MPS Davis Center Staff Receiving Annual Salary of $90,000 to $100,000 >>>>> Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

Note to My Readers  >>>>>


In the next several articles, you will have a chance to see how many staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) fall into certain annual salary categories.  This entry conveys the salaries of those receiving between $90,000 and $100,000 annually.  Interestingly thirty-seven (37) staff members fall into this category, fewer than the number of staff members who fall into the $100,000 and above category (see next article as you scroll on down this blog);  the latter figure is seventy-seven (77).  These two high-earning categories, then, total 114 staff members.


This is a great deal of money being paid out to so many central offices staff, especially given the very humble talents of so many of these people.  Many of those falling in each of these two categories would have no hope of receiving any amount approaching this level of remuneration in the private sector.


I am in the process of calculating current total staff at the Davis Center, which for many months had fallen to about 450, from about 650 soon after Interim Superintendent Michael Goar's departure in spring 2016.  There now seems to have been considerable re-bloating of Davis Center staff, so that Superintendent Graff appears to be regressing in one of his few favorable performance categories;  if excess re-staffing does persist, Graff, who has been a failure as an academic leader, will only be able to claim the very definite achievement of allowing brilliant Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop devise a structurally balanced budget.


Please proceed now to a review of Davis Center salaries in the $90,000 to $100,000 category and then, if you have not already done so, scroll on down to the next article giving those in the $100,00 and above category. 

And as you do so, remember that the factual, analytical, and philosophical presentation in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect is sending and will continue to send forth a hard rain falling on a school district that has delivered a wretched quality of education for many decades.

Perpend this factual information, and understand one of those reasons that 

a hard rain is gonna fall:

 

Project Manager, Planning & Construction ANDREW J LESCH $98,995.00

Project Manager, Planning & Construction JEFFREY M HELSTROM $98,995.00

Manager, Capital Planning & Construction Jibriil Ahmed Yusuf $98,995.00 Davis Center

Grant Funding & Resource Dvlp KERRY A YORK MYLES $96,581.00

Data Scientist CAROLINE L VAUGHN $96,581.00

Evaluation Specialist, Senior ANN L MAVIS $96,581.00

Manager, Payroll STACY SWAIN $96,581.00

Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure JASON L WORWA $96,581.00

Manager, Financial Reporting THAPAKANT THONGCHAI $96,581.00

Teacher, District Program Facilitator ANNE S LEWERENZ $95,756.00

Teacher, English Second Language KRISTEN A BOSTAD $95,756.00

Program Coordinator, GLBT JASON W BUCKLIN $94,245.00

Student Information Analyst WENDY A MENKEN $94,225.00

Student Information Analyst CHARLES KIPPLEY $94,225.00

Accountant JEFFREY E GRILLEY $94,225.00 Davis Center

Executive Assistant to Superintendent FELECIA A COOPER $94,225.00

Accountant PHANIDA SANOUVONG $94,225.00

Coordinator, Media Relations DIRK A TEDMON $94,225.00

Data Scientist KATE L PARKINSON $94,225.00

Accountant, Senior KATE E MCKAY $94,225.00

Coordinator, Creative Design Services ALEX D PARKE $94,225.00

Financial Systems Administrator JAYARAMAN SUBRAMANIAM $94,225.00

Manager, AVID Program TOMMIE J CASEY $94,225.00

IT Design and Training Services DANA E NYBO $94,225.00

Coordinator, Educational Equity ELIZABETH L OHRN $94,225.00

Project Manager, Planning & Construction DIEDRA H GEYE $94,225.00

Project Manager, Planning & Construction ANN MARIE CERNEY $94,225.00

Due Process Specialist CYNTHIA J ATSATT $91,926.00

Manager, Community Education Programs STEPHEN K ALEXANDER $91,926.00

Manager, HHM Student Services Charlotte Amalie Kinzley $91,926.00

HR Strategic Projects DANIEL B GLASS $91,926.00

Management Analyst, Academics JENNIFER A FAIR $91,926.00

Project Manager, Planning & Construction DONALD F BIELINSKI $91,926.00

Manager, Planning & Construction LAURIE A MCGINLEY $91,926.00

Teacher, District Program Facilitator KATHERINE H GRETSCH $91,318.00 Davis Center

