Bacon's Rebellion

  • What If We Ran Grocery Stores Like Public Schools?

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    James A. Bacon

    Public grocery stores in the old Soviet Union

    by James A. Bacon

    Imagine our food distribution system worked like our public schools do.  Prompted by that very question in a Reason article comparing how private schools are responding differently to the COVID-19 virus than public schools, I began thinking what a public grocery system would look like.

    The food would be “free,” except for the fact that you would pay higher taxes to support the grocery store, and the tax dollars would be paid directly to the store. Key decisions, such as what food products to offer and how many grocery clerks were needed to staff the meat counter, would be made by an elected Grocery Board. A grocery superintendent answering to the board would hire and fire the grocery store managers.  If you didn’t like the store but still wanted “free” food, you would be out of luck. You would be assigned to your neighborhood grocery store. The Grocery Board would draw the grocery boundaries. What you ate would depend upon where you lived. Only higher income earners would have the luxury of foregoing the free food and shopping at stores that didn’t accept tax dollars.

    What do you suppose would happen to the cost and quality of public food in such an arrangement? As the consumer, you would have zero power. You couldn’t patronize a different store. You couldn’t withhold your money. You would have to take what you got. Oh, for sure, you could show up at Grocery Board hearings and speak your mind. Maybe you could organize a movement to elect a board member who would go to bat for selling only free-range chicken. But that would entail a huge amount of trouble with no guarantee of a positive outcome. (more…)

  • Law and Disorder in Richmond

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    James A. Bacon

    Protest in front of Kim Gray’s house Wednesday night

    When several dozen protesters assembled in front of Richmond City Councilwoman Kimberly Gray’s house around 10:30 Wednesday night, she feared for her safety. She called the Richmond Police Department, as did some of her neighbors. Gray says the police never responded. The RPD says it did.

    “I didn’t see any uniformed officers, my neighbors didn’t see any uniformed officers, my professional security force did not see any uniformed officers, no blue lights, no marked police cars arrived,” Gray told WRIC News.

    As it happens, Gray is a candidate for mayor, running against incumbent Levar Stoney and several lesser-known candidates. As a city councilwoman, she has been one of Stoney’s most vocal critics. An African-American, she voted for removal of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue but has disapproved of law-breaking by protesters. (more…)

  • The Return of the “Cooch”

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    Peter Galuszka

    By Peter Galuszka

    Early this past Wednesday morning, Mark Pettibone and Connor O’Shead were walking on their way home after a peaceful protest in Portland, Ore.

    Suddenly an unmarked van pulled in front of them. Men wearing green uniforms, tactical gear and generic signs reading “POLICE” hustled them into the vehicle. They were not told why they were being detained. After 90 minutes, the badly shaken men were released without being charged.

    The episode might sound like the activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his “little green men” who have shown up in places like Crimea and Eastern Ukraine to intimidate and detain people.

    But this was Portland, a progressive city that has seen protests for weeks. President Donald Trump has urged federal authorities to move in on cities to restore his sense of order even though city officials in Portland do not want his help and are investigating what is going on.

    And, guess who is playing a role in what could be a growing national trend of federal law enforcement performing “snatch and grabs” of innocent protestors?

    That would be Kenneth Cuccinelli, the former hard right, state attorney general and failed gubernatorial candidate. He is now acting deputy secretary of the Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. (more…)

  • Praise for DOC COVID-19 Response

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Sussex II State Prison, housing units and interior fencing

    By Dick Hall-Sizemore

    The Department of Corrections has received praise for its response to inmates with COVID-19 from an unlikely source — an inmate who survived a serious bout with the disease. A story in today’s Richmond-Times Dispatch provides the details.

    The inmate, who is serving two life terms, was housed in Sussex II State Prison, a high-security facility, when he came down with the disease. After he tested positive and began to have serious symptoms, he said, “I was only in the quarantine pod for maybe half a day. When I told them I couldn’t breathe, [the nurse] knew what to do. She went down, got me oxygen, they called in an ambulance and I was gone” to the intensive care unit at Southside Regional Medical Center in Petersburg. (more…)

  • School Opening Variances Are a Civil Rights Issue

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    I want to offer my thanks to those that have written here that they don’t want any Virginia schools to open this fall. (The terms open and closed in this essay will refer to in-person instruction.)

