Dear Commons Community,

James Schmeling, executive vice president of Student Veterans of America, and  Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success and a former senior counsel to a Senate committee that investigated for-profit colleges, have a scathing op-ed indictment in todays’ New York Times of US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her proposed polices regarding veterans and their G.I. Benefits.  They describe her as “brazen” and “unpatriotic” because of her deregulation campaign of  for-profit colleges.  The entire op-ed is below, here is the introduction.

“As the political makeup of the 116th Congress begins to congeal, the question of what, if anything, this divided government can do together looms. Although there is faint hope of cooperation on most issues, if there is something that could unite President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell, it should be their promises to protect America’s veterans.

The post-9/11 G.I. Bill, which rewarded returning service members with college funding, first passed under George W. Bush and was unanimously expanded by Congress in 2017 with Mr. Trump’s signature. But the value of veterans’ hard-earned G.I. Bill benefits is being undermined from within the Trump administration. The culprit, unfortunately, is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Despite robust objections from roughly three dozen national veterans and military service organizations, Secretary DeVos elected to eviscerate student protections and quality controls for colleges — particularly those governing the often low-quality, predatory for-profit colleges that target veterans in their marketing schemes.”

It has been well-known that Betsy DeVos is deeply committed to anything in the for-profit education sector whether it be at the college or K-12 levels.  Despite her smiles, this is another example of her “brazen” policies supporting predatory practices.

Tony

 ———————————————————————-

New York Times

Betsy DeVos vs. Student Veterans

The Department of Education secretary has been uniquely brazen, and unpatriotic, in her deregulation campaign. It’s time that she answered for her actions.

By Carrie Wofford and James Schmeling

Feb. 18, 2019

As the political makeup of the 116th Congress begins to congeal, the question of what, if anything, this divided government can do together looms. Although there is faint hope of cooperation on most issues, if there is something that could unite President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell, it should be their promises to protect America’s veterans.

The post-9/11 G.I. Bill, which rewarded returning service members with college funding, first passed under George W. Bush and was unanimously expanded by Congress in 2017 with Mr. Trump’s signature. But the value of veterans’ hard-earned G.I. Bill benefits is being undermined from within the Trump administration. The culprit, unfortunately, is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Despite robust objections from roughly three dozen national veterans and military service organizations, Secretary DeVos elected to eviscerate student protections and quality controls for colleges — particularly those governing the often low-quality, predatory for-profit colleges that target veterans in their marketing schemes.

You’ve probably seen their sort of ads: a young soldier parachuting from a plane in one moment, smiling as he raises his hand in the warm, glossy confines of a for-profit school in the next, then the final shot of the veteran hoisting his degree, hugging his family.

Why are veterans the targets? Because for-profit colleges milk a federal loophole that allows them to count G.I. Bill benefits as private funds, offsetting the 90 percent cap they otherwise face on their access to taxpayer-supported federal student aid. Nearly two dozen state attorneys general have said this accounting gimmick — known as the “90/10 loophole” — “violates the intent of the law.”

Hundreds of for-profit schools are almost entirely dependent on federal revenue, and if the 90/10 loophole were closed, they would be in violation of this federal regulation. Taxpayers, in other words, are largely propping up otherwise failing schools.

In December, a damning Department of Veterans Affairs internal audit estimated the risk of G.I. Bill waste was exceptionally high at for-profit schools, which received over 75 percent of improper G.I. Bill payments. The report highlighted the schools’ deceptive advertising campaigns used to recruit veterans and warned that the government will waste $2.3 billion in improper payments over the next five years if changes are not made to reel in the abuse.

As Holly Petraeus — a former head of service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — has written, for-profit colleges have “an incentive to see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform, and to use aggressive marketing to draw them in.”

Overall, by 2017, for-profit colleges had vacuumed up nearly 40 percent of all G.I. Bill tuition and fee payments since the post-9/11 G.I. Bill was introduced. Eight of the 10 schools receiving the most G.I. Bill subsidies since 2009 are for-profit colleges. Six of those 10 have faced government legal action for defrauding students.

