Tax Day Meme

Down with Tyranny:

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Remembering also that all us working stiffs are paying way more in federal taxes this year because of the Trump Tax Cut for Rich Fuckwads.

Repug Policy

Down with Tyranny:

The Wrong Way to Legalize Pot

After trillions of wasted dollars and millions of wasted lives, the repugs are finally giving up on the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs.  But not before they make sure all the profits from legalization will keep going to already filthy rich white repug men.

Zandar:

Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved the legalization of marijuana earlier this month in order to gain tax revenue to pay for schools and roads.  But Republicans in the state's lame duck session are making sure that tax money goes to cops instead, with nothing for students, and that the profits go to corporate growers with both deep ties and deep pockets to give to lawmakers.

A bill proposed by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, would significantly change the voter-approved recreational marijuana program in Michigan, including by drastically lowering the tax revenue the state is set to receive.

Proposal 1 passed with 56 percent of the vote Nov. 6. It will take effect next week.

Meekhof, R-West Olive, introduced the bill Thursday.

In addition to lowering the tax rate from 10 percent to three percent, the bill cuts out Michigan's schools and roads from receiving tax revenue from legal marijuana. The state's six percent sales tax would still apply, said Amber McCann, Meekhof's spokeswoman.

"It's disrespectful to the political process and it's disrespectful to the voters of Michigan," said Josh Hovey, spokesman for the coalition behind the ballot proposal, of Meekhof's bill.

"The people of Michigan have spoken. They knew what they were voting on."

Tax revenue from marijuana sales could reach $287.9 million by the time the market matures in Michigan under the tax structure in Proposal 1, according to a Senate Fiscal Agency analysis. It's unclear how much revenue Meekhof's proposal would draw.

Under Proposal 1, Michigan has one of the lowest tax rates on adult-use marijuana in the country. Under Meekhof's proposed bill, Michigan would have the lowest tax rate in the country. The bill redirects the revenue to municipalities (25 percent), counties (30 percent) and county sheriffs (5 percent) that have marijuana facilities, and 30 percent for state police, police training and first responder disability benefits.

Meekhof's bill, Senate Bill 1243, proposes other major changes to the voter-approved Proposal 1; including eliminating the ability for individuals to grow marijuana at home and cutting out a micro-grower's license.

Proposal 1 allows for individuals to grow up to 12 plants at home, and up to 150 plants at home with a micro-grower's license.

Republicans have such a huge majority in Michigan thanks to gerrymandering that there's a chance that this passes, but it'll take Democrats too because the measure would need a 75% margin to pass. But sending all the tax money to counties with state-approved growing operations (all rural, natch) means Detroit gets zero, and it means that the growing can become yet another industry in the pocket of corporate owners and donors.

That was the plan all along, and it's dank as hell.

Hands Off Social Security, Motherfuckers

Killing Social Security is the repug holy grail.  Once the social program that allows workers disabled by destructive corporations and exhausted by decades of unpaid overtime to retire with dignity is dead, then the billionaires can force everyone who is not filthy rich to work literally to death without relief, and the New Gilded Age will be permanent.

Ddown with Tyranny:

Your Tax Dollars in the Greedy Mitts of Super-Rich Fckwads

Zandar nails it:

Just remember that when Republicans tell you that we can't afford roads, bridges, schools, clean water, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and health care, just remember they had no problem giving Apple $47 billion a year to buy their own stock.

Privatizing is About Nothing But Corporate Greed

As Kentucky Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You prepares to use his budget director's lies to justify gutting what remains of state government, keep this to hand as a reminder that the only thing billionaire privatizers build is their own offshore bank accounts,.

 

Anything that qualifies as a public service - education, health care, transportation, water and sewer, veterans benefits, law enforcement, criminal justice, parks and recreation and more - must be provided by public servants, not corporate interests.  Public servants who are well-paid, with full benefits including generous defined-benefit pensions.  That is because only such public servants on the public payroll can be trusted to do what is in the public service.

