Michigan's John Engler: The Judas who led the Public Away from Public Education and Civility

John Engler’s personal crusade to eliminate public schools has at its heart the weapon of “Faux Public School Academies” better known as “public school charters.” Charter Schools are direct descents of Neo-Jim Crow Segregation academies .  These are schools siphoned off taxpayer dollars for partisan and ideological purposes.

Charters are mainly privately-run , proprietary operations funded with tax dollars taken from traditional public schools funding sources - one clear major steppingstone in the take-down of traditional public education as we have known it.   The yellow pages of the Deep South are crammed with private and religious academies run to provide schooling for white parents’ children - with every intent to support and expand paid segregation via public tax dollars.

What a long awaited dream is being achieved via for-profit “charters!”  Using chartering and vouchers to fund these separatist operations (with public tax dollar creates a separate educational and social apartheid.  Using local and state tax dollars to re-segregate the south (and the entire nation) is a wholly unworthy accomplishment (Much MORE on Engler and Charter Schools below).

Decades Long War on Unions: Protesters hold "Stop Engler at Northwest
(Airlines)" signs and pass out John Engler Flyers in May of 2006

First Some History: Nasty was the virus infused into Michigan Politics by John Engler
No amount of sophistry or interpretation of the present "sorry state" of Michigan politics and/or its immediate future can ever factor out the corrupting cynicism and bone-ugly operations of John Engler.

Engler's revolutionary angst and bitter many years of partisanship has produced a maelstrom of civic negativity in his aftermath. Many "Englerites" (and there are plenty surrounding Rick Snyder) conditioned and trained in the "Englerisque" ways have continued and matured in "bad habits" with regard to how state government is run and how the legislature behaves-late night sessions, straight party voting, and verbal bullying. Engler's part in term limits has come to be a disaster undermining good government. His appointees and friends are still scattered around the workings of this state, unrepentant if not aggressive.

One of Engler's most visible undermining achievements was his part in creating the Mackinac Center for Public Policy - a perpetual negativist voice that has near unlimited access to both the Detroit News but many of the other newspapers and media outlets in the state. Mackinac Center's voice is an echo and a replay/update of that of Engler.

Engler planted this very bitter seeds of divisiveness in this state and also in the nation. It was Engler who, in full support of Newt Gingrich, encouraged the complete shut down of the federal government to embarrass Bill Clinton and the Democrats.

It was "Big John" who royally rewarded Engler cronies with highly placed state jobs and salaries which actually exceeded his income as governor. It was Engler who participated in and surfed off the effects of the 1983 recall efforts in the state.

The cruel and unthinking explosion of 89,000 singles from the welfare rolls and general assistance with one quarter being mentally ill and another quarter "unemployable" under heavy protests from the religious community. It was Engler who attacked the state's mental health programs in search of cost savings. Parents with children suffering with mental disorders had to take their children out of state for treatment because of Engler's revolt and ideology.

The stacking of the Michigan State Supreme Court with highly loyal and politically activist judges, one of whom telegraphed his opinion on a famous case, losing his probity for even-handedness. The amount of money raised and spent to elect the Engler Three to the state supreme court was patiently obscene.

The huge expansion of the Michigan prison system under Engler, as a state industry, has resulted in many of our current corrections imbalances and difficulties. The decline of the state started its momentous downhill, run-away pace under Engler. Jobs were being lost from 1990 on. Engler's replacement jobs, if you recall, were at McDonalds, WalMart, and Menards, hardly the living wage jobs required to live nominally in this great state.

Engler's sops to business were ineffective in building up the US manufacturing base and he was always ready to say more tax cuts would improve what in fact got worse-by projecting blame on some other entity or group.

The propensity of Engler to favor certain corporations and lower their taxes created structural deficits, many of which compounded the huge debt he left - to be covered by his successor, Jennifer Granholm. This was all at a time when the nation had a period of huge deficit reduction and surplus, and a booming economy.

Engler and George W. Bush deliberately and systematically ignored the need to bring General Motors to account for its ineptitude and disregard for sound business practices. Bush's right hand man, Andrew Card, knew the inner workings of the auto industry and was ineffective in making the difference which was required.

No one wants to remember G. W. Bush. Among Republicans is name is trash. Bush's will carry into history the burden of his ineptitude and an uber-cowboy attitude which took this nation and the world to the brink of economic disaster and disrepute. Engler's sticky fingers are all over the tarnished silver platter he used to deliver goodies to his insiders and cronies.

When it came to Engler's legacy, following his governorship, he was deemed unacceptable for a position in the Bush administration. Then as a highly visible and as the overpaid head of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Engler compounded the mistakes John made in Michigan, inflicting them on the entire country.

Engler's part in the demise of Northwest Airlines and his perpetual support of outsourcing and manufacturing in Communist China over and against the pleas from such groups as the tool and die manufacturers in Southeast Michigan, who cry out for regress of such grievances. As one loyal and supportive Engler contemporary has stated, there are those who would like to have the "fat boy" back.

Engler's a mindsticker. Ask the state's teachers about Engler. He's well-remembered and still greatly-disliked. The entire state breathed a sigh of relief when Big John left the state, but he still makes his appearances like his latest visit to CMU.

John Engler as Corporate Thug: Union Bashing in Blood-sport Englerite Politics
(Original Cartoon in the MetroTimes Series on John Engler by Curt Guyette 1999-2002)

Engler dropped his proud proclamation of his Engler Revolution when it became obvious that the public was fed up with that term.  But his undercutting the stability and necessary functions of state and local government by revolutionary means continued to the end of his tenure.  Keep in mind a revolutionary TAKES FORCEFULLY FROM SOME to gift those takings to others he favors, there’s nothing civic-minded or healthy about that.