The Education Department has the jurisdiction to undercut such fraud — and ample evidence to take action — but it has not. Instead, through several scandalous appointments, Ms. DeVos has largely delegated policymaking and enforcement to members of the for-profit-college industry, who are now her aides.

One senior aide recently worked at the very for-profit chain that just settled with 49 state attorneys general to cough up half a billion dollars for defrauding students. A top deputy worked at the same chain and at a second chain facing multiple government investigations. A third, whom Ms. DeVos hired to run the department’s enforcement unit, disappeared a crop of investigations into his former employer and several other large for-profit colleges. When news reporting brought scrutiny to this corruption, Ms. DeVos simply shifted him to the federal student aid office. The fox is running the henhouse.

Ms. DeVos fought and is now stalling defrauded students’ right to recourse under the Borrower Defense rule, and she eliminated a rule requiring career colleges to prove their graduates can get a job, even after being officially warned by the department’s Office of Inspector General that the rule was necessary to protect taxpayer funds.

This week, Ms. DeVos’s aides will meet in Washington with a panel (many representing for-profit colleges) to push forward proposals that would weaken over half a dozen regulations that govern college quality. Some changes, for instance, could leave students largely learning on their own from self-help YouTube-style videos and allow the companies responsible unfettered access to a spigot of taxpayer funds.

The Education Department’s Office of Inspector General, following the V.A.’s lead, conducted an investigation of Ms. DeVos after she reinstated the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or Acics, which had been discredited. Career civil servants on her own staff had determined that Acics had failed to meet 57 of 93 basic federal quality standards — including its inadequate oversight of the now-defunct, veteran-hungry schools ITT Technical Institutes and Corinthian Colleges. Both were for-profits whose bankruptcies left countless veteran students with deep debt and rubbish degrees.

In a stunning ethical breach, a senior aide to Ms. DeVos fabricated letters of support for Acics from other accreditors, which quickly exposed the lie.

Standing up for veterans, and student veterans, should always be a bipartisan issue. So too should protecting taxpayer dollars from waste, fraud and abuse. Indeed, Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush once led fights against the parasitic tendencies of for-profit colleges.

The 49 state attorneys general who banded together last month in a lawsuit to recover $500 million from one for-profit college company were obviously working under both Republican and Democratic governors. In the face of unquestionable evidence, sometimes bipartisanship isn’t so hard. Now it’s Congress’s turn.

Politicians of both stripes speak out for veterans on the campaign trail. It’s time to back up that talk with bipartisan oversight of colleges that seek G.I. Bill funding, bipartisan legislation to close the 90/10 loophole and a bipartisan hearing that puts serious questions to the Education Department’s leadership. The public supports standing up for our military. Congress can start by standing up to Secretary DeVos.

James Schmeling is executive vice president of Student Veterans of America. Carrie Wofford is president of Veterans Education Success and a former senior counsel to a Senate committee that investigated for-profit colleges.

Dear Commons Community,

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) yesterday defended the possibility of taking money away from building a middle school in Kentucky in order to erect President Donald Trump’s border wall, saying children need a “secure border” before a school. (His comment comes at about 11:15 of the clip above.)

Graham was grilled on CBS’ “Face the Nation” about money Trump will likely divert to build the wall in the wake of the president’s declaration of a national emergency after he failed to get the funds from Congress.

Host Margaret Brennan noted that some $3.6 billion of diverted funds could come from “military construction efforts, including construction of a middle school in Kentucky, housing for military families, improvements for bases.” She asked Graham: “Aren’t you concerned some of these projects … are now going to possibly be cut out?”

Graham responded that “it’s better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border.” He promised the kids would eventually get their school, but added, “Right now we’ve got a national emergency.”

Senator Graham is among the Republicans who will defend the President no matter what.  It is a shame to see how cowardly the GOP leadership has become in their fear of Trump.

Tony

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe  on CBS 60 Minutes

Dear Commons Community,

The long awaited CBS 60 Minutes interview with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe aired last night during which President Trump is accused as trying to undermine an investigation into his campaign ties to  Russia.   CBS has been releasing clips of the interview (see above) for the past several days.  Key moments are captured in the AP article below especially when McCabe says  that the FBI had good reason to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was in league with Russia, and therefore a possible national security threat, following the May 2017 firing of then-FBI Director James Comey.