Teacher, District Program Facilitator LA MADRID T WILSON $90,208.00

Teacher, Social Worker Spec Asgn (SWOSA) BRADEN R CANFIELD $90,208.00

MPS Davis Center Staff Receiving Annual Salary of $100,000 or More >>>>> Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

In this late August 2019, there are seventy-seven (77) staff members at the Davis Center (Minneapolis Pubic Schools Central Offices, 1250 West Broadway) Receiving an Annual Salary of $100,000 of More  

Superintendent of Schools EDWARD J GRAFF $230,000.00

Chief of Staff Chief of Staff SUZANNE P KELLY $185,402.00

Chief Operations Officer KAREN A DEVET $162,825.00

General Counsel AMY M MOORE $159,962.00

Chief Financial Officer IBRAHIMA A DIOP $159,962.00

Deputy Chief of Academics and Leadership CECILIA M SADDLER $158,896.00

Chief Information Officer FADI M FADHIL $154,630.00

Chief Human Resources Officer MEGAN Y SULLIVAN $154,630.00

Chief of Accountability, Researc & Eqty ERIC A MOORE $154,630.00

Associate Superintendent RONALD V WAGNER $150,896.00

Associate Superintendent LASHAWN K RAY Sr $150,896.00

Superintendent Associate Superintendent BRIAN J ZAMBRENO $150,896.00

Associate Superintendent SHAWN R HARRIS-BERRY $150,896.00

Associate Superintendent CARLA STEINBACH-HUTHER $150,896.00

Deputy General Counsel ANJALECK M FLOWERS $141,142.00

Special Assignment NILO P GUANZON $139,519.00

Executive Director, Cap Proj/Const/Maint CURTIS L HARTOG $136,960.00

Executive Director, Marketing & Commun. JULIE S BROWN $135,915.00

Executive Director, K12 Academic Program AIMEE Y FEARING $135,000.00

Executive Director, IT Services JUSTIN J HENNES $133,991.00

Off. of Black Male Achievement MICHAEL V. WALKER $133,137.00

Executive Director, Early Child. Educat. MAUREEN J SEIWERT $129,996.00

Human Resources Kristine Ann Morshead $129,119.00

Executive Director, Spec. Educ. & Health ROCHELLE M COX $127,265.00

Executive Director, Community Education Patrice J Howard $127,067.00

Director, Special Education Programs VIRGINIA LW NYHUS $126,722.00

Director, Extended Learning DAREN L JOHNSON $126,722.00

Director, Budget Planning & Analysis TAMMY K FREDRICKSON $126,722.00

Director, Special Education Programs SARA M STACK $126,722.00

Director, Compliance FRANCISCO J GONZALEZ $123,632.00

Director, Talent Management KEENAN L SHELTON $123,632.00

Principal, K-8 JOSEPH GROVES $121,656.00

Director Talent Acquisition CANDRA M BENNETT $120,616.00

EL & Global Ed MUHIDIN WARFA $120,233.00 Davis Center 30023746

Director, District Athletics Antony Myron Fisher $117,674.00

Executive Director, Engage. & Ext. Rel. CELINA S MARTINA $115,737.00

Manager, Capital Planning & Construction CLYDE KANE $114,804.00

Director, Nursing Services AMBER R SPANIOL $114,804.00

Director, Total Compensation PETER P RONZA $113,039.00

Director, Employee Relations Chara Louise Blanch $112,005.00

HRIS & Analytics SCOTT G WEBER $112,005.00 Davis Center

Director, STEM/CTE SARA ETZEL $112,005.00 Davis Center

Director, Student Retention and Recovery COLLEEN M KAIBEL $112,005.00

District Master Planner DAVID H RICHARDS $112,005.00

Policy Development Specialist NAN MILLER $109,273.00

Director, Indian Education Jennifer Rose Simon $109,273.00

Data Scientist ERIC J VANDEN BERK $109,273.00

Data Scientist MELODY S JACOBS-CASSUTO $109,273.00

Data Scientist CHRISTOPHER T MOORE $109,273.00 Davis Center

Director, Research & Assessment KELLY A STEWART $109,273.00

Manager, Psychological Services MATTHEW Y LAU $106,608.00

Lead Student Information Analyst JAMES E LISTON $106,608.00

Area Learning Centers MELINDA M STAPLEY $106,608.00

Director, Enrollment Management MARTHA C SWANSON $106,608.00

Manager, OTPT Therapist KAREN F BRYCE $106,608.00

Manager, Social Work CATHERINE M DALNES $106,608.00

Manager, Speech and Language Srvs JILL R RENTMEESTER DISHER $106,608.00

Director, Accountability SARAH EK HUNTER $106,608.00

Manager, Counseling Services JAMES M BIERMA $106,608.00

SAP Programmer / Analyst SYED YASEEN $106,050.00

