Connecting the Dots: Cartel Privatization Strategies, Lead Poisoning in Flint, and the Tuskegee Experiment, Part XI

Los Angeles where the past four mayors, Richard Riordan (R), James K. Hahn (D), Antonio Villaraigosa (D), a former union advocate and employee, and Eric Garcetti (D) have supported efforts to weaken teacher unions and expand the number of corporate charter schools, with current Mayor Gil Garcetti’s tacit endorsement of Cartel leader Eli Broad’s recent proposal to place fifty percent of Los Angeles Unified School District’s students into corporate charters by 2023.

These cities are but the tip of the iceberg in the Cartel’s march toward privatization of public schools and services from coast to coast.

While Flint, Michigan’s lead poisoning water crisis has received international attention, Gov. Snyder has been systematically moving Michigan’s majority-minority school districts to becoming corporate charter districts. This approach was used by former President George W. Bush to turn New Orleans into a charter and voucher district in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 while the nation’s attention was focused on this disaster.

What is revealing from this brief analysis is the bipartisan nature of Cartel surrogates across political, ideological, class, and racial lines in small, medium-sized, and large cities. Cartel incursions into the hearts of public education stakeholders are turning the future of public education upside down. From Tuskegee to Flint, private-sector backed government experiments with America’s poor citizens from majority and minority ethnic groups have persisted. As the demographic makeup of the country is changing rapidly to a pluralistic society, there is an urgency to move public services into the private sector so that the corporate and wealthy elite can sustain their economic hegemony in an increasingly diverse society.

It is imperative that we begin to examine the relationships and associations that the Cartel has formed with historical allies of public education: the NAACP and the National Urban League who have received millions of dollars from Cartel members: the Koch Bros., the Gates Foundation, etc.; President Barack Obama (who appointed two of the most anti-public education U.S. Secretaries of Education in history, Arne Duncan and Dr. John King) and presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who have received hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from Cartel corporate leaders and the wealthy one percenters; dozens of urban school districts, that have taken funding from the Broad Foundation to plug holes in their budgets; and the NEA and AFT, the major advocates for America’s public school teachers, who in efforts to be cooperative with the Cartel have received modest grants from the Gates and other Cartel foundations for projects purported to advance the mission of public education.

To get to the nexus of this conundrum, we would do well to adhere to the advice that Deep Throat, a confidential source, gave to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their Watergate investigation, “Follow the money.”

These are critical issues that will determine if public education will continue to exist as the engine of upward mobility for the American masses. The coming showdown between Cartel private-sector education reformers and public education stakeholders is “… bringing with it some very strange fruit so delightfully different and yet so hauntingly familiar.”