CPD IN THE NEWS

The Washington Post - October 5, 2014, by Valerie Strauss - Charter school advocates didn’t like it recently when Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform issued a report calling for the strengthening of charter oversight and authorization. While noting that many charters work hard to “meet the needs of their students,” the report said that “the lack of effective oversight means too many cases of fraud and abuse, too little attention to equity, and no guarantee of academic innovation or excellence.” It provided some common-sense recommendations, including an innocuous call for the establishment of minimum qualifications for charter school treasurers. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, not surprisingly, bashed the report.

Meanwhile, a new report was just issued by three groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and ACTION United — that found major fraud and mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s charter schools. It found:

Charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania school children since 1997. Yet every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. While the state has complex, multi-layered systems of oversight of the charter system, this history of financial fraud makes it clear that these systems are not effectively detecting or preventing fraud. Indeed, the vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media exposés, not by the state’s oversight agencies.

The great New York Times writer Michael Powell recently wrote a column detailing what can go wrong with a charter school when there is little or no oversight; in this case, he explores the sickening mess surrounding Prime Time Prep in Texas, created by Deion Sanders, a Hall of Fame cornerback and National Football League commentator.

Yes, there are many fine charter schools. But seriously bad news about many others keeps coming, and concerns are rising as the number of charters overall is increasing. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says that in 2013-2014, 2.57 million students were enrolled in more than 6,000 public charter schools nationwide, with nearly 2,000 new charter schools opening in the past five years.

Here’s a piece about what’s going on in the charter world by Jeff Bryant, who is the director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He owns a marketing and communications consultancy in Chapel Hill, N.C., and has written extensively about public education policy. A version of this appeared in Salon.

By Jeff Bryant

When former President Bill Clinton recently meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”

A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance. But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.

In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.

But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.

Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for many students, their families, and their communities.

Charter Schools As Takeover Operations

The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.

After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions.”

In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.

Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of students in the New Orleans Recovery all-charter Recovery District is obtainable only by “jukin the stats” or, as the NPR reporter put it, through “a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice.” As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek a year ago, “the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.”

Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. Education Secretary Arne Duncan once even said that he thinks “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina” because it wrecked the previous low-functioning school system and brought about the rise of charter schools in the Recovery District. So some school districts that have not had a Katrina are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.

School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).

The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.

The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.

The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.

None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s bets for our kids.”

What’s important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures academically, as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going by the name Jersey Jazzman stated on his personal blog. Looking at how the districts’ students perform on state assessments, he found that academic performance levels were “pretty much where you’d expect them to be” based on the fact that “most of York’s schools have student populations where 80 percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage,” and variations in student test score performance almost always correlate strongly with students’ financial conditions.  He concluded that what was happening to York schools more represents a “long con” in which tax cuts and claims of “budgetary poverty” have prompted a rapacious state government to “declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures … pick at the bones of a decimated school system.”

The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in Dialogue, “It’s the same story that played out in Detroit, Flint, and Philadelphia where these ‘chief recovery officers’ or ‘emergency managers’ have all made the same recommendation: to hand over the cities’ public schools to the highest private bidder.”

Then, hiding behind pledges to do “what’s best for kids,” these operators too often do anything but.

Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues

York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their state have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since 1997.

The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was released by three groups, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.

Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors –just in Pennsylvania – include an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.

What’s even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents, every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.

Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation.

The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year that exposed $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud, waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate how charter school fraud is spreading.

What’s happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter operators being considered for that takeover – Mosaica Education, Inc., and Charter Schools USA – have particularly troubling track records.

According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, “complications soon followed.” After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit, and when Mosaica realized they weren’t making a profit within two years, they pulled up stakes and went in search of other targets.

As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report from the Florida League of Women Voters produced earlier this year found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a construction company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every year.

In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch, Charter USA’s construction company bought a former Verizon call center for $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the front door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.

No wonder York citizens are concerned.

What Happened To Charter School Accountability?

Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more “accountable” to the public are turning out to be anything but.

As an article for The Nation recently observed, “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque.”

The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.”

Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources.

In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.”

This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label.

If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what’s required, Noguera concluded is “greater transparency and collaboration with public schools.”

Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.

This report, “Public Accountability for Charter Schools,” published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, “recommends changes to state charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to the communities served,” according to the organization’s press release.

According to the report, these recommendations are the product of “a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders” from Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and other cities, who have “first-hand experience and years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to assess impact.”

