POPS Education Forum

Protect Our Public Schools (POPS) held its first public forum at the Fogartyville Peace and Action Center.  Presenters included Sarasota School Board member, Shirley Brown; Opt Out Florida Network Manatee leader, Bridget Heffernan Mendel and POPS leader, Carol Lerner.  POPS leaders, Sandra Danu moderated and Rhana Bazzini gave the welcoming and opening remarks.  The forum focused on the growing threat of school privatization, nationally, statewide and locally.

Carol Lerner opened the forum providing an overview of the history of school privatization and showing how so called school reformers are implementing the agenda of large corporations and billionaire hedge funders who see school privatization as a key part of their economic game plan and a good way to extract billions of dollars from the 1.5 trillion dollar education industry.  She explained that the two primary vehicles for school privatization have been the rapid expansion of corporate-managed charter schools and education vouchers or tax credit scholarships to private schools.  Florida, Lerner explained, is the most advanced state in the nation in terms of school privatization, having both the highest percentage of students attending charter schools and the most students attending private schools with vouchers or tax credit scholarships.  As Florida Governor, Jeb Bush made school privatization a central part of his agenda. This effort continues with his ExcelinEd Foundation. Betsy DeVos served on its Board before becoming U.S. Secretary of Education.  In addition, most of the leadership of the Florida State legislature has direct personal ties to the charter school industry. They have pushed through draconian legislation, such as the recently passed HB-7069, that will rapidly expand corporate-managed charter schools and voucher-supported private schools at the expense of public school districts.

Dark Money in Sarasota Politics

Small portion of Sarasota campaign flows

Cathy Antunes had to do some brilliant sleuthing to follow campaign revenue and expenditures in some of Sarasota's elections. Her November 7th presentation, Dark Money in Sarasota Politics, started with a handful of political groups and their donors. By the end of her presentation, the audience had seen a lot more of the far-reaching and byzantine network of donors and pass-through organizations. These are individuals and political groups that are both inside and outside of Sarasota and Manatee Counties, with some located in other states as well. This simple diagram gives a glimpse into the money shuffling that Cathy uncovered. If you want to know more, Cathy is planning a book on the topic.

One of the takeaways from this lecture is that we need to watch our elections closely.  There are three School Board seats and two County Commission seats opening up in 2018. And there are hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in one of the political action committees (PAC) that Cathy detailed. Only those running the PAC know what that money might be used for.

At the federal level, the We-The-People Amendment would help provide broader constitutional protections, so that local and state governments could regulate campaign spending as they see fit. You can follow Cathy Antunes on her blog and on her radio show podcasts.

2017 Critical Times Conference

The 2017 Critical Times Conference, Taking Action for Economic Justice and Democracy, was a smashing success. Nina Turner, from Our Revolution, led off on Friday, November 3. On Saturday, George Friday, from the Move To Amend national leadership team, spoke about building community and building power.

Several panel discussions followed including Economics of Sprawl and Sustainable Growth,
Fighting for Justice, and Fighting for Democracy.

On Sunday, New College Professor David Brain facilitated a small group panel/discussion on
Moving Beyond Protest Politics...Creating the World We Want. This led to several breakout sessions on issues that attendees wished to work on locally. Animated discussions ensued.

Dark Money Discussion with Indivisible

Last night, Indivisible of East Manatee County presented an informative evening about  Dark Money. Barbara Somma kicked off with a grand tour of Jane Mayer's excellent book of the same name, Dark Money. Barbara explained the systematic efforts by Charles and David Koch to fundamentally alter the U.S. political system. She also researched the Koch Brothers local donation to the Poynter Institute. Jaime Canfield followed with a description of the local and national Move To Amend efforts. Jaime detailed the work toward a 28th Constitutional Amendment which would abolish the concept that money equals speech, as well as corporate constitutional rights. Click to watch the video above.

Constitution Day 2017

Every year across the country, on September 17, educational institutions - from the largest universities to the tiniest one-room schoolhouses - offer educational programs about the Constitution of the United States.  This year Manasota Move to Amend members participated once again. Jaime Canfield and Arlene Sweeting visited two local schools - one in Manatee County and one in Sarasota County. Social studies teacher, Chris Valcarcel, welcomed them to classes at St. Stephen's Episcopal School.  And they joined history teacher, Jym Froelich, for a second year at Pine View School. Together, they presented to ten classes over the course of two days, reaching over 200 students. Jaime reports:

"We visited the 6th graders at St. Stephen's and the 9th graders at Pine View High School. Our presentation consisted of walking the students through the history of the existing amendments, the court cases that have given corporations the same constitutional rights as people, the ways in which many groups of people have been excluded from the rights stipulated in our constitution, and the history of how our citizens have mobilized for change. We plan to expand this educational outreach to as many different age groups in the effort to explain the need for the 28th amendment."

