Category Archives: Politics

Your Christmas Present: Our Political Leaders are Killing off New York City

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It’s the week before Christmas, traditionally the best week of the year to be in New York City. This is the week when tourists by the thousands flock to town, hundreds of restaurants are full and festive, the theater does peak business, the symphony and opera and ballet put on their most popular shows, concert venues are fully booked, hotel rooms are impossible to find, stores are packed, and beautiful Christmas lights are everywhere.

Not this year. Don’t even think about coming here right now. Almost all of the best things are closed, by order of our political masters. The term “ghost town” is a fair description. Here’s a small roundup:

  • Restaurants. After a few months of graciously allowing restaurants to have outdoor dining plus indoor at 25% capacity, last week — just as fall was about to turn into full winter — Governor Cuomo ordered all restaurants in New York City completely closed for indoor dining until further notice. That’s right, all indoor dining at restaurants is closed in New York City. Outdoor? This is December! For most of the last week, the temperature has been well below 32F (0C); today it finally got back to a little above 40F (5C). In my neighborhood, normally the best restaurant area of the City, nearly all of the restaurants have given up. A handful have built elaborate “outdoor” structures where a few hardy patrons in parkas huddle beneath highly inadequate heat lamps. The evidence that indoor dining at restaurants is a significant source of spread of the coronavirus is non-existent.
  • Broadway theater. All of it is completely closed. Through May 2021!
  • Symphony, opera, ballet, Lincoln Center. Closed, closed and more closed. Lincoln Center is bravely talking about restarting shows some time in “Spring 2021,” but they don’t give any specific date. Carnegie Hall’s most recent proposed reopening date is April 5, 2021. Watch for that to get pushed back again, and then yet again.
  • Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Yes, it is there. You can even go to see it in person — provided that you are willing to put up with advance registration, a scheduled time, mask-wearing, social distancing, a five-minute time limit for viewing, etc., etc., etc. Or you can just watch their virtual live cam, safely from your home in Peoria — which is what they strongly recommend. After all, you wouldn’t want to get too near an actual live human being this year.
  • Concerts. Everything is canceled as far as I can find, mostly without any announced rescheduling dates at all. Madison Square Garden, which also runs Radio City Music Hall and the Beacon Theater, says “We are working diligently to reschedule as many of these events as possible for dates in the future.” When in the future? No word.
  • Hotels. I can’t find statistics for the most recent weeks, but according to this report from October, some 200 of New York’s 700 hotels have closed entirely, and the remainder had overall occupancy rates of well under 40%. I’m surprised that it is that high. Typical for this time of year would be 90% or higher. The good news is that prices have plummeted.
  • Streets. The usual festive throngs are nowhere to be seen. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but I don’t think so.
  • Subways. Still running! And at close to full schedule, if you can believe that. However, the authorities have done their best to scare away as many riders as possible, leaving the trains almost empty even at peak hours. On my line, trains that used to run irregularly, due to the difficulties of dealing with the crush of customers, now come every four minutes like clockwork. Word is that the MTA is about to get several billion in new “stimulus” funds from the latest Congressional bill, to keep the empty trains going. Thanks, flyover people! Here is a picture of the subway car I came home in this evening — with one other lonely passenger down at the other end. In normal times, this would be standing room only.
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Meanwhile our politicians proceed as if the infinite gusher of money will flow forever to fund the progressive program of perfecting the world. Allison Schrager in the City Journal has a collection of new and onerous labor regulation measures going into effect even as other government orders stemming from the virus are already crippling small businesses. Schrager calls her list “Another Stake in the Heart of New York’s Small Businesses.”

[D]on’t underestimate the capacity [of New York’s politicians] to make a bad situation much worse. The same week that Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to shut down New York City for business [because of the virus], Albany increased the minimum wage across the rest of the state (New York City’s minimum wage is already $15 an hour), City Hall made it harder to fire fast-food workers, and the New York appellate division upheld a decision that Uber drivers could not be hired as contractors—they must get all the benefits of regular employees.

