The march toward the corporate takeover of the US government is well underway. In 2012, Charles and David Koch established yet another political group, Freedom Partners. It was organized under IRS §501c(6) as a business league. An example of another 501c(6) is the NFL.

Freedom Partners is essentially a corporate politician buying club, where vast amounts of money is assembled and doled out to a long list of Super PACs and various right wing operatives. The advantage for the member corporations is that like a 501c(4), Freedom Partners can directly engage in politics. Unlike a 501c(4), contributions are tax deductible. Money is effectively laundered through a tax-deductible business league into non-deductible 501c(4) political non-profits.

Politico reports that among the groups being funded are:

• Americans for Prosperity
• The 60 Plus Association seniors group that opposes Obamacare
• Themis Trust voter database available to conservative organizations
• Generation Opportunity a group for “liberty-loving” young people
• The LIBRE Initiative free-market messages to Hispanic immigrants
• The National Rifle Association
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• Heritage Action for America

In January, we learned that the Kochs plan to use Freedom Partners to spend $889 million in the next election cycle. That amounts to more than both of the (formerly) major political parties spent in the last cycle.

“It’s no wonder the candidates show up when the Koch brothers call,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “That’s exponentially more money than any party organization will spend. In many ways, they have superseded the party.”

There is reason to think the Koch’s preferred candidate is Scott Walker, but they have since promised to fund 5 Republican candidates: Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, 4 of whom (not Bush) attended the Koch winter donor meeting in Palm Springs. Charles Koch later promised to intervene in the Republican primary only if one of these candidates isn’t poised to win. In any case, Freedom Partners is certain to fund a barrage of anti-Clinton ads starting after Labor Day.

A Koch briefing document recently surfaced. This secret “Partner Prospectus” (“Please do not disclose, discuss, or disseminate the contents herewith.”) is handed to prospective funders and spells out the AFP plans for 2015, as well as the states they intend to focus on (Michigan is not on the list). It also details the technology they have employed in the field and what they have christened the “Structure of Social Change,” the overall plan to convert state and local governments to corporate surrogates.

This involves funding university programs to produce pro-free market data, which is used by Koch-funded think tanks including the Mackinac Center, to “produce policy white papers.” These “wonky” ideas are transformed by AFP “into relatable educational materials” that they “distribute to citizens and lawmakers,” elected with Koch backing “ … who enact policy.”

Last month, the MEAMatters Facebook page and Twitter feed posted a story written by Novi Superintendent Steve Mathews, one of the growing number of public school administrators who sees a legislative attack on teachers.

Mathews work was picked up nationally, including by the very good Diane Ravitch blog. Today, Ravitch posted a followup piece, “Michigan Reader Explains Why You Should “Follow the Money”. Written by an unnamed Michigan teacher, and likely an MEA member, who understands that the attack on teachers, and necessarily their union, is part of an orchestrated campaign to cut campaign funds to political opponents and to open the public school market to private enterprise:

I taught in the same district as Steve Matthews when he was a Curriculum Director some years ago so I am familiar with who he is. He was well liked during his time there.
Something that is missing from Steve’s well spoken article and most of the subsequent comments is the fact that not only is the de-funding of public education deliberate and premeditated but it has a purpose in addition to demoralizing school employees. Two major factors are at play.
One is by keeping school districts cash strapped, it puts less money into the paychecks of teachers. Therefore less money will be going to Democratic candidates running for elected office. Starving the Democrats of donations by teacher union members, who are often the largest union in any particular state, makes it easier to outspend the Democrats by rich Republican donors. No less than Karl Rove, has stated that is a major goal of his political machine.
Another key ingredient of this premeditation for breaking down public schools is public schools are one of the last great untapped sources for the greatest stack of dollars in the country, taxpayer money. By making the school systems appear incompetent, even if it means actually ruining the education of millions of students, Republicans can create large inroads for privatization of school operations. That means Republican’s Corporate Masters will be getting those easy taxpayer monies with long-term contracts for “services.” Republicans/Corporate America have made big strides in taking over school transportation, food and custodial services to date, in addition to creating charter schools with shockingly little accountability for how taxpayer money is used and for actual student achievement. Legislative bills are being introduced in many states that will allow districts to hire non-certified teachers for the classrooms. Those “teachers” will be woefully underpaid and have little skills to deliver any kind of quality education.
The saying of “follow the money” is a real cue to see what those who seek to demonize public education are up to.

