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. 

A Few More Dots: Corporate School Indiana Update

By Doug Martin

Since I’m busy preparing my book Hoosier School Heist for the printers, I've decided to note a few things not in the book and several recent happening in the corporate school movement in the Hoosier state. 

1. The Friedman Foundation, which gave out free t-shirts of Milton to anyone who left comments on its site responding to Diane Ravitch's take on the group's new "research," has flung its corporate school tentacles wider in Indianapolis.  Ben Hunter’s wife Keri Jo is now employed by the group.  Ben is District 21’s representative to the Indianapolis City-County Council.

2. On the other side of the political spectator sport aisle, Mary Ann Sullivan, the hedge fund-supported Democrat, for several years now has been working for the Bill Gates-supported CELL, the school privatizing academic opportunist group at the University of Indianapolis. 

3.  GEO Foundation's Kevin Teasley funded Indiana Republicans when he was weaseling his way into Indiana and Colorado with $2.1 million from the Bush administration, but has kept his taxpayer-money to himself now.  In 2011-2012, he was raking in around $200,000 from running charter schools in Indiana and Colorado.  His recent piece in the Indianapolis Business Journal about "accountability" is a complete joke, since I detail in my book the various antics Teasley and his charter school people have pulled off over the years without serious consequences.

4.  Somehow I overlooked, while writing the big section on Gülen charter schools in my book, that Gülenist Mehmet Dunbar slid money to the Indiana Senate Democrats, too, in 2010, and the Greater Indianapolis Republican Finance Committee.  My book, though, does point out that US representative Democrat Andre Carson has received a lot of money from the Turkish group and that Gülenists funded Mike Pence in March 2012, as well. 

If you don't know Gülen, the FBI does. But that doesn't mean the FBI is going to do anything about them.  Too many politicians in DC and across the country are in bed with this group of Muslims which runs more charter schools in America (and across the world) than any other outfit.  

   

Voucher Gospels in Indiana Government

**Guest Post by Doug Martin

SCHOOL VOUCHER BULLYING, PURE POLITICS, AND THE INDIANA OFFICE OF MANAGEMENTAND BUDGET

When it comes to the corporate-religious-political bullying for the Amway/Walmart/ALEC/Overstock.com/Koch Brothers assault on Indiana school children, the Republicans will stop short of nothing.   House Bill 1342 was a perfect example.  Having moved out of committee but finally killed off yesterday by GOP House Speaker Brian Bosma, this bill sought to strip Indiana superintendent of public instruction Glenda Ritz and the Department of Education of all power to monitor the state voucher schools, giving instead, the Koch-Brothers/ALEC crony Chris Atkins and his Indiana Office of Management and Budget complete control over voucher school funding distribution, oversight, and even voucher school visits.

With OMB’s State Board of Accounts now handing charter school audits over to private companies, House Bill 1342 was meant to punish Ritz, who was originally involved in the lawsuit to stop Indiana’s school voucher system, and lead to even more lack of oversight.

THE INDIANA OMB AND THE CORPORATE RIGHTWING MACHINE

Mike Pence recently rehired Chris Atkins to lead OMB. A past tax and fiscal policy director at ALEC, the Anderson, Indiana-born Atkins began working for the sociopathic voucher lobbying and propaganda mill, the Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, after leaving as OMB policy director where he hammered out the Mitch Daniels’ anti-public school property tax plan, one of the first initiatives to drain funding from the schools.

Not surprisingly, Atkins is a member of the pro-school voucher Institute of Justice’s Human Action Network, a group of IJ student law conference alumni who volunteer for various cases IJ deems appropriate. IJ is battling in court to save the Indiana school voucher program.

Atkins is not a fan of increased spending to eliminate inequality in the public schools.  In 2007, while carrying corporate water for the Koch Brothers-supported/ Eli Lilly affiliated Tax Foundation, Atkins released a “study” at the Philadelphia ALEC meeting which claimed that lawsuits in favor of forcing states to pay adequate funding to inadequately funded school districts have not led to better schools or “long term increases in school spending” but only to higher tax rates. Atkins commented: "Lawsuits may be able to build schools, but they haven't proven effective at teaching kids.”

Atkins, however, is not the only OMB employee with ties to school voucher groups.  The Friedman Foundation-funded and Tea Party Americans for Prosperity is represented at OMB’s Department of Government Efficiency and Financial Planning by Gloria Downham, whose husband, Chase, heads the Americans for Prosperity’s Indiana branch.  Chase, a former Mike Pence intern, helped elect Republicans for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.  Chase and Gloria are parishioners at the St. Monica Catholic Church which operates its own Indianapolis school receiving state vouchers.

Former Ice Miller attorney Brian Bailey, OMB’s chief of staff & general counsel, is also a Tax Foundation crony.

Micah Vincent, at OMB’s Department of Local Government Finance, likes to attend Friedman Foundation events, too.

LIVING WITH DINOSAURS

Besides the American flags flying high in the Indiana religious schools accepting taxpayer money, OMB would have found no problem visiting schools promoting creationism, John Birch Society propaganda and paranoia, and free-market radicalism. Many of the schools receiving vouchers, as Steve Hinnefeld noted at School Matters, use the A Beka and Bob Jones curriculum texts, which vilify liberals, plug free-market inequality, lie about global warming, and see the Bible as the see-all-be-all to an education. Hinnefeld unearthed some disturbing examples, including these from the teacher’s guide to United States History in Christian Perspective: Heritage of Freedom, an A Beka 11th-grade history book:

FDR and the New Deal: “New Deal socialism is but a halfway house to Communism; what Communists seek by violent revolution, socialists seek by legislation, regulation, and taxation … The effects of the New Deal can be seen today in the Social Security system, Medicare, various welfare programs, and the numerous federal regulatory agencies in operation today. Many Americans depend on the government for their daily needs and all suffer from excessive government regulation in one way or another.”

Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s crusade against Communists: “Senator McCarthy’s aggressive manner and his physical appearance – he did not photograph well and often appeared to be scowling – did not play well in front of the television cameras … In addition, the print media and radio roundly castigated McCarthy. The combined effect of this propaganda turned many people against the senator.”

LBJ and the Great Society: “Higher taxes drained money from individuals and business to fund programs that destroyed the work ethic among the poor while eroding the self-sufficiency of the American family.”

These textbooks, as Professor Frances Paterson and Rachel Tabachnick have observed, compare gay people to child molesters and rapists and show hatred of Hinduism, Native American beliefs, and Buddhism, even lashing out at Roman Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants. Tabachnick also details the texts’ prejudice against African-Americans, writing that “Concerning slavery in America, a Bob Jones high school text states, ‘To help them endure the difficulties of slavery, God gave Christian slaves the ability to combine the African heritage of song with the dignity of Christian praise. Through the Negro spiritual, the slaves developed the patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is from the bondage of sin.’”

If you want more on Indiana school voucher schemes, like visits to the Creation Museum, see Zack Kopplin’s report here.

Robert Behning, House Bill 1342’s author, told the Journal Gazette “The goal was to try to send a message that we don’t want to abuse our power but we want to make sure that everything we have moved that we value in terms of reform needs to be moving forward the way it was intended.”

In other words, it was an act of bullying and pure politics, plain and simple, one geared on “moving” Indiana back into another century, with a Good News Club in every public school still left standing. If one believes that OMB would have been capable or willing to regulate Hoosier schools receiving vouchers in any way, shape, or form, one would have to believe that humans walked hand in hand with the dinosaurs and that Jesus hated the poor, which many in the school voucher movement either believe or like to lie about.