A Neoliberal Christmas Carol

 How do billionaires and celebrities avoid looking like complete jerks as they jostle to be among the first in line to receive the Covid-19 vaccine?

Easy - they pretend that it's all for charity. 'Tis, after all, the season for noblesse-obligin' -  that special time of year when the wealthy suck up public acclaim for their do-goodery as they continue screwing everybody else.

So to avoid giving the awful impression that they're cutting in line to get the vaccine, economist Richard Thaler suggests in a New York Times op-ed that they simply bribe nudge their august selves into their accustomed and deserved places as Alpha-dogs at the head of the pack. 

First, the very purpose of the charity auction would be to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. Think of it as a voluntary wealth tax. This money could be used to help people who have suffered most in the pandemic: those who have lost their jobs and face evictions, whose health has been permanently impaired, who face grievous hardship of all kinds.

Depending on the prices and quantities, billions of dollars could be raised that could be spent to help those who need it most. Robin Hood in action!

Of course, with a single payer health care system, a federal guaranteed public housing policy and a basic universal income we wouldn't need the selective and voluntary self-serving charity and bribery schemes of the rich, would we?

Thaler, at the very height of the 2008 financial meltdown that resulted in 94 percent of all the "lost" household wealth geysering up to the same wealthy miscreants whose speculative crime spree had spawned the crisis, actually released a book called Nudge, cowritten with Obama adviser Cass Sunstein. It was widely praised by corporate types as a kind of neoliberal bible for centrist policy wonks and technocrats who want to be seen as caring and concerned as they craft such austerian solutions to misery and want as cutting Social Security and unemployment benefits.

Thaler was duly rewarded with the "Nobel" memorial economics prize the following year for his paternalistic libertarian work positing that credentialed experts, both inside and outside of government, know what is better for people than people do themselves.

 One of the book's more whimsical policy prescriptions was to make it harder, if not impossible, for people to sue doctors and hospitals. If patients were required to waive their legal rights at the time of treatment, the authors claimed, then doctors and hospitals will be less likely to commit malpractice. And the obscene costs of the for-profit mess known as the US healthcare system would magically go down. In other words, with tort reform, who needs Medicare For All?

 It should come as no surprise that Thaler was also among the first "public intellectuals" to peddle the magical thinking concept of "herd immunity" when the pandemic erupted last spring. It's a way to force people back to work and discontinue their benefits before a vaccine becomes available.

And now that we still will have to wait for many long months before everybody gets vaccinated, the New York Times has given Thaler a platform from which to sell the junk theory of "trickle-down" inoculation as a natural adjunct to the equally fraudulent school of supply-side economics. This body of neoliberal thought falsely claims that since obscene wealth in just a few greedy hands will "trickle down" to the rest of us, there is no need for the wealthy to pay higher taxes to fund programs benefiting regular people.

Of course, since Thaler is on the "liberal" Democratic side of the oligarchy, he does magnanimously allow in his Times op-ed that vulnerable people like medical personnel, the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions should get the vaccine first. Only then should the rich and famous shove ahead of the rest of us and relabel their selfishness as charity. He writes:

  At that point, perhaps sometime early this winter, suppose a small proportion of doses are sold in what would amount to a charity auction. Who might be the winning bidders? Very wealthy individuals and high-tech companies are likely to account for some of the demand, along with businesses that employ high-profile talent like professional athletes and entertainers. Just imagine how much the National Basketball Association, whose season will start , around Christmas, would be willing to pay to ensure that none of its players or staff would be infected! The same goes for Hollywood studios and television production companies that are eager to go back to work.

Thaler rationalizes this grotesque shamelessness by marketing it, as I mentioned above, as a kind of trickle-down protection for the unvaccinated teeming masses. He never mentions just how this voluntary largesse would be distributed to the poor and less fortunate. Maybe it's because philanthrocapitalists rarely give their cash directly to those who need it. Rather, they park it in one another's tax exempt foundations and other financial shelters.