Administrator, Board & Governmental Rel. RYAN A STRACK $105,596.00

Manager, Community Education Programs AMY A FREY $104,007.00

Supervisor, Accountant KIMBERLY G LIEB $104,007.00

Director, ESL / Bilingual Programming KATHERINE C MCNULTY $104,007.00

Manager, IT Field Support MATTHEW C FELT $104,007.00

Manager, IT Field Support MASON CAMPBELL $104,007.00

Manager, Acct and Vendor Support NEVONIA L RAINWATER $104,007.00

Director, Equity and Integration KANDACE N LOGAN $104,007.00

Risk Manager MICHAEL J COWELL $104,007.00

Director, Special Education Programs DEEQAIFRAH HUSSEIN $101,470.00

Assistant Director, Athletics DAVID M WICKER $101,470.00

HRIS Project Manager GREGORY BENDEL $101,470.00

Manager, Teacher Development EMILY R OLSON $101,470.00

Manager, IT Solution Center BRADLEY W LUNDQUIST $101,470.00

Accountant, Senior ASHWIN R MUNI $101,470.00

Manager, Financial Operations JASON W STEGEMAN $101,470.00

Academic Credentials for New MPS Teaching and Learning Executive Director Aimee Fearing >>>>> Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall in Looming Analysis

Academic Credentials for Aimee Fearing

Minneapolis Public Schools

Executive Director, Teaching and Learning

 

Degrees Earned          Field in Which              Institution at Which             

          Degree Was Earned    Degree Was Earned

 

Bachelors Degree       ESL Education               University of Northwestern

13 May 2000

 

Masters Degree          Education   Hamline University

23 May 2003

 

Doctorate Degree       Education   Hamline University

30 April 2015

 

Other Credentials

 

Professional Licensures

 

K-12 Principal Licensure

Expiration, 30 June 2023

 

K-12 ESL Licensure

Expiration, 30 June 2023

 

5-12 Communication Arts Licensure

Expiration, 30 June 2023

Minneapolis Public Schools Davis Center (Central Administration) Top Salaries >>>>> Hard Rain's Gonna Fall as I Publish My Analysis on Key Overpaid Staff

Superintendent of Schools EDWARD J GRAFF $230,000.00

Chief of Staff Chief of Staff SUZANNE P KELLY $185,402.00

Chief Operations Officer KAREN A DEVET $162,825.00

General Counsel AMY M MOORE $159,962.00

Chief Financial Officer IBRAHIMA A DIOP $159,962.00

Deputy Chief of Academics and Leadership CECILIA M SADDLER $158,896.00

Chief Information Officer FADI M FADHIL $154,630.00

Chief Human Resources Officer MEGAN Y SULLIVAN $154,630.00

Chief of Accountability, Researc & Eqty ERIC A MOORE $154,630.00

Associate Superintendent RONALD V WAGNER $150,896.00

Associate Superintendent LASHAWN K RAY Sr $150,896.00

Superintendent Associate Superintendent BRIAN J ZAMBRENO $150,896.00

Associate Superintendent SHAWN R HARRIS-BERRY $150,896.00

Associate Superintendent CARLA STEINBACH-HUTHER $150,896.00

Deputy General Counsel ANJALECK M FLOWERS $141,142.00

Special Assignment NILO P GUANZON $139,519.00

Executive Director, Cap Proj/Const/Maint CURTIS L HARTOG $136,960.00

Executive Director, Marketing & Commun. JULIE S BROWN $135,915.00

Executive Director, K12 Academic Program AIMEE Y FEARING $135,000.00

Executive Director, IT Services JUSTIN J HENNES $133,991.00

Off. of Black Male Achievement MICHAEL V. WALKER $133,137.00

Executive Director, Early Child. Educat. MAUREEN J SEIWERT $129,996.00

Human Resources Kristine Ann Morshead $129,119.00

Executive Director, Spec. Educ. & Health ROCHELLE M COX $127,265.00

Executive Director, Community Education Patrice J Howard $127,067.00

Director, Special Education Programs VIRGINIA LW NYHUS $126,722.00

Director, Extended Learning DAREN L JOHNSON $126,722.00

Director, Budget Planning & Analysis TAMMY K FREDRICKSON $126,722.00

Director, Special Education Programs SARA M STACK $126,722.00

Director, Compliance FRANCISCO J GONZALEZ $123,632.00

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Six >>>>> Humankind’s Predicament in 2019

Thus did the great bulk of humankind arrive at late modern and contemporary times male-dominated, dictatorially ruled, economically exploited, and ill-educated.