POPS Speaks to Sarasota Legislators

POPS (Protect Our Public Schools) spoke in front of the Sarasota County Legislative Delegation, requesting that they actively work to rescind HB 7069. There were many school privatization provisions stuffed into this bill. For example, the Schools of Hope provision steers $140 million in education funding to charter school companies that agree to turn around low-performing schools. Charter companies agreeing to take on these schools do not have to serve all students and will receive more money than public schools. They may also hire teachers who lack state certification. The irony of this provision is that many charter schools, themselves, fail to perform well. For example, in 2016, 71 charter schools in Florida received a grade of D or below. Giving charter schools more power and funding than locally elected school boards smacks of corporate power and lends itself to the abuse of such power.

Protect Our Public Schools (POPS)

Stragglers left after meeting

Manasota MTA has formed an Education Committee. At our last general Move To Amend meeting, there was intense interest in local education issues. The primary concern was the privatization of our public schools. On Tuesday, we had our second meeting. Thanks to The Reserve for letting us meet there.

Carol Lerner started the meeting  by explaining some of the components in HB7069, which was recently signed into Florida law. It contains an empty body with one 278 page amendment with manifold provisions to siphon taxpayer funds from public schools to private coffers. HB7069 provides more taxpayer funds for private and charter schools - including an expansion of vouchers, bringing in Schools of Hope to replace low performing public schools, and requiring capital outlays to charter schools. This will undoubtedly lure even more profit-driven schools to open up in Florida. Sarasota County School Board Member, Shirley Brown, wrote an excellent editorial about the situation in Critical Times.

Defend Democracy Conference

The Unitarian Universalist congregation in Venice has endorsed Move To Amend and they mean it! Kindra Muntz pulled together a fantastic conference in Venice. Participants arrived from all over Southwest Florida. Arlene Sweeting and Diane Desenberg of the Manasota Move To Amend team were both presenters. During the conference, participants had a chance to get together in small groups to discuss what they could do locally to help defend our democracy.

Local Labor Panel

If corporate personhood is abolished, unions will be in a better position to assert worker’s rights due to case law already established that unions are an extension of their workers as opposed to a separate entity with its own rights. On Tuesday, a panel of local labor leaders shared their thoughts about the role of unions, about workplace automation, and about the future of labor. Carol Lerner started off the evening with some sobering graphs depicting the trends in income inequality and union participation over the years. The panelists included -

• Bradley Van Waus, Southern Region Lead Organizer for National Nurses United, 
• Kofi Hunt, Fight for $15 Florida Political Organizer
• Courtney Ruffner, President, Manatee-Sarasota Chapter of the American Association of University Professors
• Jeff Grieneisen, Vice-President, Manatee-Sarasota Chapter of the American Association of University Professors
• Mark Rodrigues, field representative, West Central Florida Labor Council, AFL-CIO, Tampa

Mark Manning from the Raw News Network recorded the panel discussion as well as the question and answer session, here.

Amendment 1: The Big Utility Showdown

** Reposted with permission from Occupy My Soapbox **

The largest utilities in Florida bankrolled Consumers for Smart Solar and Amendment 1. They want to maintain their monopoly control over energy in the State. Amendment 1 was looking to suppress competition from rooftop solar via constitutional ballot amendment. Thankfully, those in Sarasota and Manatee Counties as well as the rest of Florida saw through the ruse and voted it down on Election Day 2016. However, the story of Amendment 1 is a bit more complicated and Machiavellian, pitting the corporate and financial power of Big Utilities against the Power of the People.

As it stands now in Florida, only utilities can sell power to retail customers. Due to this restriction, landlords cannot sell power from solar panels to their tenants. It also effectively shuts down solar leasing. With leases, an outside company pays the high upfront cost of solar panels, and their customers sign long-term contracts to buy the power. Such leasing has made residential solar the fastest-growing part of the U.S. solar market. But it is simply not legal in Florida. Each utility has monopoly control of the sales and distribution of electricity. 

For many years, both citizens and politicians have wanted to open up the utility monopolies to competition from solar companies. The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting interviewed Paige Kreegel, who was a State Representative back in 2009. He was chair of the state House’s Committee on Energy. He considered himself a free-market Republican and he wanted to get government out of the way of the growing solar industry. But the rest of the Committee Members wouldn’t touch solar energy and he found himself an outsider on the Energy Committee he chaired. It turns out that Florida’s utility companies have heavily funded Florida political campaigns - to the tune of $12 million between 2010 and 2015. Those donations included contributions to every member of the Florida Senate and House leadership and a whopping $1.1 million to Governor Rick Scott's 2014 reelection campaign. According to State Sen. Jeff Brandes, “Here’s how the power companies control the Legislature: they ask the chairman of committees to never meet on the issue.”

To circumvent the lack of action in the Florida legislature, Floridians for Solar Choice attempted to place a constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot.