For a long time, I’ve been harping on a particular thing in the education “reform” movement: that it isn’t natural. People in it always claim that while they may not be doing the obvious things to improve primary education in this country, they are at least doing something. What’s more, they claim that the things that I think are important are “politically impossible.” But it just so happens that the things that they have “chosen” to do — the things that are “politically possible” — are the things that rich people are willing to pay them to work on.

As a result of this, there is really only one thing that the education “reform” movement is all about: breaking teacher unions. Everything else: high stakes testing, charter schools, and all the rest are just the means to that end of depriving teachers of basic worker protections. And whether the useful fools who work in the “reform” movement know this or not, the ultimate result of this will be to make teaching a worse paying, less stable form for work. And that will mean that it will be that much harder to find qualified teachers, not to mention the great teachers the “reformers” are always yammering on about incentivizing.

All of this is obvious if you follow the issue at all. But in general, it isn’t discussed. Maybe it is because opponents of this “reform” don’t want to be seen as questing the motives of “reform” supporters — who after all seem to be genuine in their desires. But the issue isn’t primarily about the people on the front lines. The primary issue is who is supporting them and why. And they are the plutocrats who have a very different end in mind for education “reform.” But I do blame those on the front lines who are clearly more interested in listening to people who know nothing about education but who offer up piles of cash than they are to actual teachers.

It’s because I feel so alone on this issue that I was glad to see that Matt Bruenig had written, The Left Wing of the Fundable. It it, he talked about one very telling example. Conor Williams recently made the case that those in the education “reform” movement are the true warriors against inequality because they are against segregated neighborhood schools. Hooray for charter schools because they wash away decades of segregated schools!

Except they don’t. Neighborhoods are segregated because white Americans are racists. And they are helped along by a racist system where educational funding in most areas dependent upon local property taxes. So the (mostly white) people who can afford it are incentivized to move to (mostly white) areas that have better schools. Are charter schools designed to solve the problem of segregation? No. Is it likely that racist white Americans would figure out ways to game the system anyway? I think so.

Bruenig noted that busing is the obvious answer to school segregation. We know it works. But Conor Williams isn’t running around telling everyone that we should be using busing to integrate the schools. Williams and other reformers would claim that busing is not a political possibility whereas charters are. And this is where Bruenig gets his title: “practicality is defined here in terms of what you might call the Left Wing of the Fundable.” He’s singing my tune:

This is one of the biggest ways the the power elite have to keeping the conversation always on their own turf. This is why we are always talking about cutting Social Security and not raising the payroll tax cap — because Pete Peterson pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the liberal class to talk about what he wants. And it is the same way that Bill and Mindy keep us us from talking about using the taxes they pay on their $123 million house and spending them on poor children in Lakewood. So don’t listen to the jerks like Conor Williams. They are just useful fools. Look at what the interests are of those who fund people like him. It ain’t school integration, that’s for sure.

David Brockington wrote a great article over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Why I Voted Jeremy Corbyn for Leader of the Labour Party, With Reservations. This is not another article about Corbyn, so don’t worry. It’s about choice. Brockington is a social scientist on the faculty of Plymouth School of Government. And he has been doing work that indicates that voter turnout goes down the more the two parties move to the center. He’s very careful to say that he hasn’t proven this. He’s a scientists, after all. But the evidence seems to indicate it. And the narrative is very strong.

Consider that you have two candidates. One of them is promising cut taxes on the wealthy and the other is promising to keep those taxes the same. If you aren’t wealthy, why would you care? Would this make you think that you ought to inconvenience yourself by finding time to vote? Or would you feel very much like the people of a nation where they can only vote for people from a single party? When elections come down to who is the most competent to do what both candidates agree on, very few people show up at the polls.

Given that the people least likely to vote are liberal leaning voters, it thus makes more sense to get turnout as high as possible. Of course, it doesn’t always work. In 2004, turnout was very high because people were angry about the war. But this was cutting against an improving economy. I now feel certain that had the Democrats nominated Howard Dean and made the election about the war, Bush would have lost. (And do you know what that would have meant? No John Roberts. No Samuel Alito. And we still would have likely gotten Sotomayor and Kagan, because Souter and Stevens both wanted to retire. That would have brought us a court with one liberal, five moderates, one conservative, and two wackos.)

