Tag Archives: Bill Gates

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

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By Clifton Mark

Source: Aeon

‘We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …’ Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2013

‘We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers.’ Donald Trump, inaugural address, 2017

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

The ‘ultimatum game’ is an experiment, common in psychological labs, in which one player (the proposer) is given a sum of money and told to propose a division between him and another player (the responder), who may accept the offer or reject it. If the responder rejects the offer, neither player gets anything. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times, and usually the proposer offers a relatively even split. If the amount to be shared is $100, most offers fall between $40-$50.

One variation on this game shows that believing one is more skilled leads to more selfish behaviour. In research at Beijing Normal University, participants played a fake game of skill before making offers in the ultimatum game. Players who were (falsely) led to believe they had ‘won’ claimed more for themselves than those who did not play the skill game. Other studies confirm this finding. The economists Aldo Rustichini at the University of Minnesota and Alexander Vostroknutov at Maastricht University in the Netherlands found that subjects who first engaged in a game of skill were much less likely to support the redistribution of prizes than those who engaged in games of chance. Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes. While this was found to be true of all participants, the effect was much more pronounced among the ‘winners’.

By contrast, research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors (luck, help from others) that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors (effort, skill).

Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.

This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The ‘even playing field’ is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice.

Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there.

This is why debates over the extent to which particular individuals are ‘self-made’ and over the effects of various forms of ‘privilege’ can get so hot-tempered. These arguments are not just about who gets to have what; it’s about how much ‘credit’ people can take for what they have, about what their successes allow them to believe about their inner qualities. That is why, under the assumption of meritocracy, the very notion that personal success is the result of ‘luck’ can be insulting. To acknowledge the influence of external factors seems to downplay or deny the existence of individual merit.

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. It’s false, and believing in it encourages selfishness, discrimination and indifference to the plight of the unfortunate.

Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion

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These six men own as much wealth as half the world’s population

By Alec Anderson

Source: WSWS.org

On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.

The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.

The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.

The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.

The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.

As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.

Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.

The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.

Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.

If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.

Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.

However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.

The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.

The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400 richest people in the United States is roughly three-quarters of the total federal budget. It represents nearly three times the 2018 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which was slashed from over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion budget for the Department of Education in 2018.

Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse. This is accompanied by the ongoing campaign to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin and brand Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin.

The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in the new Forbes 400 list.

Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

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By Gerald Coles

Source: CounterPunch

Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

In the forefront of this pedagogy was the No Child Left Behind legislation (NCLB), with its lock-step instruction, created under George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama. Supposedly “scientifically-based,” federal funds supported research on “brain-based” teaching that would be in tune with the mental make-up of poor children, thereby serving to substitute for policy that would address poverty’s influence on educational outcomes. My review of the initial evidence supposedly justifying the launching of this diversionary pedagogy revealed it had no empirical support. However, for the students this instruction targeted, a decade had to pass before national test results confirmed its failure.

The history of “scientific brain-based” pedagogy for poor children has invariably been a dodge from addressing obvious social-class influences. In its newest iteration– improve poor children’s  executive functioning–billionaires Gates and Zuckerberg will gladly put some cash into promoting a new neurological fix for poor children, thereby helping (and hoping) to divert the thinking of education policy-makers, teachers and parents. Never mind that over three years ago, a review of research on executive functioning and academic achievement failed to find “compelling evidence that a causal association between the two exists.” What’s critical for these billionaires and the class they represent is that the nation continues to concoct policy that does not deplete the wealth of the rich and helps explain away continued poverty. Just because research on improving executive functioning in poor children has not been found to be a solution for their educational underachievement, doesn’t mean it can’t be!

Now that’s slick executive functioning!

 

Gerald Coles is an educational psychologist who has written extensively on the psychology, policy and politics of education. He is the author of Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (Monthly Review Press).

One nation under plutocracy

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By Jack Balkwill

Source: Intrepid Report

Americans are brought up believing a fairy tale in which there is somehow democracy in their governance. But the late, great, Leonard Cohen exposed the system’s dirty little secret, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.”

Even at the start of the nation, the first Chief Justice John Jay admitted the “democracy” hoax upon which the Supreme Court is built when he conceded, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” Justices have ruled that way throughout the centuries following, with government serving a privileged ruling class.

The United States has the largest number of billionaires of any country, with 536. They live here because it is the best place to live for a greedy bastard. It was billionaire Leona Helmsley who let the cat out of the bag that “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Grand Prince Billy Gates has his “Foundation,” to ensure that he not even think about paying taxes. What inconvenience if he were to contribute anything for the massive government services he uses to increase his fortune.

It takes oceans of sweat and rivers of blood to make a billionaire. This is the dark secret of the pyramid scheme known as capitalism. Those “little people” who do the sweating and bleeding are not full partners in the sharing of the wealth they produce.

Many of us work from the time we are born to the time we die in order to satisfy the few who control nearly all of the capital.

Increasingly, everything we do benefits the super rich. If our child gets sick or injured, the wealthy may benefit from investments in health insurance, Big Pharma, and private hospitals. If we go to prison, they get paid for it, as many prisons are now privatized. If we die, they increasingly own the funeral parlors (although their corporations often retain the old family names).

The rich profit when we eat, clothe ourselves, enjoy shelter, pay taxes, watch a movie or work (taking the lion’s share of what we produce). They seem to know how far they can push us—that to charge us for breathing might encourage the erection of guillotines (but they have considered buying up all the drinking water).

Michael Parenti once pointed out that the top one-fourth of one percent own more than the entire bottom 99% in the USA.

An old friend once remarked to me “I can’t understand why they don’t have it all.” Well, of course they are not trying to take it all. The more lucid of them are aware they must leave a few crumbs to placate the riffraff.