Public servants do not work for profit.  They work for the people.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Privatization of any public service is not about quality. It's about ideology and about into whose pockets tax dollars flow. It arises from the privatizer's belief that any product or service provided by "we the people" that might even in theory be provided by the private sector is a crime against capitalism. They don't see a need to be filled or a service to be improved or a duty to be met. They see billions of dollar$ budgeted annually of which they are not getting their cut.

They want to privatize public education — a middle-man in every middle school — because the single largest component of every state's annual budget is education and They. Want. Their. Cut. So they have demonized teachers and public pensions and public servants who stand between them and their payday. They have cut budgets to degrade services and hasten institutional decline to pave the way for eliminating the public from public service and services.

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Those promoting privatizaton want to sell off publicly owned infrastructure for a song, public trusts you, your parents and grandparents and I paid through our lifetimes to build and maintain. Privatizers do not want to fix public infrastructure. They want to extract profits from it. They are rentiers looking to suck even harder off the public teat with far less accountability.

The VA is yet another program they hope to turn into a profit-producing venture by cutting costs and shortchanging patients under the rubric of "efficiency." And when they have sucked all the profit they can from it, they will abandon it for the next investment opportunity and discard its empty husk, like a retailer with an underperforming big-box store.

And public education? They want to privatize it as well, slowly weakening its funding by diverting resources to vouchers and charters because, you know, choice and competition. The real goal is to increase the pressure to fully privatize public education mandated by state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific since their adoption, thus to open "the Big Enchilada" to private investors. They too will cut costs and services to shave off more public tax dollars for themselves, meaning less for children's education.

The vultures are slowly privatizing prisons as well, and perversely incentivizing lawmakers, judges and law enforcement to keep prison beds filled and investors' portfolios padded. I'm wondering when individual Americans get vouchers from the Pentagon to purchase their own national defense. Because, you know, choice and competition.

But what happens to public schools and children's education, for example, when the system is fully privatized and hollowed out, and investors decide the hot new investment opportunity lies somewhere else? They just walk away. Investors have no commitment to the public good, no faith to keep with public trust, only to their bottom lines, especially for services like the VA's that are not and were never intended to be for-profit. Want to improve the VA? Improve the VA. Privatizing it is its death sentence.

Privatizers are the Midas cult. They believe anything that can be turned into gold should be, including wounded veterans and children. They are the corporate raider from Pretty Woman, who believes more in making money than in building things. They don't believe in this country. They believe in stripping it. Their lobbyists have turned our legislatures into chop shops so they can sell off America for parts. They have no shame, because shame is not as profitable as having none.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail. (If you are already on my email list, check your in-box.)

Bevin Moves to Get Rid of Pesky Teachers by Just Eliminating Public Education

Step One:  Strip the state economy down to bedrock and turn the treasury over to corporations.

Step Two:  ???????

Step Three:  Profit!

And give the charter school contracts to the same corrupt contractors taking over the state prisons.  Make that school-to-prison pipeline an express train.

The last public servant standing between Kentucky's schools and the corporate drone factories Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You will now install has been quit-fired and replaced with a charter school fuckhead.

From the Herald:

“Despite the outcry of tens of thousands of Kentuckians, today Governor Matt Bevin continued his offensive against public education, this time through proxies and behind closed doors,” said Kentucky Education Association President Stephanie Winkler, whose group had pushed back against the expected move earlier in the day. “Dr. Stephen Pruitt has been a strong and effective champion for our students and public schools. Forcing an honorable and highly qualified man to resign from his position without any cause is contrary to the best interests of students across the Commonwealth.”

House Democratic Leader Rocky Adkins said that it was “a sad day for public education and the children of Kentucky. This is just another attempt by Governor Bevin to weaken and dismantle Kentucky’s education system and implement his agenda of charter schools.”

Pruitt was hired in 2015, when the board was controlled by appointees of former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear.

Bevin on Monday issued an executive order appointing seven new members to the board, including Hal Heiner, former Education and Workforce Development secretary, and the governor’s former communications director, Amanda Stamper. Heiner resigned his cabinet secretary job to take the new post. All seven seats were vacant as of Friday because the terms expired.