Up in the state legislature, the Democrats have just increased their majority in the state Senate. All the buzz is about a new “millionaire’s tax” of several additional percent for those with annual income exceeding $1 million. And in New York City, Mayor de Blasio on December 18 held a news conference where he blurted out these words:

“I’d like to say very bluntly our mission is to redistribute wealth,” the mayor said. “A lot of people bristle at that phrase. That is, in fact, the phrase we need to use.”

The purpose of the “redistribution of wealth” is supposedly to fix the City’s schools. Those schools currently spend about $28,000 per year per student on K-12 education, which is well more than double the national average. As usual, de Blasio takes no responsibility for the failure of New York City schools to achieve even near-average results for almost triple the cost elsewhere in the country, and just demands more and more and yet more money.

They are doing their very best to kill off our city.

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

The voter fraud cover-up has exposed powers, principalities, and their multitudes of minions

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If you’re like me, you thought The Swamp, the Deep State, and the forces of evil were tremendous. But this election has shown me that my understanding of the depth of the adversary was a huge underestimate.

In retrospect, the writing has been on the wall for a while. We’ve seen Cultural Marxism rising inexplicably for decades. We’ve witnessed betrayals from our so-called allies on the political right as they waffle back and forth from being RINOs and constitutional conservatives. We’ve seen mainstream media and Big Tech suppress the truth and promote lies. But as this election fraud and subsequent cover-up have demonstrated, the forces arrayed against us are far greater than anything most of us could have imagined.

They’re everywhere. Fox News host Sean Hannity often said the Deep State infiltration of the FBI was made up of 20 or 30 leaders and middle managers but the majority of the Bureau was honorable. Former CIA station chief Dr. Michael Scheuer has often called Hannity out for this, claiming the Deep State was pervasive and encompassed the vast majority of the FBI, including complicit agents themselves. As it turns out, he was correct.

There aren’t just a few bad apples here or there. It’s everywhere. That’s the only way to explain how the blatant coup against the nation has, until this point, been successful. The evidence is tremendous, yet the cover-up is far greater. They did it. They are continuing to do it. And as Jake Tapper highlighted by Tweeting a story about a Trump supporter who allegedly committed voter fraud, they’re emboldened to the point that they’re rubbing our noses in the conspiracy.

This, perhaps more than anything else we’ve seen so far, tells us that we must trust solely in God to deliver us. If it is His will, nothing can stop it, not even the vast conspiracy arrayed against us. If it’s not His will to stop the steal, there’s nothing we can do to change it. This is why we must be prayerful if we are to have any hope of keeping our country from being destroyed.

And that’s why we must keep hope alive. There’s still time. If it turns out that President Trump is vindicated and reelected, then we can count this entire experience as a positive because it has allowed us for the first time to see a huge chunk of the powers and principalities working against us. Before the election, many on the right still embraced Fox News, Attorney General William Barr, and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Now we know only a handful of Republican lawmakers are working on our behalf. Everyone else is against us.

By no means am I trying to sound like a victim crying foul because the powers against us were greater than I knew. This is actually an exciting time and I love being the underdog as long as I know God is on our side. And as long as we’re faithful, He will be. Throughout the Bible, He has demonstrated a willingness to help the faithful through troubling times. We must have faith that He knows the end from the beginning and His plan will make us prevail even if that means failure today. I hate sounding fatalistic or insinuate I’m giving up. By no means! On the contrary, I’m still confident that the truth will prevail if God allows. That puts me at around 85%-90% sure President Trump will win. I have to acknowledge the possibility that the truth will continue to be suppressed, thus the 10%-15% skepticism.

In the latest episode of NOQ Report, I detail what I believe is a much bigger conspiracy against us than we ever knew before. I know some will say they’ve known all along. Good for you! I try to be rational and that often means being skeptical of conspiracies that seem impossible. Until this election, I would have thought it highly unlikely the powers and principalities were forming against us for this election. I would have been wrong.

