Dark Money, Divine Lies: The Right-Wing Plot to Kill Democracy and Public Schools

We start by focusing on the ongoing debate around school vouchers in Ohio, particularly as the state legislature is poised to debate the new budget bill, which proposes cuts to public school funding while simultaneously increasing financial support for private institutions. We clarify how these so-called "scholarships" are essentially vouchers that funnel taxpayer dollars into private religious schools, often in direct violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. Currently, despite 90% of students attending public schools, nearly $900 million has been funneled into private school vouchers, highlighting a bizarre funding disparity that raises questions about equity and accountability.

There are stark statistics illustrating that the majority of voucher funds benefit families already enrolled in private institutions. This misleading premise of "school choice" is particularly concerning for low-income families and those in rural areas, where no private options are available. 

Then we look at the ramifications of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, elucidating how it has contributed to the erosion of our democracy and facilitated the ascent of figures like Donald Trump. The decision has fundamentally altered campaign finance laws, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections, which has skewed the political landscape in favor of wealthy interests and diluted the voices of the average citizen.

We discuss the broader implications of campaign finance reforms, the necessity for rigorous regulations to ensure that the influence of money doesn't overshadow the democratic process. We advocate for constitutional amendments that clarify the rights of corporations versus individuals to establish a fairer electoral landscape.

Full Show Notes & Links Used

Chapters

• 0:45 School Voucher Ponzi Scheme
• 14:45 Citizens United Gave Us Trump and Musk

Transcript

[0:01] Today, we look at the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that helped

[0:06] elect Trump and practically destroyed our democracy. Then we look at the school voucher Ponzi scheme that is knocking down the separation of church and state and hurting our public schools. I'm Doug Berger. And this is Secular Left.

[0:32] Music.

[0:44] The ohio legislature is considering a budget net the next two-year budget currently it's i believe it's called house bill 96 right now so they address some uh conservative fever dreams like cutting libraries, funding for libraries, cutting money for food banks, cutting funding for public schools, giving more money to private schools, and they even added an anti-trans.

[1:19] Text to the budget. They copied and pasted President Trump's executive order.

[1:27] Claiming that the state would only recognize two genders, male and female, and they are not changeable. So that's how it's going. But what I wanted to talk about today in particular is about giving money to private schools, and they do that through school vouchers. Here in Ohio, they call them scholarships to try to hide what they actually are. But they are school vouchers. And Ohio has a pretty big program. It's called EdChoice. And they expanded it. I believe it was last year. In last year's budget, they expanded EdChoice. And what they did was they removed the income caps for eligibility, and they pumped more money into it. In fact, they've spent, to this point, they've spent nearly $900 million on private school vouchers. I know there are some people out there saying, hey, it's school choice. The parents should choose if they want to go to private school. Well, it's not that simple, and it's not that fair.

[2:38] I'll tell you some stats. And this is in Ohio, and I think it's probably fair to say that this compares favorably to other areas that have vouchers. Here in Ohio, 90% of kids go to public school in the state of Ohio. 90%.

[2:59] That means 10% of the kids go to private school. And they can be any kind of different private schools. Most of them are sectarian religious schools, either Catholic or evangelical, that sort of thing. And last school year, the 23-24 school year, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce said that 65,000 vouchers were paid out. To. To private schools, but the attendance, the new registrations in private schools only went up to thirty seven hundred. So that means that over 60,000 vouchers went to families that already send their kids to private school.

[4:04] And this money that's going to the private schools, what the state does is that constitutional prohibition in the Ohio Constitution, that doesn't allow direct payment of taxpayer dollars to religious schools. And so what they do to get around that is they give the money to the parents, and then the parents pay the tuition. And so we have 10% of the kids in the state go to private school, and they are getting almost a billion dollars paid out. Meanwhile, the Ohio legislature wants to cut public school funding to maybe $500 million for the year. And they also want to add some more anti-public school rules to that budgeting. One of them being that a public school is only allowed to have a certain percentage in reserve. And if they have more reserves than the state allows, then they have to return that money to the local taxpayers.

[5:21] And a lot of times these reserves are like a rainy day fund. So if something happens, like they have a boiler and a class in a school go bad and they need to get it fixed immediately, they have to dip into these reserves. It's only fiscally prudent for a school to have reserves because they can't close and they need the money to run.

