier to progress on a host of problems, from flaws in the criminal justice system to climate change.

Obama’s return to Chicago marked his reemergence in public life following a three-month vacation. His remarks echoed previous statements in which he’s hinted at focusing on community organizing efforts as a private citizen.

The free-form panel discussion featured several moments of levity from the former president, including an acknowledgement that panel members were given questions ahead of the event—a subtle reference to Trump’s complaints that Hillary Clinton had an unfair advantage during the presidential debates.

Aside from a brief statement in support of protesters against Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, Obama has avoided publicly criticizing his successor. Trump, on the other hand, has frequently lashed out at his predecessor. Most notably, in March, he accused Obama of ordering illegal surveillance of him and his associates.

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Obama Lays Out Plans in His First Post-Presidency Public Appearance

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Former Trump Adviser Can’t Recall If He Discussed Sanctions With Russians

by HarrietVerco Posted on April 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Did Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, speak to anyone in Russia about the United States potentially lifting sanctions imposed on Vladimir Putin’s government when he was in Moscow during the campaign last summer? Not at all, but, then again, maybe.

That’s what Page said during an interview with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America Thursday.

Page’s comments came days after the Washington Post reported that the FBI had obtained a secret order from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s communications last summer. To obtain that warrant, known as a FISA warrant, the FBI would have had to persuade a judge that there was probable cause to suspect that Page had been acting as an agent of the Russia government. The Post described the revelation as the “clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents.” Page has not been accused of any crimes, and he has repeatedly denied he ever acted as an agent for any foreign power.

Page visited Russia last July—reportedly with approval from the Trump campaign—and gave a speech at the New Economic School in Moscow criticizing US policy toward Russia. He left the campaign in September amid allegations that he had privately communicated with Russian officials during the trip. Page denied those allegations. On ABC Thursday, Page acknowledged that he briefly said “hello” to one of the school’s board members, when Stephanopoulos asked whether he had met with anyone in the Russia government or connected to Russian intelligence.

Stephanopoulos also asked Page whether he had ever told any Russians in the United States or abroad that Trump “would be open to easing sanctions on Russia.”

“Absolutely not,” Page replied at first.

Stephanopoulos followed up: “Never? Not once?”

“I never offered that,” Page said again. “Nothing along those lines. Absolutely not.”

Then Page seemed to reconsider his response. “I mean—it may—topics—I don’t remember—we’ll see what comes out in this FISA transcript,” he said. “I don’t recall every single word that I ever said. But I would never make any offer or intimate anything.”

“But it sounds like from what you’re saying it’s possible that you may have discussed the easing of sanctions,” said Stephanopoulos.

“Something may have come up in a conversation,” Page responded. “I have no recollection, and there’s nothing specifically that I would have done that would have given people that impression.”

Pressed again by Stephanopoulos on whether he had discussed easing sanctions with any Russians, Page said, “Someone may have brought it up—I have no recollection. And if it was, it was not something I was offering or that someone was asking for.”

Page’s comments on ABC follow an interview he gave Wednesday to CNN’s Jake Tapper, in which Page said that during his Russia trip he spoke with students, scholars, and business people about the 2016 campaign. Page told Tapper that he had never had any “direct conversations” with anyone in Russia about the possibility of Trump ratcheting back on sanctions:

TAPPER: When you went to Russia last summer, did you ever talk to any Russian about the Trump campaign or about the Clinton campaign or about the 2016 election in general?

PAGE: No Russian official. I was speaking at a university, and I spoke with many scholars and students and parents that were at the graduation celebrating their kids’ achievements. Other than that, nothing.

TAPPER: I didn’t ask Russian official, I just asked any Russian because obviously, Russians, as you know in Russia, people are affiliated with private industry but they also do work with the government, et cetera.

PAGE: Sure.

TAPPER: So—but you did not talk to any Russian at all other than students and parents and scholars about the presidential election?

PAGE: I met a few business people, but no negotiations about anything in terms of anything related to the campaign whatsoever.

TAPPER: Well, I’m not talking about negotiations, but as long as you bring it up, I mean, have you ever conveyed to anyone in Russia that you think President Trump might have been more willing to get rid of the sanctions that were imposed against Russia after they invaded and seized Crimea, which I know are sanctions that you oppose and you think are ineffective. Did you ever talk with anyone there about maybe President Trump, if he were elected—then-candidate Trump, would be willing to get rid of the sanctions?

