The conventional wisdom is that Governor Charlie Baker will glide to re-election but amidst this Democratic Party gloom comes the director of Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts with the secret to thrashing Baker: just attack unions and all will be well! This is not surprising since DFER MA is more an anti-union front than an education reform group.
In How a Democrat Can Beat Charlie Baker published at WGBHNews DFER MA director Liam Kerr selects Governor Deval Patrick as his ideal politician, but not for Patrick’s impassioned call to welcome unaccompanied migrant children, or his $1 Billion commitment to the life sciences, or his redistributive 2013 proposal for an additional $1.9 billion in revenue each year to fund infrastructure and education. No, DFER much prefers limits on pensions and health care levied against Massachusetts workers during the depth of the Great Recession.
The hook in “How a Democrat Can Beat Charlie Baker” is a state trooper at MassPort who makes so much money he’s advanced into the one percent! Which is great because I love following dark money sneaked into politics from the one percent. So let’s follow the money to some of the plutocrats behind DFER.
DFER is intertwined with another dark money operation named Education Reform Now, which provides DFER MA most of its money. Since 2010 the Walton Family Foundation has kept Education Reform Now in the clover with $12.2 million in donations. I just finished reading Dan Kaufman’s book The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics which recalls this expression of the Waltons’ attitude toward unions, from the WalMart board member who handled labor relations: “labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.”
Consider some other funders revealed in Steven Brill’s Class Warfare, which holds a very positive view of DFER. One passage concerns a fund raising meeting at which a political consultant tells a roomful of billionaires that DFER’s operations need an infusion of $8-10 million. Among the touches were Kenneth Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller, who were informed that DFER needed each of them to write at least a $500,000 check. Piffle, you insult me with your low ball begging! The outreach continued to other marks “including media mogul Rupert Murdoch.” Then there was the DFER backed launch of Michelle Rhee’s Students First, in which Rhee “gathered more than $100 million in donations or pledges from heavy hitters such as Eli Broad, Rupert Murdoch, Julian Robertson, Ken Langone, and the Fisher family.”
Rupert Murdoch, progressive Democrat reformer?
In 2016 Julian Robertson was the fifty-second highest individual giver to outside spending groups in federal elections. Robertson gave $3,321,274, 100% of it to conservative groups, ranking just ahead of Charles Koch and three places ahead of Strategic Grant Partners member Seth Klarman ($2,927,073, 100% to conservatives). Robertson finished well ahead of cheapskates Richard and Betsy DeVos, who lagged at eighty-third place.
Kenneth Langone is a consistent giver to Republican and conservative causes, and should we be surprised? Langone has attended at least one of the infamous Koch Brothers Seminars, in 2010.
Stanley Druckenmiller? Here are some of the contributions he’s made: Paul Ryan, National Republican Campaign Committee, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Keep Conservatives United, etc. (All campaign finance information from opensecrets.org).
Paul Tudor Jones was (along with Klarman) one of 9 billionaires who went about trying to privatize public education in New York – in part by spending $4.3 million to tip the state senate to the Republican Party.
There they are – the Walton Family, Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Julian Robertson, Kenneth Langone, Rupert Murdoch – your Democrats for Education Reformers!
The Massachusetts Democrats can fend for themselves but given that DFER MA threw a late $1.3 million (Walton and Education Reform Now money) into supporting Governor Baker’s highest 2016 priority, Question 2 on charter schools, isn’t it a bit much for DFER to now advise Democrats on how to beat Baker?
He who pays the piper calls the tune. Follow the money.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]