We just need to keep fighting, keep praying, and believe that the truth will prevail. If God wills it, nothing can stop it.

J.D. Rucker, noqreport.com

Walter Williams: Suffer No Fools – Full Video

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Professor Walter E. Williams passed away some two weeks ago. Among other things, he was called “The People’s Economist.” He spent his life trying to enlighten us on our Founding principles, individualism, and the morality of free-market capitalism. One of his last contributions to liberty is the attached YouTube video “Suffer No Fools.”

Its message is universal and transcendent.

The Artful Dilettante

The Wisdom of Ayn Rand

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Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

The government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.

Systemic Chaos in Liberal Education Land

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It’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry at the education chaos in Liberal Land. There’s Dalton, the swank private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose staff has just issued a 24-point anti-racist manifesto demanding, amongst other things, twelve diversity officers. Thusly,

Expand the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to include at least 12 full-time positions: one Director, one Office Assistant, three full-time staff members per division, and one full-time staff member for PE/Athletics.

Back when I went to a swank private school in England in the 1960s, I’d say the total administrative staff, from headmaster and bursar down to office staff, was no more than five.

Then there’s the school district in swank Brookline, Massachusetts, a town full to the brim with highly-credentialed, well-paid experts and NPR honchos like Meghna Chakrabarti who all seem to have the credentials to boss around the school district and its teachers’ union.

I wonder if Chakrabarti is a relative of Sandy O’s former eminence-grise, Saikat Chakrabarti? Maybe not: Chakraborty means “ruler of the country,” peasants. I have an idea. Maybe this system of politics-and-protest is a good way to cause chaos in our children’s education.

Rather like  billionaire-inspired nationwide reform, like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.

Right in line with Harvard president James B. Conant’s Fifties vision of mega high schools.

Remember the late 19th century system of schools that would prepare children to be good factory workers?

Or the excerable Transcendentalist Horace Mann’s 1830s vision of the “common school” that would keep the Puritans and the Catholic Irish in Boston in their place.

Hey, Mann wasn’t all bad. He inspired the Irish to build their own school system with the slogan “first build the school, then build the church,” and so the Catholic Irish had pretty good schools for a century and a bit.

Do these delta-minus progressive morons really think that their CRT 24-point manifestos to build a race culture at Dalton is going to do a thing to ameliorate race disparities or that their expert-led political games are going to make a blind bit of difference among the $1.5 million homes in Brookline?

Ah! I see you are way ahead of me. They are not thinking at all, you say. They are just mindlessly rehearsing the cultural protocols that they have been carefully taught since K-12.

And these are the best people, the committed people, the educated people, that presume to rule over us?

Well, I got introduced to the blogger and YouTuber Steve Turley the other day. He gave me a bit of encouragement:

The key here is that because the rising tide of populism is just beginning and promises only to get bigger, it is almost inevitable that populist lite parties will indeed work themselves out into bona fide populist Right parties.

By “populist lite” Turley means center-right parties that co-opt populists but that “easily [digress] back to technocratic globalist norms.” But not forever.

Okay. Now I am going to go off into the weeds, and get all Jungian. See, this mad passion for system — the 24-point system that will eliminate racism at Dalton, or the systematic experts that will right the ship in Brookline — results in chaos. Just like Joe Stalin’s USSR.

Jung’s line is that our notion that we are ruled by our conscious-mind’s reason is an illusion. Ninety-odd percent of our mind is unconscious, and we don’t know how it works and what it is doing. When we get too systematic or rational, he argues, the irrational takes over and centers us back to a balance between reason and emotion. Maybe it overcorrects into chaos.

You can see why I like that. My “Great Reaction” line is that the left is a lurch back to chaotic primitivism:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is…

So when we create an inhuman but oh-so-rational system — say like our government child-custodial facilities — our unconscious minds eventually rebel and kick over the traces.

As I wrote a week ago, lefty systems leave chaos in their wake, humans pounded into rubble.