Bevin previously named four others to the board that develops policies governing Kentucky’s 173 school districts and the Kentucky Department of Education, so his appointees now have full control.

Colorado makes clear that charter school proponents have no place in the Democratic Party.  That's because charter fuckheads are repugs.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

A very short time ago, Rheeists were Democratic Party power players. Remember that charter schools and so-called “education reform” were at the very center of the Obama agenda. Not only was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan right out of that world, but he was also one of Obama’s closest advisors and oldest political friends. But given the utter bankruptcy of charter schools, a movement straight out of neoliberal privatization (which, despite the feelings of some LGM commenters, neoliberalism wasn’t a term made up by Bernie supporters to make Chait or Hillary supporters feel bad) that sought to provide “market solutions” to education problems that busted teachers’ unions and pretend like poverty wasn’t the biggest issue in education, it’s extremely refreshing to see Democrats purge charter school advocates. Take Colorado:

Delegates at the Colorado Democratic state assembly Saturday sent a clear message to the state chapter of Democrats for Education Reform: You don’t have a place in our party.

After booing down the head of the education reform organization, who described herself as a lifelong Democrat, delegates voted overwhelmingly Saturday to call for the organization to no longer use “Democrats” in its name. While it’s unclear how that would be enforced, the vote means a rejection of DFER is now part of the Colorado Democratic Party platform.

…

The platform amendment reads: “We oppose making Colorado’s public schools private or run by private corporations or becoming segregated again through lobbying and campaigning efforts of the organization called Democrats for Education Reform and demand that they immediately stop using the party’s name Democrat in their name.”

SNIP

There simply should not be any place for neoliberals in the Democratic Party. Purge them all. The Democratic Party needs to stand for strong public schools, strong teachers’ unions, and a strong tax base to fund these things. I don’t want Cory Booker welcoming Mark Zuckerberg to talk about funding schools. I want Cory Booker talking about taxing Zuckerberg at 1950s tax rates to fund education. I want Rahm Emanuel to be forced into the Republican Party. The base revolt within the Democratic Party is happening different ways in different places, as Steve’s post from earlier today about New York and California indicates. But all of these revolts are positive. And when the Democratic Party is taken over by people who reject Republican-lite policies, well this is exactly the politics we should be engaging in. This is how conservatives took over the Republican Party and eliminated Nelson Rockefeller types from relevance. We must do the same. And indeed we are.

Only Gun Profits Matter

Tristero at Hullabaloo:

When I Say Privatizaation Kills, I Mean That Literally

Via Zandar:

Kiera Feldman at ProPublica takes a long look at the most dangerous job in the Big Apple: working the private garbage trucks that roam the city in the darkness.

SNIP

 In New York City overall, private sanitation trucks killed seven people in 2017. By contrast, city municipal sanitation trucks haven’t caused a fatality since 2014. SNIP

$80 bucks a shift for 18 hours and no benefits whatsoever, paid cash off the books and you have to buy your own uniform and safety gear, if you get paid at all.  That's where "cheaper, private carting" gets you in NYC these days.  And that's just the start of this piece.

Less than $5 an hour.  That's a literal crime: one-third of New York's mandated minimum wage.  Those workers should be getting 10 times that much. The owners of this criminal enterprise - and the city officials and employees who authorized the contract - get more than that.

Poor Suffering Corporations

And this doesn't even count the billions in direct subsidies.  Down with Tyranny:

 

 

And no, corporations do not create jobs.  Minimum-wage workers who have to spend every dime they make create jobs.

The Orange Loser's Real Accomplishments

Down with Tyranny has them:

1- Protecting Wall Street profits that siphon billions of dollars from retirement savers. 

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2- Letting employers hide fatal injuries that happen on their watch. 

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3- Allowing potentially billions of taxpayer dollars to go to private contractors who violate health and safety protections or fail to pay workers. 

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4- Undermining important regulations that protect workers and consumers.

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5- Allowing employers to penalize employees who don’t want to reveal their private medical information. 

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6- Gutting the strength of labor organizing by forcing unions to represent and protect non-dues-paying workers. 