Engler’s role as a fire-breathing pugilist politician became well-known.  Porcine and in-your-face,  (Engler is literally the model of "Godfather Politics" adopted by Chris Christie of New Jersey)  Engler was side by side with (and devising) Newt Gingrich’s infamous and dangerous total shutdown of the federal government in the 1990’s.

At one point in Engler’s escalation of personal braggadocio, the then governor donned a leather Hell’s Angel-style black leather biker jacket and strutted about; proud of his new and expanding tough bully image.  Engler believed he had achieved his goal as the man who had made Michigan governance the throny nest of those whose mantra was “Death to Public Service.” To this day, John M. Engler is a man with a malevolent, indelible image and remains the perfect archetype for vulture politics.

Back to Charter Schools...

John Engler - Master of Predatory Politics - The Judas Who Led the Public Away From Support for Local Democracy in Education

Central Michigan University’s Center for Charter Schools was recently renamed to honor Engler, by some of the folks he appointed at CMU. At the renaming ceremony in Mt. Pleasant John Engler had this to tout:

"We can announce today charter schools are here to stay" ….“Competition and choice are here to stay."

The Detroit News account of this event noted on May 22, 2012:

“Monday's dedication festivities at CMU reflected on the legal, political and social struggles Engler and charter school proponents have endured while highlighting new laws allowing unlimited charter schools in Michigan after 2015 and an expansion of cyber charter schools.” 

And so the Engler Revolution slogs on!

Engler and Charters
Engler’s ensconcing of Charters at CMU was but one part of his personal “revolutionary” master plan. Engler announced at the Harvard University School of Education, May 3, 1995 (Box 123, Engler Records, Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI) and made himself crystal clear as to where his passion was and where his efforts were leading.   In ten years Engler hoped to render the education unions inoperable.  Destroying the professional associations for educators would then give him entre to an entire plethora of destructive legislation and ideological opportunities.  John M. Engler never reached that goal as governor, but his successors (with the ardent help of many Rad Right think tanks and civically subversive groups like the secretive Mackinac Center for Public Policy and Rick Snyder) never relented.

Currently under a CEO/Boss Rick Snyder (who sees himself the “executive hire” in sole command of Michigan) and with the help of American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) (A.L.E.C. in which Engler is an important, long time operator  and committed proponent /supporter) and the Tea Party Republicans or TeaPartisans (funded by such anti-public education mega bucks as Walmart, Amway / Dick & Betsy DeVos, and the Koch Brothers) the push is on to complete the felonious work of Engler. 

See Also the exhaustive article: "Public Money Finds Back Door to Private schools" in the New York Times on May 22, 2012.

Michigan Was Not the Earliest Leader of the Charter Movement, That Distinction Goes to Minnesota

It was not Engler and Michigan who were the leaders in the origins of the charter movement.  Historically “chartering” was a teacher envisioned concept for real improvement in education and schools utilizing less administration deadweight and over-regulation,  hoping that by ramping up autonomy and innovation they could do great things for kids.   It became apparent to the determined critics of public education that “charters” could be easily co-opted, and so they were.   “Chartering” as a competitive wedge, an anti-neighborhood public school device (incentivized by privatizing and appeal to long sought sectarian goals) could be used to undermine the entire taxpayer funded system.

Undermining public education had taken root in the radicalism of the Cult of Ronald Reagan and was fully expressed in Reagan’s anti-public union action: the PATCO Action - where the aircraft controllers of the nation were summarily fired.

CMU is a poor excuse for a Teacher Training Institution:  Why was it made Engler’s center for Charters?

Such schools as CMU fall into a category where “the schools that train our teachers are known to be "under performing." To illustrate, "fewer than 70 percent of graduates [of our schools of education] meet state licensing requirements.... Sandra Feldman, the [former] president of the American Federation of Teachers...acknowledges that the quality of teachers isn't high enough."

Central Michigan University has had since 1996 an opportunity to retool, become a premier and singularly outstanding teacher prep institution.   Instead, it chose to  take the easy path, accept the 3% management fee offered for overseeing the Englercentric faux public charters (CMU now loosely supervises over 50 charters with 30,000 students receiving the foundation grant at about $7,000 each).  Meanwhile the university remains a sub-standard venue for teacher prep.

For a powerful account of Engler's lachluster history and more on CMU's Charter School initiatives read Michael Hanley, Democratic Michigan State House Leader in 2000, in "The Political Brutality of John Engler Over the Issue of Charter Schools":

"Charter schools may be sponsored by a variety of governmental institutions. Unlike traditional public schools, their boards are not elected by the public (or even the parents of their students). Unlike private schools, they are financed by public tax dollars. Proponents claim that charter schools will make traditional public schools better by creating competition in the educational marketplace. Opponents argue that some Michigan charter schools have been poorly managed and have not delivered results in test scores. These claims are supported by several critical reports authored by Michigan universities and think tanks [Mackinac Center and others].

State law allows any local school district, intermediate school district, and most community colleges to sponsor an unlimited number of charter schools. However, state universities are limited to 150 overall. In his 1999 State-of-the-State message, Governor Engler called on the legislature to eliminate this cap on university charters. A united House Democratic Caucus and about nine House Republicans have resisted this initiative. This bipartisan coalition continues to believe that additional accountability measures, such as a certification requirement for teachers and expanded oversight of how public tax dollars are spent by the schools, should be in place before the university charter cap is raised. Of course, some legislators believe that charter schools are a generally bad idea, and do not support expansion under any circumstances.

It deserves to be noted that one of the reasons the Governor insists on removing the cap is that Central Michigan University - the state's most aggressive charter authorizing institution - has reached its limit for granting charters.

