Category Archives: Atlas Shrugged

With the current attention to immigrants from both sides of the political fence, it seems pertinent to examine some of the women who came to the U.S. and then made changes from within our borders. Some sought to escape oppression in their homelands or were seeking new economic opportunities. Others may have been attracted to a place that boasts free thought and equal opportunity. Whether or not these dreams were realized, the following 10 women changed art, thought, and politics in the U.S. -- and beyond.

1. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-2004)

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a Swiss-born psychiatrist and famous for her theory of the five stages of grief. She was also known for her work in the AIDS movement and hospice care. She moved to the United States in 1958.

2. Isabel Allende (1942-)

Known for her many magical realist books and as one of the most widely read Spanish-language writers, Isabel Allende moved from Chile to the United States in 1989. In 1993, she became a U.S. citizen and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

3. Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000)

Hedy Lamarr was a Viennese actress and inventor who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s. Known for her parts in many movies, she is less recognized as one of the inventors behind spread-spectrum technology, which later helped the development of WiFi, Bluetooth, and CDMA. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1953.

4. Pramila Jayapal (1965-)

Pramila Jayapal is the first female Indian-American member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A long-time advocate for immigrants, she was born in India and immigrated to the United States in 1982. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000 and won her seat in congress in 2016.

5. Madeleine Albright (1937-)

Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. Secretary of State in 1997 and before that was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and emigrated from Great Britain to the United States in 1948. Secretary Albright became a U.S. citizen in 1957.

Salma Hayek was born in Mexico and came to the United States after establishing an acting and modeling career. She is a naturalized citizen who is an immigration activist and has stated that at one time she was an illegal immigrant. She is also a humanitarian and breast feeding advocate.

7. Arianna Huffington (1950-)

Famous long before she created The Huffington Post empire in 2005, Arianna Huffington was born in Athens, Greece. She moved to New York in 1980 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1990.

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American author and philosopher. The author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she was arguably more notable for her political activism and objectivist philosophy. She immigrated to the United States in 1926 and became a U.S. citizen in 1930.

9. Mother Jones (1837-1930)

Born in Ireland, Mary Harris Mother Jones moved to Canada with her family to escape famine. She moved to the U.S. when she was 23. She helped rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire and was known for being one of the first female labor activists.

10. Ruth Westheimer (1928-)

Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a German-born psychologist who became famous for her Dr. Ruth shows in which she candidly discussed sex. Dr. Ruth was a child refugee to Switzerland and later learned that both her parents died in the Holocaust. She went to Israel and then France and later immigrated to the United States in 1956. She later became a U.S. citizen in 1965.

Celebrated or controversial, these women made enough noise to be heard in their adopted country. In todays political climate, however, there are immigrants (both undocumented and with documents) hiding in silence, fearful that ICE is going to deport them. Instead, Lady Liberty (a French immigrant herself) should be setting the moral standard for how we treat newcomers in the U.S. for it is not what we do to keep others out that shows the heart of a country, but how we treat the tired and the poor.

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10 Women Immigrants Who Changed Art, Thought, and Politics in the US - Huffington Post

Last fall, Uber hired Jeff Jones, Targets former chief marketing officer, to serve as president of the companys core ride-hailing business, with a mandate to improve relationships with Uber drivers and counteract the companys increasingly negative public image. But Jones couldnt solve those problems, and over the weekend he resigned in a way that will exacerbate them, telling Recodes Kara Swisher and Johana Bhuiyan that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber.

Joness resignation is the latest blow in whats been a brutal 2017 for the high-flying transportation startup, with problems ranging from a consumer boycott sparked by Ubers participation in a Donald Trump advisory council to a Google lawsuit alleging that Ubers key self-driving car technology was stolen, from serious sexual harassment allegations to the revelation of a secret program to foil local law enforcement.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick apologized publicly for problems at the company, saying he needs to grow up. But at 40 years old, the paper billionaire has been an adult for a long time, and experts say the steps Kalanick is taking to address the harassment issues are woefully inadequate.

Joness departure is fundamentally a sign that Uber isnt really trying to change its ways. The company gained initial traction in the marketplace thanks to a pirate-ship mentality that viewed willingness to break the rules as a core competitive advantage. Having gained enormous revenue and visibility since it launched in 2010, it would probably have made sense to slow down, mature, and try to transform itself into something more like a boring utility company that maintains good relationships with drivers and regulatory stakeholders.

Ubers view of the marketplace, though, is that the ride-hailing platform is just a stepping stone to a future network of ubiquitous self-driving cars. Thats encouraged the company to plow ahead with the pirate mentality, including perhaps stealing from Google, in an all-out race to win the future of transportation.

Its far from clear that a rule-breaking company with a toxic public image at war with its own workforce can really pull this off without imploding in the process. The taxi market really was (and is) regulated with little concern for public safety or consumer interests. But Ubers sense that the rules dont or shouldnt apply to it is leading to an escalating series of problems that could easily destroy the company.

The classic taxicab market in the United States was plagued with regulations restricting the supply of cabs available to be hailed in a way that went far beyond basic safety concerns. All drivers of all cars require a license, and all vehicles on the road are heavily regulated objects that need to pass a battery of safety and environmental tests. Still, in all states obtaining the permission to drive a car is a fairly straightforward process. But in most cities, obtaining permission to not just drive a car but drive people around in exchange for money was cumbersome, requiring access to a limited supply of special permits.

This permit-rationing process generated extraordinary financial returns to the owners of the permits who, in most cases, were not the actual drivers of the cabs but also ensured that cabs were harder to find than they should have been.

In cities like New York and Washington, DC, that generally meant taxis were unavailable in lower-income and less central neighborhoods. In a more auto-oriented city like Los Angeles, it generally meant that the economics of the taxi industry was focused on exploiting tourists rather than providing a service to locals looking for an alternative to driving when heading out for a night of intoxicants.

Municipal regulation also often led to inefficiency. A Boston cab that took a passenger from South Station or Logan Airport to the MIT or Harvard campus in Cambridge could not, legally speaking, pick up a new passenger without crossing back to the other side of the Charles River first. This kind of regulatory fragmentation served no real public policy purpose, but as each local regulators politics would typically be dominated by the interests of incumbent license holders, it was very hard to get the rules changed.

The laws were, of course, always imperfectly enforced, and illicit gypsy cabs and out-of-jurisdiction pickups by real cabs were a longstanding fact of urban life.

