It may well be that DeVos’s principal crime is stupidity. But isn’t it fraud — or at least extreme negligence — to accept a position for which one is so dramatically unqualified? She has surrounded herself with fraudsters — people who should be in prison are now setting government policy. Despite her billions, the U.S. taxpayer has been forced to cough up $20 million for her “security.”
White-collar crimes are generally very hard to prosecute, and there’s a fuzzy line between prosecutable felony and other degrees of scummitude. Four months ago, she was found personally in contempt by a federal judge. The contempt was for 16,000 counts of illegally demanding money from defrauded students, in some cases garnishing wages and tax refunds, all in direct violation of court order. I’ll let the lawyers tell us whether 16,000 counts of defying court order is a high crime, or just a misdemeanor.
It will sound over-dramatic but there’s no doubt that she and her brother, both billionaires, have caused more suffering than Tim McVeigh ever did.
Here is a small part of what Google barfs up in response to “Betsy DeVos,” with of course focus on the recent news story.
Some felons get off by pleading “not guilty by reason of insanity.” Maybe DeVos gets a similar pass because of her stupidity.
Nah, it’s not fraud to accept a position for which one is not capable of doing effectively but is legally qualified for. It’s just simply a stupid thing to do.
Verdict: stupidity
The real issue is what is it for those idiots who approved her moniation?
Verdict: malfeasance (in the sense of “abuse of power”)
I don’t think she is criminal, but she’s perhaps even more contemptible than Trump in some respects. She’s clearly in over her head even to a greater degree than he is, but she has illusions that she is pursuing a greater good than aggrandizing herself.
She’s an advocate of having guns in schools to protect the children from grizzly bears* and such. Do you people have any idea how many school children are killed each year by grizzly bears? I mean, sure, guns have killed a lot of school children, but think of the big picture.
A lot of hardcore Christian nuts in this admin. And they serve a man, or at least pay lip service to in order to manipulate him, that views the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins as to-do bucket lists.
100% honesty here. I’m a career teacher, a union member, an activist, a Bernie Sanders supporter, a social justice warrior. It has never in the past four years, ever since I learned of Betsy Devos’s existence, occurred to me that anyone would ever say anything that would make me want to defend her in any way. Hell, when her yacht got vandalized, I was a giggler.
Anybody who wants the USA to be a kingdom of any sort can just get the fuck out of my country and move to some place that doesn’t mind being a kingdom.
Alas, it is the two of you who fail the simple text. It was a perversish quantitative claim, so we must get quantitative.
What is the value of a human life? Some U.S. medical cost-cutters use $50,000 or $100,000 as a benchmark; and IIUC the British NHS has it lower than that. Let’s round these up to a $1,000,000 per head for our purpose here. That’s $168 million cost of McVeigh’s massacre; round it up to $250 million since there were injuries in addition to the 168 deaths.
For DeVos we have the 16,000 counts of contempt, many of which had severe costs to these victims — job loss, jailings, bankruptcies, not to mention the actual sums pilfered illegally by DeVos’s action. She’s swindled the U.S. taxpayer of tens of millions in various ways; and helped cause many tens of thousands of students to waste money on fraudulent schools, or to get brainwashed by right-wing educators. She has degraded the public school experience considerable. Her policies have degraded teacher performance which probably led to many good teachers leaving the profession.
But let’s ignore the losses associated with teachers, taxpayer swindling, frauds and so on and just consider her pet charter schools, many of them run by her criminal() friends.* There are 3 million children in charter schools in any given year; assume 3% of them are victims of DeVos policies. There are 50 million students in public schools; assume 0.2% are victims. Even with a modest $1000 estimate of per capita degradation that’s $190 million. On top of which, we must consider subsequent costs of deliberate mis-education. Preaching right-wing values, political fakery, and discouraging critical thinking may come back to bite these children — and society — in the future. The Trump Presidency came with a cost of at least $1 trillion easily. If there’s even a 0.1% chance that GOP-sponsored mis-education will lead to another fiasco at the ballot-box on par with the Election of Trump, that represents a $1 billion expected cost. (I’m afraid the chance is much higher. Of course other right-wing criminals, dolts and haters share some of the blame. *-I use the term “criminal” to include illegal frauds where civil court judgement is easier to get than in criminal courts.)
Furthermore note that I took care to include “her brother” in the quantitative comparison with Mr. McVeigh. Her brother may have cost more than Betsy. Recall that he operated a mercenaries for hire agency, which benefits from war. If you think he’s too virtuous to maximize profits of this business, let me sell you a bridge. Just for starters, one incident which has come to light:
The quantitative claim I made might have been slightly hyperbolic, but I think the arithmetic adds up.
Betsy DeVos was one of the many early signs that the Trump administration was going to be a total train wreck, contrary to the faint hope that some of us held that the pre-election Trump idiocy was just an act. A Secretary of Education who hates education is always ideal when the entire government has gone to shit.