But still, there is also the notion of Mercia Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive… cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault… or from his neighbor’s malevolence… but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

So, if we Deplorables are suffering from the idiocy of the progressives and their mad systems, is it from our own “personal fault” or from the progressives’ “malevolence?” Or is it all simply due to quantum-mechanical indeterminacy?

Oops! I forgot! It is all the fault of “systemic racism” and the malevolence of “white supremacy.” Which all goes to demonstrate the truth of the Jungian chaotic system that drives our liberal friends to Wokie insanity.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Government, not COVID, is Killing Small Businesses

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A video of a confrontation between Ventura County, California health officials and restaurant owner Anton Van Happen has gone viral. The health officials were ordering Mr. Van Happen to close his business because he allegedly violated California’s ban on outdoor dining. Mr. Van Happen asked the health officials if the government will pay his employees and his rent while his business is indefinitely closed.

Mr. Van Happen is hardly the only small business owner worried about how to pay bills during the lockdowns. Many small businesses operate on a narrow profit margin, so being forced to “temporarily” shut down or limit the number of customers they can serve is a virtual death sentence.

The lockdowns have already caused as many as 200,000 small businesses to permanently close. Lockdowns, by shrinking the number of employers, lead to long-term unemployment or lower wages for many workers.

While governments have terrorized small businesses, they have typically deemed the big chain stores “essential businesses” so they can remain open. The lockdowns are thus another government policy that gives big businesses a competitive advantage over their smaller competitors.

The benefits big businesses get from the lockdowns — including fewer competitors, more customers, and a job market with more workers competing for fewer jobs — may explain why many big businesses are not fighting the lockdowns. Instead, most big retail chains are requiring their workers and customers to wear masks. Many big businesses may soon deny service to those who refuse to receive a Covid vaccine.

One would think that progressives who claim to oppose policies that benefit big corporations like WalMart, Target, and Amazon would oppose the lockdowns. Sadly, even many progressives are unquestioningly parroting the Covid propaganda and demonizing those who dissent.

By slowing down the development of herd immunity among the population, the lockdowns could put those truly at risk in greater danger. Lockdowns have also had negative effects such as increases in drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic violence. Meanwhile, many schoolchildren are deprived of the opportunity to interact with their teachers and their peers. Instead, these children are subjected to the fraud of “virtual learning.”

Resistance to Covid tyranny is growing as more people figure out that lockdowns and mandates are both unnecessary and harmful. This resistance was largely started by small business owners faced with a choice between obeying the government or making sure they, and their employees, can feed their families. Small business owners have been leaders in recent anti-lockdown protests across America.

Eventually the resistance will grow to the point where the politicians will be forced to either double down on authoritarianism or admit the lockdowns were a mistake. Either way, those of us who know the truth must resist the Covid tyranny until government officials no longer terrorize small businesses for the crime of serving willing consumers.

Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute

Spending WAY Beyond a Drunken Sailor

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“The Swamp Strikes Back: 6,000 Pages, 6 Hours…Members of Congress Bristle over Being Given 6 Hours to Read Massive Trillion-Dollar Spending Bill” [Breitbart News]

You cannot spend your way to prosperity. Government merely robs from the productive to reward the nonproductive. The absurdity? These government “rescue” packages spend trillions to rescue people from the government’s own lockdowns. It’s insane and unsustainable. We are on the hyperinflationary road to a Venezuelan economy.

A pitiful $600 “stimulus” check in exchange for losing your job or business to lockdowns? It’s called socialism. You fools asked for it.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Lockdowns are the Great Unequalizer

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Democrats and their liberal economic advisers obsess about income inequality. Will someone please tell them that no act in modern times has widened the gap between the rich and the poor more than the lockdowns going on right now?

Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the leftist National Low Income Housing Coalition, said, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.”

Politico reported that minorities and the poor have “been more vulnerable to job and income losses from the ensuing economic crisis, in large part because Black and Latino workers are over-represented in the service industries wiped out by shutdowns.”

James Parrott, an economist at the New York City New School, said that what the United States is experiencing is “the most lopsided economic event imaginable.”

