DON’T RUN A VICTORY LAP YET OVER HEALTH CARE

By Dominique Paul Noth

Defeated multiple times on their own health care bill, writhing in confusion over political direction, you might expect Trump and the Republicans to scurry off,  lick their wounds and try to regroup.

Instead they are forging ahead as if there had been no setbacks, no disabled carried out of the hearing room, no outrage from coast to coast at even attempting this nonsense after previous defeats.

Moving past health care as if nothing had happened, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell held a press conference September 27 to talk up a tax package as the same essential rescue of America from disaster that,  a week earlier,  they claimed for a much hated health bill. 

(Has anyone looked deeply at this tax plan? Beyond the “do your taxes on a postcard” promise?  Everyone supports a simpler tax code but how far will the GOP get removing the special protections for their own members, as they continue to deny those are even there? Or eliminating the mortgage deduction so popular with middle class buyers?) 

Trump meanwhile is engaged in health care sabotage, along with promising an executive order to further a Republican myth and a health insurance company nightmare – selling policies across state lines in the hope that the cheaper states will drive costs (and real health care)  downward.  He has pulled most of the promotion budget for the health exchanges and for the Navigators, the trained helpmates for people to sign up.  

These actions deliberately undercut some true bipartisan efforts in the Senate as Republican conservative Lamar Alexander and Democratic leader Patty Murray both believe that solidifying the insurance market and solving some frayed edges of ACA could succeed. 

That runs straight into a seven-year itch of the Republicans to defeat Obamacare and to hell with the health of the citizens. They always had the wrong end of the elephant since improving health care should have been foremost – yet foremost was hatred of all things Obama. That was not only unworthy but probably gave them Trump to deal with. 

The people don’t care whose name is on it, they just want affordable and comprehensive care, and recognize that Obama was at least trying for that while the Republicans are only trying to defeat the Democrats.

At this point it looks like only active citizenry can save the nation, as it always has.  It’s time to talk to young people and others confident in their own good health and skeptical about needing coverage. They have to be forcefully reminded to get on board. Anyone can get sick tomorrow and it is unfair to ask fellow citizens to pay for their treatment.   If they begin to feel a solidarity with fellow citizens, even a self-centered realization rather than a burst of compassion, they can sign up in droves no matter how Trump threatens and rants.  

The Republicans are drowning in their own mudpit until they actually come up with better ideas.  That seems to be harsh given some good people I know who vote GOP.  But they of all citizens know how far their party has strayed from reality. They are secretly hoping that some explosion of reality will keep crazed Christian zealot Roy Moore from taking the Alabama senate seat in a December election. 

 “If you thought Jeff Sessions was extreme,” one D.C. journalist told me, “you ain’t seen nothin’. I’m hearing from Republican officials  who would rather have a Democrat win than this guy.  But Alabama is not about to turn that way,” he added, “and those Republicans  know they can wish in safety.”  

But Republicans are talking seriously – as are some Democrats -- about the need for a third party,  of somehow isolating the Bannons and even the Trumps for more moderated positions that might actually succeed in running the country.  Their fear is that Trump has unleashed a primitivism he can no long control and the more that raises its head, the more progressives will lash out in rebellion.

The health care debacle taught several Republicans to look outside their own party – the conservatives for something more extreme, the established Republicans for something more likely to work.  Meanwhile the progressives are looking, too, but with more unfettered debate than the unhappy Republicans seem capable of.

They are watching with some dismay while Ryan and McConnell keep cheerfully  pressing the wrong buttons. Given past behavior,  I doubt they will stand up without some severe prodding.  Such as the Mueller investigation.

About the author:  Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.

