Teachers rally outside the state Capitol on the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., April 3, 2018. REUTERS/Nick Oxford
Oklahoma teachers carried their strike into a second week on Monday, with educators gathering at the state capitol after a $44 million tax and revenue package passed last week fell short of their demands to boost school spending.
Teachers are pushing for $200 million in increased annual education funding in a state that ranks among the lowest in school spending in the nation. A strike by West Virginia teachers ended in a raise last month and has prompted educators in other states to consider similar action.
Crowds of teachers began to file into the state Capitol in Oklahoma City on Monday, according to videos posted on social media. The Oklahoma Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union with about 40,000 members, listed only one item on its website for its morning agenda: “Pack the second floor of Capitol rotunda.”
The strike has garnered support from many of the state’s school administrators and much of the public and affected more than 500,000 students statewide, with 66 school districts expected to close.
The union has said the walkout would end if lawmakers removed capital gains exemptions, which could bring in an additional $100 million in revenue, and implemented a hotel tax that would bring in an estimated $50 million.
“If they can do those two items, that would be significant,” said Doug Folks, a spokesman for the association.
The strike has garnered strong public backing, with a statewide survey from the Sooner Poll agency showing that 72.1 percent of respondents supported the walkout.
Opponents of the tax hikes, including Oklahoma Taxpayers United, argue that lawmakers could boost education spending by cutting bureaucracy and waste rather than raising taxes.
Last month, lawmakers approved the state’s first major tax increase in a quarter century, a $400 million revenue package that raised teacher pay by an average of about $6,000.
But the teachers are seeking $10,000 over three years. Even with the pay raise approved by lawmakers, their mean salaries would be lower than teachers in every neighboring state, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed.
Oklahoma has the lowest median pay among states for both elementary and secondary school teachers, according to 2018 bureau data. The minimum salary for a first-year teacher was $31,600, according to state data.
Writing and additional reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Jeffrey Benkoe
A resident of Buffalo, New York, has admitted to police that he created an anonymous Twitter account to tweet out a fake threat that he intended to carry out a mass killing of Black people, just days after the deadly mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Market by a white supremacist who targeted Black people, NBC News reports.
Rolik Walker, who is Black, told investigators that the purpose of the tweet "was to see what everyone would say and if anyone would agree with him."
Walker reportedly told investigators that he also created a second account “in an effort to rectify the earlier post.” He replaced “only looking to kill blacks” with “ants, spiders and things of that nature.”
According to Law&Crime, the FBI said there was probable cause to conclude that Walker violated a law which criminalizes “in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.”
“WALKER also admitted that he used the VPN service IPVanish to hide his IP address when he created the @CoklinHero Twitter account and the post,” the FBI's affidavit said. “WALKER stated that the purpose of the post was to see what everyone would say and if anyone would agree with him.”
“WALKER claimed to want to see how segregated social media was and that once the post was made it spread within approximately thirty seconds,” the affidavit continued. “WALKER stated that the account did not have any followers. WALKER stated that he created an additional Twitter account, @ConklinHeroR1. WALKER claimed he created this second account in an effort to rectify the earlier post. WALKER copied and pasted the same post, removed the statement ‘only looking to kill blacks’ and changed it to ants, spiders, and things of that nature.”
The offense is punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Last night, the Senate Democrats finalized an agreement on a $740 billion piece of legislation that addresses climate change, corporate taxes, healthcare, drug prices and more. US Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona’s conservative Democrat, held out till the end. After some bargaining, she said last night that she’s ready to “move forward.”
The Inflation Reduction Act is only part of an agenda Joe Biden had outlined early in his administration. (The president had hoped for a couple of trillion dollars’ worth of new investments.) Headlines this morning, however, are treating it as if it were the whole shebang. CNN said it puts “Biden's agenda on the cusp of Senate approval.”
Maybe that’s why US Senator Ted Cruz slandered it.
Anti-tax rhetoric
The Republican from Texas told Fox this morning that the bill would expand the Internal Revenue Service in order to descend on America “like a swarm of locusts,” he said. Cruz went on: “These IRS agents aren’t there to go after billionaires. They’re there to go after you, to go after your small business … The Democrats’ idea is if they audit the hell out of every American, think of all the money they can raise.”
Fact is, the bill does expand the IRS. Another fact is, the IRS has been badly depleted thanks to Republicans like Ted Cruz who know very well that an enervated IRS gives multinational firms and the very obscenely rich leeway to hide wealth and otherwise dodge levies. The Inflation Reduction Act remedies this. It also reduces inflation by clawing back taxes owed, especially by the very obscenely rich.
Pro-sedition rhetoric
Cruz’s anti-tax rhetoric should be familiar. The Republicans (as well as some Democrats) have stood against every proposed tax hike for over 20 years. The last Republican president to sign a tax increase into law was George HW Bush. Since 1994, the GOP has treated the federal government’s constitutional authority to tax as if it were theft – as if taxes were morally wrong as well as politically illegitimate.
Anti-tax rhetoric used to cover up for racist white people, especially in the south, refusing to pay for programs benefitting Black people. But over time, it evolved to become something more sinister.
The GOP’s rhetoric became pro-sedition.
Mainstream sedition
That comes naturally to Cruz.
Like many others, Cruz was in contact with Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, before the former president’s bid to take over the US government. Trump pressured Republican senators to vote against accepting Joe Biden’s victory. Cruz readily complied. He voted that night to overturn the election. He later voted to acquit Trump.
The present is a product of the past, though.
And Ted Cruz is a product of Newt Gingrich.
In a review of The Destructionists, a new book about the history of the Republicans, by Post columnist Dana Milbank, Christopher Buckley summed up the record of the former House speaker:
It was Newt who pushed the Ur-rightwing nutjob conspiracy that Clinton aide Vince Foster was murdered. That big little lie metastasized a quarter-century later into 'Stop the Steal.' It was Newt who defended right-wing militias after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City. And it was Newt who, while leading a hot steaming mess of a personal life, fiercely agitated to oust Bill Clinton for playing hide-the-cigar with a 20-something intern.
Gingrich brought sedition into the Republican Party.
From that point until today, taxes from the Republican point of view were no longer constructive investments in nation-building. They were wrong. They were robbery. They were politically illegitimate.
They were the basis for a revolt.
Mainstreaming militias
Not a democratic revolt.
Gingrich escalated the Republicans’ militant rhetoric by including “the new, decidedly insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment,” wrote James R. Skillen last year, “namely that the founders had written the amendment precisely so that individual citizens would have guns to use against government tyrants.”
With that, Gingrich established the party’s paramilitary wing.
It was paranoid. It was armed. It was violent.
It was perfect. Skillen wrote:
While Gingrich, [Texas Congressman] Dick Armey, and other leaders did claim that the time for insurrection had come, they *expanded the GOP coalition to include militias,* whose members were literally preparing for war with the federal government. The militias remained at the party’s margins only because *mainstream Republicans did not yet* share their dark conspiracy theories, including the belief that communists had taken control of the federal government or that the military was preparing internment camps for American citizens.
Burning a country
Donald Trump was elected in a backlash against the country’s first Black president. That backlash didn’t come from nowhere. Its funding, its organization and its rhetoric were all firmly planted.
Gingrich had brought sedition into the Republican Party. He had wrapped insurrection in the flag and the US Constitution. He had made respectable the starving of the government of revenue, as if it were just another valid point of view. He had demanded freedom!
He had made it possible for Ted Cruz to look us in the face and say 87,000 IRS agents are going to descend “like a swarm of locusts.”
By 2010, the GOP was ready to foment, as Buckley said, “a racial backlash against Barack Obama, turning ‘itself into the party of white grievance. All that was left for Trump to do was to light a match.’”
Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don’t know why.
This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.
Over the past few decades, Earth’s rotation around its axis – which determines how long a day is – has been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so.
But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown – days are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.
While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation varies ever so slightly. These changes occur over periods of millions of years to almost instantly – even earthquakes and storm events can play a role.
It turns out a day is very rarely exactly the magic number of 86,400 seconds.
The ever-changing planet
Over millions of years, Earth’s rotation has been slowing down due to friction effects associated with the tides driven by the Moon. That process adds about about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century. A few billion years ago an Earth day was only about 19 hours.
For the past 20,000 years, another process has been working in the opposite direction, speeding up Earth’s rotation. When the last ice age ended, melting polar ice sheets reduced surface pressure, and Earth’s mantle started steadily moving toward the poles.
Just as a ballet dancer spins faster as they bring their arms toward their body – the axis around which they spin – so our planet’s spin rate increases when this mass of mantle moves closer to Earth’s axis. And this process shortens each day by about 0.6 milliseconds each century.
Over decades and longer, the connection between Earth’s interior and surface comes into play too. Major earthquakes can change the length of day, although normally by small amounts. For example, the Great Tōhoku Earthquake of 2011 in Japan, with a magnitude of 8.9, is believed to have sped up Earth’s rotation by a relatively tiny 1.8 microseconds.
Apart from these large-scale changes, over shorter periods weather and climate also have important impacts on Earth’s rotation, causing variations in both directions.
The fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles move mass around the planet, causing changes in the length of day by up to a millisecond in either direction. We can see tidal variations in length-of-day records over periods as long as 18.6 years. The movement of our atmosphere has a particularly strong effect, and ocean currents also play a role. Seasonal snow cover and rainfall, or groundwater extraction, alter things further.
Why is Earth suddenly slowing down?
Since the 1960s, when operators of radio telescopes around the planet started to devise techniques to simultaneously observe cosmic objects like quasars, we have had very precise estimates of Earth’s rate of rotation.
Using radio telescopes to measure Earth’s rotation involves observations of radio sources like quasars. NASA Goddard.
A comparison between these estimates and an atomic clock has revealed a seemingly ever-shortening length of day over the past few years.
But there’s a surprising reveal once we take away the rotation speed fluctuations we know happen due to the tides and seasonal effects. Despite Earth reaching its shortest day on June 29 2022, the long-term trajectory seems to have shifted from shortening to lengthening since 2020. This change is unprecedented over the past 50 years.
The reason for this change is not clear. It could be due to changes in weather systems, with back-to-back La Niña events, although these have occurred before. It could be increased melting of the ice sheets, although those have not deviated hugely from their steady rate of melt in recent years. Could it be related to the huge volcano explosion in Tonga injecting huge amounts of water into the atmosphere? Probably not, given that occurred in January 2022.
Scientists have speculated this recent, mysterious change in the planet’s rotational speed is related to a phenomenon called the “Chandler wobble” – a small deviation in Earth’s rotation axis with a period of about 430 days. Observations from radio telescopes also show that the wobble has diminished in recent years; the two may be linked.
One final possibility, which we think is plausible, is that nothing specific has changed inside or around Earth. It could just be long-term tidal effects working in parallel with other periodic processes to produce a temporary change in Earth’s rotation rate.
Do we need a ‘negative leap second’?
Precisely understanding Earth’s rotation rate is crucial for a host of applications – navigation systems such as GPS wouldn’t work without it. Also, every few years timekeepers insert leap seconds into our official timescales to make sure they don’t drift out of sync with our planet.
If Earth were to shift to even longer days, we may need to incorporate a “negative leap second” – this would be unprecedented, and may break the internet.
The need for negative leap seconds is regarded as unlikely right now. For now, we can welcome the news that – at least for a while – we all have a few extra milliseconds each day.