[5:48] But like I said, 10% of students go to a private school. The other thing, too, also to consider that there are not private schools in all 88 counties in the state of Ohio. A majority of the private schools in the state are clustered around the major urban centers and suburbs of those urban centers. So most of the private schools are located in the Cleveland area, Columbus. There's a scattering around Toledo, Cincinnati, and those are the main place. There are actually, I think, 12 counties in the state that have no private schools.

[6:32] So this claim that these vouchers are going to help students get better schooling doesn't help those kids that are in the rural, isolated communities that don't have private schools. And when I say they don't have private schools, they don't have private schools at all. They don't have Catholic schools. They don't have evangelical schools. Nothing. Nothing is available. Then you have some of these private schools that are jacking up their tuition because mom and dad are already paying the tuition, but they're getting some of that money from the state. And so what some of these private schools are doing are then charging tuition more than the state subsidy so that they make more money.

[7:25] And it's just ridiculous. It just really is ridiculous. And then we have a couple of states like Arkansas, I think, was one. Oklahoma was one. And I think in Arizona, where they've had to go back and redo their voucher program, their law for their voucher programs, because some of these people were getting these vouchers and they weren't spending them on school. They were going on vacation. They were buying a car or putting a down payment on a car or renovating their house or buying clothes. They weren't paying it to a private school. And so some of these states that thought that they were doing this big thing had to go back and change it and put some restrictions on it. The other problem with the school vouchers, especially in Ohio, and I'm sure that this is the same in other places, is the lack of accountability.

[8:27] Now, you have tax money that goes to a local public school. What kind of accountability do you have? You vote for the Board of Education, and they, through their fiduciary duty, operate the schools in the best interest of the community and the voters that voted for them. So you have a direct line to people who run your school district. They decide the curriculum. They decide who to hire, who to fire, you know, and they are charged with doing it in a way that makes fiscal sense, and that includes putting levies on ballots, et cetera.

[9:11] So you have, as a taxpayer, you have accountability, and then you also have the state laws that govern the operation of public schools. It's in the Ohio Constitution that the state of Ohio has to provide common schools for the children in the state. They are required to provide it. Now, it doesn't go into any detail about that. And the Republicans in the legislature have been splitting hairs constantly on this.

[9:45] And so what kind of accountability do you have in a private school? None. You do not have any. The parents do not have any. Private schools don't have to take all the kids that apply. They don't have to take disabled kids if they don't want to. They can discriminate for other reasons, like maybe Mohammed and his wife wants to send their kids to a Catholic private school, and the Catholic school doesn't want a Muslim student. It could be for that. There is no board of education in many of these private schools. They have a committee. Sometimes it's made up of parents, but it's not always. And if they decide to do something, they do it. They're not accountable to any voters. They don't have to run for election. They get appointed, or they appoint themselves, if it works out that way. For these evangelical schools, it's the church, the church elders that run the school. It's not the parents. The parents have no choice in what is taught and how it's taught and how the money is spent, unlike a public school.

[11:14] And so, again, let me stress again, in Ohio, 90% of school-aged children attend public school. But the state of Ohio, the legislature, does not want to fund those public schools fairly. And they want to give all this money to the wealthy so that they can send their kids to these suburban private schools. And I don't understand how people can think that that's fair. I really don't. You know, you could say, well, it's a parent's rights. Well, the thing is, I can't make that same kind of choice. I don't get that same treatment for, let's say, road services. You know, hey, I don't want to use that street. I should get a percentage off my taxes because I don't want to pay for that street. Or I don't like that street sign, so I'm not paying for it. I don't get to do that. A public school is a common good.

[12:22] And people say, well, I like my community. It's got good private schools. Well, your community might be good because of the public school, not because of the private school. When people go and locate in an area, not everybody goes and looks for private schools. Not everybody can afford a private school. And so not only are they not inclusive they don't have much diversity they really don't and then we were sold a bill of goods when this whole voucher scheme ponzi scheme started up in that they were going to help low-income students in struggling urban schools to go to a private school, and that's not happening. 90% of the vouchers that get distributed get distributed to, again, families that are already paying for private school. They can already afford the private school. The low-income students are only less than 10% of that number. So basically what it was is this scheme, this Ponzi scheme called school vouchers, was a way of redistributing money, tax dollars, from public schools to private schools in an effort to kill the public schools.

