All over the nation, Walton money is flowing into state and local elections to help candidates who will privatize public schools.
Now, as I reported previously, and as Mercedes Schneider writes about here, the Waltons are spreading their wings and buying “grassroots” support (doesn’t the purchase of support mean it is not grassroots?). As Mercedes puts it, just “sell the idea” and “leave the funding to us.”
But the Waltons are not merely funding advocates and research and media. They are actively intervening and interfering into the democratic process (as Putin did in 2016 in our presidential election), sinking the hopes of home-grown candidates who can’t match their funding. Putin did it by stealth and social media, the Waltons do their dirty work in the open, using the sheer force of money.
The Waltons as a family are hereby enrolled on this blog’s Wall of Shame, for their persistent attack on democracy and the electoral process, which should be determined by the voters, uninfluenced by billionaires from out of state.
They are meddling with elections in hopes of electing state and local school boards, mayors, governors, and members of Congress who will share their dream of opening more charter schools and eliminating teachers’ unions. They have poured millions into charter referenda in Massachusetts and Washington State, as well as statewide elections in California.
The latest example: Chicago, where none of the Waltons live.
With major financial help from the billionaire heirs of the Arkansas-based Walmart fortune, the PACs related to the Illinois Network of Charter Schools are aiming to become a political force in the upcoming Chicago mayoral and aldermanic campaigns.
The children and grandchildren of Helen and Sam Walton, founders of the Walton Family Foundation and Walmart, are donors to the nonprofit Illinois Network of Charter Schools and its two allied political action committees, either from the family foundation or individual contributions, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis revealed…
Members of the Walton family, one of the wealthiest in the U.S., are active nationally in bankrolling pro-charter organizations, causes and candidates supporting school choice.
Chicago is home to 122 charter schools with about 60,000 students, Broy said.
The publicly funded, privately operated charter school movement in Chicago may be at a crossroads, fighting to not lose political ground and retain enrollments in a period of slowing growth.
A charter school champion, the anti-public union Gov. Bruce Rauner lost his re-election bid; another supporter, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is stepping down, and the race to replace him is wide open, with the powerful Chicago Teachers Union backing Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
Let us celebrate every time a Walton-funded candidate loses, because democracy should not be for sale to the highest bidder.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Gates’ Frontier Set shamefully targets HBCU’s for collaborative course content and delivery which PIGGYbacks a former indictment, “Waltons are shamefully targeting Black communities with privatization promises.” Predators, one and all.
Controlling human behavior, information and experience for private gain is the goal of the richest 0.1% (Shoshana Zuboff in her new book about Surveillance Capitalism)
Frederick Hess’ American Enterprise Institute and the Center for American Progress are the two of the most deceptively-named organizations there are. Neither America nor the American people are beneficiaries of their propaganda.
Hess and Tanden/Podesta are the reincarnation of those who enacted the decisions that caused 1,000,000 Irish to die of starvation.
Speaking of propaganda, what access to information do students get in a corporate run school? People should be asking themselves this very serious question. What will students learn from history, what will they learn about justice and democracy? A corporate environment gives the 1% a platform to inculcate students with their own messaging. It’s not just the narrowing of math and reading that is at stake. It is the bigger concepts twisted to conform to the propaganda of right wing conservatives or libertarians that will be perverted. Remember Mcluhan’s “the medium is the message.” Control the medium, and you control the message.
By the way, the Koch brothers have already created a social studies curriculum.https://www.theroot.com/millions-of-students-are-quietly-being-taught-the-koch-1823742091
All should read the link that RT supplies here.
A great task for 2019: helping many more citizens see through the name game. SO many organizations/programs strategically distract the voting populace through use of adopting “caring” titles.
Exactly right!
CARING TITLES.
Disguising a heist.
I wonder if someone could be induced to write exactly THAT book…
DISGUISING THE HEIST
“Disguising a Heist”- Diane is a genius of word and idea.
