Hillary’s Hedge Fund Fundraiser Was Chelsea’s Boss

By Doug Martin at Hoosier School Heist

This morning, the Associated Press reports that Hillary Clinton is busy gobbling up donations from hedge fund managers, a group highly involved in school privatization (as I detail in my book Hoosier School Heist) and one she says she will target if elected America’s new president.

According to AP, one New York City hedge fund manager who has raised at least $100,000 to Hillary’s campaign is Marc Lasry, a new owner of the Milwaukee Bucks.

In a statement to Bloomberg News a while back, Lasry said “we have a moral responsibility” to Milwaukee.  

Morality, for Hillary’s hedge fund manager friend, means a taxpayer bailout.

Even though Lasry’s basketball team  is set to bring in $89 million annually, Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker is seeking a $220 million taxpayer bond deal for the Bucks’ new sports arena, about the same amount to be cut from Wisconsin universities soon.

Lasry is also a team player in supporting school privatization. 

In 2012, Lasry spoke at the Invest for Kids Conference in Chicago, an event which raised $180,000 for the LEARN Charter School Network. 

The Invest for Kids Conference was led by Goldman Sachs’ managing director Ron Levin.

Hillary’s son-in-law, a few years earlier, worked for Goldman Sachs, before starting his own hedge fund.

Funded by Oprah and Walmart’s Walton family, the LEARN Charter School Network is run by past venture capitalist Greg White.  The network is well-known to pro-public school activists in Chicago for preying on poor minority communities, a “dismal track record of low performance, lots of unlicensed teachers, and a record of exclusion of English language learners and students with special needs.”

But Hillary’s connections to Marc Lasry are family-deep.  Chelsea Clinton once was employed at Marc Lasry’s hedge fund, Avenue Capital Group, which currently manages around $12.5 billion.  

Lasry's Avenue Capital Group also manages Avenue Energy Opportunities Fund, in which the Texas Teacher Retirement System has just invested $150 million.  

As Chris Hedges writes in his book Wages of Rebellion, “The citizen has become irrelevant.” Since the American Federation of Teachers’ leadership has publically endorsed Hillary, teachers should know that they, too, have become irrelevant to the powers-that-be and nothing short of a real revolution is going to give any of us a chance.