Privatization of important parts of the public sector is a great scourge of our times. No institution is more fundamental to the American Dream than public education, and it is under assault by powerful and well funded forces. By billionaires who have dreams of lower taxes and libertarians who want to destroy whatever government provides. We must fight privatization of the goods and services that belong to us.
Frankly we should join together to fight for a society where there are no billionaires and no poverty. Let us agree to take care of one another and have a fairer society, where everyone has a decent standard of living, where there is no hunger or homelessness. I recommend a book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, in which two British sociologists-Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett-demonstrate that societies with more equality are happier than those where great inequality persists. By contrast, scan Bloomberg Billionaires Index. I am not a socialist, but I don’t believe we should have either billionaires or poverty.
The pandemic impoverished millions of people. But the billionaire class got richer, much much richer. Senator Bernie Sanders said recently that the fifty richest people in this country have wealth equal to the bottom 50 percent of the population. That is gross, disgusting, obscene inequality.
Our nation and its democratic ideals are being undermined by extremes of wealth and income. The middle class is struggling not to slip into poverty.
In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker, or pay of $13,940,000 a year, according to an AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch news release today.
This is not the America I grew up in, and it’s not what America should be.
I have found these old English rhymes to be inspiring.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the spirit of the post, I’m sharing this discussion from Wharton, U of P’s business school, on why government cannot be run like a business. It’s a great, nuanced piece of work.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/should-government-be-run-like-a-business/
There’s another quite similar piece to be found in the Harvard Business Review. Even the world of business knows that privatization is a wrong headed idea, but try telling that to America’s oligarchs and plutocrats.
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I am glad to see that some people at Wharton have common sense. Privatization of essential services is a mistake that generally ends up costly the public more for a worse service. What were once middle class jobs with benefits and pensions become gig jobs. That is why some Americans work three gig jobs, but they still cannot pay their bills. One of the reasons that Texas froze in February is that different companies owned parts of the electrical grid, but no one was making an investment in the entire system. DeJoy is trying to make the UPS operate like a business. If the USPS is privatized, service will end for rural America. A public service is not a business.
Alas, the great institution of public education, a keystone of democracy, is under siege. Billionaires want to take the public out of public education. It is a travesty that must be stopped. As much as I like Joe Biden, I think we must make some “good trouble” to let him know we are watching and holding him to his word. Otherwise, the interests of public schools will continue to be ignored.
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Students from around the world convened in Nice for a three-week seminar on how to rise to the top as high-tech entrepreneurs. The video below capture some of the intensity that is present in this conclave of today’s best and brightest. Yet, is the world they envision really going to be a better place? And for whom?
Neoliberalism’s goal is the formation of a supranational corporate totalitarian* system, with an espoused “intense faith in the spontaneous responses of the market” to better the lot of wage slaves who are expressly excluded from any linkage of their needs/labors to the fruit of their labors or to the commons^ which the have increasingly fallen into private hands. Neoliberalism’s evangelists extol entrepreneurship as the only vehicle for individuals to participate in this grand vision of the world.
*In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.” -Sheldon Wolin
^The term “commons” derives from the traditional English legal term for common land, which are also known as “commons”, and was popularised in the modern sense as a shared resource term by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in an influential 1968 article called The Tragedy of the Commons
Watch the video and tell me what you think:
EIA sessions in July 2016, Nice, France & Turin, Italy
Check out this video on YouTube:
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Their free unregulated market philosophy does not extend to the Government enforced monopolies that have made them billionaires in the case of the Tech/ Pharma sector. Or the government granted licenses which created multi millionaires in the case of our libertarian crop of Doctors in the Congress. They would all be wealthy but not as wealthy without the handout. A handout that the working class pays for when they buy an iPhone ,visit a Doctor or go to the pharmacy .
Look no further than the two leading Vaccines in this country. Both are by and large the result of 18 years of NIH funding at university and non profit research facilities. Followed by 2 years of vaccine development for other viruses at small startups also depending on funding and even some of the formally starving researchers from the NIH programs. .
