Mammon category archive

The Charlotte Observer reports on lack of accountability, a hallmark of the privatization scam.

Public school districts must account for every dollar they spend. Charter schools operated by for-profit companies often do not have to.

Charters can keep salaries of supervisors, academic consultants, back-office staff – sometimes even school administrators – secret and still abide by North Carolina’s public records law despite being funded by tax dollars. These positions are often considered employees of the management company instead of the school, and therefore not subject to disclosure.

Not only do they get public money to provide a public service, they don’t have to tell the public where that money goes. As Atrios would say, it’s all about the grift.

“All about the grift”–there’s a brand for North Carolina.

Robert Reich contrasts the myth of the hard-working rich with the reality.

Americans who became enormously wealthy over the last three decades are now busily transferring that wealth to their children and grandchildren.

(snip)

As the French economist Thomas Piketty reminds us, this is the kind of dynastic wealth that’s kept Europe’s aristocracy going for centuries. It’s about to become the major source of income for a new American aristocracy.

The tax code encourages all this by favoring unearned income over earned income.

The top tax rate paid by America’s wealthy on their capital gains — the major source of income for the non-working rich — has dropped from 33 percent in the late 1980s to 20 percent today, putting it substantially below the top tax rate on ordinary income (36.9 percent).

Afterthought:

Some websites don’t seem to like it when I copy a small bit of text for “fair use”; instead, they try to force the whole darn page on me.

Steve Hill, writing on behalf of the Eugene, Oregon, taxicab industry, gets to the kernel of the Uber scam: it has nothing to do with sharing and everything to do with facilitating gypsy cabs. Here’s the telling bit of his column.

Even the very notion of ridesharing is a misnomer. The term is used in a deceptive attempt to legitimize unlicensed providers of for-hire taxi services, differentiating them from those who are licensed, background-checked, inspected and insured, and somehow excusing them from legal requirements. It is clear to see that rides are not being “shared,” they are being provided in exchange for payment.

Via Job’s Anger.

Linda Welborn, once an advocate for charter schools, recants:

I supported the original charter school movement. However, the charter school movement has morphed into a money machine. The new charter school movement is bad for altruistic charters as well as traditional public schools. I think parents deserve choice. However, I also believe we should strive for quality choice, which means we need a strong authorizing board that values quality and sets high standards.

The word has gotten out that charter schools are huge money making machines. Corporate and education management companies are raking in millions from the taxpayer.

Whether or not you have children in school, you might want to start paying attention to the huge amount of taxpayer dollars these companies are consuming with no transparency and no accountability.

Follow the link for the full mea culpa.

. . . now targets the hungry.

Via the Inky.

Another privatization scammer goes bust.

An Australian company has reached a $5.73 billion agreement to buy the bankrupt business that holds the lease to the Indiana Toll Road.

IFM Investors purchased ITR Concession Co., which holds the lease on the 157-mile highway across northern Indiana for another 66 years. ITR Concession had declared bankruptcy on more than $6 billion in debt last September, and a federal bankruptcy judge in Chicago approved a plan to put the lease out to bid.

It’s not just bad policy, it’s bad business to try to wring private profits from public responsibilities.

Via Eschaton.

Paul Krugman follows the money:

A recent Bloomberg report noted that major pizza companies have become intensely, aggressively partisan. Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans. Other industry players serve Democrats a somewhat larger slice of the pie (sorry, couldn’t help myself), but, overall, the politics of pizza these days resemble those of, say, coal or tobacco. And pizza partisanship tells you a lot about what is happening to U.S. politics as a whole.

Follow the link for the lessons he draws.

Frankly, I think he omitted a part of the story. Fast food joints are deathly afraid that they might have to pay employees enough money to live on. Pizza delivery drivers are among the worst-compensated of all; tips are the great majority of their income.

Armando Iannucci tries to understand when politics stopped being about ideas or the general welfare and became all about big business. A bit:

But dare to express a single doubt over the supreme rationale of having the business community running the whole show, and you’re derided as an economic nincompoop, unfit for office. We can launch inquiries into the police, the war and the press, but it’s the stuff of fantasy to imagine we’d ever launch a full-blown investigation into why our business community lives under permanent impunity. That’s because this belief that, fundamentally, we should all be like businesses, has expanded exponentially. It is political life itself. There’s nothing left. It’s taken on the status of an unshatterable truth: if we are to have any credibility, business is what we must do.

John Romano comments on the problem with standardized testing in Florida’s schools, but his comments do not apply only to Florida. A snippet:

You see, it’s impossible to find a solution without first understanding the problem. And, friends, lawmakers still don’t recognize the problem.

They want to blame local school districts for the proliferation of tests. They want to blame parents for testing anxiety. They want to blame teachers for bad-mouthing tests.

They want to point fingers everywhere else but the real problem:

The outsized importance of the state’s tests.

Every other problem stems from this obsessive notion that accountability can only be derived by the results of a single test created by some faceless corporate interests.