PAGE: Never any direct conversations such as that. I mean, look, it’s—

TAPPER: What do you mean direct conversations? I don’t know what that mean, direct conversations.

PAGE: Well, I’m just saying no—that was never—I’ve never said, no.

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Former Trump Adviser Can’t Recall If He Discussed Sanctions With Russians

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How a Private Prison Company Used Detained Immigrants for Free Labor

by BlancheOQS Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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When Carlos Eliezer Ortiz Muñoz arrived at the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora, Colorado, in 2014, he was given a clothing package and assigned to a housing unit, where he’d have to stay for months. Like tens of thousands of other immigrants across the country who are kept in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention each night, Ortiz and his fellow detainees were waiting to see if they’d win their immigration cases or face deportation.

Before long, the private prison company that ran the detention center put Ortiz to work. Each day in his housing unit, guards assigned a crew of six detainees to clean the private and common living areas; scrub down toilets, showers, and eating tables; and sweep and mop floors. “None of us got paid anything,” Ortiz said in a court statement. But he couldn’t protest—he knew he could be sent to solitary confinement if he refused to do the cleaning. “Some of the guards would threaten us by saying, ‘¿Quieres ir al hoyo?‘” Ortiz said. “‘You want to go to the hole?'”

The GEO Group, the private prison company that operates Aurora, allegedly forced more than 50,000 immigrants like Ortiz to work without pay or for $1 a day since 2004, according to a lawsuit that nine detainees brought against the company in 2014. On February 27, a federal judge ruled that their case could proceed as a class action, breathing new life into a suit that exposes the extent to which the for-profit company relied on cheap or unpaid detainee labor to minimize costs at the Aurora facility.

“If we’re right, and these practices are illegal, it has tremendous implications on the ability of the government to use detention in the immigration enforcement architecture,” says Andrew Free, an immigration attorney on the detainees’ legal team. “It would prompt a serious rethinking of whom to detain, and how much it’s going to cost.”

GEO incarcerates more immigrants (and receives more public money to do so) than any other detention center operator, according to an analysis by the anti-detention group CIVIC. And its business detaining immigrants for ICE is only expected to grow “with this increased and expanded approach to border security,” CEO George Zoley said in a February earnings call.

According to the lawsuit, there were two ways GEO cashed in on cheap labor from detainees. There was the facility’s sanitation policy, under which detainees like Ortiz were required to work as janitors without pay. If they didn’t, they risked being punished with solitary confinement, according to GEO’s local detainee handbook. Detainees could also apply for a job in Aurora’s voluntary work program, which paid them exactly $1 a day to keep the facility running.

In a statement, GEO spokesman Pablo Paez wrote that GEO’s volunteer work program policies follow federal standards. “We have consistently, strongly refuted the allegations made in this lawsuit, and we intend to continue to vigorously defend our company against these claims,” he said. “The volunteer work program at all immigration facilities as well as the minimum wage rates and standards associated with the program are set by the Federal government under mandated performance-based national detention standards.”

ICE’s standards for immigration detention centers say that voluntary work programs are intended to give detainees “opportunities to work and earn money while confined.” Yet David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, says it’s questionable whether such programs are truly voluntary for people “held in captivity, against their will.” While working may be a positive outlet for incarcerated people, Fathi says, “the problem isn’t the existence of the work program. The problem is this inherently coercive relationship that makes the workers uniquely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.”

Some people in Aurora’s program stripped and waxed floors, while others did laundry, prepared food, cut hair, or worked in the library. Shifts lasted between three and eight hours, according to a copy of Aurora’s detainee work program policy, and detainees were paid the same $1 no matter how long they were assigned to work.

Lourdes Argueta volunteered. She was given a job as a janitor in the medical unit, where she and other detainees “clean toilets, sweep and mop floors, pull carpets and clean floors, clean windows, remove trash, clean patients’ rooms (including cleaning up blood, feces and urine), and perform other cleaning tasks,” she said in a statement to the court. She also worked in GEO’s booking area, creating new detainee files and putting together packages of clothing for new detainees.

During a deposition, GEO’s assistant business manager at Aurora testified that if there were no “voluntary workers” like Argueta, the company would need to bring in additional officers, paid at hourly wages set by rules in GEO’s contract, to get the same work done. So how much would the company have to shell out if it didn’t rely on cheap detainee labor? Under GEO’s contract with ICE, which incorporated federal wage regulations, the lowest allowable employee wage at the Aurora facility was $10.90 an hour for food service workers. A typical shift in the voluntary work program lasted approximately seven hours, according to the detainee work program policy—so if GEO had hired additional employees to do the work, it would have cost the company nearly $76.30 per shift. (That’s a lowball estimate, given that some detainees worked jobs that would have paid significantly more.) Instead, they spent $1.