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7- Cutting pay for construction workers on federally funded infrastructure projects. 

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8- Putting the brakes on overtime pay for the middle class. 

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9- Slashing the budget for the Department of Labor, hindering its ability to enforce wage theft and worker safety laws or provide job training programs. 

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10- Declining to raise the minimum wage and lift pay for low-wage workers. 

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Read the whole thing for the infuriating details.

The Resistance: Step Away From the Recycling Bin and Pick Up Pitchforks

And stop wearing pink on Breast Cancer Awareness Day, brought to you by the very companies whose toxic chemicals actually cause breast cancer.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

When consumer movements stop caring about pesticide exposure once new chemicals are created that don’t persist on the vegetables but hit hard and fast and thus poison farmworkers, which was one of the stories I discussed in Out of Sight, that’s a neoliberal aim. When parents move to the suburbs or put their kids in private school to save their children instead of fighting for better public schools where they live, that’s also a neoliberal aim. All of these things–including the Alar campaign, third party campaigns, pointless boycotts to make yourself feel righteous and good, claiming you are the problem because you take long showers even though 90% of water use is from industry and agriculture–prioritize the individual as hyper consumer with the power to change the world through consumption instead of doing the hard work of organizing for change. At best, these campaigns have the power to make small changes if enough of them care, but none of this actually challenges the power structures of oppression. And thus they all reinforce the power of capitalism to set the agenda in our society, more so ever day as the state is seen as a negative and business glorified.

Monetized Nation

Yes, we've always been capitalists.  But capitalists who tried to outlaw corporations (the Founding Fathers) and capitalists who abolished the capitalist epitome that was chattel slavery and capitalists who alleviated its worst abominations with a social safety net.

Fuck, even as late as the 1970s, corporations acknowledged a responsibility to their customers and their communities - at least until the "share price uber alles" movement took over the nation.

Not any more. Now it's so bad the Ferengi aren't a satire of greed so much as a glimpse of tomorrow's world.

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Slate's Jordan Weissmann writes:

Got that? Mulvaney says the White House is cutting Head Start to make sure it doesn't waste the taxes of single mothers in Detroit, because it's just that compassionate. Honestly, I would have more respect for the man if he'd stood up on stage with a stock pot and said the administration had decided that the poor should be boiled into bone broth. At least then he'd have the courage of his convictions.

"Proper function" is a most curious turn of phrase. In What is America for? a few weeks ago, I noted that caring for money has taken the place of caring for people in American governance. Mulvaney's response confirms that, as does Trump's choice of Goldman Sachs veterans for high positions in his administration (and Obama's before him). Serving money takes precedence over serving people — unless they have lots of money.

At Netroots-Detroit in 2014, Anat Shenker-Osorio spoke to the conceptual shift that makes not feeding hungry children and the elderly "compassionate." With schools, for example:

We've moved from this garden metaphor to the language of the factory, right? So we have inputs, and we have outputs and we ratchet up expectations, and the kid is a product of a good school.

The entailments of that metaphor are that children are like widgets, they're all uniform and why would the widgets need art? And the teachers are factory workers and they do a thing to the kids, and it's all the same and they're on a conveyor belt and they move to the next one after they've been tested and a stamp is put on their ass and they're... none are left behind.

This mechanistic language is so widespread, that we have now monetized children, right? We invest in the future and we invest in our kids, and they're too small to fail. And we can kid ourselves all we want, but the prevailing understanding of the investment frame is financial return. That is how it is used in language. And so we are saying, "The reason to do a thing, the reason it's right, is because it's lucrative"

KY Bill to Kill Public Education Not Dead Yet

You're not fooling anybody, Johnny boy; the minute defenders of public education relax their vigilance for a second, you'll shove that sucker down our throats.

A charter school bill backed by Gov. Matt Bevin could be in trouble in the 2017 General Assembly.

“I want to pass a version that’s best for our kids and if that means continuing to work on it in the interim, then that’s certainly a possibility at this time,” state Rep. John Carney R-Campbellsville, sponsor of House Bill 520 and chairman of the House Education Committee, said Wednesday.

