Bill Gates Compares Trump with JFK Revealing to America His Profound Mediocrity

Bill Gates’ astoundingly ignorant comparison of the promise of Donald Trump with President John F. Kennedy reveals to America what every conscious educator in the country has learned or unearthed about the man in the past fifteen years or so. To wit, that whatever his talents in building computer operating systems and monopolizing the intellectual property rights of both his predecessors and contemporaries, whatever his cunning in outmaneuvering his business rivals, Bill Gates is an intellectual mediocrity of the most profound order.

That, of course, has not stopped this unelected, unaccountable “philanthropist” from being allowed to impose imbecilic whim upon imbecilic whim on the entire American public school system and to do so in the most insidious ways possible. Galvanic bracelets, Big History (because it is not history) the Common Core, nonsensical teacher evaluation systems and so much more owe their existence to the bottomless billions of the saintly Bill Gates.
Now here’s Bill somehow comparing the promise of the most objectively unprepared, demagogic, clueless, vicious and mentally unstable person ever elevated to the presidency to the deeply flawed but nonetheless enormously inspiring presidency of JFK. It is revealing that Gates, a man who in his own way is as narcissistic as Trump, sees the Kennedy years, not through the sublime struggles of the Civil Rights Movement or the near nuclear apocalypse of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but through Kennedy’s Space Program, which, in the final end bore relatively little fruit, excepting in the world of technology.

At any rate, there is something grotesque about speaking of a vulgar conman like Trump in the same breath as a man like JFK who, despite his failings, had the stuff of grace and greatness. Indeed, Trump is the negation of all JFK stood for. At the same time Gate’s blathering reveals to the rest of America the quality of thought that, thanks to the spinelessness of our political leaders, has degraded American educators and education for years with not only no end in sight but with the utter certainly of greater and greater degradation under the leadership of a person like Trump.

Bill Gates and the Medal of Freedom: Obama Officially Recognizes the Right of the Rich to Impose Public Policy

As if to officially acknowledge the insidious and tacit transformation of the remnants of democracy to not so subtle oligarchy, the Obama administration has announced that Bill Gates is to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In a sense, as the Obama administration has done more to undermine public education than any in American history, it is right and fitting that Gates, the person who has bankrolled and forged that effort more than any individual in American history, be so duly honored.
For the past 15 years, Gates, a private citizen with zero educational experience and knowledge, has been allowed to use his virtually limitless fortune to impose his will on the public school system as he has pleased, an effort he has pursued with the same ruthlessness that he once used to obtain the intellectual property rights that have led to his immense fortune.

Gates’ efforts have led directly to the expansion of publically funded, privately managed charter schools, the creation and imposition of idiotic and grossly unfair teacher evaluations, mass financing propaganda like Waiting For Superman, and the purchase and acquiescence of long standing education organizations such as the national Parent Teacher Association. In addition, Gates has funded the creation of a seemingly endless amount of freshly minted “grass roots” advocacy organizations (Educators for Excellence, for example) the sole purpose of which is to deceive an unknowing public into believing that a campaign to privatize the school system by the richest people on earth is rising from the streets. (The usurpation of the language and iconography of the Civil Rights Movement has been both beyond shameless and disturbingly successful. ) It has also led to the immiseration of teachers from coast to coast as well as the weakening of the power of teacher unions – who foolishly tried to dance with this monopolist — across the nation. Gates’ crowning achievement thus far is the imposition of the secretly written, deceptively named, disastrously received Common Core State Standards which, as they were written with standardized tests in mind, in turn have led to a reduction of education to test prep.

His success at” reform” has led education historian Diane Ravitch to sardonically dub Gates “ the superintendent of American schools. “
That this unelected, unaccountable and largely hidden figure has been allowed to forge his will on an American institution as vital as the public school system should fill every American who actually believes in participatory democracy with abject horror.
Instead, Gates is being awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor. And so it goes. Allow an individual man to accumulate the wealth of a state and it is only a matter of time before that individual begins to act like the state and a short time after that the state recognizes said individual as proxy for the state.
May the kind of freedom President Obama is awarding here be clearly recognized and seen for what it is. It is the freedom of the private citizen to make public policy for millions providing that private citizen is super rich.
The rest of us be damned.

What a sad, sad time in which we live.

Obama Again Uses the Presidency to Shill for Yet Another Gates Eduscam

“The executioner’s face is always well hidden.”

Bob Dylan

Happy Bill

More than any other individual in American history, monopolist, intellectual property rights predator and non-educator Bill Gates has used his immense fortune to insidiously remake the K-12 public school system in his image. He has done this for over a decade, largely by employing the Democratic Party to force unproven experiment after unproven and often mad ( see galvanic bracelets ) experiment down the throats of millions of students and teachers. (For a comprehensive exposure of what Gates has wrought see Mercedes Schneider’s edu blog at https://deutsch29.wordpress.com ) In the process, private citizen Gates , while improving nothing, has succeeded in causing chaos, demoralization and an even further shrinking of the American mind, in this case to data based idiocy, from sea to shining sea.

Gates is apparently not satisfied with experimenting with the lives and the livelihoods of millions of students and teachers. Like a true monopolist he is reaching for millions more: Gates now wants to remake higher education, this time via community colleges.

President Obama, who has shamelessly shilled for the Gates Foundation- funded Race to the Top and the deceitfully named Common Core States Standards, going as far as to promote the same as his signature education polices, personally and to much fanfare announced Gates’ new plan to the nation yesterday. Of course, as with Race to the Top and Common Core, there was no mention of Gates.

Like all well thought out cons, the scam sounds noble from afar and appeals to the best of the American impulses – fairness, opportunity, social mobility — only to utterly undermine them and pave the way for the privatization of community colleges and the incorporation of Common Core and tracking and data collecting , bringing them to a whole other level.