 

Humankind in the 19^th century laid the foundation for a 20^th century that was an Enlightenment philosophe’s (think Voltaire) nightmare: 

 

World War I was appallingly stupid in causation and strategy.  Capitalist myopia produced the Great Depression.  The blunders and exigencies of both of these events engendered World War II, violent enough on field, air, and ocean of battle had not the killing of six million Jews also been part of the spectacle.  Ill-advised diplomacy and Big Power chauvinism yielded the Cold War, as if hot war had not been enough.  And then Cold War brought more hot war, with Big Power and proxy interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Argentina, and many other locations. The police state masquerading as democracy in the United States and its South African impersonator induced civil strife.  Colonialism and colonialism’s end brought awkward attempts to create nationalism in the absence of nationalist sentiment, complete with wretched governance and abominable brutality that rivaled the violence that had been perpetrated by exiting imperialists.  By the end of the violent 20^th century, long festering sectarian wounds burst asunder, the north-south division of Ireland upon independence (as the Irish Free State within British Dominion, 1922;  as non-commonwealth Republic of Ireland, 1948), the Arab-Israeili wars (1948, 1956, 1968, 1973), and the Iranian Revolution (1979) foreshadowing increasingly virulent Protestant-Catholic conflict in Ireland (1969-1997), the Iraq-Iran war (1981-1988), the ascendance of the Taliban in Afghanistan during and after the failed Russian intervention (1980-1986), and the violent explosions launched by Al-Qaida and then the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL]) within the first two decades of the 21^st century.

 

As the violent years from 1901 through 2000 ensued and then yielded to a 21^st century successor that signified also a new millennium, the New York City Twin Tower and Pentagon bombings plus downed United Airlines Flight 93 brought tightened security that terminated any remnant innocence that had survived the hostilities of the 20^th century. 

 

Concurrent with the violent conditions of life and other demonstrations of general ignorance were astounding achievements in the course of the 20^th century and early 21^st century produced by that minority of humanity possessing full prose proficiency or other abilities that far exceeded humankind as a whole, symbolized and materially manifested in the advent of the mass-produced automobile, heavier than air flight, atomic and nuclear weaponry and energy-generation, the mainframe computer, space flight and lunar landing, personal computers, digital cameras, cell phones, and smart phones incorporating many of these technologies into one amazingly compact device.

 

The salient feature of life throughout the late 19^th century, the entire 20^th century, and the first two decades of the 21^st century is that a fraction of humanity has elevated comprehension of scientific processes and technological applications while the mass of humanity rushes to use devices created in these applications with little understanding of what they are using, how the devices were created, with what materials, at what human cost (think koltan from the [non-] Democratic Republic of the Congo), or why.

 

More concisely, the salient feature of life in 2019 is that one portion of humanity has a deep understanding of science and technology while they and the bulk of the population have very little understanding of themselves.  Knowledge of science and technology far outstrips understanding of psychology, religion, purpose, and meaning.  Application of scientific and technological knowledge in the absence understanding the psycho-spiritual nature of those by and for whom technological devices are created is portentous:

 

We are paying dearly for this knowledge gap and we shall endure future catastrophic consequences if we do not close the gap with persistent and unprecedented acquisition of factual information and utilization of that knowledge in philosophical contemplation, psychological inquiry, analytical reasoning, and the development of more sophisticated sense of meaning and ethics that draws from but far transcends the tenets of established religions.

 

Women and those tentatively liberated in the social convulsions from the late 1960s forward must as in all other endeavors lead the way in resolving the gap between science and religion.

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Five >>>>> Illiteracy and Semi-Literacy

Happiness is grounded in concern for one’s fellows and a genuine desire to make life better for all people on the planet at the time one lives and as one anticipates the future.