So what does this mean for the 2016 presidential election here in the US? Even though I’m a supporter of Bernie Sanders, I don’t think that it means we have to nominate him. I think that Hillary Clinton is plenty exciting herself. She would be, after all, the first woman president. And we do have a history of this: first black men got the vote (in theory, anyway) and then women got the vote. It does make me more skeptical of a Joe Biden presidential run. I think that people often make a very big mistake by going with the “safe” choice. It’s just too easy to be wrong. Again, it’s like John Kerry in 2004. He was the “safe” choice, but knowing what I now know about politics, he was a horrible choice.

Someone I was reading recently noted that if the American people could vote Obama a third term, they would. That’s probably true. I think the country is happy enough with the direction of the economy. And I expect that to be true for the next year. The Republicans seem incapable of offering anything other than going backwards to worse times. And I don’t think the people are in any mood to go far to the left. Of course, the thing about Clinton is that she’s pretty much matched Sanders in terms of possible economic policy. So in addition to being a woman, she is offering policies that do make a clear distinction with whatever candidate the Republicans run.

This makes me feel even a little better about 2016.

I’ve created a short page with a list of all the dates and times of the presidential debates: 2016 Presidential Debates. But it is right there on the menu bar at the top of every page on the site. That would be: right below my reminder that you buy all your Amazon stuff through Frankly Curious so I can can continue to Earn $10 Per Month Blogging (Before Expenses)!

As you may remember, I couldn’t even bear to watch the first Republican debate. And to be honest, I don’t know just how many of those I am going to watch. I will watch this next one because Paul Bibeau has been posting this haunted house story that has to do with realtime goings on at the Reagan library where the event is taking place. There have been three installments (one, two, and three) with more coming and then the exciting conclusion via live Twitter. As he says, “Tell your friends. It should be fun.”

Anyway, haunted library or no, now you know where to get the debate info.

As you have heard if you follow these sorts of things, Jeremy Corbyn has been elected to lead the British Labour Party. It isn’t surprising, in that polls have indicated that this would happen for some time. But if you had asked anyone a year ago, they would have laughed at you. Corbyn didn’t even have enough support among Labour MPs to get on the ballot. He was only added at the last minute to provide a range of opinions in the election. This is because, just as in the US Democratic Party, the Labour Party leaders have moved very far to the right. So they were all surprised to find that the base of the Labour Party is the same as it has always been: liberal, even socialist.

But is this a good thing? The answer can be found in this headline from The Guardian, Osborne Says Electing Corbyn Will Set Labour Back a Generation. That would be George Osborne: First Secretary of State and UK Conservative Party power player. You always know that the left is doing the right thing when the conservatives start wringing their hands about the prospects of their opponents. He said that the Labour Party’s move to the right the last few decades has been good for them, and that if Labour had only elected Liz Kendall it would have caused the conservatives “the greatest problems.”

This is such nonsense. What Kendall offered was something we in the US know only too well from the Democrats. It’s the “not quite as bad” approach to campaigning. “We aren’t quite as bad as the conservatives — at least we care about the people!” At one time, I would have thought it sounded like a good political strategy, but it never works. People care about ideology, but they also care about passion. Most voters don’t know what to think — they are pulled in so many directions. So making a clear case for what you believe in can be useful.

Needless to say, George Osborne is not happy about Corbyn’s win. He is likely concerned — for his own party. They knew exactly how to fight against a Labour Party led by Liz Kendall. They really don’t know how to fight one led by Jeremy Corbyn. They haven’t had to do so in decades. That doesn’t mean that Corbyn is going to lead the Labour Party to victory in 2020. But it throws a wrench into the whole thing. The conservatives would have had almost nothing to lose if Liz Kendall led the Labour Party to victory. But if Corbyn does so, it will mean real change.