“And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, “Why would a president of the United States do that?” McCabe said.

He added: “So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?”

Asked whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was onboard with the obstruction and counterintelligence investigations, McCabe replied, “Absolutely.”

It would be interesting to see if Rod Rosenstein corroborates McCabe’s comments.

Tony

——————————————————————————————————————————

Ex-FBI official Andrew McCabe: ‘Crime may have been committed’ by Trump

Eric Tucker

Feb 17th 2019

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said in an interview that aired Sunday that a “crime may have been committed” when President Donald Trump fired the head of the FBI and tried to publicly undermine an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

McCabe also said in the interview with “60 Minutes” that the FBI had good reason to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was in league with Russia, and therefore a possible national security threat, following the May 2017 firing of then-FBI Director James Comey.

“And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, “Why would a president of the United States do that?” McCabe said.

He added: “So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?”

Asked whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was onboard with the obstruction and counterintelligence investigations, McCabe replied, “Absolutely.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment Sunday night.

McCabe also revealed that when Trump told Rosenstein to put in writing his concerns with Comey — a document the White House initially held up as justification for his firing — the president explicitly asked the Justice Department official to reference Russia in the memo. Rosenstein did not want to, McCabe said, and the memo that was made public upon Comey’s dismissal did not mention Russia and focused instead on Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation.

“He explained to the president that he did not need Russia in his memo,” McCabe said. “And the president responded, “I understand that, I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway.”

Trump said in a TV interview days after Comey’s firing that he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he fired Comey.

Those actions, including a separate request by Trump that the FBI end an investigation into his first national adviser, Michael Flynn, made the FBI concerned that the president was illegally trying to obstruct the Russia probe.

“Put together, these circumstances were articulable facts that indicated that a crime may have been committed,” McCabe said. “The president may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey.”

McCabe was fired from the Justice Department last year after being accused of misleading investigators during an internal probe into a news media disclosure. The allegation was referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington for possible prosecution, but no charges have been brought. McCabe has denied having intentionally lied and said Sunday that he believes his firing was politically motivated.

“I believe I was fired because I opened a case against the president of the United States,” he said.

In the interview Sunday, McCabe also said Rosenstein in the days after Comey’s firing had proposed wearing a wire to secretly record the president. McCabe said he took the remark seriously, though the Justice Department last Septemeber — responding last September to a New York Times report that first revealed the conversation — issued a statement from an unnamed official who was in the room and interpreted the remark as sarcastic.

McCabe said the remark was made during a conversation about why Trump had fired Comey.

“And in the context of that conversation, the deputy attorney general offered to wear a wire into the White House. He said, “‘I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn’t know it was there,'” McCabe said.

In excerpts released last week by CBS News, McCabe also described a conversation in which Rosenstein had broached the idea of invoking the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. The Justice Department said in a statement that Rosenstein, based on his dealings with Trump, does not see cause to seek the removal of the president.

It could have answered the concerns of citizens. Instead it bolted.

By Bill de Blasio

Feb. 16, 2019

The first word I had that Amazon was about to scrap an agreement to bring 25,000 new jobs to New York City came an hour before it broke in the news on Thursday.

The call was brief and there was little explanation for the company’s reversal.

Just days before, I had counseled a senior Amazon executive about how they could win over some of their critics. Meet with organized labor. Start hiring public housing residents. Invest in infrastructure and other community needs. Show you care about fairness and creating opportunity for the working people of Long Island City.

There was a clear path forward. Put simply: If you don’t like a small but vocal group of New Yorkers questioning your company’s intentions or integrity, prove them wrong.

Instead, Amazon proved them right. Just two hours after a meeting with residents and community leaders to move the project forward, the company abruptly canceled it all.

I am a lifelong progressive who sees the problem of growing income and wealth inequality. The agreement we struck with Amazon back in November was a solid foundation. It would have created: at least 25,000 new jobs, including for unionized construction and service workers; partnerships with public colleges; and $27 billion in new tax revenue to fuel priorities from transit to affordable housing — a ninefold return on the taxes the city and state were prepared to forgo to win the headquarters.

