The Mackinac Center’s top summer priority is to convince MEA members to quit their union. And time is running out so the Center is blazing with all its guns. The long list of the strategies the Center has employed makes this plain. At last count, it has used:

-Targeted Google ads
-Targeted Facebook ads
-Opt Out Facebook page
-Opt Out website
-Mass post card mailings
-Mass emails to school email accounts
-Devoted the Mackinac Center website homepage to Opt Out
-Earned media
-Op Eds by staffers in newspapers across the state
-Newspapers Op Eds written by surrogates
-Push poll/robo calls
-Mackinac Center Twitter feeds
-Mackinac Center staffer Twitter feeds
-AFP FaceBook posts
-AFP Free Press ad mentioning both the Mackinac Center and the Opt Out site

When asked, Mackinac Center staffers say this is all about “worker freedom.” But this drop-everything-else approach suggests a real desperation. “This is our big chance, let’s not blow it,” they seem to be saying.

If this corporate funded ‘think tank’ were really just interested in school employees knowing their options, would it really mount a campaign of this magnitude?

Need more evidence that the Center is using MEA members in an attempt to defund their own union? This email shows that while helping the House Education Committee chair write the 80/20 bill (that the Governor later signed and which now forces you to pay much more of your healthcare costs), Mackinac Center staffers admitted why they were going to all this trouble:

 

Breaking the MEA so it can’t keep fighting every corporate advantage that the Center intends to move this next legislative session is job 1. The Mackinac Center is banking on MEA members not seeing beyond their wallets, helping them to break their union and clearing the way for “outlawing government collective bargaining.” That would give them a clear field for a corporate takeover of our public schools.

On the day MEAMatters launched, Mackinac staffer Jarrett Skorup helped promote the site by tweeting a link. He also included what he thought was the most significant sentence on the site, and in the process, confirmed the Mackinac Center’s motive in pushing our members to quit:

This is about political strength; its not about you.