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A Billionaire Stops Funding Charters and TFA, Starts Funding Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2018 //
46

The richest woman in Connecticut no longer gives to charter schools and Teach for America. Barbara Dalio has shifted her giving to public schools.

She fell in love with public education.

She fell in love with the schools that take everyone, even the least of them, the children that the charters reject.

She got woke.

In the past three years alone, the foundation, which Barbara co-founded with her husband, has donated $50 million to public education programs in Connecticut.

“I never thought I would get into education because it’s not my background, so I am learning as I go along,” she said. “I love it. I don’t play golf or tennis. This is my passion.”

Connecticut Adds Two More Billionaires To The Forbes 400 List. Here’s A Look At All Nine Members.
Dalio, 70, who is universally described as humble and hands-on, said in an interview last week that her shift toward traditional public school districts came about as she learned more about education and became concerned about the achievement gap and students who are disengaged from school.

Dalio said she observed that the kids who go to public charter schools have parents who are often more involved and have the initiative to seek out an alternative for their child.

But many parents, she said, don’t have the time to do that.

“It’s not that they don’t care about the kids,” Dalio said of those parents. “It’s that they are burdened in many instances with just one parent having two or three jobs. That really struck me.”

It’s a shift that some of the wealthy donors that have focused on charters and other reform efforts are also making in recent years, some experts say.

A few years ago, there was a feeling among some wealthy donors that giving to local neighborhood schools might be a waste of money, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies with the American Enterprise Institute.

“Now the zeitgeist has changed,” said Hess. “TFA [Teach for America] and charter schooling are more controversial than they were eight or 10 years ago for various reasons and after the teacher strikes, teachers are more sympathetic. There’s a sense that if you’re a wealthy person and you’re trying to give away dollars in a way that you feel good about, you might make different choices in 2018 than you did in 2008.”

When Dalio arrived as an immigrant from Spain in her 20s, she knew very little about the American educational system except that she saw it is as inspiring.

“One of the things that struck me was all the people that succeeded or were able to have a very good education just through the public schools,” Dalio said. “I just admire that democratic side that the United States has. I don’t know if it still has it but I thought it was so amazing that anyone of any social class can just go to a public school and get a great education.”

Dalio, who lives in Greenwich, learned more about the public schools as she raised her four sons who attended both public and private schools and had very different needs and learning styles.

“I didn’t have a formula that would work for all of them, so I had to be very nimble and had to rely on teachers to help me help them,” Dalio said. “So that’s how my love for teachers started because they were always really there for me and for them. They were very caring.”

As the family’s foundation was expanding, Dalio said, “I really felt for the public schools and I really wanted to be helpful.”

But she realized she needed to be educated. So she began volunteering at an alternative high school in Norwalk where she started coming in once every two weeks and soon was up to two or three times a week.

“I learned really how many needs the kids have because they had kids with learning differences, kids that have had trauma in their lives, kids with emotional needs,” Dalio said, as well as kids who are hungry. “So it really is challenging for the school, the teachers to address all of those needs, especially with [budget] cuts” that eliminate social workers or mental health programs, she said.

Dalio said she learned through the alternative school and also with her own children, one of whom has bipolar disorder, that all children can succeed if given the right the services and help.

Her own son is in very good shape now, she said, “but it took a lot of resources and patience and time and you know if we didn’t succeed, he could have been just one of those kids.”

“So I always feel a bit for the underdog … or the kids that don’t have opportunities and I see that if you give them what they need, which is sometimes not that much, [with] just a little attention and love, you can really turn them around…”

David Callahan, editor of Inside Philanthropy, said he hopes “other philanthropists will pay attention to what (Dalio is) doing and the hands-on immersive approach she’s taken, which is how philanthropy should operate if it doesn’t want to alienate the people it needs to engage to succeed.”

“If Barbara ever gets focused on the national level,” Callahan said, “I think that could be a big deal, given her mindset and the sensibility she brings to this space.”
”

Public education should not have to depend on the goodwill of philanthropists. It is a civic duty to educate all children through taxation.

But billionaires have banded together to destroy education and to promote choice instead of raising taxes.