The retail giant’s expansion in New York encountered opposition in no small part because of growing frustration with corporate America. For decades, wealth and power have concentrated at the very top. There’s no greater example of this than Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos — the richest man in the world.

The lesson here is that corporations can’t ignore rising anger over economic inequality anymore. We see that anger roiling Silicon Valley, in the rocks hurled at buses carrying tech workers from San Francisco and Oakland to office parks in the suburbs. We see it in the protests that erupted at Davos last month over the growing monopoly of corporate power.

Amazon’s capricious decision to take its ball and go home, in the face of protest, won’t diminish that anger.

The city and state were holding up our end. And more important, a sizable majority of New Yorkers were on board. Support for the new headquarters was strongest in communities of color and among working people who too often haven’t gotten the economic opportunity they deserved. A project that could’ve opened a path to the middle class for thousands of families was scuttled by a few very powerful people sitting in a boardroom in Seattle.

In the end, Amazon seemed unwilling to bend or even to talk in earnest with the community about ways to shape their project. They didn’t want to be in a city where they had to engage critics at all. And it’s a pattern. When Seattle’s City Council passed a tax on big employers to fund the battle against homelessness, the company threatened to stop major expansion plans, putting 7,000 jobs at risk. The tax was rescinded.

Economic power — the kind that allows you to dangle 50,000 jobs and billions in revenue over every metropolitan area in the country — is being steadily concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

For a generation, working people have gotten more and more productive, have worked longer and longer hours, and haven’t gotten their fair share in return. C.E.O.s are reaping the benefits of that work, while the people actually responsible for it are keeping less and less.

This is no accident. The same day Amazon announced its decision to halt its second headquarters here, it was reported that the company would pay no federal income tax on the billions in profits it made last year. That’s galling, especially at a time when millions of working-class and middle-class Americans are finding that they are getting smaller tax returns this year thanks to President Trump’s tax plan, which has hugely benefited the wealthy.

As the mayor of the nation’s largest city, a place that’s both a progressive beacon and the very symbol of capitalism, I share the frustration about corporate America. So do many of my fellow mayors across the country. We know the game is rigged. But we still find ourselves fighting one another in the race to secure opportunity for our residents as corporations force us into all-against-all competitions.

Amazon’s HQ2 bidding war exemplified that injustice. It’s time to end that economic warfare with a national solution that prevents corporations from pitting cities against one another.

Some companies get it. Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff threw his weight behind a new corporate tax in San Francisco to fund services for the homeless. In January, Microsoft pledged $500 million to combat the affordable housing crisis in Seattle.

Amazon’s path in New York would have been far smoother had it recognized our residents’ fears of economic insecurity and displacement — and spoken to them directly.

We just witnessed another example of what the concentration of power in the hands of huge corporations leaves in its wake. Let’s change the rules before the next corporation tries to divide and conquer.

Dear Commons Community,

An ad for an Oscar-nominated, anti-Nazi  documentary, A Night at the Garden, warns that history can repeat itself, but as of this morning,  Fox News had refused to air it.

According to The Washington Post, MSNBC has decided to run a tweaked version of the 30-second ad, which is set to air during “The Rachel Maddow Show.” The revised spot now includes a title card noting the film’s Oscar nomination.

The Post also confirmed that CNN will air the ad during “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer,” though it is not clear whether it will be the original version without the title card, which was rejected by Fox.

The film, “A Night at the Garden,” walks through a 1939 Nazi rally that took place at Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City. At the end of the black-and-white ad, a line of text flashes on the screen, cautioning, “It can happen here.”

The Hollywood Reporter (THR) revealed on Thursday that the spot was meant to be seen by viewers of Sean Hannity’s prime-time broadcast on Fox News. The point, THR reported, was for the spot to serve as an indirect commentary on President Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric.

“The film shines a light on a time when thousands of Americans fell under the spell of a demagogue who attacked the press and scapegoated minorities using the symbols of American patriotism,” Night at the Garden director Marshall Curry said in a statement to THR.

He added, “It’s amazing to me that the CEO of Fox News would personally inject herself into a small ad buy just to make sure that Hannity viewers weren’t exposed to this chapter of American history.”