And who appoints the Board of CMU? John Engler."
{emphasis added)

Man Who Did Nothing Else Butt: A life-long Government Employee
and Politician (with 3 government pensions), John Engler Hates Government

John Mathias Engler is a Master at Utilizing Government to Undermine Government

Engler’s gamesmanship with various aspects of tricks and schemes devised to distort or control branches of Michigan government knew no bounds.   He shifted aspects of the Michigan State Board of Education to the State Treasury Department. He purposely under-funded the Michigan Public School Employee Retirement System (MPSER) retirement fund. According Michigan State Senator Glenn Anderson:

“Republicans want to blame our teachers and our school workers for the issues with the current retirement system, but the real problems started 15 years ago when Gov. John Engler made severe changes to how the system was operated. MPSERS had previously been prefunded, but Gov. Engler decided to take the lid off the cookie jar and start stealing money from the fund to fill other budget holes. Now, former, current and future school employees are being unfairly punished for the mistakes and financial mismanagement of their benefits by the state.”

Engler devised many other means to obfusticate and to purposefully undermine programs and organization(s) he wanted to REVOLUTIONIZE.

Source: "GOP's attacks on retirees must stop" by Glenn Anderson on DailyKos (May 2012)

To quote John Engler from his State of the State in 1997:

"Being for public education means making sure that every school, every classroom, every teacher, every student is safe."

"BEING FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION MEANS KEEPING EDUCATION OUR TOP PRIORITY!"

"One key to quality education is quality teachers. Proud, passionate -- these professional men and women are making a difference in the lives of students every day. That's why I was outraged to read in the Detroit News that in one high school this year nine teachers have been assaulted."

"When teachers are attacked in their own classrooms, academic performance is also a casualty. I may be old fashioned, but it seems to me, if a student lays a hand on a teacher, that student is gone."

Just words to fill in the time looking back, fake whiskey talk used to gin up support for his major overhaul of not just education financing, but the whole public perception of Public Education.  Perhaps no single individual has done more, going out of their way to make the lives of Public School teachers in Michigan lives more miserable and more publicly attack teaching as a profession, that Johnny Mathias Engler.

NAM and Damn
John M. Engler coming off term limits, and failing at his short-lived, only private sector job at EDS, was hired to run the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) a very right of center, right-wing infested, anti-union amalgamation of interests working against American workers and as an aggressive partner with Communist China.  From its earliest days NAM has been a perfect match for Engler.

Even back in 1903 the then radical NAM President “David MacLean Parry  delivered a speech at its annual convention which argued that unions' goals would result in ‘despotism, tyranny, and slavery.’ Parry advocated the establishment of a great national anti-union federation under the control of the NAM, and NAM responded by initiating such an effort.”   Eight years later, “In an address at its 1911 convention, NAM president John Kirby, Jr. proclaimed, ‘The American Federation of Labor (AFL) is engaged in an open warfare against Jesus Christ and his cause.'”

Engler’s All About Power & Money
John M. Engler is reputed to have received a million dollars a year to pontificate and expound at his NAM post.  Not bad for a “kid from a family farm near Beal City,” a legislative loner who honed his command of government minutiae and insider operations to the point he was once hailed as the “Butcher from Beal City” for his savage and relentless attacks on the mentally ill, the homeless and many other aspects of Michigan’s infrastructure and operations using government-to-destroy government.

Go ahead rebrand Central Michigan’s Center for Charter Schools with the name “Engler,” but know full-well that such a label on the public university’s infrastructure has degraded, not enhanced, the image and mission of that state institution.  The Engler Center for Charter Schools would rather have been a perfect fit for Hillsdale College – well-fit to that rogue institution’s overall mission and purpose.

On the Reader:

• "The Real Engler Revolution" and Engler series by Curt Guyette (MetroTimes 1999-2002) (Note: On-line archive no longer availible - Use Lexis-Nexis to access).
• Read about Engler's Michigan "Virtual High School" history (page 24-25) and history of "Virtual Education" used to create defacto vounders system. 
• Engler as "Public Official of the Year" in right-wing, ALEC funded "Governing" magazine in "Remaking a State through Ideology and Determination" (2001), creating $1.3 Billion "Rainy Day Fund" and... 
• Then read how Engler depleted that fund and hacked State Revenues as he left office in 2002 in "Rick Snyder’s Michigan Data: Reversing Engler Mistakes by Reviving Them (Slash, Burn, Repeat…)" (February 2012).
• More history on the political fights between Dems and John Engler on Public School funding and Engler's appointment of the CMU Charter School Institute board in "The Political Brutality of John Engler Over the Issue of Charter Schools" by then Dem House Leader Michael Hanley in 1999.

Related Slates:
The Ugly History of Engler’s Attempt at What He Praised as “School Reform” During the Engler Revolution in Michigan (April 2011) - Nerd Snyder Goes Engler’s Mississippiafication of Michigan One Better: Rick’s Kicked Michigan’s Future Right Into the Crapper (April 2011) - Before Rick Snyder Removes the Michigan Public School Code, Step Back to the Engler Revolution: What  Will NO CODE Mean? (April 2011) - John Engler presided over the beginnings of the Mississippiafication of Michigan (March 2011) - The Governor (Granholm) Must Lean on the MEA to Accomplish the GOP Senate's Radical Goals (December 2009)

More on Michigan Public Education on the Gazette.

Original.

When Radical Tax Hatred & Vengeance Go Too Far: May 18, 1927 – Sweet Innocents & Loving Teachers Gone Forever - Michigan’s Bath School Massacre

85 years ago today, a maniacal tax-hater bent on vengeance nearly wiped out his entire Michigan community killing scores of children, teachers, and others, including the Bath School's superintendent. Only a part of his explosives ignited. This event remains the single most tragic loss of children's lives due to a school massacre in American history.