Still not buying the charity auction of vaccine idea, proles? Not to worry. Thaler next grabs the concept of Lesser Evilism out of his bag of neoliberal tricks. If we don't allow the Elite to get the vaccine before we do, a "gray or black market" trafficking in precious vaccine is bound to emerge. So nudge yourselves into accepting the class system as an immutable law of nature. Rich and powerful people always have gotten superior health care, so it is no use complaining. Especially now, at this dangerous time. 

Thaler writes that eventually, we should all be required to carry a health photo ID and passport with proof of vaccination at all times. We need to be "nudged" in the right direction using whatever tactics of fear and intimidation that it takes for the Elite to get the Plutonomy (an economy for the richest) moving again and people toiling again.

 If Ebenezer Scrooge had found redemption today instead of nearly two centuries ago, he would have given Bob Cratchit a supermarket discount coupon instead of a Christmas turkey and a deferred tax credit instead of a raise. He would have promised to give Tiny Tim access to affordable health care once he reached early adulthood, or middle age at the very latest. He would have urged them all to hold on for just a little bit longer as he himself voraciously sought and received glowing publicity for the awe-inspiring miracle of his own new-found wokeness and the glory of his good intentions.

Rather than use their platforms to try to shame and pressure the Congress, which they have bought and paid for, to do right by the people, our own modern plague-profiting Scrooges are outdoing themselves with various humanitarian pledges. Even in the middle of a pandemic when millions of people are sickening and dying and going hungry and losing their homes and their jobs, the Season of Noblesse Obligin' must never be canceled.  The obscenely wealthy are at it again, investing in atonement hedge funds, and betting heavily on no-risk moral default swaps.

Miracle of miracles, their Christmas future is not at all the horrific nightmare one that Charles Dickens prescribed for Scrooge. Their Christmas future is right now, in the form of positive coverage of their aspirational  beneficence.

 If 2050 rolls around, and the world's worst polluting capitalists have not, after all, attained their noble goal of trapping all that excess carbon in special underground vats, will anybody remember what they promised back in 2020? Will anybody still be alive in 2050 to bother holding them to their promise?

The whole objective is to make environmentalists shut up during this sacred season and to "nudge" the Biden administration into going easy on its own aspirational executive orders. And the corporate media are only too happy to help spread feel-good propaganda messages like this one:  

CHICAGO, Dec 10 (Reuters) - United Airlines said on Thursday it had committed to a multimillion-dollar investment in a project to remove carbon dioxide from the air through air direct-capture technology as part of a plan to be 100% “green” by 2050. The project, 1PointFive, is a partnership between Occidental Petroleum Corp subsidiary Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Rusheen Capital Management that plans to build the first U.S. industrial-sized direct air capture plant that would permanently sequester 1 million tons of CO2 each year.That’s the equivalent of what 40 million trees can do, but covering a land area about 3,000 times smaller, United said, adding that direct-capture technology is one of the few proven ways to correct for aircraft emissions.United declined to provide further details on the investment amount. (my bold)

(And the Reuters reporter certainly didn't insist upon any.)

Meanwhile, to deflect attention from the disproportionate Black morbidity and mortality rate from Covid-19 (as a direct result of  overcrowded housing and the higher rates of pollution in poor neighborhoods), a consortium of corporate CEOs have just announced, to great fanfare, that they will be hiring a million more Black employees.... by the end of the decade. They were shattered, they say, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. They have therefore pledged to begin a start-up to conduct a study to identify potential job applicants.

If these people think that we're all snoozing while they proclaim how Woke they are, then they're the ones who are dreaming. They can plaster the charity label on their massive campaign of theft, oppression and pollution all they want, they can try and "nudge" us into accepting their nonsensical nostrums and agenda of harm all they want. But we're on to the Con. Or at least we should be.

Who can't but notice, for example, the stark derangement of Special Climate Envoy John Kerry, who is actually trying to recast big polluting subsidized oil companies as sympathetic plague victims?

 "I'm reaching out to them because I want to hear from them," he told NPR. "I'm listening to what their needs are so I can understand what the possibilities may be."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'” -- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

Off With Their Heads

 What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

While the American punditocracy is busy deciding which insipid courtier won the vice presidential debate  - was the "pivotal moment" the fly resting on Mike Pence's stiff white coif, or was it Kamala Harris bragging about all the generals and reactionary Republicans who are backing Joe Biden? - the rest of the country is wondering when the hell they'll be getting more Covid-19 relief.

