Post Tagged with: "Ohio"

According to an FBI indictment issued in July 2020, Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder accepted more than $60 million in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. in exchange for a $1.3 billion public bailout.

1 in every 10 black men in their thirties is in prison or jail. Sentences for black men committing the same federal crime are 19.1 percent longer. Why? Many stages of the criminal justice system are behind these statistics. For instance, prosecutors decide what charges to bring and what sentences […]

ECOT stands for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. It is a charter school founded in Ohio in 2000 by businessman William Lager and is a story that hasn’t received nearly enough media attention. Probably because it highlights everything that’s wrong with for-profit charter school entities delivering public services.

From 2001 to 2016 Lager’s ECOT received more than $1 billion from Ohio taxpayers to deliver an appalling graduation rate. In 2014, the graduation rate was under 39 percent. For the 2016-17 school year, it was up to a little over 40 percent in four years.This ranks as worst in the nation.

The state of Ohio is working to recover $80 million in overbilled state funds. In 2016, an Ohio audit estimates the school was paid for 9,000 more students than ECOT could document for the 2015-16 school year. In 2018, the state is still working to recover the money, which has since increased to $80 million.

Dave Yost, the Ohio auditor who has himself spoken at past ECOT graduations, said:

With the level of incompetence displayed by both the school and (the Education Department), the regulator, it’s amazing that any money went to education whatsoever.

Over this same period of time, William Lager has donated more than $2.1 million to influential Ohio politicians including several speakers of the Ohio House and Andrew Brenner, the chair of the House Education Committee.

Because much of the news coverage in Ohio only focuses on small pieces of this story at a time, here’s the full story of how ECOT scammed Ohio.

One of the biggest lies told by conservative pundits is that one-half of Americans pay no taxes.

Conservatives like to throw around numbers, like the top 1 percent of wage earners will pay 45.7 percent of federal income taxes (from a 2014 report). This only tells a small part of the story.

For example, income tax accounts for less than one-half of federal taxes, and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government. Or that the top 1 percent receive 21 percent of total income.

What they also don’t tell you is that the 80 percent of taxes that aren’t income taxes tend to fall heavily on the the poor and middle class.

When you give massive tax cuts to the rich, as Donald Trump’s new tax plan proposes, what this means is that revenues will fall at the federal level. The federal government then cuts money to state governments, who cut money to local governments, who cut services and shift the costs onto the 99 percent.

What this strategy does is privatize profits for the wealthy, create stock bubbles, and push costs down to everyone else at the state, local, and individual level.

Here’s some of the regressive taxes that the 99 percent pay most of—and that are likely to increase if we write more tax loopholes for the rich.

[caption id="attachment_2159" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Aftab Pureval for Hamilton County Clerk of Courts[/caption]

The Hamilton County Clerk’s office was not a race Democrats should have won. The Hamilton County Democratic Party was up against Tracy Winkler, a member of the Winkler local political dynasty. Robert C. Winkler is the current Common Pleas Court judge and Tracy is married to Ralph Winkler, the current Probate Court judge.

Out of the blue comes Aftab Pureval, a young former prosecutor and Ohio State student body president who took a leave of absence from his job at Proctor & Gamble to run for clerk of courts.

How did a guy with such an strange-sounding name (strange for Southern Ohio, anyway) beat a strong incumbent?

Every now and then some politician pulls a stunt where they print out a list of regulations from some agency or other to try to make the point about the “burden” of regulation.

Mitch McConnell speaking at the CPAC 2011 conference. Photo CC 2.0 courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

What they don’t talk about is that privatization creates more regulations.

Why?

All of the attention in yesterday’s Ohio election was on Issue 3, the proposal to legalize marijuana. However, Issue 2, a proposal to protect “the initiative process from being used for personal economic benefit,” a poison pill inserted by the Ohio legislature, also passed. The vote was much closer on Issue 2 than 3. I was advising people that if they wanted to vote against Issue 3, just vote against Issue 3. Here’s how Issue 2 is likely to prevent future decriminalization efforts and a few lessons learned for those of us interested in decriminalizing marijuana in other states.

A couple people have asked me about the Cincinnati and Ohio issues on tomorrow’s ballot. Because it’s a bit confusing, I thought I’d post about each issue including how I’m voting and why.

If it helps you, great. If not, great. Either way kudos to you for voting and taking the time to learn about the issues.

Buddy, Responsible Ohio’s marijuana mascot.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday that charter school operator White Hat Management can take possession of publicly paid for assets of charter schools and charge the public to buy them back. This case arose when school boards in the Akron and Cleveland area fired White Hat Management, a company […]

Elyria 5th-grade teacher Dawn Neely Randall finally spoke out over fears of reprisal against the 20 hours of tests designed for Ohio public school students.

From her Facebook post:

Well, I did it. I addressed our school board. I had packets for each member as well as our superintendent and walked them through sample PARCC passages that had no clear articulation through the grades and shared with them information straight from the website that proved that the maturity matrix of many passages were well beyond the students’ grade levels.

Randall encouraged the school board to stand up to Columbus and for Elyria students. The Lorain County Chronicle featured her story here.