Ubers solution to the basic problem was to boldly plow ahead in a legal gray area, and then wage political battles from a position of strength with customers already in place. As Bradley Tusk, one of Ubers main political impresarios, told Vanity Fair when recounting a fight in New York, We mobilized our customers, over 100,000 of them, either e-mailed or tweeted at City Hall or the city council.

This business strategy fundamentally worked.

Once Uber existed, most consumers in most cities liked it, and most political authorities gave way to the basic idea that more ride availability was going to make life better for most people. But while its certainly possible to believe that the taxi market was excessively regulated without believing that regulation is, in general, illegitimate (the cab market has long been deregulated in Sweden, for example), Kalanick appears to be a true believer in smashing the state.

Years ago, he used the cover image of Ayn Rands The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar and told the Washington Posts Mike DeBonis that his companys regulatory issues bore an uncanny resemblance to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Still, in a practical sense, Uber operates overwhelmingly in big, dense liberal cities and needs political cooperation from Democratic Party elected officials. To that end, Uber has always sought political connections with blue-state politicians (Tusk was a former communications director to Chuck Schumer and top aide to Michael Bloomberg) who can help them in concrete ways that Republicans generally cant. But Kalanick and his inner circle, according to people familiar with the situation, are largely pretty hardcore right-wingers who understand a pragmatic need to go along and get along with progressive values without really believing in them.

Indeed, as Voxs Tim Lee has written, Uber has consistently applied the its better to beg forgiveness than ask permission to a huge range of conduct that has nothing to do with rent-seeking taxi regulation:

[W]hen Uber accepted a massive $3.5 billion cash infusion from Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund, I noted the irony of Uber accepting cash from a government that doesnt allow women to drive cars and that once punished a rape victim for being alone with a male nonrelative. And Uber didnt just take Saudi Arabias cash; it also gave the theocratic regime a seat on its board.

Over the years, Uber has allegedly spied on its own customers, threatened to dig up dirt on journalists, and downplayed sexual assault concerns.

In many of these cases, Uber has backpedaled in the wake of a public backlash. Kalanick, for example, tweeted out an apology in the wake of his executives comments about journalists. But often, Uber only seems to take this kind of step after becoming the target of a social media firestorm.

While this attitude was helpful in breaking through initial taxi cartel rules, applying the principle to every situation has enmeshed the company in an endless series of controversies thats unusual for a consumer-facing company.

All corporate management structures enter into some degree of conflict with their employees. At the same time, a companys workers are often its best allies in existential regulatory battles. Coal miners are a stronger face of public opposition to environmental regulation than coal company CEOs or electrical utility shareholders. And workers are not only more sympathetic than executives but also more numerous and geographically dispersed.

A natural step in the maturation process for a company like Uber, which faces a significant and dispersed regulatory challenge, would be to try to recruit drivers as allies for the basic proposition that the service is safe and useful.

Instead, Uber has resisted the notion that its drivers are employees at all, and only under threat of litigation came to a resolution of the basic question of how the workforce related to the company. The settlement, in the end, was a broadly reasonable compromise that allowed Uber to maintain the flexibility it wanted while addressing key driver grievances and even moving toward the creation of a formal group to represent the interests of Uber drivers. But this was dragged out of the company as a concession, not put forward proactively as a workforce model.

The key factor here is that to sell investors on Ubers sky-high valuation and lack of proven profits, the company has very openly espoused a vision of replacing all drivers with autonomous vehicles. The company maintains an aggressive research division based in Pittsburgh thats working on self-driving technology, and at corporate headquarters its taken for granted that the existing hailing business is just a stool to be kicked aside soon enough in favor of the robotic future.

That blocks the otherwise natural turn toward enlisting the broad mass of Uber drivers as political and public relations allies. There are other drawbacks too. Pairing an avowed indifference to a large share of the workforce with a corporate culture that valorizes rule breaking likely encourages misogynistic behavior at the home office, and almost certainly impedes efforts to create a more rule-bound, publicly appealing corporate culture.

Hence the recruitment of Jones from the outside to try to improve things, and his rapid departure as it becomes clear that problems are too deeply rooted from him to change them.

Of course, if the bet on self-driving technology pans out, this could all be irrelevant.

A fleet of cheaply operated fully autonomous taxis would be a massive game changer for the companys basic economics. And since Uber already owns the relationship with a mass of customers, it would be very difficult to dislodge them from a hypothetical position of leadership in the autonomous vehicle game.

But the bet on an unproven, nonexistent technology in a space where Uber does not have an obvious advantage over companies that are more distinguished either in mapping and artificial intelligence (like Google) or in actually making cars (like, well, car companies) is very much a shot in the dark. And its worth asking whether Ubers reputation for lawlessness could be a considerable impediment.

After all, the core of Ubers original case for brushing aside taxi licensing regulations was that this was a fundamentally silly area of government intervention into the economy. All of Ubers drivers had drivers licenses, and their cars were all legal to drive. The basic regulatory issue was whether legal drivers piloting legal cars should be allowed to let someone ride in the back seat in exchange for money.

Self-driving car technology, by contrast, poses obvious public safety hazards. Like any car, if self-driving cars malfunction, people will die. And there is a reason theres no such thing as an automaker that has deliberately courted a public image as defiant of the law or the basic legitimacy of the regulatory state nobody would buy a car they were worried didnt meet basic safety standards. Recalls at General Motors a few years back cost the company a small fortune, and led to high-profile congressional investigations. Its a much higher-stakes game than taxi regulation.

Reasonable people can and do disagree about what rules are genuinely necessary for safetys sake (the public doesnt realize it, but cars considered safe in Europe generally wouldnt be allowed on the road in North America, and vice versa), and there is a lot of low-key lobbying around the margins, but all the players in this industry accept that there will be rules and the rules should be followed.

Nothing about Ubers approach to taxi regulation, labor law, sexual harassment, public relations, or much of anything else, though, suggests the kind of cautious attitude that would tend to give a person or a city council member, or a state Department of Transportation official confidence in the safety of Ubers robot cars. Joness words, which characterized a culture thats so badly broken it took the person brought in to fix it just six months to decide that he couldnt, do not in any way suggest a company youd want to trust on life-or-death matters.

Uber has given life to the slogan move fast and break things in a way that Facebook, which coined it, never did. It was a perfect pitch for an early venture capital fundraising round, but its a frankly terrible motto for a company that aspires to play a critical infrastructure role in piloting fast-moving metal objects down the street.

