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The President Bets on Arms Sales Big Time |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53287"><span class="small">William D. Hartung, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 11 February 2020 14:07 |
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Hartung writes: "Donald Trump likes to posture as a tough guy and part of that tough-guy persona involves bragging about how much he's spent on the U.S. military. This tendency was on full display in a tweet he posted three days after an American drone killed Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad."
Crewmasters with Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 352, Marine Aircraft Group 11, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, prepare to refuel an F/A-18 Hornet over the W-291 training area in southern California, March 6, 2019. (photo: Sgt. Dominic Romero/US Marine Corps)
The President Bets on Arms Sales Big Time
By William D. Hartung, TomDispatch
11 February 20
When it came to war, this year’s State of the Union Address, given by a president who had, at least in part, been voted into office for criticizing America’s “endless wars” and the military high command that fought them, was eerie. Since we’re talking about Donald Trump, it was, of course, also filled with braggadocio about his role in loosing, as well as supporting, the U.S. military: “To safeguard American liberty, we have invested a record-breaking $2.2 trillion in the United States military. We have purchased the finest planes, missiles, rockets, ships, and every other form of military equipment, and it's all made right here in the USA.”
There was his glorying in the deaths of the leader of ISIS (“the bloodthirsty killer known as al-Baghdadi”) and of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani (“the world’s top terrorist”). “Last month," he crowed, "at my direction, the U.S. military executed a flawless precision strike that killed Suleimani and terminated his evil reign of terror forever.”
There were the usual lies and exaggerated claims, including this howler (given the way the president has increased the American troop presence in the region): “As we defend American lives, we are working to end America's wars in the Middle East.”
There was that subtle reminder that last year he had implicitly threatened to win the war in Afghanistan by using nuclear weapons there. As he put it in speaking to a wildly divided House of Representatives, “I am not looking to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, many of them totally innocent.”
And the president who had promised to bring American troops home from those wars and the Greater Middle East more generally -- but has done the very opposite -- finally staged a genuine homecoming (of one) for his national TV audience, the surprise reuniting of a mother and her two children with her serviceman husband who had been in Afghanistan for the last seven months (his fourth tour of duty in America's war zones, by the way).
As TomDispatch regular William Hartung points out today, our “antiwar” president is now focusing on that very military and its funding (and on weapons sales abroad) as a potential key to victory next November. Think of him as our very own antiwar warmonger.
The question is: In November will Americans say “You’re fired!” to him?
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 onald Trump likes to posture as a tough guy and part of that tough-guy persona involves bragging about how much he’s spent on the U.S. military. This tendency was on full display in a tweet he posted three days after an American drone killed Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad:
“The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way... and without hesitation!”
That tweet was as much a message to the American public as to Iran’s rulers. Its subtext: that Donald J. Trump (and he alone) has restored the U.S. military to greatness after two terms of neglect under the less-than-watchful eye of Barack Obama, that he’s not afraid to use it, and that he deserves credit for everything he’s done, which means, of course, widespread political support. Never mind that Washington has “only” spent about one-third of his claimed $2 trillion on military equipment since he took office and that Pentagon spending reached a post-World War II record high in the Obama years. No surprise there: Trump has never let the facts get in the way of a good story he’s dying to tell.
He has, by the way, made similar claims to his most important audience of all: his donors. At a January 17th get-together with key supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his lavish Florida resort, he bragged that Pentagon spending had increased by $2.5 trillion on his watch. In fact, that figure is closer to total Pentagon spending in the Trump years. For his claim to be accurate, the Pentagon budget would have had to be $0 in January 2017 when he entered the Oval Office. Still, however outlandish what he says about the military may be, the underlying theme remains remarkably consistent: I’m the guy who’s funding our military like never before, so you should keep supporting me big time.
Don’t get me wrong. In collaboration with Congress, Donald Trump has indeed boosted the Pentagon budget to near-record levels. At $738 billion this year alone, it’s already substantially higher than U.S. spending at the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam Wars or during the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s. It’s more than the total amount spent by the next seven nations in the world combined (five of which are U.S. allies). Only Donald Trump could manage to distort, misstate, and exaggerate sums that are already beyond belief in the service of an inflated self-image and ambitious political objectives.
Political Manipulation and “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”
President Trump’s recent antics should come as no surprise. His use of Pentagon spending and military assistance for political gain has been hiding in plain sight since he entered the Oval Office. After all, that’s what the impeachment charges against him were all about. He was manipulating U.S. military aid to Ukraine to strong-arm its government into generating dirt on Joe Biden whom Trump, obsessed by poll numbers, saw at the time as his most threatening rival.
