No, Maduro hasn’t admitted the failure of Chavismo — the brand of Bolivarian socialism imposed on the oil-rich country by his late predecessor Hugo Chavez — instead, Venezuela’s embattled leader has launched a war on “anxiety.”
The National Superintendency of Fair Prices has reportedly instituted a policy of fining bakeries that allow lines to stretch out their front doors, according to PanAmPost. The head of this particular bureaucracy, William Contreras, claims the lines aren’t a true indicator of a severe shortage of bread, but rather, a political “strategy of generating anxiety.”
Contreras claims there is no shortage of raw materials to make bread, but seems to not understand that bakeries just bake bread, they don’t process the different kinds of wheat used to make the flour that’s then used to make bread. But this is indicative of the magical thinking of Venezuela’s socialist government: the breakdown of the economy couldn’t possibly because of failed economic policy, and scarcity must be the result of a greater conspiracy.
Contreras was also quoted by El Tiempo as saying the long lines represented “fairly clear political intentions and purposes” such as “destabilizing the economy and break[ing] the morale of the people.” This is in keeping with Maduro’s deflection of the blame he deserves for destroying Venezuela’s economy, which he puts at the feet of U.S.-backed agitators engaging in “economic war” by keeping things like toilet paper off supermarket shelves.
This whole battle over both the cause and greater meaning of long lines at bakeries must come as a shock to former presidential candidate and noted democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who once argued that bread lines in socialist or communist countries were a “good thing” because they proved that everyone is suffering equally.
Meanwhile, a major rally by the Venezuelan opposition which is calling for Maduro’s recall is scheduled in Caracas for September 1. 80 percent of the Venezuelan people reportedly want Maduro to be removed from office.
On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took aim at charter schools, which are publicly funded K-12 schools that are given more autonomy than conventional residential-assignment public schools to set their own curricula, make hiring decisions, and focus on particular sorts of instruction. In exchange for greater freedom, charters get significantly less per-pupil funding than traditional schools (about 30 percent or $3,000 less, according to one study) and typically no funds for buildings and other physical plant. Most importantly, unlike traditional schools, charters must voluntarily attract students; no one is assigned to them and they only keep their doors open if they keep students enrolled in them.
Charters have received praise from both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and they represent the most popular type of K-12 education reform over the past quarter-century. Created in Minnesota in the early 1990s, there are now about 6,700 charters in 42 states and the District of Columbia. They educate about 3 million students out of the more than 55 million kids enrolled in public and private K-12 education and in some large urban school districts (such as New Orleans and Detroit), they educate a majority or students.
Oliver’s segment (watch below) was almost unrelieved in its criticism of charters. Echoing the talking points of major teachers unions and liberal interest group such as People for the American Way and the NAACP, the HBO host attacked charters for being unaccountable to local and state authorities (this is not true, as all state charter laws have various types of oversight rules built into them), “draining” resources from traditional public schools (which presumes tax dollars for education belong to existing power structures), and skimming students (in fact, charters teach a higher percentage of racial and ethnic minorities than traditional public schools; they also serve a higher percentage of economically disadvanataged kids). Which is not to say that Oliver is all wrong in his analysis. For instance, he ran through a series of charters that were criminally mismanaged and deserved to be shut down (even as he glossed over the fact that failing charters, unlike failing traditional schools, are more likely to be closed). And he’s right to argue that, on average, charters perform about the same as regular public schools.
However, such comparisons tell us very little about whether charters do help those at-risk students better than traditional schools. On this score, there is very little doubt that charters do more with less money and fewer resources. University of Arkansas education researcher Jay Greene summarizes the data on “randomized control trials” (RCTs), which compare students who enrolled in charters and other who wanted to but were not able to due to limited slots. Because most charters use lotteries to enroll students, it’s possible to match the effect of attending a charter versus a traditional school. As Greene puts it:
Students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school. These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large. In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found: “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”
The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found: “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district.”
And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education. It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools. They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.
