By guest writer Daniel Miller, author of blog Shots Fired
Donald Trump garnered support from millions of voters because he promised to “drain the swamp,” which, according to him, meant he was going to end the systemic corruption in our government and finally allow the slowly-but-surely deteriorating middle class the fair and balanced treatment they deserve. I have had talks with Trump supporters about this topic, before and after the election, and some of them still put all their trust in him even though he has nominated the richest cabinet in American history to date. Experience? That’s too mundane for a person like Trump. What is the only thing that this self-proclaimed billionaire has based seemingly every decision on? The money, Lebowski. It’s all about the money.
Trump has mostly hired lobbyists to positions of power, so far. Like most important and relevant issues that were pushed aside this campaign so people could focus more on who was the worst person out of the two, education, of course, stayed near the bottom of an already neglected laundry list of priorities. Unfortunately, I feel like the topic of American education is a somewhat banal one. It’s not something that many seem to know a lot about, even though the general consensus would have people in favor of some type of pragmatic reform. After all, education is the bedrock of all progress and innovation. Pragmatic reforms should be obvious to most when certain areas of education seem to be falling behind.
Well, apparently the President-elect decided to spit in the children’s eyes and hire billionaire Republican lobbyist Betsy DeVos to be Education Secretary. Mrs. DeVos was born and married into money, and she, along with the rest of her family, have been generous Republican donors for several decades now. She and her husband have kindly donated somewhere in the ballpark of $2.7 million in 2016 alone, with none of that going to Trump or his supporting super PACs. Her brother Erik Prince, however, is a different story. The co-founder of Blackwater has made generous donations to Make America Number 1, a super PAC that once backed Ted Cruz, then subsequently backed Trump after he became the nominee, which is when Prince made donations.
In 1997, Betsy DeVos responded to criticism about her family’s generous political giving in the political publication Roll Call, in which she stated the she had decided “to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American values.”
I had previously mentioned that DeVos came from and married into money. She married into a family that is worth about $5 billion, with most of that coming from Amway. If that company sounds familiar, then yes, you were thinking of the same multi-level marketing company (pyramid scheme) that primarily promotes health, beauty, and home care products and had to pay $25 million for fraud in Canada.
These caveats are important for several reasons. First, they mean lower taxes. Why do big businesses love donating money to Republican super PACs? Because it means major tax breaks for them. Now, ostensibly lower taxes seem like a great offer until you understand the real reasons behind them, which are kickbacks and privatization. Major donors give politicians money so they will decrease corporate taxes, saving them undisclosed amounts of money. This is called trickle-down economics (Reaganomics) and has never once shown to be successful for anyone except for the people at the top. The idea here is that the honest CEOs running multi-national corporations are supposed to take the money saved by the tax breaks and invest it back into the companies, making everyone, including the laborers, happy. Instead, over the last three and a half decades, that money has gone to line the pockets of the people that paid for these luxurious tax breaks while storing the rest overseas (mostly in the Cayman Islands). This has led to the steady disappearance of the middle class and turned the United States into a major plutocracy while flirting with the idea of an integrated kleptocracy.
Second, they’re against unions. The DeVos family has waged a war against teachers’ unions in Wisconsin as well as Michigan and has been staunch advocates of extending school vouchers in favor of private religious and charter schools. Workers’ unions primarily give money to Democrats, so taking money away from public schools in the form of vouchers tends to weaken the public school system, thus weakening the unions. Weakening the Democratic Party is a Republican’s wet dream because it inevitably leads to lower taxes and less regulation, which means more money for their party, and they have found ways to subtly compartmentalize systemic corruption.
Third, DeVos is a fundamentalist Christian who openly pushes her ideology into the public sector. She even admitted in writing that she expected to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American values. Conservative governing philosophy means lower taxes for the rich, and “traditional American values” in the conservative sense is political doublespeak that means religion.
You might easily assume that I am guilty of projection here, but the DeVoses are on record as saying that school choice leads to “greater Kingdom gain” (I’m assuming they mean that the kids will choose a nice religious school), and have also criticized public schools for “displacing” the church as the center of communities. This is a major reason why they support school choice, because in their mind it is seen as a way to reverse the troubling trend.
According to the most recently released statistics on worldwide education comparisons by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States scored 20 points below average on math, but scored four points above average on reading and three points above average in science, respectively. (Singapore was first in all three categories in case you were wondering.) In the few times that either candidate spoke of education, Trump was fully aware of our world ranking of 28th in education, although he doesn’t seem to fully understand or care about the impact of that ranking. In a video that was uploaded to his Facebook page, he stated that “We are rated 28 in the world. The United States, think of it, 28 in the world. Third world countries are better than us.” He went on to say “It’s a lot to do with how to invest those resources. Whenever these countries have to make a choice between, you know, a better teacher and a smaller class, they invest in the capacity, they invest in teaching.”
Again, Trump says one thing and does something completely different. This should in no way be of any surprise to the people that didn’t vote for him, though. The majority of his supporters tend to selectively forget that the guy wanted to be president to badly that he changed his mind daily on any given number of issues. His inconsistencies on policy were extremely palpable, which is why he divides this country even more as he keeps making these horrendous picks. Admittedly, our education system needs work, and the numbers show. Corruption amalgamated with religion have once again played a key role in halting crucial progressive reformations, and instead of free college tuition for households with incomes of less than $125,000, parents could eventually be forced to pay for their own children’s elementary school education, no matter what their yearly income is. College tuition debt has long surpassed the amount of credit card debt in this country, it will only continue to rise as long as these current policies are in place, and it will only get worse if things end up going in their projected direction.
This was one of the most crucial and pivotal elections in American history and we managed to elect a thin-skinned, right-wing PC demagogue to run the country. People in general are intrinsically bad at seeing the forest for the trees, and this time the implications could be disastrous on a global scale. Millions of people voted for Trump because he was supposed to be the antithesis of Hillary Clinton and the establishment, but instead they chose to listen to his elementary school rhetoric rather than pay attention to his actions, forgetting that actions always speak louder than words. December 19th is when the Electoral College makes the ultimate decision on whether or not to elect the first president to be endorsed by the KKK (directly following our first black president), or to go with someone, anyone, less dangerous than Trump, but I’m not holding my breath. The best thing to do is prepare for the worst and be a few steps ahead of his staunch followers that stopped paying attention after Election Day.
If you have children, or are considering having some in the near future, then Betsy DeVos is someone that you need to be paying close attention to given she actually does get hired. This woman has the potential to completely dismantle our public education system and push for Christian indoctrination across the country. At this point, it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that Trump could run for, and win, another term. And if that gloomy scenario sounds frightening enough, it will be even worse if Betsy DeVos has had a full time government job during that time. This could potentially be detrimental to the next couple of generations filtering through the education system if we are forced to privatize public schools, so DeVos is someone to keep an eye on.
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