The biggest scam within this biggest scam is that which euphemistically passes as “national defense.” It does not defend 99% of us, most of us would prefer not to have the wars or 800+ military bases located abroad. We are, however, required to pay for it all, since we are the “little people” so scorned by the likes of Mrs. Helmsley.

Stealth bombers, Minuteman missiles, and Trident submarines are not made for defense, they are made to profit wealthy investors. Most of the profit goes to the wealthiest investors. CEOs of the corporations that make them get 7-figure salaries at the taxpayer’s expense. These weapons are made to deliver nuclear warheads, and the current national push for war with Russia and China is to “justify” making similar profit machines. Americans are told nuclear weapons have something to do with “defense,” but when I asked retired Admiral Gene LaRocque if we had enough nuclear weapons for our defense he replied “You cannot defend someone with a nuclear weapon.”

LaRocque told me he entered the Navy in the 1930s and in those days sailors made much of their own equipment, including weapons. Since nobody profited, they didn’t make weapons they didn’t need. That system, of course, would be called “socialism” today and is no longer allowed. “Defense” is now for the purpose of enriching the rich as priority one.

And the troops are deployed around the world to protect the interests of the billionaires, including foreign billionaires who own stock in the corporations that finance our elections, and therefore have far more political sway in the USA than do average citizens. Our government works for transnational billionaires, not the American people.

The most important part of the scam of capitalism is absolute control of the mass media. No hole may be left unplugged. Every one of the corporate-paid journalists is kept on their knees, a tight liplock on the derrieres of the elite at all times, slobbering and smooching. Not one of the bastards so much as tugs at their leash for fear of a pink slip.

I cringe whenever I hear a corporate media talking head speak of “American democracy.” It is a propaganda term. Often, I am “corrected” by someone when I say this, told that, “No, we don’t have a democracy, we have a republic.”

But a republic is a form of government in which the population is represented, and the American people, aside from the very rich, are not represented, hence, we have a plutocracy.

It should be obvious to the public, who only need open their eyes. We must maintain the largest prison system on earth for American capitalism to function, even as we call it “The Land of the Free.” We are the only industrialized nation on earth where thousands die each year for a lack of medical care, because we don’t have a medical care system, but a system that rewards the rich when people get sick or injured.

Those who are both poor and mentally ill are often left to sleep in our streets, eating out of garbage cans similarly to a third-world existence in the richest nation on earth.

I have often called the system “plutocratic oligarchy,” because the plutocrats don’t usually run the government (President Trump, however, has pretty much set it up that way for his administration with a cabinet filled with fellow billionaires).

Normally, transnational corporations rent the Members of Congress and presidents by financing their election campaigns. These CEOs then, with allegiance to nothing beyond greed, decide who will run the country. But the CEOs in turn work for the wealthy, who own the lion’s share of the investments, so in a back-handed way the rich do always run things, however remotely.

Members of Congress, some of the most corrupt people on the planet, then line up with the corporate media talking heads and begin kissing butt for the money they will need to stay in office. Most of their time in office is spent begging for money, there is little time for much else. The servile bastards soon find out that the best way to do this is to sell out the American people, and those who best sell out the people get buried in campaign money.

Oxfam earlier this year pointed out eight billionaires own as much as the bottom half of humanity, that being 3.75 billion people. Because we have billionaires, we have millions starving to death unnecessarily. There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, but a lot of it rots in warehouses while seeking a price that would please the billionaires.

The super rich want more money, at any cost, and obviously don’t care how many die from unsafe workplaces, unsafe products or a poisoned environment.

It was one of our wealthy slave-owning founders who described the elites who rule today. Thomas Jefferson said “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Jefferson always struck me as being the maverick among the ruling class who formed our plutocracy. He told a truth we don’t see in the mainstream press today, where all of this is covered up like the location of President Kennedy’s brain.

 

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.

Now Just Five Men Own Almost as Much Wealth as Half the World’s Population

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By Paul Buchheit

Source: CommonDreams

Last year it was 8 men, then down to 6, and now almost 5.

While Americans fixate on Trump, the super-rich are absconding with our wealth, and the plague of inequality continues to grow. An analysis of 2016 data found that the poorest five deciles of the world population own about $410 billion in total wealth. As of 06/08/17, the world’s richest five men owned over $400 billion in wealth. Thus, on average, each man owns nearly as much as 750 million people.

Why Do We Let a Few People Shift Great Portions of the World’s Wealth to Themselves? 

Most of the super-super-rich are Americans. We the American people created the Internet, developed and funded Artificial Intelligence, and built a massive transportation infrastructure, yet we let just a few individuals take almost all the credit, along with hundreds of billions of dollars.

Defenders of the out-of-control wealth gap insist that all is OK, because, after all, America is a ‘meritocracy’ in which the super-wealthy have ‘earned’ all they have. They heed the words of Warren Buffett: “The genius of the American economy, our emphasis on a meritocracy and a market system and a rule of law has enabled generation after generation to live better than their parents did.”

But it’s not a meritocracy. Children are no longer living better than their parents did. In the eight years since the recession the Wilshire Total Market valuation has more than TRIPLED, rising from a little over $8 trillion to nearly $25 trillion. The great majority of it has gone to the very richest Americans. In 2016 alone, the richest 1% effectively shifted nearly $4 trillion in wealth away from the rest of the nation to themselves, with nearly half of the wealth transfer ($1.94 trillion) coming from the nation’s poorest 90%—the middle and lower classes. That’s over $17,000 in housing and savings per lower-to-middle-class household lost to the super-rich.

A meritocracy? Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have done little that wouldn’t have happened anyway. ALL modern U.S. technology started with—and to a great extent continues with—our tax dollars and our research institutes and our subsidies to corporations.

Why Do We Let Unqualified Rich People Tell Us How To Live? Especially Bill Gates! 

