SAME SHAREHOLDERS, DIFFERENT WARS
"If you're old enough to remember Air America, congratulations — you've been watching this movie for sixty years. The sequel is worse, and they've expanded the franchise."
ACT ONE: The Airline That Wasn't (But Kind of Was Everything)
For those of you who are — how shall we put this delicately — seasoned, you may recall a curious little airline that operated in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 70s. Air America. It flew cargo. It flew passengers. It flew things that were never, ever listed on any manifest. It was, technically, a private company. It was, actually, the Central Intelligence Agency wearing a blazer and calling itself a corporation.
The CIA didn't call it a "front." They called it a "proprietary." Which is a wonderfully bureaucratic word for: "We own this, but we'd prefer you didn't ask questions."
Air America operated in Laos during what historians politely call "The Secret War" — a conflict so secret that Congress wasn't entirely sure it was happening, the American public definitely didn't know, and the Laotian people were unfortunately very, very aware. The airline flew rice, weapons, and — as was later documented with some embarrassment — opium, all in service of a covert foreign policy that had been contracted out to a private entity specifically to avoid the inconvenience of democratic oversight.
Here's the punchline that should keep you up at night: That model never went away. It just got a better logo and moved into your school district.
ACT TWO: The Family Business — From Blackwater to Betsy
Let us introduce you to the most consequential sibling duo in American political economy since the Koch brothers decided to make libertarianism a team sport.
Erik Prince — founder of Blackwater, the private military contractor that essentially asked the question, "What if we ran the Army, but without all that pesky accountability?" — is the brother of Betsy DeVos, former Secretary of Education, primary financier of the school voucher movement, and a woman who has dedicated her considerable fortune to asking the equivalent question about public schools: "What if we ran education, but without all that pesky public funding going to public schools?"
The shared philosophy is elegant in its simplicity: Government agencies are wasteful bureaucracies. Private contractors are efficient solutions. Whether the agency in question is the Department of Defense or the Department of Education is, to this worldview, essentially irrelevant. They are both just markets waiting to be liberated.
Erik privatized the battlefield. Betsy privatized the classroom. The family reunion must be fascinating.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a business model — one that has been refined over sixty years, from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the school board meetings of suburban America, and it works like this:
- Identify a public institution funded by taxpayers.
- Argue that it is failing (sometimes true, often manufactured).
- Propose a private alternative that uses public dollars but answers to shareholders.
- Ensure that the shareholders are your friends, your family, or your fund.
- Repeat until the public institution is too starved to compete.
- Collect.
ACT THREE: The Private Equity Playbook — "We Don't See a Difference Between a Soldier and a Student"
If the Prince-DeVos connection is the family nexus of this story, then Veritas Capital is its financial heart — and it beats with the cold, metronomic efficiency of a firm that has genuinely decided that a third-grader learning to read and a Special Operations soldier managing battlefield logistics are, at their core, the same product category.
Veritas Capital recently raised $15.3 billion for their ninth flagship fund, targeting sectors — and this is their actual language — "driven by regulation and public policy." Translation: We invest where the government has to pay, regardless of how the market performs.
Their portfolio reads like a fever dream of convergence:
| Veritas Asset | Sector | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| Peraton | Defense IT | Manages national security infrastructure and military intelligence systems |
| Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) | K–12 Education | Provides curriculum to millions of American students |
| Cambium Learning Group | K–12 EdTech | Digital learning platforms and professional development |
| DynCorp (formerly) | Defense Logistics | The spiritual successor to Air America — private military support |
The logic is airtight, if you have the stomach for it: Both soldiers and students are captive audiences, paid for by the U.S. Treasury, operating in systems too large and too essential to fail. The government must fund them. Private equity simply positions itself between the government and the end-user and extracts a toll.
And Veritas is not alone. KKR and Blackstone have expanded their definition of "national security" to include "worker retraining" and "educational productivity." BlackRock — the largest asset manager on Earth — is simultaneously the largest shareholder in the defense industry's "Big Five" and a major investor in for-profit EdTech and charter school facilities. The Carlyle Group, long the poster child for the "revolving door" between Washington and Wall Street, has held stakes in both tank manufacturers and for-profit universities.
These are not coincidences. They are portfolio strategies.
ACT FOUR: The Classroom as a Battlefield — The "Standardization" of Your Child
Here is where the Air America metaphor becomes genuinely eerie.
Air America's genius was standardization. You couldn't run a covert airline across Southeast Asia with bespoke, artisanal logistics. You needed uniform cargo containers, standardized flight paths, predictable supply chains. The "product" — whether it was rice or weapons — had to be interchangeable and scalable.
