Progressive Breakfast: Our School Funding Crisis Has a Cause: Bad Leadership

MORNING MESSAGE

Jeff Bryant

Our School Funding Crisis Has a Cause: Bad Leadership

Oklahoma schools are so poorly funded some of them may move from five days a week to four. This is the sad result of our elected leaders' irrational resolve to slash taxes and redirect more funds to unfounded experiments like charter schools, rather than follow the evidence that there is a direct correlation between what we spend on schools and how well our students perform.

Calling It Quits on Climate

Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement. NYT:“President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, weakening efforts to combat global warming and embracing isolationist voices in his White House who argued that the agreement was a pernicious threat to the economy and American sovereignty. In a speech from the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump said the landmark 2015 pact imposed wildly unfair environmental standards on American businesses and workers.”

States band together to form own climate alliance. Politico:“The governors of California, Washington and New York have agreed to form an alliance aimed at meeting the U.S. climate goals. The new coalition, called the United States Climate Alliance, will serve as a way for states interested in dealing with climate change to coordinate.’If the President is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavor, then California and other states will step up,’ Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement.”

Here Comes the Judge

White House asks Supreme Court to reinstate travel ban. Politico:“President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to revive his controversial travel ban executive order, hoping that the justices will give the green light to a policy repeatedly blocked by lower courts. In filings Thursday night, the Justice Department asked the high court to temporarily lift injunctions that bar officials from carrying out Trump’s directive to suspend visa issuance to citizens of six majority-Muslim countries and halt the flow of refugees to the U.S. from across the globe. The Trump administration also asked the justices to add the legality of the travel ban to the high court’s docket.

The Road Ahead

Infrastructure Is About More Than Roads and Bridges: Inside the Millions of Jobs Campaign. TruthOut:“We were deeply concerned that the president and the majority of both the House and Senate were going to try to create privatized work that really only benefits the wealthy and doesn’t really benefit the mass of people out there. We began to say, ‘We need to do something about this. We need to get out in front of this. We need to put out an agenda that is pro-family, that is pro-worker, that is pro-community, and is pro-opportunity,’ which is what we did. We worked with the Congressional Progressive Caucus to do just that.”

EPA head Scott Pruitt didn’t show up for a speech in Kentucky, but 175 protesters did. ThinkProgress:“Even when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt isn’t there, people still feel inspired to protest his pattern of climate-denial and industry favoritism. About 175 people demonstrated against regulatory rollback Wednesday in Kentucky, despite Pruitt’s canceling a scheduled speech at the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers conference in Lexington.’It hurts us all,’ Hank Graddy, a member of the Sierra Club’s Kentucky chapter, told the Herald Leader about the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the EPA. ‘In Kentucky, we don’t want EPA to lead us backwards.’”

The Democrats’ ‘Working-Class Problem.” American Prospect:“The Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class problem.’ They have a ‘working-class problem,’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.”

More from OurFuture.org:

Trump’s Superfund Cuts: Doing Less With Less. Katharine Kiel:“Trump claims his Superfund cuts of more than $300 million will make toxic cleanups more efficient. But every budget reduction over the past decade has reduced the number of sites cleaned up, and increased the time required to complete them.”

Progressive Breakfast is a daily morning email highlighting news stories of interest to activists. Progressive Breakfast and OurFuture.org are projects of People's Action.more »