The Boston Globe’s Adrian Walker recently made a good case that Governor Charlie Baker should leave the Republican Party. My colleague Professor Ubertaccio responded with some solid reasons for the governor to stay home. They’re both right. Charlie Baker is trapped. His escape hatch may be a new party, but what kind of party? Walker’s…
Category: dark money
Education Funding and the Wal-Mart/State Street Axis
As House and Senate members work out their differences on the education funding bill my thoughts are drawn back to Pioneer Institute Introduces the Beamer vs. Beater Theory of Democracy. That concerned a proposal by Pioneer to keep poor and minority communities from having the same say in their schools as wealthier and whiter communities….
New Revelations from the World of Dark Money
Two recently released documents offer insight into dark money sources that reach into Massachusetts. Let’s take a look at the donor list from the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Job Security and to the program from the annual meeting of the right wing State Policy Network. After years of legal battles the Center for Responsibility and…
The Walton Family’s Massachusetts Political Team, 2019
The Wednesday vote in the House on the Education Funding bill is a crucial test for interest groups opposing the Senate version, and all of them are influenced or controlled by the Walton Family of Arkansas. Let’s meet The Walton Family’s Massachusetts Political Team, 2019. The selected groups all have some political purpose and all…
The Waltons and the Politics of Education Funding
The three interest groups pushing to undermine the Massachusetts senate’s education funding bill are all Walton funded, two of them essentially full-time agents of the Waltons. They have to solve a problem for the right-wing Wal-Mart heirs: not that funding public education might fail, but that it will succeed. The Waltons, who contributed over $2…
Headline: Arkansas Billionaires Fight to Change Massachusetts Education Policy
“Arkansas Billionaires Fight to Change Massachusetts Education Policy.” Interesting headline, and true. No Walton family of Arkansas, no Massachusetts Parents United. No Walton family of Arkansas, no Democrats for Education Reform of Massachusetts. It’s that simple. But the Boston Globe and MassLive, among others, simply ignore that fact. It’s the politics of pretending. Readers deserve…
Special Climate Strike Day Edition of Dark Money
From Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, pp. 205, 207, study by Dr. Robert Brulle: Mayer climate change denialism
CommonWealthMagazine Answers Reader Questions
Last week I posed a Reader Question to CommonwealthMagazine and lo and behold, CW answered the question. I wondered if online polls (CW had a story on one) are reliable. And the answer, according to CW’s Steve Koczela and Rich Parr, is yes. I recommend Koczela and Parr’s Polling, like everything else, is moving online…
Koch, Kennedy, Did I Miss Anything Else?
David Koch died, Congressman Joseph Kennedy announced he’s looking at a race to unseat Senator Edward Markey in a Democratic primary – did I miss anything else? The devastation of Hurricane Dorian and increasingly unstable weather patterns as climate change presses upon us serve as miserable reminders of the political legacy of David Koch. He…
Stand Falls: Public School Privatization Front Stand for Children Abandons Massachusetts
In 2011 Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman boasted to the Aspen Ideas Festival of a legislative win over unions in Chicago, crowing that Stand had been able to “jam this proposal down their throats.” He won’t be invited back to brag on Boston. Last Friday Edelman announced that Stand for Children would abandon Massachusetts….