That translates to huge cost savings. Take, for example, November 2012, when detainees took hundreds of voluntary work program shifts. If GEO had hired employees to do those jobs instead, the company would have spent more than $125,000 in wages and benefits that month. GEO’s actual payments: $1,680.

That number only increases if you account for Aurora’s sanitation policy, under which all detainees in the facility did janitorial work in the housing units for no pay, the lawsuit alleges. GEO employees doing the same work would have been eligible for $12.01 per hour in wages, under the company’s contract with ICE.

“If GEO was absorbing all of the labor costs, its profit would be less,” explains Nina DiSalvo, executive director of Towards Justice, one of the firms representing the detainees. Andrew Free, the attorney, goes further: “It turns their profits upside down,” he claims. “It would be a money-losing enterprise if they had to pay the people to operate this facility under the current contract.” (Given that the Department of Homeland Security pays an average of $126.46 per day to detain one immigrant, that may not be a stretch.)

So how does the company get away with it? The “dollar a day” policy dates back to 1978, when Congress passed an appropriations bill funding voluntary detainee work programs, says Jacqueline Stevens, the head of Northwestern University’s Deportation Research Clinic, whose research on detainee labor informed the 2014 suit. But that was before the rise of private prison companies, she adds—and it was initially implemented in government-run facilities, not those run by for-profit companies beholden to shareholders. “GEO’s privately held, so there’s an extra concern that they may be exploiting people in a way an institution run by federal government would not be,” Stevens explains.

When immigrants inside Aurora filed grievances asking why they weren’t paid more, GEO’s assistant business manager replied by saying that ICE, not the company, set the daily rate. But in February’s order, Colorado District Court Judge John Kane ruled that while ICE only reimburses GEO for $1 per detainee shift, the company could pay more if it wanted. (And in fact, in at least one other location, it appears to have paid detainees more than the $1 ICE reimbursed it for, Stevens says.) While the detainees aren’t eligible for employment under GEO’s contract, their lawsuit argues that GEO “unjustly enriched” itself by misleading them about how much it could pay.

“By far the greatest expense of running any detention facility is labor,” Fathi says. “GEO has got to be worried that if this practice is unlawful at one facility, it’s presumptively unlawful at all facilities.” If they lose, he adds, “they have to be looking at not just what they would have to pay at Aurora.”

The lawsuit also argues that the sanitation policy violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a modern anti-slavery statute. To maintain cleanliness in the housing units, GEO used housekeeping crews like the one Ortiz was assigned to when he arrived at Aurora. According to GEO’s local detainee handbook, refusing to clean was considered a “high moderate”-level offense and was punishable by several possible sanctions, including up to three days of so-called “disciplinary segregation”: solitary confinement. Plaintiff Demetrio Valerga told the court in a statement that he “did the work anyway because it was well known that those who refused to do that work for free were put in ‘the hole.'” With the sanitation policy in place, the company employed just one janitor for the 1,500-bed facility.

ICE’s own standards say detainees can’t be required to work, except for keeping “immediate living areas” neat: making their beds, stacking loose papers, and keeping the floor and furniture uncluttered. Under questioning during a deposition, Aurora’s assistant warden of operations made it clear that GEO considered all parts of the housing unit (bathrooms and day areas, as well as cells) to be fair game. Yet a federal watchdog agency recently found that requiring detained immigrants to clean any common areas used by all detainees was a violation of ICE standards.

“Imagine you see people being yelled at by guards and thrown in solitary all the time,” Free says. “In order to avoid solitary yourself, you have to maintain the sanitary nature of the facility you’re being housed in. And then they say, ‘If you want, we’ll pay you a dollar a day to do something else. If you don’t, you’re still going to work when we tell you to.’ And the company that’s on the other end of this is making millions.”

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How a Private Prison Company Used Detained Immigrants for Free Labor

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Who Moved My Teachers?

by MaximoSessions1 Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Dale Stephanos

The school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison never used to have trouble attracting applicants with dreams of becoming teachers. Its graduate program is ranked fourth in the country by U.S. News & World Report, and until recently, its undergraduate program in elementary education typically received between 300 and 400 applications for its 125 spots. Now, says Michael Apple, a professor in the program, it only gets about one applicant per opening.