Here is Gates discussing the scam. Note his casual use of the word “tracking” again and again and again. Note the vulgar reduction of education to cost efficiency. Note the fact that this person would be talking to himself if he did not somehow accumulate the wealth of entire nations.

Each day, the reality that we are not merely well into an age of oligarchy, but an increasingly ruthless and rapacious oligarchy , becomes clearer and clearer. Each day our political system exposes itself as little more than the public relations department of the 1%. Each day the American people become more powerless and disenfranchised.

Each day the wisdom in the words of Justice Louis Brandeis have never been truer; “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Each day we near the place of no return.

Unaccountable

With the possible exception of “compliance,” I’d reckon that there are no words that American teachers have heard more times in the past 10 years than the word “accountable.”
Everyone, we are told, and told, and told again for good measure, must be held accountable. I know no teacher who would mind such an admonition if, in fact, the system of accountability was fair and reasonable and if it were even remotely true that all people were held accountable.

Alas.

Take former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, for example. Here’s a fella who not only championed a $95 million dollar technological boondoggle that is now to be dismantled because of its uselessness, but used his status and knowledge as former chancellor to profit from the project after instantly teaming up with Rupert Murdoch after he left the school system.

Conflict of interest ?

Not a chance.

Where is the accountability there?

At any rate, because of the distance I have noticed between what it held for one group or class of people and utterly excused from another, it was with more than a little curiosity that I noted during a visit to my local public library the following title: Unaccountable/ How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom and Security by one Janine R. Wedel.

I understood from the subtitle that the work would focus largely on the monsters manipulating our financial system but, sandwiched there in between the words “Finance “ and “security” was “freedom, ” so I was hopeful some dots might be connected that had to do with my world.
As one who has been forced to watch and react as insanely wealthy private citizens such as Eli Broad and the Walton family and especially Bill Gates, do what ever it is they want to do to the public trust known as the public school system and all who work within it, with exactly zero right to do so and exactly zero accountability, I was curious to see if Wedel’s altogether noble work would include these spectacular examples of complete and utter unaccountability. I was hopeful, that is, that her work would at least mention the insidious efforts of the mega rich to undermine the legislative process in order to privitze the nation’s school system and bust the last union of size while they’re at it. After all, here was a handful of people somehow allowed to force one radical unproven experiment after another — breaking up schools, value added measures for teachers, standardized test after standardized tests, and the greatest scam of all, the deceitfully named Common Core State Standards — upon America’s kids and teachers on nothing more than their own limitless hubris and bank accounts.

Sadly, and incredibly given the immense upheavals of the past decade, education is not even mentioned in the book. Moreover, the only Gates who merits an appearance is former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
As for Bill Gates and his legions…not a word. If I were to search high and low for a quote signifying complete unaccountability, I doubt I could do better than the following by an embarrassingly ineloquent
Bill Gates: “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”
There you have it.

And what if “our education stuff “ fails ?
Well…so what? Bill and Eli and the Walton’s and their kind will doubtless find some other vital institution to remake in their own one dimensional image.
Besides, when it fails — and it is failing — you can simply blame teachers and employ an eager corporate media to echo your lies.
It’s been working so far.
Why is the reality of the hijacking of a public institution of immeasurable importance and influence missing from this book or books like it ? This is a serious work by a credible author who does not seem to me to be ideologically bound. How is it the immense liberties taken by Bill Gates and company that deal with billions of dollars of public money not seem to be worthy of even a mention in a book dealing with the scandalous and horrific absence of accountability in American life ? Why is it that the complete undermining of the legislative process not only not considered a criminal act but not even deemed worthy of reporting? Not merely by Janine Wedel but by anybody? Where’s Bernie Sanders ? Where’s Michael Moore? Where’s Ralph Nader? Where is anybody? How is this happening before our very eyes ? What has happened to us ?

Why Does the NY Times Pay So Much Attention to An Accused Teacher and So Little to the Common Core ?

Over the past several years the New York Times, the paper of record and all that, has published article after article, editorial after editorial praising the wonders of the privately owned experiment on American children deceptively called the Common Core State Standards and painting all who opposed the instantly sacred writ as little more than right wing nut jobs. The paper has done all it can do to hide the fact that the Common Core exists solely because a private citizen, one Bill Gates, has decided that it is his right to undermine democratic process and dictate public policy even as our spineless politicians have helped him every step of the way. The information about the genesis and financing of the Common Core, though obscured and hidden, has been flushed out and is available to those who seek it. See especially the work of Mercedes Schneider. Apparently the New York Times does not seek it.

With this in mind, I read with astonishment the almost granular description and psychological profile of the life of one Sean Shaynak, a high school teacher arrested for multiple counts of sexual misconduct with his students.
The story is disturbing and disgusting and, yes, newsworthy but I have to ask myself: why does the horrific behavior of a single teacher merit such research and scrutiny while the imposition of a radical experiment, increasingly loathed by American parents, students and teachers, and created by an unelected, unaccountable monopolist given what results in a free pass by the paper of record?

Consider simply the level of research — research reminiscent of a NY Times profile of a presidential candidate — that went into the ridiculous citing of Shaynak’s favorite Pretenders song as he rode down the highway of life toward ignominy and worse. Try to find an a commensurate example of research in any NY Times article on the provenance of the Common Core or any of its principal creators and you will search in vain.

Consider that the admittedly sordid allegations against this one individual, horrible that they are, affected a tiny proportion of one school yet merited the front page of the most important paper in America while the stealth creation of a radical privately owned imposition that is currently upending almost every school in the country is scarcely worth a mention.

Something is wrong. Very, very wrong.
What is really going on here ?