Maria Bustillos writes here about “the smallness of Mark Zuckerberg” and why you should not give your personal information to Facebook.
She thinks he is running for President. The current occupant of the White House has demonstrated that anyone can do it and win, regardless of qualifications.
Beware.
We should have learned from Trump not to entrust our democracy to a billionaire with an inflated ego.
Peter Greene warns that it is a mistake to think that Betsy DeVos is a dope. She is not. She doesn’t really care about educating all children, although she thinks she should pretend to. Her thinking is in a different place, shaped by her fundamentalist, evangelical views.
“Here’s another theory. Let’s assume that getting a good education to every child is not a goal. Let’s assume instead that the goal is to have education functioning on the free market, free of public institutions and government meddling. Let’s assume that seeing some businesses prosper and profit is further proof that the market is working properly. Let’s assume that directing public money to religious schools at the expense of government programs is a desirable and commendable outcome. In fact, let’s assume that in such a system, having some schools and students sink to the bottom is a desirable outcome, because the free market is supposed to reward the deserving and allow the undeserving to sink to the low level where they belong. And if gutting public education has the effect of gutting unions and taking power away from those damn Godless Democrats, well, that’s only right, too…
”Looking at that smile, I was reminded of an old Christian admonition- “Be in this world, but not of this world.”
“It’s a view that people of faith, people who have been elevated by a relationship with a personal Lord and Savior, do not actually belong in this dirty, debased world. The rules of this world cannot be their rules. To achieve Godly goals, they may have to use worldy tools, even pretend to go along with worldly rules, but this is stooping to achieve a higher purpose. God will even give His chosen tools (like earthly wealth and political power), but they must avoid being seduced by worldly things, including a desire for worldly acclaim and recognition. That means, among other things, that the Chosen don’t owe these earthly, debased, going-to-hell persons an explanation. You can be in the world with these people, and maybe feel sorry for them, but there is no need to connect with them– you are almost like two separate species, passing each other for a brief moment as you travel to two separate destinations, you to eternal glory in Heaven, and they to endless damnation in Hell.
“So you smile. You smile hard, because it shows that you’re still better than they are, and that you haven’t stooped to their level. You smile even as they say mean things about you, because if the people of this world mount powerful forces against you, it’s just further proof that you are right (and they are wrong). In fact, you are so right, and so sure of it, that real conversations with them aren’t necessary because what could you learn from people who are so low and earthly and wrong? But you go through the motions to show that you’re the bigger person, and because sometimes worldly tools must be used to achieve divine goals. You smile.
“Betsy DeVos’s smile is the smile of Dolores Umbrage or the Church Lady. It’s an angry, flinty smile, a smile that says, “I am in this world, but I am not of it, and some day I will rise above it and leave you behind.”
Not having Peter’s insight into fundamentalist theology, I tend to think of that perpetual smile as a smirk. I call it the billionaire’s smirk: “I am very, very, very rich, and you are not. Nothing you say can diminish my wealth and power.” It is a smirk of smugness and condescension.
As retired high school teacher Tom Ultican writes: This makes no sense.
The California Association of School Administrators endorsed Marshall Tuck, the candidate of the privatization movement, in the race for State Superintendent of Instruction, and snubbed Tony Thurmond, a steadfast friend of public education.
The Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) Back-Stabs Public Education
Read his post to see where Tuck’s money comes from. It’s the Destroy Public Education Movement.
The old familiar faces. Walton, Broad, Jobs,Hastings, Fischer. And more that you will recognize.
I urge my friends in California to vote for Tony Thurmond. He supports public schools, and we should support him.
Betty Casey is an award-winning journalist and blogger in Tulsa.
In this post, she summarizes the multiple failures of the Billionaire reformers, who do not include a single educator in their ranks. The GatesFoundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation are seeking to transform America’s public schools, yet every one of their big ideas has failed. People line up to take their money because they have so much money.
Casey details the numerous failed Superintendents endorsed by the Btoad Superintendents Academy, and she only scratches the surface. Many communities know by now that hiring a Broadie spells trouble and strife.
She gives a valuable overview of the Lies That Reformers Tell to gain control of entire districts. She warns her fellow Tulsans against taking Gates money.
Don’t be fooled. Another phony organization has set up shop in New York to cut taxes, attack unions, and reduce government services.
It is called Reclaim New York.
It wants to eliminate waste and corruption. So do we all.
