Puerto Rico

I can't even put into words my reaction to Trump's reaction to the disaster in Puerto Rico. And now he's finally making a visit and it's even worse. Digby has a good look at the nightmare that is Trump.

Basically, he convened a meeting of local officials and then sat at a table and patted himself on the back and then complimented al the people who work for him and allowed some of the locals to tell him how wonderful he and all the federal officials had been. It was a circle jerk.

And he was the only one in the circle.

He's just disgusting.

Today's Must-Read: Privatize Everything, Redux

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo examines the charter school movement, taking off from this segment of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight:

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight back-to-school segment on charter schools Sunday was a welcome window into the world of education "reform" grifters. (I just found time to watch it last night.) Griftopia, as Matt Taibbi defined it:

There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

Sullivan details a few of the abuses and scams. I found this particularly interesting:

Aside from the happy talk about experimentation and free-market competition (you may genuflect now), the smokescreen that obscures some of the worst results of lax oversight is the notion that these schools run as non-profits. But nonprofit doesn't mean no cash flow. Oliver points out (and this is not unique) how the president of the Richard Allen charter chain in Ohio contracted oversight of its schools to a nonprofit she founded and who contracted $1 million in management and consulting firms she also founded.

Even in non-profits, someone's making money.

And of course, the real victims here are the kids, who are not getting the education we're paying for.

Explain To Me Again

why anyone considers Paul Ryan (R-Atlas Shrugged) a serious policy person. I mean, consider this:

Host David Gregory asked the representative to speak to comments he made in January of 2013, in which Ryan said the country struggles with "more and more able-bodied people" becoming "dependent on the government." Gregory said Ryan didn't sound like he had much "sympathy" for impoverished Americans.

"We don't want to have a poverty management system that simply perpetuates poverty," Ryan said, pitching his poverty proposal that he says will allow for a customized approach to each individual's needs.

If this sounds familiar, maybe it's because it's what we've been hearing from the right for the last fifty years -- at least.

Here's a somewhat sketchy summary of Ryan's plan:

The centerpiece in Ryan’s new plan is what he calls the Opportunity Grant — a program that would consolidate as many as 11 separate federal initiatives into a single chunk of funding for states.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, Ryan said that the setup would aid state governments and local organizations that should be the “front lines” in the war on poverty, instead of the federal bureaucracy.

“Success is measured by how many programs we create, how much money we spend,” Ryan said about the government’s current approach. “Not on outcomes. Not on results. How many people are we getting out of poverty? How many people are getting out of poverty and staying out of poverty?”

And here's a summary of some of the criticisms. And don't miss Paul Krugman's take:

What does scholarly research on antipoverty programs actually say? We have quite good evidence on the effects of food stamps and Medicaid, which draw most of Mr. Ryan’s ire — and which his budgets propose slashing drastically. Food stamps, it seems, do lead to a reduction in work and working hours, but the effect is modest. Medicaid has little, if any, effect on work effort.

Over all, here’s the verdict of one comprehensive survey: “While there are significant behavioral side effects of many programs, their aggregate impact is very small.” In short, Mr. Ryan’s poverty report, like his famous budget plan, is a con job.

As far as I can see, Ryan's proposing that all federal anti-poverty programs be lumped into one program to give block grants to the states, with, admittedly, some federal oversight. (Which, one hopes, will preclude the states using the funds to balance their own budgets while leaving their poor to starve. One hopes. Given the states' records with things like Medicare and other block grants, I'm not sanguine on that one. And of course, if they don't use the money for intended purposes what are the feds going to do? Take it back? There's still no help for the poor in that scenario.) And of course, Ryan doesn't address the fact that there are no jobs for the poor to move into -- unless they also move to Bangladesh or China.

Oh, and about the supposed ineffectiveness of the federal programs? Not so much -- in fact, Ryan's own report demonstrates that many of them have been very effective. Maybe if he weren't such a media whore he'd have time to read what his office is putting out. And there's a possibility, though I hate to bring up the obvious, that if Republicans would actually fund these programs at necessary levels, they'd work a lot better.

Just sayin'.

(For a commentary on Ryan's plan that's even snarkier than mine, read this at Mahablog.)