The Boston Globe is doing a pretty good job (I hope the Globe keeps it up) paying attention to SuperPACs in the Boston mayor’s race, the latest example being Danny McDonald’s SuperPAC’s emerge in Boston mayor’s race, with little objection so far. But regular people do object to these vehicles for oligarchic wealth, and they should.
Trigger warning: I’m quoted in the story a couple of times, and here’s my favorite:
Cunningham pointed out the contribution of Reed Hastings, the Boston-born cofounder and CEO of Netflix and a charter school advocate who now lives in California. In April, Hastings gave $125,000 to the superPAC supporting Campbell.
“I think of that number and then I think of another number, from the Globe’s 2018 report on race: ‘African-Americans in Greater Boston have a median net worth of just $8,’” he said. “And I ask you, who is going to have more influence on who gets elected mayor of Boston, that California donor or that Boston family? That ain’t democracy.”
I should have said those Boston families, because in the aggregate they couldn’t pool their money and match billionaire Hastings. The consequences of who is the next mayor fall heavily on them and not at all on schools policy hobbyist Hastings.
And I do think it matters to voters. After the wild dark money spending spree in the 2016 charters ballot campaign studies including one conducted for the Waltons found that voters reacted negatively to the money flood, especially millions traceable to the Waltons of Arkansas. When Ranked Choice Voting went down to defeat in 2020 both sides cited millions poured into the state by Texan John Arnold and New Yorker Kathryn Murdoch as one of the factors in the loss. People like democracy. They don’t like oligarchy.
Mr. McDonald correctly cited the Better Boston SuperPAC as being funded by supporters of charter schools. Here’s another quote of mine that didn’t make the cut:
So far as I can tell what unites these givers ($10k-$150k, etc.) is belief in an education philosophy that was overwhelmingly rejected by Boston voters at the ballot box in 2016.
How overwhelmingly? Crushed, 61.37%-38.63%. Charters lost twenty-one wards and narrowly won one ward—the donor rich (and white) Ward 5.
Most issue advocates don’t come back from a shellacking like that, and certainly not without years of education, organizing, advocacy, blood, sweat, and tears. But if you’re Hastings, 2016 dark money biggie Andrew Balson of Newton, etc. you just shake out the coins from the couch cushions and write a check for $125,000.
And that’s another reason I say “That ain’t democracy.” School Privatization to the actual living breathing voters in this democracy is deader than Kelsey’s nuts. Privatization is kept alive by oligarchy.
We have in this state a few mythical organizations claiming to be about parents, like Parents United and Massachusetts Parents United. Don’t be fooled. They are trifling tools of oligarchic checkbooks. MPU is underwritten by the Waltons and the Boston Foundation, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, Longfield Family Foundation, Barr Foundation; all organs of elite Boston wealth, all of which got crushed in 2016.
Who poured that big can of whoop-ass all over the oligarchs? It was Boston parents of color, as James Vaznis of the Globe reported on November 13, 2016 in In Boston, charter vote reflected racial divide:
Working with the No on 2 Campaign, families, teachers, and others began going door to door in July, hitting every neighborhood across the city.
Some volunteers turned their homes into make-shift call centers to lobby against the ballot measure. In East Boston, a group of grandmothers cooked dinner every Wednesday night for parent volunteers who worked a phone bank at the home of Kelly Gil Franco, a Boston teacher whose son attends a district elementary school.
During two-hour sessions, they made calls in both English and Spanish. They also had one parent who spoke Arabic. “I was lucky to see how supportive the community was,” said Gil Franco. “We were encouraging people to study multiple perspectives, conduct their own research, and visit their public schools.”
The Waltons, Hastings, Balson, Boston Foundation, Longfield, Gabrieli, Kraft, Burnes, etc. Boston keeps not inviting them but they keep coming back.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”—Louis Brandeis.
Full disclosure: as a (retired!) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about money, not education.]