Thank you, Ms. Dalio, for putting your money where it does the most good for the most children.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Hope, Philanthropy

Audrey Watters: Why Pre-School Should not Be “Just Like Amazon”

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2018 //
75

Audrey Watters, writing a guest post on Larry Cuban’s blog, demonstrates the insidious nature of Jeff Bezos’ plan to create his own chain of pre-schools, where “the child is the customer.”

She writes:

“The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about private schools offering private, individual benefits.)

“This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to “personalized learning” as well, as is the invocation of a “Montessori-inspired” model. As the customer, the child will be tracked and analyzed, her preferences noted so as to make better recommendations to up-sell her on the most suitable products. And if nothing else, Montessori education in the United States is full of product recommendations.

“There’s another piece to all this, not mentioned in Bezos’s note about building a chain of preschools that “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon”: Amazon’s own labor practices. The online retail giant is a notoriously terrible place to work – the pay, particularly in the warehouses, is so low that many employees receive government assistance. The working conditions are dangerous and dehumanizing. “Amazon has patented a system that would put workers in a cage, on top of a robot,” read the headline in last week’s Seattle Times. And it’s not so great for the white collar workers either. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” one employee in books marketing told The New York Times back in 2015.

“The majority of the early childhood educators in the US are already very poorly paid; many preschools have incredibly high turnover rates. As research has demonstrated that preschool has a lasting positive effect on children’s educational attainment, there have been efforts to “raise the standards,” demanding for example that preschools be staffed by more qualified teachers. But that demand for more training and certification hasn’t brought with it better pay or benefits. The median pay for preschool teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is less than $30,000 a year. Even those with Bachelor’s degrees earn only about $14.70 an hour, about half of the average wages for all those with the same level of education.

“This is a field in which a third of employees already qualify for government assistance. And now Jeff Bezos, a man whose own workers also rely on these same anti-poverty programs, wants to step in – not as a taxpayer, oh no, but as a philanthropist. Honestly, he could have a more positive impact here by just giving those workers a raise. (Or, you know, by paying taxes.)”

Sadly, there will be parents who will get in line to have their children treated like Amazon customers, as there are parents who sign their children up for harsh and punitive “no-excuses” charters.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Early Childhood Education, Philanthropy

This Article about the Ford Foundation and Ocean Hill-Brownsville Brought Back Memories

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2018 //
4

A reader, Joel Schwartz, sent this article as a comment.

It is based on Karen Ferguson’s book Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism.

Ferguson tells the remarkable story of the Ford Foundation’s decision to become a funder of the community control movement in the battle over the future of the New York City public schools in 1967-1969. As she explains, Ford was The Establishment; it was the Gates Foundation of its time. Yet it decided to align with the Black Power movement and to cast itself as anti-establishment and anti-professional.

The events she describes were the start of my professional life.

I was an unofficial advisor to Preston Wilcox, a black social worker who was one of the leaders of the community control movement in Harlem (his organization was called Afram). Tagging along with him, I attended many of the meetings with community activists concerned about the new I.S. 201 in Harlem. I later worked for the Carnegie Corporation as an hourly employee, writing about the three demonstration districts at the heart of the teachers’ strike, which lasted for two full months in 1968.

It was during these tumultuous events that I began to write about the New York City schools. One of my first articles was about the role of the elitist Ford Foundation; the article was titled “Playing God in the Ghetto.”

I won’t go into all the details here, but the teachers’ strikes of 1967-68 inspired me to write my first book, which was published in 1974, called The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973. Many others have been written since then about those crisis-ridden years. They left a deep imprint on me.

Those events continue to resonate today for many people, for different reasons.