“We could put something out and pass a charter bill but my goal, and I think all of our goals, is to pass what’s best for our students. Let’s don’t rush that. It would be nice to get it done. We’re still hopeful we can get it done by the end of the session, but obviously the clock’s ticking and I’m not going to rush to pass a bill that I don’t think that helps kids,” Carney told the Herald-Leader. “If we have to work on it over the interim that’s certainly a possibility.”

“There’s still some other things that we’re trying to work on,” Carney said Wednesday afternoon. He said he was working on language regarding the financing of public charter schools.

SNIP

Jason Bailey, executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, said charter schools could “divert resources from already underfunded public schools.”

That's the whole point.  Charter schools are nothing but a vacuum sucking tax dollars away from public schools and pouring it into the pockets of corporations and freakazoids.

OK, class. Because Johnny Carney and his greedy friends are hiding the facts, let's review:

When Betsy DeVos, your new Secretary of Education, forced charters on Detroit, those struggling schools went from struggling to catastrophic.

By 2015, a federal review of a grant application for Michigan charter schools found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the worst-performing 5 percent of public schools statewide. The number of charters on the list had doubled from 2010 to 2014.

“People here had so much confidence in choice and choice alone to close the achievement gap,” said Amber Arellano, the executive director of the Education Trust Midwest, which advocates higher academic standards. “Instead, we’re replicating failure.”

And of course they're cheating and abusing students of color and poverty, because denying good education to poor and minority children is another major charter goal. 

Wonkette:

Hope you’re ready for some edu-outrage this morning, because the good folks at investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica have published a damning look at how some school districts have found an ingenious way to raise test scores and graduation rates at their top schools: All they have to do is nudge the academically weakest students out of the good schools into private charter schools where they can be warehoused until they drop out. The “good” schools win awards for excellence, the charters turn a healthy profit for the companies that plop the low achievers down in front of computers all day, and everyone’s happy, except maybe the low-achieving students who, instead of getting extra help and a second chance for academic success, get shunted off to a dead-end school where they’re allowed to quietly fail. It’s OK! Those losers would have just dragged everyone else down anyway!

To illustrate how this nationwide problem plays out, the ProPublica report looks closely at two high schools in the Orlando, Florida, school system: the high-achieving Olympia High School, which “offers more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, even more afterschool clubs, and an array of sports from bowling to water polo,” and Sunshine High School, a for-profit charter located in a strip mall, just a couple doors down from a liquor store. Olympia High wins awards, attracts scholarships, and got listed in US News and World Report’s top 1,000 high schools. Sunshine High has its students sit at computers for four hours a day, and they’re lucky to ever see any live teaching. Big surprise: More than 85 percent of Sunshine High’s students are black or Hispanic. You know, disposable kids. ProPublica explains the sick symbiotic relationship between the prize-winning public school and the charter dumping ground:

Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst achievers to Sunshine. Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than $1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show – more than what the school spends on instruction.

But students lose out, a ProPublica investigation found. Once enrolled at Sunshine, hundreds of them exit quickly with no degree and limited prospects. The departures expose a practice in which officials in the nation’s tenth largest school district have for years quietly funneled thousands of disadvantaged students — some say against their wishes — into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts.

There is one thing and one thing only that improves public education for children of poverty: Money.  Lots and lots and lots of money.  Money to eliminate poverty. Money to build new schools.  Money to hire outstanding teachers and get class sizes down to 20. Money invested in schools, not corporate profits and freakazoid indoctrination.

KY Repugs Preparing to Execute Public Education

Public money filling the pockets of for-profit scammers.

"Schools" that accept only the wealthiest, whitest and most high-achieving students, leaving the children of color and poverty who most need help out in the cold. 

"Schools" that do not teach, but indoctrinate children into freakazoid religion, corporate obedience or other mindless conformity.

That and worse happened when charters replaced public education in New Orleans, and there is no protection against the same catastrophe in Kentucky

Valetie Honeycutt Spears at the Herald:

Republican state lawmakers have filed legislation for the 2017 General Assembly that would lead to significant changes for Kentucky public education, including charter schools, the statewide school accountability system and teacher requirements.