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Uber's toxic culture of rule breaking, explained - Vox

According to conservative news site The Daily Caller, rising right-wing star Tomi Lahren, aka Tammy to rapper Wale, has been suspended from Glenn Becks The Blaze network starting next Monday. The blonde, sentient copy of Atlas Shrugged ruffled feathers at the network after revealing that she is a pro-choice conservative during her appearanceon The View Friday. The network has since put a pause on her daily show Tomi, which is essentially a glorified monologue of that jock from freshman seminar who wonders why theres no white history month.

I cant sit here and be a hypocrite and say Im for limited government but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies, Lahren said while appearing on the daytime panel talk show. Stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.

The Blaze founder Beck once again let the world know that his performative liberal woke conversion was a total sham when he hit back at Lahren during his Monday radio broadcast.

I would disagree that youre a hypocrite if you want limited government, said Beck, and yet you want the government to protect life of the unborn.

An earlier Daily Caller post claimed that Lahren was already disliked at The Blaze and was pretty much on her way out when her contract expired in September.

Lahrens inflammatory, oftentimes angry style has placed her increasingly at odds with coworkers at The Blaze, The Daily Caller has learned, a situation thats worsened after she called pro-life conservatives hypocrites.

Lahren acknowledged that shes going through a career rough patch with a vague tweet oozing with you havent heard the last of me subtext.

Before those of us on the left start pointing at the woman once lampooned as white power Barbie and doing our Nelson Muntz laugh, its important to remember that her advocating for women to have autonomy over their own bodies was the bridge too far for the conservative media company.

Lahren herself will be fine. Given how she has a large audience for her racist rants, Im sure shell fit in as yet another leggy blonde on Fox News.

[Photo: The Blaze]

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Report: Tomi Lahren suspended from The Blaze after calling pro-lifers hypocrites - Death and Taxes

Recently, a talk show host in Iowa, Jan Mickelson, asked Congressman Steve King: If we dont raise godly children to take our place . . . that vacuum will be filled by whatever washes up on our shore and makes a claim on our territory. Civilization has to be on purpose. Isnt that correct, Congressman King?

It has to be on purpose, King an unrepentant racist who keeps a confederate flag on his desk responded, and I would recommend a book to your listeners, and the title of it is The Camp of the Saints.

Jean Raspails The Camp of the Saints which derives its title from Book of Revelation 20 is a rabidly racist 1970s novel in which the sentiments of the author are expressed thusly: Ive always led a rather quiet life . . . (Yet) Im sure I would have shown a certain zeal in poking my blade through Arab flesh . . . what a horde of Turks I would have cut down. . . . Like the War Between the States, when my side is defeated and I join the Klu Klux Klan to murder myself some blacks. . . . Perhaps Ive done my bit, killing a pinch of Oriental at the Berlin gates. A dash of Vietcong here, of Mau Mau there. A touch of Algerian rebel to boot. At worst, some leftist or other, finished off in a police van, or some vicious Black Panther.

What kind of person recommends this kind of book? What have we become? Where is the outrage that King and Steve Bannon hold this book is such high esteem?

That they believe, as King states, that culture and demographics are our destiny, and that we cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies.

When Raspail rails against a million poor wretches armed only with their weakness and their numbers, I hear echoes too of President Donald Trump advancing his racist Muslim ban and building a wall, and I hear State Rep. Ken Weyler of Kingston saying, Giving public benefits to any person or family that practices Islam is aiding and abetting the enemy. That is treason.

I hear not only Raspail, King and Weyler but I hear Trump advisers Bannon, Steve Miller, Sebastian Gorka and Michael Anton, all of whom seem to share sentiments that the immigration of non-white people corrupts America.

I hear Trump appointee to the U.S. Department of Energy Sid Bowdidges (from Bedford) comments on Twitter that President Barack Obama wasnt using the term radical Islam because theyre his relatives and who called the San Bernardino shooters, Scum sucking maggots of the world. Exterminate them all.

Thankfully, Bowdidge has been fired.

When I hear, in the community where I live, the voices of such small-minded politicians living in such fear that their white privileged world is being challenged by citizens demanding standing, dignity, respect and equal opportunity in the Public Square, I wonder where weve all gone wrong whether there is more I could do, could have done.

What, I ask today, have we as a nation or as a state done, how have we sinned, to bring such hateful ignorance into our company, corrupting our discourse and scarring our childrens futures?

How does the America that embraced generations of immigrants embrace people like Bannon and King.

I share these Raspail quotes so you dont have to read them, so you dont have to confront and imagine, as you turn the page, which of your neighbors embrace such sentiments to read as you are looking over your shoulder. Neighbors who live in such ignorant fear of the Other that they forget that they too were once strangers in a foreign land.

Today, I want to say that if you voted for, support, contribute to, or stand in silence alongside people who espouse such bigotry and hatred then youre one of them you are Steve King, you are Jean Raspail and I believe each of you complicit in attempting to delegitimize, disenfranchise and exclude Americans not like you from the Public Square.

America is not a world unto itself white, sterile, homogenous.

America is part of a world increasingly filled with billions of poor people overwhelmed by misery a world where America acts, economically, militarily, politically, with near impunity with little regard for the consequences.

Too often America acts out of ignorance.

Challenge the ignorance: Instead of House Speaker Paul Ryans beloved Atlas Shrugged and Bannons oft-referenced The Camp of the Saints, read the literature of the peoples themselves. Be suspect of anyone who claims that only they know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and be wary of those who cant recognize nuance, are ignorant of allegory and fearful of metaphor.

Be open to embracing the beauty and varieties of human experience and truth will emerge.

Today, Im reminded, as I witness hate and venom spilling into our public spaces, of the words Georgetown Universitys Father Thomas Reese directed to Congressman Ryan in 2012: Survival of the fittest may be okay for Social Darwinists but not for followers of the gospel of compassion and love.

I know that theres a hard-core of people whose minds will not be changed, who eyes will not be opened, whose hearts remain untouched.

I know, too, that there are those who struggle to discern the differences between sacred and profane, between light and darkness, who struggle to read the signs of grace, mercy and forgiveness that fill the hearts of most of humanity.

Yet, I know, as certain I breathe, pray, speak, that I believe that whoever is hungry let him come and eat. Whoever is shackled let her be free.

That whoever truly believes in compassion, love, justice and dignity believes in that for all of humanity.

(Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. He can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com and his columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.)

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Robert Azzi: Challenge the ignorance - Concord Monitor - Concord Monitor

Entertainment Weekly, RedditEntertainment Weekly reports on unseemly acts of eco-terrorism in Oakland, California: Somebody is chopping up perfectly good trees to mirror the selfless act of the titular character in Shel Silverstein's classic 1964 picture book, The Giving Tree.

Let's not mince words. Written by a Playboy mansion habitue and composer of "A Boy Named Sue," The Giving Tree is about a female tree that literally gives up every aspect of her existence to please a spoiled, uncaring boy. By the end of the volume, the tree is reduced to a stump where the boy, now an old man, can park his ass. Decades past the Sexual Revolution, it's damn nigh impossible to read The Giving Tree as anything other than sublimated male anxiety over the rising tide of unfettered feminine sexuality and freedom. Wouldn't it be great, the book effectively asks, if women on the cusp of societal emancipation, would sacrifice every aspect of their being for jerk guys?

You don't have to be an Ayn Rand fan to read the book this way (though it helps). In 2013, Reason interviewed novelist Arin Greenwood about her excellent YA title Save the Enemy, in which the teenage girl protagonist is searching for her kidnaped father, a weirdo with libertarian sensibilities.

From the book:

Your dad probably read you books like The Giving Tree when you were a kid. My dad did read me The Giving Treeonce, calling it "evil" in that it "promotes the immoral destruction of the self." (I was four.) He preferred Atlas Shrugged, which is basically about how rich people shouldn't pay taxes. He has explained to me a lot over the course of my seventeen years that taxes are "slavery."

Though no libertarian herself, Greenwood nonetheless told us, "Personally, I am a little creeped out by The Giving Tree."

As are we all, Ms. Greenwood, as are we all.

Watch The Giving Tree vs. Ayn Rand: YA Author Arin Greenwood on Save the Enemy:

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The Giving Tree: Bad Book or Worst Book? - Reason (blog)

Seth Weathers loves The Duke.

In John Waynes movies, the political consultant said he finds a do-whatevers-gotta-be-done attitude thats easy to embrace.

Wayne was always the one going to the town, the little sheriffs given up, cant fight, criminals are gonna overrun the town, and no ones gonna fight. All the other guys are a bunch of [wimps], Weathers says. And Waynes like no, were gonna stand up and fight to the death and kill them all.

To his clients, the brash 32-year-old Republican strategist wears the white hat. Others would rather see him ride out of town.

Weathers, the former director of Donald Trumps Georgia campaign, has been in the national spotlight recently after Gwinnett County Commissioner Tommy Hunter, a longtime client,called civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis a racist pig on Facebook. He has stood by Hunter since the day the commissioners Jan. 14 Facebook post went viral, and hes made plenty ofnew enemies along the way.

Weathers has publicly sparred withvarious Democratic officials, the attorneys whofiled an ethics complaint against Hunter, andAtlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. Hes become a second target for those protesting the commissioner, too.

Mr. Weathers is certainly the moral equivalence of Commissioner Hunter, Gwinnett County Democratic Party Chairman Gabe Okoye said. They are birds of the same feather, but [Weathers] may be worse, because he is more calculating.

During a recent interview at an Atlanta-area steakhouse, Weathers dismissed that assessment with a hearty laugh.

I dont give a [expletive] what people think about me, he said. I know people say that. But I really dont [care].

A brass-knuckle fighter

Weathers childhood was spent playing along the train tracks in downtown Norcross. Home-schooled, he jokes that hes had basically no education. He said he read Ronald Reagans autobiography when he was about 14 years old and listened to talk radio.

I dont know, Weathers said. I just always liked politics.

Weathers did not go to college and started a web design business fresh out of high school. With a second job working the night shift at OfficeMax helping make ends meet, he began to make his way into the political world, too.

Id be stocking [stuff] at night, and then go throw my suit on and go to a luncheon at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce that day, he said.

By 2010, Weathers had served as an e-consultant for several campaigns. He made the leap to full-service consulting less than two years later.

One of his first clients was Tommy Hunter, who reached out before Hunters 2012 county commission run.

Weathers also handled the 2014 campaign of State Sen. Michael Williams (R-Cumming), who in Oct. 2015became the first member of Georgias General Assembly to offer public support for Trump. By then, Weathers wasalready the director of Trumps Georgia campaign.

I read The Art of the Deal at 18, and Ive followed Trump since then, Weathers said. Hes a brass-knuckle fighter. Id wanted him to run for years.

Weathers official time with the Trump campaign lasted only about two months, though. Its unclear why Weathers left the campaign, and he calls rumors hinting at a reason for his departure fake news.

The official line is that Weathers transitioned out of his position to devote his time to pursuing work with outside organizations and down-ballot races through his firm.

Its personal

Weathers now lives in Johns Creek with his wife and two sons, one thats 4 1/2 and another thats less than two weeks old. The latter is named Rearden Wayne Rearden coming from a character in Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, Wayne being an homage to the movie cowboy.

On the same day his youngest was born, Weathers did a TV interview on the Hunter situation in the hospital parking lot.

For most consultants that I interviewed and talked to, it was a job, Williams, the state senator, said. To Seth, its personal.

Weathers has plenty of detractors. Reed, Atlantas mayor, recently suggested that he lacks a moral compass. But clients love that hes so willing to go to war for them, either in the press or in person. On Valentines Day, he quicklyushered Hunter out of a tumultuous meeting with the Gwinnett NAACP.

And Weathers likes defending his clients, and the political gamesmanship involved, perhaps more than any other part of his job.

He said he has no regrets about his handling of Hunter who, in his eyes, has been railroaded after saying something dumb that had nothing to do with racism.

I like fighting for the person thats just gonna get run the [expletive] over if someone else doesnt fight for them, he said.

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Meet the brash Atlanta consultant battling 'racist pig' backlash - MyAJC

Yet another fight is shaping up over elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, which on Thursday the Trump administration announced as part of its first federal budget proposal. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, a chief revenue source for PBS and National Public Radio, would also get the ax.

How many times has this battle already been fought? Welcome to Groundhog Day.

Heres one big difference between the cultural life of today and of 1965, when the NEA was founded: Where once a public museum audience and a private commercial market for contemporary American art were tiny, now they are vast and international. Imagine where todays cultural life would be if the federal agency, born into an era of general indifference to the arts, had never existed.

