The Wall Street-backed charter lobby spent more last year than unions and won’t he support of Governor Cuomo and the Legislature to expand and get Néw York City to offer free space or pay the rent for charters.
“Charter school groups and their supporters spent $16 million on lobbying, campaign contributions to state-level candidates and parties and independent expenditure campaigns last year. Charter schools spent nearly $700,000 on lobbying. Education unions and labor-funded advocates spent $11.77 million, according to the analysis.
“Additionally, large school districts and stakeholder groups representing school boards spent $922,193. An advocacy group pushing a generous tax credit that would incentivize donations to schools spent $659,404.
“In defending their spending and high-profile backers, education reform leaders have often portrayed teachers’ unions as deep-pocketed behemoths representing special interests. But the spending reality is that in 2014, the pro-charter and reform groups outspent unions by a considerable margin….
“What’s striking in these numbers is that a few dozen Wall Street financiers and billionaire hedge fund managers are able to far outspend more than 600,000 educators who believe in the promise of public education and voluntarily give a few bucks out of each paycheck to ensure they have a voice,” said Carl Korn, NYSUT’s spokesman.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The $11.77 million from the teachers’ union probably includes retirees that continue to contribute to Vote Cope. I know several retired teachers that continue to donate in retirement.
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No surprise. Here, in Michigan, we had a slew of paid ideological hacks who pushed right-to-work through. Their primary argument: unions contribute to political ideas that their members don’t necessarily agree with. Then, they push the idea that unions have this dominant stranglehold on politicians and legislatures. Unions are major donors but they can’t compete with the new overclass of the uber-rich. (Think of the money Gates has spread around and used to influence numerous policy initiatives and the unions’ inability to do much about it.)
A microcosm in my state happened a few years back in a recall election of a state legislator. The MEA helped finance the petition to recall this senator and ran a few local TV ads. The Devos family supported this politician. Devos contributed more to help him survive the recall than the MEA spent on the entire process. One person had greater financial influence than a union of tens of thousands of middle class people.
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The new democratic truth of our society seems to be that “Might makes right”, Money is Power, and those who have this power are clearly “better” in such a way as to make choices that directly impact the thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands or millions with their choices.
I don’t see a way around this, between Citizens United, a legislature that is obviously being heavily influenced by those with big money, and a paid for PR machine that works around the clock to create the desired perception (no matter how much the plodding pace of actual research dispels their myths, they don’t receive as much press as a quickly generated sound byte based on specious data).
The playing field is now completely uneven, and those with the power to fix it have disincentives to do so, and those who they listen to, are incentivized to want them to not fix it.
How do we fix our own democracy at this point when the system has spun so wildly out of control such that the representative democracy doesn’t really represent the population, and the population is so acutely aware of how badly broken this process is, that their votes seem meaningless.
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But these people have the money to spend. Just consider: the 4 biggest hedge fund managers made $10.4 billion in 2013. 158,000 Kindergarten teachers made, combined, 8.3 billion in 2013. So these 4 made about 2 billion more than the combined salaries of 158,000 kdg. teachers. AND guess who paid the most in taxes? Of course the teachers did not help society quite the way the hedge fund managers did. Just ask our politicians. [Of course in reality, that is true, they did NOT effect society in quite the way that teachers do.]
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And the sad thing is that a significant portion of the union money was probably spent on the same candidates as the charter supporters’ money.
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Here’s what is especially problematic: even Democrat Governors, who should be on the side of labor unions, would not want a picture of them meeting with the State teachers union president to appear anywhere in print but they would gladly appear with the head of the State’s Business Roundtable. Worse yet, the State’s Business Roundtable President will get the ear of the Governor in private while the union president won’t even get a photo op… and the businessmen will eagerly tell the Governor who should be appointed to the State Board or a “Blue Ribbon Committee” on schools while the unions’ thoughts are not actively sought or valued. Bottom line: Governors and legislators are hearing only what businessmen tell them and aren’t giving practitioners the time of day… and 31 of them are Republicans and the majority of the others are neo-liberals like Cuomo.
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Oh… and one more thing… I imagine these 31 statehouse leaders (AND the neo-liberals like Cuomo) are itching to have the opportunity to use the “flexibility” the reauthorization of NCLB is promising… Unburdened by the Common Core we see what Oklahoma has introduced… and VAM, the favorite metric of the business community, will spread even more. Arne Duncan’s ideas about reform are terrible… but they are better than those of many Statehouse leaders.
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As a Huffpo commenter said, “Unions are the only lobbyists the middle class can afford.”
Unions go to the table with pennies and Silicon Valley and Wall St. go with pirates’ booty.
like the unpaid taxes on offshore profits, Microsoft, $76.4 billion, Apple, $54.4 bil. and Goldman Sachs, $22 bil. (Mother Jones)
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