    That provides clarity.

    All will agree that in-person instruction is superior to remote instruction for primary and secondary students  I know of no study that contends otherwise.

    Now comes the debate.

    I am joined by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in contending it is unwise and unfair that some schools will remain closed.

    Others contend that it is unwise and unfair that some of them will open. They cite statistics that they apparently think the AAP missed.

    A very polarized disagreement.

    (more…)

  • Bacon Bits: COVID-19 Heroes and Villains

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    James A. Bacon

    Somebody’s got to do it. Linda Echols has driven school buses for Pittsylvania County for 48 years. At 75 years old, she’s at elevated risk of contracting the COVID-19 virus. She is concerned about her safety when the school year starts back up this summer, but worries more about her students. In marked contrast to thousands of teachers from Virginia Beach to Fairfax County who are resisting in-person teaching this upcoming academic year, Echols is determined to stay by her post, according to this article in the Danville Register & Bee. “I have to pray and do it,” she says. “Somebody’s got to do it.” If Virginia public school children manage to get an education this year under the trying circumstances of the COVID epidemic, it will be due to unsung heroines like Linda Echols.

    Unannounced inspections coming to a restaurant near you. How will Governor Ralph Northam enforce his emergency COVID-19 health-and-safety restrictions on restaurants and retailers announced earlier this week? The state will conduct unannounced inspections, with a focus on the Hampton Roads area where COVID-19 infections have increased in recent weeks, reports the Washington Business Journal. “If you own a restaurant or a business and you’re not following the regulations, your license will be on the line and we will not hesitate to take action if needed,” Northam said at a press conference Tuesday. Business groups have criticized the crackdown, saying they were not consulted in the drawing up of regulations.

    (more…)

  • Richmond City Council Debates Police Defunding

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Richmond City Council has taken up discussion of the demand by social-justice protesters to “defund the police.” Richmond is not Minneapolis, or Portland, or Seattle, and the three-person finance committee charged with making funding recommendations for the full council has split the baby. Instead of full defunding, the committee supports asking the Richmond Police Department (RPD), in effect, to recommend how to partially de-fund itself.

    If City Council approves the committee’s recommendations, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch, RPD will identify funding in its budget for mental health, substance abuse, and social service functions that could be reallocated to other departments, and submit a report by Oct. 1 on where the money would go.

    The half-measure is unlikely to satisfy militant Black Lives Matter advocates, many of whom spoke at the virtual public hearing yesterday. “We demand that funds be reallocated from the Richmond city police department’s excessively large budget, and reinvested in our community,” said Princess Blanding, sister of Marcus-David Peters, a tragic figure who was killed when threatening police during a mental health crisis in May 2018. Militants occupying the Lee Circle on Monument Ave. have renamed it in Peters’ honor.

    Neither will the committee’s half measure likely satisfy the city’s new police chief Gerald Smith, who said RPD would require more money, not less, to address the systemic changes called for during recent protests. It will be difficult to extract the funding for the specific areas in the resolution, he said, because they are “intertwined in other things.”

    The debate occurs against the backdrop of continued demonstrations as well as the effective takeover by activists of the Lee Circle, where the Robert E. Lee statue still stands while legal challenges to its removal work through the courts. The site is placid during the day, occupied by two or three dozen people who are mostly chatting and milling around. When I visited recently around 6 p.m., there were a couple of tents where vendors were selling trinkets, and a couple of men were shooting hoops in a portable basketball net. Families with children were walking and riding bicycles through the streets of the Fan neighborhood a block or two away. (more…)

  • Teachers Are Afraid to Return to Their Classrooms

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    We all knew this was coming.

    In fact, I suggested last month that if you have kids in local public schools you should quickly enroll them in Catholic or other private schools before those filled and your kids would be stuck trying to learn online. (Some of these institutions have scholarships available.)

