Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 879
January 29, 2016
Tough spot for Clinton days before Iowa: She demands release of 22 “top secret” emails after feds block them
The State Department announced Friday that 22 emails from Hillary Clinton's private server contained "top secret" information and would not be released to the public. "We can confirm that later today [Friday], as part of our monthly FOIA productions of former Secretary Clinton's emails, the State Department will be denying in full seven email chains, found in 22 documents representing 37 pages," State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. Kirby explained that the information in the emails was not classified at the time the messages were sent, but is now being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community. This marks the first confirmation that emails from Clinton's personal server contained top secret information. The timing of the announcement puts Clinton in a difficult position, as she is currently locked in a tight race with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with only days to go until Monday's Iowa caucuses. The Clinton campaign immediately went on the defensive. "Since first providing her emails to the State Department more than one year ago, Hillary Clinton has urged that they be made available to the public," said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. "We feel no differently today." https://twitter.com/brianefallon/stat... Republican leadership reacted to this latest release by attacking Clinton and trying to tie the issue to President Obama: https://twitter.com/Reince/status/693... The issue has been a nagging distraction for Clinton, who has struggled to maintain a consistent defense against accusations that she mishandled classified information during her time as Secretary of State. Clinton offered an apology in September. "As I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. One for personal, one for work-related emails," she told ABC News. "That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility." But at CNN's Iowa Presidential Town Hall on Monday she took a more defensive posture. "I’m not willing to say it was an error in judgment because what - nothing that I did was wrong," she said. Though the Iowa caucuses are just days away, the Clinton campaign can take solace in the fact that Sanders, Clinton's main Democratic challenger, has repeatedly declined to attack her on the issue. Raising the issue of Clinton' private email server has been an applause line for Republican presidential primary contenders for months, but Sanders has indicated that he will not use the emails to go negative. "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about [Clinton's] damn emails," Sanders famously said at a Democratic debate in October.
Stephen Colbert just made Donald Trump debate Donald Trump, and it’s better than the entire GOP debate
The fact that Donald Trump sat out Thursday night's debate because of his ongoing feud with Megyn Kelly made Stephen Colbert not want to even watch the debate. He explained to his "Late Show" audience that a debate just isn't the same without Trump. "Why would he want to practice going head to head with a strong blonde woman," Colbert said with a photo of Hillary Clinton beside Trump. He read the mocking statement from Fox News explaining that Trump won't be allowed to blow off international political leaders who challenge him. "We all know he brings huge ratings. After all, he is the star of this year's top reality show 'Celebrity-a-President,'" Colbert joked. Without Trump in the debate that means that there are 24 million viewers up for grabs. So if Fox News won't go all in with Trump, Stephen sure as hell will. He's having "The 2016 Top Trump Tremendous All-You-Can-Trump Luxury Presidential Debate." Mashing up videos of Trump, Colbert hosted the first ever Trump against Trump debate. Check it out in the video below: The fact that Donald Trump sat out Thursday night's debate because of his ongoing feud with Megyn Kelly made Stephen Colbert not want to even watch the debate. He explained to his "Late Show" audience that a debate just isn't the same without Trump. "Why would he want to practice going head to head with a strong blonde woman," Colbert said with a photo of Hillary Clinton beside Trump. He read the mocking statement from Fox News explaining that Trump won't be allowed to blow off international political leaders who challenge him. "We all know he brings huge ratings. After all, he is the star of this year's top reality show 'Celebrity-a-President,'" Colbert joked. Without Trump in the debate that means that there are 24 million viewers up for grabs. So if Fox News won't go all in with Trump, Stephen sure as hell will. He's having "The 2016 Top Trump Tremendous All-You-Can-Trump Luxury Presidential Debate." Mashing up videos of Trump, Colbert hosted the first ever Trump against Trump debate. Check it out in the video below:
This is why Trump was smart to avoid her: Megyn Kelly just crushed the GOP debate
So, after all that, Donald Trump made good on his promise to shun Thursday's Republican presidential debate on Fox News. What a smart thing that turned out to be.
Despite what he told CNN in an interview shortly before the debate aired, Trump had been clear about why he didn't want to participate in the Fox debate: the presence of moderator Megyn Kelly. Whether or not he really meant it, Kelly showed time and again why he was right to avoid a renewed confrontation with her.
Here's the thing about Megyn Kelly. She's not some closet liberal. That's a common mistake made about her. She often indulges in the same right-wing racial hysteria as anybody on Fox. But she can be a pretty fearless—and fearsome—TV journalist. On Thursday, she unveiled what might be the most ruthless, devastating technique I've ever seen in any debate I've watched. It was so neat and brutally effective that you wondered why it had never been done before.
Put simply, Kelly pulled a "Daily Show" on Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, playing lengthy montages of their past support of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. (They've each since flip-flopped.) Both men, robbed of their ability to insist that they'd never said the words they'd obviously said, floundered helplessly.