This sober and unforgettable heinous event should serve as a strong and present warning: There is a limit to what our society can allow when it comes to direct action and the purposeful stoking up of anger and resentment against taxes and public institutions.

Bath School Disaster Makes National Headlines (Baltimore News May 19, 1927)

Yes, Bath Consolidated School was a 'government school.' Bath School was a public school; operated and run by the local governing school board and supported by the means of democratic voting-majority rule. Bath Consolidated 1927 was a proud community school.

One man, having been elected to the Bath school board, designed to work against it; plotted and executed a diabolical, murderous plan to punish his own community for offending his personal ideology and hatred of taxes levied for progressive educational reform-consolidation of the area's rural one room schools into a new and modern building.

Across the Country People Sense the Ongoing Warning Revealed in the Bath School Disaster

"I realized that today (May 18, 2011) is the anniversary of a terrorist act in Michigan 84 years ago. Ironic and fitting that it happened in Michigan, the home state of Betsy DeVos (sister of Erik Prince and wife of Amway heir Dick DeVos), the rabid crusader for dismantling public education."

This was the troubling revelation and remonstration of U.S. Rep. Emma Berry, from Texas, on this date a year ago.

Today, 85 years after this horrific event, the single greatest domestic terror attack on innocent children in the history of America, we are rightfully reminded that there are radical forces still seeking to destroy, bring down our proud historic institution, the public school.

It may not be one stupendous blast of dynamite under the school house, it is a sustained and sinister series of local and state battles across the country pitched and fought by people with rage and anger at the public school and the teachers who mentor our children.

-----

The rise of the national TeaPartiasns (Republican Tea Party members) across America has given "legs" to the multi-millions of the Walton Family and the Amway Clan which have lit the fuse of mistrust and angst in the minds of the malleable public. Hating taxes, resenting the conditions of urban schools (abandoned by whites and cut off by business and corporations) as well as religious bias against the curriculum that includes a wide spectrum of free expression and critical thinking (dubbed by Fundamentalists and Christian Dominionists as a new religion: 'Secular Humanism') these mega-wealthy radicals (who have done so much to destroy the heart and soul of American communities with their plunder of dreams and usurpation of local merchants places on Main Street), now dane to take away that which is left, the neighborhood school.

-----

The vouchers and the charter school movements were born out of rabid reaction to the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960's and the forced federal integration of public schools. The segregation academy was the response to these revolutionary attacks on the "separate and equal" racial doctrines and the charade of Jim Crow Laws devised to enforce racial injustices, a quasi-pogrom that had ruled in America for far too long. In Michigan during the early 1920's there was a rapid rise in the activity and membership of the KKK. Churches and ministers, leading business men and citizens joined up as was discovered in Newaygo's cache of KKK member records and hidden memorabilia. This movement included religious individuals, mainly Protestant Fundamentalists, who like their counter parts in the Southern Baptist Convention, were rank racial and religious bigots with hatred for the "others" they despised in their society.

-----

The 1920's may have been "roaring" for bankers, speculators, and others on Wall Street and in large urban areas, but life on the farms and in the countryside at large was steadily declining, revealing the tell-tale signs of a economic and social rift. The gap between the wealth and income of the ordinary folk, many of them still on small family farms, was corrosively and aggressively taking hold and would result in, what we know now to be a widespread, deep national depression which lingered into the Second World War.

There are chilling parallels with the 1920's and today. The KKK is passé and in its place is the conspiracy of corporate backroom operators, the Koch Bros. et al, and The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose collaboration with FOX Cable News has ginned up a pseudo indigenous/astroturf amalgamation of hate and angst known loosely as the Tea Party movement. Their mantra: No new taxes, no collaboration, no helpful compromise, no bi-partisanship, no hand of fellowship: It's the enforcement wing of the Party of 'NO'.

This rise of a multiplicity of groups-skillfully manipulated and utilized to terrorize the Republican office holders of the nation-via the Karl Rovian tactic of TeaPartisan 'Primarying' of Moderates and Independents in the GOP-has given rise to a 'mob' of malcontents and anti-tax activists who feed on fear, anger, and personal greed. Their targets, much like that of the KKK, are immigrants, minorities, and other elements they envision as gnawing away at their own wealth, assets, and future security.

The Kehoe Malignancy
Andrew P. Kehoe, who was the mad bomber of Bath School May 18, 1927, would fit right in (during the lead up to his murderous act) with the TeaPartisan sentiment and share their anger and desire to radically alter the course of public education. He crossed the indelible line. Kehoe went far to the darkside. There is no way to excuse or diminish his aberrant act of blind rage and unhinged revenge against his own community-its children and teachers, none. There is here on this sad anniversary, however, sufficient and strong warning that the desire to perseverate and concentrate angst on government coercion and police powers to tax its citizens still inflames minds-some of which are unreasonable and unstable.

Squaring Off Against Political Vengeance & Reprisal That Goes Too Far
The current frame of mind in the Republican dominated Michigan Legislature includes a bull-headed determination to take down public schools and replace them with a zoological jungle of loosely-run charter schools, vouchers for religious/sectarian operations, on-line teaching schemes (virtual schools) and full-frontal attacks on the mentors who teach our children in the neighborhood school owned by everyone.

A miasma of delusion and reprisal is currently sweeping the Nation, and Michigan, replete with program cutting and give-aways, for-profit enterprises designed to undercut and replace the public schools. This is coup can only be classed as an updated campaign by some to resurrect the destruction and divisiveness of the KKK, benefit from the power of reprisal and greed, and offer private operators entree into billions of taxpayer dollars specifically set aside for publicly operated education and community acculturation.