And don’t forget the president’s penchant for dipping into the Pentagon budget to pay for his cherished wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, a vanity project that plays extremely well with his political base. So far, he’s proposed taking $13.3 billion from the Defense Department’s budget to fund that “big, fat, beautiful wall,” $6.1 billion of which has already been granted to him. For good measure, Trump pushed the Pentagon to award a $400 million contract for building part of the wall to Fisher Sand and Gravel, a North Dakota firm owned by one of his donors.
For Trump, the Ukraine scandal and the wall aside, the real politics of Pentagon spending -- that is, of translating military dollars into potential votes in 2020 -- will come, he hopes, from his relentless touting of the alleged jobs being generated by weapons production. His initial major foray into portraying the buying and selling of arms as a jobs program for the American people occurred during a May 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, his first foreign visit as president. He promptly announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudi regime that would, he swore, mean “jobs, jobs, jobs” in the United States.
In reality, the agreement itself -- and the jobs to come from it -- were both far less than advertised, but the message was clear enough: this country’s deal-maker extraordinaire was selling weapons over there and bringing jobs back in a major way to the good old U.S. of A. Even though many of the vaunted arms deals he boasted about had been reached during the Obama years, he had, he insisted, gotten the Saudis to pay through the nose for weaponry that would put staggering numbers of Americans to work.
The Saudi gambit was planned well in advance. In the middle of a meeting with a Saudi delegation in a reception room next door to the White House, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner suddenly called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson. He asked her about a missile-defense system the administration wanted to include in the mega-arms package the president was planning to announce during his upcoming visit to the Kingdom. According to a New York Times account of the meeting, the Saudis’ jaws dropped when Kushner dialed up Hewson in front of them. They were amazed that things actually worked that way in Trump’s America. That call apparently did the trick, as the Lockheed missile-defense system was indeed incorporated into the arms deal to come.
The arms-sales-equals-jobs drumbeat continued when Trump returned home from his foreign travels, most notably in a March 2018 White House meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. There, in front of TV cameras, the president brandished a map showing where tens of thousands of U.S. jobs linked to those Saudi arms deals would supposedly be created. Many of them were concentrated in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan that had provided his margin of victory in the 2016 election.
His trumpeting of employment linked to Saudi arms sales went further over the top when he claimed that more than half a million American jobs were tied to the sales his administration had negotiated. The real number is expected to be less than a tenth of that total and well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.
Much as Trump would like Americans to believe that U.S. weapons transfers to the brutal Saudi dictatorship are a boon to the economy, they are, in reality, barely a blip on the radar screen of total national employment. The question, of course, is whether enough voters will believe the president’s Saudi arms fairy tale to give him a bump in support.
Even after the Saudi regime’s murder of journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi, the president continued to argue that the revenues from those arms deals were a reason to avoid a political rupture with that nation. Unlike on so many other issues, Trump’s claims on arms sales and jobs are maddeningly consistent, if also maddeningly off the mark.
Trump to Ohio: “You Better Love Me”
Perhaps the president’s most blatant linkage of Pentagon spending-related jobs to his political future came in a March 2019 speech at an Army tank plant in Lima, Ohio. After a round of “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” chants from the assembled crowd, Trump got right down to it:
“Well, you better love me; I kept this place open, that I can tell you. [Applause.] They said, ‘We’re closing it.’ And I said, ‘No we’re not.’ And now you’re doing record business... And I’m thrilled to be here in Ohio with the hardworking men and women of Lima.”
Of course, the president wasn’t actually responsible for keeping the plant open. In the early 2010s, the Army had a plan to put that plant on “mothball” status for a few years because it already had 6,000 tanks -- far more than it needed. But that plan had been ditched before Trump ever took office in no small part due to bipartisan pressure from the Ohio congressional delegation.
Misleading statements aside, the Lima plant is doing just fine at a time when the Pentagon budget is running at nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars per year, and Trump is capitalizing on it. He repeatedly returned to the jobs argument in his Lima speech, and even reeled off a list of other parts of the country involved in tank production:
“Our investment will also support thousands of additional jobs across our nation to assemble these incredible Abrams tanks. The engines are from Alabama, transmissions are from Indiana, special armor from Idaho, and the 120-millimeter gun -- and the gun parts from upstate New York and from Pennsylvania. All great places. In Ohio alone, almost 200 suppliers churn out parts and materials that go into every tank that rolls off this factory’s floor. Incredible.”
