Right-To-Work Billionaire Wins IPS’ Coca-Cola Property Deal

PART 1 OF A BIGGER STORY 

By Doug Martin 

 “I’m in a male-dominated industry.  They like to see deer running by with big antlers.”
                      Diane Hendricks, in reference to keeping a herd of deer on her 200-acre estate

“In a video shot on Jan. 18, 2011, days after Walker was sworn in as governor and shortly before he introduced his Act 10 bill ending collective bargaining rights for public sector workers,” billionaire Diane Hendricks, from Beloit, Wisconsin, asks the governor if there is “Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions....And become a right-to-work [state]?” She then adds, "What can we do to help you?"

Scott Walker replies “The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer... That opens the door once we do that.”

The owner of ABC Supply, “the largest wholesale distributor of roofing, windows, siding and gutter materials” with “715 stores across the United States”,  including four locations in Indianapolis, and many more in Terre Haute, Bloomington, Muncie, and other Indiana cities, Diane Hendricks, with a net worth of $4.9 billion, has given Scott Walker’s campaign at least $519,100, due to a fluke in Wisconsin law, which is more money than even the Koch Brothers have given Walker and more than any donor to a candidate in Wisconsin history.  The majority of this funding came after Hendricks' meeting with Walker captured on video.

Hendricks prides herself on breaking unions.

In 2014, she gave $1 million to Wisconsin Republicans to help move the right-to-work agenda forward.  With help from a Koch Brothers-affiliated group whose “website was registered by Kurt Luidhart of the Indiana-based ‘Prosper Group,’ a GOP digital media firm that Walker's campaign hired in 2014 to run his online fundraising”, it worked.

Walker followed in Mitch Daniels’ footsteps, eliminating public workers’ rights (which led to protestors taking over the state capitol for weeks) and eventually signing a right-to-work bill for private sector workers into law in 2015, the same year Hendricks, recently a member of the Trump campaign’s economic advisory team, handed $1 million to the Koch Brothers-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund in September 2015, “enough to make her one of its top eight donors”.

Hendricks also sits on the board of the Bradley Foundation, a school voucher-supporting and racist group I examine in Hoosier School Heist, and helped fund an anti-socialism/free market conference in Kohler, Wisconsin, where “the Bradley Foundation staff did the legwork” and Diane and Bradley’s Michael Grebe signed the invitation.

Diane Hendricks owns Hendricks Commercial Properties, the company buying the Indianapolis Public Schools’ Coca-Cola property, where the 1930’s Art Deco Coca-Cola bottling plant, once the largest Coca-Cola bottling plant in the world, sits and has been used recently for IPS bus upkeep.

Hendricks Commercial Properties competed with Strategic Capital Partners (highlighted in Hoosier School Heist), a charter school and gentrification organization with many political ties in Indianapolis.  Going under the name Mass Ave Partners, in partnership with Schmidt Associates, Gene Zink's Strategic Capital Partners offered IPS $17.5 million for the property.

In May 2016, however, the IPS board voted to sell the property, located on an 11-acre site in the Mass Ave. district, to Hendricks’ group for $12 million.

Hendrick's company’s $260 million development proposal is for a hotel, dinner movie theater, retail, apartments, and office space, among other things. Many opposed the plan, and the Chatham Arch Neighborhood Association’s president said it was “the worst of the proposals” for local residents.

In 2017, the City of Indianapolis said it was “prepared to commit up to $4.6 million to the downtown Bottleworks project,” the name given to the development by Hendricks Commercial Properties.  Diane Hendricks’ company also “is seeking $2.4 million in site work from the state”.  Hendricks Commercial Properties’ proposal has “68,000 square feet dedicated to day care and ‘other schooling options.’”

Will these "other schooling options" include charter schools?  Maybe even ones which partner with IPS?