What happened? Scott Walker became Wisconsin’s governor in 2011 and promptly enacted a wide-scale rollback of unionization rights for state employees. That law, Act 10, effectively wiped out the ability of teachers and other public-sector workers to bargain collectively over salary and benefits.

Walker’s assault on unions has had well-publicized effects, including an unsuccessful recall election against him, a sharp reduction in union membership, and a proliferation of anti-union legislation in other states. Unions’ diminished organizing power for Democrats helped Donald Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Wisconsin in more than 30 years. But less visible consequences have colored nearly every facet of Wisconsin society. One is a sudden and drastic teacher shortage. “The attack on teacher unions has an echo that is often invisible,” Apple says. “That invisibility is many fewer teachers.”

Wisconsin teachers now earn less total compensation than they did seven years ago, thanks to cuts in benefits. They face larger classes and less job security, and in some districts they’ve been asked to teach extra sections. Fewer people are applying to teacher education programs. One Wisconsin education student, who asked not to be named to avoid hurting his job prospects, warns that “better conditions and job security will lead some of us elsewhere.”

The downturn for Wisconsin teachers is so bad that when a Minnesota public school district sent representatives to a job fair at UW-Madison’s education school last fall, they made a point of boasting about the benefits their state still offered. “I actually heard them promote having unions as a sales pitch, which I found interesting coming from administrators,” says the student.

That Wisconsin is the front of the war on unions is particularly poignant. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents public workers at all levels of government, began as an association of local workers in Madison in 1932. Twenty-seven years later, Wisconsin became the first state to recognize state government employee unions. But when Walker signed Act 10 on March 11, 2011, that long chapter of progressivism came to an end and the state became a radical experiment in the opposite direction.

The battle over the law was as dramatic as its effects: The entire 14-person Democratic caucus in the state Senate fled to Illinois in a bid to prevent it from passing, and about 100,000 union advocates demonstrated, with some camping in the hallways of the Capitol and singing union anthems. Teachers protested by calling in sick, and schools were forced to close.

In the end, it wasn’t enough. Act 10 prevailed and other conservative state governments soon followed with their own anti-union legislation. It attacked public-sector unions from a variety of angles. Wisconsin workers can no longer negotiate to improve their health or retirement benefits. Raises can’t exceed the rate of inflation. Job-security measures like tenure were tossed aside, and managers were given the freedom to fire employees at will. Dues are no longer deducted directly from paychecks, forcing public-sector unions to track down members individually to raise funds.

At the time, Walker sold Act 10 as a way to close a $3.6 billion budget gap. But there was never much question that the real motivation was to hobble liberal causes. A video later surfaced showing Walker hobnobbing with billionaire donor Diane Hendricks, founder and chairwoman of Wisconsin-based ABC Supply, two weeks after taking office. “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions and become a right-to-work?” she asked. (So-called right-to-work laws slash union revenue by prohibiting unions from compelling employees to pay dues, allowing employees to benefit from a union’s efforts without contributing their share.) Walker replied, “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

That strategy could soon become national policy. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump adviser, has pointed to Walker’s anti-union crusade as a model for how the new administration could target public-­sector unions at the federal level. Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, chaired a group called the American Federation for Children, which claims it has spent more than $4.2 million on Wisconsin races since 2010. The AFC tapped Walker as its keynote speaker at the group’s 2015 policy summit.

Six years after the passage of Act 10, a small band of retirees still gathers in the Capitol rotunda every weekday at noon for a pro-union Solidarity Sing-Along. But it barely draws the attention of passing school groups, let alone lawmakers. State labor organizations, struggling to maintain their membership rolls, have little time or money to press legislators for policy changes. One AFSCME council saw its budget drop from $5 million before Act 10 to $1.5 million in 2013.

Before Walker’s crusade, 14.2 percent of Wisconsin’s workforce belonged to a union. By 2015, that figure had dropped to 8.3 percent, significantly below the national average for the first time. That year, Walker and the Legislature passed a law that extended the right-to-work provisions to private-sector unions as well. That law’s central provision is still on hold pending legal challenges.

It’s no coincidence that 2016 was the first election in which the state voted Republican for president since Ronald Reagan. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton won union households in the state by 10 percentage points. But 79 percent of voters didn’t belong to a union household, and they went in Trump’s favor by 8 points—enough to deliver him a surprise victory in Wisconsin. “Scott Walker just won the presidential race in 2016 by passing Act 10 five years ago,” anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist tweeted on election night.