Trump may not be able to find all the places in which the U.S. is at war on a map, but he’s made a point of getting well briefed on where the money that fuels the U.S. war machine goes, because he views that information as essential to his political fortunes in 2020.
The Domestic Economics of Weapons Spending
What Trump failed to mention in his Lima speech is that much of America is not heavily dependent on Pentagon weapons outlays. The F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons system in history and widely touted as a major job creator, is a case in point. The plane’s producer, Lockheed Martin, claims that the project has created 125,000 jobs spread over 45 states. The reality is far less impressive. My own analysis suggests that the F-35 program produces less than half as many jobs as Lockheed claims and that more than half of them are located in just two states -- California and Texas. In fact, many of them are located overseas.
Most states are not heavily dependent on Pentagon spending. According to that institution’s own figures, in 39 of the 50 states less than 3% of the economy is tied to it. In other words, 97% or more of the economic activity in most of the country has nothing to do with such spending.
In reality, despite the dreams and claims of the president, the national economy as a whole, as well as the economies of the vast majority of states, would be far better off if Pentagon spending were reduced and the funds freed up were invested elsewhere. That’s because it’s actually a particularly poor job creator. Spending on infrastructure or green-energy projects, for example, would create one and one-half times as many jobs as Pentagon spending does. Putting the same money into the public education system would create roughly twice as many jobs. In 2019, in a paper for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Heidi Peltier showed that shifting $125 billion per year from the Pentagon to green manufacturing would result in a net increase of 250,000 jobs nationwide.
As for places that do depend on Pentagon dollars in a significant way, recent polling shows that even residents of those areas are willing to support cuts in the Department of Defense’s bloated budget. Writing in the Nation, Guy Saperstein of the New Ideas Fund and Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione note: “Our polling suggests that the majority of voters will still call for cuts in Pentagon spending even if it affects their local communities, both because they believe their communities will recover and the money could be spent in more productive ways in the long run.”
That sentiment was remarkably strong in such communities, with 77% of poll participants agreeing with the statement that “members of Congress who use the Pentagon budget to send more jobs to their districts should find ways to support their local economies by building things that actually improve people’s lives.”
The best option for creating alternative jobs for workers displaced by a reduction in Pentagon spending is large-scale investment in green energy and sustainable infrastructure. Not only could a comprehensive Green New Deal create millions of new jobs, but it would provide employment across a broad range of occupations, potentially absorbing workers from defense, coal, and other industries. The only issue is political will, no small problem in Washington in the Trump years. Even a progressive president would undoubtedly encounter serious difficulty enacting such changes if the Senate remains in Republican hands after the 2020 elections.
Will Trump’s Gamble Work?
Donald Trump isn’t the first president to try to parlay Pentagon funding into political support, but he’s been more aggressive and systematic in his efforts than any president in memory. That doesn’t necessarily mean the ploy will work. Admittedly, there are high profile weapons projects in key swing states like Ohio (tanks), Pennsylvania (artillery), and Wisconsin (combat ships and armored vehicles). Still, in 2020, many voters are visibly looking for more than just business as usual, as evidenced by significant support for initiatives like the Green New Deal.
Running as the candidate of the military-industrial complex while ignoring urgent problems like climate change may not prove to be the magic formula for political success Trump expects it to be. That could be especially true if his opponents put forward concrete plans to create new non-military jobs in areas particularly dependent on the Pentagon budget.
Ten months from now we’ll know whether Trump’s attempt to ride the Pentagon to reelection was a wise gamble or ultimate foolishness. In the meantime, tax dollars going into the U.S. military continue to rise.
William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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FOCUS: As Roger Stone Awaits Sentencing Trump Hints at Pardon |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51552"><span class="small">Igor Derysh, Salon</span></a>
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Tuesday, 11 February 2020 13:07 |
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Derysh writes: "President Donald Trump lashed out at federal prosecutors who recommended that his oldest political adviser, Roger Stone, serve up to nine years in prison after his conviction in former special counsel Bob Mueller's investigation."
