Our blog poet on the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
Gates never gives without getting a tax break and never gives without strings attached.
That’s how you know it is not real philanthropy, but Billyanthropy.
“The Billyanthropist”
Billyanthropist am I
I gave you Common Core
And testing to the sky
I’d like to give you more
Billyanthropist am I
I gave you teacher VAMs
A lovely Chetty pie
And lots of charter scams
Billyanthropist am I
I gave you pseudo-science
And sellebrate the lie
With test and VAM reliance
Billyanthropist am I
Billyanthropy I do
Democracy I buy
Impose my will on you
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All the world is a reckless sellebration. Have you heard, Billynaires aren’t philanthropists anymore. Now they’re impact investors! They profit from impacting us, one assumes with sledgehammers, bulldozers, and dynamite.
Social Impact Infestment
Impact wrenches
Micro wares
Common wretches
Billyan errs
Now infesting
In our kids
Soon injesting
Future bids
Billdozers
Builders build
And dozers wreck
Billdozers filled
Our schools with dreck
BillyanT (with apologies to AC/DC)
See me ride out of the sunset
On your color TV screen
Out for all that I can get
If you know what I mean
Shaftware to the left of me
And shaftware to the right
You got no money
You got no might
Don’t you start no fight
Cuz I’m BillyanT, I’m dynamite
BillyanT, and I’ll win the fight
BillyanT., I’m a power load
BillyanT, watch me explode
So lock up your schoolkid
Lock up your school
Lock up your back door
Run from the fool
The Bill is back in town
Don’t you mess me ’round
A Billdozer is a bulldozer in that Bill dozes bull all over everyone, by the ton.
and there it is: we give nothing, we control all
And instead of backing away, there are teachers and schools who think they have found the second coming. RUN FAR, RUN FAST. No one hands out cash like that without requiring ownership.
Any billionaire “partnerships” involving public education are “poisoned partnerships.”
Thank you, SomeDAM Poet.
You are good.
I refuse to use Microsoft products.
I’m about to have my life placed in the virtual hands of a Microsoft COVID tracing app.
Tracking bugs has never been one of Microsoft’s strong points.
And even when they do find some by pure accident (as in car accident), their “fixes” usually introduce more than they eliminate.
I’m trying to think of what one of Microsoft’s strong points is, but coming up blank.
DianeI don’t know if author Jared Diamond (below) refers to it in his description of “three cardinal sins” that the elites do to bring down a vibrant working democracy, (Gates among them) but I would add that not only do they “starve” the government, but they become the foxes in the chicken-house . . . actually writing laws and making policies that benefit themselves and leave others out . . .which in turn, throws the light back on the corruption of elected officials who are supposed to be true to the electorate.
Here is some of Diamond’s article: CBK
“SEPTEMBER 19, 2020/PUBLISHED BY THE BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE/Weekend Roundup: When Things Fall Apart
“Breakdown always comes before breakthrough.
NATHAN GARDELS/EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
“Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine
“It is startling how rapidly things can fall apart. After so many decades of normalized stability in the United States, no doubt with both plenty of racial injustice as well as deaths of despair among the white working-class underneath, it suddenly all rises to the surface and explodes. Nothing ever changes, until it does.
“The most sobering conversation I’ve had of late was with a former governor of California who knows American politics as well as anyone, if not better. He laid out a frighteningly plausible scenario: The chaos and violence in the streets of American cities these days — the latest incendiary incident being the bald assassination attempt on two young patrol officers in their squad car in Los Angeles last week — will drive that margin of voters whose ballots count most into the arms of Trump’s law-and-order reelection narrative. If they need further cause to cast their votes his way, it is the radical demands to defund the police and the blinkered cancel culture that visits so many sins of the past upon a hapless mainstream that is only trying to get by.
If Trump is returned to office, . . . ”
“Visit Noema Magazine at https://www.noemamag.com/.
I share the same concerns about civil unrest. It plays into Trump’s tiny hands. Now that most of the smoke has cleared in Portland, the protests, aka, nightly brawls, can resume.
These poems help me keep my sanity by keeping a little sense of humor about what Gates does to harm my students and me.
Billyanthropy- one of the best poems I’ve read.
Like enthusiastically.