We keep reading this story in district after district, state after state, but we should not stop being outraged. There ought to be a law that prevents fabulously wealthy people from buying state and local school board elections. We know that their goal is not to improve the schools but to privatizatize them.
In Oakland, California, the privatizing organization is called Great Oakland public schools, and it has the chutzpah to call itself a “grassroots campaign.” It has raised half a million or so for pro-charter candidates. $300,000 came from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City. Most of the rest came from two other billionaires, who have no interest in Oakland other than to support privatization and subvert democratic control of the schools.
Here is the story:
“If it were just a matter of raising money from parents, teachers, and community members, then school-board candidates James Harris, Huber Trenado, and Jumoke Hinton Hodge’s financial advantage over their opponents would be minimal. For example, the incumbent board chairman Harris has raised $11,836 from individual contributors for his re-election this year. That’s not much more than Chris Jackson, his challenger, who has scraped together $9,622.
“But Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge benefit from two independent-expenditure committees funded by super-wealthy charter-school advocates, which have raised millions since 2014.
“These committees are on track to spend about half-a-million dollars to help Harris and Hinton Hodge keep their seats on the board, and to help Trenado unseat Roseann Torres.
“Critics worry, however, that this “outside money” distorts Oakland’s school-board races.
“It’s shocking to me how much they’re spending to get these specific candidates elected,” said Kim Davis, a parent whose kids attend Oakland public schools. “This is not a level playing field. More money means more mailers, more people knocking on doors, and more people making phone calls.”
“Gonzales, who was elected to the school board in 2014 to represent District Six, noted that a “typical school board race in years past was one where a candidate wouldn’t have to raise more than twenty-thousand, max.”
“But in 2012, Gonzales says the nonprofit organization Great Oakland Public Schools began raising and spending tens of thousands of dollars to support candidates who will advance its goals of growing the number of charters and providing them with greater access to publicly-funded resources. As a result, GO Public Schools changed the calculus of school-board elections and unleashed an avalanche of money, which other groups haven’t matched, and that dwarfs the sums that candidates can raise by themselves.
“They have relationships with corporate titans all over the country,” Gonzales said of GO Public Schools. “That’s why the school board has become a much more high-dollar affair.”
“According to campaign-finance records, the two committees supporting Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge received most of their funding from a few billionaires, who have played key roles backing the charter-school industry.
“So far, the two committees — Families and Educators for Public Education, which was set up by GO Public Schools, and the Parent Teacher Alliance, run by the California Charter Schools Association — have spent $421,906 to support Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge.
“The result is that, for every dollar spent to support Jackson, $17 have been spent to support Harris.”
Will the people of Oakland allow the billionaires to buy their school board? Or will they fight to keep their public schools public?
A loss for Bloomberg won’t hurt him. A donation of $300,000 from him is equivalent to one of us dropping a dollar in a Salvation Army bucket. But if he loses again and again, whether in Oakland or in Massachusetts, he might lose interest.
The money going in is one thing, but if Americans want to get all this money out of politics they have to look at who benefits- where the money is spent.
They are paying OUT half a million dollars to ad agencies, consultants, pollsters and media.
The group of people who make their living off of campaign spending gets bigger every year, which will make it harder and harder to stem the flow. It’s a whole industry and at the top tier it pays VERY well.
What does Hillary Clinton have to say about campaign finance reform?
“Our democracy should work for everyone, not just the wealthy and well-connected.”
But should we only trust what she says on her campaign site? Of course not, so what did she vote on as a Senator regarding this issue. Regardless of Trump and his campaign’s lies that Hillary did nothing as a Senator, she did sponsor and co-sponsor and vote yes or no on hundreds of bills. Anyone with an open mind can easily find and Google “Vote Smart on Hillary Clinton” for an entire fact-based record of her achievement, successes and failures as a U.S. Senator; and nothing but the facts with absolutely no bias.
http://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/55463/hillary-clinton/12/campaign-finance-and-elections#.WBi82_krKUk
For instance, Hillary co-sponsored the Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2001 and it passed in the Senate and then in the House.
http://votesmart.org/bill/3144/11319/55463/campaign-reform-act-of-2001#.WBi9PPkrKUk
What happened to this bill that passed both the Senate and the House.
The GOP Senator Mitch (crooked and paid for) McConnell challenged the bill as unconstitutional and it reached the Supreme Court in 2003 where the Bill survived.
But a few years later, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulling in Citizen United struck down campaign financing laws related to corporations and unions. The ruling did not, as commonly thought, change the amount of money corporations and unions can contribute to campaigns. The minority argued that the court erred in allowing unlimited corporate spending, arguing that corporate spending posed a particular threat to democratic self-government.
As for Donald Trump, it’s not easy to know where he stands because like the Iraq War he’s been for it and against it like the changing weather from winter to summer. We have no voting record. But we have a history of serial lies and losing other people’s money while making money using the money those other people lost from banks, investors workers, and contributions to the fraulent Trump Foundation.
In fact, Trump just refused to pay a bill to a polling service for his campaign, and Newsweek revealed on Monday, yesterday, how he destroys evidence even after courts have demanded that evidence in hundreds if not thousands of court cases going back to the 1970s.
Then there is this about the alleged Moscow Candidate: “A Veteran (U.S.) Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump
The 1962 film, the “Manchurian Candidate”, got it all wrong. It’s time for a remake, but the remake should be called “Putin’s Candidate” or “The Moscow Candidate”, and Alec Baldwin should play Donald Trump.
Sorry about the first link. I don’t know how that happened.
Here’s the first link to what Hillary Clinton says about campaign finance reform.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/campaign-finance-reform/
Part of the scenario. The Occupy Wall Street group representing the 99.9% of Americans were removed from Zuccotti park, a public property. The Native Americans opposing the North Dakota pipeline which devastated their “Arlington National Cemetery”, could devastate their water supply, further enhance climate change with the oil it would send to processors and throughout this, both groups have their “Constitutional guarantees of freedom to peacefully protest removed.
Big money is giving us the best government money can buy
Bernie might have led a rebellion against this but the Democratic party has shot itself in the foot and us along with them.
If, big if, Democrats could take back the ‘Senate Bernie might still be able to lead a rebellion against big money in politics. We can only hope.
“…. we should not stop being outraged. There ought to be a law that prevents fabulously wealthy people from buying state and local school board elections.”
Money is speech. Corporations are people. Those Supreme Court rulings make it hard to prevent the take over.
The only bypass is informed voting and a very big turnout. Exposing the contributions to view is still possible, if people are paying attention and care. Oakland hired a Broadie Superintendent, charter friendly. The current Boardseems to have invited the money to pour in.
In my District for Cal. State Assembly and State Senate, each race is a contest between a candidate heavily funded by EdVoice, a pro-charter PAC and one in each race backed by the teachers’ union. The reformsters are looking to silence any hope of meaningful oversight, whether at the School Board or State Legislative level, so they can continue business as usual (i.e., stealing dollars intended to educate kids). Quite disgusting, actually.
This is only part of the story from Oakland. I am running for school board in District 5 and out of 4 candidates I am the ONLY one who has never taken money from the charters and their billionaire backers. In two elections I have had over $300,000 spent against me, which is a record in Oakland, by a lot. Roseann Torres was also heavily funded by the billionaire PACs when she ran against me in 2012. Many of the people quoted have also supported corporate candidates. I am always available to talk to people to give a more accurate picture of how 4 billionaires (Broad, Rogers, Walton, and Gates) have hijacked education policy in Oakland.
Charter schools are not public schools
Mike Hutchinson for Oakland School Board District 5