When Governor John Kasich rolled out his “Jobs Budget” (HB 153), no one was surprised that this champion of all things “free market” called for the acceleration of the privatization of public education in Ohio via the repeal of the 2005 moratorium that prohibited the opening of new on-line schools in the state.

But — surprise, surprise — the Republican dominated Assembly rejected Kasich’s proposal and voted to keep the moratorium in place. Wow, at first glance, it looked like the legislature was responding to the dismal academic failure of Ohio’s current e-schools, and, amazingly, that Republican Assembly members, tempering their free market mania, were acting to protect the public interest.

Not so — says Innovation Ohio. This think tank has published a report “OHIO’S E-SCHOOLS: FUNDING FAILURE; CODDLING CONTRIBUTORS,” that says the Assembly’s refusal to allow the opening of new e-schools, in fact, was a pay back to e-school owners from Republicans demonstrating their gratitude to their big political donors.  E-schools are hugely profitable and, naturally, e-school owners don’t want additional competition, so they pressed their Republican “friends” to keep the moratorium in place. From the report:

“Innovation Ohio has found that between 2001 and 2010, Ohio Republicans, who now control both the Governor’s office and the Ohio General Assembly, received nearly $4 million in campaign contributions from just two men – David Brennan and William Lager.

David Brennan, who operates more charter schools in Ohio than anyone else, has single- handedly donated nearly $3 million to state candidates and Republican Party accounts. Brennan operates the Alternative Education Academy E-School (OHDELA), as well as several brick-and-mortar charter schools.    Though OHDELA graduates just 35.9 percent of its students, Brennan receives $11.7 million a year in state money to operate it.

Incredibly, Mr. Brennan—who currently rakes in roughly $100 million per year from the state, and has banked over $500 million in state money since 2000—has never once testified before any education committee of the Ohio General Assembly.

For his part, Mr. Lager, who operates ECOT, has made nearly $1 million in political contributions since 2001. ECOT receives $64 million per year in state money – yet graduates just 35 percent of its students, and has a performance index rating worse than all but 14 of Ohio’s 613 districts.  …

(By keeping the moratorium in place that stops the formation of new Ohio e-schools,) far better for these Republican benefactors to maintain their gravy train, especially since the adoption of standards is nowhere in sight. Coupled with the repeal of E-school reporting and minimum spending on student requirements, Brennan and Lager now can enjoy the best of both worlds—no pesky competition to eat into their market share, no standards for the schools they already operate, and no risk of state- imposed fines to cut into their profits.”

The New York Times last December reported, “Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools,” that one Ohio School, Ohio Virtual Academy, receiving more than $60 million a year from the state, is managed by a national company called “K-12.” Astoundingly, the CEO of K-12, Ronald J. Packard, receives an annual salary of $5 million.

The NYT reports: “In an interview at K12’s headquarters in Herndon, Va., Mr. Packard said, ‘We’re here to help children, and that is our overriding purpose and we want to do it as well and efficiently as possible.’ ” I had to laugh when I read Mr. Packard’s “It’s all about the children” defense. I guess it’s nice to have your good deeds rewarded with a $5 million paycheck each year, as well.

Innovation Ohio doesn’t report the salaries of Lager or Brennan, but, I’m sure they are huge.  Do the math:

E-schools receive $6,320 tax money per pupil — subtracted from funds that otherwise would go to local public schools — and the reported average student: teacher ratio for Ohio e-schools is 37:1.  (I suspect it is much higher.) The average salary for teachers in Ohio e-schools is $36,000 and with retirement and health benefits the average total compensation per teacher would be much less than $50,000.

The largest Ohio e-school is ECOT with 9257 students. On the expense side, if the 37:1 ratio is accurate, ECOT has 250 teachers with total compensation each year of $12,500,000, round to $13 million. Add computer equipment, software, on-line expenses, etc cost, I’m guessing, on average, $1500 per student each year for $14 million Add a generous amount for administrative and office costs,  for another $5 million.  And the TOTAL is $13 + 14 + 5 = $32 million

On the revenue side, @6320 per student, there is an income of $58 million, and, so, there seems to be an excess of $58 – $32 = $26 million.