In 1975, at the age of 20, Bill Gates founded Microsoft with high school buddy Paul Allen. At the time Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system was the industry standard. Even Gates’ company used it. But Kildall was an innovator, not a businessman, and when IBM came calling for an OS for the new IBM PC, his delays drove the big mainframe company to Gates. Even though the newly established Microsoft company couldn’t fill IBM’s needs, Gates and Allen saw an opportunity, and so they hurriedly bought the rights to another local company’s OS — which was based on Kildall’s CP/M system. Kildall wanted to sue, but intellectual property law for software had not yet been established. Kildall was a maker who got taken.

So Bill Gates took from others to become the richest man in the world. And now, because of his great wealth and the meritocracy myth, MANY PEOPLE LOOK TO HIM FOR SOLUTIONS IN VITAL AREAS OF HUMAN NEED, such as education and global food production.

—Gates on Education: He has promoted galvanic skin response monitors to measure the biological reactions of students, and the videotaping of teachers to evaluate their performances. About schools he said, “The best results have come in cities where the mayor is in charge of the school system. So you have one executive, and the school board isn’t as powerful.”

—Gates on Africa: With investments in or deals with Monsanto, Cargill, and Merck, Gates has demonstrated his preference for corporate control over poor countries deemed unable to help themselves. But no problem—according to Gates, “By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.”

Warren Buffett: Demanding To Be Taxed at a Higher Rate (As Long As His Own Company Doesn’t Have To Pay) 

Warren Buffett has advocated for higher taxes on the rich and a reasonable estate tax. But his company Berkshire Hathaway has used “hypothetical amounts” to ‘pay’ its taxes while actually deferring $77 billion in real taxes.

Jeff Bezos: $50 Billion in Less Than Two Years, and Fighting Taxes All the Way 

Since the end of 2015 Jeff Bezos has accumulated enough wealth to cover the entire $50 billion U.S. housing budget, which serves five million Americans. Bezos, who has profited greatly from the Internet and the infrastructure built up over many years by many people with many of our tax dollars, has used tax havens and high-priced lobbyists to avoid the taxes owed by his company.

Mark Zuckerberg (6th Richest in World, 4th Richest in America) 

While Zuckerberg was developing his version of social networking at Harvard, Columbia University students Adam Goldberg and Wayne Ting built a system called Campus Network, which was much more sophisticated than the early versions of Facebook. But Zuckerberg had the Harvard name and better financial support. It was also alleged that Zuckerberg hacked into competitors’ computers to compromise user data.

Now with his billions he has created a ‘charitable’ foundation, which in reality is a tax-exempt limited liability company, leaving him free to make political donations or sell his holdings, all without paying taxes.

Everything has fallen into place for young Zuckerberg. Nothing left to do but run for president.

The False Promise of Philanthropy 

Many super-rich individuals have pledged the majority of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. That’s very generous, if they keep their promises. But that’s not really the point.

American billionaires all made their money because of the research and innovation and infrastructure that make up the foundation of our modern technologies. They have taken credit, along with their massive fortunes, for successes that derive from society rather than from a few individuals. It should not be any one person’s decision about the proper use of that wealth. Instead a significant portion of annual national wealth gains should be promised to education, housing, health research, and infrastructure. That is what Americans and their parents and grandparents have earned after a half-century of hard work and productivity.

Having Their Cake and Eating Ours Too

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By Chris Lehmann

Source: The Baffler

What are billionaires for? It’s time we sussed out a plausible answer to this question, as their numbers ratchet upward across the globe, impervious to the economic setbacks suffered by mere mortals, and their “good works” ooze across the fair land. The most recent count from Forbes reports a record 1,826 of these ten-figure, market-cornering Croesuses, with familiar North American brands holding down the top three spots: Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, and Warren Buffett. Esteemed newcomers to the list include Uber kingpin Travis Kalanick, boasting $5.3 billion in net worth; gay-baiting, evangelical artery-hardeners Dan and Bubba Cathy, of Chick-fil-A fame ($3.2 billion); and Russ Weiner, impresario of the antifreeze-by-another-name energy drink Rockstar ($2.1 billion). For the first time, too, Mark Zuckerberg has cracked the elite Top 20 of global wealth; in fact, fellow Californians, most following Zuckerberg’s savvy footsteps into digital rentiership, account for 23 of the planet’s new billionaires and 131 of the total number—more than supplied by any nation apart from China and the Golden State’s host country, a quaint former republic known as the United States.

What becomes of the not-inconsiderable surplus that your average mogul kicks up in his rush to market conquest? In most cases, he (and in the vast majority of cases, it is still a “he”) parks his boodle in inflation-boosted goods like art and real estate, which neatly double as venerable monuments to his own vanity or taste.

But what happens when the super-rich turn their clever minds toward challenges beyond getting up on the right side of their well-feathered beds? Specifically, what are the likely dividends of their decisions to “give back to the community,” as the charitable mantra of the moment has it? Once upon a time, the Old World ideal of noblesse oblige might have directed their natural stirrings of conscience toward the principles of mutuality and reciprocity. But this is precisely where the new millennial model of capital-hoarding falls apart. The notion that the most materially fortunate among us actually owe the rest of us anything from their storehouses of pelf is now as unlikely as a communard plot twist in an Ayn Rand novel.