As aristocratic scolds like Michelle Obama love to remind us all day and every day, our job as citizens is not to make strident demands for guaranteed health care, housing and food. It is to Vote for a more "soothing" Joe Biden as if our lives depended on it, even more than we depend on food, health and shelter. Because choosing a third party candidate, such as a Green, who supports universal health coverage and a pro-environment, antiwar agenda would just be, Mrs. Obama chided this week, simply "throwing away your vote."

That statement pretty much tells you what the country is really for. And it ain't for you. What is an election for, after all, but for the lesser people to give the quadrennial stamp of legitimacy to a cabal of princes and wolves?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also made it absolutely and chillingly plain this week that her priority is not restoring the nation's actual people to health, but to restore her exiled Democratic Party to power. Sending those $1200 relief checks to people struggling to pay their bills would only make Donald the Usurper look good, the same way that Henry VIII tried to make himself look good 500 years ago by handing out baskets of leftover food to the poor at Christmastime.

That was a monarchy and this is a democracy, by golly, so Madam Speaker is not about to stoop to Noblesse Oblige - not when she views the deliberate withholding of direct cash aid to hundreds of millions of people as just the right hook to get them out there to vote. And they say King Donald is the demented one, the way he cut off the desultory-at-best negotiations on pandemic relief between her and Treasury Chancellor Steve Mnuchin in a fit of steroid-enhanced pique.

But since wealthy people still have to get around their playground of an exploited planet, Pelosi and Mnuchin were reported to be feverishly working on a stand-alone bailout of the polluting airline industry. Airline stocks soared anew as these two courtier/oligarchs renewed their negotiations. This was despite the fact that Pelosi had previously denounced negotiating Covid relief in such separate, limited packages, because "they (the party currently in power) don’t want to put food on the table and rent in the pockets of the American people, crush the virus, support our heroes, and the rest.”

Because here's the thing. Stand-alone stimulus checks sent out to needy Americans would bear Donald Trump's name on them, and could conceivably garner him extra votes. It's much better, Pelosi insinuated, to draw out the mass hardship for several more weeks or months to achieve the noble goal of Joe Biden winning the election.  If Nancy Pelosi can make enough people too hungry, homeless, terrified, desperate or disgusted to follow Michelle Obama's hectoring advice to get out there and vote, then at least they won't be voting for Donald Trump.

(Update: As I was writing this article, Pelosi had flip-flopped - once again - to calling for a broader stimulus package, including checks. I believe that this topsy-turvy negotiation process is mainly theater, to keep us properly gaslit as we wait in suspense for the barest kind of relief, and then both sides can declare victory.)

 When you hear them warn that "everything is at stake" in this election, maybe they can make you forget about the big juicy steak you can't afford.

What Pelosi and the Democrats are essentially saying is that American children going to bed hungry or families getting evicted for just a little teensy while longer is certainly better than having Trump in the White House for another four whole horrible years. Let them eat Biden, who promised his Wall Street donors that under his rule, "nothing would fundamentally change." 

This is being sold as a choice that we can all believe in.

 As the Red Queen lectured Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared to which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

Because the United States, ranking first or near-first in the world in Covid cases, despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, is not the "slow country" which the Red Queen scoffed at, nor is it even (not quite yet anyway) among the "shithole countries" that King Donald sneered it.

"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," she lectured to the panting, befuddled Alice."If you want to get somewhere else, you have to run twice as fast." 

 

And political courtiers talking fast and folksily (yet wolfishly) out of both sides of their mouths is also an absolute must if the princely enterprise that is America can continue to thrive, and so that the political courtiers can fulfill the great American meritocratic dream of one day becoming full-fledged princes and media moguls themselves.

The Malthusian States of America

With 20 million Americans' incomes plummeting by as much as two-thirds literally overnight with the expiration of federal unemployment benefits, and 40 million of us facing eviction in the coming months because we lack the money to pay the rent, and with a pandemic raging all around us, comparisons to such catastrophes as the Great Depression simply fail to suffice.