If I’m off in my expense side by $10 million, there is still plenty of excess money to pass around. One big e-school expense I’ve not noted is advertising — e-schools spend a lot of public tax money soliciting new students.  And, of course, donations from e-school owners given to politicians is also an indirect expense. Here is how the gravy train chugs along, ever faster:

• Money extracted from taxpayers
• is cleansed by “private enterprise”
• then placed to politicians’ hands
• so politicians can enact policies
• to empower “private enterprise” to extract more taxpayer money so
• even more money is placed in politicians hands so
• “private enterprise” can extract even more money ….

Here are more details from the Innovation Ohio report — all data taken from public records:

From 2001-2010, David Brennan alone made political contributions totaling $2,933,046 to political party accounts and candidates for statewide and legislative offices, with only token amounts going to Democrats.    William Lager donated $943,452 during that same time frame –again mostly to Republican candidates and causes. What is especially noteworthy is the size of their recent largesse, especially since it is Republicans who are now seeking to remove all caps, restrictions and accountability from E-schools and charter schools more broadly.

As the 2010 elections approached, Mr. Brennan stepped up his contributions to statewide Republican candidates, giving generously to the campaigns of Gov. John Kasich ($22,781); Secretary of State Jon Husted ($22,745); Treasurer Josh Mandel ($22,692); Auditor David Yost ($11,000); Attorney General Mike DeWine ($11,000) and Speaker of the House William Batchelder ($22,000). xxi    Their Democratic opponents received nothing from Mr. Brennan.

Mr. Brennan also contributed heavily to various Republican Party organizations and committees during 2009-10. In 2009, he gave a total of $169,075 to 5 different GOP political funds, and in 2010, $106,000 more to 3 Republican funds and committees. He also contributed an additional $24,850 to Republicans in 2009-10 through “Go-Go PAC”, a political action committee that he himself controls. xxii    Go-Go PAC’s contributions to Democrats during this period totaled $9,420, with the bulk of that ($8,395) going to incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland.

All told, David Brennan lavished over $412,000 on Republican candidates and committees during 2009 and 2010 alone, while contributing a token $9,420 to Democrats in this period.

Although not as generous as Mr. Brennan, William Lager also targeted Republican candidates in 2009-10, giving Batchelder $21,000; Yost $11,395; and Senate President Tom Niehaus $11,000.    Two Democrats—then-House Speaker Armond Budish and Rep. Ted Celeste of Columbus—received $10,000 each. xxiiiLike Brennan, Mr. Lager also gave significant amounts to party organizations in 2009-10, with Republican committees receiving $86,093 and Democratic committees getting $42,000.

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but exceedingly fine.

The foundation for justice in a democracy is free and fair elections. Ohio Republican efforts to suppress voting rights, along with the rest of their radical agenda, I’m thinking, shows the gang in Columbus has gone too far and this coming election, even gerrymandered districts may send non-Republicans to the Ohio House and Senate.

Last week federal judge, Susan J. Dlott, in the Hunter v Hamilton County Board of Elections case, ruled in favor of election justice and ordered the Hamilton County Board of Elections to count all of the provisional ballots that were cast in the right location but the wrong precinct for the juvenile court judge race in 2010.The ruling will add over 300 votes to the tally, in a race that where over 200,000 votes were cast. The decision may overturn the results of the election. As it stands now, before these additional votes are counted, Republican John Williams has 23 votes more than Democrat Tracie Hunter.

Judge Dlott found that the Board violated right to equal protection and due process and rejected all of the defenses posed by the Board in her 93 page opinion. The case was tried over three weeks in July and August of 2011.

Judge Dlott ruled that the Board of Elections violated the voters’ constitutional rights when it decided to count some provisional ballots but discard others based solely on the location of where they were cast. She indicated that that Ohio’s Republican designed “wrong-precinct” law is unconstitutional. Dlott wrote:

“Ohio’s precinct-based voting system that delegates to poll workers the duty to ensure that voters are directed to the correct precinct but which provides that provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct shall not be counted under any circumstance, even where the ballot is miscast due to poll-worker error, is fundamentally unfair and abrogates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process of law.”

But the court could not find Ohio’s law unconstitutional without an appropriate due process challenge, and as a result of Dlott ruling, such a challenge has now been made to the Ohio Attorney General. At the same time, in response to Dlott’s ruling, the Republicans on the Hamilton County Board of Elections voted to appeal her decision all the way to The Supreme Court.

Every election in Ohio, thousands of perfectly good ballots, mostly from the poor, are trashed because they fail to meet the technical requirements of Ohio Law. Ohio’s crazy election laws, it seems, are designed to unjustly disenfranchise voters.