Ferguson’s focus on the Ford Foundation’s role is refreshing. I haven’t read the book yet, but intend to do so.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, New York City, Philanthropy, Race

Mercedes Schneider: Conflicts of Interest, Common Core, Gates Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2018 //
37

Mercedes Schneider reviews an exhaustive report by Richard Phelps about the origins, policies, and practices of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

I approach this topic with caution because I was a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Institute. I was a close friend of Checker Finn, until I broke ranks and turned against the conservative activism in which TBF is a prominent actor. I don’t say bad things about Checker or Mike Petrilli. But I don’t agree with them, I think they are doing immeasurable damage to public education, and I regret that they lack the ability to be self-critical or reflective. When I was on the board, I strongly opposed the decision to accept funding from the Gates Foundation. I said it would compromise TBF’s independence. I was right. I opposed the board’s decision to become a charter authorizer in Ohio, where TBF is technically located. I thought that a think tank should not be a charter authorizer. That was well before I took issue with the whole conservative package of standards, testing, accountability, and choice.

Read the entire Phelps’ report.

Phelps raises a serious issue of “donor intent” and whether it was honored. The TBF Funds were intended by their owner to be used strictly for charitable purposes, Phelps writes, never to benefit any individual nor to influence legislation. When I was a member of the board, I was unaware of these restrictions. Mrs. Thelma Fordham Pruett’s lawyer was Checker Finn’s father. He was chairman of the board of the TBF foundation. He decided that the funds—about $35 Million—were not restricted, and he turned them over to his son, who became CEO of the new foundation and used the funds to promote a highly political agenda of education reform. The Fordham Institute has led the way in advancing privatization by charters and vouchers in Ohio. Nationally, it was and is a leading voice in promoting the Common Core standards. Gates paid millions of dollars to TBF both to evaluate the Common Core and to advocate for it.

This is a very troubling report.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Ohio, Philanthropy

Jeff Bryant: How the Rich Get Richer by Destroying Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2018 //
26

I think we are beginning to understand the real purpose of Corporate Reform. The 1% and their minions repeat ad nauseum that school choice will fix all education problems, lift the poor out of poverty, and no new taxes are needed. Indeed, they have pushed for tax cuts and cheered on deep cuts to public education. We are watching a generation of defunding public schools, refusing to invest in teachers’ salaries, and a massive transfer of resources from the public sector to private institutions.

Jeff Bryant explains it here.

“Recent news stories about wealthy folks giving multi-million donations to education efforts have drawn both praise and criticism, but two new reports by public education advocacy groups this week are particularly revealing about the real impact rich people have on schools and how they’ve chosen to leverage their money to influence the system.

‘The Education Debt’

“The first report, “Confronting the Education Debt” from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools examines the nation’s “education debt” – the historic funding shortfall for school systems that educate black and brown children. The authors find that through a combination of multiple factors – including funding rollbacks, tax cuts, and diversions of public money to private entities – the schools educating the nation’s poorest children have been shorted billions in funding.

“One funding source alone, the federal dollars owed to states for educating low-income children and children with disabilities, shorted schools $580 billion, between 2005 and 2017, in what the government is lawfully required to fund schools through the provisions of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“The impact of not fully funding Title I is startling, the report contends, calculating that at full funding, the nation’s highest-poverty schools could provide health and mental health services for every student including dental and vision services, and these schools would have the money to hire a full-time nurse, a full-time librarian, and either an additional full-time counselor or a full-time teaching assistant for every classroom.

“State and local governments contribute to underfunding too by keeping in place tax systems that chronically short schools, particularly those that educate low-income students, mostly of color. Two school districts in Illinois are highlighted – one where 80 percent of students are low-income and gets about $7,808 per pupil in total expenditures, while another, where 3 percent of students are low-income, spends $26,074 per student…

“In the meantime, while the nation’s education debt expands, the accumulated wealth of the richest Americans continues to grow. During that time period the federal government was shorting schools billions, the personal net worth of the nation’s 400 wealthiest individuals grew by $1.57 trillion, the report notes.

“There is a direct correlation between dwindling resources for public schools and the ongoing political proclivity for transferring public dollars to the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations,” the report declares. “The rich are getting richer. Our schools are broke on purpose.”

This is the context for Bryant’s discussion of the NPE Action Report, “Hijacked by Billionaires.” The 1% buy control of state and local races so they can advance their tax-cutting, budget-cutting ideas and promote school choice.

“What motivates these wealthy people from exerting their will in the electoral process varies. They are bipartisan politically. Some are directly connected to the charter school industry. Others have expressed disdain for democratically controlled schools and argue, instead, for school governance to transfer to unelected boards. Some are motivated by their hatred of teachers’ unions. While others believe strongly that public education needs to be opened up to market competition from charters.