The founder, chair, director, and treasurer is Rebekah Mercer, who has been the financial backer of Breitbart and Steve Bannon (she is said to have cut off Bannon after the expose “Fire and Fury” was published, which quotes Bannon extensively about Trump’s flaws). Her father is billionaire Robert Mercer, who bankrolls the alt-right.
Reclaim New York incorporated in 2013 as a tax-exempt nonprofit. Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and a mastermind behind Trump’s nationalist campaign, was a founding director. Laurence Levy, a longtime associate of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, filed the paperwork.
The stated mission was to be non-partisan. Tax filings show that the Mercer Family Foundation provided about $1.3 million of Reclaim’s $2 million in revenue during its first three years, including the group’s entire $1.25 million in revenue in 2015, the most recent year for which filings are publicly available.
Muir refused to say what Reclaim’s budget is now or who else is funding operations.
In 2016, a related organization called Reclaim New York Initiative incorporated as what’s technically called a “social welfare organization.” Such organizations have earned the moniker “dark money” groups because they can typically shield the names of donors from the public. New York State rules, however, do require some disclosure.
It’s through this entity that Reclaim does its lobbying.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway was a founding director of Reclaim New York Initiative. Disclosure forms filed with New York state show Robert Mercer provided $70,855 in March last year to launch the lobbying unit.
One of Reclaim’s most visible projects is building a giant, searchable database of government spending. The group says it has filed 2,500 public records requests with government agencies across the state, including tiny villages and school districts, asking for their “checkbooks” — records of all expenditures in a given year.
Reclaim sued 11 local agencies for either denying the requests or not complying quickly enough. When it won, Reclaim fought for lawyers’ fees. One Rockland County village implored the judge to impose what it called “The Mercer Mercy Rule” and not require the cash-strapped village to pay the legal bills for the billionaire’s nonprofit. The judge agreed.
The group also holds workshops across the state in hotel conference rooms, restaurants and other local gathering spots. The events feature a presentation on New York’s “affordability crisis” and training on how to use public-records laws to keep an eye on local officials.
Watch out for Reclaim New York. It wants to destroy our state and local governments.
Karen Wolfe, parent activist in California, reports that Marshall Tuck—candidate for state superintendent of schools— is once again the candidate of the privatizers. She learned that he recently returned a gift of $5,000 to an anti-gay crusader.
More troubling is the money he did not return.
She writes:
”Tuck’s donors include Doris Fisher (whose Gap retail company has faced numerous child labor scandals), Eli Broad (a former top investor at AIG whose non-accredited Broad Academy trains privatizing “education leaders”), Alice Walton (the anti-labor heir to the Walmart fortune), Reed Hastings (a Silicon Valley billionaire who has tried for years to take away the right of local voters to elect their own school boards.)
“Tuck’s campaign is also apparently being funded by political action committees, despite its pledge last August that it “has not accepted—and will not accept—contributions from companies or PACs.”
“On January 11, Tuck’s campaign reported receiving $23,725 and $37,430 from a group called Govern for California, chaired by George Penner, husband of Walmart heir Carrie Walton Penner, as well as $5,000 from Fieldstead & Co.”
“Fisher, Walton, Broad, and Hastings are leading financiers of the movement to privatize public schools. Ironically, while California is a blue state, its Silicon Valley billionaires have funded an aggressive and politically powerful movement to destroy public schools and replace them with charter schools.
”The primary election will be held on June 5, with the general election this November.
“Tuck’s opponent, Tony Thurmond, is a social worker, former school board member, and current member of the state assembly. He has been endorsed by Senator Kamala Harris, U.S. Congressional Representatives Barbara Lee, Eric Swalwell, and Karen Bass, and the teachers’ union.
“Tuck, on the other hand, has the same pro-privatizing platform that voters rejected when he ran for the position four years ago. It’s the same education platform of Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and John Kasich, and Vice President Mike Pence: Deregulate public education, outsource school services, make it harder for teachers to gain tenure, and expand the market of “school choice.””
Warren Buffett said his company benefitted mightily from the GOP tax “reform.”
A $29 Billion plum.
””The $65 billion gain is nonetheless real – rest assured of that. But only $36 billion came from Berkshire’s operations. The remaining $29 billion was delivered to us in December when Congress rewrote the U.S. Tax Code.”
I wonder what the Koch brothers and DeVos family got?
One of the nation’s leading corporate education reform groups— Families for Excellent Schools—has collapsed. It adopted a name to suggest that it spoke for poor black and Hispanic families, but the families it represented were wealthy financiers from Wall Street, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Walton Family, and the Eli Broad family.