As a result, the Conservative Party may have to hold back some now. Maybe their continued policies of austerity — which work to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor — might not look so good when they are facing the possibility of a leftist revolution that will roll-back the current normal brought to the UK people by Margaret Thatcher. But Labour is going to have to be smart about this. And I fear that there are too many people in the Labour Party establishment who have a greater hatred of Corbyn than they do the Conservative Party. That is the real issue going forward: is the Labour Party going to find its roots? Is it going to be smart about this opportunity? Or is it going to crumble to pieces?

Last week, Jonathan Capehart tried to explain, How Ben Carson Cures White Fright in the Republican Party. It’s mostly an interview with Leah Wright Rigueur, author of the recent book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican. With all the discussion of Donald Trump leading the pack in the Republican presidential nomination, it is easy to overlook the fact that Ben Carson is the only person who is even close to him. It is Trump, then Carson, then statistical noise.

Rigueur mentions a number of reasons why Carson is doing so well. One rather obvious one that she doesn’t mention is that he’s been a Fox News celebrity for years. If Dr Oz decided to run for president, it wouldn’t be surprising that he would have an installed base of support. But that does rather beg the question. Carson is doing well because he did well on Fox News and he did well on Fox News because conservatives like him and conservatives like him because… Well, that is the question.

One of the minor reasons that Rigueur mentions is that Carson is an evangelical. Of course, he’s more than that: he’s a young earth creationist. So he not only appeals to the conservative Christians, but he also assuages their fear about him being a “scientist” — or close enough. And there is also the fact that Carson is kind of a self-made man. He found something he was good at and got rich doing it. And then, much more to the point, Carson is able to complain about the “wrong kind of blacks.” So he can say that Black Lives Matters is all wrong and no one can say that he is a racist.

But this is all nuance if you ask me. Ben Carson is doing well with the very same people who once made another political neophyte, Herman Cain, the front-runner in the 2012 Republican primary. And I think it is pretty clear that Carson and Cain are extremely different men. In fact, Cain is more akin to Donald Trump: loose, entertaining, substanceless. Carson is soft spoken. He seems serious — like he’s given the issues serious thought (even though he clearly has not). Indeed, if you look at the two men, you can see what a lie the whole concept of race is. Other than having darker skin than I do, there aren’t a lot of things that bind them together. They have totally different shaped heads, different noses, different eyes. But the key thing is that all Americans recognize them as the same race. And that’s most especially true of conservatives.

Like everyone else — very few conservatives think of themselves as racists. But they are painfully aware of just how white their party is. And yes, they take some comfort in convenient narratives about how the Democratic Party has tricked African Americans into supporting them. But they also know that for almost a century, African Americans were very loyal to the Republican Party. So something happened about 50 years ago, and we all know what it is: Richard Nixon and the southern strategy.

So there is a certain section of the conservative movement that is just dying to support a black candidate. So when one comes along who seems good enough, they love him! (It’s always him, right?) I know that I’ve seen this in my father. He wants to vote for black candidates because it makes him feel better about his belief that racism is mostly a thing of the past. Rich corporate CEOs and famous brain surgeons fit that bill. So I think there is always going to be a good 15% of the Republican Party who will support whatever black candidate shows up — as long as that candidate has the basic conservative qualification. And often not even that. There is one qualification that trumps all others: the belief that if these black kids would just pull up their pants and get a job, everything would be fine.

Ben Carson is the Valium for Republican racial anxiety.

Jared Bernstein wrote a very good article over at The Atlantic, America’s Poorest Are Getting Virtually No Assistance. It’s not a new story to me — or many of my readers — but it is one that we as society have not reckoned with. In 1996, Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it.” Most people are still confused about this. When I talk to people of all political stripes — but especially conservatives — they mostly think that people get on welfare out of high school and die on it. At the very least, they think single mothers without jobs get it. That just isn’t true.

With “welfare reform” came this idea that people should work if they want to get off welfare and climb the economic ladder. That’s actually true. But as Bernstein noted, there was a major problem: “the new welfare law assumed the jobs would be there.” No one really thought about that side of the equation. They seemed to be trapped in the Say’s Law fallacy: supply creates its own demand. So by this way of thinking, if these people went out looking for jobs, the jobs would suddenly appear. It sounds ridiculous when it is put so bluntly, but that is exactly what they were assuming.

