Mammon category archive

Via Job’s Anger.

’nuff said.

A week after paying $8 million for a private island in the Florida Keys, a real estate developer was arrested for stealing $300 in merchandise from a department store, police report.

Andrew Lippi, 59, was busted Saturday on a felony grand theft rap for allegedly swiping coffeemakers, linen, and light bulbs from a Kmart in Key West.

The most surprising item in this story, as far as I am concerned, is that this took place at a Kmart.

There are still Kmarts?

Q. What’s in the hen house?

Via Job’s Anger.

The charter school movement originated out of good will as an attempt to fix struggling public schools on the cheap by allowing charter school operators to try new things.

That was the rationale, at least. Of course, it hasn’t fixed anything. Fixes cost money and “on the cheap” is never a good strategy; you do get what you pay for.

Instead, this “movement” has mutated from a hopeful fix into a con and a scam. In the course of a longer article about legal obstacles facing Pennsylvania school districts who want to fix failing charters (in a fix over fixing the fix), Lisa Haver tells the story of such charter gone bad:

The District handed over management of Olney High and Stetson Middle schools to Aspira, Inc., in 2010 and 2011 respectively, as part of its “Renaissance” program, with the expectation that Aspira would effect “dramatic” change at both schools. Not only did Aspira, which operates three other charter schools in the city, fail to turn around either school, test scores actually went into a steady decline every year. But it was Aspira’s questionable financial practices and overall mismanagement that led to the District’s 2016 recommendation that the SRC vote not to renew both charters.

Several Philadelphia Daily News stories reported that Aspira had filed phony receipts for contractors and diverted funds from the Renaissance schools to their other charters, a clear misuse of taxpayer funds.

To ice the cake, Pennsylvania’s charter school law makes shutting down the charter cons almost impossible.

Do please read the rest.

Celia Rivenbank considers various why rich parents chose to bribe their children into elite universities and suggests that there’s only one reason that makes sense:

Bragging rights.

Follow the link for her reasoning.

Via C&L, which has a transcript.

Via The Bob Cesca Show Blog.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Reich argues that the new Gilded Age needs a new trust-buster. A snippet:

America’s first Gilded Age began in the late 19th century with a raft of innovations — railroads, steel production, oil extraction — but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber barons” such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and William H. (“The public be damned!”) Vanderbilt.

The answer then was to bust up the railroad, oil and steel monopolies.

We’re now in a second Gilded Age — ushered in by semiconductors, software and the internet — that has spawned a handful of high-tech behemoths and a new set of barons such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

No news is no news.

Ed over at Gin and Tacos, who is an academician, expects any efforts to prevent another such scandal will yield more bureaucracy without positive results. Here’s a bit from his piece:

The college admissions process will never be meritocratic. There’s just too many variables, too many incentives for universities to do things for the wrong reason, and too much disagreement about what even constitutes “merit” or “fairness” for anything approaching either term to exist.

(snip)

I’m not saying it isn’t worth it to strive toward fairness and equality, but given the systems in place in this country we are so ludicrously far from either that we’re flat-out lying to kids by telling them anything is either fair or equal.