“But what billionaire donors all have in common, the report authors write, is their devotion to blaming schools and educators for problems posed by educating low-income children. Instead of using their political donations to advocate for more direct aid to schools serving low-income kids, wealthy donors “distract us from policy changes that would really help children,” the report argues, “such as increasing the equity and adequacy of school funding, reducing class sizes, providing medical care and nutrition for students, and other specific efforts to meet the needs of children and families.”

Their one unifying idea is lower taxes.

His third example is a new book about how predatory elites subvert democracy.

“Rich people are playing a double game,” writes Anand Giridharadas in his new book ‘Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.’ “On one hand, there’s no question they’re giving away more money than has ever been given away in history … But I also argue that we have one of the more predatory elites in history, despite that philanthropy.”

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Philanthropy, Privatization

Peter Greene: None Dare Call It “Philanthropy”

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2018 //
26

In this post, Peter Greene spells out the difference between philanthropy and the desire to control the lives of others.

One is generous, the other is a blunt use of power to gratify one’s own ego.

One helps people achieve the goals they have set for themselves, the other imposes the donor’s will on unwilling and resistant recipients, whose voice is silenced.

“Modern fauxlanthropy is not about helping people; it’s about buying control, about hiring people to promote your own program and ideas. It’s about doing an end run around the entire democratic process, even creating positions that never existed, like Curriculum Director of the United States, and then using sheer force of money to appoint yourself to that position. It’s about buying compliance.

“It is privatization. It is about taking a section of the public sector and buying control of it so that you can run it as if it was your own personal possession.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Injustice, Koch Brothers, Philanthropy, Shame, Walton Foundation

Audrey Watters Has a Suggestion for Jeff Bezos and Other Billionaires

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2018 //
87

Blogger Audrey Watters is not impressed by billionaire Jeff Bezos’ plan to establish preschools.

“It’s like Amazon, but for preschool.”

Ominously, “the child will be the customer.”

The assurance that “the child will be the customer” underscores the belief – shared by many in and out of education reform and education technology – that education is simply a transaction: an individual’s decision-making in a “marketplace of ideas.” (There is no community, no public responsibility, no larger civic impulse for early childhood education here. It’s all about private schools offering private, individual benefits.)

This idea that “the child will be the customer” is, of course, also a nod to “personalized learning” as well, as is the invocation of a “Montessori-inspired” model. As the customer, the child will be tracked and analyzed, her preferences noted so as to make better recommendations to up-sell her on the most suitable products. And if nothing else, Montessori education in the United States is full of product recommendations.

There’s another piece to all this, not mentioned in Bezos’s note about building a chain of preschools that “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon”: Amazon’s own labor practices. The online retail giant is a notoriously terrible place to work – the pay, particularly in the warehouses, is so low that many employees receive government assistance. The working conditions are dangerous and dehumanizing. “Amazon has patented a system that would put workers in a cage, on top of a robot,” read the headline in last week’s Seattle Times. And it’s not so great for the white collar workers either. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk,” one employee in books marketing told The New York Times back in 2015.

The majority of the early childhood educators in the US are already very poorly paid; many preschools have incredibly high turnover rates. As research has demonstrated that preschool has a lasting positive effect on children’s educational attainment, there have been efforts to “raise the standards,” demanding for example that preschools be staffed by more qualified teachers. But that demand for more training and certification hasn’t brought with it better pay or benefits. The median pay for preschool teachers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is less than $30,000 a year. Even those with Bachelor’s degrees earn only about $14.70 an hour, about half of the average wages for all those with the same level of education.

This is a field in which a third of employees already qualify for government assistance. And now Jeff Bezos, a man whose own workers also rely on these same anti-poverty programs, wants to step in – not as a taxpayer, oh no, but as a philanthropist. Honestly, he could have a more positive impact here by just giving those workers a raise. (Or, you know, by paying taxes.)

