Re: [blind-democracy] Re: Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary

And all of those "pretenders" who believed they were successful
examples of the American Dream, moved into a building that began
falling in around their ears, never stopping to understand that this
very building represented all that was Donald Trump. His kind built
that building, and many thousands of others just like it. We have
served clients in "high end" retirement apartments, where entire walls
had to be torn out in order to clean out the black mold that had been
growing there for the five or six years since the building first
opened. And so many of these fancy retirement apartment buildings
were sold early on, to huge corporations. Staff positions were cut;
replaced by low paid help. Meals that had been top of the line when
the buildings opened, were cheapened to meals no better than those
served in the homes of many working poor.
But we were coaxed by the pied pipers of Wall Street, to turn our
anger toward our government.
Speaking of those little houses, I know they represent the wide spread
American Suburbia, but it was the best I could do...and besides I love
the song. And it does remind us...some of us...that we are watching
the "dumbing down" of more than our minds. Our life style is being
"dumbed Down", too.
But before I head off down this long, complex road that leads to a
leveling of America's Poor and Working Classes, I will shut up.

Carl Jarvis

On 11/28/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> But the little boxes in the song aren't Puerto Rico. They're American
> suburbia. They're Long Island where I live which is why Long Islanders
> voted
> for Trump in such great numbers. And these are the, excuse the expression,
> iddle class, better educated people, well, many of them are. They're
> actually the working class with delusions of grandeur. They're the people
> who own condos in my apartment building who said at a meeting I attended
> when I first got here, "This is a luxury building!" Of course, they never
> saw a real luxury building. I did when I did home studies for the very
> wealthy in Manhattan. Those buildings have one apartment on a floor, or
> sometimes, 2 floors, and the apartments were bigger than my house, which
> was
> pretty big. But the people in my building saw the marble on the lobby floor
> and the security guard at the desk and they thought they had purchased
> luxury. The fact that the building was built so poorly, that there were
> terrible leaks in many of the apartments and in the underground parking
> area, and that the door frames weren't straight and the doors weren't flush
> with the frames, all that went unnoticed.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 6:11 PM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education
> Secretary
>
> "Make America Strong Again!"
> Translated, this Trump proclamation means, "We're bringing back the
> 90's...the 1890's.
> With a congress controled by conservatives, and Trump bravely leading the
> way, "For Sale" signs will be popping up on many of our public owned
> properties.
> Remember, Capitalism is like, besides an out of control cancer, Ca;pitalism
> is like a giant vacuum cleaner. Whenever a little loose change is left
> laying around...Whoosh!, a loud sucking noise and it's gone.
> Just look at all that loose change. Trust funds and government pensions.
> Public buildings and bridges, not to mention entire freeways, all can be
> better run by private corporations.
> I tell you, the day is close at hand when the USA will look just like
> Puerto
> Rico. we'll all live in little boxes. But we won't own them.
>
> Little boxes on the hillside,
> Little boxes all the same.
> There's a green one and a pink one
> And a blue one and a yellow one,
> And they're all made out of ticky tacky
> And they all look just the same.
>
> And the people in the houses
> All went to the university,
> Where they were put in boxes
> And they came out all the same,
> And there's doctors and lawyers,
> And business executives,
> And they're all made out of ticky tacky
> And they all look just the same.
>
> And they all play on the golf course
> And drink their martinis dry,
> And they all have pretty children
> And the children go to school,
> And the children go to summer camp
> And then to the university,
> Where they are put in boxes
> And they come out all the same.
>
> And the boys go into business
> And marry and raise a family
> In boxes made of ticky tacky
> And they all look just the same.
> There's a green one and a pink one
> And a blue one and a yellow one,
> And they're all made out of ticky tacky
> And they all look just the same.
> Malvina Reynolds songbook(s) in which the music to this song appears:
> ---- Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs
> ---- The Malvina Reynolds Songbook
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
>
>
>
> On 11/28/16, joe harcz Comcast <joeharcz@comcast.net> wrote:
>> And she is now going to head the Dept. of Ed. Her main goal is to
>> effectively privatize public education.