Bath School Memorial Plaque Listing Victims (Bath, MI)

Never Again
It was out of such motives that anger and ideology drove Andrew P. Kehoe May 18, 1927 into an act arising out of public school hating, tax-resenting, a single man's act which is unparalleled for its murderous zeal to kill children. Kehoe is a tragic and powerful reminder of unilateral direct action and a ghastly and deviant design laid to takedown a community-centered on obliterating its children.

Communities are rapidly losing their control and oversight of their neighborhood schools. Just as WalMart, with its cheap Chinese goods and poverty wages, has brought down town after town, now the Waltons, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, and others led by Amway and Betsy Prince DeVos (American Federation for Children or AFC) are determined to rifle the assets and plunder the funding sources of your public school for personal profit and their extreme ideological purposes.

If these Anti-Public School forces succeed, we will not have learned the harsh lesson of the Bath School Disaster: The public school will always remain the enduring heart and soul of any community. Public schooling is essential to sustaining American democracy.

A Powerful Afterthought:

Pres. Bill Clinton's Remonstration and Plea Against Domestic Terror, Dark Forces That Give Rise to Evil

"To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.

Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness. Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.

Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it.

In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, 'Let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.'"

Source: Speech Transcript of President Clinton in Oklahoma City, OK on April 23, 1995.

On the Reader:
Documentary "Bath School Disaster" by Lansing Community College (March 2012).

Contemporary, firsthand account and history of the Bath School District events by local resident M. J. Ellsworth (1927 5th Edition 1991), description of events on Wiki and a Rootsweb extensive list of historical sources and articles.

More recent coverage in "Survivors Recall 1927 Michigan School Massacre" a NPR story on April 17, 2009 and "Local residents recently discuss the future of the Bath School Memorial Park" and historical site - Story and video (May 14, 2012)

Related Slates:
More on Public Education and Michigan Public Schools on the Gazette.

Original.

Holy Tomatoes! Detroit News' Nolan Finley Plays Catchup

In response to Nolan Finley and those on the right attempting to spin the story that it's supposedly President Obama and Dems not the GOP that has been using 'social issues' to gin up votes.

Sez Brother Finley in "Obama milks social issues" (Obama gave Romney an implied snuggy) on May 11, 2012:

"Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney again took the bait, allowing himself to be drawn into this discussion. So again the campaigns are debating divisive social issues instead of fiscal policy. That plays to Obama's strategy of painting Romney as an extremist and avoiding having to answer for the economy."

Catch up to reality, Nolan. This is exactly what Republican Svengalis have been so artfully doing for decades; beginning under the nefarious tutelage of Newt "the genius" Gingrich or so he was labeled by friendlies until Newt crossed that thin red line and was tossed.

Rich Men Ride while the Rest of Us Run: Corporatocracy
and Income Inequality is THE current 'social issue'.

No one, no party, no group, no clique, no organized political faction does a better job milking the essence of divisive issue politics than the Republican Party; so weakened that the GOP can be taken over by the wealthy elites like the the Koch Brothers, the Club for Growth, various Christian Dominionists, religious and racial bigots, and radical militia elements (gun nuts) until the once sensible and civic-minded Grand Old Party is no more. Poof! Think Ike.

Let Ted Nugent go on wallowing in hate and incitement to mayhem; as evil as he is, he 's only a "scare'jim'crow" archetype of a certain redneck gnarl of lawless tyranny that smirks across the nation. Nugent's part of a cohort of wild and reckless men, dark alley troublemakers, civic hoodlums. And don't they love the trouble they incite... the attention they get!

For decades Newt Gingrich's distraction & negativatization of language made useful for undermining civil discourse has prevailed in the dark hearts of the "Hard Right," as former President Gerald R. Ford labeled them during the Pat & Bay Buchanan dominated 1992 GOP National Convention. It was at Houston where Pat Buchanan declared religious and cultural war on the nation. As a direct result George H. W. Bush, the standing president, high right off the First Gulf War 100 hour victory, when down to stunning defeat to William Jefferson Clinton.

From "Ford tells Gingrich He'd Better Tone It Down" by AP reporter Lawrence L. Knutson:

Ford believed Gingrich should leave "partisan attacks" to others. "One thing that speakers have to understand is that the speaker is speaker for the House. You have to keep that high-level attitude and let the partisan attacks come from your majority leader.... The Speaker (Gingrich) is better advised to stand back." Ford went on to say that looking at the wider future, he believes that if the "extreme-right" partisans within the GOP control the party's policies and dictate who is the candidate... "the party will lose at the polls."

Note: This account also appeared in the Grand Rapids Press, June 2, 1998 and is still spot-on for the 2012 election cycle.

Social Issues Aside: Our National Troubles & the Great Bush Recession Have Created Vast New Opportunities for Unscrupulous Business Opportunists & Scammers

The aggressive CORPORATOCRACY (see the expanded definition from Wiki below) had better get out their act together and begin to restore the rule of law in financial and banking affairs. So far they haven't. The plague created by Citizens United will make this a very reprehensible election season; bar none.

Corporatists were quick to sense an opening, an "opportunity" and they seized it. They have profited immensely from the great disturbance in the economy brought on by the buffoonery of George W. Bush, the Lesser. (The man no Republican can bring themselves to mention in favorable light.) The Bush TARP and the bailouts have put stunning amounts of cash in the coffers of bankseters and Wall Street schemers and shysters'; amounts so large and so excessive as to be incomprehensible in light of in historic perspective. Are we angry? You bet we are!

War profiteering has egregiously enlarged the holdings/coffers of Dick Cheney and Neo-Con Cronies.