    Most private schools plan to reopen fully this fall with students in class five days a week .

    Sadly, it looks like most public school kids will not be so lucky.

    All across the country militant teachers’ unions are balking at a return to the classroom. In Fairfax County, teachers groups are saying they don’t want to return to school until there’s a COVID-19 vaccine.

    As expected, we learned this week that Norfolk schools are unlikely to offer any classroom instruction, except to “some” kids in the youngest grades. A final decision will come later this month. (more…)

  • The Opportunity Agenda: K-12 Vouchers

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    The fastest, quickest, most sure-fire way to eliminate “structural racism” in Virginia’s public education system is to empower parents financially to find alternatives to failing public schools.

    Let’s crunch a few numbers. This fiscal year, 2021, the General Assembly has allocated a bit more than $7 billion in direct aid to education. This sum supplements funds that local governments raise from local taxes for their school systems. In 2018, there were roughly 1.6 million school-age children in Virginia (a number that includes children who are home schooled or who attend private school). That averages out to roughly $4,500 in state aid per child.

    The Commonwealth should convert that $4,500 aid into a voucher for any family seeking an alternative education, be it home schooling or a private school. That sum is not enough, by itself, to cover the cost of a private-school education. But it could well make the difference on the margin to thousands of families considering keeping a parent at home to teach their child or need help paying a private-school tuition.

    Moreover, for poor households unable to pay a dime toward their children’s educations, the voucher could supplement scholarship funds made available through the state’s education tax credit. In Fiscal Year 2019, that tax credit funded $10.8 million in scholarship funds benefiting 4,710 students. Those figures don’t include thousands of scholarships provided by private schools without benefit of the tax credit. (more…)

  • Bacon Bits: Purges, Clickbait, and Drunkenness

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    James A. Bacon

    Pushing back against the New York Slimes. Liberty University is suing the New York Times for defamation, accusing the paper of crafting a “clickbait” story intended to create the erroneous impression that there was a COVID-19 outbreak on the school’s campus this spring, reports the News & Advance. The lawsuit says that reporter Elizabeth Williamson misrepresented the statement of a university-affiliated physician, who said that twelve students showed signs of “upper respiratory infection,” which can refer to the common cold, as evidence of a COVID-19 outbreak. “We’re not looking for money,” said Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. “We want to expose the New York Times for the liars and Buzzfeed clickbait organization they’ve become.”

    VCU’s purge of the past reaches logical conclusion. Having completed its review of buildings, names, plaques and places, the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Committee on Commemoration and Memorials has targeted 16 memorials on the campus for removal. Regardless of life-long accomplishments and contributions to the community, any individual who served in the Confederate army in any capacity is being stuffed down the memory hole.

    One memorial identified for removal a plaque honoring Simon Baruch. In 1939 philanthropist Bernard Baruch gave $100,000 to the Medical College of Virginia to renovate a building in honor of his father, Simon. The elder Baruch graduated from MCV in 1862 and served as a surgeon in the Confederate army. The plaque outside the auditorium lists his accomplishments and mentions his Confederate service. Similarly, the committee recommends de-commemoration and deletion of all references to the university’s Ginter House on the grounds that Lewis Ginter, one of Richmond’s great business leaders and philanthropists of the late 19th century, served in the Confederate army.

    Drunken revelry and the COVID epidemic. If you wonder what’s contributing to the uptick in COVID-19 in Virginia, here’s a hypothesis: Drunken young people are dispensing with their masks and infecting one another. (more…)

  • More Fallout from the COVID Shutdown

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    A least 5.4 million Americans lost their medical insurance when they lost their jobs to the COVID-19 epidemic between February and May, says Attorney General Mark R. Herring in a press release issued today. In Virginia, he adds, it is estimated that 14% of adults lack health insurance.

    Nine hundred thousand Virginians have filed for unemployment benefits, Herring notes. “Virginia continues to see unprecedented COVID-related job loss, which means that hundreds of thousands of Virginians have also lost their job-related health insurance.”