CITY PROGRESS BEGINS WHEN STATE GOP INTERFERENCE ENDS

By Dominique Paul Noth

With the end of the legislature's fetish to control MPS properties,
the old Wisconsin Ave. School is being converted
into an extended stay Ambassador  hotel

Lurking within beat writer Tom Daykin’s fine story on how the former Wisconsin Avenue School (near 27th St.) will be converted by 2019 into an extended-stay companion to the Ambassador (the hotel is a few blocks away) was an unwritten  political reality. The Madison legislature’s constant intrusion into local affairs continues to backfire into delays, blind alleys and higher costs for the citizenry. (And just wait till the new budget spits its venom.)

I’ll define what a real estate journalist cannot (and the JS editorial board probably should).  The development is fruit of the collapse of one Madison effort at interference.

That was the misguided command that vacant or underutilized Milwaukee Public Schools’ buildings must be sold only to voucher school or charter competitors, freezing for two years any city effort to develop commercial uses on nearly a dozen properties. Technically, the city owns these school buildings.

If you look at that two-year moratorium, it was never about robust neighborhood development but imposing the march toward private and religious schools on the community, inventing a demand for such schools that clearly didn’t exist. It also intended to hold MPS’ head deeper under water.

If you look at what now is happening, retail and apartment developments are spurring ahead in the Harambee, Bronzeville and other inner city neighborhoods (even the Ambassador is expanding the popular definition of the Downtown area).

All this also gives the lie to arguments that the city of Milwaukee is only interested in developing the core Downtown area.  Turns out, once Madison leaves the city alone or offers real help, good things happen for the tax base.

Once the moratorium ended, the Ambassador Suites became only one of four commercial developments (retail,   apartments or mixed) rushing forward using MPS properties – and there are others in the wings.

Moreover, city development deputy commissioner Martha Brown reminded me in an interview, before the moratorium shut things down for two years, there were several MPS properties either completely or in the process of being converted into commercial use – the old Jackie Robinson School now the Sherman Park Senior Center; Garfield in Bronzeville (2205 N 4th St.) almost ready for mixed use, and Fifth Street School (2770 N. 5th St.) already under apartment conversion.

It was a sign that, despite agitation from Madison that these were all dead weight and invented claims that MPS was the culprit, there was a lot of life being snuffed out in the fabrications.  The city even had to fight off a lawsuit threat from the rabid right-wing WILL (Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty) when it tried (appropriately it turns out) to finesse the moratorium rule.

While there were feints of educational use from MPS competitors, Brown says only Rocketship’s intention to use Carleton as its upper northwest campus is still active (national data on Rocketship profitability keeps me a doubter) while another negotiation with a religious voucher operator has stalled.

The moratorium was inserted into the 2015-2017 state budget as part of an enormous education failure aimed at Milwaukee known as the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program, brainchild of Dale Kooyenga and Alberta Darling with such cheerleaders on the side as Leah Vukmir.

Failure may be too optimistic. It is, legally, still a vulture poised to swoop down on the hardy local pioneers of public education and peck out the eyes of real progress.

OSPP (my emphasis would be on the PP) would have an administrator chosen by County Executive Chris Abele (city Mayor Tom Barrett was too savvy to be the whipping boy) seize MPS schools designated within the boundaries of “failed schools” by the state – and sell the losers only to education privateers. In other words, MPS properties would be used to prop up its enemies.

The administrator, Demond Means, was chosen, tried to change the plan, resigned and departed the state for Georgia.  The whole idea was laughed out of public court when the MPS survived the “failed” designation within the state’s boundaries.  (That was also a measure of how well the MPS has been improving schools.)

Sidelining these school businesses for MPS competitors was originally intended by legislators to make properties available for a dollar or so to education privateers, under the invented demand for such schools. But the city insisted on heeding land assessment for what in several cases were valuable pieces of real estate, as opposed to the original penalty to any expansion of property tax rolls.

The landscape immediately changes when private schools are forced onto an even playing field. (That reality is already chilling the state’s expansion of the voucher school idea into the whole state, since many school districts, even conservative ones, are quite happy with the public school route and correctly see the voucher schools as siphoning off public money.)