Republicans have control of the state House for the first time since 1921. Education bills that failed in the past could be on the fast track under the Republican majority. The session resumes in February. 

SNIP

Gay Adelmann said she is founder of a Louisville-based group called Save Our Schools Kentucky, which will oppose HB 103. She said a Lexington chapter is starting.

Charter schools, Adelmann said, “don’t work.”

“There’s no evidence that proves that they do any better than public schools when adjusted for demographics, they pick and choose their students that attend, and they open the door for abuse, fraud and waste,” said Adelmann. She said charter school systems in Ohio and other states have had problems.

Zandar has the lowdown on charters:

By any reasonable metric, the conversion to charter schools has been a disaster for the city and its people.

Last year, 63 percent of children in local elementary and middle schools were proficient on state tests, up from 37 percent in 2005. New research by Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance shows that the gains were largely because of the charter-school reforms, according to Douglas N. Harris, the alliance’s director. Graduation and college entry rates also increased over pre-Katrina levels.

But the New Orleans miracle is not all it seems. Louisiana state standards are among the lowest in the nation. The new research also says little about high school performance. And the average composite ACT score for the Recovery School District was just 16.4 in 2014, well below the minimum score required for admission to a four-year public university in Louisiana. 

There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data.

That's the whole point of the charter operation: to drive out the "undesirable" kids and say "look at us, we've improved test scores!"  And now the entire district will most likely be charter. The reality of the existing charter schools has been ten years of neglect and shame.

Test scores have improved, according to two major reports that examine academic achievement over the past nine years. On Katrina’s 10th anniversary, RSD is being held up as a national model. The graduation rate has risen from 56 percent to 73 percent. Last year, 63 percent of students in grades 3-8 scored basic or above on state standardized tests, up from 33 percent.

But by other measures, the RSD suffers. In These Times received an advance copy of research conducted for the Network for Public Education (NPE) by University of Arizona researchers Francesca López and Amy Olson. The study compared charters in Louisiana, the majority of which are in New Orleans, to Louisiana public schools, controlling for factors like race, ethnicity, poverty and whether students qualified for special education. On eighth-grade reading and math tests, charter-school students performed worse than their public-school counterparts by enormous margins—2 to 3 standard deviations.

The researchers found that the gap between charter and public school performance in Louisiana was the largest of any state in the country. And Louisiana’s overall scores were the fourth-lowest in the nation. 

“You can say until you’re blue in the face that this should be a national model, but this is one of the worst-performing districts in one of the worst-performing states,” says NPE board member Julian Vasquez Heilig, an education professor at California State Sacramento.

SNIP

Eliminating public schools has long been a crusade of the far right, and New Orleans is the prime example of what will happen to the rest of the nation should people like DeVos get their way.

Gov. Trump-Lover Appointments Yet Another Corporate Creep to Fuck Up State Government

You know what would happen if every single corporate executive on earth - starting with the ones currently committing mass casualty event while masquerading as public servants - were loaded onto rockets and fired into the sun?

Lots of good.  Businesses would be run by the workers who actually do the work instead of playing games with stock prices and people's lives. Governments would be staff and run by people who have the education, experience and enthusiam about public service to actually be good public servants.
And we wouldn't be under attack by nonsense like this:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Dec. 14, 2016) - Gov. Matt Bevin today announced the appointment of Terry R. Gill, Jr. as Secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. 

The Cabinet is the primary state agency responsible for encouraging new jobs and investment in the state. Gov. Bevin says Gill is the right choice to help lead the Commonwealth to new heights.

“Kentucky is poised for unparalleled success in the years ahead,” said Gov. Bevin. “Thanks to a new pro-business majority in the legislature and our focus on eliminating bureaucratic red tape, Kentucky is becoming more business-friendly by the day. Terry brings integrity, business competence and a passion for economic development that will foster a stronger environment for job creation in every region of Kentucky. The Commonwealth is on track to becoming the undisputed engineering and manufacturing hub of excellence in America.”