 

Before the advent of writing systems, oral communication was the only means of recording thoughts, including those pertaining to ethics and spirituality in poetry, stories, and epics that combined those two forms.  In the aftermath of the creation of systems of writing in certain parts of the globe, many societies continued to transmit intellectual, creative, ethical, and spiritual thoughts orally, operating without the written word.  Such societies often continued to operate very close to nature, so that the sun, moon, rivers, lakes, land, all manner of features of the sky and what could be observed of the cosmos pervaded the lives of humans, giving them ideas of creation, deity, and meaning. 

 

Given that God is to be found in and in contemplation of Nature and Cosmos, people living in preliterate and non-literate societies had a deeper understanding of life than would be the case with the advent of civilization.  Writing systems came with the urbanization and hierarchical mechanisms of control identified with civilization.  City life and concerns associated with urban people presented distractions that people in less complex forms of social and civic organization did not have.  Although people warred on each other, the capacity for enormous destruction was limited and the impetus for survival necessitated a focus on what was good for the community as a whole in the present and in contemplation of the future.

 

Civilizations have been dominated by elites who sought to control all aspects of existence as much as possible.  Expressed concern for the greater good was mostly a rationalization for the exercise of power.  Life in the palace and territorial expansion became chief goals for the governing elite and associated militarists, and by extension those scribes who served their needs.  Concern was not to make life better for all but for an elite few, who pretended that the greater number of inhabitants in realm and empire would also benefit from their political, territorial, and hedonistic gratifications.

 

Scribes used writing systems first created approximately 3500-3000 BCE by the Vinca culture of Serbia and then very proximately by elites in Sumer, the first of numerous influential civilizations in Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (today’s Iraq).  The writing system of Sumer, cuneiform, was in the beginning highly functional in application, used to advance the purposes of mercantile, trader, and government elites.  This was true, too, in Egypt, in which the pharaohs and others in the bureaucracy used hieroglyphics, the first writing system to incorporate phonetic values, to further their personal aggrandizements and to control the populace.  Hieroglyphics, while a very distinct system, was at a high degree of likelihood inspired by the Serbian and Sumerian initiatives.

 

Over the expanse of Eurasia, other people created writing systems that may have had some sense of those initiatives but were largely independent.  Some time after 2000 BCE, elites in the urban center of Harappa in the Indus River Valley created an as yet undeciphered script, used for the familiar mercantile and governing purposes.  By 1200 BCE, the ruling classes of the Shang Dynasty recorded details of their religious sacrifices, military fates, and matters of law and governance on oracle bones.

 

More definitely independently generated in the Serbian and Sumerian manner were scripts developed by the elites of the Americas from today’s Mexico southward.  During 900-400 BCE, the Olmecs and Zapotecs created royal iconography and calendars via writing systems that furthered the aims of elites in today’s Mexico.  And in today’s Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and southward to Guatemala, the Mayans created the most sophisticated writing system of the American pre-Columbian era, used for administration and for the propagation of the religion and governing dictates of the ruling class.

 

Inspired by a succession of scripts induced by the achievements of the Serbians and Sumerians, the Greeks developed an alphabetic system during 1100-700 BCE that feature consonants and vowels.  But this alphabetic system in all likelihood was part of a historical concatenation dating to the consonantal alphabetic system of the Canaanites from 1500 BCE.  This script became influential upon those elites who developed the Phoenician writing system featuring the first linear alphabet, a script which in turn inspired Hebrew and Aramaic systems.  The Hebrew system was used by those who migrated to Canaan during 1200-1000 BCE;  the system evolved into the new “Square Hebrew” system after the 6^th century BCE Babylonian exile.

 

Aramaic, developed during the same 1200-1000 BCE period as in the Canaanite case, became a hugely influential system, adopted by the Achaemenid rulers of Persia and inspiring systems ranging to Turkish and Mongol populations in today’s Siberia, Mongolia, and Turkestan.  With the expansion of trade and associated advantages of reading and writing for mercantile classes, literacy in West Asia (Middle East) may have increased to 15-20% of the population.  Literacy may have been in that range also in the Roman Republic and Empire, where from 1200 BCE Latin evolved from systems used by the Etruscan and Latin peoples and from the various systems of the Mediterranean and West Asia.   And during the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), Latin was used by Christians at the papal court and by clergy and monks throughout Europe for purposes of maintaining the papacy;  and by governing aristocrats, who often employed these clerics and monks do their administrative bidding.