These are not small achievements and they received no mention in Oliver’s excoriaton of charters, which focused on a series of terribly managed schools. More power to him on that score: It’s always worth calling attention to wasteful expenditures of tax dollars. However, it’s not particularly helpful to do so while simply ignoring the overwhelmingly superior results of charters for the most at-risk students they serve, especially if doing so simply blunts criticism of traditional public schools that have seen real per-pupil spending soar without any improvement in student outcomes.
Indeed, charters are best understood as one way of introducing choice into a system that is predicated upon denying choice from its participants. A child’s ZIP code shouldn’t determine her opportunities, runs a popular slogan in school choice circles. Yet that’s exactly what traditional residential-assignment schools do. Wealthier Americans exercise school choice by deciding to live in this or that neighbhorhood or town, or by sending their kids to private schools. Poorer Americans have no such options but are instead stuck with schools that routinely underperform.
Toward the end of the Oliver segment, he takes Gov. John Kasich of Ohio to task for arguing that charter schools also introduce to education the same sort of competition that we all understand raises the average level of other goods and services. Kasich (who by the way is hardly a staunch supporter of charters or school choice) clumsily walks through an example of a town with one “pizza shop” that would up its offerings if a second “pizza shop” opened up. Oliver mocks Kasich for calling pizzerias “shops” and ultimately launches into a bit about how education is not simply beholden to normal laws of supply and demand.
This is all clever, glib, and blessedly uninformed by research that shows increasing publicly funded choices for parents increases outcomes for students across the board. Holy hell, it turns out that education, a $620 billion industry, actually does respond to competitive pressures, just like most other activities.
It’s precisely that lack of seriousness in Oliver that is so off-putting. In the name of standing up for taxpayers and students, Oliver does a cliched piss-take on one of the few reforms that has actually helped poor kids in school districts from Los Angeles to New York.
The clip shows Clinton speaking in New Hampshire in 1996; the description in the tweet isn’t precisely right, but it really is an appalling video. Even as America was entering a long decline in violent crime, Clinton was warning that subhuman monsters were on the prowl. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she announced. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
That moment became infamous during the 2016 primaries, and Clinton eventually apologized for it, though her apology focused on her choice of words rather than the ideas underlying her language. The primaries also saw her make a show of supporting some sorts of criminal justice reform, though she stopped well short of endorsing the systemic changes required to reverse the mass incarceration she played a role in building. So while the candidate has walked back her comments, it is perfectly legitimate to bring them up, both to remind people of her past and to push a more serious reform agenda. But that critique sounds hollow coming from Trump, who has been running on exactly the sort of hopped-up law-and-order talk that Clinton was spouting in her superpredators speech. It’s been just a month since the man was invoking some recent attacks on police officers to declare Obama’s America “a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen, and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.” That’s just as absurd a piece of fearmongering as Clinton’s claims about monster gangs.
By the way: Were you wondering where Clinton got that word “superpredators”? There was a whole superpredator panic in the ’90s, fueled by a small group of criminologists who later conceded that they’d been wrong. The most influential was John J. DiIulio Jr., the neoconservative academic who told us that “the demographic bulge of the next 10 years will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips…look tame by comparison.” Last fall I wrote a post here at Hit & Run about that panic, and you can find more details by reading it. It includes that same Clinton clip that Trump highlighted. In fact, the YouTube video that he linked to was the very one I uploaded so I could embed it in my post. I’m glad to see it enjoying a second life; I just wish I could believe that either one of these candidates was serious about moving in a different direction.
A Pennsylvania man convicted of “possessing child porn”—that is, a 21-year-old arrested for possessing sexts from his 16-year-old girlfriend—will no longer have to register as a sex offender for life, thanks to a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Until now, any Pennsylvanian convicted more than once of certain sex crimes was required to stay on the registry until he died. That included people like “A.S.,” the 21-year-old who was convicted of seven counts of “child porn” for one sexting relationship with an underage girlfriend. It was his case that went all the way to the state’s supreme court. From now on, that court declared, “more than one conviction” will be interpreted to mean, “convicted another time of another crime,” indicating actual recidivism. Otherwise, a person convicted just once will “only” be required to register for 15 years.