An open secret for years is that teaching isn’t what it used to be. In fact, having been targets for so many years, most teachers have had it and would love to retire if they could afford it. But after years of cuts, that’s not possible for most.

With morale so low, its not surprising to see that word is getting out. A piece in the Capital News Service illustrates this new truth, and a secondary impact. Shrinking number of teachers signals end of a dream career shows that it’s not just today’s teachers that want out, but tomorrow’s.

MEA President Steve Cook is quoted identifying public education’s new role:

Not one of them got involved because they thought they were going to be rich,” Cook said. “They want to teach. And they get there and find out, I’m not doing that much teaching, I’m a professional test proctor.”

How this all came about is one familiar to many of us:

In the wake of the Great Recession, many states passed laws reducing teachers’ job security, cutting their salaries and benefits, increasing class sizes and limiting their collective bargaining rights.

As a result, applications to teacher colleges have dropped as much as 50 percent. Western Michigan University’s James Muchmore, predicts:

At some point, people will realize that the current round of teacher-bashing is counter-productive to the well-being of our society, and it will change.

But will they realize this in time…?

As reported yesterday by The Michigan Populist Blog, The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation has announced a million dollar grant to the Mackinac Center to support “research to help public schools become more responsive, measurable and efficient.” Any suggestion that the Mackinac Center might use this money to actually help public schools, or that the Dow Foundation would want them to, is easily dismissed when Dow’s long financial support is taken into account.

Dow has been working the Mackinac Center levers since its earliest days:

Fundraising activity was active from 1984 to 1991, with peak activity in 1987 when Cornerstone established the Mackinac Center.  The insurance industry (primarily Citizen’s) provided initial funding, amounting to $306,382 during this period. Various officials of Dow Corning and Dow Chemical paid $335,986.

Its creation was driven by the insurance industry’s call for product liability reform, its interest in the Accident Fund, and by Dow Corning’s concern over silicone breast implant liability. The Truth About the Mackinac Center, Greg Steimel, 2012

In fact, the Center’s current President, Joe Lehman is a former Dow employee.

This new grant cements Dow as the Mackinac Center’s biggest backer. Between 2009 and 2012, the Dow Foundation wrote checks totaling a whopping $5,560,500. This figure doesn’t include the Dow funding since 2012, including this new figure. And it doesn’t include the other Dow-connected contributors, Dow Chemical Board member Charles J Strosacker’s Foundation, which was good for $68,750, or retired Dow Chemical Chairman Rollin M.Gerstacker’s Foundation, $310,000.

In fact, in 1997 the Center decided it needed a new headquarters building, it went to Dow. The Foundation put up (another) million, and the Gerstacker Foundation, $500,000.

As Eclectablog points out, there are organizations that do actual research on education, like the Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice.

In response to all this, a petition drive to demand Dow get out of the public school bashing business has come together. Sign on here.

It appears almost yearly, and again today the Mackinac Center repeated a lie that it must by now know full well is a lie: that “…just 11 percent of total [MEA] spending goes toward “representational activities.” The rest, they say, is spent ” for the salaries and benefits of the union’s central staff.”  They used to use 29.5%, but today they are going with just 11%.

In the past, they’ve used this graphic:

It suggests that only 29.5% of MEA spending is for ‘representation,’ meaning the rest is for non-bargaining efforts or wasted, and that this percentage is the lowest among all unions in the state.

It’s hard to reconstruct the Mackinac Center’s math, but if you instead look at how much fee payers pay the MEA, that is, the percentage they pay for MEA representation, it’s 79.37%, not the Center’s 29.5%. This payment is the result of a lawsuit brought by a right to work organization, so isn’t spin: it’s legally enforceable and monitored by MEA’s enemies.

The spending listed above for “overhead” (43.1%) reflects MEA’s policy of maintaining UNISERV offices all over the state, bringing the union to its members. None of the other unions listed does this.