This is especially true because our government, ostensibly formed to protect the citizens, is now openly run by a cabal of corporate predators using "democratically" elected politicians as their front-men and front-women. We are, in effect, not so much a nation or a republic as we are a colony.

A more apt historical comparison to the present crisis might be 19th century Ireland, where mass famine was the de facto pandemic of the era.

Ireland, a British colony, suffered from extreme inequality. Most property was owned by absentee landlords. When the famine arrived in 1845, nearly a million people died and some eight million more were forced to emigrate. British elites simply delighted in the situation, much as Wall Street investors are delighting in Malthusian population control, via Covid-19. The soaring stock market indicates the euphoria of the elites every single day. The more people who die in service to the rich, the more their homes become vacant, the more that the profits of the wealthy few can soar into the stratosphere. Jeff Bezos notoriously glommed up an extra $13 billion in just one 24-hour period and promises to become America's first trillionaire once the dystopian dust finally settles - with or without survivors, with or without a superfluous exploited labor force.

What other conclusion can we reach than to acknowledge that our ruling elites are deliberately making a horrendous situation even worse? What is different in 21st century America from what the British lords intended for Ireland nearly 200 years ago?

As economist Thomas Piketty writes in "Capital and Ideology," those elites demonstrated the "quasi-explicit Malthusian goal of reducing the number of the poor and the number of rebels to boot."

That the elimination of the poor through Social Darwinism is the explicit goal of the "bad cop," or Republican, side of the ruling duopoly is a given. Donald Trump's  goal of eliminating protesters by sending Homeland Security forces to Portland to roust them has initially failed, largely because he went about it in his usual oafish incompetent manner. The "good cops" of the oligarchic duopoly have therefore been temporarily forced to withhold their usual rubber stamp approval of funding for Homeland Security, to try and keep up the pretense that we do not live in a police state. At the same time, they are adamantly supporting continued militarization of local police forces.

If the Democrats had any actual political will or interest in serving the mass of constituents who are not members of the donor class of task masters, their national political platform would contain a guaranteed national income, guaranteed housing and guaranteed single payer health care.

None of these things was on Franklin Roosevelt's vaguely worded "Forgotten Man" 1932 platform, either. He and the political class of the Great Depression had to be scared into passing initial New Deal legislation by socialist rabble- rousers and unions and rent strikers.

Even with this modicum of relief, as Frances Fox Piven notes, the protests continued. 

"They were crucial in pressuring reluctant state and local officials to implement the federally initiated aid programs... By the mid-1930s, mass strikes were a threat to economic recovery and to the Democratic voting majorities that had put FDR in office. A pro-union labor policy was far from Roosevelt's mind when he took office in 1933. But by 1935, strikes escalating and the election of 1936 approaching, he was ready to sign the National Labor Relations Act."

This bowing to popular demand followed a pattern. A similar thing had happened in famine-stressed Ireland, where rural tenants refused to pay rent, occupied the property they'd been ordered to vacate, and fought back against police and the landlords' private militias. The Gladstone government, duly frightened, finally passed the first Irish Land Act in 1870.

It turned out that when push came to shove, the sacred right of private property was not quite as sacrosanct as the owning class liked to pretend. The rationale, Piketty writes, was then and still is now, that if the elites give the poor too much relief and and too many rights, society itself might collapse. But eventually, the British elites relented -much as FDR's party relented in the 1930s - not so much because they'd suddenly developed any empathy for the poor, but because they were scared for their own hides.

Only when they realized that the poor simply weren't buying into their elite propaganda of imminent societal collapse from too much fairness (for the simple fact that the poor had nothing left to lose) did the Lords change their tune in a big fat hurry. They knew that unless they agreed to some reappropriation of wealth, a true bottom-up revolution threatened to become a reality. Their world would be the one to collapse.

In the case of Ireland, tenants were allocated their own land, and landlords were compensated by the government, temporarily placating the masses of people. In the case of the United States, cash relief and a jobs guarantee and retirement security were enacted. In the case of both, elites have been chipping away at these reforms ever since.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden's vow to "Build Back Better" is, without any real economic relief, nothing but a vague promise to build upon a foundation of neoliberal quicksand. Because he is no Barack Obama, who was so charmingly adept at fooling most liberals most of the time with his glib doublespeak of hope and change and "winning the future" by "sharing the sacrifice" with billionaires, it's an absolute given that the street protests will continue unabated all across America, even with a Democratic restoration.

