In Greg Abbott’s Texas, everything has a price or makes a profit.
Mothers Against Greg Abbott posted this video showing how it’s done.
A for-profit online charter school is opening in a for-profit prison whose inmates are families arrested by ICE.
The school will be supplied by a giant online corporation called Stride, which used to be K-12 Inc.
K-12 Inc. was known for low-quality instruction, low graduation rates, and scandals. Its executives are paid multi-million dollar salaries.
It’s ironic that the government is paying Stride to provide low-quality online instruction to hapless children whose families are about to be ousted from America.
Peter Greene has the story here.
The detention center in Dilley is operated byCoreCivic, a Tennessee-based for-profit operator of prisons, jails, and detention centers. In 2025, they scored $300 million in ICE contracts.
CoreCivic was founded as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in 1983, by Thomas W. Beasley, Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto. Beasley served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party; Crants was the chief financial officer of a real estate company in Nashville; Hutto was the president-elect of the American Correctional Association, and according to a 2018 Time Magazine investigation, ran a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay…
One of its first big investors was Michael Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison (Oracle), who both kicked in money for K12. Steve Fink, a trusted Milliken confidant and lead independent director of Stride, is the brother of Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of Blackrock, which has been a longtime investor in Stride.
In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12’s schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught K12 using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, “despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012.”
In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about“the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”
In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.
In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their “epic series of tech errors.” K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”
Well, who cares? Who cares if Stride-K12 provides high-quality education? So what if it’s a waste of taxpayer money? The “students” are children who are being deported. Their parents are being deported too. Who cares?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Diane – the real question is how to stop these people so that they can’t revive, like some Dracula. Martha Ture Mt. Tamalpais Photographyhttps://mttamalpaisphotos.com The greatest joy in the world is in restoring the earth.
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Martha,
We need a blue tsunami in 2026 to stop the grift.
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The headline should read “Capitalism: Why not Monetize Everything?”
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If these folks could monetize breathing air, they would! All government/public spending is anathema to those who derive their wealth from investment because it deprives them of a place to use and increase their capital. Their extreme market, individualistic, no-empathy ideology follows. Their alliance with Christian nationalists is instrumental.
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Don’t give them ideas. They are willfully polluting the air and water now. They will create a market for oxygen tanks.
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The AI big data centers are gobbling up electricity at alarming rates. These are the same people that put the current regime in power and support all forms of privatization. However, they make low rate NDA utility deals with providers, and make the customers, often in rural communities, pay the increased consumption costs. Big companies are shameless profiteers.https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/how-data-centers-are-driving-up-your
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“ran a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay…”
This history needs context. The convict lease system was the order of the day when labor was never enough. The labor required to pick enough cotton to be profitable created a permanent underclass n the cotton belt until the advent of the mechanical harvesting of cotton. That underclass included newly freed slaves, whose fate was often to be arrested for misdemeanors and pit into a system designed to trap them and use them for either county finance or personal gain or both. This system largely survived any attempts at reform on a governmental level, but buckled as labor became unneeded. Today a single man sitting in a million dollar machine harvests acres per hour, which makes the use of slave labor and its companion, the worker kept on penury, obsolete.
What we have replaced this system with in Core Civic is the monetization of warehousing human beings. If you know a bunch of people on your community, you will probably know someone caught in the web of the system that makes some people wealthy. When it is profitable for people to be put in jail, more people will go to jail. Their presence in jail puts money in a thick wallet, and does not reward the private prison for doing a good job. These prisons, some corporate and others state run, now provide a significant number of communities with their many n source of income. Trust me. In Tiptonville, Tennessee, the prison is about your only job unless you sell groceries to a person working in the prison.
Horrible situation.
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Roy,
Crevice, the for-profit prison company, started in Tennessee. Some big-name politicians got in early.
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Wondering about the name “Crevice.” Is this representative of what’s expected to be happening to or disappeared immigrants–they’re falling into a “crevice?” (Things are pretty bad here in Chicago–ICE has returned in full force & has been terrorizing the city & suburbs. A 68-year-old man (who has health problems) selling tamales on a street corner, was taken just the other day. A man who has been in this country for 30 years–a successful business owner who had only minor traffic violations–was taken to a Michigan detention facility; his family just received a letter that he has died there.)
& they are in the papers & on the news–esp. Bovino–brandishing theis guns & tauntingly calling out, “Merry Christmas,” as some dystopian Charles Dickens world. Just today, there was a news item as to how religious leaders are outside the Bridgeview, IL detention facility, asking for permission to minister during Christmas. They were, of course, ignored.
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Tragic, disgusting, and it generates a lot of money for Trump donors.
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Sorry for the many grammatical mistakes & some misspelled words in my comment. Not my usual…just so upset about this intolerable situation.
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