[13:44] To damage them so much that it forces more kids to go to private school. But like I said, in some of these rural areas, there are no private schools. And so I think that the school vouchers are a bad deal for the state of Ohio and for any state, really. And if you are a parent and you don't want to send your kid to public school, that is your right. I don't have a problem with you making that choice. But why do I have to pay for your kid to be schooled in a private school? How is that fair? Really?

[14:30] For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.us. I happen to have an account on Blue Sky, a social media platform.

[14:50] Kind of distanced myself from Twitter or I'm sorry, X, because there's just too many Nazis on X and it raises my blood pressure. So I enjoy listening to people discuss things and you can have a conversation and they don't tell you to go, go, you know, off yourself or or whatever, whatever they do on that other bird thing, X thing. Anyway, one day there was a discussion about Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling from 2010, about campaign finance, and somebody had... Made the argument that, you know, what if or what if the U.S. Supreme Court at the time knew or could see into the future that that decision would have such a detrimental effect on our election system today?

[15:50] And I posited or I explained that they did know what what the outcome would be. And they still made the decision, the majority decision to strike down the federal campaign rule called the McCain-Feingold Act. Struck and struck that down. That wasn't the first rodeo for campaign finance reform. In fact, one of the first ones in the Wikipedia article about some of the compact campaign finance stuff, Theodore Roosevelt complained about money in politics. And so the current crop, the modern era of campaign finance reform started in the 70s with a law that was signed by President Nixon. And one of those things, it started the Federal Election Commission that would adjudicate violations of campaign finance law.

[16:58] And the other interesting thing, too, is these laws, when they passed them, they not only applied to corporations, they also applied to unions. And see, that's how they made it bipartisan, because the liberals or the Democrats, in most cases—.

[17:22] Got a lot of money from unions and conservatives or Republicans got a lot of money from corporations. So they said, well, if you want to regulate campaign financing, then we have to do both. We have to do corporations and unions. And so that's the other interesting thing. When they struck down the Citizens United decision, struck down that law, they took it away from the unions too. But the point I'm making is, and we know, we know this from experience, corporate expenditures for elections have drowned out the average person, the marginalized person, the grassroots person. That's why we have gerrymandered districts. That's why we have Trump in office and all that stuff, Because the corporations have spent a lot of money to make sure that their agenda is addressed and everybody else's is not.

[18:26] A good example of that was during the health care reform debate during President Obama's term. And there was calls for Medicare for all. Bernie Sanders led that charge, Medicare for all. And then when we found out that that wasn't going to happen, then we said at least put in a public option so that people could get health care that wasn't part of some conglomerate, insurance conglomerate. And that was taken care of. That was shoved aside. And what had happened was that President Obama made a deal with the private insurers in this country to not fight the Affordable Care Act. And what he gave them was that they were still going to exist and there was going to be no public option that the Affordable Care Act would go through them.

[19:26] See, that's how corporate money talks. They get their agenda taken care of. Because even though everyone knew, every rational person knew the best option was Medicare for all and not having that, then the second option, good option, was a public option. They chucked both of those because the private insurers spoke with the money. And, you know, I argue with some of my more leftist friends and they're talking about both parties are like that. And I am not a member of either party. I've said that many times. And yes, both parties are infested with corporate corporate money. But you have to think, is it because they want to be or because they think they have to be? We know why the Republicans are infested with corporate money, because that's who finances all the bad stuff, the cutting of Medicare, the dismantling of the safety net, welfare reform, all that stuff. That is all corporate stuff that comes from the corporations.

[20:48] And so they've been paying. They've been stacking the courts, helping stack the courts. They helped write Project 2025. You know, we know what they do. And they've been doing this for a long time, at least since the New Deal era of FDR. They've been working together, colluding together.

[21:13] And they've been pretty successful because they've been putting a lot of money, millions and millions and millions of dollars for a long time.

[21:23] So the Democrat Party is like, we've got to compete. So they go out and they try to get their corporate donors, some corporate donors. And some corporations are pragmatic. For example, I remember seeing a story where they were taught about, I think it was 2016 election. Microsoft had donated X amount of dollars to the Republican candidate and X amount of dollars to the Democratic candidate. They're hedging their bets. Same thing with the most recent one is that a lot of the tech bros donated to Trump, and they also donated to Kamala Harris. We know one tech bro spent $250 million in one way or another to elect Trump. So we know the result of not having any campaign finance regulation at all, or barely any.