Things are still in need of repair and restitution.

Corporatocracy for Idiots

"A corporatocracy is a situation in which corporate bodies interact with sovereign power in an unhealthy alignment between business and political power. In a corporatocracy an elite upper-class, maintains ties between business and government, sometimes by lobbying efforts or funding political advertising campaigns, or providing bailouts when corporations are seen as too big to fail, for the purpose of controlling government and dictating policy to serve its financial interests.

"A corporatocracy is viewed as anti-democratic or opposed to democracy or used to describe situations in which democracy has been manipulated negatively, sometimes resulting in a passive citizenry and subservient media.

"A corporatocracy represents what some see as economic exploitation, and the concept has been used to explain bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs, as well as generalized complaints such as the plundering of national treasuries, people, and natural resources. The concept has also been used by critics of globalization, sometimes in conjunction with criticism of the World Bank or unfair lending practices, as well as criticism of free trade agreements which, according to these claims, move high-paying jobs overseas.

"The term corporatocracy is a negative term, likened pejoratively to cancer, fascism, and Orwellianism, perhaps because, according to this view, business-government ties are seen as secretive, lacking transparency and accountability. The elite engaging in corporatocracy is sometimes termed the 1 percent."

Source: Corporatocracy on Wiki (Be sure to click on all the footnotes to this piece. Go from ignorant to informed.)

So Nolan, fearless thought leader, it's time you play catch-up. Pocket your rotten tomatoes, stop our carping, and do something substantive, pro-active about saving Michigan and America. You can begin by restraining yourself from "milking social issues" and move toward a sound economy and a restructuring of taxes so as to save Michissippi's middle class. Put aside your poison pen, and take up your Habitat for Humanity hammer, rise early, move out to save the day for a family in need. It would be a start.

Dump the tomatoes. Catch-up Finley, catch-up!

On the Reader:
List of Responses to Nolan Finley on the Gazette (Topic DATE):

• High up in Jim Crow’s Nest: Constant Cawing Incites Civic Upheaval by the Detroit News - Michigan View (General Idiocy and use of Racial Undertones February 2012)
• Nolan Finley: Maniacal Warmonger? (General Idiocy and Violence September 2011)
• Dead End/Bad Trade Off: Profitazation or Abandonment of Detroit’s Public School Children (Education June 2011)
• No National Honor Given Finley: Taking Down Detroit’s Public Schools is a Civic Crime (Education May 2011)
• Snyder, the Socialist, Takes on Local Democracy Calling it a "Status Quo" That Needs to Be Radically Re-invented.(Ideology April 2004)
• Honest Abel “AWOL” in Michigan just as in Wisconsin (Ideology March 2011)
• A one nostril false grunt from Nolan: It’s not my pigs that stink (Ideology June 2011)
• The Detroit News is "Tapped Out" (Taxes and Ideology February 2011)
• Nolan Finley Rocks Local Detroit High School With His Decision to Teach English to Sophomores (Education December 2009)
• Raw Revenge Raises Its Ugly Head (Education December 2009)
• An Additional Dollar a Day... (State Budget and Ideology November 2009)
• The only place a teacher gets a fair shake in the Detroit News is on its obituary page (Education June 2009) 
• Finley's Right Wing anti-teacher Crusade: A man with a forked tongue and a flaying pen (Education October 2009)

Related Slates:
More on Corporatocracy and the Republican Party on the Gazette.


Original.

Michigan GOP's Priceless Princess Betsy DeVos Chums Around With Communists

In response to all the communist-baiting hype on the right, a little Michigan history and commentary.

Betsy DeVos has several former-Commie associates and friends, with whom she chums with in her nationwide crusades to radically change and overpower democratic institutions and politics in America.

Robert Laurie, Michigan View contributor wrote wrote a blistering defense of “aging guitar player”  Ted Nugent by bringing in Bill Ayers and connecting Ayers, whom Laurie labels a “Communist", with President Obama.  It is the old guilt-by-association thing. 

In "The Motor City Madman meets Bill Ayers' pal" on the Michigan View April 18, 2012 here is Laurie:

“Ayers was one of Barack Obama's earliest supporters... Far from being mere acquaintances, their relationship lasted years."

Back in Vogue: More with the American Radical-Right than on the Volga
Poster of Vladimir Lenin making a speech with Marxist caption (1920)

Laurie’s article brought to mind another well-known political person, Michigan’s own Elizabeth (Betsy) Prince DeVos, who has more than one relationship or political connection to former Communists.

If  the President is to be “bound-to” and black-brushed by references to Bill Ayers,  let’s go the distance and examine those ex-Communists in Betsy DeVos’circle of friends and influence with the same degree of  intensity and focus Laurie applied to Ayers:

As Chair of the Michigan GOP, Betsy invited David Horowitz to the Michigan Republican Party Mackinac Island Leadership Conference. (Horowitz was raised by parents who were both members of the Communist Party USA. Between 1956 and 1975, Horowitz, himself is a former communist radical, a self-described “Marxist Revolutionary,” as his autobiography "Radical Son" puts it).

On the Island Horowitz spoke at the traditional Saturday luncheon event where hundreds of leaders heard him accuse all the major journalism schools of America as being “Communist.”  Jointly with Horowitz was Lynn Cheney, together they were outlining their crusade to root out college professors who held ideological or political views of the kind Horowitz did not favor.  Their organization: The Freedom Center/Students for Academic Freedom is designed to hunt “ideological enemies” on college campuses and mount purges.