>>
>> And this is surely going to suck for pwd as well.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
>> To: <blind-democracy@freelists.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2016 3:57 PM
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education
>> Secretary
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Mayer writes: "After choosing for his cabinet a series of political
>>> outsiders who are loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken
>>> with this pattern to name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education.
>>> DeVos, whose father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel
>>> marketing empire, comes from the very heart of the small circle of
>>> conservative billionaires who have long funded the Republican Party."
>>>
>>> Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
>>>
>>>
>>> Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary By Jane Mayer, The
>>> New Yorker
>>> 27 November 16
>>>
>>> After choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who
>>> are loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this
>>> pattern to name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose
>>> father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing
>>> empire, comes from the very heart of the small circle of conservative
>>> billionaires who have long funded the Republican Party.
>>> Trump's choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase
>>> the role of charter schools, which she has long championed. But it
>>> also flies
>>>
>>> in
>>> the face of his fiery anti-establishment campaign rhetoric. Steve
>>> Bannon, who was named Trump's senior counsellor and chief strategist,
>>> has mocked what he called "the donor class," arguing that it and the
>>> politicians it bankrolls have little understanding of the needs of
>>> working-class and middle-class voters. Such populist rhetoric fuelled
>>> Trump's campaign, in which he presented himself as an outsider who
>>> would govern independently of the corrupt and out-of-touch private
>>> interests that he said had "rigged"
>>> American politics.
>>> But it would be hard to find a better representative of the "donor
>>> class"
>>> than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch
>>> for years. Betsy, her husband Richard, Jr. (Dick), and her
>>> father-in-law, Richard, Sr., whose fortune was estimated by Forbes to
>>> be worth $5.1 billion, have turned up repeatedly on lists of attendees
>>> at
> the Kochs'
>>> donor
>>> summits, and as contributors to the brothers' political ventures. In
>>> 2010, Charles Koch described Richard DeVos, Sr., as one of thirty-two
>>> "great partners" who had contributed a million dollars or more to the
>>> tens of millions of dollars that the Kochs planned to spend in that
>>> year's campaign cycle.
>>> While the DeVoses are less well known than the Kochs, they have
>>> played a similar role in bankrolling the rightward march of the
> Republican Party.
>>> Starting in 1970, the DeVos family, which is based in Grand Rapids,
>>> Michigan, began directing at least two hundred million dollars into
>>> funding what was then called "The New Right." The family supported
>>> conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic
>>> organizations such as the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded
>>> conservative publications on college campuses; and the secretive
>>> Council on National Policy, which the Times called "a little-known
>>> club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the
>>> country." The Council's membership list, which was kept secret,
>>> included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat
>>> Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups.
>>> Richard DeVos, Sr., liked to say that it brought together "the doers
>>> and the donors."
>>> In 1980, the DeVos family contributed heavily to the election of
>>> Ronald Reagan, and DeVos, Sr., was named the finance chair of the
>>> Republican National Committee. Two years later, he was removed, after
>>> calling the brutal 1982 recession a "cleansing process," and
>>> insisting that anyone who was unemployed simply didn't want to work.
>>> That same year, DeVos and his Amway co-founder, Jay Van Andel, were
>>> charged with criminal tax fraud in Canada. Eventually, Amway pleaded
>>> guilty and paid fines of twenty-five million dollars, and the
>>> criminal charges against DeVos and his partner were dropped. Despite
>>> these incidents, the DeVos clan remained a major political force.
>>> "There's not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the
>>> last fifty years who hasn't known the DeVoses," Saul Anuzis, a former
>>> chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told Mother Jones, in 2014.
>>> The marriage of Dick DeVos to Betsy Prince only increased the
>>> family's wealth and power. Her father, Edgar Prince, had made a
>>> fortune in auto-parts manufacturing, selling his company for $1.35
>>> billion in cash, in 1996.
>>> Her
>>> brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that
>>> the government infamously contracted to work in Afghanistan and Iraq,
>>> where its mercenaries killed more than a dozen civilians in 2007.