The chart below (available in the back of the MEA calendar) shows a more reliable breakdown. Keep in mind that representation includes more than the first category: UNISERV directors give and receive training, nearly all of legal spending is related to UNISERV work, etc.

And just as important, this knowing falsehood, designed to foster complaints, is brought to you by the group that literally wrote the 80/20 Hardcap law and pushed for passage of the increases in your retirement contribution, costing you money every day. It is working at the Capitol, right now, to shut down the state pension system. The Mackinac Center is also responsible for a long list of laws that allow school districts to unilaterally make every layoff, recall, and evaluation decision, and ignore the now gutted Tenure Act.

Even before this new, more conservative legislature was elected, the Mackinac Center announced some of its priorities for the new Legislature. Most relate to education, and all serve the purpose of reducing union power.

Cut pensions and benefits, make teachers work on commission, divert public school funds to pay private school tuition and reduce union membership. All sold as ways to save money but all serving to make unions politically irrelevant.

And while you’re at it, kill off full time release and make freeloaders immune from criticism.

The Koch brothers are one of the Mackinac Center’s funders, this has been known for years, thanks to relatively small donations made by one of their foundations, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. This funding has always suggested that the Kochs were funneling much more corporate money, but the IRS refuses to make these corporate tax returns public

But as the Koch influence on national politics has grown over the years, their spending has become an increasingly difficult secret to keep. For example, in the final week of the 2014 election, the brothers invested $6.5 million on behalf of just 6 Republican Senate candidates. As their role in Republican politics gets more widely known, their targets are willing to point this out. The Kochs are so active that associating Republican candidates to them has become almost routine.

There’s been so much of this lately, that the Koch Brothers have begun a PR campaign to improve their image. These include TV commercials featuring Koch employees that served in the military and now newspaper Op Eds placed by surrogates extolling the many virtues of the Koch Brothers.

A recent such Op Ed appeared in the Midland Daily News. The writer credit said only: “Timothy G. Nash … vice president and economics professor at Northwood University.” A particularly gushing review of the Koch Brother’s heroic contribution to our society (“Every now and then, you come across exceptional people who by their leadership, courage, vision, principles, and imagination have literally changed the world.”), the piece failed to point out that the writer is part of the Koch machine.

First noticed by Media Matters and quickly picked up by Eclectablog, the newspaper, located in the Mackinac Center’s hometown, failed to mention that Nash is a Mackinac Center adjunct scholar. Worse, the News failed to tell its readers that Nash more or less works for the Koch Brothers:

… the Midland Daily News failed to reveal Nash’s own significant and beneficial relationship to the Koch brothers. In February 2011, Nash was announced as the director of the Koch Scholars program at Northwood University, which is funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

The Koch connection to the Mackinac Center is substantial. Media Matters makes this clear:

Between 2010 and 2012, the Mackinac Center received $1,494,000 from the Koch conduits DonorTrust and Donors Capital Fund.

Donors Capital Fund is organized, under yet another Internal Revenue Code section, as a 509(a)(3) “supporting organization”. Using this little-known regulation serves to bury money as part of the “murky money maze.” Corporations that donate (at least $1 million each) can make it even harder to track their money.

According to the IRS, a supporting organization is:

… a charity that carries out its exempt purposes by supporting other … public charities. This classification is important because it is one means by which a charity can avoid classification as a private foundation, a status that is subject to a more restrictive regulatory regime.

Donor’s Capital Fund is a massive dark money operation, funneling over $310 million tax-free dollars to a long list of members of the right wing echo chamber, including Muskegon’s Education Action Group as well as the Mackinac Center’s forerunner, the Heritage Foundation.

IRS tax returns show the Charles G. Koch Foundation and the Coors Foundation are Donors Trust funders, and that the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation alone provided $2.5 million. So while right wing foundation funding to Donor’s Trust/Capital is discoverable, none of the corporate funding can be uncovered. That, after all, is the whole point to Donor’s Capital Fund.