Not miraculously, those platforms developed by NIH and WHO funding allowed them to substitute in the Covid MRNA in 45 days and be ready to test. Then the testing was paid for by World Governments and the pre-production was paid for by World Governments. Yet at the end of the day they will be granted Patents for the peoples Vaccine . Patents that will prevent the rapid mass production of the vaccine in the scope of 8 billion people to be vaccinated.
Read “Rigged ” by Dean Baker . He likes to brag its free on line .he does not believe in patents and copy rights. He also points out that it is not the .01% but the top 1% many working near the top in these corporations who are responsible for the inequality. Many if not most benefit from the Government dole and investments they often rant against.
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Well said!
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The problem is not parents themselves but the award of patents that were publicly funded to individuals and assignment to private companies .
If a person gets a patent for a device or process that they invented on their own time and money, they deserve to have rights to such an invention. Otherwise, there is no incentive for a person to invent.
Patents as they were originally envisioned actually acted to spur innovation.
It is only relatively recently due to corruption of the process that patents have become an impediment to innovation.
And patents should never be awarded to individuals and assigned to private companies for inventions that resulted from publicly funded research.
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One could actually make a pretty good argument that the mRNA vaccines for covid do not even meet the criteria for a US patent because they are not unobvious to those skilled in the relevant art.
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Part of the problem is that the USPTO has completely lost its way.
In recent decades they have been awarding patents for things that should , under their own rules never have been awarded patents.
Eg, software implementations of mathematical algorithms and slight changes to genes and even living things that were actually not inventions but the result of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.
Many of the patents awarded today would never have passed muster in the past.
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SomeDAM Poet
Patents are whatever the Congress decides they should be . So what to grant Patents on and for how long is a political decision. As such those decisions are subject to influence and those monopolies have been extended. But what we saw with the Vaccines is that the NIH actually holds the Patent application for critical parts of the platform.
The outrage should be that they were almost totally funded by public dollar over a 20 year period . Yet they will unlike the Polio vaccine be patented. Salk also worked in a Public lab.
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such scary words: neoliberalism’s evangelists
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The Neoliberals love to drag out Hardin and the MYTH of the Tragedy of the Commons, which ignores the fact that commonly held resources persisted in good condition for thousands of years among thousands of peoples throughout the world, throughout history. Why did common resources persist in good shape? Why did people not succumb to the temptation that Hardin purports to overexploit the commons for their own gain? Because if they did so–if they threw a net across the river and caught all the salmon for themselves–their neighbors would visit them with scythes and pitchforks and torches.
The Commons requires protection from vandals, and Garrett Hardin was full of ______, providing a historically false argument that is actually simply a slimy rationalization of the extirpation of our common legacy as humans, and especially of the resources of indigenous peoples.
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Dear Diane:
You are much closer to socialism than you realize.
I’d be happy to see a ‘socialism’ that provides universal health care, strong community public schools and a truly ‘democratic’ government that represents the electorate (not the oligarch class.)
The ecological crisis will doom humanity because capitalism cannot surrender its hegemony over the planet
Back to the mundane: Get well quickly. Try listening to the the great musician Charles LLoyd. In particular, the album “Forest Flower.”
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“This is not the America I grew up in, and it’s not what America should be.”
Such a bizzarre line. Maybe borrowed from Mitch??I’m not agest, I just can’t stand this line. If I were your teacher, I would redirect you to state this in a positive way. “In the America I want to grow up in, and what America should be…” I’m sure you understand. I agree with the content of almost everything you currently write. Your blog saves me so much time and aggravation from having to explain my own thoughts and POV on Education so often. Thank you.
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I don’t understand, TIm. The line says that there has been a dramatic falling away from a time when there was a large and growing middle class in the United States. That’s important to know and to say.
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In 1900, the poverty rate in the United States was 80-percent according to http://www.irp.wisc.edu.
“Over the period from 1900 to 1990 there was no trend in income inequality. Inequality was high and rising during the first three decades of the century and peaked during the Depression. It fell sharply during World War I1 and remained at the lower level in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s it rose rapidly to pre-WWII levels. The rate of poverty exhibited a long-run downward trend from about 80 percent in 1900 to the 12 to 14 percent range in recent years.”
Click to access dp99893.pdf
What was the tax rate on the wealthiest American taxpayers in the 1950 and 1960s?