 

The Renaissance featured a revival of interest in the humanistic works of the Greeks and Romans and created a spirit of critical analysis that impelled a concern for reform of received institutions, including conspicuously the Roman Catholic Church.  Protestants created their own orthodoxies and manifested their particular institutional deficiencies, but their approach to religion proved a boon to literacy.  With Protestant emphasis on actually reading the Bible, with new printing presses churning out works far more cheaply, and with the quest for data and facts engendered by the Enlightenment (1600-1800, Age of Reason, Scientific Revolution), some nations of northern Europe surged toward full literacy;  in Sweden, literacy became a prerequisite for marriage.

 

But in the British Isles and then in the United States literacy remained below 50% through the 19^th and into the 20^th century.  Worldwide, the masses remained mostly illiterate until the latter half of the 20^th century:  Literacy increased from 55.7% in 1950 to 86.2%  in 2015.   In the year 2019, literacy remains wildly variable:  almost full literacy in North America, Europe, West Asia, and Central Asia;  above 90 percent in East Asia, the Pacific, Latin America;  67.55 percent in South Asia and North Africa;  and 59.76 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Literacy among youth (younger than 15 years of age) augurs more promisingly for the future, but still is at only 84.03 percent for South Asia and North Africa and 70.06 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

And although female literacy increased fifty percent from the year 1970 through 2000, reducing the gender gap, there has been stagnation in the literacy rates for women, who constitute 63 percent of the world’s 745,000 illiterate people.  In North Africa, the gap is sixteen percentage points, with 70 percent of women and 86% of men literate;  the comparable figures for South Asia are 58 percent and 77 percent;  and for Sub-Saharan Africa 52 percent and 68 percent.  Thus, although illiteracy worldwide is now low, gender and regional disparities exist.  In the contemporary world, these disparities predict others:  Incarcerated people across the globe tend heavily toward illiteracy;  children of literate mothers are 50 percent more likely to live past the age of five years.

 

Literacy rates are all the more disturbing, since reportage of such rates indicates only very minimal literacy.  Scholars classify literacy in three or four categories that rise from the very basic literacy recorded in reported rates to a classification typically labeled “full prose proficiency.”  Those who possess full prose proficiency are readers who can comprehend complex texts, defined as those assigned at the undergraduate level in college.  To make this reference concrete, perpend the following :

 

Such ability would be required, for example, to understand the much-discussed Mueller Report from an investigation into actions that might rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and thus involve impeachable offenses.  Scholars estimate that only 15 percent of the American adult population have full prose proficiency.

 

Only fifteen (15%) of adults in the United States could read this chapter and the other chapters of Understanding Human Ignorance, fully comprehend the articles entered on my blog, or read my books that appear on the blog or those that have been commercially published. 

 

And dauntingly, such scholars fix the literacy rate for the average American adult at grade seven or eight.  They convey that a truly acceptable literacy rate abides only in the 65-85 percent range;  that 19 percent of the American adult population cannot comprehend a newspaper or comparable website, or fill out a job application;  that 50 percent cannot read at an eighth grade level (understanding that many grade 8 students also cannot read at grade level);  and that 21-23 percent of adults have trouble locating information even in rudimentary texts or making low-level inferences.

 

Thus, people who lived in societies before the advent of writing systems proceeded on their earthly sojourn more fully in control of their lives than have those who lived in those literate societies called civilizations.  Once civilizations developed and society became socially stratified and occupationally specialized, male governing, military, and scribal elites used literacy as a device of control.  Failure in contemporary society to educate most people (who attend wretched public schools) at a high level of literacy suggests strongly that elites continue to maneuver to send their children to private schools (the case, for example with almost all Senators and Representatives in the United States Congress) or the best suburban schools they can find.

 

The United States and other putatively advanced nations who claim democracy as a descriptor of governance do so in name only:  They have yet to become the democracies that they imagine themselves to be.

 

This means more work for women, who shall lead the world into the future.              

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Four >>>>> Economic Exploitation

Human ignorance, then, is grounded in the temporal, intellectual, and spiritual infancy of humankind. 

 

Once civilizations became a reality of human existence, society featured social stratification in which elite groups of governors, militarists, and scribes used their high positions in the hierarchy to wield authoritarian power.

 

They also used this power to subject those lower in the hierarchy to economic exploitation.