Can you imagine the kind of clip show Kelly and her team were preparing for Trump? She does not mess around. Instead of dealing with her, Trump got the best of both worlds. He ducked any debate messiness but still managed to dominate the proceedings in his absence, and got his alternative rally aired on both CNN and MSNBC. He also left Ted Cruz in place as a default frontrunner; Cruz, who even on his best nights has the air of a man trying to sell you a monorail you don't need, had one of his worst nights. He resorted to whining about how much he was getting ganged up on, which is never attractive even when attractive people do it.Nothing else in the debate reached the audacious heights of the clip-show hit jobs. Faced with Kelly's sheer star power, the other moderators, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier, couldn't help but play second fiddle. The worst part of the evening was the repeated tossing aside of interesting, relevant questions. The requisite 9 hours were spent getting each man onstage to brag about how many ISIS fighters he would personally disembowel, but questions on Puerto Rico's debt, on criminal justice and policing, on climate change and on the crisis in Flint were all asked of just one candidate and then discarded. What's the point of having multiple debates if you don't use them to tackle a wide range of issues in the broadest way possible?
It would be foolish to predict what effect the debate will have. The caucuses are just around the corner. Nobody knows what's going to happen. What does seem certain is that at least some of the people who participated in the debate on Thursday won't be around much longer. Megyn Kelly won't be one of those. She is now well on her way to cementing herself as the indispensable star of Fox News, with or without the assistance of Donald Trump.
Check out our GOP debate recap here: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/Highli..." image="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/960x0....]
Megyn Kelly is no better than Fox News: Her racist question about Muslims puts her on par with GOP candidates
Thursday night's Republican debate on Fox News was a cornucopia of politicians saying vile and untrue things. Keeping up with what these fools who think they deserve a seat in the White House are saying is hard enough, so it's no surprise that one of the most wretched moments of the night, courtesy of moderator Megyn Kelly, got a bit lost in the media coverage of the debate. But it's worth taking another look, because the moment demonstrated why Kelly most certainly doesn't deserve the glowing reputation she has in much of the mainstream and liberal press. The moment came when Kelly was trying to portray Chris Christie — Chris Christie, who spent most of the debate competing with Marco Rubio for who can be the hysterical over terrorism — as somehow soft on terrorism because he won't endorse racial profiling as a tactic. "In December, two radical Muslims killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California," she began. "Neighbors of the terrorists said that they did not report the couple to law enforcement prior to the crime, because they were afraid that they would be accused of profiling." Christie, in one of his few sensible moments of the night, pointed out that using "facts" and collecting intelligence instead of abusing everyone in a hijab is more effective as a law enforcement technique, but Kelly wasn't having it. "The neighbors said they saw men going in and out of the garage," she countered. "They saw packages being delivered. They saw Muslims, and they did not think that was enough to call the cops. Do you?" It was a jaw-dropping moment of pure, unadulterated racism. Kelly's argument was that behaviors that would never raise an eyebrow if performed by white Christians — receiving packages, having friends over to your house — become suspicious and reason enough to call 911 if being performed by people you suspect are Muslims. It's tough not to wonder if Kelly actually buys her own nonsense. She does, after all, live in New York City, where people of every race and ethnicity you can imagine fill the streets. Does she flip out and call the cops every time she thinks she sees a Muslim? "Yes, officer, I see two people that look like Muslims drinking coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I get that there's nothing suspicious about drinking coffee, but you know, those San Bernardino shooters seemed normal, too, and look what happened there!" And no, despite Kelly's implication, the fact that these two were up to something doesn't justify treating every Muslim who gets a package in the mail or has a friend over for tea like they are plotting a terrorist attack. That was Christie's point about focusing on facts over inchoate suspicions based on racial stereotypes. Out of every million package deliveries or visits from friends, there might be one incident that's more nefarious than it seems. Forcing law enforcement to harass every single Muslim who does either every single time isn't just a violation of basic human rights, but it's a massive waste of law enforcement resources. The moment really highlighted, however, the sheer illogic at the heart of conservative hysteria over the threat of Muslim terrorism. After all, we live in a country where it's downright routine for angry people to take their resentments out on the world by going into a crowded area and shooting the place up. In the annals of mass shooters, however, the San Bernardino shooters stand out because of how atypical they are. Almost all mass shooters are men and nearly all of them are single. But if you suggested profiling single white men the way that Kelly suggested profiling Muslims, Kelly herself would be the first to have an aneurysm and start throwing out accusations of bigotry. This wasn't just Kelly toying with Christie, either. She kept pushing this profiling agenda with Ben Carson, who, unlike Christie, isn't burdened by professional experience and therefore is free to push the ridiculous notion that harassing random Muslims is effective law enforcement. After Kelly asked if he thinks "GOP messaging on Muslims has stoked the flames of bias," he dismissed that idea out of hand, saying we "need to stop allowing political correctness to dictate our policies, because it's going to kill us if we don't." Kelly did not dog Carson about this answer the way she dogged Christie for his anti-profiling answer. This all matters, and not just because you have a major network peddling odiously racist ideas that would even make a 19th century colonialist say they're going too far. Kelly has a reputation in the media for being a hard-nosed journalist, and gets glowing accolades after debates like this for supposedly being so good at her job. But, as this exchange shows, Kelly's not actually a good journalist. She's quick on her feet and doesn't back down from a line of questioning, and people mistake that for good journalism. But, at the end of the day, her ability to do her job correctly is hobbled by her crippling lack of basic critical thinking skills. This isn't even really about her politics, but about her failure to root her questions in basic logic and facts. Asking if law enforcement should waste its time investigating every time one of the almost 2 million Muslim adults in this country gets a package or visits with a friend isn't just astoundingly racist, it's stupid. It shows she hasn't given this question a moment's thought. It's made worse by the fact that she wants to target people based on an atypical case instead of looking at more likely scenarios. Not that any of this should be a surprise. Kelly has a long and ugly history of saying racist things that manage to be even more stupid than they are offensive. (My personal favorite was when she went off insisting that Santa Claus "just is white," even though Santa Claus is not actually a real person, but a made-up character who can have any traits you want him to have.) People really need to stop mistaking Kelly's ability to act tough on TV for actual skills as a journalist. 