Look around at the charitable causes favored among today’s info-elite, and you’ll see the public good packaged as one continual study in billionaire self-portraiture. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, endowed by a celebrated prep-school graduate and Harvard dropout, devotes the bulk of its endowment and nearly all of its intellectual firepower to laying waste to the nation’s teachers’ unions. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is but the Gates operation on steroids, unleashing a shakedown syndicate of overcapitalized and chronically underperforming charter schools in the beleaguered urban centers where the democratic ideal of the common school once flourished. The Clinton Global Initiative, when it’s not furnishing vaguely agreeable alibis for Bill Clinton’s louche traveling companions, is consumed by neoliberal delusions of revolutionary moral self-improvement via the most unlikely of means—the proliferation of the very same sort of dubious financial instruments that touched off the 2008 economic meltdown. In this best of all possible investors’ worlds, swashbuckling info-moralists will teach international sex workers about the folly of their life choices by setting them up with a laptop and an extended tutorial on the genius of microloans.

This recent spike in elite self-infatuation, in other words, bespeaks a distressing new impulse among the fabulously well-to-do. While past campaigns of top-down charity focused on inculcating habits of bourgeois self-control among the lesser-born, today’s philanthro-capitalist seigneurs are seeking to replicate the conditions of their own success amid the singularly unpromising social world of the propertyless, unskilled, less educated denizens of the Global South. It’s less a matter of philanthro-capitalism than one of philanthro-imperialism. Where once the gospel of industrial success held sway among the donor class, we are witnessing the gospel of the just-in-time app, the crowdsourced startup, and the crisply leveraged microloan. This means, among other things, that the objects of mogul charity are regarded less and less as moral agents in their own right and more and more as obliging bit players in a passion play exclusively devoted to dramatizing the all-powerful, disruptive genius of our info-elite. They aren’t “giving back” so much as peering into the lower depths of the global social order and demanding, in the ever-righteous voice of privilege, “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

Noblesse Sans Oblige

There was plenty to deride in the Old World model of noblesse oblige; it dates back to the bad old days of feudal monarchy, when legacy-royal layabouts not only abjured productive labor entirely, but felt justified in the notion that they owned the souls of the peasants tethered to their sprawling estates. It’s no accident, therefore, that the idea of the rich being in receipt of any reciprocal obligation to the main body of the social order failed to make it onto the American scene. The sturdy mythology of the American self-made man didn’t really permit an arriviste material adventurer to look back to his roots at all, save to assure those within earshot that he’d definitively risen above them by the sheer force of an indomitable will-to-succeed.

But the relevant defining trait is the oblige part: the notion that the wealthy not only could elect to “give back” when it might suit their fancy, but that they had to positively let certain social goods alone—and assertively fund others—by virtue of their privileged station. Traditions such as the English commons stemmed from the idea that certain public institutions were inviolate, so far as the enfeoffing prerogatives of the landowning class went. The state church is another, altogether more problematic, legacy of this ancien régime; in addition to owning feudal souls outright, the higher orders of old had to evince some institutional concern for their ultimate destiny. There was exploitation and corruption galore woven into this social contract, of course, but for the more incendiary figures who dared to take its spiritual precepts seriously, there were also strong speculative grounds for envisioning another sort of world entirely, one in which the radical notion of spiritual equality took hold. As the Puritan Leveller John Lilburne—a noble by birth—put it in 1646, in the midst of the English Civil War:

All and every particular and individual man and woman, that ever breathed in the world . . . are by nature all equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion, or magisterial power, one over or above another.

Of course, the Levellers clearly were not on the winning side of British history, but this militant Puritan spirit migrated to the American colonies to supply the seedbed of our own communitarian ideal, expounded most famously in John Winthrop’s social-gospel oration “A Model of Christian Charity” aboard the Arbella in 1630. Throughout his sermon, Winthrop repeatedly exhorted his immigrant parishioners to practice extreme liberality in charity. “He that gives to the poor, lends to the Lord,” Winthrop declared in an appeal to philanthropic mutuality far less widely quoted than his fabled simile of the colonial settlement of New England as a city on a hill. “And he will repay him even in this life an hundredfold to him or his.” Citing a litany of biblical precedent, Winthrop went on to remind his mostly well-to-do Puritan flock that “the Scripture gives no caution to restrain any from being over liberal this way.” Indeed, he drove home the point much more forcefully as he highlighted the all-too-urgent imperative for these colonial adventurers to hand over the entirety of their substance for fellow settlers in material distress. “The care of the public must oversway all private respects,” Winthrop thundered—and then, sounding every bit the proto-socialist that his countryman Lilburne was: “It is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.”

The Accumulator As Paragon

The story of how Winthrop’s model of Christian charity degenerated into the neoliberal shibboleths of the Gates and Zuckerberg age is largely the saga of American monopoly capitalism, and far too epic to dally with here. But there is a key transitional figure in this shift: the enormously wealthy, self-made, and terminally self-serious steel-titan-cum-social reformer Andrew Carnegie. Born in rural Scotland in 1835 to an erratically employed artisan weaver, Carnegie grew up on the Chartist slogans that, amid the more secular social unrest of the industrial revolution, came to supplant the Levellers’ democratic visions of a world turned upside down. When he rose from an apprenticeship in a Pittsburgh telegraph office to true mogul status in the railroad, iron, and steel industries, Carnegie continued to cleave to the pleasing reverie that he was a worker’s kind of robber baron. Thanks to his own class background, he intoned, he had unique insight into the plight of the workmen seeking to hew their livings out of the harsh conditions of a new industrial capitalist social order. “Labor is all that the working man has to sell,” Carnegie pronounced just ahead of a series of wage cuts at his Pittsburgh works in 1883. “And he cannot be expected to take kindly to reductions of wages. . . . I think the wages paid at the seaboard of the United States are about as low as men can be expected to take.”

It was vital to Carnegie’s moral vanity to keep maintaining this self-image as the benevolent industrial noble, and he did so well past the point where his actually existing business interests dictated (as he saw it) the systematic beggaring of his workers. When the managers of Carnegie-owned firms would sell their workers short, lock them out, or bust their unions, Carnegie would typically blame the workers for not obtaining better contracts at rival iron, steel, and railroad concerns. While he might sympathize with their generally weak bargaining position, Carnegie well understood that he couldn’t have his competitors undercutting his own bottom line with cheaper labor costs—and with cheaper goods to market to Carnegie’s customers.