According to the Post, it had almost been rejected by NBC-Universal because of its provocative imagery, but passed muster after the addition of the title card.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Trump during his press conference yesterday declared a national emergency in order to build a wall on the Mexican border.  During the conference, CNN’s Jim Acosta and other reporters challenged his “facts and statistics” to which Trump took some umbrage (see video above). 

The press conference did little to persuade the American people that his “national emergency” is nothing more than a make-believe ploy to build his wall. David Gergen, former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan,  and Clinton, during an interview after the press conference stated “There is no border emergency” (see video below).

The president’s declaration will be challenged in the federal courts and eventually the US Supreme Court where given the conservative majority could well be upheld.

Below is a New York Times Editorial on Trump’s declaration.

Tony

New York Times

Opinion

Phony Wall, Phony Emergency

The president plans to manage the border crisis from the golf course at Mar-a-Lago this weekend.

By The Editorial Board

.

Feb. 15, 2019

“I didn’t need to do this,” President Trump insisted at a Rose Garden appearance on Friday, as he declared a national emergency aimed at shaking loose a few billion dollars in financing for his beloved border wall.

The president’s assertion was both ludicrous and self-defeating. If a declaration was unnecessary and the wall on track (the wall is “very very on its way,” the president said earlier in the week), how could he claim to be addressing an emergency? As Mr. Trump explained it, “But I’d rather do it much faster.” A presidential desire for speed does not constitute a crisis — no matter how eager a president is to camouflage his failures.

In reality, the wall is not a done deal, and Mr. Trump has spent the past few months — the past two years, really — failing to convince either Congress or Mexico to pay for it. This week’s bipartisan spending bill, which contained no more wall money than the one over which Mr. Trump shut down the government in December, was a particularly humiliating defeat.

Desperate to save face, the president and his team cooked up a nonemergency emergency with the aim of seizing funds already appropriated for other purposes. Currently, the plan is to pull $2.5 billion from the military’s drug interdiction program, $3.6 billion from its construction budget and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s drug forfeiture fund. The White House plans to “backfill” the money it is taking from the Pentagon in future budgets.

And so, in a breathtaking display of executive disregard for the separation of powers, the White House is thumbing its nose at Congress, the Constitution and the will of the American people, the majority of whom oppose a border wall.

Even as he spun this as an act of strong leadership, Mr. Trump acknowledged that his declaration resolves nothing and creates a host of legal, legislative and political troubles. He predicted that the move would prompt swift legal pushback, which it did. Less than four hours after the announcement, a government watchdog group filed suit, demanding that the Department of Justice hand over “documents concerning the legal authority of the president to invoke emergency powers.” Soon after, the State of California announced its intention to sue. On Thursday, even before the announcement, Protect Democracy and the Niskanen Center announced plans to file on behalf of El Paso County and the Border

Mr. Trump predicted that he would lose the first couple of court rounds, particularly in California federal courts, but would ultimately be vindicated by the Supreme Court. Critics of the move expect things to turn out differently. Whatever the outcome, the legal issues are complex, and the case could wind up bogged down indefinitely, meaning not much wall for now.

Moving from the legal to the political realm, Republican lawmakers will very likely to find themselves in a pickle. Congress has the power to override a national emergency declaration by passing a joint resolution. To prevent opponents from stalling the bill indefinitely, once one chamber passes the resolution, the other must hold a vote on it within 18 calendar days. House Democrats have already announced their intention to hold such a vote, and are expected to prevail. This will then put Senate Republicans in the position of having to vote on whether to support a presidential grab of Congress’s power.

To survive a presidential veto, such a measure would need to pass with two thirds of the votes in both chambers — which seems unlikely. But the vote itself will prove awkward for Republicans, forcing them to go on record as to whether they have officially abandoned their constitutional duties.

Then there’s the violence this will do the budget process — not exactly a smooth-running machine as is. But if members of Congress start worrying that money appropriated for one purpose will be clawed back by the White House and handed over for a different one, look for spending battles to get bloodier still. Some of the money to be raided for the wall will come from military construction projects in Republican states like Kentucky and North Carolina.

Which brings us to the question of precedent. In defending his declaration, Mr. Trump and his team keep asserting that emergency declarations are not unusual. The president called them “a great thing” that other presidents have done “many, many times.”