Private equity has applied this exact logic to your child's education.
When a firm like Veritas acquires Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the goal is not to improve the quality of the third-grade reading experience. The goal is to create a scalable, predictable, data-generating product that can be deployed uniformly across 45 million students, generating consistent revenue and — crucially — consistent data.
The data is the real asset. PowerSchool alone holds behavioral and academic data on over 45 million children. The curriculum is, in the cold language of private equity, a "Trojan Horse" — a delivery mechanism for the actual product, which is the predictive modeling of human development, packaged and sold back to the state as an "AI-driven personalized learning solution."
The platforms now assign risk scores to students as early as first grade. If the algorithm — programmed with the PE firm's efficiency goals — decides your six-year-old is "at risk," it automatically routes them toward simplified, remedial digital modules. The teacher, whose professional judgment has been replaced by a dashboard, watches from the side.
This is not education. This is asset management with homework.
And the "workforce readiness" pivot of 2026 makes the ideological agenda explicit: rather than producing curious, civically engaged citizens capable of questioning power, these platforms are redesigning curriculum to produce compliant, credentialed workers for the very corporations that own the platforms. The circle is not just complete — it is self-sealing.
ACT FIVE: The War Dividend — When Your Tax Dollars Fund Both the Bomb and the Algorithm
The 2026 defense budget stands at $838.5 billion. The proposed 2026 request — driven by the Iran conflict codenamed Operation Epic Fury — represents a 50% increase, approaching $1.5 trillion.
Under the "Arsenal of Freedom" agreements signed in March 2026, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, and L3Harris have agreed to quadruple production of precision weaponry. Lockheed's PrSM missile made its operational debut in Iran last month. Honeywell committed $500 million to replenish depleted stockpiles.
BlackRock — the same firm invested in your child's EdTech platform — is the largest shareholder in these companies. Reports surfaced in late March 2026 of a multi-million dollar inquiry into BlackRock's Defense Industrials Active ETF (IDEF), which showed record gains just weeks before the February strikes on Iran. The Pentagon denied the allegations. The ETF kept its gains.
Meanwhile, to fund this defense expansion, the federal government is diverting funds originally earmarked for social infrastructure and public education. This is not a side effect. This is the mechanism. The academic term is "starve the beast" — defund public institutions until they are too weak to resist privatization, then offer the private alternative as a rescue.
The same billionaire-owned firms that are cashing the defense checks are simultaneously lobbying for the privatization of public land, public schools, and public health systems. Whether the U.S. is "at war" abroad or "reforming" schools at home, the financial structures are identical, and the beneficiaries are the same.
ACT SIX: They're Selling the Wilderness Too (Of Course They Are)
Just when you thought the privatization playbook had run out of public goods to absorb, allow us to introduce Natural Asset Companies (NACs) — the innovation that asks: "What if we financialized nature itself?"
Developed by the Intrinsic Exchange Group in partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, NACs are corporations that hold the rights to the "ecosystem services" of a specific area — carbon sequestration, water filtration, biodiversity. Instead of cutting down the forest, the NAC makes money by protecting it — and selling shares in its protection to institutional investors.
Private equity firms are the primary drivers, seeing "Nature" as a new asset class. The Bureau of Land Management's 2026 push has opened over 2.1 million acres in Alaska for mineral entry, while the "Energy Dominance" policy has approved over 6,000 new drilling permits — a 63% increase over the previous administration.
The tactical similarities to education privatization are, at this point, almost comedic in their consistency:
- Captive audience? ✅ The public uses the land, the water, the parks — whatever the private firm "manages."
- Datafication? ✅ NACs use satellite and sensor data to track "biomass metrics" for shareholders, just as EdTech platforms track student behavioral metrics.
- Plausible deniability? ✅ By moving operations into the private sector, the government bypasses the environmental oversight that would apply to federal agencies — just as contracting out education bypasses FOIA requirements.
The forest, the classroom, and the battlefield have been placed in the same portfolio. They are all, in the language of 2026 private equity, "government-influenced markets" with "recession-proof revenue streams."
ACT SEVEN: The Resistance — 8 Million People Who Remember What "Public" Means
On March 28, 2026, an estimated 8 to 9 million Americans participated in the "No Kings Day of Nonviolent Action" across 3,300 locations. Crucially — and this is the detail that should terrify the billionaire class — two-thirds of those protests occurred outside major urban centers. Significant turnouts appeared in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. This is not a coastal phenomenon. This is a populist uprising that has crossed partisan lines, because the looting of public goods does not respect zip codes.