Gill most recently served as President of OneTouchPoint, a $140MM marketing services organization. He was responsible for growth and M&A initiatives resulting in the creation of the largest privately held marketing services and technical printing company in the region. 

Prior to OneTouchPoint, Gill served as the Vice President of EnterpriseCorp, the arm of Greater Louisville Inc., which is focused on increasing the number of high potential companies headquartered in the Louisville and Southern Indiana market. Before coming to EnterpriseCorp, he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of FetterGroup.  

Gill holds a BA degree in Marketing with a Minor in Economics from the University of Kentucky. In addition to his charitable and civic involvement, he is a Board Member and serves on the Investment Committee for AccessVentures, a Louisville based impact investment firm.

Government is not a business.  It is pretty much the opposite of a business, in that it is supposed to be operated for the good of all the people, not just the good of the owners.

Government doesn't seek to make a profit; it works to improve the lives of all of its citizens.

All the abominations of government - budget cutting, deregulation, tax cutting, corruption - are the effluent of corporate influence. 

Taxes, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, are what we pay for civilized society. When corporations and the rich demand their already scandalously low toxes be cut even further, they are saying they don't want to be part of a civilized society that includes everyone.

Fine. Ship them all to Somalia.  No taxes there.

Trump-taint-licker Bevin is a member and tool of the money power.  He and his corporate cronies have no place in any government.

Churning Out Mindless Drones

Handing public school funding to freakazoids and corporations to establish indoctrination centers will be one of the first bills to sail through Kentucky's new all-repug lege when it convenes on January 3. Governor Trump Will Be Great for Kentucky will sign it at light speed.

Casey Quinlan at Think Progess:

Americans can expect to see a new era of education policy that embraces charter school expansion like never before, but it comes at a cost — the cultural identity of the students these schools say they serve.

Although charter schools differ in their approach to school culture, many popular charter school networks, such as Success Academy, the Knowledge Is Power Program, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and STRIVE Prep, embrace a strict “no excuses” approach to learning, where respect of authority is important and students always wear school uniforms.

Many of these charter school models have populations of mostly low-income students of color. These responsibilities — to be quiet, walk in an orderly line, and adhere to very strict rules, are often called school norms, and critics have pointed out that some of these norms reinforce the idea that in order for students of color to be successful, they must be “compliant.”

Shut up and obey!  That's how we create the critical-thinking voters of a strong Democracy mindless drones the trumpian dystopia requires.

KY Board of Ed Ready to Kill Public Education

Charter schools are a scam.  Period.

The private ones funnel tax dollars directly from the public purse into the pockets of corporations without spending a dime on actual, you know, education.

The supposedly "public" and "nonprofit" ones steal tax dollars for religious or corporatist indoctrination free from any oversight or accountability.

Public education is exactly that: public education.  Any diversion of a single dime in tax dollars to entities not currently paid to, you know, teach is an absolute abdication of public responsibility and grounds for impeachment of every public official who advocates it.

Valerie Honeycutt-Spears at the Heralde:

Members of the Kentucky Board of Education appear open to charter schools for Kentucky, although the panel did not take a position after a daylong study session Monday.

The board is going to review other states’ laws and is expected to come to a consensus at its December meeting in advance of the 2017 General Assembly.

No legislation had been prefiled in the General Assembly by Monday. In 2016, a bill failed in the legislature that would have allowed charter schools as a pilot in Fayette and Jefferson counties, urban districts that are grappling with an achievement gap between minority, disabled and low-income students and other students. But a charter school bill is much more likely to pass in the coming legislative session after Republicans won control of the state House in the election earlier this month.

 PZ Myers reminds us that nothing about charter schools improves education.  Because, again, their purpose is not to educate; it's to profit.

Vouchers don’t work!

The longest running voucher program in the country is the 20-year-old Milwaukee School Choice Program. Standardized testing shows that the voucher students in private schools perform below the level of Milwaukee’s public school students, and even when socioeconomic status is factored in, the voucher students still score at or below the level of the students who remain in Milwaukee’s public schools. Cleveland’s voucher program has produced similar results. Private schools in the voucher program range from excellent to very poor. In some, less than 20 percent of students reach basic proficiency levels in math and reading.