Because Trump defeat or no Trump defeat, we will still be living in a failed state come Inauguration Day, 2021. The social contract will still have been broken into a thousand little pieces. As legal scholar Rosa Brooks has written of failing states, America still will have  lost "control over the means of violence," unable to create peace and stability for its citizens, unwilling to ensure economic growth through a more equitable redistribution of social goods, and still ruled by the "violent competition for resources."

Biden's selection of a Black woman as his vice president will not achieve the oligarchic goal of quelling dissent through identity politics. One top contender,Kamala Harris, is a former prosecutor who jailed the poor mothers of truant children and exploited prison labor, even under a court order to stop doing it. Another, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, is an architect of the Libyan regime change war, resulting in a modern-day slavery system in that particular fail-by-design state. The least-bad choice, Karen Bass, once advocated Medicare For All before orchestrating the congressional Kinte Cloth stunt in lieu of giving health care to everybody. She also just "walked back" her kind words about Fidel Castro in hopes of increasing her veep chances.

But the pendulum is swinging back in our direction. Perhaps we can convince - as in, scare shitless - a Biden administration into commandeering vast parcels of vacant oligarchic real estate and transforming it into affordable housing. The owners and landlords and donors comprising his base would, of course,  be fully and fairly compensated, just as they once were in Ireland, Uncle Joe's beloved ancestral home.

We've got to take advantage of the pendulum-swinging while the pendulum-swinging's still good. It happens so rarely in the favor of the have-not majority.

Fast Times At Covid Corporate High

It was hard to miss Saturday night's glitzy Graduate Together show broadcast in primetime over all the commercial TV and cable networks, and live-streamed on Facebook, Youtube and many other social media platforms.

 Its marquee attraction was former President Barack Obama, whose virtual commencement address to the nation's quarantined high school seniors was covered as a major political news event by the corporate media. (It followed a separate address, sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, to graduates of the nation's Historically Black Colleges.)

Obama's performance was augmented by song and dance routines and motivational speeches by students who had entered to win a spot in what might be called the Bootstraps Inspiration Sweepstakes. One girl gushed about her success being the result of a heroic mother working three jobs to pay her college tuition. The lesson this student learned was not that no parent should ever have to work three jobs, or that no student should ever be in onerous college debt, Her message was that it is incumbent upon the youth of America to "demand more" and show up to vote for politicians who will also pay proper verbal respect to hard-working parents like hers.

Although our disrespectful and disrespected current president was never mentioned by name, a distinct anti-Trump current ran right though the High School Musical program. The liberal politics of orchestrated diversity and slick entertainment and inspiring vignettes served to distract the audience from the true, underlying agenda and profit motive of the show.

A joint project of Hollywood's Entertainment Industry Foundation (ETF), the XQ Institute and the LeBron James Family Foundation,, the show's occult purpose was to gin up public enthusiasm for the complete oligarchic control of our public school systems. It was one giant infomercial for school privatization.

As the Jonas Brothers crooned, and activist Malala Yousafsai championed the rights of female students, a scrolling chyron at the bottom of the screen urged viewers to visit a "Rethinking High School" website. One click brought you to the XQ Foundation,  a think tank bankrolled by billionaire Apple heiress Laurene Powell Jobs and led by former Obama administration officials and investment bankers and hedge fund operators.

It's just another variation on the same old refrain from those smash capitalistic hit jobs on public education and teachers known as No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top. 

Following the neoliberal mantra of never letting a serious crisis go to waste, ETF CEO Nicole Sexton told Variety that Obama's participation in the infomercial was neither the surprise nor the altruistic rare treat that corporate media had been promoting it as:

 "We have a long-standing relationship with XQ Institute, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging traditional education platforms and ways of teaching. This period of time has taken that to a whole other level. But through XQ’s networks, there were a number of students and educators and families across the country who expressed sadness about the missed opportunity to experience the wonderful rites of passage tied to high school graduation. XQ came to us and said, “Let’s talk through what we could do with a telecast,” and we took that to our board.

