Peter Greene writes here about Erica Green’s excellent coverage of Betsy DeVos’s testimony to Congress about student debt.
He says you have to pay close attention to her words to understand that she is not greedy, she is not dumb; she knows exactly what she is doing.
He writes:
“Here’s an absolutely DeVosian quote from the proceedings:
“I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.
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| Ah yes– the smirk. |
“This is DeVos– she knows what’s right, and she’s going to stand up for it. And’s what is right is that Those People shouldn’t be able to get away with not paying their debts. Those People should not be allowed to stiff their Betters. Because you know that Those People are probably lying about how badly they were hurt, anyway, because Those People are always trying to get things they don’t deserve. This “anyone who raises their hand and files a claim” characterization that DeVos has been using is such a flip way to dismiss the damage done by for-profit collges, an d here it matters what DeVos doesn’t say– she doesn’t say that there are people out there who played by the rules, tried to bootstrap themselves to a better life through education, and got fleeced, and we should provide those people some real relief. She has never seriously acknowledged that harm.
“But that takes us to the other DeVosian value that’s on display here.
“Ms. DeVos maintained that it was “probably the case” that Corinthian Colleges deceived students, but she also said she believed that the “prior administration basically forced schools like Corinthian out of business” with onerous financial restrictions. She rebuffed questions about an investigation by career staff, unveiled in January 2017 memos published by NPR on Wednesday, that concluded that Corinthian students deserved full loan forgiveness because they received no educational benefit.
“Businesses fleecing customers is not outrageous. What’s outrageous is government interfering with the operations and practices of businesses. There is an extra layer of irony here– the Obama administration actually was pretty damn slow to take any useful action against Corinthian, and even helped bail them out for a time, and any good Obama-bashing Trumpian might hammer that point home, but DeVos can’t see that because for her there is no greater sin than interfering with the operation of a business.
”She’s made variations of that point again and again, all the way back to the confirmation hearing when she couldn’t imagine any misbehavior that would prompt her, as a government official, to step in and say “Stop!” Businesses matter more than people.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is it any surprise that the Child-Man in the Promised Land who brought you Trump University put Ditzy DeVoid in charge? Of course not. She of no relevant experience except, perhaps, having been born into unimaginable wealth and then marrying into the Amway multilevel marketing pyramid scam. Oh the irony that she casts everything she says in terms of moral values. Cruella DeVille’s sister, Clueless.
“DeVos is what you get when you combine unmovable righteousness with a belief that the invisible hand of the free market is, in fact, God’s hand.”
Having never wanted for anything, Clueless DeVille, Cruella’s kid sister, has no notion how laughable it is to speak of “free markets” that most people can never dream of participating in. Yes, Ms. DeVoid, Ms. DeVille, whatever your name is, there is a free market in yachts (Ditzy has 10 of them), personal assistants to pack your bags, basketball teams (her family owns part of the Orlando Magic), scam-y brain training companies (Neurocore), pyramid marketing companies that prey on the dreams of the poor(Amway), think tank lackeys (the Macinack Center, Focus on the Family), state and federal political wind-up toys and action figures, 22,000-square-foot nautical-themed summer mansions, private 737s, private Gulfstream 550s, private Bombardier Challengers, helicopters (the family owns two of them), and bespoke haute couture jackets costing tens of thousands of dollars. All you have to do is have the money! This is also, true, by the way, of bus fare, food for your kids, dental care, eye glasses, and other stuff that Those People struggle to afford.
To call markets that exclude many millions, like the healthcare market in the United States or like the market for homes or even fresh vegetables, for example, “free” is one of the most common and Orwellean misuses of language.
Free market. n. A market that those with money can participate in
By the way, in a free market, there are no government subsidies. Everyone is on their own. Oligarchs don’t want a really free market. They want one that favors them.
The question, when people bandy about the intentionally obfuscating term “free market” should always be, “Free to whom?”
We pay for a lot of corporate welfare, and a lot of it is totally unjustified. I am glad Amazon is not squeezing incentivizing money out of the people of NYC as their mere existence in the city will cost it a great deal.
Free Markets. Each year in World History class we study European thinkers. Each year I re-read some of the writings that made them famous. My emphasis for most of the Enlightenment thinkers is that they were all searching for the mechanics of their ideas. What is “natural” ? What are the “natural” operations of the system we have come to call economics? Physics? Government?
This year, when I was reviewing Karl Marx and Adam Smith, it struck me that they both sounded incredibly utopian. Smith voiced that not interfering with economic transaction would naturally police itself. No one would want to do business with a dishonest man. Marx thought that the “dictatorship of the proletariat ” would naturally evolve into a sort of de-centralized system whereby workers would control the means of productions. Both these expectations are a dream.
The problem is that these two thinkers, and those who agree with these propositions, are ignoring power. The adage that power corrupts is an obvious historical postulate. This is why the ideas of Montesquieu’s balance of power idea–power checks power, he said–are so commanding and important.
We are presently engaged in an impeachment that hinges on a president’s abuse of power. That, however, fits into,a pervasive abuse of power on the part of many people who have the time to be involved in political activity. Since political activity requires the leisure time to become involved in it, most of us are constrained to forums like this one and the people who are wealthy enough to spend a few minutes a day with their thoughts. Extreme wealth allows individuals to spend as much time as they want on political thought. It is natural, therefore, that leisure time attracts some people to political involvement even as it attracts others to building model trains. When Jefferson used the word “happiness” in the Declaration, he was most surely using the word to suggest that the idea of freedom was associated with the ability of a person to be a part of community in a political sense, a definition that has gone away like a woodpile in a cold winter.