This is the group that spent millions to run ads attacking Mayor deBlasio when he had the gall to challenge Eva Moskowitz’s demand for free space in public schools and the right to force the city to pay for any space she was required to rent. Eva had the support of the powerful financiers of FES and Governor Cuomo, and together they beat DeBlasio and taught him not to challenge Queen Eva.
FES expanded to Massachusetts and poured millions of “Dark Money” (undisclosed names) into the referendum battle to lift the cap on charter schools. After the election, the state investigated the millions in outside money that poured into the race, fined FES nearly half a million dollars for failing to identify its donors, and banned them from operating in the state for four years.
Then came the embarrassment this week when FES was compelled to fire its leader, Jeremiah Kittredge, for inappropriate sexual behavior with a non-employee. As Politico reported, Kittredge was one of the most prominent reform leaders in the nation. But he acted like a jerk, making stupid vulgar comments about a woman’s breasts at an education reform conference, the Philos retreat. Kittredge was one of Eva Moskowitz’s closest advisors.
Then today came this announcement:
**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE** FEBRUARY 5, 2018
New York, NY – Statement from Bryan Lawrence, Board Chair of Families for Excellent Schools:
“This is a sad day for everyone at Families for Excellent Schools. We are very proud of the work we’ve done to help thousands of families stand up for educational opportunity in their communities, and believe our vision of a world where every child has access to an excellent school has never been more important.
“Unfortunately, after a series of challenges over the past year and particularly given recent events, we have determined that the support necessary to keep the organization going is not there. We are beginning the process of winding down our work. I want to thank all those who have given their heart and soul to this organization since its inception; I know they will continue to advocate for the families and communities we serve.”
Mercedes Schneider wrote about the fall of this phony group here:
Families for Excellent Schools (FES) Is Shutting Down. Marvelous.
Politico explained the declining fortunes of FES this way (and hedged on whether FES was closing partially or completely):
The pro-charter group has seen its fortunes decline sharply over the last year. Its influence in New York has waned as de Blasio has largely declined to criticize charters and much of the local press turned its attention away from Families for Excellent Schools’ relentless schedule of rallies and press releases aimed at pressuring the mayor.
By 2016, the expensive rallies the group was best known for were no longer leading to policy wins at the city or state level, and the strategy was eventually abandoned.
And most crucially, the group suffered a disastrous political defeat in late 2016 from which it never fully recovered, sources say. After funnelling $20 million into a pro-charter ballot initiative in Massachusetts known as Question 2, the question was defeated at the polls by 25 points.
Several sources indicated its once-prolific fundraising became significantly more challenging in the aftermath of the Massachusetts loss.
So, the big rallies with the matching T-shirts were no longer impressing politicians. The money was drying up. The executive director was caught in an embarrassing moment of monumental grossness.
Sad. The ed reform movement seems to be cracking up. Students First, gone. FES, gone. Who is next?
ADDENDUM:
Correction by a reader:
“Jeremiah Kittredge’s behavior was not just “an embarrassing moment of monumental grossness.”
“Jeremiah Kittredge guy was a serial creep. Consensual or not, Jeremiah was basically f—ing his way through the Families for Excellent Schools headquarters:
“POLITICO: “Kittredge has been involved in multiple consensual sexual relationships with colleagues throughout his relatively brief career in education reform, including at least one employee who reported directly to him, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation.”
“That’s from here:
“Jeremiah picked the wrong year(s) to be engaging in this kind of Don-Draper-in-Mad-Men type carousing. (Mad Men took place in the early to mid 1960’s) Given the current MeToo/Times Up atmosphere, his behavior was / is monumentally anachronistic.”
One of my favorite non-education bloggers is Andrew Tobias (except on the rare occasions when he ventures into education), who cuts through the economic morass with a fine scalpel and recognizes Trump for the phony that he is. I subscribe (free) at AndrewTobias.com. He gave me his permission to post his latest. Open here to read his links.
Tobias writes:
YOU Get $930! And YOU Get $930!”
John Grund, one of your fellow readers, offers this wonderfully clear analysis (thank you, John):
Here’s another way to think about the Republican tax bill: Think like an owner.
Sit down quietly and let your mind inventory all that you own as an American. I like to start with the Statue of Liberty. It was a gift from France to the American people; I’m an American person, so that includes me. And the Park Service charges admission, so there’s that.
From there, I like to fly over the country in my mind, surveying all that you and I own. All the beaches and waterways. All the roads and bridges. All the public lands and forests. All the great national landmarks and parks. All the wonderful buildings our fathers and mothers built for us: the libraries and colleges and theaters.
