🔥 Primavera Profits: How Arizona's Online Charter Schools Made One Man a Multi-Millionaire While Students Fail Math
💰 Wall Street Warning: April 2025 Tracking Worst Stock Performance Since Great Depression
Based on the Buckmaster Show for 4/22/25, a daily radio show in Tucson, AZ, interviewing local newsmakers. Analysis and opinions are my own.
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾
🌍📚 The Buckmaster Show on Earth Day highlighted three major issues 🌟. First, an online school in Arizona is making its owner 💰 super rich while students aren't learning much 📉. Second, the economy 📉 is struggling since Trump took office, with experts worried 😟 about a possible recession 📉📉. Third, researchers found that forest fires 🔥 used to happen naturally 🌲 but were beneficial for forests 🌳, and our efforts to stop all fires 🔥 have made today's fires worse 🚒. Also, the Western U.S. 🌵 is experiencing a serious water shortage 🚱, with Tucson having almost no rain 🌧️ in months. All these problems are connected 🔗 as they reveal how focusing on short-term profits 📈 harms education 🎓, the economy 💼, and the environment 🏞️.
🗝️ Takeaways
💸 Primavera Online founder Damian Cramer extracted $24 million over eight years while his school earned D-grades
📉 April 2025 is tracking as worst April for stocks since 1932, with Dow down 13% since Trump's inauguration
🔮 International Monetary Fund reduced global growth forecasts to just 1% for 2025, signaling potential stagflation
🌡️ Catastrophic wildfires are human-caused through 140 years of fire suppression and climate change
🏔️ Colorado River flows to Lake Powell at only 67% of normal, with Southwest facing historic drought
🧪 New research finds even remote mountain snowpack contaminated with mercury and microplastics
👀 Arizona's online charter schools haven't been properly audited since 2007 despite millions in taxpayer funding
Earth Day 2025: Buckmaster Show Exposes Profiteers, Prophesies Doom, and Plants Seeds of Resistance
Welcome, progressive readers, to our analysis of the latest Buckmaster Show, where on this 55th anniversary of Earth Day, Bill Buckmaster hosted a cavalcade of concerning conversations about our collective future. From educational exploitation to environmental extinction anxiety, this Tuesday's broadcast painted a portrait of plutocratic problems plaguing our parched planet.
Education Exploitation: Online Charter Cash Cows
The show kicked off with Dr. Dave Wells, Research Director at the Grand Canyon Institute, exposing the financial farce of Arizona's online charter schools. The nonpartisan think tank is calling for an audit of Arizona Online Instruction (AOI), with astounding revelations about Primavera Online Schools—a situation that hasn't seen proper oversight since 2007.
Eighteen years without an audit while millionaires siphon public education funds? Seems like Arizona's regulatory agencies work about as well as their online schools' math programs.
Dr. Wells revealed how Damian Cramer, the founder of Primavera Online, transformed from a non-profit education pioneer to a multi-millionaire manipulator. By cleverly converting to a for-profit model, Cramer extracted approximately $24 million in shareholder distributions over eight years while still pocketing $100,000 annually for a mere 10 hours of weekly work at the original non-profit entity.
"Initially, Primavera online was actually a non-profit," Dr. Wells explained. "But what they ran into, and they were founded like in the early 2000s, but by 2015, they kept running, making profits as a non-profit, they had accumulated $45 million in assets, which is a massive amount, which still exists."
This capital accumulation scheme involved Cramer funneling massive amounts of money to his own software business—a potential violation of IRS rules prohibiting charitable organizations from primarily benefiting private interests. When questioned about this apparent conflict, Cramer made a simple adjustment: he just converted the entire operation to for-profit status.
Nothing says "committed to education" quite like restructuring your entire business model to maximize personal profit extraction.
The academic aftermath of this avarice? Dismal D-grades for three consecutive years, equivalent to an F. The academic performance of these virtual vultures is, unsurprisingly, abysmal—especially in mathematics. Yet Arizona continues its love affair with educational experimentation, having gone "all in" on school vouchers despite evidence of their ineffectiveness.
Dr. Wells pointed out that despite 30 years of "school choice" in Arizona, graduation rates remain lackluster. The capitalist conversion of classrooms continues to cash in while children crash academically.
When Buckmaster asked about oversight and accountability, Dr. Wells lamented the lack of attention from state officials: "I think what the legislature can do is they can require another audit of Arizona online instruction. Because the auditor general does some really good reports, and they did a really nice one in 2007."
Only in Arizona would we need to remind our legislators that once-per-generation oversight might be insufficient for protecting hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.
Economic Apocalypse: Wall Street Woes Under Trump
Financial advisor Shelly Fishman delivered a devastating diagnosis of the economy under the new Trump administration, reporting that April 2025 is on track to be the worst for stocks since 1932—the depths of the Great Depression.
"The Wall Street Journal has been very critical of the policies of this administration," Fishman noted, "and the Wall Street Journal isn't exactly a left-wing communist rag, but they led with a headline this morning that points out that the stock market, as of close yesterday, was having the worst April since...1932."
When even the capitalists' daily prayer book is sounding the alarm, perhaps it's time to question the narrative of Republican economic competence.
