The parasitic seizure of social wealth by the rich has intensified in recent years and promises to increase in 2021. While the stock market soars to artificial new heights, the productive sector of the economy continues to steadily disintegrate, leaving the financial oligarchy with fewer options to maximize profit over time. This in turn is causing the rich to engage in more stock market gambling, private lending, bankruptcies, and restructuring of the state in order to funnel more public funds into private hands (e.g., through more “public-private-partnerships”). As the law of a falling rate of profit invariably intensifies, the nexus between the rich and the state will become more critical to analyze in the months and years ahead. Left unchallenged, state-organized corruption to pay the rich will be strengthened well beyond 2021, leaving society, the economy, and the environment worse off, and making it harder for the New to emerge.
In the sphere of education, given the increased obsession with technology and screen-based instruction, the rich are more aggressively striving to seize public funds, impose user fees, and maximize profits through a dramatic expansion of “virtual learning,” especially through cyber charter schools, which have consistently low graduation rates and are regarded by many as a scam. The rich are extremely eager to commodify as many students as possible, at home and abroad. To be sure, the charter school phenomenon is reducing more and more students, parents, and teachers to fend-for-yourself consumers entangled in commodity logic, which in turn degrades the integrity of human CONTINUE READING: Cyber Charter Schools: Neoliberals Determined to Commodify More Students | Dissident Voice