These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.

For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of Open Records in Pennsylvania, “testified that her office had received 239 appeals in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters.” In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management Company, “takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually … yet has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own schools for detailed financial reports.” In Philadelphia, the report authors found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available “only one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf club in the Philadelphia suburbs.” In New York City, where charter schools are co-located in public school buildings, “public school parents have complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours, and earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the co-located charter school.” The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, which documented public school classrooms “with peeling paint and insufficient resources” made to co-locate with charters that have “new computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks.”

The Annenberg report’s policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of “standards:”

Traditional school districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure a coordinated approach that serves all children.

School governance should be representative and transparent.

Charter schools should ensure equal access to interested students and prohibit practices that discourage enrollment or disproportionately push-out enrolled students.

Charter school discipline policy should be fair and transparent.

All students deserve equitable and adequate school facilities. Districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure facility arrangements do not disadvantage students in either sector.

Online charter schools should be better regulated for quality, transparency and the protection of student data.

Monitoring and oversight of charter schools are critical to protect the public interest; they should be strong and fully state funded.

Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That organization’s response cites “remarkable results” as an excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry loves to crow about, the facts are those results really aren’t there.

Charter Accountability Now

Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out of the corners of the “black box” the industry uses to protect itself, the charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality.

Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on a publicity terror with a national campaign claiming to tell “The Truth About Charters” and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia and New York City.

But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.

There’s little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw deal. The deal is off.

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The City Council’s dominant Progressive Caucus—led by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito—announced their endorsement today of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

As Democrats look to recover from a devastating Election Day, Ellison is vying to lead the party against former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and South Carolina chairman Jaime Harrison. Ellison, the first Muslim-American ever elected to the House of Representatives, has attracted the support of Sen. Charles Schumer and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom the congressman backed for the presidency in defiance of most party leaders.

Now the Progressive Caucus, whose 19 members mostly though not unanimously favored Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, has added its backing to the Midwestern lawmaker’s bid.

“The members of the Progressive Caucus Alliance are proud to add our voices to those in support of Keith Ellison for Chair of the Democratic National Committee,” the group said in a press release today. “Congressman Ellison has been a true progressive champion in Congress, and has demonstrated the grit and tenacity that we’ll need for the tough fights ahead.”

Dean, who headed the DNC from 2005 to 2009, has asserted that the organization needs a chair who can attend to party business full-time. The Democrats have suffered severe setbacks over the past eight years under chairs who held elected office, most recently the controversial Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

The former Green Mountain State governor and 2004 presidential candidate has highlighted the success of his “50-state strategy” in yielding the first Democratic majority in Congress in 22 years in 2006.

More important for the Council’s Progressive Caucus, however, are Ellison’s two turns as keynote speaker at “Local Progress” gatherings of low-level left-leaning officials. This, the caucus asserted, showed an emphasis on building a party bench at the most basic levels of government.

“As municipal legislators, we are especially enthusiastic about his emphasis on progressive politics at the local level,” their statement said. “Congressman Ellison recognizes that progressive politics matter at the most local of levels: to families seeking a job that pays the bills, to kids from low-income families hoping to go to college, and to parents worried about whether their kids of color will be treated fairly by the criminal justice system. He knows the difference it makes to unite action at the local, state and federal levels, and why it is important to build strength among City Council members and other local elected officials.”

Ellison’s bid also comes as many Democrats, including Schumer, have argued the party needs to increase outreach to blue collar white voters in depressed industrial areas. But the Progressive Caucus insisted the “incredibly divisive national atmosphere” President-elect Donald Trump’s incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric has created demands party leadership that will stick up for minorities.

“We need a leader who will stand firm against hatred, bias, discrimination, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia,” the Council members’ release said. “The members of the Progressive Caucus Alliance know that Congressman Ellison will be that type of leader, and we enthusiastically support his bid for Chair of the DNC.”

“We are enthusiastic that he will be [the] first Muslim-American DNC Chair,” it added.

Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.

By Will Bredderman

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Ask an education “reform” proponent about any issue facing public education and the answer is always the same: “school choice.” Whether they’re championing charter schools, vouchers or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), advocates prefer to frame the debate around the right of parents to send their child to a better-performing school. This is merely a smokescreen to divert attention away from what school choice is really about: the transfer of public money to the private sector without accountability or transparency.