I am not sure how we keep away the wolf of power from the door of freedom, but it must start at bare minimum with the participation of more people. We need to have a population that can discern idiocy when it comes over the radio. We need one that will spend some time on the issues. If we do not get this, we get trump, DeVoss, and anyone else to whom power is accessible due to great wealth and attractive as a game.
Is it any surprise that Success Academy Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz worked so hard to insure that DeVos was confirmed by the Senate? DeVos owes Eva Moskowitz a huge debt of gratitude for her hard work in fighting for her nomination and doing everything she could to make sure that Betsy DeVos was the Secretary of Education.
So whenever I think of DeVos, I give credit for her successful nomination to one of her very biggest fans, Eva Moskowitz. Their values are so similar, as Eva Moskowitz herself made clear in her many interviews and op eds praising DeVos and demanding that the Senate confirm her nomination.
Eva Moskowitz doesn’t agree with everything Trump does, but Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos was certainly one of things Trump did that Eva Moskowitz was most delighted with! How proud she and her staff at Success Academy are that they played such a huge role in making sure that Trump’s “good” decision to nominate DeVos resulted in her being confirmed and empowered! Betsy DeVos thanks Eva Moskowitz and so do the right wing billionaires who were so delighted with Eva Moskowitz’ enthusiastic endorsement of DeVos.
DeVos gave Eva’s chain $10 million this year, along with $89 million for KIPP, and over $100 million to the IDEA chain.
Well DeVos is surely incredibly grateful to Eva for being so selfless and giving DeVos so much help to get her job. Ten million is so little for all of Eva’s hard work empowering DeVos, but no doubt DeVos feels confident that her pals the billionaires are making sure that Moskowitz is being generously rewarded.
The Bible says “God loves business”.
Blessed are the poor, for they can be exploited.
“Businesses matter more than people.”
That’s not just Betsy’s mantra, but the mantra of mainstream economists (regardless of political party) in the US.
The Second Gilded Age
Business first
And people last
Unquenched thirst
For gilded past
regardless of political party
exactly
In other news,
Our president thinks that “little” is spelled “liddle” and that an apostrophe is a hyphen. I’m not exaggerating. I wish I were. He actually does. He is very, very close to being completely illiterate.
“In September, in a chyron, CNN apparently cited a tweet from Trump in which he referred to Representative Adam Schiff as “Liddle’ ”—a form that the network transposed, sans apostrophe, as “Liddle.” Turning once again to Twitter, the President claimed that CNN, as a representative of the “LameStream Media,” “purposely took the hyphen out” of the word he used in “discirbing” Schiff. It is, he lamented, “A small but never ending situation with CNN!” What makes this tweet the winner for me is its glorious display of the dense layers of mistakes and misapprehensions that the President labors under. “Describing” is “discirbing,” an apostrophe is a hyphen, and “li’l” is “liddle’,” but never “liddle.” (What doesn’t change, however, is Trump’s paranoid sense of persecution.) To read this tweet is to become privy—hilariously, frighteningly—to the thinking process of a man whose head seems packed with cement. It’s a place that even the thinnest rays of wisdom and discernment no longer reach, if they ever did.”
–Naomi Fry, “This Year in Stupidity,” The New Yorker
Insightful post. At its core, DeVosianism is the same as Gatesian neoliberalism. It’s meritocracy, pure and simple. It’s the belief that unrestrained free-market capitalism should be applied to everything because, well, Darwin. If you are a serf, you deserve serfdom because the ruler of the fiefdom was anointed with innate gifts of greatness and you were not. So just crawl into a hole with your unwashed self and die, serf. We can’t argue with that belief system. It’s a religion. We can only unite and overthrow the people who believe it. Boycott or strike, anyone?
Darwin, btw, detested this “Social Darwinist” application of his ideas. He was an extremely gentle and modest man who was driven to fury by the then common abuse of nonhuman animals. See James Rachel’s profound and beautiful book, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism. Oxford UP, 1999.
And you nailed it. It’s a religion. But it is taught in university economics departments as science.
Peter misses the real essence of DeVos which is that of a deeply committed believer in Christian Dominionism, a made-up jumble of beliefs shared by her, Vice President Pence, Rick Perry and many many others on the religious far right that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their own interpretation of the Bible. Everything else is just details.
Patrick, you are so right. Most of us grew up with a live-and-let-live approach to religion. The DeVos-Barr-Pence cabal mean to shove their ideology down our throats
[from NYT article] “Representative Greg Murphy, Republican of North Carolina, agreed [re: DeVos ‘inherited a mess.’] “I do think the federal government has led to some of the problems we’re having in higher education right now because the money is so — free.” Ya think?? Whose idea was it to allow vast DofEd loans to outrageously-priced, unvetted, back-of-a-matchbook-cover for-profit tech instututes in the first place? Part & parcel of the whole student-loan fiasco, wherein US, unlike any other OECD country, “supports” tertiary ed via the for-profit financial sector. They feed off our families pyramid-style, grabbing $ up-front, w/constant pressure to feed more new students w/ever-bigger loans into the front end to hedge against the inevitable defaults at the back end. No different from the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. And similar to the for-profit health-insurance picture. Housing, ed, & healthcare: this country is cannibalizing its middle class.
““I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness ”
because that’s right.