Carnegie’s patrician moral sentiments were genuine; throughout his career, he erected an elaborate philosophical defense of philanthropy as the only proper path for the disposition of riches, and famously spent his last years furiously trying to disperse as much of his fortune as possible to pay for charitable foundations, libraries, church organs, and the like. As he saw it, the mogul receives a sacred charge from the larger historical forces that conspire in the creation of his wealth: the rich man must act as a “trustee” for the needier members of the community.

Because the millionaire had proved his mettle as an accumulator of material rewards in the battle for business dominion, it followed that he had also been selected to be the most beneficent, and judicious, dispenser of charitable support for the lower orders as well. In Carnegie’s irenic vision of ever-advancing moral progress, all social forces were tending toward “an ideal state, in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the common good,” as he preached in his famous 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth.” “And this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.” The accomplished mogul was, in Carnegie’s fanciful telling, nothing less than a dispassionate expert in the optimal disbursal of resources downward: “The man of wealth,” he wrote, became “the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”

Such blissfully un-self-aware flourishes of elite condescension—and the intolerable contradictions that called them into being—point at the tensions lurking just beneath Carnegie’s placid, controlling social muse. For as his own career as a market-cornering industrialist made painfully clear, precisely none of Carnegie’s fortune stemmed from serving out a benevolent trusteeship in the interests of the poor and working masses. Indeed, something far more perverse and unsightly impelled the business model for Carnegie’s commercial and charitable pursuits, as his biographer David Nasaw notes: Carnegie used the alibi of his own enlightened, philanthropic genius as the primary justification for denying collective bargaining rights to his workers.

Since he was clearly foreordained to serve the best interests of these workers better than they could, it was ultimately to everyone’s benefit to transform Carnegie’s business holdings into the most profitable enterprises on the planet—all the better to sluice more of the mogul’s ruthlessly extracted wealth back into the hands of a grateful hoi polloi, once it was rationalized and sanctified by the great man’s “superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer.” In the sanctum of his New York study, where he spent the bulk of his days once his wealth disencumbered him of direct managerial duties at his Pittsburgh holdings, Carnegie found thrilling confirmation of his enlightened moral standing in the writings of social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Yes, the wholesale of workers, widows, and orphans might seem “harsh,” Spencer preached to his ardent business readership. But when viewed from the proper vantage—the end point toward which all of humanity’s evolutionary struggles were ineluctably trending—this remorseless process of deskilling, displacement, and death was actually a sacred mandate, not to be tampered with: “When regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be of the highest beneficence.”

And so, indeed, it came to pass, albeit a bit too vividly for Carnegie’s own moral preference. At the center of the Carnegie firms’ labor-bleeding business model was a landmark tragedy in American labor relations: the 1892 strike at Carnegie’s Homestead works. Carnegie’s lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, locked out the facility’s workforce after the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers pressed management to suspend threatened wage cuts and pare back punishing twelve-hour shifts for steel workers. Frick clumsily tried to ferry in Pinkerton forces on the Monongahela River to take control of the plant; Homestead workers, backed by their families and local business owners, fought to repel the Pinkerton thugs. Gunfire was exchanged on both sides, killing two Pinkertons and nine workers. Eventually, Frick got the state militia to disperse the crowds of workers and their supporters; with his field of action cleared, the plant’s manager proceeded to starve out the strikers, breaking the strike five months after it began. The Amalgamated Union collapsed into oblivion the following year. No union would ever again darken the door of a Carnegie-owned business, no matter what sort of lip service he continued to pay to the dignity of the workingman in public.

Homestead was a bitter rebuke to Carnegie’s self-image as the workers’ expert missionizing advocate—but tellingly, it didn’t do any lasting damage to the larger edifice of his charitable pretension. Partly, this was a function of Carnegie’s genuine generosity. More fundamentally, though, the steel mogul’s outsized moral self-regard endured in its prim, unmolested state thanks to the larger American public consensus on the proper Olympian status of men of wealth, especially when gauged against the demoralizing spectacle of industrial conflict.

Strings, Attached

The desperate intellectual acrobatics of the self-made Carnegie were never viewed as pathological, for the simple reason that they mirrored the logic by which American business interests at large pursued public favor. In this scheme of things, the lords of commerce were always to be the unquestioned possessors of a magisterial historical prerogative, and the base, petty interests of a self-organized labor movement were always the retrograde obstacle to true progress. What else could it mean, after all, for the owners of capital to always and forever be acting “in connection with the interests of universal humanity”? Following the broad contours of Carnegie’s founding efforts in this sphere, a long succession of American business leaders would proceed to claim for themselves the mantle of enlightened market despotism, from GM CEO Charlie “Engine” Wilson’s breezy midcentury conflation of his corporation’s grand good fortune with that of its host nation to the confident prognostications of today’s tech lords that we are about to efface global poverty in the swipe of a few well-designed apps.

So how does the philanthropic debauching of the public sphere unfold today, now that Carnegie’s bifurcated model of exploitation for charity’s sake has receded into the dimly remembered newsreel footage of the industrial age? Well, for one thing, it’s become a lot less genteel. Trusteeship isn’t the model any longer; it’s annexation.

