Rich man, poor man: A closer look at Oxfam's inequality figures

"martin14" said
Pathetic.

Canadian rich guys are small fish in a big pond.


These are the guys you want:





They are all in Davos right now.

President-Elect Donald Trump on Wednesday said he will nominate the Michigan philanthropist and prominent Republican donor Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Education Secretary.

DeVos, 58, is married to Dick DeVos, who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the governorship in Michigan. He is the former president of Amway, which his father co-founded, and of the Orlando Magic NBA team. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the controversial security firm. The family has given to a number of conservative and Christian organizations....According to Chalkbeat, DeVos’s family poured $1.45 million into an effort to prevent Michigan from adding oversight for charter schools. That effort ultimately failed. DeVos and her husband have been supporters of charter schools for decades and longtime opponents of regulation. And according to Chalkbeat, around 80 percent of the state’s charter schools are run by private companies.

The impact of the education policies DeVos championed across the nation is controversial. In Michigan, where DeVos has been particularly influential, there is little evidence of improved outcomes but strong documentation of abuses by for-profit charters and lax oversight. DeVos herself, however, seems not primarily preoccupied with understanding what teaching methods or school organizational structures are most effective. ...In private for-profit educational markets, a veritable who’s who of investors and entrepreneurs have seen opportunity in applying market disciplines and new technologies to a sector that often seemed to shun both on principle. As attractive and intuitive as these ideas might be, with surprising regularity, those who pursued them have failed to achieve their financial objectives precisely because they let their political enthusiasms color their business judgements. DeVos has invested in a number of these misguided efforts.

Over a decade ago, DeVos invested in the online charter-school operator K12, which targeted the growing homeschool market. But K12’s overly expansive business model made it both significantly less profitable and more prone to regulatory and operating deficiencies than smaller, less ideologically driven competitors. K12 still trades below its IPO price from 2007.