The May Day Strong coalition — organized under the banner of "Workers Over Billionaires" — is planning a nationwide general strike on May 1, 2026, with a "No Business as Usual" framework:
- No Work — Walk out or call in.
- No School — Students and educators in mass walkouts, including a Digital EdTech Blackout where participating districts "unplug" from PE-backed platforms for 24 hours.
- No Shopping — A total consumer boycott to demonstrate working-class economic power.
The coalition includes the NEA, AFT, Chicago Teachers Union, Starbucks Workers United, AAUP, United Electrical Workers, and local affiliates of the AFL-CIO and UFCW.
The "No School" branch is particularly pointed: it frames public education as a "public trust" being dismantled by billionaire foundations, and it is demanding a return to teacher-led, play-based, civically engaged learning — the direct opposite of the algorithmic, workforce-readiness model being installed by private equity.
In many cities, "No School" means Freedom Schools — one-day community learning centers in churches, libraries, and community centers, where children are taught labor history, civil rights, and the history of Social Security. It is, in the most literal sense, education as resistance to the privatization of education.
THE FULL PICTURE: The Looting of the Commons
Here is the complete architecture of what we are describing, laid out without euphemism:
| Entity | War Machine Role | Education Machine Role |
|---|---|---|
| Prince-DeVos Family | Founded Blackwater; architected private military contracting | Funded vouchers; deregulated public schools via DeVos DOE |
| Veritas Capital | Owns Peraton (Defense IT & national security) | Owns HMH (mass curriculum) & Cambium (K–12 EdTech) |
| BlackRock | Largest shareholder in Defense "Big Five" | Major investor in for-profit EdTech and charter facilities |
| KKR / Blackstone | Defense logistics and intelligence infrastructure | Social services, EdTech platforms, privatized housing |
| Carlyle Group | Tank manufacturers, Booz Allen Hamilton | For-profit higher education (Apollo/University of Phoenix) |
| Walton/Gates Foundations | Influence policy via defense think tanks | Drive "market-based" school reforms and standardized testing |
The three mechanisms of extraction are:
Voucher Siphoning — Public dollars move to private schools, which purchase "standardized" curriculum from PE-owned EdTech giants. The money completes a perfect circle back to the same firms that lobbied for the vouchers.
Tax Avoidance — Corporations contribute to "scholarship tax credit" programs instead of paying state taxes, effectively choosing which schools get funded while starving the general public fund. They get the PR of "supporting education" while defunding the system they're replacing.
The War Dividend — The $838.5 billion defense budget is a direct transfer of public wealth to the same billionaire-owned firms simultaneously lobbying for the privatization of public land and schools. The war and the school reform are not separate agendas. They are the same budget cycle.
CONCLUSION: The Secret War Came Home
Air America was a proprietary. It was a public function — intelligence gathering, covert logistics, foreign policy execution — dressed in the clothing of a private corporation, specifically to avoid the accountability that public institutions require.
In 2026, the "proprietary" model has been scaled and domesticated. The private military contractor managing drone swarms over Iran and the private EdTech platform managing your child's reading curriculum are, structurally, the same entity: a private company performing a public function, funded by public dollars, answerable to shareholders rather than citizens, and deliberately positioned outside the reach of public oversight.
The No Kings movement has named this correctly. Whether it is a private army exercising sovereignty over U.S. foreign policy, a private algorithm exercising sovereignty over student data, or a Natural Asset Company exercising sovereignty over a public watershed — the pattern is identical. The public good has been contracted into private hands, and the contract was written by the people who benefit from it.
The seasoned among you will remember that Air America eventually ended. Congress found out. The public found out. The proprietary was wound down, and the CIA was forced — however temporarily — back into the realm of democratic accountability.
The question of 2026 is whether 8 million people in 3,300 locations, a general strike on May 1st, and a generation of teachers, students, and workers who have figured out the playbook can accomplish the same thing — not for one airline in Laos, but for the entire architecture of privatized public life that grew from its blueprint.
The Secret War came home. The question now is whether the public is ready to take its commons back.
📌 Join the May Day Strong movement at MayDayStrong.org | Text SOLIDARITY to 58910 for updates | NEA Solidarity Toolkit: nea.org/mayday-toolkit
Hashtags: #NoKings #PublicSchoolsStrong #NoKingsInClassrooms #RightToPlay2026 #MayDayStrong
The author notes, with some dark amusement, that the same private equity firms described in this article likely have a stake in the platform you're reading it on. We regret the inconvenience.