We simply have to grasp the fact that the world is now dominated by a small but powerful class of people who believe they and theirs were born to deserve the finest of everything while everyone else was born to serve their fondest wishes. No matter what they preach to the peons they understand that teaching is a human profession that demands the humane interaction between human beings and that is what they demand for their own. Everyone else can of course go begging.
In these final days of 2018, I dust off my “Quote of the Year” nomination:
If a foreign country had inflicted upon our public education system what Ed Reform plutocrats and their toadying political sycophants have implemented upon it, we would have considered it an act of war.
Excellent!
I think Randy Newman would say, “Very.”
Drag these peasants
Kicking and screaming
Into the 21st century
I thought we’d make it
Must’ve been dreaming
These chicken farmers and file clerks
Gonna be the death of me
It doesn’t get much lower than people willing to steer the political process to legally steal a community’s schools.
SO very Walmart/Walton: move a large store into a neighborhood, close up every single small enterprise within a fifteen mile radius — then pack up and leave as soon as the profit margin turns out to be still too small.
The Waltons are a much bigger threat than the Russians. I know this is useless around here, but: https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-elections-interference/
I despise the Waltons and Putin. Both are threats to democracy.
My wife was born in the USSR. She understands that Putin is a KGB thug. What she does not understand, is why so many Americans cannot understand the fact that Putin is an evil dictator.
The man in her house supports the oligarchs’ theft of American schools….. does she have trouble understanding that too?
Don’t answer Charles, it’s rhetorical.
Go over the Walton education site and read their stuff.
They are charter and voucher promoters. That’s what that organization is dedicated to- promoting charters and private schools.
It’s embarrassing that the ed reform “movement” is so captured they can’t admit this basic fact.
They aren’t advocates for “public education”. They are advocates for charter and private schools.
It’s misleading to the public to continue to present this as something OTHER than blatant lobbying for privatization. That’s what it is. They should have the courage of their convictions and admit it.
Ed reformers either ignore public schools or they denigrate public schools. You will not find a single positive story or statement about a public school anywhere on any of their sites or outlets. That they present themselves as “agnostics” is laughable, yet it’s accepted in the echo chamber. It’s ludicrous. Any outsider reading across the ed reform spectrum cannot honestly draw ANY OTHER conclusion that this “movement” is about promoting charters and vouchers and NOT about public schools. Yet they insist otherwise.
The Walton 2020 Strategic plan is at this website:
Click to access k12-strategic-plan-overview-updated.pdf
I continue to be amazed by the dismissive, apologist views some have about Russian (and other national and corporate) actions to influence democratic processes around the world. In the U.S. these arguments are mostly shared, ironically, by the voices of the very few far left and the more far right of the political spectrum. A core argument they propound is that the “smallness” of funds and operations used to target small populations couldn’t possibly affect big elections or social movements. They revert to classic “whataboutism” arguments whenever their “reasoning” is challenged or facts get in the way of corroboration; a “we do the same thing” that uses selective facts to create false narratives to distort the big picture and ignore history.
A key error they make to judge today’s propaganda too closely with that of the 1920s through the 1960s. While useful on many levels, the mechanisms used by Goebbels and Stalin cannot be adequately compared with today’s evolving technology and politics. When they do so, they flounder in a sea of simplification and fallacies. They seem incapable of understanding—what internet marketers have known for years—that audiences can be manipulated by micro-targeting. They seem incapable of understanding that this is not a partisan political issue, however much they try to make it one. Unfortunately, those on the far right ignore it to grasp onto and keep power while those on the fringe left choose to bury their heads in the sand before all the facts are known.
But I guess those who willfully put on blinders will never be open to rational arguments. They will yell louder and become more obstinate. They will be vehemently contemptuous when evidence counters their views and are chomping at the bit to unleash that “I told you so” if the conclusions don’t exactly match our worst fears. (Spoiler alert: real life is more complicated and messy than that.) They have an ideological pathology feeding a political malignancy that undermines everything they profess to believe in. If they get their way, they’re going to find out that there won’t be anything they can do to resuscitate the very idea of an American polity once it’s gone. And it’s pretty close to being brain dead right now.