America’s secret history of forced sterilization: Remembering a disturbing and not-so-distant past
Writing for the majority in the Supreme Court’s landmark case,
Buck v. Bell
, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville native Carrie Buck as the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted,” writing that “her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” In that ruling, the Court found that that the Virginia Sterilization Act, under which Carrie was sterilized, was Constitutional. Citing the best interests of the state, Justice Holmes affirmed that Virginia's law was valuable, and that laws like it could prevent the country from being "swamped with incompetence." The Court accepted, without evidence, that Carrie and her mother were promiscuous and that therefore, the three generations of Bucks shared the genetic trait of feeblemindedness. Based on this assessment, the Court found that it was in the state's best interest to have Carrie Buck sterilized. The ruling was considered a major victory for eugenicists. In Monday’s PBS documentary premiere, "No Más Bebés," Maria Hurtado speaks of the moment she realized that she couldn’t have more children, “They must’ve thought, ‘this woman has so many kids, we’ll just sew her up, so she won’t know that we did the operation.’” Mrs. Hurtado is one of ten plaintiffs who filed a civil rights lawsuit against doctors at the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center, claiming that they were sterilized without their consent. Another woman, Conseulo Hermosillo, then 23 years old, didn’t realized that she had been sterilized until she asked her doctor for birth control. Maria Figueroa was raising her young children in East Los Angeles when she learned that she’d been sterilized. Dolores Madrigal and her husband were saving up for a house and more children by working factory jobs. When they learned that Dolores had been sterilized, her family broke apart, as she and her husband dealt with the pain and anger of their crushed dreams. In "No Más Bebés," filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña tells the story of these Mexican immigrant women who sued a powerful hospital, county doctors, the state of California and the U.S. Government after having been sterilized without their consent. In the early and mid 1970s a young Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, working in the obstetrics ward of the L.A. County USC Medical Center in the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A., began to notice that immigrant women, not fluent in English, were being pushed into tubal ligations while they were in the active late stages of labor. Several of the women in the film remember the moment, while being rushed into the operating room for an emergency C-section, that they were given a piece of paper, in English, to sign. Over several years, Dr. Rosenfeld covertly gathered proof of these sterilizations and sought out the help of a young Chicana attorney, Antonia Hernández, to bring a legal challenge. In 1978, after months of tracking down the women who had been sterilized, Hernández and her clients brought a lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, and asserted that their right to bear children had been violated by coercive sterilization. Anchoring the argument to Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut, Hernandez’ legal strategy was to prove that there is an established individual right to procreate. "No Más Bebés" tells the story of their fight to stop the practice of sterilization without consent. This fight to end such coercive sterilization practices brought up some rifts in the feminist movement. In the 70s, as Chicana feminists were railing against the practice of sterilization without consent, white feminists were fighting for the right to an abortion. Laura Jimenez, the Executive Director of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice tells Salon that mainstream feminism has been defined by issues of abortion and contraceptive access, and the right of women to not have children, while women of color, “have had to fight for our right to have children consistently, sterilization abuse being just one example of this struggle.” Finding partners and allies in their efforts proved to be a challenge for the Chicana feminist leaders of the 60s and 70s. Activist Gloria Molina recalls the pushback they faced when they brought their concerns to the male-led Chicano movement of the time, who often diminished or delayed centering women’s issues within their advocacy efforts. Seeking solidarity from fellow feminists, Chicana activists approached the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. The NOW chapter refused to support their call for laws mandating a waiting period for sterilization, not wanting to add any burden for those women seeking sterilization on demand. Jimenez thinks it important to shine a light on a chapter of reproductive rights history that often goes untold. “It is important to see the issue of sterilization abuse in the context of a historical legacy of reproductive oppression of women of color and poor women, and as with other eugenic strategies, part of a larger ideology to control the reproduction of certain communities,” Jimenez said. In 1965 a government film, "Fertility Control and the Physician," showed a tubal ligation procedure and was intended as a training film for doctors to encourage them to control the birth rate of poor populations. In fact, Madrigal v. Quilligan came at a time when population control hysteria was at a high, in the wake of Paul Ehrlich’s influential book, "The Population Bomb." In his book, Ehrlich’s now-debunked warning is that if birth rates are not lowered drastically, the planet faced an apocalyptic scenario of devastation and famine. The first line reads, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Scholar Natalie Lira, offers important historical context, telling Salon that in the early 1920s, 32 states around the country had eugenic sterilization laws like California’s. While the L.A. County hospital and doctors vehemently deny any eugenic or population control intent, Lira tells Salon, “sterilizations were cast as part treatment and part prevention. The idea was that people who were committed to these institutions were incapable of being fit parents and, furthermore, they were genetically unfit themselves and should be sterilized to prevent degeneracy. This fell in line with the eugenic ideology of managing reproduction for the benefit of humankind. Of course, eugenic notions of fitness were greatly influenced by race, class, gender and sexuality.” Dr. Lira who is co-leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers and students at the University of Michigan to study the phenomenon of eugenic sterilizations, says that approximately 20,000 sterilizations (of approx. 60,000 nationwide) took place in California between 1920 and 1950. After that time, formalized eugenic practices fell out of favor due to hatred of the Nazi eugenic practices. But the phenomenon of coercive sterilization continues on. As recently as few years ago, California was back in the news as The Center for Investigative Reporting released a report on the sterilization abuse of incarcerated women. Filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña finds a strong parallel in this case, telling Salon,