Roger Stone. (photo: Joe Raedle)
As Roger Stone Awaits Sentencing Trump Hints at Pardon
By Igor Derysh, Salon
11 February 20
“This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” Trump tweeted at 1 a.m. "Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!"
 resident Donald Trump lashed out at federal prosecutors who recommended that his oldest political adviser, Roger Stone, serve up to nine years in prison after his conviction in former special counsel Bob Mueller's investigation.
Trump called the Department of Justice's recommendation that Stone serve seven to nine years behind bars "disgraceful."
"This is a horrible and very unfair situation," Trump tweeted just after 1 a.m. ET Tuesday morning. "The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!"
Stone was convicted in November of making false statements to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection to his contacts with WikiLeaks, which released emails stolen from Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign by Russian military hackers during the 2016 campaign.
He joins former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, Manafort's deputy Rick Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos as Trump aides convicted in Mueller's probe into the campaign's ties to Russia.
Prosecutors said in a 26-page sentencing memo Monday that Stone's crimes call for a sentence of 87 to 108 months in prison.
"Roger Stone obstructed Congress' investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, lied under oath and tampered with a witness," prosecutors said in the filing. "When his crimes were revealed by the indictment in this case, he displayed contempt for this court and the rule of law."
Prosecutors said during trial that Stone tried to hide his attempts to coordinate the release of the Clinton emails with Wikileaks. Stone also tried to threaten his friend Randy Credico to stop him from testifying to Congress, according to the Justice Department.
Stone "made repeated efforts to obtain information from an organization called WikiLeaks that could help the Trump campaign," the filing said, detailing his attempts to contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his public claims of inside information about upcoming releases.
"During this time period, Stone regularly communicated with senior Trump campaign officials," who "believed Stone was providing them with non-public information about WikiLeaks' plans" and "viewed Stone as the Trump campaign's access point to WikiLeaks."
Stone later lied to Congress about his efforts, prosecutors said.
"Stone's false statements about documents had a significant impact on the committee's investigation," the filing said, and prevented others from submitting evidence to investigators.
The filing went on to detail Stone's defiance of a gag order issued in the case as he sought to raise money for his legal defense.
"Foreign election interference is the 'most deadly adversar[y] of republican government,'" it said, quoting Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Papers No. 68. "The House Intelligence Committee that Stone obstructed was examining allegations that 'the Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith in the democratic process.' . . . It is against this backdrop that Stone's crimes — his obstruction, lies and witness tampering — must be judged . . . Stone chose — consciously, repeatedly and flagrantly — to obstruct and interfere with the search for the truth on an issue of vital importance to all Americans."
Many observers predicted that Trump could pardon Stone or commute his sentence after his late-night diatribe.
"While you were sleeping, the president was teeing up another potential pardon for another criminal ally," The Washington Post's Aaron Blake tweeted.
"Either he's gearing up to pardon this crony / criminal," CNN legal analyst Elie Honig added, "or he's getting ready to deploy [Attorney General Bill] Barr against perceived politics enemies. Or both."
After Trump reacted to his impeachment acquittal by purging his administration of officials that testified against him, national security attorney Bradley Moss predicted that the paperwork to commute Stone's sentence and any sentence that Flynn gets "likely is already drafted."
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Lindsey Graham Implicates William Barr in Massive Scandal, on Live Television |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Tuesday, 11 February 2020 09:38 |
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Chait writes: "Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Face the Nation and blurted out an apparent confession of what, if true, would be a scandal of Nixonian proportions."
Lindsey Graham might not have been supposed to say this. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Lindsey Graham Implicates William Barr in Massive Scandal, on Live Television
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
11 February 20
 esterday, Senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Face the Nation and blurted out an apparent confession of what, if true, would be a scandal of Nixonian proportions. Graham reported he had spoken with Attorney General William Barr that morning. “The Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy,” he reported, explaining that Barr “told me that they’ve created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”
Graham explained why, in his opinion, this state of affairs is appropriate: “Rudy Giuliani is a well-known man. He’s a crime fighter. He’s loyal to the president. He’s a good lawyer.” On the contrary, he is describing an arrangement that is not only the appearance of a conflict of interest but a massive abuse on its face.
First, Giuliani is not a government official. He is representing Donald Trump as an individual, a fact he has made perfectly clear. He boasted to the New York Times last May that he was seeking to uncover “information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.” The distinction between “will” and “may” was Rudy’s open acknowledgement that he was looking out for Trump, not the U.S. government, and that the interests of the two might not be the same. He was even more clear in a letter to Ukrainian President Zelensky, which his former partner, Lev Parnas, produced. The letter stated Giuliani was representing Trump “as a private citizen, not as President of the United States”.