Bezos is not alone in eyeing the early education “market,” which has received quite a bit of attention from ed-tech investors in recent years. So far this year, three companies have raised venture capital to help people run preschools and childcare facilities in their homes: Wonderschool, WeeCare, and Procare Software. Last year, VCs poured millions into similar sorts of companies, including Tinkergarten, Sawyer, and Kinedu. Investors in these startups include some of the “big money” names in Silicon Valley: Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. (One of these companies, WeeCare, says it’s also planning to train and license childcare providers, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see the micro-certificate, online education, nanodegree folks also jump on this bandwagon. “Uber for Education” or something.)

She wonders whether we really want to turn early childhood education over to private providers. “Can the gig economy and the algorithm ever provide high quality preschool?”

Categories Early Childhood Education, Philanthropy

Peter Greene: What’s Wrong with Jeff Bezos’ Philanthropy: Everything

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2018 //
17

When Peter Greene learned that Jeff Bezos and his wife planned to allocate $2 Billion to creating their own preschools and helping the homeless, he was appalled.

Greene has a better idea for the billionaire class: They should pay their taxes. More taxes.

“Jeff Bezos (and his wife) starting pre-K schools is stupid. Let me count the ways (in no particular order).

“This damn guy

“It’s a stupid small pledge on his part. Yes, $2 billion is a chunk of money (aka more money than any teacher will ever make in their lifetime), but it’s chump change to Bezos. As this piece points out, it’s about 1% of his wealth. It’s considerably less than some of his fellow billionaire dabblers have donated. This is the exact opposite of a “we’ll spend whatever it takes to do this right” pledge.

“His concept is stupid, as witnessed by the oft-quoted “the child will be the customer.” This is, in its own way, as stupid as the many rich amateur education “experts” who insist that the child is the product. In our current hyper-commercial environment, as exemplified by the cutthroat capitalism of Amazon.com, the customer is a business’s adversary, the mark from whom pennies must be shaken loose by any means necessary, in return for which, the vendor will provide the absolute minimum they can get away with. How is this a good model for schools? A business has no relationship with a customer (though it may serve the business well to dupe the customer into thinking there’s a relationship there). The interactions are purely transactional– you give me some money, I give you whatever goods or services the money was supposed to pay for. The rest of the customer’s life and concerns are immaterial. How is this a good model for schools? Schools should help create educated citizens, help students become their best selves, create the public for a country; none of this is the same as creating customers. And customers, it should be noted, have to earn the right to be served by showing that they can plunk down the money.

“The stupid keeps getting deeper because we already know about Bezos’s treatment of people with whom he has a transactional relationship– he screws them mercilessly. Amazon workers are notoriously poorly treated so that Bezos can make more money. Bezos has made cities dance and scrape and bow for the privilege of having him gift them with another amazon hq. A school should take care of the students it serves. When has Jeff Bezos ever taken care of anybody?

“It’s stupid because of the blinding hypocrisy. I know this has been said, but it deserves endless repetition– Bezos wants to give money to the homeless, even as his corporation helped kill a tax bill in Seattle designed to help the homeless. But this isn’t just hypocrisy– it’s a blatant example of modern fauxlanthropic privatization. It’s about doing an end run around democratic-style government and insisting on commandeering the project yourself, in the same way that avoiding taxes is not just greedy, but is the Bezos way of saying that he will spend his money on his own terms, and if he’s going to spend money on something, then he will by God own it himself.

“It’s stupid because of the sheer oligarchical privatizing balls displayed. If Bezos wants some of his money to go to improving schools, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “paying your taxes.” If Bezos wants a say in how schools are operated, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “running for school board.” The country is not served by having vital institutions dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. We are not served by falling back into a system in which cities get their schools or water supplies by convincing some rich patron to take care of them.

“It’s stupid because the poor Montessori people are once again having their “brand” co-opted by somebody who doesn’t even get it. Bezos’s schools will apparently be sort of Montessori-flavored, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.

“It’s stupid because it is soaked in tech-giant arrogance. Note that Bezos says nothing along the lines of, “I will bring in the top education experts to don this right.” Experts, shmexperts. Bezos will just “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession.” In other words, running a school or a giant internet-based mail order business is pretty much the same thing, so I already know everything I need to know. Even if Amazon weren’t built on a mountain of worker abuse aimed at working the customers over, this would still be an arrogant, stupid thing to say.”