“We met some of the women who had been sterilized in California prisons, as well as filmmakers who are documenting that story. It was stunning how similar the experiences of incarcerated women were to the women in our film.”Historian Virgina Espino, producer of "No Más Bebés," situates the story in a long history of reproductive injustice. "Bodily autonomy is key to the story and the Madrigal plaintiffs are very clear about this," Espino said. "They were clear in ’75 and they are clear today." Ultimately, in his 1978 ruling, Judge Jesse Curtis acknowledged that while the women had “suffered severe emotional and physical stress because of these operations,” he refused to blame County General physicians for what he called “a breakdown in communication between the patients and the doctors.” In 1979, California’s sterilization law was repealed and, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare implemented new sterilization guidelines for those sterilizations performed with public funds. In 2013, the North Carolina state legislature approved $10 million in compensation for the men and women who were victims of eugenics between 1929 and 1974, with the state of Virginia following suit in March of 2015. In 2003, California officially apologized to victims of the state’s sterilization program, but there has yet to be any offer of compensation. The Supreme Court has never overturned Buck v. Bell. Eesha Pandit is a writer and activist based in Houston, TX. You can follow her on twitter at @EeshaP , and find out more about her work at eeshapandit.com .
Republican fault lines exposed: Campaign donations reveal a House GOP divided
The Republican split that defines this year’s presidential campaign has been on display in Congress for years, with the most conservative wing battling party leaders on issues from spending to immigration. A ProPublica analysis of campaign donations highlights just how profound this gap has become in the House of Representatives. The analysis shows that the Republican leadership, including Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, raises money from a vastly different set of political action committees than members further to the right. In fact, the donor bases for Ryan and McCarthy are actually more similar to some Democrats than to their colleagues in the main conservative grouping, the Freedom Caucus. The fundraising disparity stokes the divisive atmosphere in Congress, reinforcing policy differences and sometimes affecting the outcome of legislation in surprising ways. For example, when a Republican-backed plan to ease a campaign finance rule evaporated in Congress, it was the most conservative GOP lawmakers in the House who joined with liberal Democrats to get it killed. The provision, which died in December, was initiated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and was included in a must-pass spending bill. It would have eliminated caps on the money a national party committee can spend in coordination with a candidate. The caps were originally meant to reduce the amount of outside cash flowing directly to advocacy for a particular candidate. Those in favor of lifting the restrictions say they are outmoded in the increasingly wild world of campaign finance and effectively give less-accountable outside groups like super PACs more influence than traditional parties. Many Democrats argued that eliminating the caps would have opened the spigot to even more big money in politics. For conservatives, the reason to oppose the McConnell plan was different: It might have helped Republican leaders quash internal dissenters. With a bigger campaign war chest raised from donors who support mainstream Republicans, the party would find it easier to select and back its favored House candidates. “The McConnell rider provides preferential treatment to the Washington establishment,” the Conservative Action Project, a group led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese, wrote in appealing to like-minded lawmakers to fight the measure. The differences in donor bases affect other policy debates, said Dave Brat of Virginia, a Freedom Caucus member who defeated then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 primary and went on to take his seat. For instance, he said, conservatives lost their fight to defund the U.S. Export-Import Bank last year in part because the companies that benefit from the bank won over Republicans and Democrats who received campaign contributions from those firms. The disparity is “a huge deal,” Brat said. ProPublica’s analysis used a calculation called cosine similarity to compare each House members’ donors to others; two members with an identical set of donors would receive a score of 1, while two with no PAC donors in common would get a score of 0. The degree of similarity between Ryan’s 2014 PAC donors and those of Freedom Caucus members Justin Amash of Michigan and Ted Yoho of Florida was close to nil: 0.03 and 0.16. Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican who lost his seat on the House Agriculture Committee in 2012 for his votes against leadership, had few PAC donors in common with Ryan (a score of 0.15) or any other House colleague in 2014: his highest score was 0.3, with fellow Kansan Mike Pompeo. PAC donors to House Majority Leader McCarthy, of California, were more like Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer’s (0.53 score) than they were those of Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who heads the Freedom Caucus (0.31). The gap between the leadership and insurgents has widened since 2008. That year, McCarthy’s PAC donors were more similar to those of Michele Bachmann, the former Minnesota congresswoman who founded the House’s Tea Party caucus, than they were to PACs that gave to then-Majority Leader Cantor or then-Speaker John Boehner. By the end of 2014, the gulf between McCarthy and the conservatives was much wider: all House GOP leaders, and even 11House Democrats, had PAC donors more similar to McCarthy’s than any member of the Freedom Caucus. Paul Ryan’s PAC Donors Are More Likely to Also Be Democratic Donors Than Freedom Caucus Donors Cosine similarity scores for PAC donations made to members of the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2014 election cycle. A score of one would mean an identical set of donors, and a score of zero would mean no overlap between donors.