One reason I am an enthusiastic supporter of Caroline Gentry, the Democratic candidate for the Ohio House in the district where I live, OHD-41, is the fact that, educated as a Yale Law School attorney, she has donated many pro bono hours working for voter protection. Caroline recently received the Lloyd O’Hara Public Interest Law Award. Her citation reads in part:

“Caroline served as lead counsel in Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) v Blackwell, a pro bono case that helped to change and clarify Ohio’s voter-identification requirements for the November 2006 general election dn Ohio’s provisional ballot rules for the November 2008 general election. … Caroline’s work on behalf of disadvantaged people who otherwise might be deprived of their voting rights exemplifies the spirit of Lloyd H. O’Hara who was a champion of the poor and disadvantaged.”

The citation also notes that Caroline helped litigate the enforcement of the NEOCH ruling as part of the Hunter v Hamilton County Board of Elections case, just ruled on by Judge Dlott.

The Republican effort to suppress voting rights may become a big issue in this campaign. The Republican legislation, House Bill 194, screams injustice. Many habitual Republican voters in gerrymandered districts may see the unfair suppression of voting by the 129th Assembly as something that they cannot support.

HB194 limits early voting and, most outrageously, prohibits poll workers from helping voters to find their correct precinct. I know, it sounds so absurd as to be a joke. It’s amazing that the anti-democratic Republican majority has the audacity to so clearly show their hand, and enact a law that prohibits poll workers from helping citizens so their votes can be counted.  (Bryan, see comments below, shows that this sentence is incorrect. HB194 does not prohibit poll workers from helping citizens, it relieves them of any responsibility for doing so.)

I’ve not heard a Republican defense of HB194 and, recently , in response to over 300,000 Ohioans signing a petition to put a repeal referendum on the November ballot, Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, urged the Assembly to repeal the legislation saying publicly, to the effect, “Gee, maybe this bill isn’t such a good idea, after all.”

HB194, of course, is just part of the radical Ohio Republican agenda.

The Ohio Republicans in power, traditionally, have been so secure in their “safe” gerrymandered districts that they have felt a license to advance whatever legislation they wanted. Ohio’s 2005 Tax Reduction Law, for example, was anti-progressive, a give away to corporations and the wealthy, and resulted in a $2.6 billion annual revenue shortfall to the state budget.

Under Kasich, this license, this sense of entitlement, to exercise right wing ideology, has been pushed to new levels of arrogance. Taft Republicans, unlike Kasich et al, regardless of their complete control of the state government,

• did not attempt to curtail collective bargaining for public employees,
• nor sell the state prisons and state turnpike,
• nor cut down the trees and drill for oil in the state parks,
• nor take tax money from public local schools and give to religious private schools.

Taft Republicans did not push legislation so “business friendly” as to be dangerously anti-environmental. But Kasich Republicans passed House Bill 231 greatly compromising Lake Erie and its watershed to the point that, amazingly, former Republican governors Bob Taft and George Voinovich protested and pushed Kasich into his first veto. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Kasich was under mounting pressure to veto the bill. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo suggested “potential legal action” on Thursday if Kasich signed it, and The Plain Dealer of Cleveland has editorialized against the measure.

The bill also was opposed by former Republican Govs. Bob Taft and George V. Voinovich, the Ohio Environmental Council, the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy, the Alliance for the Great Lakes and past directors of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

But the bill did have the support of business interests – which are typically cozy with Kasich and vice versa – including the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which hailed the bill as a jobs-friendly proposal that would provide economic certainty about future water resources from the Great Lakes.

“The liberal environmentalists want to misuse the Great Lakes Compact to place unnecessary and expensive hurdles in front of businesses that will seek to take advantage of northern Ohio’s overly abundant natural resource – freshwater – to relocate or expand their water-use-dependent businesses in northern Ohio,” Sen. Timothy J. Grendell, R-Chesterland, wrote in a letter to Kasich yesterday.

With the current Republican corporatists, in charge in Columbus, accusing former Republican governors Bob Taft and George Voinovich as being part of a “liberal environmentalist” cabal, certainly many main stream Republican voters are beginning to wake up and realizing that they no longer can support this group.

There is wake up call after wake up call. The most recent are the comments of Judge Dlott that Republican “wrong precinct” legislation is unconstitutional.