So, can any private citizen have their lawyer send allegations to Barr? What is this special “process” he created to let Rudy supply him with allegations? Is it a 1-800 number, a drop box, or what? Has Barr told the Democratic candidates how the process works so they can have their lawyers feed their own leads to him?
The second problem here is that Giuliani is not only representing a presidential candidate as his personal client. He is working in close contact with foreign partners who have a combination of personal interests and foreign-policy goals that do not line up with U.S. interests. He has not disclosed who is paying him for his work, but he was paid half a million dollars by Parnas, who was in turn paid by Dymtro Firtash, a Russian oligarch whose work tends to advance Russian foreign-policy interests. This raises the strong possibility that Giuliani is effectively a paid backchannel for Russian propaganda, and he now has a special line into the Department of Justice.
Third, Giuliani himself is the reported subject of a criminal investigation. Two of his partners have already been arrested, and the Department of Justice is reportedly pursuing the possibility of charges against Giuliani as well. (He allegedly pursued his own profit-making scheme in Ukraine, and seems to have committed campaign finance violations, by funneling foreign donations to Republican allies.)
Normally, people who are being investigated by the DOJ don’t have a special back channel that lets them feed allegations of their own to the attorney general. I am pretty sure that, if the DOJ opened up an investigation of me, and arrested two of my partners as they tried to leave the country with one-way tickets, I couldn’t just open up my own back channel to their boss.
Graham defends this on the grounds that Giuliani is a “crime fighter,” a label Trump himself has used. But there is no “crime fighter” badge that lets you go into private practice with a bunch of crooks, and have your allegations given special attention by the authorities. Or, at least, there shouldn’t be.
Now, just because Graham confessed this gigantic scandal doesn’t mean the confession is true. Graham is, um, a complicated figure. He might be lying about what Barr told him, or Barr might have been lying to him.
The Department of Justice refused to comment on Graham’s statement, though. This seems like the kind of transparent violation the leading law enforcement agency ought to be able to say is not happening and cannot happen. (If Hillary Clinton’s ally said in 2016 the attorney general had a special process to let her private lawyer feed dirt on Trump to the Department of Justice, there is a 100 percent chance the department would insist this was false.) That DOJ cannot even deny an obvious abuse is a sign things have gotten pretty far out of hand.
Update: Barr confirmed today that the Department has “established an intake process,” because it “has an obligation to have an open door to anybody.” But if it has an obligation to have an open door to anybody, hasn’t that open door always existed? Why did Barr have to establish a new one?
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Students With Disabilities Deserve a Quality Education. Bernie's New Disability Rights Platform Would Give Them One. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53283"><span class="small">Heather Gautney and Eric Blanc, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 11 February 2020 09:38 |
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Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders introduced a new Disability Rights platform this past week that, together with his Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, offers a path to provide all students with a high-quality education, regardless of their background or zip code."
Democratic Presidential Candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders looks on during a press conference at his New Hampshire campaign headquarters on February 6, 2020 in Manchester, New Hampshire. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Students With Disabilities Deserve a Quality Education. Bernie's New Disability Rights Platform Would Give Them One.
By Heather Gautney and Eric Blanc, Jacobin
11 February 20
Bernie Sanders introduced a new Disability Rights platform this past week that, together with his Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, offers a path to provide all students with a high-quality education, regardless of their background or zip code.
 verybody acknowledges that public education across the United States is in dire straits. But establishment politicians continue to overlook the particularly deep crisis in special education, on which over 6.5 million students depend.
The extent to which students with disabilities remain invisible to policy makers was most glaringly evident in the January 2017 confirmation hearing of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. When questioned about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the landmark federal law that over forty years ago set out to protect students with disabilities, DeVos erroneously claimed that states could decide for themselves to comply with the law. Only after Senator Maggie Hassan informed her that the IDEA is in fact a federal law did DeVos concede that “I may have confused it.”
Unfortunately, DeVos is not the only leader to overlook the importance of special education, despite the fact that it serves 14 percent of students in this country. The IDEA, the original iteration of which was passed in 1975, mandated the federal government to cover 40 percent of the cost of educating children with disabilities. Yet as a comprehensive 2018 report from the National Council on Disability explained, the federal government is currently paying less than half of its originally promised per-pupil funding. As Bernie Sanders pointed out when sponsoring a 2008 amendment to increase the special education budget by $10 billion, “kids with special ed needs are not getting the attention they deserve.”