But they — Bill Clinton most of all — lucked out. Welfare reform came along at exactly the same time as a huge economic boom — and stock market bubble. So there really were jobs available. Massive numbers of people who had been stuck on welfare suddenly found themselves with jobs. Hooray! Welfare reform worked! But of course it didn’t. Without welfare reform, it is certain that a comparable number of people who had been on welfare would have gotten jobs. As Bernstein noted of the poorest of the poor, “They want decent, steady jobs, and not just because they recognize work as an economic necessity but because of the dignity they believe it will bring to their lives as people and as parents.” Trust me on this: “dignity” is the key word there.

But now we are stuck with this narrative: we forced people on welfare to get jobs and it worked! Tough love rules the day! I don’t think that liberals are quite so sanguine about this anymore. But conservatives are convinced because it is what they want to believe anyway. And this is what gives us people like Paul Ryan saying that the safety net is a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence.” Poor people don’t have it great in America — regardless of whether or not they are on welfare. The very notion is silly.

I have an even more fundamental problem with this kind of thinking. I don’t understand why it is that we think mothers should have to work outside the home. Certainly it wasn’t traditionally like that. And every time some rich woman decides to stay home and raise the kids, we as a nation stand and applaud her noble act. But poor women need the “dignity of work,” because raising children isn’t a dignified occupation — when you are poor. So I think we as a society need to give this some thought. And we also need to think about the effect an insecure, nomadic lifestyle has on the life prospects of children.

As a society, we should be ashamed of how we treat the poor. They need a helping hand — and very often a hand out. I don’t know when they ever need a kick in the pants.

David Cay Johnston wrote a really interesting and disturbing article at Al Jazeera last week, New York’s Electricity Market Is a Scam. Rather than have an old fashioned public utility, New York has an electricity market that just so happens to have been set up by Enron. The promises are always the same: a market will make prices cheaper. And the results are always the same: they aren’t. In fact, “Adjusted for inflation, electricity in New York costs almost 17% more than a decade ago.”

Let’s get something straight: businesses are not designed to keep prices low; they are designed to keep prices high. This confusing is what is behind one of my favorite brainless arguments against raising worker salaries, “If you raise wages, the companies will just raise their prices!” No they won’t! If the companies could have charged more before, they would have. Businesses charge as much as they possibly can. The only thing that stops them from gouging is that there are other companies that compete with them. And in a properly regulated market, this is exactly what happens. But businesses do everything they can to avoid competition.

Actual collusion is illegal, of course. In an oligopoly, businesses don’t generally need to collude. They can avoid competition because it is to everyone’s benefit and they know how much it costs their “competitors” to bring their products and services to market. As a result, the regulators of the New York electricity market keep data secret to stop collusion. Or supposedly they do. It seems more like they are trying to keep the data away from the people and their representatives so that the power companies can continue their scam. Because it really is remarkable. New York energy prices have gone up despite the fact that energy supply is always greater than demand. And by a lot, “Its surplus is huge, as much as 63 percent in May, and never less than 4.6 percent, New England Power Coordinating Council reliability reports show.”

What’s more this supposed private data isn’t private. New York Assemblyman James Brennan thought he smelled a rat, so he hired utility economist Robert McCullough to look into it. And McCullough found that by using the disparate data that is released, it is a simple matter to derive all the data. And if he can do it, the companies that are supposedly competing can do it. And they most certainly are, because energy prices in New York should be down not up, by the laws of microeconomics.

Johnston is no liberal. His conclusion is:

I know that my libertarian enemies will claim that this just shows that the government should be out of the market altogether. There are two words such people should keep in mind: Silk Road. But this is all just conservative nonsense: the idea markets exist naturally without government. They don’t, and indeed, can’t. And this is not a theoretical issue. The question is how we are going to distribute energy to consumers. We can start with a little transparency.