The National Restaurant Association said that 40 to 50 percent of restaurants may go bankrupt in the months ahead if their stores don’t reopen immediately. Two of the U.S.’s most iconic restaurants, the 21 Club in Manhattan and the Cliff House in San Francisco, announced they had closed their doors permanently after nearly 100 years of business. As they die, so do hundreds of jobs in these cities. The workers out of work aren’t rich. Overall, 15 million middle-income people work for bars and restaurants.

Even Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and arguably the planet’s richest man, complained that the lockdowns exacerbate inequality. With tens of billions of dollars of added profits, Amazon has been the world’s biggest beneficiary from locking down brick-and-mortar stores.

For once, liberals are spot on.

Lockdowns are crushing the little guy. Even so, it is the Democrats who are pushing this anti-freedom agenda. Here are the 10 states listed by The New York Times with the strictest lockdown orders: California, Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Washington. What do they have in common? Democratic governors.

Liberals love to talk about following the science, but all evidence of the last nine months points to the scientific conclusion that lockdowns do not work to reduce deaths. Contact-tracing studies show that about half of those infected with the coronavirus got it despite staying at home. Only 2 percent of the transmission comes from restaurants, and almost none comes from outdoor dining, which is now idiotically prohibited in California.

The states that have not locked down their economy have lower death rates than New York and New Jersey. The unemployment rate for service workers in these states has skyrocketed to as high as 10%. In contrast, the red states, such as Utah and Florida, that are still open for business have unemployment rates for service workers as low as 4 percent.

Yet lockdowns are supported by politicians, university professors, journalists, technology executives, government employees, preachers, teacher unions and wealthy suburbanites. Their incomes are not in jeopardy. They won’t wait in lines for a meal. Would teachers support school closures if they weren’t getting a paycheck? How many people get tenure like six-figure salaried university professors who have been inoculated from the lockdowns they cheered on?

I don’t see Yentel or many other “low-income advocates” protesting the lockdowns; do you? They think a government stimulus program of $1 trillion will solve the problems of the poor and the unemployed. Handouts are no substitutes for jobs and paychecks. Millions will fall through the cracks in any case.

There is an old joke about a boy who kills his parents and then throws himself on the courts’ mercy because he is an orphan. The modern-day version of that story is liberals who have helped burn down the house and then piously complain about rising homelessness.

Arthur Laffer, Walter Williams, Milton Friedman and so many other great economists have always warned us: The poor and minorities are the first victims of anti-growth and boneheaded public policies. Tragically, we are once again learning that lesson.

So, why is the left all in for lockdown policies? These policies are doing just the opposite of what they preach: “rewarding wealth, not work.” Perhaps the answer is that the left cares a lot more about power than the poor.

Stephen Moore, American Thinker

The Biggest Political Blunder in American History

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If courts and state legislatures award Joe Biden the presidency, the anti-Trump cabal, driven by a four-year single-minded obsession to defeat President Trump, will have committed the greatest political blunder in American history — the unabashed and overt theft of the 2020 presidential election. 

This myopic and oblivious group so misunderstood the depth and breadth of support for Donald Trump that their blatant manipulation of the election would fall monumentally short of the planned for and anticipated landslide defeat of the incumbent.  A landslide they needed in order to dominate the political arena for the foreseeable future and avoid any backlash from the electorate for their duplicity.

Thus, this cabal, which consists of the Democrat party establishment, Tech and Wall Street billionaires, the mainstream media and left-wing elitists, will find itself in a quagmire of being unable to govern.  The Democrat party’s dominant and radicalized left-wing base will revolt over failed promises and expectations while the extent of the fraud will inevitably be fully exposed, resulting in nearly half of the citizenry viewing the government as illegitimate. 

The unleashing of Covid-19 on the world by the Chinese Communists opened the door for massive voter fraud, primarily via mail-in ballots, to be introduced into traditional battleground states.  Operating on the four-year premise that the destruction of President Trump justifies any means, the Democrat party establishment extra-constitutionally imposed changes to election laws in a number of states. 

