CharMa

Historical interlude: the Mafia

Don't you feel romantic when you think about the times when the Mafia ruled the land? They were the heroic protectors of small and not so small businesses. They were rich, charismatic and very macho. They did cool, manly stuff like gambling, smuggling, and shooting each other over broken poker chips or elegant but infectious courtesans.

Admit, dear reader, you crave for those times too. You went to see all those movies with Brando, Pacino, de Niro and Pfeiffer playing the all-American heroes. You were excited, and wished, you could see real blood puddling on the streets in your own neighborhood or that you could fire those sexy, plump Thompson machine guns yourself.

Many people say "Those were the challenging, exciting times, full of action. But what do we have now, especially here, in my neighborhood?"

The present: CharMa

Those people, who think without the Mafia our country is dull, are mistaken. They just don't look at the right place. We have the largest, most powerful organized crime in history. They call themselves the Public School Reform movement, but I prefer the more expressive and less formal Charter Mafia name, and I affectionately refer to them simply as the CharMa.

CharMa sounds exotic and charming, doesn't it?

CharMa is conducted from the highest possible level in politics, but, as always, the real instigators are the wealthiest, most popular businessmen such as Gates or the Waltons. Just the billions CharMa has invested in Common Core, the largest child-brain experiment in World history, has already far exceeded what the Mafia ever got out of their small time experiments with business protection services, gambling, smuggling and pimping.

Do we know why these most powerful CharMa members are willing to invest this much into child experiments? Yes, of course. The prize money for their (m)educational operations will be in the hundreds of billions each year, and they dream of reaching one trillion per year by 2020.

Do these billionaires have a chance to collect this much in the near future? After all, they are far from charismatic or macho, they are rather nerdy looking, hopelessly unfunny and dress without style or even good taste in necktie. They wouldn't survive on the streets, not to mention a gun battle.

The answer to the question is undoubtedly yes, and you, dear reader, will agree once you understand the devilish idea behind the CharMa plan.

The idea came about when they watched, in amazement, Gandhi and Martin Luther King achieving their goals without guns. "Wow, what an inventive, game changing method! Can we expolit it?" they exclaimed. Then they got together, and worked out a strategic plan on how to twist the Gandhi-MLK duo's ideas to reach their own delightfully devious goals.

Their object of desire was, of course, predictable: collect more money than God. But they had to find it. Finding money for mere mortals like us, dear reader, is impossible since our sense of smell for it is almost completely disabled by morals. But our star philanthropists were born with the keen sense of smell and empathy of the common fly, so they had no problems whatsoever finding gold, and they found it in public education.

In going after the treasure in public education, all they had to remind themselves during their morning coffee was "If we don't use guns, people won't realize what we really are doing, so we won't ever get punished."

And they were correct. There's noise here and there against CharMa, but so far nobody has thought, they deserve a few hundred years behind bars. Their strategic plan has been working brilliantly!

Mafia-CharMa pocket dictionary

We watched so many movies about the Mafia that we understand their language with no problem. On the other hand, not many people have a full command of the CharMa language, so here I provide translations of the most common Mafia expressions to CharMa.