The honors keep rolling in for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance which was named today to the Boston Globe’s Hypocrite’s Hall of Fame. It’s not as prestigious as MassFiscal’s Award for Fraud in Massachusetts Politics in 2015, but it shows MFA is still on the bottom of its game.
The Globe editorial board took notice when the Globe reporter Matt P. Stout wrote about a new layer of dark money that is fueling MassFiscal. MFA is only good at one thing, hiding its donors, but it is very good at that. Its reliance on the in-house Fiscal Partners, an IRS 501(c)(6) business league adds another layer by which rich white guys get to make tax deductible donations while pursuing their political interests.
The Globe mentioned some of the sins of MassFiscal in addition to running dark money schemes. For instance, MFA preaches transparency while avoiding it entirely. It publishes phony polls, hoping some overworked news outlets will bite. Then there is the MassFiscal Precedent, which is to simply ignore determinations from Office of Campaign and Political Finance to disclose dark money contributors. The Globe also mentioned MFA founder Rick Green’s effort to bring more corporate money into politics which I’ve called, “the great civil rights case of his life.” But the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed that one out. If you can’t wait for the Globe to notice these things just click on the links, MassPoliticsProfs.org has you covered.
There’s only so much perfidy the Globe can cover in a column inch though, and it left out MassFiscal’s claims to be a champion of civil rights. Spokesperson Paul Craney argues that MFA should not have to disclose its wealthy donors based on a 1958 Supreme Court decision in which the sovereign State of Alabama was trying to drive the NAACP out of the state. Alabama sought to discover the list of the NAACP’s members. The Supreme Court allowed the NAACP to withhold its membership list because it recognized that threats of violence and intimidation against African Americans in Alabama would all but destroy their right to free association under the Fourteenth Amendment.
MassFiscal, here’s a little history about Alabama in the Fifties, from Michael Honey’s To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice: “In this brutal and racist climate, King and others experienced death threats, arrests, and bombings.” Here’s a reminder from last week’s Sunday New York Times review of Doug Jones’s Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing That Changed the Course of Civil Rights recounting how Jones helped send “to prison three Birmingham Klansmen who murdered four black girls by dynamiting their church on Sept. 15, 1963. The four children, aged 11 to 14 — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris Wesley — died instantly in a women’s restroom where they were preparing for Sunday school.”
So how seriously should we take MassFiscal’s hiding behind NAACP v. Alabama? As seriously as MassFiscal does, as we can see from federal district court Judge Rya Zobel’s dismissal of MassFiscal’s intimidation claim in her decision in Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance v. Michael Sullivan, et al.: “Finally, plaintiff is unlikely to succeed in challenging this provision as a threat to its’ donors associational or privacy rights because it has not even alleged that these individuals or groups fear ‘threats, harassment, or reprisals’ in the event of disclosure.”
That’s right, even though MassFiscal spokesperson Craney constantly hides behind NAACP v. Alabama in public arguments, MassFiscal didn’t dare make that poppycock argument before a federal judge.
Maybe because MassFiscal’s record includes a minority voter suppression scheme designed to help founder Rick Green in his campaign for the Third Congressional district seat last year?
Dear Boston Globe: Will there be an official ceremony inducting MassFiscal into the Hypocrites Hall of Fame? Can I come?
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money – and sometimes, voter suppression, and other things.]
Image credit: pxhere.com