Betsy and her mother (Elsa Prince) and brother (Erik Prince) are heavily invested in,and advised by Father Bob.  Robert Sirico, founder of the Grand Rapids based Acton Institute, was a Communist.  They have helped to make him a rising “star” on the Rad Right.  Father Bob  is reported to have been one of the first ministers in the country to perform a gay marriage ceremony, and he the “house” vicar to the Prince Family.  Father Bob is council and guide to infamous “kill for hire” Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy (Father Bob married to Erik and his second wife).  Father Bob is a very useful tool in the Prince/DeVos/Amway universe-as a radical supporter and a (beck -&-call) apologist for extreme capitalism-often defending Amway-an entire corporation built on plundering the dreams (and assets) of millions of eager MLM recruits-who rapidly become drop-outs of the scheme. 

Betsy never once spoke out against former commie Marvin Olasky. Olasky has been an honored guest at her mother’s Acton Institute’s Acton Forum (Grand Rapids, MI).  Marvin, self-confessed former Communist, went on to be the architect of George W. Bush’s “appeasement/payback” federal funding scheme for his religious backers/base  called Faith-based Funding. Olasky is a harsh critic of welfare which Olasky calls "The Tragedy of American Compassion."

The conservative Weekly Standard’s Bill  Kristol has never been called out by Betsy for being the son of a self-described former communist (Irving Kristol), she has never questioned Neo-Conservatives and other radical right-wingers who follow in the rut laid out by Bill Buckley.  It was Buckley who worked with Willi Schlamm, ex-communist editor of The Freeman , in the raising up of his “conservative” movement and the establishing of the National Weekly, which became the National Review of today. 

Betsy husband’s family, the Amway (Alticor) Clan, are doing billions in business with the Peoples Republic of China or Communist China. the Reds own/control a substantial part of their Guangzhou plant.   “The company stepped into the Chinese market in 1995.  In 2008, Amway China has already become Amway's largest market” (Shanghai Daily, 2009).

All business in each Chinese Province is directly supervised by a Red Army General.  Amway’s profits are stoking up the power and wealth of the Communist Reds in China.  Look who’s profit-sharing with
the enemy!

How does this all link in with the ebb and flow of Darkside Ideology?

From Bill Moyers and Michael Winship in "Joe McCarthy’s Ghost Slithers Again" on April 27, 2012:

“Right-wing paranoia knows no bounds, as propagandists stoke dark fantasies about President Obama that revive memories of “black helicopters” from the 1990s. But Tea Party favorite, Rep. Allen West reaches back even further to the days of Joe McCarthy…”

“We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw Congressman Allen West of Florida on the news. Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are ‘card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists'.”

Statement by Teapublican Allen West:

“I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

Again, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:

“By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Barack Obama ‘a low-level Socialist agitator,’ said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is ‘a threat to the gene pool’ and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to “get the hell out of the United States of America.’ Apparently, he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or the discredited right-wing rocker Ted Nugent.”

“But this time, we shook our heads in disbelief (at Allen West's assertion) ‘78 to 81 Democrats… members of the Communist Party?’ That’s the moment the memory hole opened up and a ghost slithered into the room. The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on its stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics.”

(break)

“Millions of Americans lapped it up, but in the end, Joe McCarthy would be done in by the medium that he had used so effectively to spread his poison: television. In 1954, legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow bravely exposed McCarthy’s tactics on the CBS program, See It Now. Edward R. Murrow:  “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent,” Murrow declared. “We can deny our heritage and history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a Republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”  

Excepted from Moyers & Company show transcript April 26, 2012.

In the end McCarthy was censured  by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 67-22.  Joe faded from the limelight in disgrace.  However, McCarthy is an infamous name, and McCarthyism,  a set of tactics  which live on in infamy. And now Michigan View’s Laurie wants to blacken Obama with his association with Bill Ayers.

Back to Betsy's Buddy
There is no need to blacken Betsy Prince DeVos with her ongoing associations with a smarmy group of self-declared ideologues and operatives who have shifted from Far Left to Far Right (and whose book sales and lecture honorariums  stack up in the process). In their efforts the former Reds have endeared themselves to Betsy, and she to them.  She finds them useful “tools.”   The Red Chinese continue to co-operate with Amway for the time being, and the billions in corporate profits amass,  making a tempting cache of cash with which Betsy and family members can provoke and engender their favorite, private idiocies and ideologies.  It is puzzling why Betsy has such an affinity for former Communists.  What exactly do they have in common?

As Betsy DeVos goes about her merry way tearing down and destroying public institutions and making politics a much more sooty process (American Federation for Children):  Does the radicalism of these commie friends influence her actions or promote her many fights and radical agendas?   It would seem hard to rule out such possibilities.

Way Left of Rad-Right: David Horowitz giving an ex-Leninist anti-Islamist speech
at the UNC where dozens of students walked out on him March 12, 2012.

Let’s Take A Look at David Horowitz: Betsy Prince DeVos’ Ex-Commie Chum Illuminated

So just who is this guy that Betsy had to have keynote up on Mackinac Island to layout new strategies for the Michigan GOP? We get a pretty through description from Justin Raimondo, who is a Ludwig von Mises Institute Adjunct Scholar (remember that Hillsdale/Mackinac Academic Dr. Gary Wolfram is the real von Mises fan among the Michigan rad-right), gives acute insight into Horowitz, the ex-communist and close Betsy DeVos ally.  In "David Horowitz & the Ex-Communist Confessional" in Chronicles, June 1997 this is what Raimondo had to say about David Horowitz, former Communist:

"The literature of recanting radicals has been with us since 1917: from the recollections of Russian Mensheviks, who rued the day they joined with Lenin, to Irving Kristol's "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," in which the neoconservative godfather fondly reminisces about his youthful dalliance with dissident communism. With each successive atrocity and betrayal-Kronstadt, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Khrushchev's admission of Stalin's crimes-library shelves grew heavier with the weight of accumulated mea culpas.

