Photo by Remy Steinegger
Summary: Another new example of exploitation of a crisis (caused by oligarchy) by oligarchs who wish to profit from it (privatisation)
Will Hill, a regular contributor of this site, reminds us of this topic which we no longer explore (no time to cover it anymore). The Gates Foundation continues to do its evil deeds under the pretense of charity and teachers are not stupid enough to think that Bill Gates, a college dropout, genuinely wants to improve education. "The article goes on to expose Bill Gates' recent, self dealing and other interference in Colorado's schools," Hill says. Dora Taylor, the teacher who wrote an analysis based on this news, puts it like this: "it is the same oligarchic attitude that now dominates local education politics all over the country. Perhaps most illustrative of the trend is my home state of Colorado. This state has unfortunately become the national petri dish of the Education Oligarchs – people like the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Michael Bloomberg, the anti-union media mogul; and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire sponsor of right-wing Christian causes. These oligarchs and others aim to put everything – including our kids future – up for sale to the highest bidder in the Colorado education system.
"One way to see this is to look at how the Walton family and Gates have deployed their wealth to make an opportunity out of this square state’s infamous education finance problems. Leveraging their tax-subsidized foundations, they purport to come to the financial rescue of budget-strapped schools. Yet, they typically tie their seemingly altruistic beneficence to ideological demands."
Taylor concludes by saying: "Some go further and push specific technologies into classrooms – technologies that, not coincidentally, their corporations stand to profit from. One example: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has used $100 million from his foundation to ram his company’s corporate partner, inBloom, into the Colorado’s largest school district. InBloom collects student data to share with technology companies like Gates’ Microsoft, which then develop for-profit education software to sell back to schools. According to the New York Times, parents objecting to the surveillance-like technology feared “officials might be unable to evaluate inBloom objectively, given its backing by the Gates Foundation, a major donor to public schools whose grant money Jeffco was hoping to attract.” The school district ultimately received a coveted $5.2 million grant from the Gates foundation and – not surprisingly – decided to keep using inBloom."
We
covered inBloom before. It's like Gates' own mini-PRISM. What we generally have here is a huge problem and Gates is one of several who cause it. When the "corporate rule" [1] runs the country and exploits crisis (real or manufactured) it is no wonder that we see people-hostile policies being passed. Gates does this not only in education. In agriculture too, Gates pushes hard for private profits by trying to promote the agenda of Big Agriculture he invests in, including GMO [2]. Gates wouldn't know charity even if it hit him in the face [3]. He was born a super-affluent boy. To him, making himself richer is the solution to poverty in the world.
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Related/contextual items from the news:
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RT TV interview about how governing by crisis and brinkmanship is having a negative effect on the US economy.
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The agribusiness giants would have us believe that our inherently unsustainable and morally reprehensible factory farming system is the only way to feed the world’s burgeoning population. But the facts prove otherwise. Factory farming is all about maximizing profits for a handful of the world’s largest corporations.
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Studies have found the wealthy are less interested in the needs and motions of others and are not as helpful, compassionate or generous as those who possess less. One study, published in 2010, found people with less money are better at reading faces in a measure called empathy accuracy.