Take your time. It takes time to even touch on how much there is. The public hospitals and clinics. The harbors and canals. The lighthouses and navigation markers. The reservoirs, rivers, lakes and water systems. The radio and television airwaves. The courts and city halls and schools. The warships, guns and warplanes.
And now reflect that corporations are granted a charter by the state (which you and I own, of course) that allows them to do business. And think of corporate taxes as the rent those corporations pay for using all that we own – the roads to deliver their products, the monetary system the underpins commerce, the police to keep their trucks safe, the schools to train their workers, the military to protect it all.
The Republican tax bill cuts the rent you earn on all that property. The corporate tax rate drops from 35 percent to 21 percent of profits.
Now perhaps you are a gracious and benevolent landlord, and you say you don’t really mind giving your renters a break. You’re feeling generous.
But remember you have a mortgage against all that property, too. It’s the national debt, and you use the rents – the taxes – you receive as owner to pay off that mortgage. And remember that the rents have to pay for upkeep on all that property. Are the roads and bridges in great shape, with plenty of money squirreled away to keep them that way? Or are they in dire need of long-delayed maintenance and restoration?
This is one case where it is right to think like an owner, because that is what you are. Be a calculating landlord when you consider the Republican tax bill.
Isn’t that kinda great?
One could certainly tinker with the implementation. For example, how about revenue-neutral corporate tax reform? Adopt the more-globally-competitive 21% were adopted — but pay for it by closing loopholes that most big corporations have been using to pay far less than the nominal 35% rate.
But the gist of John’s essay, I think, is exactly right.
Again, I urge you to watch Reagan budget director David Stockman’s critique of the massively ill-advised tax cut.
And again, note how beyond nuts — how bizarro-world — it is that this tax bill, designed to help the middle class (yeah, right), and that’s gonna cost Trump a fortune, “believe me” (yeah right), includes a special provision for real estate developers like Trump.
I’m all for the much-heralded $1,000 bonuses a few million employees (maybe 5% of American workers?) have gotten from corporate employers . . . perhaps in part to curry favor with the strong man in the White House, perhaps in part to help Republicans hold Congress in the next election, and surely in part because they’d like to do something nice for their valued employees. That’s great.
And I’m all for the modest but real tax breaks many middle-class Americans will see (if we can afford them; though: can we afford them?). Bloomberg estimates $930 a year for people in the middle fifth of taxpayers ($60 for people in the bottom fifth). But don’t you get it? The motivation here is to help those at the top. You get $930! And you get $930! And you get $930! And — if I’m in the top 1% — I get $51,140. Unless I’m in the top tenth of that group — $193,380. Unless I’m in the top tenth of that group — where Trump and his friend Carl Icahn and his pal Wilbur Ross and his pals Sheldon Adelson and the Mercers and Betsy Devos presumably are. That number Bloomberg doesn’t even try to estimate, but it would be a lot higher.
When the ultra-rich were taxed at a 90% top federal tax rate (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower), it was too high (though designed to lower our National Debt, relative to the economy as a whole, which it did help do). And when they were taxed at 70% (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter) it was still too high (though it, too, helped shrink the Debt relative to the economy as a whole). Even when they were taxed at 50% (Reagan’s first cut), I would argue it may have been too high.
But, with his second cut, Reagan, and then Bush 43, and now Trump have exploded the National Debt — borrowing not to build infrastructure that’s been crumbling for 35 years, but to enrich the already-rich by cutting their taxes to record-low levels.
Criminal.
Well, not literally. But immoral.
And dishonest (Bush told us “by far the vast majority” of his tax cut would go to people “at the bottom”).
And . . . well, tragic.
Only Clinton and Obama managed to turn the deficits around, leaving their successors with economies growing faster than the debt . . . thus shrinking the debt relative to the economy as a whole.
This massively irresponsible Republican tax cut reverses that, once more. It puts us back over $1 trillion in deficit spending . . . gets the debt growing faster than the economy again, as under Reagan, Bush, and Bush . . . and is sold to the voters as, “Look! You get $930! And you get $930!” (And me? Don’t bother your pretty little head with that. If you can’t trust Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Devin Nunez and Vladimir Putin — Trump trusts him, why shouldn’t we? — whom can you trust?)
Right?
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In the case of the money-hungry DeVos family, you find what they care about by what they invest in. Or invested in.
PR watch reviewed the list a year ago.
She had big investments in student debt collection. That’s a money maker.
Why does a billionaire need more? That’s above my pay grade. What do you think?
