Billionaires’ 2025 Plan to Bankrupt TN Schools, Part 1: From Amway to Bill Lee’s Way

Betsy Devos and her family amassed their billions by exploiting untold numbers of people around the globe with delusional schemes of becoming rich by buying in to the Devos family’s de facto Amway pyramid scheme. With promises of wealth and financial independence spouted during capitalist cult revival rallies, generations of the gullible and desperate have fallen prey to the siren song sung by agents of the corrupt, immoral, and unethical Devos clan and their army of recruiters and marketers. (Check out this NBC segment of Dateline here, or read the transcript here.)

Hoping to escape its international reputation as a corporate bloodsucker based on recruiting, exploiting, and discarding its distributors, Amway is now rebranded as Quixtar.  

Co-founded in 1959 by Richard Devos,  the enormously profitable Amway scam grew alongside the Devos patriarch’s extremist conservative political commitments and the family’s white nationalist religious fundamentalism.  Richard Devos was instrumental in founding and financially supporting the Council for National Policy (CNP), an ultra-right  John Birch Society spin-off that sought to “remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders” (Dallek, 2022). DeVos served as CNP's President from 1986-88 and 1990-93.

For the Devos clan, “pro-moral” translates to mean Christian nationalist.  As the school voucher movement failed to justify its existence on sound policy or empirical grounds, libertarian and fascist oligarchs like the Kochs and the Mercers turned to white Christian nationalists like the Devoses to sell their educationally-bankrupt and racist school voucher privatization scheme. After all, the Devos empire was built on a foundation of zealous propaganda, and these were exactly the skills needed to sell a voucher scheme that had been demonstrated inferior to public schools in terms of educational value. 

And so Betsy Devos was the “chosen one” for the Lout’s first-term Education Secretary, not because of any educational knowledge she had but, rather, for her already well-established and zealous connections to a right-wing infrastructure built to destroy public education, specifically because of public education's non-sectarian, humane, and democratic foundations.  Betsy’s leadership and support of voucher marketing organizations like American Federation for Children and Alliance for School Choice placed her front and center as the mouthpiece, albeit an ignorant one, for the latest fascist scheme to destroy public schools.

But the fascist oligarchs needed something else to sell increasingly unpopular school voucher schemes besides a theocratic billionaire zealot intent upon establishing her version of a white heaven on Earth. They needed willing politicians, either guided by greed, ignorance, and/or religious zealotry. 

Enter Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.  

ED and Blackwater Share Same Goal

Just as her murderous brother, Erik Prince, has a scheme to privatize the U. S. military, the criminally-ignorant crone, Betsy DeVos, is out to do the same for schooling from pre-K through college:

“I think that there’s been an outsized footprint in the last couple, three decades on the part of the federal government in education,” she said. “And it’s my goal to extract us from a lot of those spaces. I will welcome your thoughts on what we need to be doing less of. And if there are areas to be doing more of, what are those areas?”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article170327837.html#storylink=cpy

DeVos Will Make Democrats' Charter Plan Easier to Sell

A few years back Diane Ravitch was forced to admit openly what the opponents of testing accountability knew when No Child Left Behind became law: the ridiculous goal of 100% percent student proficiency in reading and math could never be met, and the fanciful imposition of such a pipe dream would wreak havoc across the entire K-12 education universe.

By the time Ravitch finally came around to acceding the dangerous fantasy that she had loyally promoted along with her fellow charter and voucher supporters at the Hoover Institution, almost half the schools in the U. S. had already been labeled as failures, and a reckless and corrupt corporate feeding frenzy had been set into motion by Ravitch's free market chums.  Tutoring companies were draining billions in federal dollars by cramming poor children for tests they would never pass; the scandal-ridden Reading First gang was shoving its antiquarian reading techniques nationwide to really bad effect; alternate teacher certification scams had been federally incentivized; charter schools, both virtual and physical, were springing up like mushrooms in cow paddies after a rain, and a whole new industry of sponsored fake education research by corporate foundation "think" tanks had become an acceptable occupation for under-employed academics.

During the seven years since Ravitch's lucrative conversion experience, Diane has made it clear that she maintains one foot solidly on the side of the corporate education reformers who brought us the NCLB disaster.  It took her until 2013 to admit her stubborn wrongheadedness on Common Core, even while maintaining even today her support for "voluntary" national standards--whatever that means.  Today she maintains her enthusiasm for shoveling Core Knowledge into the heads of children, just as she remains a supporter of ridiculously high NAEP standards that have been used by "reformers" for years to bludgeon the public schools for their low scores.