Consider: During those 50 years, a modest but not insignificant number of artists have gotten exceedingly rich. Charitable foundations established by just four of them the late Mike Kelley in Los Angeles and Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol in New York have combined assets in excess of $2.25 billion, according to their most recent tax filings.

The resources of those artist-created foundations vary, and they are put to different charitable ends. But theyre giving back. The Warhol is arguably the largest source of grants made to institutions that support artists, surpassing the federal government.

Our public investment is working. Pulling the plug is unwise. As with any other infrastructure, from bridges and roads to power supplies, an arts infrastructure requires maintenance.

The NEA was instrumental in creating an infrastructure for these artists popular success. Their numbers, however, remain modest, and popularity is not always the sole gauge of importance. Imagine what could happen if the battle-scarred agency, rather than limping along fighting opponents as it has for half its institutional life, was empowered to do its full share.

This is all you really need to know about the looming battle over the arts endowment:

Out of sight, out of mind. The NEA has not been popular among conservatives and the GOP since 1965, the year the federal agency was founded. Theyve been trying to kill it for half a century not because they hate art, but because they hate government.

The other day, the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, D.C., overseen by a couple of Nobel laureates and other prominent economists, published a devastating bar graph. If you thought charts were dull, this one would snap your head around.

The design is sort of like Trump Tower looming over the Big Shot thrill ride at the Stratosphere hotel in Las Vegas, plus a neighborhood Taco Bell. It compares the annual federal allotment to the National Endowment for the Arts (just under $150 million) and the Corp. for Public Broadcasting ($445 million) to the estimated cost to taxpayers of Melania Trump choosing to live in New York City rather than in the White House (about $2 million daily). This means an annual government outlay of more than $700 million. The first ladys tall bar on the graph towers over the others.

Estimates that high have been disputed. But the Center for Economic Policy Research also notes correctly that the NEA, CPB and seven other relatively low-cost domestic programs are on the chopping block not for diligent reasons of fiscal restraint. The NEA gets 0.004% of the $4 trillion U.S. budget, or 0.014% of the $1.1 trillion in discretionary spending. Together those nine cuts would add up to a pittance. Elimination will have roughly zero effect on the federal deficit, which President Obama slashed by nearly two-thirds.

The point of the bar graph was to demonstrate that an expenditure benefiting a presidential whim dwarfs modest ones that benefit the nation as a whole. Like all good graphic design, it did its work well. Which is one reason it pains me to think that it wont much matter.

The hit list drafted by the White House budget office is ideologically driven. Whether its the diverse American cultural infrastructure or our collective duty to help the poor, federal assistance lies far outside a greedy worldview popularized by junk novelist Ayn Rand in her potboilers The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Those juvenile texts, comic books without the pictures, are beloved by GOP leadership.

In 1964, just at the moment legislation was being written to establish the NEA, Rand published The Virtue of Selfishness. The idea that the federal government should play an active role in arts support, common across affluent Western European democracies, had been percolating during the Eisenhower years. But selfishness did not drive the NEAs creation.

Tragedy did. Shocked sorrow at President Kennedys assassination dominated the national mood, which Lyndon Johnson leveraged into otherwise nearly impossible legislation the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and establishment of the NEA.

Not for nothing does the first photograph in the NEAs official history show John Fitzgerald and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy with Catalonian cellist Pablo Casals, who famously performed at the White House in 1961. When Washingtons plans for a National Cultural Center, conceived during the Eisenhower years, finally opened a decade later, its new name was the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Johnson is the only American president to have worked in a New Deal agency. (He ran Franklin Roosevelts National Youth Administration in Texas during the Great Depression). His Great Society was crafted in the New Deals image.

Ever since, the NEA goes on the chopping block whenever Republican conservatives gain power in the nations capital. Yes, Richard Nixon famously upped the endowments budget more than any president, but thats because the Californian was notoriously insecure about being seen as an uncouth rube. He let his true feelings be known in a private 1970 memo to H.R. Haldeman, unsealed in 2010.

Describing Modern art as something the Kennedy-Shriver crowd believed in, Nixon arrived at the political calculation that those who are on the Modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway. Traditional art was fine with him, but he quietly ordered Modern paintings and sculptures to be pulled from American embassies.

Since Ronald Reagan, the arts agency has been whittled away to a mere shadow of its former self. In inflation-adjusted terms, it spends $100 million less today than it did 20 years ago. But even in its financially straitened condition, it manages to help mostly small arts organizations across the country, either directly or through allocations to every state arts council.

Whenever the executioner mounts the platform, arts supporters fight back with the same litany. The arts are essential, not secondary. Smaller mid-American communities will be hardest hit. Jobs will be lost. Veterans programs will disappear. Quality of life will suffer. Arts education will vanish from more school curricula. Etc.

We are hearing this lucid inventory recited again for the umpteenth time. All of it is true.

Yet, given the players, expect it to fall on deaf ears this time. How many in the Trump administration cabinet were expressly chosen to dismantle the programs under their purview, whether civil rights or education, environmental protection or healthcare? Neoconservative writer Ronald Radosh explained that Stephen K. Bannon, the presidents chief strategist, once told him, I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of todays establishment.

Simple people who are puzzled by organized society, as writer Gore Vidal once described Randians and their anti-government ilk, now run the legislative and executive branches. This is their chance.

Because demolishing the little NEA is a metaphor for undoing the big New Deal, it is only right to give FDR the last word.

In a 1936 Madison Square Garden speech, deep into the Great Depression and just a week before elections, Roosevelt railed against what he called the hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government that let the 1920s roar and the 1930s collapse.

Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government, with its doctrine that that government is best which is most indifferent, he thundered. Roosevelt won re-election in a landslide.

Americans still believe him. Last year, Ipsos Public Affairs published a survey commissioned by Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group that favors federal funding, showing that, by a 2-1 ratio, Americans support doubling the NEA budget the opposite of penciling it out. Nonetheless, hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing indifference to the arts is poised to become Trump-era doctrine.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

@KnightLAT

ALSO

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The NEA works. Why does Trump want to destroy it? - Los Angeles Times

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

So said William Kingdon Clifford, a 19th-century English mathematician and philosopher. Inspiring words, but did you catch the one glaring error? He forgot the women!

If Clifford had known Vivien Kellems, he wouldnt have made that mistake.