Take one especially revealing case involving our own age’s pet mogul crusade of school reform. Just five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made a splashy, Oprah-choreographed gift of $100 million to the chronically low-performing Newark public school district—an announcement also timed to coincide with the national release of the union-baiting school reform documentary Waiting for “Superman.” The idea was to enlist the Facebook wizard’s fellow philanthro-capitalists in a matching donor drive, so that the city’s schools, already staked to a $1 billion state-administered budget, would also pick up $200 million of private-sector foundation dosh, to be spent on charter schools and other totems of managerial faux-excellence. With this dramatic infusion of money from our lead innovation industries, it would be largely a formality to “turn Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation,” as Zuckerberg told a cheerleading Oprah.

And sure enough, all the usual deep-pocketed benefactors turned out in force to meet the Zuckerberg challenge: Eli Broad, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and even Zuckerberg’s chief operation officer, Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg, all kicked into the kitty. At the public forums rolling out the initiative—organized for a cool $1.3 million by Tusk Strategies, a consultancy concern affiliated with erstwhile New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s own school-privatizing fiefdom—Newark parents more concerned with securing basic protections for their kids in local schools, such as freedom from gang violence and drug trafficking, exhorted the newly parachuted reform class to focus on the mundane prerequisites of infrastructure support and student safety. But try as they might, they found their voices continually drowned out by a rising chorus of vacuous reform-speak. “It’s destiny that we become the first city in America that makes its whole district a system of excellence,” then-mayor Cory Booker burbled at one such gathering. “We want to go from islands of excellence to a hemisphere of hope.”

But for all these stirring reprises of the Spencerian catechism on “the interests of universal humanity,” the actual state of schooling in Newark was not measurably improving. The leaders of the reform effort (which was, of course, entitled “Startup:Education”) couldn’t answer the most basic questions about how the rapidly deployed battery of excellence-incubating Newark charter schools would coexist beside the shambolic wrecks of the city’s merely public schools, where a majority of Newark kids would still be enrolled—or even how parents of charter kids would get their kids to and from school, since these wise, reforming souls neglected to allot due funding for bus transportation. Not surprisingly, the new plan’s leaders were also cagey about explaining how all the individual school budgets, charter and public alike, were to be brought into line.

So in short order, the magic Zuckerberg seed money, together with the additional $100 million in matching grants, had all vanished. More than $20 million of that went to pay PR and consultancy outfits like Tusk Strategies, according to New Yorker writer Dale Russakoff, who notes that “the going rate for individual consultants in Newark was a thousand dollars a day.” Another $30 million went to pad teachers’ salaries with back pay to buy off workers’ good will—and far more important, to gain the necessary leverage to dismiss or reassign union-protected teachers who didn’t project as the privatizing Superman type. The most enduring legacy of Startup:Education appears to be a wholly unintended political one: disenchanted Newark citizens rallied behind the mayoral candidacy of Ras Baraka, former principal of Newark’s Central High School and son of the late radical poet Amiri Baraka, who was elected last year on a platform of returning Newark educational policy to the control of the community.

With all due allowances for the dramatically disparate character of the underlying social order, and the shift from an Industrial Age economy to a service-driven information one, it’s nonetheless striking to note just how little about the purblind conduct of overclass charity has changed since Carnegie’s time. Just as Carnegie’s own sentimental and imaginary identification with the workers in his employ supplied him with the indispensable rhetorical cover for beggaring said workers of their livelihoods and rights to self-determination in the workplace, so did the leaders of Startup:Education evince just enough peremptory interest in the actual living conditions of Newark school families to net optimal Oprah coverage. And once the Klieg lights dimmed, the real business plan kicked into gear: a sustained feeding frenzy for the neoliberal symbolic analysts professionally devoted to stage-managing the appearance of far-seeing school reform. These high-priced hirelings were of course less brutal and bloodthirsty than the Pinkertons Frick had unleashed on the Homestead workers, but their realpolitik charge was, at bottom, equally stark: to discredit teachers’ unions and community activists while delivering control of a vital social good into the hands of a remote investing and owning class. If the parents and kids grew restive in their appointed role as stage props for the pleasing display of patrician largess, why, they could just hire Uber drivers to dispatch themselves to the new model charter schools, or maybe scare off local gang members by assembling an artillery of firearms generated via their 3-D printers.

In truth, no magic-bullet privatization plan could begin to address the core conditions that sent the Newark schools spiraling into systemic decay: rampant white flight after the 1967 riots, which in turn drained the city of the property-tax revenues needed to sustain a quality educational system, combined with corruption within the city’s political establishment and (yes) among the leadership of its teachers’ unions. To make local education districts respond meaningfully to the needs of the communities they serve, reformers would have to begin at the very opposite end of the class divide from where Startup:Education set up shop—by giving power to the members of said communities, not their self-appointed neoliberal overseers. In other words, common schools should rightly be understood as a commons, not as playthings for bored digital barons or as little success engines, managed like startups in the pejorative sense, left to stall out indefinitely in beta-testing mode until all the money’s gone.

Andrew Carnegie, at least, had the depth of character to recognize when his vision of his world-conquering destiny had gone badly off the rails. In the last years of his life, his infatuation with the stolid charms of mere libraries and church organs seemed to fade, so he adopted a quixotic quest to recalibrate human character entirely. Starting with an ardent—and quite worthy—campaign to stem the worst excesses of American imperialism in the wake of the Spanish-American War, Carnegie then turned to the seemingly insoluble challenge of stamping out altogether the human propensity to make war. When this latter crusade ran afoul of the colossal carnage unleashed in the Great War, he became an uncharacteristically depressed, isolated, and retiring figure, barely reemerging in public life before his death in 1919.

