Two recently released documents offer insight into dark money sources that reach into Massachusetts. Let’s take a look at the donor list from the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Job Security and to the program from the annual meeting of the right wing State Policy Network.
After years of legal battles the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington forced Americans for Job Security to disclose its donors. AJS was a political money laundering operation for some of America’s wealthiest families. The donors, who gave hundreds of thousands and often millions of dollars, included Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Peter Thiel, Charles Schwab ($8.8 million), Richard and Helen DeVos, Steven Mnuchin, Linda McMahon, and U.S. Sugar Several million dollars were donated through another Koch affiliated dark money front, Center to Protect Rights.
Massachusetts connections? Wynn Resorts gave $500,000. Greg and Carrie Penner of the Walton family gave $500,000. Eli Broad gave $500,000. The Walton Family Foundation is the biggest known giver to Education Reform Now, funding parent of Democrats for Education Reform. The second largest donor is the Broad Foundation. Since 2017 the Waltons have also been picking up the tab for a big part of the budget of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, and the Waltons essentially own Massachusetts Parents United outright. Doris and John Fisher gave millions to AJS and kicked in $500,000 in dark money to Families for Excellent Schools in 2016. In 2012 in California, Democrats for Education Reform teamed up with the Kochs’ Americans for Job Security and Center for Patient Rights to run television ads on two ballot questions that would have imposed an education tax and weakened union rights.
On to the State Policy Network, another Koch-related front described by the Center for Media and Democracy as “a web of right-wing ‘think tanks’ and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states” including the Pioneer Institute in Massachusetts. SPN just met and the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch’s headline cannot be improved upon: Koch Network Dominates SPN Annual Meeting Attendees. Attendees could go to gatherings like Comparing State Public Labor Laws: A Comprehensive Post-Janus Grading of Worker Friendly States or Implementing Janus: How Every State Can Improve Worker Freedom . (When SPN says worker friendly or worker freedom, it means corporate domination). There was also a panel for education privatizers, How to Message School Choice.
Pioneer sent three employees to the SPN conference as well as Cara Candal, who writes on education for Pioneer. DFER and Pioneer have partnered on education forums too. Pioneer counts among its most generous funders the late David Koch and the Waltons.
If you check out the SPN annual meeting website there is a helpful scroll of sponsors on the right side. ALEC is there. Altria and Phillip Morris, the tobacco giants are donors, as is the DeVos’s dark money education front American Federation for Children. The Kochs’ major political operation Americans for Prosperity is there along with more fossil fuel interests. Facebook and Google – present and accounted for. And of course, the Walton Family Foundation.
Money never sleeps. Follow the money.
The Washington Post recently adopted a new slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I agree.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things). I don’t write about education.]
Someone who masques as aN education progressive is Paul Reveille. I was surprised to find that he was co-founder of MBAE, recipient of the Walton’s largess.