The numbers paint a painful picture: The Dow is down 9.5% year-to-date, the S&P 500 is down 12%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq is plummeting 17%. From election day to Fishman's calculation, the Dow had dropped 9.6%; since inauguration day, it had tumbled 13%.
"Trump himself yesterday... actually said there might be a mild recession," Fishman reported, while highlighting that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell fears something far worse: stagflation—a toxic combination of stagnant growth and persistent inflation. With GDP growth potentially slowing to 1% or less while inflation increases, we're witnessing economic whiplash from widespread policy chaos a mere 100 days into the Trump administration.
Fishman's most alarming revelation: "Europeans and Asians are dumping US dollars. They're dumping their position in treasuries, they're dumping their holdings in US equities." Under Trump's leadership, these international investors are fleeing, an unprecedented vote of no confidence in the U.S. economy.
The IMF has reduced its forecast for 2025 world growth from over 2% down to a paltry 1%, potentially foreshadowing a decade of Japanese-style stagnation. "That is very, very alarming. That's stagflation," Fishman emphasized.
Remember when conservatives mocked Biden's economic policies while the stock market set record highs? Apparently, the invisible hand of the market is now giving Trump the middle finger.
The impact may be even more immediate for the 40% of Americans without stock market investments: inflation and empty shelves due to tariffs, with baby products already facing potential shortages within 90 days.
"What we're seeing potentially is a steamroller effect," Fishman warned. "And quite frankly, Bill, I'm really worried about that."
Environmental Enigmas: Fire, Forest, and Parched Earth
In a surprising counterpoint to fiery news headlines, UA professor Dr. Donald Falk shared research showing a historical decline in wildfire activity. Using tree ring data, researchers discovered that North American forests historically experienced fires every 10-20 years, low-intensity blazes that maintained forest health rather than destroyed it.
"There's no question that this is a very counterintuitive result," Dr. Falk acknowledged. "What we see on the television, what we hear on the radio, and in print are these spectacular catastrophic fires, and that's actually happening. There's no question that those fires are very large, very severe, causing a lot of ecological and human tragedy."
Yet the research reveals these catastrophic fires are not the historical norm. By analyzing over 2,000 fire history sites—the largest fire history network in the world—researchers documented patterns showing frequent, low-intensity fires that trees routinely survived.
The catastrophic conflagrations we witness today are largely self-inflicted wounds. After 140 years of fire suppression, forests have missed numerous natural fire cycles, allowing dangerous fuel accumulation. When fires inevitably ignite in our warming world, they explode into the media-worthy infernos we now recognize.
Once again, our arrogant assumption that we could improve on nature's design has backfired spectacularly—quite literally in this case.
"It's ironic that the destructive fires that we're seeing today are very much of our own doing," Dr. Falk explained. "Every time you miss a fire cycle, you allow the fuel to burn up. And so finally, when the inevitable fire comes, and I hate to say it, but they are inevitable under the current climate and other land use conditions, now you have set the stage for a gigantic high severity fire."
The solution? Returning controlled fire to the landscape—knowledge that indigenous peoples possessed for thousands of years before European settlement disrupted these practices. "We have all the knowledge, all the information to do this," Dr. Falk assured, "but take care of fuels and climate if we put our minds to it."
Indigenous land management practices worked for millennia until colonizers arrived with their "superior" knowledge. Perhaps it's time to acknowledge that Western science is still playing catch-up to traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).
Environmental reporter Mitch Tobin closed the Earth Day conversation with sobering snowpack statistics for the Western U.S. The Colorado River's inflows to Lake Powell are projected at only 67% of normal, with particularly dire conditions in the Southwest. Tucson itself is experiencing its driest cycle since record-keeping began around 1895—a measly half-inch of precipitation in the past 8-9 months.
Adding insult to ecological injury, a new study found Rocky Mountain snowpack contaminated with mercury and other metals from mining residue—further evidence that even the most seemingly pristine environments bear humanity's toxic fingerprints.
"A new study... shows that some of the mining residue, things like mercury and other metals, are being mobilized by the air and then are being incorporated into the snow," Tobin explained. "There's been other research that shows microplastics are also being found in the snowpack, and so really you can go to a very remote, seemingly pristine place and you'll still find the impact of humans."
Tobin also voiced concerns about the approaching fire season in the southwest, exacerbated by "chaos in the public lands agencies" under the Trump administration. "President Trump has sent a message on Earth Day by opening up national forests to corporations," Buckmaster noted, "and this will affect Mount Lemmon and the Coronado National Forest."
On Earth Day, Trump's gift to the planet is more extraction, pollution, and deregulation. Nothing says "responsible stewardship" quite like handing over public lands to private interests for exploitation.
Connecting the Dots: A System in Crisis
As Earth Day 2025 passes, the Buckmaster Show painted a portrait of interconnected systems in critical condition: educational institutions exploited for profit, economic indicators flashing warning signals, and environmental systems pushed to breaking points.