Source: ProPublica analysis of Federal Election Commission data. Credit: Sisi Wei and Derek Willis.
The donors that typically back House leaders are large corporate PACs with broad interests before Congress. They include the Automotive Free Trade International PAC, which represents American dealers of foreign car manufacturers. The PAC giveshundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, of which just $11,500 went to three dozen Freedom Caucus members during the 2014 cycle. On the other hand, none of the leaders received contributions from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund, which is one of the top overall donors to Freedom Caucus members. The two factions do have some PAC donors in common, such as the Koch Industries PAC, which gave $201,500 to 36 members of the House Freedom Caucus identified by the Pew Research Center during the last election. The KochPAC gave more than $1.4 million to Republican House candidates, including its leaders. But even in cases where the same PAC backs both camps, the amounts are often lopsided, with less money going to Freedom Caucus members, many of whom are relatively junior lawmakers. The Home Depot PAC, for example, gave the maximum $10,000 to scores of lawmakers’ campaigns in 2014; only one of them, Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, where Home Depot has its headquarters, is a Freedom Caucus member. Other members of the Freedom Caucus received donations from the PAC, but not for the maximum amount. Stephen Holmes, a spokesman for Home Depot, said many factors go into the company’s PAC giving, but caucus membership wasn’t one of them. The failure of McConnell’s plan to lift the caps on party spending shows how the source of lawmakers’ contributions influences their votes. Republicans generally have voted in favor of looser rules on raising and spending campaign money, especially since the passage of the 2002 McCain-Feingold law that banned national parties from collecting unlimited contributions. Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine law professor who studies campaign finance and elections, said it’s notable that the Freedom Caucus pushed to preserve the party restrictions. “Sometimes,” Hasen said, “self-interest can trump ideology.” This story was co-published with The Daily Beast.
You really are becoming your mother: The science that confirms your greatest hopes and fears
We often attribute key characteristics to one of our parents: “He gets his athleticism from his father.” “Her quickness to anger—that’s all her mother.” Whether the genetics are actually pulling the strings in these cases is another story. But a growing body of research has suggested that heredity does apply to mood disorders—including depression, which afflicts more than 2.8 million adolescents in the U.S. alone—and that there is compelling evidence hereditary ties are strong between mothers and daughters. Researchers in a new study of 35 healthy families published in The Journal of Neuroscience this week have found that the brain’s corticolimbic system, responsible for the regulation of emotion—and associated with the manifestation of depressive symptoms—is more likely to be passed down from mother to daughter than from mother to son or father to child. This finding, which supports past evidence from animal research and clinical studies on depression, could provide a better understanding of the role genetics play in mood disorders and other conditions, allowing better identification of at-risk groups and preventive measures. “Our study’s uniqueness,” says lead author Fumiko Hoeft, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, “is that we’re the first one to get the whole family and scan both parents and offspring to look at how similar their brain networks are. We can tell, even though the genetics are more complicated than we originally thought, who we got our eye color from. And we joke about inheriting stubbornness or organization—but we’ve never actually seen that in human brain networks before. [This research] was a proof of impact, of using a new design that has significant potential.” Hoeft cites Dr. Seuss’s children’s book Horton Hatches the Egg—in which an elephant sits on a bird’s egg in lieu of its actual mother and a hybrid elephant–bird ends up hatching—as a cartoonish example of the inspiration for this research. The forces of both nature and nurture are at play. “What’s relevant is that it shows the profound influence of prenatal impact on offspring, which we often forget,” Hoeft adds. “Prenatal input is considered in the most severe cases, like alcohol and smoking. But it happens in everyone. A mom being stressed has an impact on her child’s outcome.” The finding is particularly relevant in light of the recommendations issued today by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which include the screening of pregnant women and new mothers for depression. Although this recommendation is primarily a response to concerns about the role of the “nurture” side of the equation, Hoeft seeks to unravel how biology plays its part as well. Hoeft and her team took MRI brain scans of each family member in the study—all participants were healthy and none had been diagnosed with depression—and examined voxels, or discrete units of volume, in the corticolimbic system. They found that the association between gray matter volume in the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus (all parts of the corticolimbic system) was much greater in mother–daughter pairings than in any other parent–offspring pairing, which, in turn, may suggest a significant female-specific maternal transmission pattern in mood disorders like depression. “These results are truly interesting and exciting,” says Geneviève Piché, a psychologist at the University of Quebec en Outaouais who has studied a different aspect of the intergenerational transmission of depression, particularly the impact of environmental factors such as parental care and punitive behavior. “But we must remain cautious when we interpret these results,” she says. “For one, only 35 families were studied, and these were 35 healthy families. We cannot be certain that these results can be generalized to depressed families, per se. We’ll have to wait for future studies on depressed mothers and see if we get similar results.” And, as Hoeft notes, whereas the study does show intergenerational transmission patterns, it does not differentiate between the type of influence at hand: genetic, prenatal or postnatal impacts or some combination of the three could be responsible. “It’s not just one factor, it’s an accumulation of many risk factors that play a role or cause a child to develop depressive symptoms,” Piché adds. Hoeft’s team intends to address this limitation in a new study by examining MRI scans of parents and children in families that used different forms of in vitro fertilization. The current study opens doors for future research as well. Hoeft is particularly excited about potentially applying this study’s design not only to other mental health conditions, such as autism, but also to forming a better understanding of our addiction and reward systems and even our language abilities (differentiating, for instance, between language, an innate ability that has existed throughout human history and presumably embedded in our genetics, and reading, a relatively far newer skill). “And these results are also interesting from a preventive point of view,” Piché says, “because in the future it may help us identify and target girls that will be at higher risk of disorders like depression, and then be able to possibly prevent the development of depressive symptoms.”
