Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids

Teachers, here's a pop quiz. How will you receive information trying to convince you to drop ties with the teachers union? (a) Email. (b) Snail mail. (c) Phone call. (d) Knock on your door. The correct answer is (e) Any or all of the above.

The Public School Wrecking Crew scored a huge win when the Supreme Court decided public-employee unions cannot make nonmembers contribute to collective bargaining in its recent Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees decision. The ink was barely dry on the written arguments when right wing money began pouring into campaigns to persuade teachers to walk away from their unions.

Right-leaning think tanks and advocacy organizations have placed anti-union ads on Google and social media and sent targeted emails to teachers across the country. Some plan to go door to door to reach educators during the summer.

One group is trying to uses states' open records laws to get the email addresses of union members to make targeting even easier.

Two groups spearheading the campaign are The Mackinac Center and The Freedom Foundation. Both have strong libertarian, "free market" leanings. That puts them in the same ideological camp, and funding stream, as UA's "Freedom Center," which created the high school course, Philosophy 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship, currently on hold in TUSD, though it's still being taught in other local school districts as well as charter and private schools. (To give you the complete buzz word, dog whistle experience, the center's full name is the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. It is housed in the recently created Department of Political Economy & Moral Science.)

Let's look at the two groups funding the anti-union push.

First, the Mackinac Center. Based in Michigan, it's one of the largest state-level "think tanks" in the country. It receives direct and indirect funding from the Koch brothers, making it a sucker on the Kochtopus, the gigantic, many-tentacled denizen of the Dark Money deep. It has also received Continue reading: Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch