Thanks to friends in Georgia who sent me the alert about a meeting planned in Atlanta for January 11-12, 2017.
It is billed as planning for the future for a radical transformation of Georgia education. Georgia voters just voted overwhelmingly to block the governor from taking control of their public schools and giving them to charter operators.
Nonetheless, consider the 2016 sponsors of this “radical” transformation:
The Walton Family Foundation
American Federation for Children (Betsy and Dick DeVos)
StudentsFirst
Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence
The corporate reformers never give up. No matter how many times the voters say no, they come back for more.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tyrants never give up. They fight to the or they wait until close to the end when it is clear they have failed and then they run away to hide in another country somewhere on the planet. When Germany’s generals approached Hitler near the end of the war and urged him to surrender, he went into a rage and shouted that his people had failed him and they deserved to suffer. He refused to surrender.
After Hitler shot his wife and then put a round through his brain, what did many of the surviving Nazi’s do, most of them silently slipped out of Germany with fortunes and ended up hiding in South America. Some were forgiven their crimes, given U.S. citizenship and ended up helping train the CIA or working in the weapons industry creating better bombs and missiles/rockets.
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Very true. Wernher von Braun was portrayed as an innocent mere engineer or cog in the Nazi war machine. He was a Nazi, an SS-Sturmbannführer (major), he was in charge of every facet of the rocket program, he was certainly aware of and complicit in the slave labor used to build the V-2 facilities. It has been estimated that more people died constructing the rocket facilities than died in the attacks on the UK. The slave laborers were literally worked to death. WvB was a war criminal and should have been tried as such instead of being celebrated and feted as an American hero. Mort Sahl once quipped that von Braun aimed for the stars but missed and hit London instead.
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From wikipedia: I Aim at the Stars is a 1960 biographical film which tells the story of the life of Wernher von Braun.
Did the film show the slave laborers being worked to death or being beaten to death if they no longer could lift or shovel dirt?
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The Arab sheiks had the undeserved luck that lots of oil was found under their soil. They knew nothing better to do with their money than to finance the spread of Wahhabism and terrorism in the world.
The billionaires had the underserved luck that citizens blindly elected governments which knew nothing better than to lower taxes for the super-rich, instead of for repairing highways and bridges, providing health care for everyone and improving the public school system and teacher education. The super-riches in turn know nothing better to do with their money than to destroy public education — the very place where citizens learn how to solve problems and conflicts peacefully, that is, not through violence and deceit but through thinking and discussion.
Their good luck is mankind’s bad luck.
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ALL true, but to my mind you’re giving those who suck up every penny they can find a little too much credit for being in this together; when profiteering and opportunism have become the deregulated name of the game, there will be little logical control/consistency.
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They don’t care what Georgia voters want. They’ll jam their version of reform thru no matter what the citizens of Georgia think about it.
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Grifters gotta grift; looters gotta loot.
It will be interesting and instructive, in a revealingly perverse way, to see the “education reform is the civil rights issue of our time” crowd migrate over to Trump’s side of the pig trough.
Their ethics, shall we charitably say, are highly malleable.
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AMEN, Michael.
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They have ethics?
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I view this as an ALEC-like national strategy moving from state to state. Jeb knows how to make the pre-emptive strikes that nullify citizen discussion and participation as voters. Making anything look like and “emergency” helps.
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Signed up for the conference (it’s free). Hell I was wanting to drive through the Southeast US about that time anyway as I’ve never been to that part of the country. Florida here I come!
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If there is a billboard across from the venue, should we consider chipping in for one with Diane’s picture and an apt quote? I thought a donation of her books might be good, but they would likely serve as kindling for the book burning reception they are surely planning.
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Representatives from the Ludakris Foundation, TFA,, UNCF, etc. are on the “Summit” panel. They should read about how the Walton’s and Gates’ Foundations bailed from support of one of the major, charter school-promoting organizations in Ohio. “Ohio charter-school advocacy organization disbanding.” (Dayton Daily News, Dec. 15, reporter- Bill Bush) In the wake, are an alleged pay-to-play state government, harmed students, exploited taxpayers and long-term consequences to the state’s future prosperity. From the article, “More than 80% of charter high schools got an F on the most recent state report cards on their ability to graduate students within 4 years.”
Participants should review Bill Gates’ and Pearson’s investment in the for-profit schools-in-a-box of Bridge International Academies and, Philanthropy Roundtable’s Kim Smith interview about the Gates-funded New Schools Venture Fund, which refers to charter school organizations and “brands on a large scale”.
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