Archives for category: Billionaires
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Newsweek: Why Does Betsy DeVos’s $40 Million Yacht Fly a Foreign Flag?

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
40

Well, that’s easy. This multibillionaire doesn’t like to pay taxes, so she saves money by registering her yacht in the Cayman Islands, like so many other tax-avoiding .001%ers.

She has at nine other yachts, and it is not clear whether all of them are registered in the Cayman Islands. Maybe some are registered in Michigan or Ohio. Hard to keep track of so many yachts. Can you imagine how confusing it would be if you owned 10 cars? Even harder when you are talking yachts, each of which needs servants and crew.

Newsweek writes that offshore havens seem to be a pattern among the rich members of Trump’s cabinet, you know, the ones who say “America First,” but only for the peons:

When someone untied a yacht owned by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s family, the episode was portrayed as an example of anti-Trump harassment. But the yacht’s foreign flag illustrated how an allegedly “America First” administration is full of moguls who have stashed their wealth offshore in ways that help them avoid taxes, regulations, transparency requirements and domestic employment laws.

We already know that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s family shipping consortium routes its business through the Marshall Islands—a notoriously secretive tax haven. Federal records detail how Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton and Federal Reserve board appointee Randal Quarles held parts of their personal fortunes in investments based in the Cayman Islands, which are not necessarily required to adhere to America’s domestic financial regulations.

Now there’s DeVos, one of the heirs of Amway’s multilevel marketing empire. When the family’s 164-foot yacht was untethered from a Huron, Ohio, dock, it was flying a flag of the Cayman Islands, where the yacht is registered, according to VesselTracker. According to federal records, the yacht is owned by RDV International Marine, which is an affiliate of the company that controls the DeVos family’s fortune…

When buying a vessel or cruising in U.S. waters, American yacht owners like the DeVos family could face state sales or use taxes like those most nonyacht owners face on everything else. However, registering a yacht in a locale like the Caymans—under what has come to be known as a “flag of convenience”—allows those American yacht owners to effectively characterize themselves as foreigners for tax purposes, thereby avoiding the obligation of paying the standard levies…

DeVos’s yacht is reportedly one of 10 in the family’s fleet and is worth $40 million. If the vessel was registered in, say, Grand Rapids, Michigan—the state where RDV is located and that has in the past made an effort to compel yacht owners to pay use taxes—the Seaquest would likely be subject to Michigan’s 6 percent use tax. That would require the DeVos empire to cough up about $2.4 million: public revenues that help finance the kind of police services that the DeVos yacht crew called when the boat was untied. With the Cayman flag fluttering on its deck, the family can avoid the levy even as it cruises the Great Lakes.

Another incentive for yacht owners to register offshore is the potential to avoid stricter inspection and safety standards required for U.S.-registered vessels of a certain size.

“If someone is buying a boat that is above 300 gross tons but below 500 gross tons, getting registered offshore means they can avoid being subject to U.S. Coast Guard inspection and certification requirements as either a ‘seagoing motor vessel’ or a ‘passenger vessel,’” said maritime attorney Mark J. Buhler. “The most commonly used offshore yacht registries have comprehensive large yacht safety codes that were specifically developed for large yachts, whereas the U.S. Coast Guard regulations and inspection requirements applicable to ‘seagoing motor vessels’ or ‘passenger vessels’ were created many years ago principally for vessels engaged in trade, and not really having large yachts in mind. Those requirements do not translate well to yachts, and most yachts are simply not designed or built to those particular standards.”

The DeVos yacht is 492 gross tons, according to MarineTraffic.

If you are a billionaire, there are so many details to weigh you down. Of course, you have a multitude of lawyers, accountants, fixers, go-fers. But who will manage all of them?

Poor, poor billionaires. So many problems.

What do the simple folk do?
(h/t, “Camelot”)

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires

Should Republican Billionaires Pick Democratic Candidates? Attention, Politico Morning Education.