Read it all.

Peter Greene’s crap detector is better than anyone else’s. Jeff Bezos should listen to him.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Early Childhood Education, Philanthropy, Stupid

Jeff Bezos Pledges $2 Billion for Homeless, Preschools

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
39

Jeff Bezos, who may now be the richest man in the world, has pledged to spend $2 billion to aid the homeless and to establish preschools for low-income children.

“Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced Thursday that he will give $2 billion to help homeless families and create a new network of nonprofit preschools in low-income communities.

“The pledge, announced in a tweet, fulfills the promise he made last year when he tweeted that he planned to give money to charities that help people facing the most desperate, immediate need. Bezos asked for feedback from nonprofit leaders working on the front lines to help the planet’s neediest people….

“The $2 billion gift establishes the Bezos Day One Fund, which will support two missions. The Day One Families Fund will steer money to existing charities that help the homeless. The Day One Academies Fund will create the preschools.

“When he first asked for suggestions on how to jump-start his philanthropy, Bezos got an earful. The feedback was swift and high-volume with nonprofits bombarding Bezos with requests. He responded to at least one request for a gift early this year with a $33 million donation to TheDream.US, a charity that provides college scholarships to undocumented students, but no other large donations were publicly announced.

“Bezos also entered the political arena. Earlier this month, he and his wife, MacKenzie, gave $10 million to With Honor, a veterans-focused political-action committee.

“Until now, Bezos and his family have given a total of about $160 million to nonprofits over the past decade, according to the Chronicle’s analysis of the gifts he has announced publicly. Critics have complained that wasn’t a lot for a guy whose net worth Forbes recently pegged at nearly $163 billion.“

I know that many of us are skeptical, if not downright hostile, to billionaire gifts, which typically seem to be about telling people what to do, and privatizing the public sector, leaving people dependent on them.

I say, let’s wait and see how the Bezos philanthropy plays out. What will he do to help the homeless? A handout or a fresh start? What kind of preschools will he create? Developmentally appropriate models that allow children to play and learn at their own pace or test-prep centers?

Let’s watch and see.

Categories Billionaires, Early Childhood Education, Philanthropy

Why Philanthropy Is Bad for Democracy: An Interview with Anand Giridharadas

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2018 //
28

This article expresses our frustration with arrogant, clueless billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Betsy DeVos, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, the Waltons, the Koch brothers, and Mark Zuckerberg. We have long known that they don’t like democracy. It gets in the way of their grand plans to change the world. Why should we—the targets of their plans—have any say? Those of us who are not billionaires think that they should stop rearranging our lives. We don’t want them to disrupt our lives and our institutions. We believe in the idea of one person, one vote. We are losing faith in democracy because these plutocrats have more than one vote. They use their vast resources to buy elections and, what is even cheaper, to buy politicians.

Anand Giridharadas frequented their circles, mainly at the Aspen Institute, which made the mistake of inviting him to join them as a Fellow. He confirms what we suspected. These people are a threat to democracy. They think they are “doing good,” but they are destroying democracy.

It begins:

“In 2015, the journalist Anand Giridharadas was a fellow at the Aspen Institute, a confab of moneyed “thought leaders” where TED-style discourse dominates: ostensibly nonpolitical, often counterintuitive, but never too polemical. In his own speech that year, Giridharadas broke with protocol, accusing his audience of perpetuating the very social problems they thought they were solving through philanthropy. He described what he called the Aspen Consensus: “The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm.” The response, he said, was mixed. One private-equity figure called him an “asshole” that evening, but another investor said he’d voiced the struggle of her life. David Brooks, in a New York Times column, called the speech “courageous.” That lecture grew into Winners Take All, Giridharadas’s new jeremiad against philanthropy as we know it. He weaves together scenes at billionaires’ gatherings, profiles of insiders who struggle with ethical conflicts, and a broader history of how America’s wealth inequality and philanthropy grew in tandem.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Democracy, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Inequality, Koch Brothers, Philanthropy, Walton Foundation
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