 We have 11 board members, four of whom are executives for the four major networks. It was instantaneous. They all got so excited. There were a lot of people recognizing that there are going to be seniors who will miss these wonderful rites of passage and asking, “How do we fill that void in a way that really celebrates them?” So our networks at the national level had been exploring different ideas. And then when that opportunity came to them with a formidable partner like XQ, it was literally a no-brainer for them. Within an hour, they came back and said, “Yeah, we want to do this as a roadblock.” And within 24 hours, I had the date.

The CEO of the XQ Institute is Rosslyn Ali, former deputy Obama education secretary for civil rights. Its parent organization, the Emerson Collective, is managed by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, author of Obama's punitive Race To the Top initiative, as well being Rosslyn Ali's current and former boss.

The XQ Institute uses the same obfuscatory vocabulary to hide its for-profit motives as other finance capital-backed school "reform" initiatives run by such billionaire luminaries as Bill and Melinda Gates and the Walton Family Foundations. 

As school privatization critic Diane Ravitch outlined several years ago in her book Reign of Error, common tropes are that public schools are failing, that mainly poor and minority children are "trapped" in these failing schools, that unionized teachers are not up to the challenge of training children for the "jobs of the future," that there exists a "skills gap" in the job marketplace that unionized teachers cannot bridge, and that if only we can bring some of the same good old market-based creative destruction (closures) to schools as private equity brings to business in order to "rescue" them, then all might be well. And be sure to use the word "choice" in every other sentence, as though you actually had one.

To further hide the gross profit motive of placing education of children into the hands of greedy and unqualified venture capitalists and oligarchs, education reform cultists also commonly and cynically frame their agenda as "the civil rights issue of our time." 

Ravitch continues:

"Their policies, they say, will make our children into 'global competitors.' They will protect our national security. They will make America strong again. The corporate reformers play to our anxieties, even rekindling dormant Cold War fears that we may be in for jeopardy as a nation of we don't buy what they are selling. The critics want the public to believe that our public schools are a clear and present danger to our society. Unless there is radical change, they say, our society will fall apart. Our economy will collapse. Our national security is in danger."

And these are the people who complain that Donald Trump is the guy who brought fascism to the country. How convenient. What a gift both Trump and the coronavirus pandemic are giving to the school privatization movement. 

Due to the pandemic, there's been been a slight change in plans and a tweak in the propaganda delivery. Since society has already failed and the economy has already collapsed right before our eyes, the new message to investors is that Remote Learning Is Fun and Profitable. 

All that America's education policy makers have to do is dream and imagine the possibilities. And the XQ Institute is here to help with its pharmacopoeia of hallucinatory drugs.

One of the first steps is to do away with democratically elected local school boards - or at least, to seed them with XQ-funded candidates. This is euphemized on their website as " empowering local communities." Their accompanying illustration is thus one of clenched fists rising in protest against traditional schools.

Speaking directly to local and state legislators and governors, XQ waves wads of money to legions of innovators in contests to redesign their local high schools to neoliberal expectations. A big part of freeing students from the schools they are trapped in is in getting them unpaid internships for the jobs of the future - or "Innovation Schools."

What could be more radical and innovative than never re-opening the shuttered schools at all in favor of remote learning and de facto serfdom - or opening them at vastly reduced physical capacity? Think of the real estate. Not for nothing are the boards of directors of reform organizations rife with property developers and real estate magnates. 

If you watched Saturday's graduation show and clicked on the incessant advertisement link to XQ, you were treated to an avalanche of reform Newspeak that would bury even George Orwell. The language is that turgid and uninformative. You will be led down endless alleys and mazes in search of the perfect Covid Academy merchandise and tips.