Education reform’s devious blame game: The charter school movement doesn’t want you to know it’s failing
Charter schools, which have been criticized for grabbing billions in taxpayer dollars with promises to reinvent public education using corporate efficiencies and values, are finding themselves under fire from industry insiders who are saying that these hyped market-based reforms don’t work. The criticism comes in the wake of scandals by some of the sector’s biggest for-profit players that have given the industry a bad name. But the remarks appear to reflect a new public relations and lobbying strategy, where allies of non-profit charter operators are blaming their for-profit brethren as a way to duck political fallout, avoid scrutiny for many of the same practices and to boost their market niche. “National for-profit charter school operators have increasingly been in the press lately and not for good reasons,” begins a January column by lobbyist-consultant Alex Medler on EducationPost.org. “Based on how often for-profit operators embarrass the charter sector, many are willing to say it’s time to ban them.” Medler is not merely referring to investigative reports in 2015 that found hundreds of millions of dollars was misspent or missing. Nor is he referring to studies that show online charter school—the industry’s fastest-growing sector—are dogged by dropouts, poor academics and last fall’s stock price collapse of K12 Inc., the nation’s largest online charter operator. It has approximately 90,000 students enrolled in entirely Internet-delivered instruction in more than 20 states. He is referring to all those threads and a more basic one: “hubris” that the marketplace and all its vaunted know-how could fundamentally transform public schools and improve learning. “For-profits mistakenly assumed that inefficiency leads to bad schools,” he wrote. “They thought national scale and business savvy would allow them to outperform the competition. Chalk it up to outsiders’ hubris, but any school leader will tell you that running good schools is much more complicated than getting operations to fit together efficiently.” Medler added that state and local laws governing how public schools are to be run also confounded these would-be reformers. “Both the profit and quality quickly evaded most of them.” Not News To Longtime Charter Critics These comments are not coming from longtime charter foes like advocates for traditional public schools, but from an industry lobbyist-consultant. But Medler, who goes on to argue that non-profit charter schools are a healthier breed—his field’s new talking point—is not alone in revealing deep doubts about the charter school industry. In an USnews.com commentary, charter consultant Andrew Rotherman noted that taking charter-related companies public—by selling stock—frequently yields bad outcomes. He cited Amplify, an education technology firm that was resold to private investors by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. “The company grew too fast,” he said and then floundered under “constant pressure of stock prices, earnings expectations and the short-term thinking plaguing public companies right now.” James Merriman, the CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, added his voice to the naysayer chorus when he last month told Slate.com, “You can’t make a profit and get good results… any dollar converted [to profits] from being used inefficiently in an inner-city charter school is needed in the school.” These statements by industry insiders about how free market tenets have not transformed public schools as promised are a notable crack in the propaganda armor surrounding the charter movement. But they also reflect a shrewd political move, where more enduring charter operators—who increasingly seem to be set up as non-profit businesses—are trying to uncouple themselves from their for-profit brethren in the public’s and lawmaker’s eyes. “Yes, there is a recent trend with representatives from the charter school establishment openly criticizing the for-profits or even suggesting or implying that the for-profit companies like K12 Inc. should be covered under separate legislation (i.e., do not call them charter schools thus allowing remaining charters to distance themselves from the damaging news about online charters that continues to pop up across the country,” wrote Gary Miron, a professor of Evaluation, Measurement and Research at Western Michigan University’s College of Education and Human Development, in an e-mail to AlterNet. “In addition to the link you shared from Alex Medler, who has worked with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Alex has been posting similar comments on a discussion board about his concerns about for-profit EMOs.” Wall Street-Created Fictions EMO—or education management organizations—is the Wall Street-created term for firms running charter school chains—like HMO refers to health maintenance organizations in the health care world. When charters emerged in the early 1990s as a reform idea, they were envisioned as a new type of public schools that would be small, locally run, innovative and open to all students. In the two decades since, they have become an industry dominated by growing brands—some for-profit, some non-profit—and the primary mechanism for privatizing public schools and public school functions. The sector has more than 6,700 schools with 2.9 million students across the country. In many states, specially created authorities—not locally elected school boards—hire EMOs to run their newly created charter public schools. Miron said there were roughly 100 for-profit EMOs running about 900 schools and about 300 nonprofit EMOs running 2,000-plus schools. In all, they account for about 1.2 million students nationwide. Miron, who also is a National Education Policy Center fellow at the University of Colorado, has been tracking the charter school industry for years and co-wrote a late 2015 report with Rutgers University’s Bruce Baker that detailed the various ways unscrupulous or greedy operators skim profits from running these schools. That report identified four major areas where taxpayer funds were being diverted from academics into profit centers for owners-operators. What was most striking was the array of complex business strategies that