>>> DeVos is a religious conservative who has pushed for years to breach
>>> the wall between church and state on education, among other issues.*
>>> (The Washington Post reports that Betsy DeVos has been an elder at
>>> Mars Hill, in Grand Rapids.) Betsy, who served as the chairwoman of
>>> the Michigan Republican Party in the late nineties and again in the
>>> early aughts, spent more than two million dollars of the family's
>>> money on a failed school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would
>>> have allowed Michigan residents to use public funds to pay for
>>> tuition at religious schools.
>>> The
>>> family then spent thirty-five million dollars, in 2006, on Dick
>>> DeVos's unsuccessful campaign to unseat Jennifer Granholm, then the
>>> Democratic governor of the state. After that campaign, the DeVos
>>> family doubled down
>>>
>>> on
>>> political contributions and support for conservative Christian causes.
>>> Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent
>>> heavily
>>>
>>> in
>>> opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to
>>> the Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her
>>> husband led the successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage
>>> ballot referendum in the state in 2004, contributing more than two
>>> hundred thousand dollars to the effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a
>>> hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to an amendment that banned
>>> same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen,
>>> Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the effort to pass
>>> Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.
>>> Trump may have run against big money in politics, but his choice for
>>> Education Secretary has made no apologies about her family's
>>> political spending. Betsy DeVos has been a major financial backer of
>>> legal efforts to overturn campaign-spending limits. In 1997, she
>>> brashly explained her opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures
>>> that were aimed at cleaning up so-called "soft money," a predecessor
>>> to today's unlimited "dark money"
>>> election spending. "My family is the biggest contributor of soft
>>> money to the Republican National Committee," she wrote in the Capitol
>>> Hill newspaper Roll Call. "I have decided to stop taking offense,"
>>> she wrote, "at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I
>>> simply concede the point.
>>> They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster
>>> a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government
>>> and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on
>>> our investment."
>>> "People like us," she added archly, "must surely be stopped."
>>> In the 2016 campaign, DeVos continued to spend heavily, but not in
>>> favor of Trump, who, she declared, "does not represent the Republican
>>> Party."
>>> Evidently, she has changed her mind about that, and he has changed
>>> his about the merits of "the donor class."
>>>
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
>>> valid.
>>>
>>> Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
>>> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-
>>> educati
>>> on-secretaryhttp://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trump
>>> s-big-d
>>> onor-education-secretary
>>> Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary By Jane Mayer, The
>>> New Yorker
>>> 27 November 16
>>> fter choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who are
>>> loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this pattern to
>>> name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose
>>> father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing
>>> empire, comes from the very heart of the small circle of conservative
>>> billionaires who have long funded the Republican Party.
>>> Trump's choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase
>>> the role of charter schools, which she has long championed. But it
>>> also flies
>>>
>>> in
>>> the face of his fiery anti-establishment campaign rhetoric. Steve
>>> Bannon, who was named Trump's senior counsellor and chief strategist,
>>> has mocked what he called "the donor class," arguing that it and the
>>> politicians it bankrolls have little understanding of the needs of
>>> working-class and middle-class voters. Such populist rhetoric fuelled
>>> Trump's campaign, in which he presented himself as an outsider who
>>> would govern independently of the corrupt and out-of-touch private
>>> interests that he said had "rigged"
>>> American politics.
>>> But it would be hard to find a better representative of the "donor
>>> class"
>>> than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch
>>> for years. Betsy, her husband Richard, Jr. (Dick), and her
>>> father-in-law, Richard, Sr., whose fortune was estimated by Forbes to
>>> be worth $5.1 billion, have turned up repeatedly on lists of attendees
>>> at
> the Kochs'
>>> donor
>>> summits, and as contributors to the brothers' political ventures. In
>>> 2010, Charles Koch described Richard DeVos, Sr., as one of thirty-two
>>> "great partners" who had contributed a million dollars or more to the
>>> tens of millions of dollars that the Kochs planned to spend in that
>>> year's campaign cycle.
>>> While the DeVoses are less well known than the Kochs, they have
>>> played a similar role in bankrolling the rightward march of the
> Republican Party.