Many school choice campaigns are bankrolled by a faction of incredibly wealthy conservative donors and political groups, including the Koch Brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (better known as ALEC). Their agenda is clear: dismantle public education.

But it’s a safe bet you won’t hear their names during National School Choice Week (Jan 25-30). What you will hear is a lot of people parroting messages about “freedom,” “innovation,” “options,” even “civil rights” – buzzwords that underpin the campaigns to expand charter schools, vouchers and ESAs across the country. But the jargon masks the devastating impact these policies have had on public education, particularly on those students who are supposed to benefit the most.

Unaccountable Charter Schools: The Truth Hurts

Many people support the idea behind charter schools, but how many are aware of the mounting troubles the charter industry has experienced lately? Probably not enough. Proponents work very, very hard to maintain a facade of success and transparency in the face of evidence that many of these schools operate without any oversight, while wasting taxpayer money and fostering inequity and racial segregation.

Take the North Carolina State Board of Education, which just this month rejected the Department of Public Instruction’s annual report on charter schools as “too negative.” Dominated by school privatization stalwarts, the board is determined to prevent any meaningful oversight of the state’s charters and demanded revisions to the report before it could be submitted to the legislature.

North Carolina educator Stuart Egan took the board to task in an open letter to Lt. Governor and board member Dan Forrest: “Overall, charter schools seem to lack diversity and operate under a different set of rules according to the report you are trying to squelch. The fact is that many of the charter schools you have enabled are perpetuating segregation and are not accomplishing what you advertised they would do,” Egan wrote.

Given the magnitude of waste and fraud in the sector, it’s unsurprising why many charter operators are hiding from accountability and regulation.  And according to a new study, the expansion of unregulated charter schools, particularly in urban communities, is beginning to resemble the effort a decade ago to pump up bad mortgages that eventually blew up the economy.

“Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in Black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers,” Preston Green III of the University of Connecticut and co-author of “Are We Heading Toward a Charter School ‘Bubble’?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis” told EduShyster. “At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight is creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in low-income communities.”

Vouchers: Who Is Really Benefitting?

According to the 2015 PDK/Gallup poll, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose school vouchers. They see it for what it is: a privatization scheme that subsidizes tuition for students in private schools. And perhaps they are aware that there is no conclusive evidence that vouchers improve student achievement. The public is also not fooled by the often-repeated falsehood that vouchers are primarily benefitting disadvantaged students.

In Scott Walker’s Wisconsin and Mike Pence’s Indiana, where vouchers have expanded dramatically, promises that the programs would serve low-income students in failing schools didn’t last. “That tale quickly and methodically changed,” said Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. By 2015,  only 2 percent of participants [in the voucher program] had attended an ‘F’ public school.

“The most expansive voucher program in America has become an entitlement program which, in large part, now benefits middle class families who always intended to send their children to private (mostly religious) schools and taxpayers are footing the growing bill,” Meredith said.

Education Savings Accounts (or Vouchers on Steroids)

In 2015, Nevada lawmakers were hoping to blaze a new trail for school choice with a new gambit, education savings accounts (ESA), which allow parents to claim more than $5,000 in state funds each year and use it for any qualified education expense. This includes religious-based private schools, but also a variety of other services, all with little or no oversight over student outcomes. In addition, states impose no quality controls on the textbooks, curriculum, tutoring, or supplemental materials that parents can purchase with ESA funds.

Education savings accounts exist in five states, but Nevada became the first to pass a bill that offered them to every public school student regardless of family income. Very few private schools in the state, however, have tuition low enough to be covered by the $5,100 or $5,700 provided annually by ESAs. Wealthier parents can supplement their own income to pay for the tuition, but for lower-income families private school will remain largely out-of-reach.

Earlier this month, a state judge slapped an injunction on the program. In his ruling, District Judge James Wilson said the law diverted public funds to pay for private school tuition and was therefore unconstitutional. The decision will be appealed because advocates have vested a lot in the scheme. ESAs are unquestionably the new school choice battleground and are being pushed in a growing number of states with proponents deploying the usual tropes about “freedom” and “flexibility” to mask their real impact: erosion of public school funding, fewer education resources, wider achievement gaps and increased segregation.