Born in 1896 in Des Moines, Iowa, Kellems was a locomotive that never quit. Indeed, to continue the train analogy, she was a real-life Dagny Taggart, the railroad vice president protagonist of Atlas Shrugged. Before Kellems died in 1975, she could proudly look back on a life of service to her country as a successful entrepreneur, an accomplished public speaker, a political candidate more interested in educating than in winning, and, most famously, as a tireless opponent of the IRS and its tax code. Outspoken to the end, nobody ever accused her of hiding her light under a bushel.

While earning her bachelors degree in economics from the University of Oregon in 1918, Kellems gave her classmates a dose of the spunk that would mark the next half-century of her life. She became the first and only female on the college debate team, humbling many men in a competition widely thought at the time to be for males only. She went on to earn a masters in economics in 1921. Decades later, while in her 70s, she started work on a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The focus of her dissertation was the issue that made her a virtual household name in America: the income tax.

The Roaring Twenties were well under way when Kellems and her brother Edgar invented the Kellems cable grip, used for lifting and supporting electrical cables. With a thousand dollars she had saved and another thousand borrowed, she founded the Kellems Company in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1927 to manufacture and market the device. By the time World War II broke out, she was a wealthy woman with an intensely loyal following among her hundreds of employees.

When the war demanded grips to lift 2,700-pound artillery shells, Kellems innovated and ended up selling two million of the resulting product to the armed services. Doing business with the military also introduced her to the seamy side of government the endless and often needless or duplicative paperwork, the meddlesome bureaucracy, the increasingly complicated and dubious tax code, and even a dangerous naivet about foreign regimes.

Most Americans were reluctant to criticize Washington in the early years of the war. Other more pressing matters occupied us, as the Axis powers scored one victory after another. But when Kellems saw waste, bungling, and stupidity in government, she didnt hesitate to speak out and make headlines. She was incensed by the US governments shipping thousands of tons of vital materials to Stalins Soviet Union at a time when our own war effort demanded them. To a Chicago audience, she prophetically warned, Mark my words. This temporary ally will soon pose a mortal threat to the United States and the entire free world.

Roosevelts minions were not amused by Kellemss very public disapproval. Her private correspondence was intercepted by the Office of Censorship (yes, we had one of those), then leaked to two newspaper columnists and a congressman friendly to the administration. Nothing in her letters was in any way incriminating, and no action was ever taken against her, but it was plain that the government wanted to embarrass and intimidate her into silence. It underestimated Kellems, big time.

As the tax burden soared, so did Kellemss resentment of the confiscatory marginal rates (as high as 90 percent on personal and corporate income) and the bullying tactics of the revenuers. In speeches around the country, she ripped into FDR for promising lower taxes during his first presidential campaign in 1932, only to deliver relentlessly higher rates ever after. Treasury Secretary and FDR crony Henry Morgenthau hinted at treason charges and proceeded toward legal penalties against Kellems. Fortunately, those threats were sidelined by both the wars end and a scandal that enveloped the Bureau of Internal Revenue (predecessor to the IRS). Thanks in part to Kellems and the women around the country that she personally stirred up, congressional investigations led to the indictment or voluntary retirements of hundreds of BIR employees for violating the very tax laws they were supposed to enforce.

Kellems could get fired up about intrusive government at any level. When the state of Connecticut passed a law in 1947 forbidding women to work after 10:00 p.m., she sprung into action. Her friend, the Hollywood movie star Gloria Swanson, describes what happened:

Charging rank discrimination, she brought several hundred women in to work at her factory one night, but no arrests were made. Finally, she got a job in an all-night diner and threatened to work there every night until the legislature acted. Two days later, the law was repealed.

The year 1948 is pivotal in the Kellems timeline. Franklin Roosevelt was three years gone and Harry Truman occupied the Oval Office. What started out as a temporary and voluntary wartime measure tax withholding was made permanent and compulsory. Kellems would have none of it. She was not about to become an unpaid tax collector for the feds without a fight.

In February 1948, she began paying her employees in full, which meant they had to cough up the required taxes and pay them directly to the federal government. Within days, she was on NBCs new show Meet the Press only the second woman to appear as a guest on the program. The withholding law, in her view, was unconstitutional. The very rationale for creating it to make the costs of big government less visible to workers was, in her mind, yet another reason to get rid of it. People needed to know what their government was costing them. Violating the law was the only way the issue could be settled once and for all:

If High Tax Harry wants me to get money for him, then he must appoint me an agent for the Internal Revenue Department. He must pay me a salary for my work, he must reimburse me for my expenses incurred in collecting that tax, and I want a badge!

She wrote to the Treasury secretary to inform him of her decision and added, I respectfully request that you please indict me.

Fearing an unfavorable ruling in the courts, the government dodged and weaved. The indictment never came. Instead, the IRS sent agents to her bank and seized the $6,100 it said was due.

Kellems fired back with a lawsuit against the government, and in 1951, a jury ordered the feds to return the money, with interest. She continued to press for a decision on constitutionality, and finally, in 1973, the United States Tax Court formally rejected her argument. Meanwhile, she had relented to prevent her company from going bankrupt from IRS seizures. With great reluctance, she began withholding taxes from her employees.

In 1952, she authored a book detailing her fight and the case against the income tax. Titled Toil, Taxes and Trouble, its still available. Powerful and entertaining at the same time, its full of insights about taxes and the proper role of government. In the words of Romaine D. Huret, author of the excellent 2014 book, Tax Resisters,

Kellemss book explored the brainwashing of taxpayers. The income tax, she wrote, was a way for the government to deliberately hide from employees the payment of their taxes and thus to prevent them from becoming tax-conscious. Throughout the book, she identified the foes against which she was struggling with a vivid, and at times colloquial, vocabulary: they were the tax grabbers and tax planners yellow cowards, mangy little bureaucrats in Washington.

In the 1960s, with the withholding issue still to be resolved, Kellems took up another tax crusade the built-in penalty against single people. Income tax rates for an unmarried person were as much as 42 percent higher than those for married couples making the same income. Congress finally recognized her point, and in 1969, it gave her a partial victory by cutting the disparity to a maximum of 20 percent. Swanson wrote,

Vivien could quote passages from the Constitution by heart, recite the legislative history of obscure sections of the Internal Revenue Code, and do it all in a grandmotherly, finger-wagging manner that disarmed even the most experienced politicians.

