Part One:
BETSY DEVOS DEPRIVES PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF NEEDED FUNDS.
We speak with Derek Black, professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law, about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s proposal that local school districts divert a significant portion of their CARES Act COVID relief money to *private school* students — leaving less of this public money available to help underfunded public schools.
Even the Republican leader of the Indiana Dept of Education refused to follow DeVos’s guidance because it was an unconstitutional attempt to undermine Congress’s vote to provide emergency relief to needy people. One Republican Senator has already gotten DeVos to back down from her very right-wing anti-public-school agenda, and we hope that other fair-minded Republican Senators will also challenge DeVos’s policies.
Part Two:
THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE BECOME SOCIALISTS SINCE APRIL
We talk with Elaine Godfrey about her recent piece in The Atlantic. The coronavirus has laid bare the tremendous inequities in our society, including how the very rich get tax breaks and exercise undue influence over our elected officials, while the vast majority of us are struggling to make ends meet. The average working American is living paycheck-to-paycheck, just one unanticipated car repair away from being unable to cover their rent, utilities, and groceries (not to mention their prescription medications). Millions have inadequate health insurance (or none at all). Thanks to the pandemic, they have learned — the hard way — that they can’t rely on their employer-provided health coverage to obtain the medical care that their families desperately need.
So guess what? The Democratic Socialists of America have gained about 10,000 new members in April, an outcome that they attribute in part to the coronavirus and its devastating effects on the non-wealthy population. Even before COVID-19, of course, Bernie Sanders — a self-described democratic socialist — was winning over large numbers of ordinary voters — and not all of them were young.
28 years ago, Bill Clinton was elected president as a New Democrat ” telling us that the era of big government is over. His administration dismantled an unprecedented number of federal rules that had constrained the excesses of large corporations. He was reelected on the popularity of ending welfare as we know it. For decades after Clinton, it was deemed political suicide to be tarred as a socialist. Democrats were afraid even to call themselves liberals.
Surprisingly, after a lurch toward authoritarian government in 2016, the “S word” is now back. It is no longer verboten to call oneself a socialist. A person can even win the first four presidential primaries as a declared socialist (even though his victories gave conniption fits to Donald Trump, the Republican right-wing, and even the centrists in the Democratic Party). They excoriated the policies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, accusing them of trying to ignite a “class war.”
But now the pandemic has shown us all the true meaning of inequality, of deprivation, of racism, of the naked fear that is caused by losing one’s means of subsistence. And, importantly, it showed us just how close most of us are to falling into that terrifying situation.
How will this all get sorted out in the November elections? What will happen to the American dream? Next year at this time (and in years afterward), will we continue to enjoy the benefits of democracy, freedom, economic security, physical security, good health? [Let’s put these questions in perspective: The Democratic Socialists of America now have 66,000 members. The Libertarian Party has more than 600,000. And who has counted the number of white nationalists?]