In early 2015, her crucial support for NCLB 2.0, which is better known as ESSA, made her culpablility undeniable. This was followed by a year of propagandizing for the longtime charter supporter, Hillary Clinton, while pretending to be the most determined foe of school corporatization.  Diane's blog was used to soft-pedal Weingarten's autocratic choice of Clinton over Sanders, just as it was used to obfuscate Hillary's supportive position on corporate welfare charters.  And it was her political soulmate, Randi Weingarten, who put the final flourishes on the Democratic platform, which clearly supported charter schools while pretending to do the opposite.

Her recent outlining for Jay Mathews the kind of charter schools she would support signals that she is ready to swing both legs onto the side of the charter fence.  Along with the NEA's Eskelsen, AFT's Weingarten, and the troglodytes running the DNC, Ravitch is clearly signaling surrender on charters to Team Trump, even before the first inaugural dance.

Ravitch, as lead propagandist for the corporate unions, will use the Betsy DeVos nomination to make the Dem position of supporting "non-profit" segregated no excuses charters seem most reasonable in comparison.  It is not a coincidence that Ravitch is suddenly playing footsie with charter spokesman, Jay Mathews.

The ESSA, which could not have happened without NPE, NEA, and AFT support, will continue intact, thus allowing Trump, too, to appear reasonable in letting public schools die a slower death than Sister Betsy would have preferred.  And thus the bipartisan dismantling of public education is likely to continue on schedule.  The biggest change we are likely to see in Washington are the corporate Democrats from the Gates Foundation heavily reinforced by the corporate Republicans from the Walton Foundation.

Oh yes, don't forget to send your next donation to NPE.  Ravitch and the corporate unions need your support to buy a whole new supply of whitewash.

Grit-meister Angela Duckworth headlines Jeb Bush's reactionary ExcelinEd summit

“As a close protege of Dr. Martin Seligman, Angela Duckworth serves as Seligman’s point person in moving his brand of paternalistic corporate psychology and character control into schools that teach the children of the poor.” — Professor James Horn

When modern day eugenicist Angela Duckworth isn't transforming Martin Seligman's torture techniques into "character development" policies for children of the poor, she's headlining events held by the nation's most reactionary, right-wing extremists.

What will the perseverance paramour be preaching to her DeVos, Bradley, Broad, Walton, Fisher, Gates, and Bloomberg partisans? Well, GRIT of course! What else do folks that otherwise engage in victim blaming talk about? You're poor because you don't try hard enough and give up too easily!

Nothing says hard work and perseverance like a handsome inheritance—just ask the Walton fortune heirs, who are both key sponsors of the summit and top ExcelinEd Donors. They're gritty, and so is Duckworth.

UPDATE ON THE MICHIGAN FAMILY BUYING INDIANA, FLORIDA, AND OKLAHOMA EDUCATION

By Doug Martin,  the author of Hoosier School Heist (find it on Facebook)

cross-posted at the Hoosier School Heist Blog

Without a doubt, Betsy DeVos and her family members are some of the biggest players behind school privatization in Indiana (and several other states, so see the end of this piece).

Betsy DeVos is the wife of Richard (Dick) DeVos, Jr., the Christian Right leader of Amway and Right-to-Work  supporter who ran for governor of Michigan in 2006 and almost won.   As I explain in my book  Hoosier School Heist, Richard, in a video a few years back, detailed the family plan for Indiana public education and school privatization across the country.

Betsy DeVos’ brother Erik Prince founded the Christian military force Blackwater, known for its massacre, threats to a U.S. investigator, and big government payouts in the War on Terror.

Along with Walmart’s Walton family, Betsy DeVos heads the American Federation for Children, a front-group operating in several states, which funneled money into the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC which in turn handed tons of campaign donations to Indiana Republicans to pass anti-public education bills to benefit for-profit charter operators and rightwing Christian schools.

Besides giving Tony Bennet $10,000 directly, the DeVos family has handed $940,000 to the American Federation for Children.

Mike Pence has received just $20,000 in campaign donations from the DeVos family.

In 2014, the group gave the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC (now the Hoosiers for Quality Education PAC) $175,000.