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2018 //
47

In the education world, we have become accustomed to the intrusion of billionaires into local and state school board races, bundling money for candidates committed to privatizing—not helping—our public schools. The most prominent such group calls itself Democrats for Education Reform, but we have no way of knowing whether its contributors are Republicans or Democrats. Some of its most prominent members are billionaires who donate to both parties, depending on which candidate is likeliest to protect charter schools and low taxes.

This post in the Blog “Crooks & Liars” notes a broader phenomenon of Republican billionaires inserting their money into Democratic primaries to choose rightwing candidates.

I noted on Twitter and on this blog that Politico’s Morning Education recently published a lengthy interview with DFER spokesmen about where they plan to target their millions, which school board elections they plan to invade, without noting that DFER represents Wall Street and contains not a single educator in its midst. Politico didn’t bother to question why hedge fund managers in New York and Connecticut are swaying elections in Colorado and California. Nor did they point out that DFER was censured by the Democratic parties in both states, which said they stop calling themselves Democrats because they represent corporate interests. I don’t know nor does Politico whether DFER is actually a Republican front group with one or two show Democrats.

Politico Morning Education has NEVER interviewed a critic of Corporate Reform, has NEVER discussed the distorting effect of outside money bundled by hedge funders on state and local school board elections. Why do the Waltons—a fiercely anti-union, anti-public school family of billionaires—invest in school board elections across the nation? Why is this story NEVER reported by Politico? Why do they keep hands off the billionaires intent on privatizing public schools?

Conversely, why has Politico never seen fit to interview public school supporters other than National Union leaders? Why have they never interviewed Carol Burris or Anthony Cody or Julian Vasquez Heilig or Jesse Hagopian or the BATS?

When the Network for Public Education released a carefully researched 50-State report ranking states on their support for public schools, Politico did not consider it worthy of even a mention, let alone a paragraph with a link to the report.

What gives at Politico Morning Education?

Categories Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Colorado, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Reform

Andrew Hartman on “DeVos Democrats”

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2018 //
64

Somehow I missed this article when it was published in January 2017. It is well worth reading because it explains how the mainstream of the Democratic Party paved the way for the radical rightwing DeVos agenda.

Unless the Democrats regain their pro-public education values, they will cede a significant part of their base. They cheered striking teachers in the spring of 2018, but they long ago abandoned them and their schools.

It is time for Democrats to once again be the party that fights for the common good, the party that supports public schools, not school choice, which is a mighty hoax. Charter schools are partial privatization that lack oversight or accountability, this opening possibilities of waste, fraud and abuse. On average, they don’t get better test scores than public schools. Those that do choose their students and skew the demographics. Voucher schools get worse results and are free of any civil rights laws.

Hartman could have named many more Democrats who abandoned public schools, starting with DFER. Dannel Malloy of Connecticut. Andrew Cuomo of New York. Please feel free to add to the list..

Hartman wrote last year:

“American public schools have some very serious problems. Spend time in the crumbling public schools on the south side of Chicago and then venture over to the plush public schools in the leafy Chicago suburbs, and you’ll experience alternative universes. Schools all over the greater Chicagoland are filled with committed and professional teachers, some quite excellent. But the students who attend the city schools arrive at school with stark disadvantages, unlike their better-off suburban peers. Discrepancies in school funding only exacerbate such class deficits.

“Most of the problems with the public schools, in other words, are outgrowths of a deeply unequal society. Yet the solution to this problem — the redistribution of wealth — is inimical to the interests of billionaires like DeVos. The fact that she will soon be in charge of the nation’s schools is a sick joke. Make no mistake: DeVos is a serious threat to public education and should be treated accordingly.

“Unfortunately, many Democrats have long supported the same so-called education reform measures that DeVos backs. Often wrapping these measures in civil rights language, Democratic education reformers have provided cover for some of the worst types of reforms, including promoting the spread of charter schools — the preferred liberal mechanism for fulfilling the “choice” agenda. (Charter schools operate with public money, but without much public oversight, and are therefore often vehicles for pet pedagogical projects of billionaire educational philanthropists like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.)

“DeVos will not have to completely reverse the Department of Education’s course in order to fulfill her agenda. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the brainchild of former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, past CEO of Chicago Public Schools — allocates scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing education reform measures, particularly around charter schools.