In today’s America, however, no one learns from our mogul class’s leadership mistakes and moral disasters—we just proceed to copy them faster. So when New York’s neoliberal governor Andrew Cuomo tore a page from the Zuckerberg playbook and launched a system of lavish tax breaks for tech firms affiliated with colleges and universities—surely these educational outposts would be model incubators of just-in-time prosperity—nemesis once again beckoned. Indeed, when Cuomo’s economic savants unleashed tech money to do its own bidding in the notional public sphere, the end results proved to be no different than they had been in the Zuckerberg-funded mogul playground of Newark charter schools. Cuomo’s ballyhooed, billion-dollar, five-year plan for way-new digital job creation—called, you guessed it, “Startup New York”—yielded just seventy-six jobs in 2014, according to a report from the state’s Committee on Economic Development. This isn’t a multiplier effect so much as a subtraction one; it’s hard to see how Cuomo could have netted a less impressive return on investment if he had simply left a billion dollars lying out on the street.

Just as Newark vouchsafed us a vision of educational excellence without the messy parents, neighborhood social ills, and union-backed teachers who louse the works up, so has Cuomo choreographed a seamless model of tax breaks operating in a near-complete economic vacuum. Say what you will about the abuses of Old World wealth; a little noblesse oblige might go a long way in these absurdly predatory times.

 

Feds Panic on Mass Common Core Test Refusals, Threaten Reprisals

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By Alex Newman

Source: The New American

Public resistance to Common Core is exploding across America, and officials are not happy about it. The Obama administration’s Department of Education, along with pro-Common Core government officials across the country under pressure from the feds, appear to be in panic mode. Facing a growing nationwide “opt out” movement to refuse participation in the unconstitutional federally funded testing regime aligned with the Obama-backed national school standards, senior bureaucrats, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, have actually started resorting to lawless threats against parents, teachers, students, and entire state governments. Some parents were threatened by officials with jail time. Even small children are being punished by the state for “opting out” of the deeply controversial tests, with one California mother telling The New American that her daughter was publicly denied ice cream in retaliation.

But so far, the threats are only emboldening the opposition.

Perhaps the most outrageous threat so far came from Obama’s education chief, Duncan, who boasted in recent years of using government schools to create “green citizens” with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) as a “global partner.” Late last month, Duncan, who was greeted by protesters urging him to “stop test bullying,” threatened federal intervention to force Americans to take the Common Core tests if states would not do the job. “We think most states will do that,” Duncan proclaimed at an Education Writers Association conference in Chicago. “If states don’t do that, then we [the federal government] have an obligation to step in.” In reality, of course, the federal government has an obligation under the U.S. Constitution to butt out. But despite swearing an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, including the 10th Amendment, Duncan has led the charge in recent years to finish federalizing the government school system — and to use it as what he called a “weapon” to “change to world.”

Sounding oblivious to America’s federalist system of constitutional government, Duncan proclaimed that he expected state governments to hold “districts’ and schools’ feet to the fire on this,” as if state governments were mere administrative units to enforce decrees from the all-powerful federal executive branch. Hundreds of thousands of students in New York recently opted out. Almost nobody took the tests in some districts amid a full-scale uprising by teachers, students, and parents. In Chicago, where even the teachers’ union has blasted the federal takeover, school officials were threatened with the loss of more than $1 billion in state and federal “education aid” if not enough students were successfully coerced into taking the Common Core-aligned tests. Still, few details were provided on what it might look like to have the Obama administration “step in” and force students to take the controversial tests — an outrageous threat he also made in a discussion with Motoko Rich of the New York Times.

Critics, however, ridiculed the threat, daring the administration to try it. “Assuming that Duncan is not planning to call in the National Guard to haul off opt-outing 8 year olds, the only possible ‘sanction’ would be withholding funds,” observed Carol Burris, an award-winning New York principal who recently stepped down to fight back against what she sees as problems with the public education system. “That would surely lead to court challenges forcing the Education Department to justify penalizing schools when parents exercise their legitimate right to refuse the test — an impossible position to defend.” Noting that students of all races and backgrounds were opting out of the testing scheme, Burris pointed out that the rates “defy the stereotype that the movement is a rebellion of petulant ‘white suburban moms.’”

In a recent statement published by the Washington Post, the New York “2013 High School Principal of the Year” also highlighted a number of troubling government abuses targeting parents. Among other concerns, she said, citing activists and teachers, that administrators in some districts took advantage of non-English speaking parents by lying to them about the tests, saying they were mandatory or that children would be held back for refusal to take them. One critic called it “blatant discrimination at best.” Burris also lambasted the Common Core tests and noted that Duncan’s own children go to a non-Common Core school — as do the children of Common Core financier Bill Gates, and Common Core strongman Obama. She concluded the scathing commentary by noting that the movement to refuse the tests puts the entire “education reform” agenda in serious trouble.

Beyond targeting states and schools, education officials in some areas, responding to federal pressure, have strayed into the realm of potential criminal activity in seeking to boost participation in the tests. In one especially extreme case from Georgia, school officials, citing supposed “federal and state mandates” on the tests, said parents could not refuse to allow their children to take the tests. A meeting was scheduled for the parents to meet with the principal. However, when they arrived, they were met by a police officer, who reportedly warned them that they may be “trespassing” on school property due to their opposition to the testing regime. In the end, it was apparently sorted out without arrest, but the incident was deeply troubling to parents.

In South Carolina, education bureaucrats went even further. The officials reportedly warned parents that they could be imprisoned for 30 days for refusing to allow their children to participate in the national testing regime, which was mandated under the unconstitutional Bush-era No Child Left Behind scheme. According to news reports citing the group South Carolina Parents Involved in Education, South Carolina Education Department Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Carpentier also threatened groups or organizations that encourage testing refusals with potential criminal charges of “aiding and abetting a crime.” School officials cited in media reports downplayed the threats, saying that parents and groups were merely threatened with existing statutes on “truancy” for not sending children to school for the testing.