Of course, even 15 years seems outrageous, considering that our justice system was supposedly founded on the idea that if you do the crime you do the time, and then you resume your life. That redemption, available to con artists, drunk drivers and axe murderers is often not available to the person convicted of a sex crime—a fact even more outrageous when you consider that at least in A.S.’s situation, he was convicted of possessing pictures of a young woman, not a child. He was also sentenced to between 5 and 23 months in prison and five years probation. In America, the “child” in “child porn” can be anyone under 18.
Nonetheless, ignoring the fact that the law can still treat female teens like two-year-olds, and 20-something males like predators for dating girls old enough to marry, it is nice to know that A.S. will not be publicly shamed as a child porn addict through his 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
Instead, he’ll just be treated like a pervert for 15 years. In a society obsessed with sex offenders, that constitutes great news.
For those interested in hearing what’s going on at the forefront of sex offender law reform, the Reform Sex offender Laws group (RSOL) is having its annual conference in Atlanta Sept. 16-19. Info is here.
Trillions of dollars in U.S. Army financial records are “materially misstated” or invented from whole cloth, according to a Department of Defense (DoD)’s Inspector General report from this past June.
In just one 2015 fiscal quarter, $2.8 trillion “wrongful adjustments” were made to create the false appearance of a balanced budget. Such questionable accounting ended up amounting to $6.5 trillion by the end of the year, Reuters reports. A lack of receipts and other documentation was largely the reason for the accounting chicanery, which made senior military and DoD officials unable to make accurate decisions on how to deploy resources commensurate with the budget.
But even with the Inspector General’s report revealing eye-popping levels of fiscal mismanagement, the trillions of dollars in discovered voodoo accounting might actually be understating the problem.
Reuters notes that all the IG’s reports on annual military accounting include a disclaimer because “the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.” Reuters also quotes a former Defense Department Inspector General, who referred to the annual practice of disingenuously making the budget appear to be balanced using invented numbers as “the grand plug.”
The Defense Department’s current annual budget continues to creep upwards toward almost $600 billion, and both major party presidential candidates have called for increased military spending, but have made no issue of the problem of wasteful defense spending.
Cigarettes have long served as one form of currency between prison inmates, but they’re being supplanted in the bartering hierarchy by an unlikely candidate: packaged ramen noodles. So says researcher Michael Gibson-Light, in a paper presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting this week. He attributed the shift—which can be seen even in prisons where smoking is still allowed—to “punitive frugality” stemming from prison cost-cutting and cost-shifting, and the resulting unhappiness among inmates over the quality and amount of food they’re served.
“Services are cut back and many costs are passed on to inmates in an effort to respond to calls to remain both tough on crime and cost effective,” said Gibson-Light, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Arizona. “Prisoners are so unhappy with the quality and quantity of prison food that they receive that they have begun relying on ramen noodles—a cheap, durable food product—as a form of money in the underground economy.” Like cigarettes—and, increasingly, in place of them and other erstwhile prison-bartering staples, like stamps—they’re used to exchange for other goods, services such as laundry, and bargaining chips in football pools or card games.
The rise of ramen noodles as prison currency is just one of Gibson-Light’s findings from interviewing inmates and staff at an all-male, Sunbelt-area state prison from May 2015 to May 2016. Honing in on inmates who worked as laborers, his research led him to focus largely on a spectrum of monetary practices among inmates.
While his research was only conducted at one prison, the ramen noodle finding is in line with other investigations into prison markets, he noted. “What we are seeing is a collective response—across inmate populations and security levels, across prison cliques and racial groups, and even across states—to changes and cutbacks in prison food services.”
“Prison staff members as well as members of the inmate population provided narratives of the history of changes in prison food—the past few decades have seen steady decreases in the quality and quantity of inmate food,” Gibson-Light said.
Gustavo Alvarez, who spent more than a decade in a California men’s prison, published a book last year on creative ramen recipes from behind bars (titled, aptly, Prison Ramen). “Large buckets lined with plastic trash bags would be used to cook huge spreads,” including “dirty ramen,” adorned with canned Vienna sausages and green beans, Alvarez told NPR. “It can bring a couple of guys who don’t have much together. Why? Because maybe a guy has a bag of chips—that’s all he has to his name. And this other guy is blessed to have a couple of soups. Well, they get together, they make an interesting meal.”