The campaign to monitize public schools is getting more and more public attention. Journey for Justice, “an alliance of 36 grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in 21 cities across the country” It is working for “community-driven school improvement as an alternative to the privatization and dismantling of public school systems.” Its Coordination Committee includes Detroit’s Keep the Vote, No Takeover.

In May 2014, J4J published Racism, School Closures, and Public School Sabotage, a report documenting the movement to close underfunded urban schools.

The real, underlying cause for these school closures is that there has been a realignment of political forces. Right-wing conservatives have long sought to eliminate public goods such as public education, and dismantle organized labor, especially teachers’ unions.

They have also long pursued the replacement of public schools withnon-unionized, privately managed schools that receive public funds, either through a voucher system or a system of charter schools.

Their privatization proposals received little support until they were joined by billionaires willing to invest heavily in education reform such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family; members of the business community, especially Wall Street and large corporations, who realized there is considerable profit to be made by outsourcing education to private management…

It also addresses the media fascination with charter schools and sheds light on some of these success stories:

Urban Prep Academies in Chicago … dubbed “Hogwarts in the Hood,” recently received national attention for having all of their graduating seniors accepted at four-year colleges or universities, for the fourth consecutive year. … Urban Prep’s Englewood campus had 85 students in their 2011-12 graduating class, there were 178 students who originally started in the class four years earlier. Over time, they lost over half of their students. … During the 2011-12 school year, it expelled 31 out of their 473 students, or one out of every fifteen … Additionally, nearly one out of every 10 of their students  elected – or were encouraged – to transfer out of the school, during just that one school year … the school lost over one  out of every six students during just one school year.

Of course, these expelled student return to the neighborhood public schools, which are held responsible for their performance. Expulsion rates speak volumes:

In 2012-13, among the 19 schools with the most expulsions in Chicago, 18 of them were charter schools. Overall, the city’s charter schools had an expulsion rate 12 times higher than that of the city’s public schools.

In 2011-12, the expulsion rate in Washington, DC charter schools was 72 times higher than it was at local public schools.

A 2011 study of Philadelphia schools found that the expulsion rate for local charter schools was three-and-a-half times higher than it was in public schools. Many New Orleans charter schools have extraordinarily high suspension rates, which have led a group of students and parents to file a Title VI complaint alleging racial discrimination against African-American students.

…the KIPP network of charter schools, well known for their strict, military-style atmosphere,50 loses 15% of their students per year, far higher than their surrounding school districts.

Public schools continue to be closed nevertheless, resulting in a downward spiral that ends either with a change in policy or the end of public schools.

Among the action steps J4J recommends, is a US Senate hearing on the impact of these attack. Which is way, way overdue.

Former New York Times reporter Bob Herbert’s new book, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America, includes a Chapter entitled: “The Plot Against Public Education, How millionaires and billionaires are ruining our schools.” Politico reprinted the chapter yesterday.

Herbert retells the early days of this trend, when Bill Gates decided smaller high schools were the answer. He was wrong.

From 2000 to 2009, he spent $2 billion and disrupted 8 percent of the nation’s public high schools before acknowledging that his experiment was a flop. The size of a high school proved to have little or no effect on the achievement of its students. At the same time, fewer students made it more difficult to field athletic teams. Extracurricular activities withered. And the number of electives offered dwindled.

Gates said it himself in the fall of 2008, “Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for.”

Undeterred, Gates moved on to fixing teaching, although he admitted he didn’t know how. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know.”

This random shot approach has persevered. But common to every reform proposed is the entry  of the private sector, ready to apply the profit motive.

While schools and individual districts were being starved of resources, the system itself was viewed as a cash cow by so-called education entrepreneurs determined to make a killing. Even in the most trying economic times, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, earmarked for the education of children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade, are appropriated each year. For corporate types, especially for private equity and venture capital firms, that kind of money can prove irresistible. And the steadily increasing influence of free-market ideology in recent years made public education fair game.

The chapter serves as a 4 page primer on the corporate takeover of public schools. It illustrates,  thanks to the Republican party’s fealty to market-oriented solutions, that corporations have been given the go-sign to the monitize this new market.

“When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” Rupert Murdoch

Read the entire chapter on the Politico site.