There must therefore be more to the story behind funding inequities. This report tries to provide a fuller picture of the problem so that we know more about what stands in the way of equity. The two chapters that follow explore stealth inequities in school finance, which are defined as often-overlooked features of school funding systems that tend to exacerbate inequities in per-pupil spending rather than reduce them, and that do so in a way that favors communities with the least need.
As noted earlier, the goal of this report is to uncover stealth inequities to explain why these states exhibit such regressive patterns in school spending. Is it the case that in the most regressive states, there is simply not sufficient state revenue in the system to target low-wealth districts in order to improve equity? Or are other factors at play?
The Stealth
But there have been upgrades. Its stealthy skin is now easier to maintain, and the time spent on maintenance per flight hour has been cut in half. Its radar and communications have been improved. Since 1993, new precision-guided weapons have been added to the quiver, and more are on the way, including a nuclear-tipped cruise missile.
There will be no more B-2s rolling off the lines from Northrop Grumman, but the two more decades of service now projected for the B-2 should overlap with the next stealth bomber, now being designed: the Long Range Strike Bomber.
In the mid-1970s it was discovered that when neutral hydrophilic polymers were attached to foreign proteins they provoked a lower immune response in the body. This phenomenon (known as the stealth effect) led to a simple and effective way to enhance the in vivo stability and retention of medicines (including current nanomedicines). It is believed that the polymers prevent the adsorption of proteins on the medicines. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Frederik Wurm and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz now challenge our understanding of how neutral hydrophilic polymers alter the biological fate of nanoparticles1. In addition to reducing protein adsorption, these polymers can modify the composition of proteins that surround nanoparticles, and the presence of specific proteins is required to prevent non-specific cellular uptake.
Citing safety concerns after an emergency at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, Air Force officials announced the entire fleet of B-2 stealth bombers would be grounded until they could be inspected.
The Stealth Bomber Packing PuzzleThe Stealth Bomber is a Tetris inspired, volumetric packing puzzle with the signature piece in the shape of a stealth bomber. A great entry level puzzle to introduce a friend into puzzles! There are 122 solutions.This packing puzzle is a culmination of 8 pieces and made from reclaimed woods from my workshop; some exotic, some common, but all of it would have been destined to the scrap pile. The pieces create a 5 x 4 x 2 unit rectangle shape to fit into the box. The wooden box is made from reclaimed 2x4's that I used for event booth builds pre-pandemic. The puzzle is about 2.5 x 3 x 1.25 inches. I have designed the puzzle to give new life to the "less than perfect" pieces from other projects to make something beautiful, unique and fun!
The recent book, Democracy in Chains, by Nancy MacLean, allows us to discern more closely how such slides and gallops can occur. It is focused on the life of a Nobel Prize winning neoliberal--who often called himself a libertarian--loved by the Mt Pelerin Society by the name of James Buchanan. I used to teach critically his book The Calculus of Consent in the 1980s. But MacLean's book, through a close review of an archive not studied before, reveals how the public neoliberal pronouncements by Buchanan between the 1970s and 2000s were soon matched by a set of covert plans and financial funding designed to bring neoliberalism to power by "stealth" strategies. Buchanan had come to see, as had others, that the neoliberal agenda was not apt to be enacted by democratic means. So he adopted a two-track model.