At the same time their cadre of co-conspirators were also mobilized.  The social media oligarchs and the mainstream media controlled and blatantly censored the flow of information.  The self-styled progressive billionaires, in violation of campaign laws, poured untold millions into so-called get out the vote campaigns.  And the left-wing elites mobilized their army of foot soldiers to intimidate state and local politicians as well as state and federal judges in addition to being frontline participants in various statewide voter frauds.

These conspirators smugly believed that they had successfully set up a scenario wherein Donald Trump would be defeated in such a massive landslide that a vast majority of the citizenry would never question the results.  Further, Donald Trump would be so marginalized that his future as the leader of a growing political movement would be rendered moot as he slunk, tail between his legs, back to Mar-A-Lago.  Thus leaving the political playing field in the hands of the established ruling class in near perpetuity.

Instead the worst-case scenario played out.  The election came down to four battleground states, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania with a total margin for Joe Biden of 120,000 out of 18,600,000 legally or illegally cast votes or 0.6%.  The question of fraud, despite the cowardice of the federal and state judiciaries, cannot be swept under the rug particularly as so many illegalities have already been exposed. 

Further, nearly half of all likely voters (75% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats) believe there was sufficient fraud in the election to ensure Biden won.  Despite the best efforts of both social and mainstream media as well as the Democrat party hierarchy, that perception will never dramatically change, as in a recent poll just 56% of Americans say Biden is their president.   Once in office, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would be viewed by a significant plurality of Americans as transparent frauds and imposters thanks to an unabashedly fraudulent election.  A citizenry already consumed with contempt for the ruling class due to their ham-handed police-state tactics in dealing with the Chinese Coronavirus is now waking up to their duplicity and megalomania. 

Without the modicum of a mandate and open hostility towards a Biden/Harris Administration, there is very little the ruling class can do to enact their agenda with the specter of revenge in the 2022 mid-terms hanging over their heads.  However, there is a more pressing issue that will impact the nation.  The left-wing base of the Democrat party can rightfully claim that it was their grassroots efforts that pushed the Biden/Harris ticket over the top.  Had there been the landslide all had anticipated and planned for, then the left would have had no choice but to be satisfied with the crumbs from the executive table as their role in the election fraud would be downplayed.

But there will be no crumbs from the table, as many of the grandiose plans of the ruling class will have to be shelved.  This will not sit well with the rank-and-file left-wing radicals as they will realize they were mere pawns in the lawless seizure of power by their nemeses.  The billionaire class, the corporatists and the ruling elites and their collective self-interest runs counter to Marxist/socialist ideology of the left.  None of the promises made during the campaign season will be kept as these doctrinaire socialists and their leaders will be shunted to the side while their erstwhile allies focus on maintaining their stranglehold on the levers of power in the face of an aroused and determined opposition led by Donald Trump.

In the spring and summer of 2020, the ruling class, in a marriage of convenience, tacitly allied themselves with another anti-Trump faction, the left’s uncontrollable militant militias, Antifa and Black Lives Matter.  By their collective silence and capitulation in the face of ongoing riots, violence, intimidation and looting, they conveyed to these self-styled revolutionaries that they are spineless and easily intimidated.  When the radical left is ignored and marginalized by a Biden/Harris Administration and the frustration level reaches a boiling point, then these militants will again take to the streets in an even more violent manner. 

The bitter harvest of massive election fraud will be a government beset with an inability to govern, as it will have no good will with the bulk of the American people and a political base it cannot placate.  The perpetrators of this fraud are predestined to fail as well as hasten the ultimate demise of the Democrat Party.  The only issue outstanding is whether this nation will descend into chaos and bitterness as a result.

Steve McCann, American Thinker

Affluent Families Ditch Public Schools, Widening US Inequality

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Affluent Families Ditch Public Schools, Widening US Inequality

One is thriving after switching from online public school to in-person private education. The other is struggling, stuck in her virtual classroom.