A 2014 Vanity Fair story on prison food also yielded a “prison chicken nuggets” recipe: “Take ramen noodles, boil it down to literally mush. You ball it up, put a piece of cheese and beef summer sausage in the middle. Make sure it’s tightly wound up. You cook it in the microwave for ten minutes until it’s brown.”
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Friday to halt the scheduled execution of a man who did not kill anyone.
Jeff Wood was set to be executed by lethal injection this Wednesday for taking part in a 1996 convenience store robbery that resulted in the death of Kriss Keeran, the store’s clerk.
Yet Wood was not the man who shot Keeran; he was outside the store when his friend, Danny Reneau, pulled the trigger after the clerk refused to give Reneau access to the safe. When Wood went inside the store afterward, Reneau threatened him unless he helped remove both the safe and the security tape. Lawyers from both sides acknowledge that Wood didn’t commit the murder, yet he and Reneau were both sentenced to death.
Wood’s conviction is the result of Texas’ law of parties, which states that if a person encourages or aids someone else in committing a crime that results in capital murder, both are eligible for the death penalty. Reneau was executed in 2002, and Wood was supposed to have a similar fate.
But that plan was halted Friday when judges ruled 7–2 to stop the execution. The court said it is asking a lower trial court to review the sentence as well as claims that evidence was obtained improperly and was “based on false testimony and false scientific claims.”
Wood’s lawyer, Jared Tyler, said there were serious issues with statements made by the late Dr. James Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist who testified against hundreds of capital murder defendants, earning him the nickname “Dr. Death.” He was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association and Texas Psychiatric Physicians for ethical violations. The issue: He diagnosed defendants without first examining them.
According to The Washington Post, “Grigson didn’t personally examine Wood. But during the sentencing phase of the trial, the forensic psychiatrist told jurors that Wood would ‘most certainly’ commit violent crimes in the future, according to court records.”
“Three former jurors have said they feel the government’s presentation to them of a discredited psychiatrist who predicted with certainty,” Tyler said in a statement Friday, “and without evaluating Mr. Wood, that Mr. Wood would be criminally violent in the future was unfair.”
Additionally, there are concerns over whether Wood’s execution would be constitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in Enmund v. Florida that the death penalty is not a valid punishment for those who did not kill or have the intent to kill anyone.
Questions have also been raised regarding Wood’s mental health. His lawyers have said he has borderline intellectual functioning, and his stepmother has previously described him as an “8-year-old in a man’s body.” The Supreme Court has ruled that people with severe mental disabilities cannot be executed, though states are left to define for themselves exactly what that means. This unclarity has raised ethical questions in the past, including in 2015 when Missouri executed a man who was missing part of his brain.
Wood was previously scheduled to be executed in August 2008, but a federal district court issued a stay so he could be tested on whether or not he understood why he was on death row. Tests showed he was competent, and the parole board and then–Gov. Rick Perry refused to commute his sentence.
Federal Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas has granted a nationwide injunction that prohibits the Department of Justice and Department of Education from attempting to legally enforce its recent “guidance” on how to treat transgender students.
The guidance told all school districts across the country that the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX requires that schools must allow transgender students to use the facilities (restrooms, locker rooms, et cetera) of their expressed gender. Several states do not agree with this interpretation of the law and have objected, turning to the courts out of concern that their federal funding could be jeopardized if they don’t comply with the orders.
Judge O’Connor agreed with Texas and essentially noted that the administration supplied much more than just “guidance,” and despite the administration’s claims otherwise, federal agencies were setting up new rules without going through the correct procedures.
To be clear, O’Connor is not ruling whether it is appropriate for the federal government under Title IX to require transgender students to be accommodated. Rather, his ruling is focused on whether the way the administration has been pushing this order forward has been appropriate under the law.
The administration attempted to deflect the lawsuit by attempting to claim that this all was “guidance” and that the states’ federal funds were not currently threatened. This was perhaps an odd choice, given that the Department of Justice is actually suing the state of North Carolina right now to try to block the implementation of HB2, which prohibits transgender accommodation in public school facilities and government buildings. That lawsuit is referenced in the ruling, and O’Connor also notes that complying with the guidance brings new costs and actions that states must account for, giving them standing to oppose the non-legislative way this guidance is being pushed on them.