The Bridgeport Post paid tribute to Kellems in an editorial. Lamentably, there may be no newspaper editor in Connecticut with the guts or the wisdom to print something like this today:

When it comes to possessing a spine of pure steel, we wonder if there is any man or woman in Connecticut who can match Miss Kellems. One lone woman against the whole U.S. government! If there are persons and we know there are who think she is simply a pugnacious person making a personal fight over the withholding tax, they are doing her a great injustice. Her interest is one of deep conviction and firm principle based on study of the history of the Constitution of the United States. She understands the circumstances which gave birth to this country, the firm realization of the founders that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and the steps which they took to prevent this power from being misused.

Kellems ran four times for public office in Connecticut, once for governor and three times for US Senate. Though she never won, she did something all too many candidates seldom do: she educated people. After a Kellems campaign, nobody could say she stood for what she thought people would fall for.

She never changed her mind about the income tax. The personal income tax forms that she filed for each of the last 10 years of her life were all blank. Apparently not even the IRS wanted to tangle again with this scrappy patriot.

Whether you agree or disagree with Vivien Kellems on the issues, you have to give her credit. She had principles sound ones, in my estimation and the courage to stand for them come hell or high water.

This piece was originally published at the Foundation for Economic Education on August 12th, 2015.

The rest is here:

Vivien Kellems: Please Indict Me! - Learn Liberty (blog)

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt (Gage Skidmore | Wikimedia Commons)

A YEAR ago, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was the focus of national outrage when it was revealed that residents of Flint, Michigan, were being poisoned by their own drinking water, thanks in significant part to the actions of Snyder's pro-business, do-nothing-for-the-poor administration.

Today, with Donald Trump's appointment of Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it's as if Flint never happened.

Bought and paid for by the Oklahoma energy industry, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times as that state's attorney general. Today, he's in charge of running the agency...into the ground.

With Pruitt's appointment, the Trump administration hopes to repeal any meaningful regulation and enforcement of the energy and farming industries, as well as wage an ideological attack on the environmental movement, which the right views as an existential threat.

"Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace," said Trump after the election, claiming that the EPA has an "anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs." The irony is that Pruitt's draft budget for the agency calls for 3,000 layoffs and a 25 percent funding cut in order to free up money for the military.

In a recent interview with CNBC, Pruitt said that he doesn't think carbon dioxide is "a primary contributor to the global warming that we see." This is science that not even Shell or ExxonMobil dispute. He has called himself a "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda"--but hasn't had anything to say about the $300,000 in donations that the energy companies gave to his Oklahoma campaigns.

Pruitt was also caught letting Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma's largest oil and gas companies, write an official complaint to the EPA using his official attorney general letterhead. And it wasn't until his confirmation hearings this year that some 3,000 e-mails Pruitt wrote to oil and gas companies as attorney general were finally released, after he refused previous requests to release them for several years.

As 350.org Executive Director May Boeve noted, "You couldn't pick a better fossil fuel industry puppet."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE OPENING act for Pruitt was Myron Ebell, Trump's pick to head the EPA transition team. This "libertarian gadfly" is the director of global warming and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and is known for his hostility to the EPA, science and the reality of global warming.

Ebell suggested firing 10,000 of the EPA's 15,000 current employments, half of whom are scientists. James Delingpole of Breitbart "News" relished Ebell's appointment, writing, "The left just lost the war on climate change...Yup, greenies. That climate change gravy train you've been riding these last four decades looks like it's headed for a major, Atlas-Shrugged-style tunnel incident."

In addition to staff and budget cuts, the White House draft plan for cuts at the EPA includes the elimination of 38 programs as well as many grants to clean up contaminated industrial sites, climate change initiatives and aid to Alaskan villages.

Research and development funding would be cut 42 percent, and the overall reduction of funds and staff would make an already weak enforcement division even weaker. As for the Office of Environmental Justice, Trump plans to shut it down.

"The point here will be, more than in any prior administration, to reduce the agency's effectiveness so much that it can't recover even when the political winds change," wrote the Natural Resources Defense Council's David Doniger.

However much the administration would like eliminate any fetter on profits, they won't be able to rip up existing protections without lengthy legal battles. But we shouldn't expect the courts to win these battles without a loud movement countering Trump and Pruitt.

The first victims are the Clean Water Rule and the Clean Power Plan, which the Trump administration is targeting because they're part of Obama's climate legacy, as meager as it is.

The Clean Water Rule involves defining what bodies of water are federally protected. Trump's executive order in February to roll back the rule is more about following through on a campaign promise he used to whip up resentment against the EPA with rural voters.

But the EPA is already too weak and pro-business to enforce regulatory compliance. The lack of enforcement on drinking water partially explains why Flint happened and why we have a national crisis of clean drinking water. The EPA estimates that the nation's failing water infrastructure will take 20 years and anywhere from $384 billion to $1 trillion to repair.

If Trump does address the water crisis in some way, you can bet it will involve privatization and profit.

Obama's Clean Power Plan (CPP) aims to reduce carbon emissions from power plants to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, which the market, not regulation, will accomplish through the glut of fracked natural gas and cheaper renewables at the expense of coal.

Keith Gaby of the Environmental Defense Fund noted, "The crazy thing is, [Obama's CPP] is a really flexible plan, very business-friendly." Eliminating it won't revive the fortunes of coal if current natural gas production continues. So Trump's attack is largely ideological.

Trump and Pruitt have also opened a review of new rules requiring automakers to meet fleet fuel efficiency target of 54.4 miles per gallon by 2025, which in reality is about 40 miles per gallon.

Not only will this prevent a reduction in carbon emissions, it will save automakers money while costing consumers and average of $8,000 more in gas per new vehicle.

United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams raised concerns about emissions, but was told by Trump that, "We all agree with you 100 percent. One hundred percent. We want you to make great cars, but if it takes an extra thimble of fuel, we want you to do it."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE STORY of how Republican President Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon created the EPA in 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, can help us to see how we can defend the EPA today.

The radicalization of the 1960s included rising demands that government must protect land, air and water from industrial pollution. Nixon, a paranoid, power-hungry conservative, felt compelled to create a unified regulatory agency to improve water and air quality, lower vehicle emissions, stop dumping the Great Lakes and guard against oil spills.

Multiple protest movements and a stronger left put the Nixon administration on the defensive. The key to beating back Trump lies in deepening the current radicalization, building the left and eventually making business as usual impossible.

The March for Science and the People's Climate March, both in late April, will be excellent opportunities for progressives and radicals to unite in a show of force against Trump.