In California, mother Amy Watson and her husband decided that their 10-year-old daughter would not be taking the unconstitutional federally funded Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test. She was placed in an alternate classroom each testing day with other “opt out” students. In response to the refusal, though, on the day after testing was finished, “the three girls who opted out again were identified, ‘called out,’ and given instructions to go to the same classrooms as during SBAC testing,” Watson told The New American. “The girls were sent out so the ‘test takers’ could have an ice cream party. My daughter returned to her classroom with the trashcan full of empty ice cream containers. There were three ‘left over’ containers. The three opt-out students were not permitted to have them. These three containers were given to teachers instead.” The same thing happened to opt-out students in other grades, she added, calling it an “egregious act.”

Now, Watson has filed a privacy law-violation complaint with the U.S. Department of Education after her daughter and other opt-out students were “intentionally targeted.” The 10-year old is now fearful of additional retaliation from school officials, and Watson is seeking counseling for her daughter due to the emotional and psychological impact the targeting had on her. “I described the situation to the representative at the federal Department of Education,” Watson said. “He verified that ‘yes, this is a violation of FERPA [federal privacy law to protect students].’” The outraged mother is also in contact with attorneys and vowed to continue pursuing the case. Since the scandal, school officials have tried to downplay the incident as a “misunderstanding,” Watson said. But she is not buying it.

As the rebellion against the unconstitutional Common Core testing regime continues to sweep across America like wildfire, the Obama administration is certain to continue doing everything possible to stop it — including lawlessly threatening the American people. But despite those threats, as awareness of Common Core spreads, opposition will keep spreading as well. The testing regime is crucial for enforcing Common Core, and for gathering vast amounts of private data on students for the federal government. Without it, the widely criticized standards regime foisted on America by taxpayer-funded bribes from the Obama administration may well crumble.

The education establishment is now in a serious bind. On one hand, it can rip off the mask and resort to more outright lawlessness and tyranny in an effort to enforce compliance with its deeply unpopular machinations. Such a reaction would almost certainly backfire and produce even more public outrage and resistance. Alternatively, the Obama administration and its backers can risk having the entire Common Core scheme come crashing down around them by ignoring the mushrooming national movement to refuse the tests. Either way, the American people can still win the battle for education in the long run, if the pressure stays on.

Breaking: Moguls Fear AI Apocalypse

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By Jacob Silverman

Source: The Baffler

A funny thing happened on the way to the Singularity. In the past few months, some of the tech industry’s most prominent figures (Elon Musk, Bill Gates), as well as at least one associated guru (Stephen Hawking), have publicly worried about the consequences of out-of-control artificial intelligence. They fear nothing less than the annihilation of humanity. Heady stuff, dude.

These pronouncements come meme-ready—apocalyptic, pithy, trading on familiar Skynet references—grade-A ore for the viral mill. The bearers of these messages seem utterly serious, evincing not an inkling of skepticism. “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence,” Elon Musk said. “If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” said Stephen Hawking, whose speech happens to be aided by a comparatively primitive artificial intelligence.

Gates recently completed the troika, sounding a more circumspect, but still troubled, position. During a Reddit AMA, he wrote: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

It’s easy to see why these men expressed these fears. For one thing, someone asked them. This is no small distinction. Most people are not, in their daily lives, asked whether they think super-smart computers are going to take over the world and end humanity as we know it. And if they are asked, the questioner is usually not rapt with attention, lingering on every word as if it were gospel.

This may sound pedantic, but the point is that it’s pretty fucking flattering—to one’s ego, to every nerd fantasy one has ever pondered about the end of days—to be asked these questions, knowing that the answer will be immediately converted (perhaps, by a machine!) into headlines shared all over the world. Musk, a particularly skilled player of media hype for vaporous ideas like his Hyperloop, must have been aware of these conditions when he took up the question at an MIT student event in October.

Another reason Silicon Valley has begun spinning up its doomsday machine is that the tech industry, despite its agnostic leanings, has long searched for a kind of theological mantle that it can drape over itself. Hence the popularity of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Any sufficiently advanced religion needs its eschatological prophecies, and the fear of AI is fundamentally a self-serving one. It implies that the industry’s visionaries might create something so advanced that even they might not be able to control it. It places them at the center of the mechanical universe, where their invention—not God’s, not ExxonMobil’s—threatens the human species.

But AI is also seen as a risk worth taking. Rollo Carpenter, the creator of Cleverbot, an app that learns from its conversations with human beings, told the BBC, “I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realised.”

There’s a clever justification embedded in here, the notion that we have to clear the runway for technologies that might solve our problems, but that might also, Icarus-like, become too bold, and lead to disaster. Carpenter’s remarks are, like all of the other ones shared here, conveniently devoid of any concerns about what technologies of automation are already doing to people and economic structures now. For that’s really the fear here, albeit in a far amplified form: that machines will develop capabilities, including a sense of self-direction, that render human beings useless. We will become superfluous machines—which is the same thing as being dead.

For many participants in today’s technologized marketplace, though, this is already the case. They have been replaced by object-character recognition software, which can read documents faster than they can; or by a warehouse robot, which can carry more packages; or by an Uber driver, who doesn’t need a dispatcher and will soon be replaced by a more efficient model—that is, a self-driving car. The people who find themselves here, among the disrupted, have been cast aside by the same forces of technological change that people like Gates and Musk treat as immutable.

Of course, if you really worry about what a business school professor might call AI’s “negative externalities,” then there all kinds of things you can do—like industry conclaves, mitigation studies, campaigns to open-source and regulate AI technologies. But then you might risk deducing that many of the concerns we express regarding AI—a lack of control, environmental devastation, a mindless growth for the sake of growth, the rending of social and cultural fabric in service of a disinterested higher authority ravenous for ever-more information and power—are currently happening.

Take a look out the window at Miami’s flooded downtown, the e-waste landfills of Ghana, or the fetid dormitories of Foxconn. To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, will be published in March.