Whatever may be reported or tweeted about the ruling, this is not a judge saying that schools are right to discriminate against transgender students, and it doesn’t even block school districts from accommodating transgender students on their own. It’s about agencies within the Obama administration attempting to bypass the legislative and rule-making process and just putting policies in place that expand their own authority.
The ruling is different, but the reasons are not dissimilar, to last week’s smackdown of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in a case where a funeral home fired a transgender worker who wanted to switch from wearing a male uniform to a female uniform in the workplace. A judge determined that the EEOC failed to consider alternative solutions (as required under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) before taking the most punitive approach against the funeral home. As The New York Times recently noted, President Barack Obama’s legacy as president will most certainly be focused on how he and the agencies that serve the administration have been using new rules and regulations within the executive branch to bypass the lawmaking process and push their political goals forward. This is far from the first time the judiciary has stepped in and stopped it, and it probably won’t be the last.
Read Judge O’Connor’s ruling here. Also note that the Supreme Court is still considering whether it’s going to take up any cases over these disputes.
On September 16 Nuclear Blast records will release Pocho Aztlán, the latest studio album by the Mexican-American death metal band Brujeria. The group combines thrashing guitars and blast-beat drumming with first-person lyrical accounts of murder, mayhem, and assorted acts of narco-terrorism, all sung (screamed) in Spanish. Needless to say, it’s pure theater of the macabre. Just like Kiss and GWAR before them, Brujeria perform in the guise of outlandish fictional characters. Specifically, the members of Brujeria portray a gang of Satanic killers affiliated with Mexican drug cartels. Their songs tell the tales of their bloody “exploits.”
Originally founded in 1989 as a side project of Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares and Faith No More bassist Billy Gould, Brujeria has turned into something of an underground music supergroup over the years, with a lineup that has featured such notable players as bassist Jeffrey Walker (Carcass) and drummer Nick Barker (Cradle of Filth/Dimmu Borgir). If you happen to enjoy extreme heavy metal and/or extremely violent crime or horror movies, you might enjoy Brujeria too.
The band’s recent single “Viva Presidente Trump!” offers a nice introduction. Spoiler alert: It’s not exactly a pro-Trump song. Translated, the lyrics include stuff like this:
He hates Mexicans
If Trump wins he’ll deport everyone
He hates my race, he loves his money
That crazy güero is going to start a war
According to vocalist Juan Brujo (real name John Lepe), the song “was on shelf for years with no idea for vocals. It was gonna be an ‘Anti-Castro’ part II song but nothing came out of it. It just needed proper motivation to go an attach itself to someone…and Trump came thru!”
Check out the NSFW teaser video for “Viva Presidente Trump!” here.
Item #1: A story in today’s New York Times, headlined “After Shake-Up by Trump, Clinton Camp Keeps Wary Eye on ‘Conspiracy Theories.'” Here’s the lede:
It took just a few hours, after Donald J. Trump announced a major staff shake-up last week, for Hillary Clinton’s campaign team to settle on a new buzzword.
“He peddles conspiracy theories,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said of Mr. Trump on MSNBC.
“We hear rehashed conspiracy theories,” he added moments later.
“He doubled down on this today,” Mr. Mook said, wrapping up, “by appointing someone to lead his campaign who makes these conspiracy theories basically his professional mission.”
Robby Mook…hmm. Didn’t I see that name somewhere else recently? Oh, right:
Mook said told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump still needs to explain a “web of financial ties” that connects the Republican candidate to Moscow.
“There’s a web of financial interests that have not been disclosed,” he said. “And there are real questions being raised about whether Donald Trump himself is just a puppet for the Kremlin in this race.”
Mook cautioned that the Russian government is still at the “core” of Trump’s campaign…
Seems to me that if you’re going to dismiss “conspiracy theories” as a category, you might want to refrain from suggesting your rival is a tentacle of the Kremlin. But I’m not a political professional.
(For more on Trumpian conspiracy theories, go here. For more on anti-Trumpian conspiracy theories, go here.)