    In citing those numbers, Herring urges Virginians to evaluate their health insurance options on HealthCare.Gov, the subsidized medical insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare). The AG also also is asking federal administrators of the program to create a special enrollment period to allow access to the insurance during the COVID-19 epidemic.

    I find the statistics of interest, though not for the same reasons Herring does. They measure a huge unintended consequence of the COVID shutdowns in Virginia and other states: When people lose their jobs, many lose their health insurance as well. Many Virginians do not qualify for the state’s expanded Medicaid program, or may conclude that Obamacare coverage is too pricey to be worthwhile. (more…)

  • Galuszka Dissects Dominion’s ACP Decision

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    James A. Bacon

    Bacon’s Rebellion contributor Peter Galuszka discusses Dominion Energy and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline on the Bold Dominion podcast.

  • Northam’s COVID Conference

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Well, I sat through another Ralph Northam press conference Tuesday eager to hear if any reporter – just one – would ask the governor  if maybe, just perhaps, the uptick in Covid cases in Tidewater might be linked to recent protests.

    I mean it’s possible, isn’t it? After all, the positive tests are predominantly among those in the 20 to 29 age group.

    Let’s think. What have some of these youngsters been up to over the past month that might account for a surge in new infections?

    Have they been canoodling in restaurants? Shopping maskless in Kroger? Cramming the pews in local churches?

    “They’re occurring when people are gathering, especially in areas around a bar,” Northam said, without presenting any supporting data.

    Oh, and last time I checked, bar areas in restaurants were closed.

    Still, not one journalist asked about protests. (more…)

  • Uncertain Times, Uncertain Leadership

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    James A. Bacon

    by Shaun Kenney

    You have to give Governor Ralph Northam the tiniest bit of credit. Not only did he survive wearing blackface or wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood (we still don’t know which) but he has done just about everything possible to present himself as the only governor who is also a doctor of medicine.

    Richmond will point towards Virginia’s rather decent numbers fighting COVID-19 in comparison to the rest of the South. Geographers will point at the great American megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Hampton Roads. Nothing novel has come from Virginia since William Faulkner — and cancel culture will come for him in due course, I’m sure.

    So points for self-preservation.

    What we should be talking about is that Virginia — unique among her neighbors — seems to have the worst of both worlds.

    Despite our current flirtation with Phase 3 restrictions, businesses are in limbo as to whether or not Northam will continue to allow retail and restaurants to function even at half-mast. (more…)

  • Lane’s “Anti-Racism” Revolution in Virginia Schools

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    James A. Bacon

    James F. Lane, Superintendent of Public Instruction for Virginia public schools

    by James A. Bacon

    If you want to know how the Northam administration is transforming Virginia public schools, don’t bother reading the newspapers. They might report on local controversies, but they don’t come close to recounting the wholesale changes taking place under the rubric of social justice. To find out what is going on, subscribe to the “Virginia Is For Learners” newsletter, in which state Superintendent of Instruction James F. Lane lays it all out. Here I publish, unedited, his latest missive. (I have added boldface for statements especially worth noting.)

    Dear Educators, School Division Leaders, Parents, and Community Members,

    As our nation, state, and local communities continue to grapple with the legacy of racism in our country, we are all being called to respond to the increasingly loud calls for social and racial justice amplified by protesters across the nation. It is important that as education leaders we affirm our commitment to advancing equity in Virginia’s public schools and facilitate courageous conversations in our school communities on racism and its continued impact on students and families of color. Now is the time to double down on equity strategies and lean into courageous leadership.

    Many school divisions have designed new positions, Equity Directors, Equity Coordinators, or designated equity leads to advance equity outcomes at the division level. These members of our teams, in the current climate, are being called upon to lead and facilitate conversations on racism, bias, cultural proficiency, and inclusive curriculum in ways they never have before. At the same time, they have in many communities been positioned as the “face” of equity work – and therefore also the face of anti-racism in their communities. It is important that as leaders we recognize that this positioning may also put these leaders at risk for increased public scrutiny, so they need our support more than ever.

    (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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