 

During the years 4,000 BCE through the early centuries of the Common Era leading to approximately 500 CE, economic exploitation was frequently of the governmentally direct sort, through heavy taxation and other extractive devices.  Pharoahs, emperors, and monarchs heavily taxed the majority agrarian population and also levied taxes on urbanities of the craft and mercantile classes, and on traders operating across land and sea.  Forms of feudalism did exist during the millennia preceding the Common Era and the first centuries of the latter, whereby favored elites were given land that bore tax obligations that were passed on to peasants who labored on the land;  sometimes these remained taxes in the formal sense, while in other cases they took the form of rents, shares of the crop perceived to be due to the aristocratic lord as owner of the fields.  Either way, the peasant paid heavily and the aristocratic classes, including the top aristocrat, the emperor or monarch, extracted heavily.

 

During the medieval era of Europe of 500-1500 CE, the feudal type of economic exploitation became more dominant.  Monarchs of this era were typically just the top aristocrats to whom other aristocrats pledged military service and economic sustenance.  Peasants in what we today know as France and Germany were serfs, generally secure on the land but bound to it, without the option of moving to another place or serving another lord;  this sort of economic arrangement was also witnessed in other realms throughout continental Europe and the British Isles.  As Russia became a more developed political entity under Ivan III and Ivan IV during the 14^th century and 15^th centuries, serfdom became common;  under the Romanovs, from the 16^th century forward, serfdom became a fixture of Russian society and persisted longer than anywhere else in Europe (remembering that the political fulcrum in Russia has been west of the Ural Mountains and thus in European Russia, whereas the much greater portion of Russian territory lies in Asia).

 

The peculiar economic arrangement of serfdom was not the common form of peasant exploitation across the globe from 500 CE forward, but the broader defining elements of aristocracy had many parallels.  The Chinese empires of Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing commanded great centralized resources but frequently depended on local landowning gentry to take their cut via high rents and then pass a suitable amount on to the central government.  An interesting variant of the feudal style prevailed in Japan during the blend of imperial and shogunate governments of the Ashikaga (14^th through 16^th century) and Tokugawa (early 17^th century through mid-19^th century) periods.  The Toltecs, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas in Mesoamerica and South America featured systems of hierarchical elites who controlled great expanses of land worked my peasant masses and forwarded generous portions of wealth extracted from the agrarian laborers to those living in imperial style in Tenochtitlan, Cuzco, and the like.  And this feudal mode of ascending economic obligation existed, too, in the great Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires of West Africa.

 

Not until the 19^th century, in the nation-states of Europe, did the aristocratic pattern with many of the general features of feudalism undergo significant change.  Technological innovation and machine invention of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of the mercantile and trading classes, and the factory system induced and produced those economic arrangements that define capitalism.  Aristocrats hung on stubbornly but the owners and managers of the bourgeoisie accumulated the greatest fortures;  and even as agriculture and peasant labor continued to dominate most economies, the greatest fortunes were made in the cities by exploiting the working, proletarian masses who toiled in urban factories.

 

This arrangement continues to dominate in many nations across the globe in the 21^st century, but in especially the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, and the nations of western Europe, plutocrats are the new aristocrats, building their fortunes by exploiting the labor of free contractors and specialists as well as the conventional working classes, escaping taxation on much of the wealth that they amass, and leaving the greater share of taxes to the various gradations of the middle class.  The economic measure known as the gini coefficient places the economic distance of the wealthiest and the poorest as shorter in Taiwan and Japan by comparison especially with the distance that abides in the United States.  But the highly technological capitalist economy as a new form evidences ever more ingenious forms of economic exploitation and dominance by economic elites.

 

Spiritual and ethical matters count little in the schemes of existence that dominate life in the most advanced economies of the early 21^st century.  Older forms of economic exploitation prevail in the many other quarters of the globe.

 

At this juncture in human infancy, humanity has been ingenious in developing ever more powerful forms of military, governmental, and economic exploitation but woefully ignorant as to the psychological underpinnings of human behavior and unimaginative in contemplating more satisfying ethical and spiritual lives.

 

Again, the hope is that women and the formerly dispossessed who surged forward during the 1964-1973 period and are in the year 2019 asserting power vigorously will be less psychological ignorant and more ethically and spiritually advanced than the white male who formerly dominated military, political, economic, and institutional life during the earlier phases of human infancy.