Though the federal government continues to plead poverty when it comes to students with disabilities, it somehow manages to find over $600 billion dollars yearly for the Department of Defense. This systematic underfunding of the IDEA punishes precisely those students in our society who need the most help — as well as those educators who aspire to teach them.
Class sizes have mushroomed, often leading schools to force together students with widely different types of disabilities, ranging from emotional and behavioral disturbances, to acute learning or physical disabilities. And while schools in richer and whiter districts are sometimes able to cobble together funds for students with disabilities by raising local property taxes, working-class public schools, disproportionately educating black and brown students, are abandoned to their fate.
Those who work in special education increasingly fail to receive the basic material and professional support that they need. “We used to have money for updated materials and professional development,” notes Vicki Zasadny, a special education teacher in Western Wyandotte County, Kansas. “Now we pretty much have money for paper and pencils.” Unsurprisingly, the number of special education teachers, already low to begin with, has dropped by more than 17 percent nationwide over the last decade.
To make matters worse, the underfunding of special education has been further exacerbated by billionaire-backed privatization efforts. As a 2019 study by United Teachers Los Angeles demonstrates, the percentage of students with disabilities in public schools has risen because of the spread of charter schools, which tend to under-enroll students with disabilities. In Oakland, for example, charters enrolled students with disabilities at about half the public school rate. All in all, these disparities cost the districts of Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego upwards of $97.19 million in funding.
To address these educational injustices, Bernie Sanders introduced a new Disability Rights platform last week that together with his Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education offers a path to provide all students with a high quality education, regardless of their background or zip code.
Released last spring, Sanders’s Thurgood Marshall Plan calls for aggressively reinvesting in public schools, reversing racial segregation, and eliminating high-stakes testing. Its provisions also include tripling Title I funding for schools with students from low-income families, substantially raising teacher pay, universal school lunches, and modernizing and greening schools.
Because underfunding the IDEA has caused enormous suffering and lack of opportunity for millions of students with disabilities, the plan also includes increased federal funding for educating students with disabilities. Sanders wants to ensure that the federal government provides at least 50 percent of the funding for students with disabilities, beyond the original 40 percent commitment set out in 1975. His new Disability Rights plan supplements that funding by providing schools with 100 percent of the additional costs of educating students with disabilities in general education classrooms, above the average per pupil price-tag.
Sanders’s plan to set a baseline starting annual salary of $60,000 for all teachers would especially help those who work in special education, whose average starting salary is roughly $42,000. That increase, along with grant programs to cover out-of-pocket expenses and ongoing professional development, would go a long way in addressing the profound shortage of special needs teachers nationwide, which in many parts of the country has reached crisis levels.
Sanders has not hesitated to call out the hedge-funders and billionaire “philanthropists” trying to privatize our public school system. Following the NAACP’s lead, he supports placing a moratorium on all charter school expansion until they can be made publicly accountable, and he wants to ban for-profit charters altogether.
He also opposes high-stakes testing, which is particularly important for special needs students and teachers. Sanders has been vocal about teachers being treated with the professional respect to determine their own evaluation methods based on their expertise and knowledge of their students’ learning styles and needs.
Some students with disabilities suffer immeasurably from the stresses of being forced to take tests that are not appropriate for their aptitude level. In a recent op-ed in USA Today, Sanders recalled a discussion he had with a teacher in South Carolina who had been forced to administer a standardized test to a child with a severe disability. The teacher described the experience to him as “torture.”
Sanders often points out that none of these changes can be achieved without a mass movement that is willing to take on the political establishment and big-money interests. The educator strikes that have spread from West Virginia to Los Angeles, Chicago, Little Rock, and beyond show exactly what this kind of bottom-up struggle can look like — and what working-class people can achieve against seemingly insurmountable odds.
When elected to the White House, Bernie Sanders will fight alongside educators in the Red for Ed movement to ensure that every student in this country receives an excellent public education. Turning this vision into a reality means putting the needs of students with disabilities, and the educators that serve them, at the center of the struggle for education justice. We cannot afford to wait any longer.
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n Sunday, Lindsey Graham revealed that Rudy Giuliani was feeding information about Ukraine and the Bidens directly to the Justice Department. Today, Attorney General William Barr confirmed in a press conference that the Justice Department has set up an “intake process” for any information that Rudy Giuliani may have about Ukraine.