Since 1976, such declarations have been used 59 times. But most have been uncontroversial and involved matters of foreign policy. Declaring an emergency simply because Congress refused to fund the president’s pet project is seen even by members of his own party as setting a dangerous precedent. As Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, warned, “For the president to use it to repurpose billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated for other purposes and that he has previously signed into law, strikes me as undermining the appropriations process, the vote of Congress and being of dubious constitutionality.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised broader issues on Friday. “This issue transcends partisan politics and goes to the core of the Founders’ conception for America, which commands Congress to limit an overreaching executive,” she said in a statement with Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader. “The president’s emergency declaration, if unchecked, would fundamentally alter the balance of powers, inconsistent with our Founders’ vision.”

“We call upon our Republican colleagues to join us to defend the Constitution,” they added. “The Congress cannot let the president shred the Constitution.”

Mr. Trump betrays no interest in the collateral damage wreaked by his actions. This move will come back to bite him and his party. The question is when, and how hard.

Dear Commons Community,

The absurdity of the people around Donald Trump knows no bounds. The Huffington Post reported earlier today that the wife of White House communications director Bill Shine has been spreading false information about vaccinations on her Twitter page, claiming that more people should contract measles, which can be deadly to young children.

Darla Shine, a former TV producer and podcaster, falsely claimed Wednesday that sizable measles outbreaks in Washington state and New York are fake. 

“Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases they keep you healthy & fight cancer,” she tweeted, falsely claiming that a 2014 Mayo Clinic study proved the measles cures cancer.

In fact, the study outlined the use of a genetically modified version of the virus to treat one woman’s blood cancer. There’s no evidence that the standard measles virus cures cancer.

Darla Shine retweeted several people who peddled conspiracy theories that the government intends to hurt people using vaccines and that the injections cause autism. The CDC reports no link between vaccines and autism.

Measles symptoms include a high fever, cough, runny nose, rash and diarrhea. Measles is usually treatable but can pose a serious risk to children younger than 5 years old.

From 2001 to 2013, 28 percent of children younger than 5 years old who contracted the disease had to be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In rare cases, measles can lead to permanent brain damage, deafness and death for some children.

The recent spread of measles in Washington and New York are directly connected to anti-vaccination communities. The outbreaks originated with unvaccinated people traveling to countries such as Israel and Ukraine, where measles outbreaks are occurring, and returning to the U.S. infected. The disease is highly contagious and can spread rapidly through pockets of unvaccinated people.

The number of people choosing not to vaccinate themselves or their children has grown in recent years, largely because of the spread of misinformation about vaccines. Many anti-vaxxers worry such injections pose health risks. But the measles vaccine has been proved exceedingly safe and effective. Receiving two doses of the vaccine as young children is 97 percent effective.

With the number of anti-vaxxers growing, 2018 saw the most imported measles cases since the virus was thought eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, according to the CDC. As of Feb. 13, there have been at least 73 confirmed cases of measles in the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn since October and 54 confirmed cases in Washington state since January.

Darla Shine correctly noted on Twitter that media outlets were reporting on her anti-vaccination tweets because her husband works for the president, though she didn’t seem to recognize the dangers of spreading misinformation about medical treatments using such a platform.

Neither the Shines nor the White House responded to multiple requests for comment.

Trump appointed Bill Shine to head the White House’s communications in June 2018. Previously, he was a co-president of Fox News until he was forced out in May 2017 over his handling of sexual harassment and misconduct scandals at the network.

God save us from the imbecility that exists in the White House (and at Fox News.)

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Amazon announced that 

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens. For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.

We are disappointed to have reached this conclusion—we love New York, its incomparable dynamism, people, and culture—and particularly the community of Long Island City, where we have gotten to know so many optimistic, forward-leaning community leaders, small business owners, and residents. There are currently over 5,000 Amazon employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and we plan to continue growing these teams.”

Amazon’s move to Long Island City would have brought 25,000 jobs to the area, but the company would have received $1.7 billion in incentives from the state and another $1.3 billion from the city, including a taxpayer-funded helicopter pad, just for moving in. That didn’t sit well with local lawmakers and residents of Queens who said the change would negatively impact the neighborhood. 