One such link is to an outfit called Envision Learning Partners. The essence of this experience begins a mission statement in ALL CAPS. Because, let's face it, by the time you find your way to this site via the long and windy road that XQ has provided for you via the gala star-studded TV graduation special, your eyes are already glazed over. An example of school reform Newspeak:

ENVISION LEARNING PARTNERS (ELP) EMPOWERS SCHOOL AND DISTRICT LEADERS TO BUILD A SUPPORTIVE CULTURE OF LEARNING BY DESIGNING SYSTEMS OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT THAT ENCOURAGE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS TO LEARN AND GROW TOGETHER. WE BELIEVE THIS APPROACH CONTRIBUTES TO GREATER EQUITY IN EDUCATION—MAKING SURE EVERY STUDENT HAS REAL CHOICES AND POWER OVER THEIR OWN FUTURE

In other words, Teach to the Test. Pandemic or no pandemic, keep rating teachers as failures if their students from poverty stricken neighborhoods don't score well. And with Zoom replacing the classroom, they are guaranteed not to do well. In the small print at the bottom of the page  Envision finally sees fit to divulge that it is a for-profit charter school conglomerate in the business of selling test-taking kits to teachers and school districts who must buy them if they are to succeed in the Education Marketplace. They need a lot of 'elp.

For as Barack Obama advised graduating seniors in the keynote address of Disaster Capitalism's gala graduation party:

Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up.... >When you need help, Michelle and I have made it the mission of our Foundation to give young people like you the skills and support to lead in your own communities, and to connect you with other young leaders around the country and around the globe.

He might as well have been speaking his empowering message into the un-monetized wind. Before Covid-19 struck, socialism was just as popular as capitalism among the young adults surveyed. People both young and old still have their brains and they still have their eyes to envision what myriad and deliberate screw-ups that the lords of unfettered capitalism truly are.

Here's the commencement address that should be broadcast far and wide. As Marxist economist Richard Wolff argues, what we need is not a glitzy graduation show or remote learning-by-oligarch. During this national lockdown, what we need is an education reform program that would pair millions of jobless but eminently skilled and qualified professionals from many fields with millions of quarantined students. The sessions would be one-on-one, the teachers would be paid by the government, and the students would not be indebted for life.

That's how reimagining and rethinking high school - or any school or functional democracy, for that matter - would ideally sound.

Capitalistic Necromancy

The Grand Re-Opening of the United States, a/k/a  global Blooperpower, will proceed despite the expected septupling of Covid-19 cases in the coming months. The death rate itself is expected to double to nearly 3,000 Americans a day by June 1st.

Call it depraved indifference to human life,call it Newgenics, call it a crime against humanity or call it genocide . All of these appellations would be correct. But the media-political complex idiots running this show are, with various degrees of rationalization and gaslighting and coercion and propaganda and magical thinking, actually celebrating the increased morbidity and mortality as the regrettable but acceptable "collateral damage" of any typical Blooperpower war for profit and democracy.

If you or a loved one is personally affected by the enhanced infection rate as a result of their cold-blooded policies, just think of yourselves as patriots who are nobly sacrificing yourselves for your country and the American Way of Life.  You wouldn't want your failure to enlist and get with the program to label you a traitor or a draft dodger, would you?

The well-padded gourmand and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went on CNN to warn that we will simply have to "swallow the idea" of losing thousands more lives. He said that being forced into quarantine is every bit as "sad" as dying from Covid-19. I mean, if you can't  breathe while your labor is being extracted from you, then there is no point in even breathing. Buck up, you rotten bunch of death-haters and emulate of the Greatest Generation who so willingly fought and died for us in World War II. Heaven forbid that those extra hundred thousand body bags that the Trump administration so thoughtfully ordered for you went to waste, after all.

“Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can ― but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” Christie asked. “Are there ways that we can  thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?”

This is the very definition of extreme centrism, or what the corporate media likes to euphemise as pragmatism or moderate politics. And if you don't like it, then you're simply being unreasonable. There is no alternative.

An internal government report obtained by the New York Times this week projects 200,000 Covid-19 new cases each day by the end of May, as compared to 34,000 daily cases now. That is a nearly seven-fold increase in less than a month. Donald Trump and his collaborators would probably characterize this as a Lucky Seven victory for them in the lottery of life. Because the house always wins. 

At least for now. How many patriots actually will stand up and say "I regret that I have only one life to give for my Trump, my Christie, my McConnell , my Pelosi, my Smithfield Farms, my Jeff Bezos?"