The lives of these two girls, Ella Pierick and Afiya Harris, encapsulate the growing divide in U.S. education as more affluent parents flee public schools.

In Connecticut, enrollment fell 3%. Colorado reported a similar decline, with the steepest losses in one of its wealthiest counties. Chicago’s rosters dipped 4.1%, the most in 20 years.

Parents with means are instead homeschooling; joining with other families to hire teachers in so-called pandemic pods; or signing up for private schools. Poor and minority children often have no choice but to attend inferior virtual classrooms, and some are just giving up entirely.

“The pandemic has exposed so many things,” said Amanda Thompson-Rice, a math support specialist in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg public schools. “Our affluent parents, they’ve got what they call pods, they’ve hired teachers or workers to support their kids for the day. They’re paying them like $20 or $30 an hour. Black families are trying to just live.”

A December study by consultant McKinsey & Co. found that students of color in U.S. schools had fallen behind in math by three to five months because of the pandemic; white students trailed by only one to three months. A quarter of kids do not have access to any kind of web-enabled device or broadband at home.

A quarter of kids do not have access to any kind of web-enabled device or broadband at home

Other disadvantaged groups are floundering, too. In Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools, the number of middle and high school students earning failing grades in at least two classes nearly doubled to 11% of students, with steeper rises among children with disabilities and those for whom English isn’t their first language.

U.S. public schools educate more than 50 million children, so even modest enrollment declines could add up to hundreds of thousands of kids. National figures won’t be available for a couple of years and class sizes could recover after the pandemic. If a significant number don’t return — or if there’s a lag — it could have an impact on school budgets, which are based on the previous year’s enrollment.

Public schools spent $739 billion in the 2016-2017 school year, or $14,000 per student, 90% from local and state money and most of the rest from the federal government. So schools face a potential challenge: less money to treat students who demand more attention because they’ve fallen behind in virtual classrooms.https://bc192dfac6939d6ccf1cf1f7fce8de32.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

“Kids are very likely to return to school needing a great deal of enrichment,” said Kevin Welner, an education professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “That educational issue runs smack into the school finance issue.”

In the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, near the state’s capital, Jessica Pierick did what she could to make sure her daughter Ella didn’t fall behind in third grade. She and her husband work for a small construction company, so they could afford to switch from public to nearby Saint Ann School, a Catholic institution that charges $5,000 a year tuition.

“I really like it there because there’s a lot of new people I get to meet,” Ella said.

In the New York City borough of the Bronx, Afiya Harris, who is 10, still logs on for school on a laptop. Her father is an elevator mechanic. Her mother recently lost her job an administrative assistant at a law firm. Afiya attends Tag Young Scholars, a magnet school for the gifted and talented in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood.

Her parents spend nights tutoring Afiya, and she recently started meeting weekly with a social worker to address her difficulties in concentrating amid computer glitches.

“I have breakdowns because I can’t believe I spent so much time going over this with her,” said her mother, Rasheedah Harris. “I get emotional, because most parents, I know, aren’t able to put in that time.” 

Elsewhere in the Bronx, some students are barely showing up. Leton Hall, a science teacher at predominantly Black and Hispanic Pelham Gardens Middle School, said 10 out of 25 students don’t log-in at all on a typical day. Many who do lose connections because of Wi-Fi problems or don’t turn on their cameras, suggesting they may not be participating.Hall records a video of himself teaching for students who missed live instruction but knows some will fall many grade levels behind. More than the three quarters of students at the school are considered economically disadvantaged and 7% are homeless. 

“We always have contact with students and with parents that are absent, but it’s just different now,” Hall said. “You can call, but there is not much you can really do.”

Bloomberg News

Another example of the complete failure of our government-run education system. It’s our national embarrassment. And, unfortunately, only the affluent are able to drop out of the system. The public schools have done irreperable damage to generations of American students, of every race and ethnic group. It’s child abuse. The people responsible for this should be strung from a lamppost. A/D