Vouchers are simply a means to an end: the demolition of the public school system. The DeVoses can afford the best private schools, and if you can’t, you deserve to be uneducated.

We thought Trump would be bad. We had no idea how awful electing an incompetent sould be, because it’s clear that the first thing he’s doing is appointing more incompetents solely on the basis of ideological fanaticism.

 And the truth about privatization has been known for decades.

Via The Nation, from a 1975 article by Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier, later assassinated by Pinochet's thugs for daring to tell the truth.

This situation recalls the story of a Latin Amer­ican dictator at the beginning of this century. When his advisers came to tell him that the country was suffer­ing from a very serious educational problem, he ordered all public schools closed. Now, more than seventy years into this century, there still remain disciples of the anec­dotal dictator who think that the way to eradicate pov­erty in Chile is to kill the poor people.

You Don't Have A Good Job Because Employers Like Jim Beam Won't Hire the People They Need

So 250 well-paid workers at Jim Beam Distilleries in Kentucky are on strike.

Not for higher pay; they're some of the highest-paid manufacturing workers in the country.

Not for better conditions; Jim Beam treats them OK.

No, they're on strike for fewer hours.

This is the dirty little secret of the recovering economy; instead of hiring all the people they really need - and paying them a living wage - employers are keeping skeleton crews and working them to death.

From the Courier:

On Saturday, employees of the Jim Beam facilities in Clermont and Boston, Kentucky, entered a strike following failed contract negotiations that they say didn't place enough emphasis on hiring more full-time employees to reduce current workers' hours.


SNIP

But Mudd said that while the employees realize they are paid well, they also feel that the company has neglected to hire the number of full-time workers needed to keep up with production demands.

"The reason they didn't do it was because the workload fluctuated so much," Mudd said, acknowledging that bourbon production is traditionally seasonal. "They always said they didn't want to hire (full-time employees) because when the workload drops off, then they would have to lay them off. But for the past two to three years, the workload has been consistently on the high side."

Remember: corporations have loyalty to no one and nothing but profits. They will sell out their employees, sell out their communities, sell out their country. Always.

And Fuck Pink, Too

The very LAST thing the fight against cancer needs is more "awareness."  Especially when that "awareness" is not only raising money not for cancer research or treatment but for anti-woman, anti-choice lobbying groups; not only pink-washing corporations seeking cover for their crimes, but also allowing the companies who actually manufacture the poisons that cause breast cancer to skate off the hook entirely.

PZ Myers:

(I)t’s as if daubing pink paint on something suddenly makes it an accomplishment in cancer research.

So we had pink drill bits. Fracking for the cure!

Pink fighter jets! Strafing and bombing for the cure!

 

They cut support for Planned Parenthood! Who needs mammograms and education when you’ve got drill bits and bullets?

Susan G. Komen has long held deep ties with right wing groups. Now we learn that another aspect of those ties is that they have scheduled major fund raising events at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Komen has held their annual “Perfect Pink Party” at Mar-a-Lago since 2011, and Trump has attended throughout the years. The AP reported today that the party is still planned for January 2017, and that the organization won’t make a final decision about whether to go ahead — or cancel and lose the deposit — until after October. Komen spokesperson Andrea Rader declined to comment beyond the AP story.

The AP also reported that two alleged instances of Trump touching women inappropriately occurred at Mar-a-Lago.

There’s also this little gem.

Nancy Brinker, who is the founder and chair of Global Strategy for the Komen Foundation [but who is currently on leave] endorsed Trump earlier this year.

Trump’s support among women is dismally low — this is a thug who thinks women need to be punished for getting an abortion — and yet Komen doesn’t think this is enough of a problem that they should distance themselves from him.

I’ll never donate to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and I don’t see how they can stop their slide into irrelevance at this rate. I’m just waiting for the Republicans to slap a coat of pink paint on their logo to show that they are pro-woman. It’s the least they could do.