There is also an interesting sidelight to those who remember Right Step. It was the only private school that responded during the moratorium, forcing the city to sell it the listed Centro del Nino at 500 E. Center St., actually a bank building converted into a Head Start program but included on the master life for MPS schools though the area was not zoned for a school.   With strong anger at the whole idea from Ald. Milele Coggs, the zoning appeals board turned the idea down.   

Brown and others speculate that a big part of the push was the fallacy that all a private education operator had to do “was get in the building and turn on the lights,” since MPS had been a highly regarded absentee landlord and was only closing buildings over decades to retain flexibility in the face of changing demographics (which made some neighborhood schools obsolete). 

Of course “walk in and turn on the lights” wasn’t true since there remained considerable costs on long closed schools (handicapped accessibility, repairs, lead pipes, new code standards, etc.). A lack of common sense was another factor in how bad this idea was, because an MPS building usually went vacant when demand in the area for a school had fallen off, so it wasn’t demographics and need,   just the rising money the state taxpayers were forced to pay that explained the interest.  

And how that money is rising! That state legislature, with Gov. Scott Walker as gang leader, has elevated the voucher goodies as high as $75,647 for a family of four.  The new budget does even more, as much as $9,800 per student by 2019.

Amazingly, despite that come-on and constant expansion of the limits, around the state there are few takers – and it is not surprising that most of the responders are not public school participants but children from families attending private schools already. They are in effect getting a state taxpayer discount of $7,696 each on their private school tuition.

So in Milwaukee there was no land rush – and actually crippling of some neighborhood commercial development.   Assessing the value of a school building is difficult depending on the intended use, noted Jeff Fleming, a spokesman for the mayor who is also deeply involved in the Department of City Development.  MPS was probably not happy that Wisconsin Ave. School, land-assessed at $800,000 under some scenarios, was sold to Ambassador developer Rick Weigand for $100,000.  But the MPS and the city were assuredly comforted that Weigand has also pledged half a million in environmental cleanup as part of a $15 million project.

Because of changing expectations in the master list of MPS buildings, two schools – Fletcher and 68th – still have a year left when they can only be sold to private school operators. There don’t seem to be any takers while the city anticipates movement by commercial developers on other sites now lifted from the moratorium.

Bottom line -- the “school choice” liars actually held the city of Milwaukee hostage for two years in growing neighborhood development. That’s the exact opposite of what elected representatives should be doing. Brown says MPS has been cooperative in conversion efforts, exposing another lie from the school choice camp.

There are several emerging opportunities for citizens to punish such feeble education thinkers, including rabid right-winger Vukmir, who has wrapped herself around these failed education policies to run against Sen. Tammy Baldwin.  Ideology sinks her –what is keeping her campaign afloat is billionaire Diane Hendricks and single-issue voters who don’t seem to give much of a damn of what happens to our children and taxes.

About the author:  Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.

DACA – FALLING CRUELLY BEHIND IN FOUR YEARS

By Dominique Paul Noth

President Obama in Milwaukee five years ago -- what he and
we dreamed about immigration and the Dreamers.
-- Photo by Dominique Paul Noth

A long memory can sometimes be a curse.  Trump’s Tuesday combination play on DACA – rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, then  delaying the full weight for six months to give a messed-up Congress a chance to get its act together,  though it hasn’t all year, and then saying he will revisit if Congress doesn’t – was also a reminder of how tragically we have traveled backwards.  

The US has horribly moved from overly optimistic hope into morass and cynicism.

The recent events raised memories of what I wrote as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press  more than four years ago, for a newspaper now defunct largely because of the gouges taken out of union strength and solidarity by Gov. Scott Walker. I looked it up and was dumbstruck at how prescient, if overly hopeful, I and perhaps the nation were about the progress of immigration. 

