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Sunday, May 08, 2011

If you've had a suspicion that the right wants to kill public education, you're on to something
Posted by Jill | 8:16 AM
The Koch brothers are sucking up all the wingnut oxygen in the room, but there's another right-wing family whose agenda is not specifically to kill public-sector unions, but rather, to kill public education in America.

Rachel Tabachnick at Alternet introduces us to the DeVos family:
Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But "school choice," as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

By now, you've surely heard of the Koch brothers, whose behind-the-scenes financing of right-wing causes has been widely documented in the past year. The DeVoses have remained largely under the radar, despite the fact that their stealth assault on America's schools has the potential to do away with public education as we know it.

[snip]

The DeVoses are top contributors to the Republican Party and have provided the funding for major Religious Right organizations. And they spent millions of their own fortune promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000, dramatically outspending their opposition. Sixty-eight percent of Michigan voters rejected the voucher scheme. Following this defeat, the DeVoses altered their strategy.

Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.

Media materials for Betsy DeVos’ group All Children Matter, formed in 2003, claimed the organization spent $7.6 million in its first year, “impacting state legislative elections in 10 targeted states” and a won/loss record of 121/60.

Dick DeVos also explained to his Heritage Foundation audience that they should no http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflonger use the term public schools, but instead start calling them “government schools.” He noted that the role of wealthy conservatives would have to be obscured. “We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities,” said DeVos, and pointed to the need to “cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”


Go read the whole thing, especially if you live in New Jersey, or in Wisconsin, or any of the other states (like all 50 of them) targeted by this bunch of Christian Dominionists. Public education has been the one thing in this country that has allowed for upward mobility. We already know that the wealthiest people in this country do not want a thriving middle class. Their vision is of an American utopia, dominated by a twisted, perverted, pseudo-Christian ideology that recasts Jesus as an Ayn Rand objectivist, in which the wealthy are that way because they are anointed by God, and the rest of us only serve to do their bidding until we have outlived our usefulness to them.

We are the only ones who can stop them.

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1 Comments:
Blogger Buffy said...
Only God's chosen elite deserve edumacatin'. What's more, it's far easier to convince unprivileged and uneducated masses to accept peanuts for wages and no benefits. When they're worn out from working two or three jobs just to survive they can go off somewhere and die. Meanwhile the employers will just more desperate, ignorant masses willing to work for slave wages because they have no other options.

But this wouldn't be a utopia, except for the privileged few. For the majority it would be a dystopia of the worst kind. Work your fingers to the bones until you die, gaining nothing but the bleakest survival.
5/8/11, 10:50 PM  
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