In its statement, Amazon said it backed out amid criticisms from state and local politicians.

State Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) was one of those politicians opposed to Amazon’s plan.

“The dollars are pointed in the wrong direction,” Gianaris told Reuters on Wednesday. “Amazon is trying to take, take, take. There’s no consideration of the devastation they would wreak on the surrounding community.”

In a statement yesterday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) took aim at Amazon for abandoning the project.

“You have to be tough to make it in New York City,” de Blasio said. “We gave Amazon an opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said the New York State Senate has “done tremendous damage” by voicing concerns over the project. 

I agree with Mayor de Blasio, Amazon threw away an opportunity to work in our city.

Below is a New York Times editorial that presents further opinion on this matter.

Tony

New York Times

New York Returns 25,000 Jobs to Amazon

As the company cancels its plans for a major Queens campus, anti-corporate activists got what they wanted at a great cost.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Feb. 14, 2019

“You have to be tough to make it in New York City,” Mayor Bill de Blasio boasted, choosing to jeer at Amazon as it canceled its plans on Thursday to build a new headquarters in Queens, after some local officials angrily criticized its proposal.

What a strange thing for the mayor to take pride in. It’s certainly true that you have to be tough these days. But that’s because the subways don’t work, the streets are gridlocked, the housing is unaffordable, the shelters are overcrowded, and the schools are segregated and often inadequate. Now think how much tougher it’ll become for the typical citizen — not the ones who ride in chauffeured government cars — if New York gets a reputation for the smugness of its politicians and their hostility to business.

There were all sorts of problems with the deal New York cut to bring Amazon to the city, and Amazon is no paragon, but its abrupt withdrawal was a blow to New York, which stood to gain 25,000 jobs and an estimated $27 billion in tax revenue over the next two decades. This embarrassment to the city presents a painful lesson in how bumper-sticker slogans and the hubris of elected — and corporate — officials can create losers on all sides.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio, in a rare fit of comity, rolled out the red carpet for Amazon, for what would have been one of the biggest economic deals ever in the state. They offered the company $3 billion in tax benefits to build a campus in the Long Island City neighborhood. But it was clear as soon as the company, governor and mayor announced the deal in November that not all New Yorkers felt welcoming.

Politicians and activists had good reason to criticize the size of the tax breaks and the secrecy of the negotiations. After years of rapid development in New York that has come with soaring real estate prices, many rightly feared Amazon’s arrival could accelerate already costly gentrification.

Things quickly got out of hand, though, and reasonable criticism of the deal was overwhelmed by opposition to the company itself, even as polls showed wide support for Amazon’s move to Queens. Elected officials who identify as progressive painted Amazon as a rapacious engine of inequality. It seemed that few were interested in having a constructive conversation about how to improve the deal and make it work for the tech giant and the city.

Some berated the company’s executives in a City Council hearing and at rallies. That kind of tough talk is par for the course in “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” New York. But in grandstanding, they missed an opportunity to try to get the company to help address housing and infrastructure problems that the development, for all its benefits, would exacerbate. Perhaps they thought the city’s pool of skilled workers and many other attractions made it so irresistible that there was no need to negotiate.

“We have the best talent in the world, and every day we are growing a stronger and fairer economy for everyone,” the mayor said. “If Amazon can’t recognize what that’s worth, its competitors will.” Because, you know, Amazon’s competitors have a great track record of seeing the future more clearly than Jeff Bezos.

Last week, the State Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, nominated a critic of the deal, Senator Michael Gianaris, to a state board that had veto power over it. Mr. Gianaris, who represents the district where the campus would have been located, had legitimate concerns over the arrangement and wanted more investment from Amazon in the city. Though his staff was engaged in discussions with Amazon, he refused even to meet with anyone from the company. His appointment could only have helped Amazon decide to call New York’s bluff. The governor seems to think so.

“The New York State Senate has done tremendous damage,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement on Thursday. “They should be held accountable for this lost economic opportunity.” He’s got a point.