It was then I headlined that optimism, though with a warning:  Do Immigration Steps Rescue or Merely Reveal GOP?  Even while critical of Obama, the story stands as an important signpost of what America dreamed in early 2013 and what depth it is descending into today:

February, 2013 -- If you listened to President Obama’s impassioned call for “common sense comprehensive immigration reform” January 29, you can’t be blamed for hearing an echo.  He made much the same speech when he was running for re-election and, in fact, though now fleshed out, in earlier presentations throughout his first four years. 

It isn’t Obama who has budged in 2013.  It’s the opposition, not from moral drive but self-preservation.  All along he has seen the issue more clearly -- willing to bring others along on the details but a  superior politician and analyst of the American psyche, seeking ways to combine what he wants, what the country needs and what the voters will come around to agreeing with. {Editor’s Note: So I dreamed then, remember?}

What makes overdue immigration reform possible now are the self-centered politics of once obstructionist Republicans and reluctant Democrats.  He now has a bipartisan group of eight senators and a House committee working on similar immigration regulation.   Some are true believers. Some are doing the politically expedient.  Consider those GOP senators like Rubio and Graham who have spun back and forth on this issue, failing to inhale the proper political winds.  John McCain is now back in the fold, contradicting his own dervish reversal when he ran for president or fought off a right-wing primary challenge in Arizona.

No one should fool themselves that this is a done deal.  It’s just that the atmospherics are better.  The Republicans cannot permanently be a major political party until they address the growing Latino community.  Democratic political insiders wonder if their own party is being foolish to risk a devastating advantage for the opposition  by moving to solve this crucial lingering problem and helping the GOP look good.  But in doing so willingly, the Democrats are again spelling out the differences between the two sides.

At least Obama has been there from the start.  But, to the dismay of the most progressive Latino activists, he has to put emphasis on something necessary but fast becoming the least central issue in comprehensive reform – security of the US-Mexican border. The deal on the table sends more boots on the ground and even drones to a region where illegal human traffic has shrunk to near nothing under Obama’s watch, a combination of tighter security, higher hostility to Latinos and fewer jobs in America.

No vast numbers of undocumented further clog the path to citizenship of the millions already working and raising families here.   But it’s wrong to use such apprehension to demonize a central fabric of the US community or claim the border must be locked tighter than a drum before any scrupulous path to citizenship can be allowed.

It’s worrisome how Obama must stress Mexican border security to give Republicans a reason to act sane. [Editor’s Note: They sure didn’t and still have the same hangup.]  Yet there are many other porous borders while this one, where we’re spending vast money, is largely dormant except for drugs. There are bigger people problems, such as greedy middlemen from Europe to Asia – many moving traffic through Canada and the Caribbean in both directions if you talk to the human slavery coalitions. 

Yet we still focus on penalizing families who have worked hard for decades in this country because they jumped the fence to save years in waiting or – no different than the homeowner duped by some shady roof contractor – believed the promises of a better life from businesses bussing them to rural jobs.

As politically savvy as it may be, given the insistence on border security before intelligence, this aspect of the outline has already raised the first doubts from the left in the immigration debate. Right-wingers insist that Southwest officials (many who would never agree to any path to citizenship) must first verify border security . . .

Cynically, the system will remain out of balance if Congress bends to Republican fears just to get the votes. But the true common sense will indeed be what the Tea Party fears would happen – speeding the process, because that is the right thing.  Let’s not pretend that sending 12 million people to the back of a cumbersome crooked line is better than putting humanity and fairness at the front. It’s not even fiscally intelligent because the citizenship route combines fines, back taxes and further contributions to the taxpayer coffers, and the quicker the better for the economy.

Frankly, undocumented workers are not the key concern of citizens, though their treatment is intrinsically tied to our view of a political party. It is the fading right-wing whites who are most agitated. . . . 

Well, they still are. And now they have a president who plays into those fears – and a Congress being asked to show some sanity in the middle of those fears.  No question, our country has retrogressed in four years.

Where will we be, if we are allowed to be, in another few years?

About the author:  Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.