The thread tying these topics together is the prioritization of short-term profit over long-term sustainability, whether in education, economics, or ecology. From Damian Cramer's $24 million educational extraction to the reversal of environmental protections for corporate exploitation, we witness the consequences of modifying every aspect of our collective existence.
The root illness afflicting our society isn't individual greed or policy failures—it's a system that incentivizes extraction over regeneration, accumulation over distribution, and profit over people and planet.
In Arizona's education landscape, we see a microcosm of national trends: public money funneled to private interests, with Damian Cramer's Primavera Online representing just one particularly egregious example. The state's online charter experiment has yielded dismal academic results while producing millionaires—a pattern replicated across education, healthcare, and environmental policy.
Meanwhile, Trump's economic policies are already producing shockwaves throughout global markets, with potentially devastating consequences for working-class Americans. The promised prosperity has instead delivered volatility and uncertainty, with food insecurity and shortages looming on the horizon.
And environmentally, we continue to reap what we've sown: fire suppression leads to catastrophic blazes, climate change intensifies drought conditions, and toxic pollutants find their way into even the most remote ecosystems.
Hope on the Horizon: Building Resistance and Resilience
Despite these daunting challenges, the possibility for transformation remains. As Mitch Tobin noted, "a lot of people still care very deeply about these issues... I think you've seen that in reaction to some of the moves from the Trump administration, some of the changes in the environmental policies, some of the changes to public lands, and that's triggered a real outcry among a lot of people."
That outcry represents our greatest resource—our collective consciousness and commitment to creating a more just and sustainable world. From community-based fire management to grassroots economic alternatives to public education advocates, people across the country are building models of resistance and resilience.
The path forward requires reconnecting these seemingly disparate issues—recognizing that environmental justice is inseparable from economic justice, which is inseparable from educational equity. It means creating regenerative systems that prioritize collective well-being over individual accumulation, and it means reclaiming our democratic institutions from corporate capture.
As we commemorate Earth Day's 55th anniversary, let's remember that true environmentalism means challenging the economic and political systems that treat our planet—and its people—as expendable resources for profit extraction.
Support Three Sonorans: Keep Independent Analysis Alive
At Three Sonorans, we're committed to providing critical analyses of local and national issues, connecting the dots between policies, power structures, and their impacts on our communities. However, independent journalism requires community support to survive.
Your contributions help us continue investigating the stories that matter most to southern Arizona residents, from educational policy to environmental justice to economic impacts. Consider becoming a monthly supporter to ensure we can keep these vital perspectives in our local media ecosystem.
Visit our support page to make a one-time or recurring contribution. Together, we can build the informed, engaged community necessary to create the change we need.
What's Your Take?
How is the educational privatization model affecting your community? Have you seen the impacts of these online charter schools on students you know?
With the economic indicators flashing warning signs, what steps are you taking to prepare your household for potential economic turbulence ahead?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and let's continue this important conversation.
Quotes
"Damian Cramer is now a multi-millionaire. Thank you to Arizona taxpayers." — Dr. Dave Wells exposing how the Primavera Online founder profited from public education funds
"The Wall Street Journal has been very critical of the policies of this administration, and the Wall Street Journal isn't exactly a left-wing communist rag." — Shelly Fishman highlighting bipartisan economic concerns
"That is very, very alarming. That's stagflation." — Shelly Fishman reacting to IMF reducing global growth forecasts to just 1%
"Europeans and Asians are dumping US dollars. They're dumping their position in treasuries, they're dumping their holdings in US equities." — Shelly Fishman describing unprecedented international investor flight
"It's ironic that the destructive fires that we're seeing today are very much of our own doing." — Dr. Donald Falk explaining how fire suppression created conditions for catastrophic wildfires
"You can go to a very remote, seemingly pristine place and you'll still find the impact of humans with things like chemicals and plastics in the snowpack." — Mitch Tobin revealing contamination in even remote mountain ecosystems
People Mentioned and Their Roles/Quotes
Bill Buckmaster: Host of the Buckmaster Show, interviewing experts on education, economics, and environment on Earth Day 2025.
Dr. Dave Wells: Research Director at the Grand Canyon Institute, who investigated Primavera Online. Quote: "So Damian Cramer is now a multi-millionaire. Thank you to Arizona taxpayers."
Damian Cramer: Founder of Primavera Online, who converted from non-profit to for-profit model and extracted approximately $24 million over eight years.
Shelly Fishman: Financial advisor discussing economic concerns. Quote: "When you have a president who ran in part on the economy, for his policy is to have had this kind of effect on markets so quickly, that is very alarming."
Donald Trump: Current President, whose economic policies are criticized throughout the show. Referenced as tweeting about "a mild recession."
Jerome Powell: Federal Reserve Chair, described as worried about stagflation rather than just recession.
Dr. Donald Falk: University of Arizona Fire Ecologist and Professor who co-authored study on historical fire patterns. Quote: "It's ironic that the destructive fires that we're seeing today are very much of our own doing."
Mitch Tobin: Environmental reporter and co-director of the Water Desk at University of Colorado. Quote: "A lot of people still care very deeply about these issues."
Retry
Claude can make mistakes.
Please double-check responses.
Have a scoop or a story you want us to follow up on? Send us a message!