The American Federation for Children is still very actively raising money in Indiana through Citizens United lawyer James Bopp, Jr.’s Terre Haute office, with Jim Walton giving close to $40,000 this year alone.  So far, the school privatization money is flowing into Florida and Oklahoma, but it’s a sure bet it  will find its way to the Indiana statehouse doorsteps soon, too.

New Jersey's Hedge Fund Guru In Indiana

By Doug Martin

Even though New Jersey hedge fund guru Sean Fieler likes to fight gay-marriage equality and women’s reproductive rights on the national arena, he spends a good deal of his leisure time buying Indiana politicians. 

Fielder is a big honcho in the school privatization movement in the Hoosier state, although you will never hear a whisper about him in the papers.
 
Here is the nitty-gritty:

On September 21, 2012, hedge fund manager Sean Fieler tossed district 30 Republican Mike Karickhoff $15,000 (page 10)for his campaign.  

A few days earlier, Fieler dished out another $15,000 to rightwing Alan Morrison, the handful house rep. from district 42 in central Indiana.  

In October of 2012, Fieler gave the Indiana House Republican Campaign Committee $15,000.

These politicians above have all played a role in school privatization in Indiana.  Both Morrison and Karickhoff are Walmart/DeVos lawmakers, Karickhoff having received $16,000 from the Hoosiers for Economic Growth Pac back in 2010 (see page 9).

And Fieler’s assault on Indiana public schools begins here.  Back in September 2010, Fieler gave $70,000 to the Walmart/Devos Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC which owns education in our state, plain and simple.

Outlandishly, Sean Fieler and his wife have given over $187,000 to Republicans in Indiana, including anti-sign language lawmaker Cindy Noe (see Hoosier School Heist, note 101, page 182-183, for Noe’s role in the Indiana School for the Deaf scandal).

Fieler shares the same God as Mike Pence, so Fieler gave our governor $50,000 in campaign funding in 2011.

Unfortunately, Fieler only has an anonymous mention in Hoosier School Heist, but now I have seen the light.  If you live in the districts (see above) where Fieler has been gassing up the funding machine, as he enjoys his wealth in New Jersey heaven, vote every single one of these bought-and-sold politicians out come November.

Basketball Hero Bobby Heaton and the 13 Filthy Rich Who Bought Indiana Public Education

By Doug Martin

Whenever he gets the opportunity, Indiana State House 46 district member Bobby Heaton (who lives in Terre Haute) likes to let everyone know that he played basketball with Larry Bird back in the good ole days at Indiana State University, but nowadays Heaton is a Walmart team player, dribbling out school privatization for the filthy rich who don’t even live in Indiana, let alone his district.

Representing the high poverty and unemployed Vigo, Clay, Owen, and  Monroe counties, over the last few years Heaton has received  over $113,000 from the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC.  The Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC is funded by the Walmart/Amway Corporation DeVos family/hedge fund  manager/school voucher/charter school millionaires and billionaires who run the American Federation for Children and All Children Matters, front groups which I detail in my upcoming book Hoosier School Heist.  

Here is how the Walmart and DeVos/Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC's school privatization went down.  Using heavy funding from thirteen donors which included Betsy DeVos, Walmart’s Alice and Jim Walton, Pennsylvania hedge fund managers, two leaders of charter schools in Indiana (John Bryan and J.C. Huizenga), and Jeb Bush friend John Kirtley, the American Federation for Children’s Indiana-registered PAC in 2010 funneled over $4.6 million into the Hoosier state (through the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC) and six other states using the Terre Haute office mailbox address of Christian Right lawyer James Bopp Jr., the man behind the Citizens United case which gave rights to corporations to fund campaign super-PACs without publically disclosing their donors.  In 2010, the American Federation for Children gave various Indiana corporate school front groups $375,000 to attempt to swing eighty-five primary and general elections, using millionaire Fred Klipsch, School Choice Indiana, and Hoosiers for Economic Growth to elect a super-majority of Republicans to the Senate and take total control of the House to pass anti-public education laws in 2011.

That is right.  Thirteen filthy rich people bought out Hoop Star Heaton, Indiana Republicans, and other lawmakers across the country to throw children and teachers under the bus and hand money to private schools.  Thirteen, the same number of people in a kindergarten class in Indiana, not counting the aides, since a lot of schools don’t have them because there’s not enough money left after the free-market Christian Right schools and the for-profit charter school owners like John Bryan and J.C. Huizenga get their way because of people like Heaton.