The point is, the Ohio Assembly is now controlled by radical party apparatchiks who feel so entitled to their antidemocratic bias they are well outside of the mainstream — shockingly so. The wheels of justice grind very slowly. Common sense must eventually return to Ohio. I’m thinking our democracy will rouse sufficiently this next election, and respond as it should.

• Rejecting Radicalism, Voters in Some Republican Districts May Elect Democrats To Ohio House, February 2nd, 2012
• Moderate Oakwood Democrat Seeks To Replace Radical Republican Jim Butler To Represent OHD-41, November 11th, 2011
• Ohio’s Proposed Voucher Law HB136 — Should Tax Money Be Used To Fund Religious Education?, September 29th, 2011

It’s amusing to hear Newt Gingrich proclaim that, in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, he is the “true conservative.”  The Tax Policy Center shows that the Gingrich tax plan would add $1.3 trillion to the U.S. budget deficit each year. True conservatism? For his tax ideas, alone, Gingrich deserves to be laughed off the stage.

George H. Bush in 1980 said Reagan’s “supply side” tax proposals amounted to “voodoo economics.” He had it right. During the Reagan presidency, the national debt tripled — going from one to three trillion dollars.

To be conservative means to believe “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” To be conservative means to be prudent, logical, reality based. It means taking a long term view and making wise plans for a secure future. It means showing a resolve to “conserve” what is important and what is of value.

Gingrich and Republicans want to frame their wacky ideas as “conservative,” but they are not conservative at all. What Gingrich calls “true conservatism” is an ism, all right.  It is a collection of irrational beliefs based on a pretend universe that demagogues like Gingrich use to manipulate the gullible. It is simply wrong to call this ism conservatism. It is “Republicanism.”

George Lakoff states, “At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.” He writes:

“The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.

Budget deficits are a ruse, as we’ve seen in Wisconsin, where the governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions.”

What is astounding is how effective Republicanism propaganda is. There are true believers who actually think Gingrich and other “true conservatives” are wonderfully logical and honestly interested in advancing the general good. Long time Republican, David Frum, asks, When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? He writes: “We used to say ‘You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.’ Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

In 2005, the Ohio Republican government passed a big tax cut drastically reducing taxes on corporations and changing the progressivity of the income tax system, and gave the lion’s share of the tax cut to the wealthy, those who least needed to receive it. The tax cuts, phased in over a five year period, reduced revenue to the state by $2.6 billion each year.  There is no way this big change in Ohio’s tax laws could be defended as following “conservative” principles — prudently planning for the future.  It could only be defended by using “pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

It was obvious, to anyone not believing in voodoo, that this tax cut would cause a big gap in the budget. In 2005 Ohio Policy Matters said, “Closer scrutiny reveals that massive cuts in state spending, or alternative tax increases, that will be required to make up for the revenue shortfall of about $2.8 billion in 2010, the fifth and final year of the tax reform plan’s phase out period.”

And so, in 2011, when it came time for the first Kasich budget — Wow. Surprise, surprise — reality slapped us in the face. The state didn’t have enough revenue. Kasich argued that the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions should be gutted via SB-5 because such action would save the state $1.3 billion.

The motive behind pushing SB-5, of course, had nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with dealing with the deficit. It was an attempt to advance the ism of the true believers — smaller government, less regulation, free markets — a belief system deemed worthy of fierce loyalty.

But, authentic conservatism has nothing to do with this wacky belief system of Republicanism, but instead is centered on the democratic principles that make this nation exceptional. The first goal of authentic conservatism should be, in Lincoln’s words, to produce a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Why Republicanism rejects authentic conservatism is obvious. A “government of the people” would flatly reject the irresponsible, class warfare strategies that true believers of Republicanism hold dear.

In this campaign season Democratic candidates need to educate voters that “Republicanism” is not conservatism. Democrats should co-opt the word “conservative,” should show that they have ideas that are prudent, reality based, and honor the wisdom of our forefathers. Democrats should speak boldly how “We the People” must work together to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

• Ohio’s 2005 Tax Reduction Act Was Predicted, By 2010, To Result In Yearly State Budget Shortfall of Billions, December 15th, 2008
• Ohio’s 2005 Tax Reduction Law Diminished, By 21%, The Progressivity of Ohio’s Tax Code , August 6th, 2008
• The Ascending Issue In Our Democracy Is Democracy Itself, September 17th, 2007