“Perhaps the most effective advocate of school choice is New Jersey senator Cory Booker, who many Democrats are touting as the party’s savior in the post-Obama era. Liberals swooned when Booker opposed his Senate colleague Jeff Sessions, the right-wing racist Trump tapped to be the next attorney general. But however laudable, Booker’s actions didn’t take much in the way of courage.

“Booker’s funders — hedge-fund managers and pharmaceutical barons — don’t care about such theatrics. They’re more concerned that he vote Big Pharma’s way and keep up his role as a leading member of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-privatization group. They want to make sure he continues attacking teachers’ unions, the strongest bulwark against privatization.

“Their aim is to undercut public schools and foster union-free charter schools, freeing the rich from having to pay teachers as unionized public servants with pensions.

“So in the fight against Trump and DeVos, we can’t give Booker and his anti-union ilk a pass. As enablers of DeVos’s privatization agenda, they too must be delegitimized.

“Public education depends on it. The beautiful school where I send my children depends on it.“

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Privatization

Nancy Bailey: What is Bill Gates’ End Game for Teachers and Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2018 //
19

Nancy Bailey reviews the latest failure of Bill Gates in his efforts to reinvent public education.

This is just the latest in a long series of failures for Gates.

She asks, what is he really aiming for?

It is not to make schools better, but to make them unnecessary. The goal: using technology to tailor education to each child.

“All of this will lead to:

-No more teachers.
-No more public schools.
-Students using technology anyplace, anytime.
-Technology in charter schools.
-Continuous online assessment.
-No more privacy rules.
-Connecting children with workforce needs.

His acumen is to put down the seed money and get you to pay for his next experiment.

No accountability for him as he wrecks your schools with his latest brainstorm.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Philanthropy, Teacher Evaluations, Technology

Randi Weingarten: The Right-Wing Assault on Unions Won’t Win: It Just Makes Us Angrier

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2018 //
38

Randi Weingarten wrote this commentary in Education Week about the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which ruled that people do not have to pay agency fees to unions, thus allowing them to collect benefits negotiated by the union without paying dues.

The final day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 term may have been overshadowed by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement, but in one of two important cases decided that day, the court overturned four decades of precedent to bar public-sector unions from charging fees to nonmembers who enjoy the benefits of a union contract.

On its face, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 claimed to be about free speech. But the right-wing forces behind it admitted a detailed plan to “defund and defang” unions and dismantle their political power. That’s according to documents obtained by The Guardian from the State Policy Network—a national alliance that includes the primary Janus-backer, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, as an associate member.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the precedent established by the court’s 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education ruling was embedded in the nation’s law and its economic life. It ensured the labor peace that gave teachers, firefighters, nurses, police, and other public-sector employees a path to a better life. It made communities more resilient and kept public services strong.

In Janus, the plaintiffs weaponized the First Amendment from its original purpose of securing the political freedom necessary for democracy by arguing compulsory union fees violated free speech. By a 5-4 majority, the court put the interests of billionaires over established law and basic principle—just as Justice Kennedy did with his deciding vote in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. The right wing’s thirst for power again trumped the aspirations of communities and the people who serve them.

Janus will, of course, hurt unions, but most importantly—and by design—it will hurt workers. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Unions are still the best vehicle working people have to get ahead. Workers covered by a union contract earn 13.2 percent more than comparable workers in nonunionized workplaces, and they are far more likely to have employer-sponsored health insurance, paid leave, and retirement benefits, according to a 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute. Unions negotiate everything from manageable class sizes to safety equipment for emergency personnel.
Unions help make possible what would be impossible for individuals acting alone.

For the American Federation of Teachers’ 1.75 million members (our largest membership ever, and growing—we’ve added a quarter million in the last decade), Janus poses opportunities as well as threats. In the face of right-wing attacks on public education and labor, we have come to understand that when we walk the walk with the community, we become exponentially more powerful.