The Hendricks Education Center, in Beloit, in the past has housed two charter schools which have partnered with the school district.  At a ceremony for the re-opening of the center in  2010 after renovation, Diane Hendricks was honored. “From the district perspective, we appreciate everything Diane and the Hendricks group has done in developing this marvelous facility,” uttered Milt Thompson, the School District of Beloit Superintendent.  “Today’s a chance for the public to see what charter schools are all about.  This is the first charter school in Beloit and that’s due to the efforts of the Hendricks family for their contributions.”

FIRE fascists save campus kooks' Howard Roark devotional cult

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” — John Rogers

Any wonder why Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) staffers consistently conflate hate speech with free speech? Note the glaring lack of diversity—may be a melanin deficiency issue, no?

Write about education and other public policy issues long enough and you'll end up on everyone's press release (PR) list. To be sure I receive PR from right-of-center organizations like Center for American Progress (CAP) and National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), all the way to fringe-right outfits like the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Unlike "reporters" employed by the corporate media, I occasionally call the contact persons on the PR and ask fairly innocuous questions like "is the study you mention in your PR actually juried research, or is this just a policy paper?" The response is inevitably the latter, and I've documented such encounters with CAP and NCTQ in previous Schools Matter installments. Too bad "journalists" from organs like the Broad Foundation Newslett… uh, I mean the Los Angeles Times don't question these groups' PR before publishing their misinformation uncritically to the public.

One of the more lamentable groups sending me PR is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Somewhere on the political scale between Randian libertarians and unapologetic fascists, FIRE champions the "rights" of bigots, racists, nativists, misogynists, and other assorted reactionaries to spew various forms of hate speech unabated on college campuses across the nation. Their press releases typically celebrate victories over policies that would prevent exercising of oppressions over those whose educational experience is stifled by said oppressions. FIRE sends press releases celebrating calls to eliminate co-ed mandates, gushing defenses of rape culture, and apologetics for arch-reactionaries Karl Rove and war criminal Condoleezza Rice.

Late August FIRE sent me a PR that simultaneously caused me to retch and laugh — they were able to rescue the Ayn Rand Cult, I mean Club, at The University of California, Davis (UC Davis). The near vomiting experience is natural for any educated person having to hear Rand's name or of her associated "works." The laughing reaction came from the notion that any college student (especially at UC, where I graduated, albeit from the far more prestigious Los Angeles campus) would admit to having read Rand. FIRE, in their accustomed self-congratulatory style, waxed about how they forced the UC to do an "about-face" in order to accomodate kooks revering an "author" whose inspiration was a sociopathic murderer.

FIRE claims they are composed of individuals "from across the political and ideological spectrum", but even a cursory glance at their funders, advisors, and choice of causes reveals they are little more than a satellite of the John Birch Society. Let's start with the extreme right-wing reactionaries funding the FIRE Foundation. A selection from their own annual report:

Laura and John Arnold, Bradley Impact Fund, Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, Milken Family Foundation, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust.

Given that the Kochs and Bradleys are both founding families of the John Birch Society (both families are choice and charter supporters too), I want it noted that my allusions to that extremist organization are in no way hyperbole. FIRE's funders are some of the most powerful and extremist elements composing the right wing of our plutocracy. Moreover, noted misogynist Lawrence H. Summers sits on FIRE's Board of Advisors, as do several other reactionaries.

I've yet to see anything from FIRE about their defending the rights of LGBT groups, or Students for Justice in Palestine, or any other group that is oppressed under our, to borrow from the esteemed Professor bell hooks, "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." Indeed, FIRE exists specifically to perpetuate the "rights" of the oppressors, not the oppressed. I, for one, do not conflate hate speech with free speech. I once said as much to FIRE's Greg Lukianoff in a Twitter exchange, during which he Klansplained me about how my stance would be different if I had a law background like him. I'm a second year law student now (2L), and I still don't find racist, sexist, and other spoken slurs acceptable on campus. Perhaps once I have my Juris Doctor in hand, I'll understand why Lukianoff and his fellow right-wing reactionaries despise what they call "groupthink" (sounds hauntingly like that trashy novelist FIRE was so proud to defend). Probably not.

Pence Funded by Oregon’s Charter School Libertarian

By Doug Martin, Author of Hoosier School Heist

(Doug Martin is up for the Best Local Political Activist of the Year Award.  Please go to NUVO and vote for him today and every day until August 21.) 

