We’ve just published the fourth installment of our four part series on the privatization movement. This final installment is on the educational testing industry: No Test Left Behind: How Pearson Made a Killing on the US Testing Craze. See the whole series here.
We’re incredibly proud of the whole package: it includes a great look at the ideological history of the privatization movement, another detailed feature on how the prison industry is about so much more than prisons and yet another on how so-called “public private partnerships” around making it impossible for many cities to govern themselves. We published most of this series prior to the election of President-Elect Trump. But all of it is even more newsworthy and pertinent in the coming Trump Era since Trump is investing heavily, both literally and in figurative political terms, in each of the drives for privatization described in this series.
TPM is pleased to announce the nominees for the Tenth Annual Golden Dukes Awards, celebrating the most surreal scandals in politics, absurd behavior and dubious claims that we all had the misfortune of witnessing in 2016.
The shocking assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov today in Ankara, amidst a rising tide of global violence and instability, has pitched people’s thoughts to events in Sarajevo, 102 years ago, when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the crown of Austria-Hungary, provided the trigger for World War I. Let me say, briefly, that I don’t think this is that kind of event. But one key to understanding why today’s assassination is not like that other assassination 102 years ago is realizing that our collective understanding of what happened during the so-called “July Crisis” of 1914 is basically wrong.
This latest is an almost comical instance of the flagrant corruption that will fill the next four years, or however long the Trump family holds on to the White House. Trump Organization staffers shook down the Kuwaiti Embassy to get it to move its business from the Four Seasons’ to the new Trump Hotel.
We’re learning a simple, structural reality of our government. The President runs the government. The Congress oversees the President. With carte blanche from Congress, the President can do virtually anything.
GOP Rep. suggests time he waited a day to seek medical care for son’s broken arm as inspiration for post-Obamcare world.
We are still collecting information on the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey. The first confirmation, just in in the last few moments, is that Ambassador Andrei Karlov has died of his wounds.
I was just watching a brief segment on CNN about, among other things, the future of the Democratic party. The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy was one of the two panelists. And it was, frankly, embarrassing.
Murphy said in so many words that Democrats aren’t able to move forward because they have no theory of why they lost and in many cases think they actually won (because of the popular vote). “So when you have that kind of an attitude going forward there’s very little soul searching, very little effort to look inside and say what do we need to say and do differently in order to get more people to win? They’re writing off a large portion of the electorate as a group of people they don’t even want.”
From TPM Reader VI …
Regarding your post today about Russia – it should not at all be underestimated despite weak economy and diminished status. I wrote to you in August of 2008 during Russia’s incursion into Georgia, saying that they also have ideas for Crimea and the Baltic states. You actually published my comment during those days.
From TPM Reader AB …
I wanted to share a really disorienting experience I had yesterday morning in Minneapolis. I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the city. We had a sizable snowfall on Friday night, so my wife and I were shoveling out our front walk on Saturday morning.
As we were digging, a guy in a van drove by and came to a stop. He rolled down his window and said, “I was going to make a funny, but no…” and then shouted “Heil Hennepin! Heil Hennepin! Heil Hennepin!” while making a Nazi salute.
The Electoral College will meet on Monday to declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2016 election. Sometimes, in order to get beyond an awful loss, you have to give up on the rationalizations by which you deny the extent of your defeat.