Blame also needs to be assigned, of course, to a system in which powerful corporations can milk billions in tax benefits out of cities and states to locate facilities, without any added investment in infrastructure, schools and other benefits. Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world, run by the richest man in the world, had held a nationwide contest in which governments scraped together enough entitlements to satisfy it, even as those same cities struggled to fortify corroding infrastructure and stave off a housing crisis that has pushed the middle class to the brink and forced the poor into homeless shelters.

Amazon’s initial offerings to New York — like a $5 million commitment to work force development — were meager. The company displayed arrogance of its own and seemed to have little respect for greater public scrutiny and review, and little interest in salvaging the deal once it became vulnerable.

Mssrs. Cuomo and de Blasio should have better prepared for what was in store, since their constituents are maybe more worried about housing, subways and the cost of living than in job creation alone. In fact, it’s partly thanks to the failure of these elected leaders to seriously address the subway and housing crises that Amazon was met by some with such visceral anger and anxiety. If they’d better anticipated that reaction, they might have worked with the company to address these issues, and win local buy-in before things went off the rails. Then, together with Amazon, they could have helped the city diversify its economy and leverage the power of a tech giant to help solve big problems. It’s an opportunity lost. May it also be a lesson learned.

Dear Commons Community,

The Denver teachers and Denver School District officials reached an agreement this morning after an all-night bargaining session to end a strike that disrupted classes for 92,000 students this week.  Although the agreement must be ratified by a majority of its members to take effect, teachers will likely return to classes today, the union said in a statement issued before the start of the school day.  As reported by the Associated Press:

“This agreement is a win, plain and simple: for our students; for our educators; and for our communities,” Denver Classroom Teachers Association President (DCTA) Henry Roman, an elementary school teacher, said in the statement.

The marathon negotiating session, which began on Wednesday morning, ended with a deal that overhauls a pay system, known as ProComp, that teachers and the Denver Public Schools district had criticized as unpredictable, the union said.

“We’re pleased to share that DPS and the DCTA reached a tentative agreement on a new ProComp contract at about 6 a.m. on Thursday after negotiating through the night,” the school district said in a statement on Twitter and Facebook, using the acronym for Denver Public Schools.

All 207 Denver public schools will hold classes on Thursday, except prekindergarten, the district said. Schools have been staffed by substitute teachers and administrators throughout the strike.

The walkout, the first teachers’ strike in Colorado’s largest city since 1994, began on Monday after 15 months of contract talks broke down.

It followed a wave of teacher walkouts in Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia last year and a six-day strike in Los Angeles that was settled last month.

The tentative agreement includes base pay increases of between 7 percent and 11 percent on a salary schedule that has 20 pay steps, along with cost of living increases in the second and third years of the agreement, the union said. More details will be posted later, it said.

ProComp, or Professional Compensation, had been criticized by the union, as well as by schools Superintendent Anna Cordova, as offering unpredictable bonuses based on shifting criteria and resources. As a result, the union said many teachers were leaving Denver because their compensation failed to keep pace with the city’s cost of living.

Both sides pledged to work more collaboratively throughout the term of the contract.

Congratulations to the teachers, their union, and the Denver School District.  The students will be the main beneficiaries of this agreement.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Opportunity, NASA’s Mars rover that was built to operate just three months but kept going and going, was pronounced dead yesterday, 15 years after it landed on the red planet.  The six-wheeled vehicle that gathered critical evidence that ancient Mars might have been hospitable to life was remarkably spry up until eight months ago, when it was finally doomed by a dust storm.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“Flight controllers tried numerous times to make contact and sent one final series of recovery commands Tuesday night along with one last wake-up song, Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You.” There was no response from space, only silence.

“This is a celebration of so many achievements,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told team members gathered at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for what amounted to a wake for the intrepid rover.

The golf cart-size Opportunity outlived its twin, the Spirit rover, by several years. The two slow-moving vehicles landed on opposite sides of the planet in 2004 for a mission that was meant to last 90 days.

In the end, Opportunity set endurance and distance records that are years, if not decades, from being broken.

Rolling along until communication ceased last June, Opportunity roamed a record 28 miles (45 kilometers) around Mars and worked longer than any other lander — anywhere, ever.”

Congratulations to NASA and may Opportunity rest in peace!

Tony