The school privatizers are tossing money at Mike Pence right and left.  The governor cashed in on a $25,000 contribution on June 4 from John D. Bryan in Lake Oswego, OR.

As I reveal in my book Hoosier School Heist, Bryan is the millionaire charter school/voucher champion who helped finance Walmart-Amway’s American Federation for Children in 2010 and 2011, a front-group which has funneled millions of dollars into Indiana and other states to buy Republicans to pass anti-public school laws.  Last year, Bryan gave $50,000 to the Walmart-Amway backed Hoosiers for Quality Education. 

Not only is Bryan pro-charter school, as former director of the Georgia Gulf Corporation, a plastics and petrochemical maker now operating under the name Axiall, he is also an anti-climate change promoter.  

A past leadership board member of the Koch Brothers-affiliated Club for Growth and a Scott Walker donor, Bryan has handed at least $201,000 to the Indiana Republican Campaign Committee since 2006.  Over the years, Bryan has gifted Pence $145,000.  

The Challenge Foundation has given money to at least 182 charter schools nationwide, as of my book’s writing. I have a whole section in Hoosier School Heist on Bryan’s Challenge Foundation and the Avondale Meadows School in Indianapolis, when it went by the name Challenge Foundation Academy.  Charter schools headed by the Challenge Foundation are rampant across the country, at least one with serious religious Right leanings.  

Bryan has brilliantly combined the Religious Right with the Corporate Right.  He has funded the the Black Alliance for Educational Options and is fond of the national anthem.  He likes former Indianapolis’ Democratic mayor Bart Peterson, too, who first allowed him into Indiana in the first place.  

(Doug Martin is up for the Best Local Political Activist of the Year Award.  Please go to NUVO and vote for him today and every day until August 21.) 

Corporate Radio Picks On AFT Indiana

by Doug Martin 

A few days ago, WIBC 93.1’s Ray Steele and Mike Wilson, hosts of The 10 @ 10 Show, found a tweet by AFT Indiana and went into corporate bully mode. 

The AFT Indiana tweet read:  

“To all the heroes of the education world headed back to the trenches: Good luck & Thank You!” 

WIBC’s hosts were offended by the war metaphor, claiming that teachers do not do anything like engage in battle from the “trenches” and that it was “outlandish” for AFT Indiana to make such a statement. 

WIBC is owned and operated by Emmis Communications.  Emmis’ Executive Vice President is Scott Enright, a board member of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an Indianapolis-based national privatization propaganda mill started by economist Milton Friedman and Mitch Daniels. Emmis, as I note in my book Hoosier School Heist, was paid very well by the Friedman Foundation a few years back for ads to push school privatization. 

 

With a board made up of Overstocked.com’s founder and many school privatization champions, the Friedman Foundation pays well, too.  In 2013, CEO Robert Enlow raked in over $220,000 (see page 7).  The Friedman Foundation has funded the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (page 39) and even the Indianapolis Urban League, the latter to the tune of $20,000 in 2013 (see page 40).  

As I mention in my book, Milton Friedman knew quite a bit about war, literally war against the people.  In the 1970s after the CIA helped overthrow the democratically-elected president in Chile, Friedman aided the new brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in beating into place a free-market scheme that still spurs protests in the streets.  As Naomi Klein and others have detailed, thousands of people were killed and tortured who tried to fight off Pinochet and Friedman’s assaults against humanity.  In fact, it is now believed that the great poet Pablo Neruda, a socialist, may have been killed by Pinochet.  

Friedman and his trained economists, the Chicago Boys, heaped havoc on Chile, and the disaster capitalism to steal the public infrastructure you see going on in America and across the world today starts with Friedman.  

Of course you won’t hear anything about this on WIBC or any other corporate media in Indiana or across these states.  If WIBC’s hosts want to argue metaphor, maybe they should read some Neruda.  If not, they should stick to discussing things they know something about, which is not education.  And maybe they should read a bit of real history, too.