Another key epiphany occurred in the 1980s in the States. Reagan's massive tax cuts, which were promised to spur rapid growth to pay for them, instead created deficits three times larger than those Jimmy Carter had bequeathed. A public reaction set in as the regime proposed to make radical cuts in Social Security and Medicare to make up the shortfall. But those plans failed. After that failure, Buchanan concluded, consonant with advice by Milton Friedman, that such entrenched programs could only be weakened and dismantled through disinformation campaigns. Democracy had to be squeezed. Why? The majority of "takers" will never accept open plans to curtail their benefits to reduce taxes on a minority of "producers". The takers, let's call them for starters workers, the poor and the elderly, don't even believe in "liberty"--meaning above all the freedom of entrepreneurs to roam freely in the market. So, you must pretend you are trying to save the very system you seek to unravel. Talk incessantly about its "crisis". Divide its supporters into older, retired members, who will retain benefits, and younger ones who will have them cut. Celebrate the virtues of private retirement accounts. Propose to have the wealthy be removed from the system, doing all these things until general support for the social security system weakens and you are free to enact the next steps--steps not to be publicized in advance. Once you finally eliminate the system, people's general confidence in the state will wane more. And new initiatives can be taken--again in a stealth manner--with respect to Medicare, pollution regulations, climate change, unemployment insurance, and democratic accountability.
The Koch/Buchanan alliance, consolidated through an Institute at George Mason University, soon became a Center to fund movements and generic models of reform on the Right as it informed American movers and shakers how to create constitutional "locks and bolts" in states and the federal government to secure desired reforms from dissident majorities once they were pushed through and their real effects became apparent. A stealth campaign, followed by opposition to "mob rule". Wisconsin, for instance, became a key laboratory under the regime of Scott Walker, both enacting draconian policies and pursuing constitutional changes to secure them from future majorities. To discern the severity of the stealth activities, consider how one of Buchanan's lieutenants, Charles Rowley, eventually turned against them. He became upset when a new Chair of the economics department summarily fired all untenured economists to replace them with a single breed of libertarians. As summarized by MacLean, two things above all dismayed Rowley, who retained his neoliberal outlook but opposed the stealth practices. "First the sheer scale of the riches the wealthy individuals brought to bear turned out to have subtle, even seductive power. And second, under the influence of one wealthy individual, in particular, the movement was turning to an equally troubling form of coercion: achieving its ends essentially through trickery, through deceiving people about its real intentions to go to a place which, on their own given complete information, they would not go." (p. 208) It's like saying "repeal and replace Obamacare" while planning only to make the first move. And then turn the same trick again in several other domains. Eventually, Buchanan himself grew wary of Koch, in a setting where two narcissistic, authoritarian men struggled to control the same Center. The money man won out. In Rowley's own words Koch, the billionaire donor, "had no scruples concerning the manipulation of scholarship."
How many neoliberal Republicans called out Donald Trump, for instance, when he launched his presidential campaign by pretending insistently for six long years (with absolutely no evidence) that the first African American President held office illegally. Obama was guilty until proven innocent, according to that Donald Trump. How many stepped to the plate to acknowledge galloping climate change in the face of those who have called it a hoax against all the available evidence? What about the appointment of a judge who lied about his previous record, had trouble with his drinking and temper, and probably tried to rape a young girl when they were in high school? What about Trump's constant suggestions that minorities are guilty until found innocent, punctuated by assertions that men applying for high government positions and accused of harassment must be treated as innocent unless a court of law finds them guilty. Quiet whispers from neoliberals of regret and suspicion against Trumpism on these issues, by the way, do not cut the mustard. Neoliberal stealth tactics and neofascist Big Lies have moved too close together for comfort.
One thing that emerged out of the long-term two track campaigns of neoliberalism is a powerful wealth/income concentration machine joined to a series of precarious and suffering minorities, including so many urban Blacks and poor whites. With labor unions, too, caught in a squeeze. Donald Trump could then play on the prejudices and insecurities created; he thus found himself in a position to incite large segments of the white labor and lower middle classes to return to the old days, while retaining the support of a huge segment of the wealthy, donor class. The disinformation campaigns of the old neoliberal vanguard can too easily slide into the Big Lie campaigns Trump pursues in the service of White Triumphalism, intense nationalism, misogyny, the reduction of critical social movements to mob rule, and militant anti-immigration campaigns. The long time con man and money launderer has not, then, merely cowed a neoliberal elite that had pointed in a different direction. He has pulled its stealth campaigns into channels that most find more palatable than other social visions in circulation. 2ff7e9595c
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