Meher Baba

It's almost winter and the wind is whistling down the chimney. The sound has the orchestral majesty of a Hitchcock movie, full of sociopathic hypocritcal beings that go bump in the night sliding down the chute with bags of money.

Betsy DeVos, US Secretary of Education who doesn't believe in public education but does believe in private, for-profit schools and universities, floats the idea of the federal government forming another agency to collect the $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. "It's an untamed beast," says DeVos of the debt, a Republican, a believer in small government and states rights.

The small government in Afghanistan, none the larger for the estimated $2 trillion spent by the US on making war there on the Taliban since the US War on Terror began in 2001, could use that $1.6 trillion owed by student borrowers so that President Trump can 'draw down' the war with the help of our new political ally, Pakistan.

Betsy DeVos is rich, very rich, rich enough to become an actual cabinet member instead of being offered a mere ambassadorship. She laments the poverty of wealth, preferring to redistribute privilege in the form of charter schools and school vouchers so that the poor 1% can continue to thrive. According to DeVos the student debt 'problem' should be handled by a large financial instutiution, either by creating a new federal agency or by entrusting the problem to one of the big banks with whom DeVos is friendly.

The cost of the longest war in American history, Afghanistan, is an estimated at $2 trillion. The actual cost is thought to be much higher, there being no clearly deliineated, uniform way that money spent on wars is allocated or counted by the White House or Congress. Nor does the estimated cost include future spending on the Department of Veterans Affairs by states or localities for services provided to returning vets. 

There's no horizon line for the hypocrisy. The War on Terror grinds on courtesy of the US, the world's greatest terrorist. Big Pharma loves Afghani poppies and gives thanks to US soliders protecting their off-shore assets. The rap sheet on Betsy DeVos, she of the family that birthed Amway, suckering millions into its pyramidal sales model, and Blackwater, a shadowy, para-military security company owned by her brother Erik Prince, grows by the day: that Betsy DeVos is incompetent is the least of her crimes and misdemeanors.

Hypocrisy may be the greatest sin acc. Meher Baba (1894-1969), but it appears unimpeachable. You can hear the sound of it coming down the chimney to enter that creaky old movie set of a house where Tony Perkins comes upon Janet Leigh taking a shower.