The Walton Walmart family, it should be noted, has the wealth of 48 million American families  combined.  Their whole goal is to privatize education so that rich people can steal our public schools and pay our teachers pennies.  Michigan's DeVos family promotes biblical capitalism, school vouchers, and the free-market Christian Right message that Jesus hated poor people and came back to earth as Mitch Daniels’ buddy Milton Friedman to steal from the poor and help kill off citizens in Chile under dictator Augusto Pinochet. In 2010, Heaton took a  staggering $47, 250 from the Walmart Walton Family/DeVos front group (see page 6 in the PDF box).  In 2012 (see page 25 in PDF box), Walmart and DeVos' Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC gave Heaton $30,500 to spread school vouchers and charter schools across Indiana.  In 2008, Heaton  pocketed another $35,000 from  the filthy rich school privatizers (see page 7 in PDF box).

Heaton is also funded by JP Morgan Chase (see page 4 in the PDF box), the mega-bank whose CEOs plan to do with schools what they did with middle-class and poor families doing the housing bubble, kick the kids to the streets and steal the roofs over their heads.  JP Morgan has been making money from loans to charter schools in the Hoosier state and across America.  Quite frankly, the only place JP Morgan Chase’s leaders belong in Indiana is in the federal prison in Terre Haute in  Heaton’s own backyard.  

And let’s not forget that Heaton is also gifted by Eli Lilly (see page 25 in PDF box), which pretty much owns school reform in Indiana, as I’ve noted too many times to count. The drug company and its nonprofits, by far, are big players in the corporate school movement in Indiana, and current and past board members sit on a whole slew of boards and fund the people and groups out to privatize our schools.  When they are not hiding billions of dollars in tax havens overseas or illegally marketing Zyprexa to nursing home residents, a drug which has killed off more than a few senior citizens and hurt thousands of people of all ages, they are funding the temporary teacher outfits Teach for America and the New Teacher Project in Indiana to take the place of real Hoosier educators.

Heaton  has also taken money from Faegre Baker & Daniels LLP , the shady lawyers in Indianapolis I wrote about at Douglas Storm’s Common Errant a year ago, pointing out they helped fund Indy mayor Greg Ballard’s campaign for corporate charter schools.

Heaton is loaded with money from corporate school operative Brian Bosma and Mitch Daniels' out-of-state funded Aiming Higher PAC.  Aiming Higher is also funded by the Betsy DeVos/Walmart/hedge fund front group All Children Matter.

I am sure some of the small business people (like Baesler's Market) who gave a few hundred dollars in Terre Haute to Heaton's campaign would like to know how Heaton is working for Walmart, the mega-corporation out to put them out of business.  I am positive his minister at the Union Christian Church in Terre Haute may like to know what "Christians" he's associating himself with.  Teachers, real Christians, parents, small businesses, and community leaders in Terre Haute should know what team  All Star Heaton's really playing on, how thirteen people running Walmart, Amway, hedge funds, and Indiana charter schools handed Bobby Heaton almost $113,000 for his role to turn over our schools to the wealthy.  They should also know  that Larry Bird did not fund Heaton’s campaign.  

Mitch Daniels Back Home Again With the Racist and Poor-Bashing Filthy Rich

By Doug Martin

Before heading out with our governor Mike Pence to appear on a panel entitled "Disrupting Higher Ed" at NBC's corporate school commercial Education Nation, Mitch Daniels, former Hoosier governor and current president of Purdue University, will be in Minneapolis tomorrow hanging out and keynoting a big gala event at the Center of the American Experiment on slashing government services.

In fact, if you dish out $2,500, you can get a front row seat in the "Right-to-Work Row."(scroll down the hyperlink for details)

Connected to ALEC and the Franklin Center for Public Policy, the Center of the American Experiment is another right-wing think tank member of the State Policy Network and is associated with the anti-affirmative action, climate change-denying, Christian Right, Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos-affiliated Donors Trust.  American Experimenters promote school vouchers and right-to-work propaganda, too, so Daniels will be right at home.

Although most of the funding to the Center of the American Experiment is hidden, it does load its pockets with money from  the racist and poor-bashing crowd at the Bradley Foundation, the wealthy group that has been the money and force behind anti-affirmative action, workfare, school vouchers, and other anti-social agendas for years now.   Bradley is notorious for using black operatives like former Hoosier Kevin Chavous and Newark mayor Cory Booker to turn blacks against union workers and blacks against blacks.  In a must-read piece, Glen Ford from the Black Agent Report, in fact, says that Barack Obama was the black president the Bradley Foundation had been praying for for years.