Scientists fed up with the Trump administration's mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue and the threats to defund or silence research and scientific advocacy spurred a group of them to organize the march on Earth Day. The main science rally will be in Washington, D.C., but over 295 satellite marches are registered on the event's website, with 395 events taking place globally.

The following weekend will see a similar mobilization in D.C. for the People's Climate March, backed by many of the coalition members who organized the massive 2014 People's Climate March in New York City.

We know that Trump, like Nixon, hates these mobilizations--and this is just one of many reasons to organize and resist.

See original here:

Running the EPA...into the ground - Socialist Worker Online

Since the late 1950s, when my stepdad and I fished what later became the Boundary Waters, I have been an avid outdoorsman and fisher; thus, I feared I would take a significant step down in quality of these experiences when I moved to St. Louis in 1998. I was wrong. From home, I was 50 minutes from Boundary Waters-like experiences, wading a clear, spring-fed stream in the Ozarks, casting for smallmouths, which, though smaller than most in Minnesota, were as feisty; and although I didnt catch walleye or northerns, I did catch rainbow and brown trout bigger than most Minnesota specimens, and large crappies and sunnies. I recently moved back to Minnesota and, after reading in the Star Tribune about proposed fishing license fee increases, thought I would cost comparison, state vs. state, these experiences.

Last year in Missouri, being over 65, I paid nothing for a resident fishing license, just $7 for trout. In Minnesota, I would pay $22, though if 90 (past my life expectancy), I would also be able to fish free (thank you) plus $10 for trout. In Minnesota, I can fish with one line and two over ice. In Missouri, I once calculated that, between pole, jug and trot, I could fish with 23 lines (plus two hands for noodling). And its easier to fish in Missouri. One page in that states fishing regulations book lists all license fees; in Minnesotas, its three pages. Missouris regs book is 48 pages; Minnesotas, 92. Now, Missouri has few natural lakes but many reservoirs and fishable ponds, and though Minnesota, with 12,000-plus lakes, has more fishing opportunities, its probably worthwhile to put all this in perspective.

William Pilacinski, Blaine

TEACHER SHORTAGES

So theyre flaming out. The question, then, is: Why?

The March 5 article on teacher shortages in Minnesota with emphasis on the metro area was interesting, alarming to a point and woefully short of information. The information included the numbers of teaching vacancies posted last month for special education, science and math (more than 200). Statistics included 46 percent leaving the profession since 2008, 15 percent leaving after year one and a three-year retention rate of 55 percent for St. Paul schools. Not a strand of information about why teachers are leaving the profession other than use of the term flaming out. Good solutions require good problem definition. Until the Minnesota Department of Education and the Legislature take a good look at why teachers leave the profession, I would imagine their solutions will be ineffective. Thats a shame for a state that used to be a net exporter of well-qualified teachers.

Alan Briesemeister, Delano

As a former student in a special education teaching program, I believe there is more to the deficit in qualified teachers than stringent licensing requirements. I lost interest in a career as a public school educator once I actually spent time in a classroom. When 15 percent of new teachers leave after one year, we need to look at the education system as a whole.

Our public schools are designed like factories, rather than being a reflection of the communities they serve. Million-dollar, state-of-art facilities with the latest in technology are not what our teachers or children need to succeed. Strict schedules, one-size-fits-all curriculum and an emphasis on indoor work is not helping our national test scores surpass those of other countries, especially Finland. Finnish classrooms emphasize play, creativity, outdoor learning and the arts, according to Timothy D. Walker, an American teacher who moved to Finland and runs the Taught by Finland website.

Minnesota has options for private or charter schools offering a different learning focus, including Montessori programs and arts-focused schools like Da Vinci Academy. However, for new teachers who want a job, these smaller, private programs may not be geographically or financially feasible, or even be hiring. Why cant our public schools evolve? We should be empowering teachers to creatively form their own learning spaces, rather than focusing on fulfilling bureaucratic testing goals. Our kids need art class more than iPads, outdoor learning more than technology, and play time more than work sheets. Lets encourage our local public schools to be more open to hiring teachers who passionately implement different learning tools and unique ideas, rather than alienating those who cant (or wont) conform.

Danielle Wiener, Stacy, Minn.

URBAN/RURAL DIVIDE

At least us country mice know how to dress at the theater

The March 5 commentary Bridging our city mouse/country mouse divide contained some very interesting points. I would question who the hayseeds are, though.

My wife and I, residents of West Central Minnesota, attended The King and I on a recent Saturday night at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. We felt overdressed. My wife wore a dress, and I wore a sport coat with a tie. I saw two other ties on men in a crowd of approximately 2,000.

After the play, we noticed some people on the sidewalk taking selfies with the marquee in the background. These hayseeds had dresses and sport coats on and were obviously excited to be at a high-caliber performance.

I wonder what the Lincoln Center touring company thought when they looked out over the audience and saw stocking caps, bluejeans, T-shirts and tennis shoes. And most of those outfits suggested that the wearer had just left a burning house.

Gordy Wagner, Glenwood, Minn.

UBER

Journalists should steer away from pitching its promotions

Shilling for Uber, as occurred in a short item the March 5 Minnesota section, is not appropriate. While noting the companys expansion is one thing, listing its promotion codes is an entirely different and unethical matter. Especially given an earlier article on Ubers lack of ethics (Uber used its app to identify, block law enforcement, March 4). Star Tribune, please revisit your policies and editing.

Christine Soderling, Eagan

TRUMP AND AYN RAND

She would have adored him, and Democrats are obstructionists

When Democrats made a movie about Republican Ayn Rands book, Atlas Shrugged, it was docile, as expected.

Now Ive read Jennifer Burns We just might miss the heartless Ayn Rand (March 5).

After the first three paragraphs, I was done. They were wrong, wrong and again wrong.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, I started back on it, as she was trying to tie Milo Yiannopoulus into the mix.

Well, Ms. Burns, I think Trump is the absolute capitalist outsider Rand would have loved.

My liberal friends are screaming at me every day that Trump is failing (OK Monday through Friday). Well, he doesnt even have his full Cabinet in place sheesh!

Tell Sen. Al Franken to give Trump some breathing room. How can we possibly evaluate his progress when Franken and Sen. Amy Klobuchar havent even voted in his Cabinet?

Rob Godfrey, St. Louis Park

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Readers Write (March 12): Fishing fees, teacher shortages, urban/rural divide and culture, Uber discounts and ... - Minneapolis Star Tribune