Monthly Archives: January 2019

Videos of the historian calling out the billionaires in Davos have been circulating online a lot over the past few days. Kind of makes you wonder how he got in the room in the first place, doesn’t it? Well, my colleague from Save Maine Schools pointed out today that Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for […]

Stanley Druckenmiller, also a hedge fund manager, recruited Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs for the board of the Harlem Children’s Zone. As board chair, Druckenmiller shaped the leadership of the organization, which came from the highest echelons of New York’s finance sector. Druckenmiller and Geoffrey Canada had gone to school together at Bowdoin in Maine. […]

Over twenty plus years, Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) grew from a one-block pilot offering integrated social service delivery to a vast enterprise overseeing 20,000 children and adults within a ninety-seven block area. Under the leadership of Geoffrey Canada, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed from finance interests into HCZ’s programs, including Promise Academy Charter Schools, […]

Global finance has not underwritten “cradle to career” interventions to empower the poor or eliminate the source of their suffering. No, the intent of the 168 pages of calculations paid for by Paul Tudor Jones and the Robin Hood Foundation is to harness the human capital of oppressed communities so it can be scrutinized for […]

An influential network of economists and billionaire-backed foundations have laid out this nefarious plan for a futures market in human capital data with the help of complicit academics and think tanks (here, here, here, here, and here). They did it piece by piece, so gradually that few realize the dangers that loom on the horizon. […]

168 pages 168 pages of calculations 168 pages assessing people as commodities 168 pages estimating economic returns on “investment” in the poor 168 pages of financial depravity, inequality, callousness 168 pages of too few with too much and too many with too little 160 pages built on the trans-Atlantic slave trade 400 years from Jamestown’s […]

In the aftermath of the well-funded “Choose Children” campaign, we are left to ponder what Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2019 budget really means for California’s children. Will he use his position to do the will of the people, or instead sacrifice the state’s youth on the altar of technological surveillance and venture capital? I see […]

I wrote the piece below in November 2015 during the lead up to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed the following month and cemented into place “Pay for Success” finance of education delivery in the United States. The Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools hosted that post, since I had not yet started my […]

I’m worried about universal pre-k. Let me repeat. I’m VERY worried about universal pre-k. I worried when Michael Bloomberg and John Arnold supported it in Philadelphia. I worried when I learned about social impact bonds and “pay for success” finance. I worry few people know about these new methods of intrusive pre-k data collection: vests […]

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Part Five Here for the introduction and parts one, two, three, and four. Community foundations were established a century ago to aggregate assets from individuals, families and businesses and advance the activities of nonprofits operating in a particular geographic area, hence the “community” designation. The first example is generally considered to be The Cleveland Foundation, […]