>>> Starting in 1970, the DeVos family, which is based in Grand Rapids,
>>> Michigan, began directing at least two hundred million dollars into
>>> funding what was then called "The New Right." The family supported
>>> conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic
>>> organizations such as the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded
>>> conservative publications on college campuses; and the secretive
>>> Council on National Policy, which the Times called "a little-known
>>> club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the
>>> country." The Council's membership list, which was kept secret,
>>> included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat
>>> Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups.
>>> Richard DeVos, Sr., liked to say that it brought together "the doers
>>> and the donors."
>>> In 1980, the DeVos family contributed heavily to the election of
>>> Ronald Reagan, and DeVos, Sr., was named the finance chair of the
>>> Republican National Committee. Two years later, he was removed, after
>>> calling the brutal 1982 recession a "cleansing process," and
>>> insisting that anyone who was unemployed simply didn't want to work.
>>> That same year, DeVos and his Amway co-founder, Jay Van Andel, were
>>> charged with criminal tax fraud in Canada. Eventually, Amway pleaded
>>> guilty and paid fines of twenty-five million dollars, and the
>>> criminal charges against DeVos and his partner were dropped. Despite
>>> these incidents, the DeVos clan remained a major political force.
>>> "There's not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the
>>> last fifty years who hasn't known the DeVoses," Saul Anuzis, a former
>>> chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told Mother Jones, in 2014.
>>> The marriage of Dick DeVos to Betsy Prince only increased the
>>> family's wealth and power. Her father, Edgar Prince, had made a
>>> fortune in auto-parts manufacturing, selling his company for $1.35
>>> billion in cash, in 1996.
>>> Her
>>> brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that
>>> the government infamously contracted to work in Afghanistan and Iraq,
>>> where its mercenaries killed more than a dozen civilians in 2007.
>>> DeVos is a religious conservative who has pushed for years to breach
>>> the wall between church and state on education, among other issues.*
>>> (The Washington Post reports that Betsy DeVos has been an elder at
>>> Mars Hill, in Grand Rapids.) Betsy, who served as the chairwoman of
>>> the Michigan Republican Party in the late nineties and again in the
>>> early aughts, spent more than two million dollars of the family's
>>> money on a failed school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would
>>> have allowed Michigan residents to use public funds to pay for
>>> tuition at religious schools.
>>> The
>>> family then spent thirty-five million dollars, in 2006, on Dick
>>> DeVos's unsuccessful campaign to unseat Jennifer Granholm, then the
>>> Democratic governor of the state. After that campaign, the DeVos
>>> family doubled down
>>>
>>> on
>>> political contributions and support for conservative Christian causes.
>>> Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent
>>> heavily
>>>
>>> in
>>> opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to
>>> the Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her
>>> husband led the successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage
>>> ballot referendum in the state in 2004, contributing more than two
>>> hundred thousand dollars to the effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a
>>> hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to an amendment that banned
>>> same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen,
>>> Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the effort to pass
>>> Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.
>>> Trump may have run against big money in politics, but his choice for
>>> Education Secretary has made no apologies about her family's
>>> political spending. Betsy DeVos has been a major financial backer of
>>> legal efforts to overturn campaign-spending limits. In 1997, she
>>> brashly explained her opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures
>>> that were aimed at cleaning up so-called "soft money," a predecessor
>>> to today's unlimited "dark money"
>>> election spending. "My family is the biggest contributor of soft
>>> money to the Republican National Committee," she wrote in the Capitol
>>> Hill newspaper Roll Call. "I have decided to stop taking offense,"
>>> she wrote, "at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I
>>> simply concede the point.
>>> They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster
>>> a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government
>>> and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on
>>> our investment."
>>> "People like us," she added archly, "must surely be stopped."
>>> In the 2016 campaign, DeVos continued to spend heavily, but not in
>>> favor of Trump, who, she declared, "does not represent the Republican
>>> Party."
>>> Evidently, she has changed her mind about that, and he has changed
>>> his about the merits of "the donor class."
>>>
>>>
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>