91%
“In the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was booming, the wealthiest Americans paid a top income tax rate of 91%. Today, the top rate is 43.4%.”
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-taxing-wealthy-americans/
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The billionaire pays little tax
While middle class, it gets the ax
The corporation gets a ride
While poor have no one on their side
The law divides ‘tween Black and White
Where Black is wrong and White is right
The law forgives the Wall Street crook
While at the poor, it throws the book
The law is made for those with means
It’s isn’t made for pork and beens
And “justice” means “it’s just for us”
The rest it throws beneath the bus
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I just ate pork and beans for dinner, by the way.
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Thanks for the poem. It speaks volumes.
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And there is this, from a sermon by John Ball, a leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381:
“When Adam delved and Eve span,
“Who was then the gentleman?
“From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty[b] men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free.”
delved: delved into the soil, farmed
span: archaic past tense of “spin”
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Enuendo but not rly? Pfft.
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Innuendo? Really?
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Proud Socialist here. But happy to live under a large tent that includes folks who won’t use the “S” word but want steeply progressive taxation, equal access to high-quality public education, parental leave, universal single-payer medical insurance, strong policies to reverse climate change and otherwise protect our environment, legalization and regulation of drugs and of sex work, reparations for centuries of systemic racism, and universal voter registration and suffrage. As far as I’m concerned, all who share these goals are my brothers and sisters.
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Oh, and ofc, recognition of the rights of LGBTQX persons.
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“By billionaires who have dreams of lower taxes and libertarians who want to destroy whatever government provides. We must fight privatization of the goods and services that belong to us.”
This part here reads a little biased… “Billionaires” specifically leaving out millionaires…. Looks like meant to seek radicals and disenfranchised persons of no particular category. Yer all welcome if you’re offended by billionaires. Yes, i do think they’re offensive but im not looking to join up. “Libertarians,” because the lated buzzword noun for people that dont deserve respects could really only be the only other person besides a billionaire, right? What about kids that dont want to be send off to a biased indoctrination camp? What about parents that dont want to send them there? What about kids that have to live in the real world and wont have a kooshy tenured union ensured government job with more benefits than their whole family will ever see in their life, what about them not wanting directed direct subjugation by first line overlords that cant or wont enforce the rule of law against their own selves and who subsequently cant but national security above their own personal convenience? What about whole industries that could do the job safer faster and with relatively nonexistent overhead proven by the fact they already do and have for decades. What about children that dont want 5o have to worry about being trampled by their peers as they flee, arsonists, bombers, terrorists, south american catholic invaders, random shootings, unhinged drug dealers(including all the way up to the school board itself), homosexual sexual harrasment from gym teachers, hypochondriac manufactured pandemics, and who can even guess what else a death trap can invent fresh. A deathtrap like the one they have to cross to get to the school in the first place. And when they get to “school” what do the have to look forward to besides gangs and monsters, and then the same from other kids! Lets face it, between leftists and rightists, you’re both the source of all division in america. Both radicalised by terms from pseudo-scientific fields of study meant to justify british foreign and domestic policy by forced fictious concepts? 20 years ago americas biggest gripe with theists was their habitual fallacious reasoning. Now the leftists have completely taken that over for themselves. You should have skipped that aspect of unreality. The theists, while fallacious, were at least trust worthy. They were at least honest about what they were. Leftist slime, no one can guess if they’re not prone to guessing “pederast heroin cartel of every color of the rainbow and the rainbow and itself specifically and prominently…”
I mean when the world sees a dixiecrat getting elected to a third term of running a bacha bazi slave labor heroin farm for a 3 bill a year(not even 25%) cashcrop, what are they to think about a guy pushing that no one should suspect the rising tranny gang for anything? Hmmm?
Nope, cant stand partisans. Verifiably cannot stand either type of partisan. Bipartisan just sounds twice as bad by this point.
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Take your meds.
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Ad hom. Typical.
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I can do ad hom. You sure you’re in for surgery and not mega colon extraction? Your bacha-bazi dope does that.
Remember folks, these are the people who cared so much about the children…
Cared? maybe Like chester
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty
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