Years before Janus, the AFT embarked on a plan to talk with every one of our members on issues that matter—supporting public education, creating good jobs that support a middle-class life, securing high-quality and affordable health care, pursuing affordable higher education, fighting discrimination and bigotry, and defending democracy and pluralism. Whether you lean conservative or liberal, higher wages, a voice at work, safe schools, and a functioning democracy are American values.

Since January, all over the country, more than half a million of our members signed new cards recommitting to the union, and that number is growing. Many of the AFT’s 3,500 local affiliates are reporting that 90 percent or more of their members have recommitted.

After the Janus decision hit, groups funded by the Koch brothers and the DeVos family launched their own campaigns, urging Los Angeles Unified School District teachers to “give themselves a raise” by dropping the union. Think about it—not only did U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos attend the Janus oral arguments at the Supreme Court (while not bothering to put it on her public schedule), her fortune is funding the post-Janus assault on unions.
When our members at AFT discover the special interests behind these “opt out” campaigns, they get extra mad. You only need to look at Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia to show that when salaries and benefits are stripped away, the response can be intense—and righteous. In Los Angeles, 34,000 members of the local union affiliate were contacted by those Koch- and DeVos-linked groups trying to get them to opt out. So far, only one member has….

We are in a race for the soul of our country. But if we really double down, if we fight not only for what’s right but for what the vast majority of Americans believe, working people—not Janus’ wealthy funders—will emerge as the real winners.

Categories Billionaires, Equity, Justice, Unions

Tom Ultican: iReady, Privatization, Blended Learning, and the Assault on Public Education

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2018 //
11

Tom Ultican pulls together four divergent strands of the effort to undermine public education, and iReady seems to be the tie that binds them together.

He writes:

“iReady is an economically successful software product used in public schools, by homeschoolers and in private schools. It utilizes the blended learning practices endorsed by the recently updated federal education law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). iReady employs competency-based education (CBE) theory which is also advocated by ESSA. The outcome is iReady drains money from classrooms, applies federally supported failed learning theories and undermines good teaching. Children hate it.

“Public education in America contends with four dissimilar but not separate attacks. The school choice movement is motivated by people who want government supported religious schools, others who want segregated schools and still others who want to profit from school management and the related real estate deals. The forth big threat is from the technology industry which uses their wealth and lobbying power to not only force their products into the classroom, but to mandate “best practices” for teaching. These four streams of attack are synergistic.”

What does iReady have to do with the big picture?

“Profiting from Education Law

“A group of billionaires with varying motives are using their vast wealth to shape America’s education agenda to their own liking. The last rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 called ESSA was larded up with provisions like the big money for technology which is listed in Title’s I and IV. It also specifies generous grants to promote both “blended learning” and “personalized learning.” (See page 1969 of the official law.) Charter schools, vouchers and social impact bonds are promoted in ESSA. All these initiatives drain money from the classroom and none have been credibly shown to improve education outcomes.”

Read the tangled web that Tom Ultican unweaves.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Blended Learning, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Technology

Jan Resseger: The Janus Decision Weakens the Common Good

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2018 //
14

Make no mistake: the Janus Decision is a victory for plutocrats and corporations. As Jan Resseger argues here, it is an attack on working people that will weaken them in their efforts to enter the middle class.

It will weaken every public sector unions, not just teachers, but police, firefighters, social workers, and many others. It is a victory for the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the same people trying to cripple public schools, Medicare, Social Security, and the principle of government of, by, and for the people.

She writes:

“Weakening public sector unions is part of the far-right corporate political agenda. Political economist Gordon Lafer describes the impact of the the Red-wave 2010 election that turned more than half the states all-Republican: “For the corporate lobbies and their legislative allies, the 2010 elections created a strategic opportunity to restructure labor relations, political power, and the size of government… Starting in 2011, the country has witnessed an unprecedented wave of legislation aimed at eliminating public employee unions, or where they remain, strictly limiting their right to bargain… The number of public sector jobs eliminated in 2011 was the highest ever recorded, and budgets for essential public services were dramatically scaled back in dozens of states.” (The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time, pp. 44-45)”

The champagne corks were popping yesterday at ALEC, the Center for Education Reform, the Heritage Foundation, and all the other habitats of the corporate elites.

