Joanne Barkan has an excellent essay in Dissent magazine that explains how foundations founded by plutocrats use their wealth and political power to damage democracy.
She uses the example of public education to demonstrate how a small number of large foundations have captured control of public policy, taking it out of the hands of voters and parents to impose their will and get what they want.
She offers the examples of the AstroTurf groups created by the Gates Foundation; these are groups that pretend to represent local, grassroots groups but in fact carry out the wishes of the plutocrats.
Then there is the example of grants offered to districts that are contingent on certain officials remaining in office.
Then there is the example of the “parent trigger,” which manipulates parents to hand over their public school to a private corporation.
And another example is the practice of the Broad Foundation, which underwrites the salary of certain public officials to ensure that it gets its way.
She asks a good question: why are these plutocrats allowed to get tax breaks as they impose their control over and subvert a democratic institution?
This is a subject that deserves a book-length treatment. With her meticulous research skills and her understanding of the political dynamics involved, Joanne Barkan is just the one to do it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Must read article. TFA is fast becoming like this as it has grown in wealth way beyond its original dreams.
Why does Bill Gates care about education?
Because he happens to have money, and has too much time on his “IDOL” hands…and I did mean “idol” and not “idle.”
Malanthropy (n): self interest masquerading as altruism, whereby the federal tax code is used to subsidize one’s financial and political interests, See Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates and Foundation, Broad, et al.
Michael Fiorillo: with a little updating, Ambrose Bierce is still relevant to today’s “malanthropy” and its corporate backers:
“Philanthropist. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.”
“Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.”
🙂
Love your comments, KrazyTA.
I am citing Daily Kos here in this quote: “William K. Black whittles down a piece he wrote for New Economic Perspectives for Alternet and goes for the jugular in America Has Become a “Cheater-Take-All” Nation… [citinging[ Tyler Cowen equality will only get worse as a “hyper-meritocracy” of smart, energetic people at the top commanding machines and data speed ahead…[according to Black] those hyper-meritocrats are led by criminal morons. Cowen’s embrace of Social Darwinism assumes that the winners have a selective advantage that arises from “merit” – which Cowen conflates with the ability to create wealth. This is passing strange as we are still suffering from an orgy of wealth destruction led by the “winners.”
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we face this in education as well; the snobbish arrogance and hubris from the test-makers and corporates making tons of money. We had crooks, yes call them criminal morons or moral imbeciles, who siphoned off money but only DiMasi went to jail. John Barranco siphoned almost 40 million calling himself a “CEO” of an educational firm through his 401 (c)3 that he took as a license to create his own feathered nest through a non-profit and he did it by telling the schools “I am saving you money”. Where did the saved money go into his 4 homes and his girlfriend’s home. He pretended to be a “good guy” to sell his ideas to a board and the board kept reinforcing him with raises making him the highest recipient on the teacher retirement system. Corruption isn’t only in corporations but they provide the models of how to do it
They are reinforcing their own ideas of “Merit” by the tests and forming quartiles and quintiles to show that the rest of us are the “unwashed” and should go to the end of the kine for schools, food, jobs, etc. That is the only purpose of their tests and it feeds into the huge gaps in financial inequalities with the 1% at the top reaping all society’s benefits for themselves.
Yup, it is this BAD.
From the Dissent article:
Teddy Roosevelt:
“no amount of charity in spending such fortunes [as Rockefeller’s] can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.”
The mr. Gates’ Microsoft Corporation eluded justice in America through a sweetheart deal with the Bush administration.
We must look to Europe to see a realistic appraisal of Gates’ legacy:
From the European Committee for Interoperable Systems:
Microsoft’s history of anticompetitive behaviour and consumer harm | ECIS
“Microsoft’s conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft’s willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies. This conduct has caused real harm to consumers, who continue to pay high prices and use lower quality products than would have prevailed in a competitive market. ”
http://www.ecis.eu/2009/03/microsofts-history-of-anticompetitive-behaviour-and-consumer-harm/
If you’re a philanthropist, you build a building or donate some books. Studies? We don’t need no stinking studies. How hard is that?
“Almost forty years before the craptastic Wall Street meltdown of 2007-08, an economist named George Akerlof published an article titled “The Market for Lemons” in the 1970 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
In that article, Akerlof identified the problems that plague markets because of “assymmetrical information”, a situation that occurs when a seller knows more about a product than a buyer. Part of Akerlof’s Nobel Prize winning article centered on a theory he called “Gresham’s Dynamic”, a corollary to Gresham’s Law – the theory that in an economy, bad money drives out good money.
Akerlof posited however that Gresham’s Law – or Gresham’s Dynamic as he called it – wasn’t just related to money. In fact, he said, it applied across markets and in particular to businesses. The core of his theory was that dishonest dealings in business tend to drive honest dealings out of the market.
The cost of dishonesty, therefore, wasn’t only the amount by which a purchaser was being cheated, but also the loss incurred from driving legitimate, honest businesses out of existence.” http://www.theresilientfamily.com/2012/02/greshams-dynamic/
I love this essay. I don’t understand how these people haven’t been charged with bribery. They are using money to force their political or financial will. I was never cynical until I worked in a charter school. I really couldn’t believe that politicians could completely ignore the will of the people and kow tow to billionaires. I’ve seen firsthand how people have used education as a “cash cow”. I’ve seen a great staff being treated like garbage. I became even more cynical when I realized that the Presidency has been controlled by a few billionaires and an unqualified Ed. Secretary has worked to destroy not only the teaching profession but the power of the individual at the local level.
Fake local groups are not formed just in the US. The World Bank and other corporate interests have created them in all low-income countries. They are called “local education groups”, and they are anything but local ! They consist of expatriates who represent various donor agencies. Rarely does one see a local non-profit. These “locals” have various agendas they promote with governments.
And this is not all. There is also a set of local folks paid to do this. The World Bank through a puppet internal agency (caled the Global Partnership for Education) has spent at least $12 million to hire local people who show up in various meetings and “advocate” in favor of education. It is called a “Civil Society” Education fund. No one quite understands who is being chosen for payments and for which results.