In my upcoming book Hoosier School Heist, I trace the various activities of the Bradley Foundation and Mitch Daniels throughout more pages than I can remember.  Below is a small snippet of what I've dug up on Bradley and Daniels for my book, apart from the fact that the Bradley Foundation handed Daniels a $250,000 prize earlier this year and many, many, many other things:

• Now headed by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s campaign co-chair Michael Grebe, the Bradley Foundation has given $31.3 million to school privatization groups since 2001.
• Bradley has funded many racist anti-affirmative action initiatives across America. Besides giving millions to the deceptively named American Civil Rights Institute, the National Association of Scholars, and other anti-affirmative action factions, Bradley subsidized the Center for Individual Rights which won the 1996 Hopwood v. the State of Texas case against racial diversity at the University of Texas, until the Supreme Court ruled against it.  Clint Bolick, from the Koch brothers and Bradley-funded Institute for Justice which successfully fought the Indiana school voucher lawsuit, drafted a national bill to end all affirmative action programs across the country.
• To convince legislators that poverty was the result of blacks being genetically lazy and stupid and not of low wages and no work, the Bradley Foundation hired Charles Murray—one of Mitch Daniels’ friends—to write junk science the media passed off as scholarship.  This lead to The Bell Curve.
• With Charles Murray’s IQ propaganda set in place in 1994, the Bradley experiment was good to go.  In The Feeding Trough, Phil Wilayto notes the following. With Eli Lilly’s J. Clayburn La Force as a board member, the Bradley Foundation unleashed its racist experiment on Wisconsin.  First, they funded a bogus study accusing Illinois residents of getting Wisconsin’s welfare checks.  Then, along with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Bradley handed the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute money to camp in Wisconsin for two years to develop Wisconsin Works or W-2, a welfare program eventually passed by both Republicans and Democrats in 1996.  For the W-2 plan, the Hudson Institute hired Charles Murray himself as consultant.  The think tank was thriving from Eli Lilly money and the success of Mitch Daniels, the Institute’s CEO who had left a few years earlier for his Lilly job.  
• When the Black Alliance for Educational Options was founded, the front group was headquartered in Milwaukee and completely owned by the Bradley Foundation, Walmart, and Mitch Daniels and Milton Friedman’s Friedman Foundation.  
• In one AP-released email, Daniels stresses his desire to sneak into Indiana classrooms as quickly as possible William J. Bennett’s America: The Last Best Hope, a pseudo-history book which whitewashes all the truth behind America’s so-called exceptionalism and has the Bradley Foundation propaganda written all over it.  Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, former Bradley Foundation board member, and past Hudson Institute operative, was the founder of online learning K12 Inc. and now sits on the board of the workforce-ready school training program Project Lead the Way, which is funded by Eli Lilly and the right-wing Kern Foundation, both involved in Marian University’s Turnaround Leadership Academy. Besides being an opportunist and school privatizer, Bennett is best known for his racist comments about how if every black kid was aborted in America, there would be no crime.

Daniels has been a Bradley Foundation waterboy for years now, and this year he once again is following in the footsteps of his companion Bill Bennett, who gave the keynote address at the Center of the American Experiment last year.  I am sure Mitch is happy to be back home at the Center of the American Experiment with the Milton Friedman Christian Right big-money white men that love him so dearly.

NOTE:

Although a lot of the above is my own research, I have also pulled information from Phil Wilayto, The Feeding Trough: The Bradley Foundation, 'The Bell Curve' and the Real Story behind W-2, Wisconsin's National Model for Welfare Reform, A Job Is a Right Campaign. See this link for summaries: http://my.execpc.com/~ajrc/ft.html. You can listen to Phil Wilayto’s June 16, 1998 interview on Democracy Now! at http://www.democracynow.org/1998/6/16/wisconsin_readies_for_school_voucher_system. For more on Bradley’s anti-affirmative action work, also inspect Brendan Fischer, “For Bradley Foundation, Challenging Affirmative Action & Voting Rights Is Part of Long-Term Crusade,” Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch, June 27, 2013,  http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/06/12142/bradley-foundation-challenging-affirmative-action-voting-rights-part-long-term-cr.