[22:23] And so Citizens United was decided in 2010. The Supreme Court said that spending money on campaigns was a First Amendment right, and that corporations had a First Amendment right to do that. So basically saying that they were people, that the Bill of Rights applied to them. That kind of blew everything up. That really did.

[22:48] The country has not been the same since that decision. You know, and I agree that we have to be vigilant and not over-regulate. I'm not one of those that say over-regulate. But the whole purpose of regulation is to correct behavior or to rectify a bad behavior that had hurt some people. And that's the way I see campaign finance law, is that it was put in place because some bad actors had taken advantage of what was available at the time. And it's not good for it's not good for democracy. It's not good for democracy that somebody with, you know, five million dollar purse gets more contact with the with the government and gets paid attention to than somebody over here with only a twenty dollar bill. You know, you can't tell me that that they're being treated equally. They are not being treated equally.

[23:58] You know, the scale of justice is, you know, biased towards the guy with a lot of money or the corporation with a lot of money. And so Citizens United was just bad, just a bad deal. So this person on Blue Sky is talking about this and saying we need to get a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and they can overrule it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not going to be that easy. For one thing, we're not going to get a liberal majority on the Supreme Court anytime soon. Not with the Republicans running Congress. We need to start in the states and get the gerrymanders taken care of and all that stuff. You need to build up. Putting liberals on the court still isn't going to change it because you need a case to bring in order to change it. So my suggestion was to have an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that specifically says corporations are not people and that the Bill of Rights do not apply to corporations. Simple as that. Once you do that, then you can regulate corporations as much as you want when it comes to campaign financing.

[25:23] You know, it's not going to be a total ban. It can't be a total ban because they still have to be able to do it. But you have to regulate their largeses so that it's more equitable and fair to the guy on Main Street who only has maybe a couple hundred bucks to donate. They have to be equal. They have to be treated equally the same, you know. And then once you take care of that, then you can ban political ads within 30 days of an election.

[25:58] On TV, I mean, TV and radio. Broadcast media, you can ban political advertisements. And what I'm saying is you're doing this, and some people are going to make the argument, well, Doug, you're violating First Amendment rights of the candidates. That's possibly true. But the First Amendment, the free speech and First Amendment doesn't mean you can say anything you want anytime, anywhere. It can be regulated time, manner, place. days.

[26:33] Regulating campaign ads, banning them from 30 days within the election, is a time, manner, place regulation. It's not banning them outright. It's not saying you can't do it ever again anywhere. It's just saying 30 days before an election, you can't buy TV time for political ads. The other thing that I would like to see in campaign reform, campaign finance reform, should we pass this constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United, is that if you lie in your ad and it is proven that you lied in your ad, then you should be fined several thousand dollars for the lie. You could talk shit about your opponent as much as you want. You can tell them that, hey, they do this, they do that, they don't do this, they support this, whatever. You just can't lie about them. You just can't tell falsehoods. You know, you can't say, well, he went on a trip to Israel, so he's anti-Palestinian, when you don't know for a fact that that is true.

[27:51] You know, I think I think campaign ads should be treated the same way that they treat regular business commercial advertising. If you lie, then you could be sued. And punished for lying. And I think that's that's only fair. But this idea that if we just get a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and will undo Citizens United. That is a fantasy. I hope that that happens. I don't think it's going to happen because you're still not going to get past that part where the precedent is. And I'm telling you, a liberal majority on the Supreme Court isn't going to undo precedent. That's what the conservatives do. They go like Roe v. Wade. They just undid it because they said it was decided wrong.

[28:47] Liberal justices don't do that normally. They don't normally do that. They don't turn the court on its ear to get the decision that it wants, like the conservatives do. So I think the best course of action is a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United and say simply, corporations are not people and do not enjoy the same rights that individuals do under the Bill of Rights. And I think once that's done, there'll be a lot of, the elections will start clearing up and start being a little bit better.

[29:32] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used, in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments, either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments at secularleft.us. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using Amplify Studio.

[30:17] Music.