Sowing Bloomfields’ Millions
There are a lot of Big Personalities here in the land of Studio Art and artiface. The parsimonious Eli Broad, with his “pushy” impact philanthropy may have captured the most frontispieces, but there are other moguls massaging the political machinery around here.
Bill Bloomfield distinguishes himself as the plutocrat who complains about special interests while personally giving more than $36m to influence state politics (see below), runs for political office while proclaiming “politics is too important to be left to politicians”, and subverts partisan party politics through private coronationwhile criticizing the influence of partisans.
You can read Bloomfield’s autobiography here. More revealing is the folks he first started “fauxlanthropizing” with in 2005. He opened a Political Action Committee (PAC) aka Independent Expenditure Committee (IEC) with contributions from some of America’s most notorious heterological “Education Reformers”: Netflix’ ed tech entrepreneur Hastings, Wal-Mart’s union-busting Walton, EdReform investor Buzz Wooley, Charter School Growth Fund and ed tech venture capitalist Doerr among others (Table 1).
They used that money to unsuccessfully advance the Republican initiative to concentrate gerrymandering power into the hands of just three unelected judges. Nearly $8m was spent in collecting signatures alone on this and three other initiatives, all part of Schwarzenegger’s political “reform plans”. The petition CONTINUE READING: Sowing Bloomfields’ Millions – redqueeninla