Teachers’ unions have been hit hardest. Prior to the law, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC)—the state’s largest association of local teachers’ unions and an affiliate of the National Education Association—counted about 98,000 members. Now it has fewer than 40,000. The WEAC spent $93,481 on lobbying in 2015, compared with more than $2.2 million in 2011. The union recently put its Madison headquarters up for sale to shore up its finances.

As unions have lost their sway, teaching has become a less attractive profession. School districts have struggled to hire and retain teachers. A study from the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum found that between the 2008-09 and 2013-14 school years, the number of people entering Wisconsin teacher-training programs declined by 28 percent and the number of teachers in the state dropped by 2.4 percent, even as the number of students remained nearly constant. In 2013, schools attracted an average of 4.9 applicants per open teaching position, according to data from the Wisconsin Education Career Access Network. By 2015, that average had dipped to 3.3 applicants. Last August, with the start of the school year weeks away, state Superintendent Tony Evers was forced to offer more emergency one-year teaching licenses in order to expand the pool of applicants.

Act 10 has thinned the ranks of both veteran teachers and younger ones. Thanks to the old collective bargaining agreements, Wisconsin teachers used to enjoy generous benefits that allowed people to retire at age 55 and receive a full pension, though many teachers continued teaching into their 60s. But Act 10 threatened to strip away those benefits once the agreements expired, leading many teachers who were eligible for retirement to make their exit years earlier than planned. “We lost a lot of people who developed the expertise over the years to reach kids at their various learning styles,” says John Matthews, who led Madison’s teachers’ union for 48 years. “Those people were leaving en masse.”

The teachers who remain, meanwhile, have been forced to take on extra work to make up for the shortage. The La Crosse school district, for example, tried to solve budget problems by saddling its newest high school teachers with an additional class, at the expense of time spent developing a curriculum and grading papers. John Havlicek, a Spanish teacher in his 21st year and a union representative, says he’s never seen so few teachers take on secondary roles as coaches—they simply don’t have the time for sports. “Within two years, you had teachers leaving because they just couldn’t keep up,” Havlicek says. “It doesn’t seem like it, but 30 more kids and one less period in which to help kids who come in for help was a double whammy.” (The school district is rolling back the change after pressure from teachers and parents.)

In 2011, Walker signed legislation that cut the state’s K-12 education funding by $792 million over two years. If districts want to increase taxes for school funding, they’re required to hold referendums. Last November, 67 such measures were on ballots across the state, with 55 passing. Schools are also getting crunched by state Republicans’ zeal for voucher programs that use public funds to send students to religious and other private schools. Walker has called vouchers a “moral imperative” and expanded their use in 2015, lifting income caps for families to qualify. That year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction warned that school districts would receive less funding because of the voucher program. In the two years since, those schools have lost $41.4 million.

“The shortage of money is causing class sizes to be larger than they should be,” Matthews says. “It’s causing teachers not to have the resources like new textbooks, workbooks. Those resources just aren’t there. And there’s been a cutback in assistance work in the classrooms, a cutback in music, art, and phys-ed teachers. It’s hit the quality of education.”

With unions diminished at the state level, conservatives have shifted their attention to weakening them and their influence in liberal cities where they remain relatively strong. In the old manufacturing city of Kenosha, the school board continued to negotiate with the local teachers’ union, although it didn’t have to under Act 10. So in a 2014 election, Americans for Prosperity—­the main political arm of the Koch brothers—got involved in the school board race, in which two seats held by vocally pro-union members were up for grabs. The group set up phone banks and sent people campaigning door to door. The incumbents were replaced with anti-union candidates.

Act 10 requires annual recertification elections in which at least 51 percent of all eligible members—including those who don’t show up—must vote in favor of a union to keep the chapter alive. Bob Peterson, the head of the Milwaukee teachers’ union from 2011 to 2015, says these annual elections can cost thousands of dollars and force unions to run full-scale phone-banking operations. Last year, 11 WEAC affiliates lost recertification votes. In the small eastern Wisconsin town of New Holstein, all 42 teachers who voted backed recertification, but there were another 42 members who didn’t vote, so the local union disappeared.

Peterson has warned his peers in other states for years that Wisconsin could be the test case for the country. “I generally start out by saying, ‘I’m from Wisconsin,'” he explains. “‘I’m from your future. There’s some lessons to learn.’ I sort of thought I was exaggerating, but with the Trump election I don’t think I was. What has gone on in Wisconsin for the last five and a half years is what very well could happen nationwide.”

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Who Moved My Teachers?

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