Real Innovation That Works

The good news is that a growing number of communities are finding solutions to struggling schools and achievement gaps that benefit all students, not just some. Educators and parents are working together to expand the community schools model, which is currently present in nearly 5,000 schools nationwide. When public schools extend services and programs beyond the school day, creating strong learning cultures and safe and supportive environments for both students and educators—in effect becoming community “hubs” – student outcomes improve. In 2015, Minnesota educators were instrumental in persuading the legislature to pass a bill creating a grant program for “Full-Service” Community Schools and other states may soon follow suit.  To learn more about community schools, read “Investing in What Works” by the Southern Education Foundation and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Source: NEA Today

How does one get invited to attend one of the most exclusive palavers on the planet? Well, if it’s the annual Jackson Hole economic summit sponsored by the Federal Reserve System, it’s virtually a prerequisite that one belong to that elite fraternity of beings known as central bankers. Or a pointy-headed professor with a certified globalist bent. Or, it seems, a loudmouthed, obnoxious street radical with a Marxist-Leninist “social justice/economic democracy” bent.

So, if you’re a screaming activist with the Center for Popular Democracy, apparently, you have an open door, a welcoming hand, and a place at the table with the Jackson Hole uber-elite.“Federal Reserve officials sought to reassure a group of labor activists that the central bank isn’t going to cool down the economy just as a stronger labor market is reaching a broader swath of Americans,” reported  the Wall Street Journal on August 26.

Here is an excerpt from the Journal’s report:

“We’re going to run [the economy] hot, get the unemployment rate down lower,” San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams said at an unprecedented meeting with activists from the Campaign [sic for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign.

The meeting of activists and high-ranking Fed officials took place shortly before the start of the Kansas City Fed’s high-profile policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Central bankers in attendance included Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s two top lieutenants, New York Fed President William Dudley and Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer....

The left-leaning activist group Fed Up publicly met with eight Federal Reserve presidents Thursday to discuss inequality and interest rates during the central bank's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Serious, responsible critics of the Fed of  a conservative/libertarian bent would never receive similar cordial treatment, of course. That’s understandable, since they want to restrict the power of the Fed, or abolish it altogether. The left-wing activists, on the other hand, want to expand the power of the Fed, and to use those expanded powers to further socialize our economy and society. That is surprising to many people, but it shouldn’t be; it’s completely in line with Karl Marx’s handbook. The fourth plank in Marx’s 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto calls for “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” Bingo: That’s the Federal Reserve.

So, what is the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and who is supporting it and its Fed Up Campaign? Not surprisingly, one of its major supporters is the Ford Foundation, which has been notorious for funding “progressive,” socialist, pro-communist, and outright communist organizations and individuals for more than seven decades. Also, among the CPD financial angels is the Open Philanthropy Project, which has generously funded CPD’s Fed Up Campaign, it boasts, to the tune of at least $2 million. And it has pledged millions more.

In our previous report on the Fed’s conference last weekend (Jackson Hole’s Gangsters and Banksters: What Are They Planning?) we utilized the Fed’s official list of conference attendees to underscore the fact that the Fed’s top echelon officials and advisers hail almost entirely from that elite cabal of globalist one-worlders, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Moreover, we pointed out, this confirmed a virtually non-stop control of the Fed by CFR members since the Fed’s inception, under the guidance of elite Wall Street banker Paul Warburg, who was also a founder of the CFR.

The same CFR hands are at work in the creation of the Astroturf Fed Up Campaign posing as a grassroots “opposition” force to the Fed. The Ford Foundation and many of the other tax-exempt foundations supporting this faux CPD effort are longtime funding arms for the globalist agenda. Ditto for many of the other controlled opposition groups that CPD/Fed Up list as their “Partners.” Here is a partial list of those CPD partners, most of which would scarcely exist, if not for the activist cash they regularly receive from their globalist paymasters they pretend to oppose:

Arkansas Community Organization

Living United for Change in Arizona

ACCE Institute (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment)

Working Partnerships USA

CASA de Delaware

New Florida Majority

Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights

Good Jobs Now

Neighborhoods Organizing for Change

TakeAction Minnesota

New York Communities for Change

Common Good Ohio

CASA de Pennsylvania

Ohio Organizing Collaborative

Texas Organizing Project

Wisconsin Jobs Now

Clearly, as with #BlackLivesMatter and the many other Astroturf “progressive” organizations funded by billionaire George Soros (a CFR member and CFR President's Circle corporate supporter), the Fed Up Campaign is another example of CFR Insiders providing simultaneous pressure from above and below to effect social/political/economic/moral revolution.

By  William F. Jasper

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