Categories Billionaires

How Elon Musk Educates His Own Children

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2018 //
20

Reading this article, I couldn’t help but think of a song from “Camelot,” called “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” about Royalty speculating on how the peasants amuse themselves when they are feeling down. In the last stanza, Richard Burton and Julie Andrews agree that the simple folk sit around and wonder what the Royalty do.

What do the billionaires do when they educate their own children?

Elon Musk invented a school for his children.

In a corner of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company’s usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs.

Those at Ad Astra still find time for a quick game of dodgeball at lunch, however, because the average age within this group is just 10 years old.

Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk’s sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his sons’ teachers, the CEO founded Ad Astra to “exceed traditional school metrics on all relevant subject matter through unique project-based learning experiences,” according to a previously unreported document filed with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

“I just didn’t see that the regular schools were doing the things that I thought should be done,” he told a Chinese TV station in 2015. “So I thought, well let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school will be better.”

In an atmosphere closer to a venture capital incubator than a traditional school, today’s Ad Astra students undertake challenging technical projects, trade using their own currency, and can opt out of subjects they don’t enjoy. Children from 7 to 14 years old work together in teams, with few formal assessments and no grades handed out.

Ad Astra’s principal hopes that the school will revolutionize education in the same way Tesla has disrupted transportation, and SpaceX the rocket industry. But as Musk’s sons near graduation age, the future of Ad Astra is unclear. Will Musk maintain interest in the school once his children move on? And even if he does, can a school of fewer than 40 students ever be anything more than a high-tech crèche for already-privileged children?

Read on. If money is no object…the first things to go are grades and tests.

Categories Billionaires, Innovation

Understanding the Janus Decision

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2018 //
46

The Supreme Court is expected to rule, perhaps tomorrow or next week, on the Janus case.

In this five-minute video, Celine McNicholas of the Economic Policy Institute explains why this decision matters, whom it will affect, and who is funding it.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform

Henry Giroux: Striking Teachers Fight for Public Education and the Public is With Them

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2018 //
41

Henry Giroux places the recent wave of teacher strikes in historical perspective. The teachers are fighting a battle on behalf of the public good against an assault by reactionary neoliberalism.

He writes:

“The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism in which they and their students are treated with little respect, dignity and value. They have had enough of corrupt politicians, hedge fund managers and civically illiterate pundits seduced by the power of the corporate and political demagogues who are waging a war on critical teaching, critical pedagogy and the creativity and autonomy of classroom teachers.

“Since the 1980s, an extreme form of capitalism — or what in the current moment I want to call neoliberal fascism — has waged a war against public education and all vestiges of the common good and social contract. In addition, this is a war rooted in class and gender discrimination — one that deskills teachers, exploits their labor and bears down particularly hard on women, who make up a dominant segment of the teaching force. In doing so, it not only undermines schooling as a public good, but also weaponizes and weakens the formative cultures, values and social relations that enable schools to create the conditions for students to become critical and engaged citizens.

“Schools have been underfunded, increasingly privatized and turned into testing factories that deliver poor students of color to the violence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Moreover, they have also been restructured in order to weaken unions, subject teachers to horrendous working conditions and expose students to overcrowded classrooms. In some cases, the dire working environment and dilapidated conditions of schools and classrooms appear incomprehensible in the richest nation in the world…

“Moreover, as state and corporate violence engulfs the entire society, schools have been subject to forms of extreme violence that in the past existed exclusively outside of their doors. Under such circumstances, youth are increasingly viewed as suspects and are targeted both by a gun culture that places profits above student lives and by a neoliberal machinery of cruelty, misery and violence dedicated to widespread educational failure. Instead of imbuing students with a sense of ethical and social responsibility while preparing them for a life of social and economic mobility, public schools have been converted into high-tech security spheres whose defining principles are fear, uncertainty and anxiety. In this view, a corporate vision of the U.S. has reduced the culture of schooling to the culture of business and an armed camp, and in doing so, imposed a real and symbolic threat of violence on schools, teachers and students. As such, thinking has become the enemy of freedom, and profits have become more important than human lives…

“Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.”

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform
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