In 2012, Bill Gates and friends spent close to $20 million to win a referendum allowing charter schools, after losing the previous three such referenda. To their chagrin, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they do not answer to elected school boards. Thus, they are not entitled to receive public funding intended for public schools. This made Gates and friends really angry.
Now, Peter Greene tells us what Gates and friends are doing about the mess. They are spending another load of money to oust judges on the State Supreme Court, to punish them for daring to deny public funding to privately managed charter schools. They are literally trying to buy control of Washington’s highest court.
So here’s Chief Justice Barbara Madsen, the author of the 2015 decision that ruled Washington’s charter law unconstitutional. She is being opposed by Greg Zempel who doesn’t like how capricious and random the court’s decisions are. Zempel has been backed by a pile of money from Stand for Children, an Oregon reformster group that has funneled money to his campaign from Connie Ballmer, wife of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix; and Vulcan Inc., owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Vulcan and Ballmer were big financial backers of the charter law that was struck down.
Also facing reformster-backed challenge is Justice Charlie Wiggins (who is nothing if not a snappy dresser). Charteristas must sense a vulnerability because as we come down to the wire, they have pumped almost a million dollars into the campaign of Federal Way Municipal Court Judge Dave Larson. Vulcan tossed in $300K and Gates threw in $200K of his own. Meanwhile, one more fly-by-night PAC, Judicial Integrity Washington has dropped $350K on a tv ad smear campaign against Wiggins featuring ads that other members of the legal community likened to the infamous Willie Horton ads used against Dukakis way back in the– well, shut up, kid. Some of us remember that.
Parent activist Dora Taylor in Seattle writes that Bill Gates is so eager to gain control of the Washington State Supreme Court that he is backing a climate-change denier for a seat on the state’s highest court.
So we know that billionaires can buy legislators; they do that all the time. Now will they be able to buy Washington’s highest court, which had the nerve to stand up for public education as defined in the state constitution?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
While Gates seems to have an intellectual curiosity that drives many of his projects, he displays little concern for the people/subjects who have been part of his experiments. They are laboratory rats, and who allows rats to have a role in their own lives?
By the way, it has been showed to me in many different ways that all these anti public school reform movements are all supported by michael bloomberg. Bloomberg who has a new worth of 35 billion has created hundreds of organizations using different name with different people but lest assure you the funds come from the bloomberg foundation. This evil midget is quietly getting people to pit up against each other – just look and see what he did when he was mayor of nyc and the school system there….Bloomberg is poison and must be destroyed as he is the silent backer of most of the anti public school organizations sitting in the back ground like he normally does.
If only it were just Bloomberg. It’s a whole ocean liner full of billionaire pro charter, pro voucher, pro school privatization cheer leaders: Gates, Waltons, Dell, Icahn, Bezos, DeVos, Paul Tudor Jones, the Koch brothers, Arthur Rock, T. Gary Rogers, the Broads, Reed Hastings, Doris Fisher, Whitney Tilson, Bryan Lawrence, Joel Greenblatt, Daniel Loeb,Paul Appelbaum and other assorted hedge fund managers.
Gates, Allen, and Ballmer aren’t educated enough to make a persuasive case in the editorials? They can’t convince anyone of the merit of their ideas as citizens, without bribing the system with money?
If they champion critical thinking, they sure are lazy to just try to buy off their ideas.
In NJ, State Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor and then go through an approval process with the state legislature. There’s no perfect system for appointing judges but I think that judges running for office like regular politicians is just a bottomless pit of bribery by the rich and the corporations.
If justices are appointed, then you run into the same debate we have on a national level: the potential for the Court to be defined by the current executive branch for decades if there is also a legislative majority. I know that court cases and decisions do not always work out the way a party might plan, but it would be interesting to look at how an elected state supreme court has performed as opposed to an appointed (given all the confounding factors). Now that money supplied by a small group of wealthy individuals, who don’t even have to be residents of a state, can buy elections, the whole electoral process can be compromised in a new way.
Bill Gates and his billionaire colleagues pose a much greater risk to democracy than any of our so-called border issues. These oligarchs want to suppress democratic participation while they pay to have laws tailor made to suit them. We need to work to overturn Citizens United and enact campaign spending limits like our wiser Nordic allies. Perhaps then more Americans would vote, if they thought they had a voice in the direction of the country. https://followmyvote.com/comparing-americas-voter-turnout/
Yes. Exactly this, retired teacher.
You are correct.
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Oy! Bill Gates is using his billions to actually back a climate change denier for the Washington State Supreme Court because he is in favor of publicly funded charter schools.
Double Oy!
So what else is new???? Billionaires have taken over our government. We had a chance with Bernie. Now????
Typical ed reform initiative. Charter schools are the be-all and end-all. Nothing matters compared to the ideological crusade to replace public schools.
This is California:
“Californians are used to seeing outside groups — from oil and business interests to environmental and labor groups — spend millions of dollars in hopes of swaying state legislative races.
But in 2016, another sector came on the scene and surpassed them all: charter school advocates.
With a week before election day, no organization in the state has spent more outside money in the 2016 election cycle than either EdVoice or the Parent Teacher Alliance, two pro-charter committees.
Combined, they’ve made around $17 million in “independent expenditures” on state legislative races this year, a KPCC analysis shows.
Backed by donors like L.A. philanthropist Eli Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and Gap founder Doris Fisher, these pro-charter groups’ outside spending has even surpassed traditional heavyweights in California politics: groups backed by the energy industry, real estate developers or organized labor.”
It is all charters all the time in the echo chamber. They do absolutely nothing to benefit to any public school, anywhere. The saddest part is so many of them are public employees. We’re actually paying them to eradicate our schools.