have little to do with improving student achievement but much more to do with diverting money from classrooms, teacher salaries, real estate assets and funds obtained from selling government-backed bonds. The Center’s report is very complex and shows how many charter operators use an intentional web of interrelated for-profit and non-profit shells. “It is very hard to distinguish the behaviors of for-profits and non-profits—consider the issue of administrative salaries for example,” said Alex Molnar, National Education Policy Center research professor and publications director. The center’s reports have detailed why two business models are not as different as one may assume, as both have underwriters, targeted metrics and set their own salary and management structures—including no-bid contracts. “Most nonprofit EMOs operate similar to for-profit EMOs,” said Miron. “Their management fees, and management contracts look similar to the for-profits and the concerns about privatization, weak or powerless boards, lack of transparency, high salaries at the top, etc. etc. are all similar to concerns we have with the for-profit EMOs.” In other words, despite the public pronouncements by charter industry insiders that their for-profit operators are need to be quarantined and held to a different standard than their non-profit operators, it is a myth to suggest the industry’s internal divisions are so black and white. The Easier Target: For-Profits The Center’s report highlighting the charter industry’s corruption-prone business model reenforces that conclusion. But what’s true is that for-profit companies that have sold stock are legally required to disclose different and more detailed fiscal information than charters that have been organized as non-profits. That makes them an easier target in the media’s eye. That’s especially true of the higher-profile for-profit chains that were not delivering anticipated revenues for their Wall St. investors, primarily because they learned that running any public school is complex and hard. K12’s seems to be the field’s Exhibit A for the “hubris” that industry consultant Alex Medler wrote about on EducationPost.org—vastly overpromising and then underperforming. The firm is the nation’s largest provider of internet-only public schools. Its stock dropped more than 20 percent last fall after embarrassments could not be swept away. They had sub-par test scores, dwindling enrollments, and management contracts that were not renewed. That came after investors betting—and winning—that their stock would crash, and admissions by former employees, like marketing director Houston Tucker, who told Bloomberg.com that “K12 grew too fast and invested too little in instruction.” But despite this new wave of insider-driven criticism, Miron said the industry’s for-profit sector has not stopped growing—even with calls for a moratorium on new schools by industry insiders like Medler and other vocal critics such as the locally elected high school board in Anaheim, California. “Our research shows that the growth of for-profit EMOs has slowed but—on the whole—they still are growing,” Miron said. “I am not aware of increase of action to implement charter moratoriums.”
Charter schools, which have been criticized for grabbing billions in taxpayer dollars with promises to reinvent public education using corporate efficiencies and values, are finding themselves under fire from industry insiders who are saying that these hyped market-based reforms don’t work. The criticism comes in the wake of scandals by some of the sector’s biggest for-profit players that have given the industry a bad name. But the remarks appear to reflect a new public relations and lobbying strategy, where allies of non-profit charter operators are blaming their for-profit brethren as a way to duck political fallout, avoid scrutiny for many of the same practices and to boost their market niche. “National for-profit charter school operators have increasingly been in the press lately and not for good reasons,” begins a January column by lobbyist-consultant Alex Medler on EducationPost.org. “Based on how often for-profit operators embarrass the charter sector, many are willing to say it’s time to ban them.” Medler is not merely referring to investigative reports in 2015 that found hundreds of millions of dollars was misspent or missing. Nor is he referring to studies that show online charter school—the industry’s fastest-growing sector—are dogged by dropouts, poor academics and last fall’s stock price collapse of K12 Inc., the nation’s largest online charter operator. It has approximately 90,000 students enrolled in entirely Internet-delivered instruction in more than 20 states. He is referring to all those threads and a more basic one: “hubris” that the marketplace and all its vaunted know-how could fundamentally transform public schools and improve learning. “For-profits mistakenly assumed that inefficiency leads to bad schools,” he wrote. “They thought national scale and business savvy would allow them to outperform the competition. Chalk it up to outsiders’ hubris, but any school leader will tell you that running good schools is much more complicated than getting operations to fit together efficiently.” Medler added that state and local laws governing how public schools are to be run also confounded these would-be reformers. “Both the profit and quality quickly evaded most of them.” Not News To Longtime Charter Critics These comments are not coming from longtime charter foes like advocates for traditional public schools, but from an industry lobbyist-consultant. But Medler, who goes on to argue that non-profit charter schools are a healthier breed—his field’s new talking point—is not alone in revealing deep doubts about the charter school industry. In an USnews.com commentary, charter consultant Andrew Rotherman noted that taking charter-related companies public—by selling stock—frequently yields bad outcomes. He cited Amplify, an education technology firm that was resold to private investors by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. “The company grew too fast,” he said and then floundered under “constant pressure of stock prices, earnings expectations and the short-term thinking plaguing public companies right now.” James Merriman, the CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, added his voice to the naysayer chorus when he last month told Slate.com, “You can’t make a profit and get good results… any dollar converted [to profits] from being used inefficiently in an inner-city charter school is needed in the school.” These statements by industry insiders about how free market tenets have not transformed public schools as promised are a notable crack in the propaganda armor surrounding the charter movement. But they also reflect a shrewd political move, where more enduring charter operators—who increasingly seem to be set up as non-profit businesses—are trying to uncouple themselves from their for-profit brethren in the public’s and lawmaker’s eyes. “Yes, there is a recent trend with representatives from the charter school establishment openly criticizing the for-profits or even suggesting or implying that the for-profit companies like K12 Inc. should be covered under separate legislation (i.e., do not call them charter schools thus allowing remaining charters to distance themselves from the damaging news about online charters that continues to pop up across the country,” wrote Gary Miron, a professor of Evaluation, Measurement and Research at Western Michigan University’s College of Education and Human Development, in an e-mail to AlterNet. “In addition to the link you shared from Alex Medler, who has worked with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Alex has been posting similar comments on a discussion board about his concerns about for-profit EMOs.” Wall Street-Created Fictions EMO—or education management organizations—is the Wall Street-created term for firms running charter school chains—like HMO refers to health maintenance organizations in the health care world. When charters emerged in the early 1990s as a reform idea, they were envisioned as a new type of public schools that would be small, locally run, innovative and open to all students. In the two decades since, they have become an industry dominated by growing brands—some for-profit, some non-profit—and the primary mechanism for privatizing public schools and public school functions. The sector has more than 6,700 schools with 2.9 million students across the country. In many states, specially created authorities—not locally elected school boards—hire EMOs to run their newly created charter public schools. Miron said there were roughly 100 for-profit EMOs running about 900 schools and about 300 nonprofit EMOs running 2,000-plus schools. In all, they account for about 1.2 million students nationwide. Miron, who also is a National Education Policy Center fellow at the University of Colorado, has been tracking the charter school industry for years and co-wrote a late 2015 report with Rutgers University’s Bruce Baker that detailed the various ways unscrupulous or greedy operators skim profits from running these schools. That report identified four major areas where taxpayer funds were being diverted from academics into profit centers for owners-operators. What was most striking was the array of complex business strategies that have little to do with improving student achievement but much more to do with diverting money from classrooms, teacher salaries, real estate assets and funds obtained from selling government-backed bonds. The Center’s report is very complex and shows how many charter operators use an intentional web of interrelated for-profit and non-profit shells. “It is very hard to distinguish the behaviors of for-profits and non-profits—consider the issue of administrative salaries for example,” said Alex Molnar, National Education Policy Center research professor and publications director. The center’s reports have detailed why two business models are not as different as one may assume, as both have underwriters, targeted metrics and set their own salary and management structures—including no-bid contracts. “Most nonprofit EMOs operate similar to for-profit EMOs,” said Miron. “Their management fees, and management contracts look similar to the for-profits and the concerns about privatization, weak or powerless boards, lack of transparency, high salaries at the top, etc. etc. are all similar to concerns we have with the for-profit EMOs.” In other words, despite the public pronouncements by charter industry insiders that their for-profit operators are need to be quarantined and held to a different standard than their non-profit operators, it is a myth to suggest the industry’s internal divisions are so black and white. The Easier Target: For-Profits The Center’s report highlighting the charter industry’s corruption-prone business model reenforces that conclusion. But what’s true is that for-profit companies that have sold stock are legally required to disclose different and more detailed fiscal information than charters that have been organized as non-profits. That makes them an easier target in the media’s eye. That’s especially true of the higher-profile for-profit chains that were not delivering anticipated revenues for their Wall St. investors, primarily because they learned that running any public school is complex and hard. K12’s seems to be the field’s Exhibit A for the “hubris” that industry consultant Alex Medler wrote about on EducationPost.org—vastly overpromising and then underperforming. The firm is the nation’s largest provider of internet-only public schools. Its stock dropped more than 20 percent last fall after embarrassments could not be swept away. They had sub-par test scores, dwindling enrollments, and management contracts that were not renewed. That came after investors betting—and winning—that their stock would crash, and admissions by former employees, like marketing director Houston Tucker, who told Bloomberg.com that “K12 grew too fast and invested too little in instruction.” But despite this new wave of insider-driven criticism, Miron said the industry’s for-profit sector has not stopped growing—even with calls for a moratorium on new schools by industry insiders like Medler and other vocal critics such as the locally elected high school board in Anaheim, California. “Our research shows that the growth of for-profit EMOs has slowed but—on the whole—they still are growing,” Miron said. “I am not aware of increase of action to implement charter moratoriums.”