At the height of the Cold War, a new subgenre grew up around the sensational revelations of ex-communists detailed in dozens of books, the most famous being Whittaker Chambers' Witness. This over-praised and overwrought work inspired many imitators, whose works became a staple of the anticommunist arsenal. With their lurid tales of a secret sub-world of subversion, a hidden labyrinth of evil beneath the placid streets of postwar America, THEY THRILLED THEIR READERS WITH A DELICIOUS FEAR.

(break)

With the publication of David Horowitz's book "Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey" (The Free Press, 1997), a memoir detailing the author's involvement with the Black Panthers and the New Left hothouse of Berkeley in the 6O's, we are hearing the last echoes of the ex-radicals' self-abnegation. The twin themes of recantation and retribution dominate these works, from the earliest-Benjamin

Gitlow's, I Confess (1940), This is My Story, by Louis Budenz (1947), Whittaker Chambers' Witness
(1954)) and several other works by lesser-known figures-to their 60's counterparts, Phillp Abbott Luce, author of  The New Left (1966), and Horowitz.

Like disappointed lovers, the authors of these works testify to the cruel seduction they were subjected to: all were innocent idealists led astray by temptation, but redeemed in the end. Budenz, like many of the ex-Stalinists, made a beeline for the Church; others, such as Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, became right-wing Social Democrats and were instrumental in crafting the CIA's penetration of the European labor movement. In time, many - Chambers, Kristol, Luce, Horowitz-would join the conservative movement.

Taking Gitlow and Horowitz-the first, and, likely, the last-as examples, a biographical pattern begins to emerge: both were born into a family of Eoisfieviks, New York Jewish immigrants who instilled their progeny with devotion to the God Who Had Not Yet Failed. Yet the biographical parallels also highlight their vivid contrasts in character, tone, and style.

(break)

Compared to Horowitz, Gitlow the fanatic avenger and consummate opportunist-is a veritable giant. While HOROWITZ WAS ALWAYS A PERIPHERAL FIGURE ON THE LEFT, WITH NO STATUS AS AN ACTIVIST BEYOND THE BERKELEY SCENE, Gitlow was one of the founding leaders of the American Communist Party, whose defection was front-page news all across the world.

(break)

Horowitz, on the other hand, is ambivalent about confronting the mini-Stalin of the Panther New Left milieu, Huey Newton, and he continually worried about the danger to his own safety. Typically, when he discovers that his Black Panther heroes are murderers and thugs, he blames other people: "Anger welled inside me. Why hadn't Noel said anything before? Why hadn't Charles? Or Troy? Why hadn't they warned me? The answer was clear: they did not want to be accused of betraying the Left."

The Panthers had killed their accountant, Betty Van Patter, who had been recommended for the job by Horowitz himself, but he confesses that he "was now ruled by the principle of silence." Although Horowitz knew who had killed Van Patter, and why, it took him years to go public-and he never really does come clean. For nowhere does he directly acknowledge his own complicity in her death, even though it was he who recruited her for the position that was to prove her undoing. He claims that he and other New Left activists were "blind" to the fact that the Panthers were, as Dick Gregory put it, "a bunch of thugs." But this is not very credible: What else is one to think of a group that walks into a session of the California State Assembly armed with rifles and dressed in uniforms? Huey Newton urged his followers to "pick up the gun." What else did Horowitz and friends expect but that, one day, they would pick it up-and use it?

Unlike Gitlow, Chambers, et al., Horowitz was not an activist but a self-styled theoretician, a literary type who held a key post as an editor of RAMPARTS but who deliberately avoided any organizational loyalties except in running the "Learning Center" for the Oakland branch of the Black Panthers. In spite of his best effort to inflate his own importance to the growth of the New Left movement, Horowitz never exercised any appreciable influence over its activities or direction.

When Gitlow was expelled from the Communist Party in the 1930's' along with Jay Lovestone, they took several hundred members with them; when Horowitz, the great New Left guru, announced his support for Ronald Reagan, he took exactly one of his ex-comrades with him: his longtime, friend and literary collaborator Collier.

One striking difference between the ex-commie confessionals of yesterday and Horowitz's tome is stylistic; while Gitlow is concerned with exposing the inner workings of the communist movement, its front groups, strategies, subterfuges, Horowitz is mainly interested in self-revelation.

We learn everything we never needed to know about the messy little ups and downs of his personal life: an affair with a "psychic healer" who "heals" him out of his marriage his relationship with a crack-addicted drifter who left him suddenly after draining him of considerable sums of money and affair with Abbie Rockefeller. Particularly maddening is the fact that the author, in detailing this Bacchanalia, keeps asserting his growing disenchantment with the counter-cultural values an lifestyle of his generation.

(break)

Horowitz... in detailing his own psychosexual peccadilloes at such length-while all the time proclaiming his growing devotion to conservative family values-succeeds only in proving his own hypocrisy. Reflecting the self-absorption so typical of his generation, Radical Son chronicles Horowitz's every mood swing in excruciating detail. To relieve the tedium, the author recalls his brushes with the glitterati: how he hung out with some Kennedy kids as they snorted coke and mingled with the Hollywood crowd, dropping plenty of names along the way.

But the star of this show is the author. IN A PROLOGUE THAT READS LIKE A MARKETING STRATEGY, the tirelessly self-promoting Horowitz declares, "I was like Whittaker Chambers in their generation-a young man, inspired by the high-minded passions of the Left who had broken through to the dark underside of the radical cause. Like Chambers, I had encounters with totalitarian forces that involved betrayal and death. Like him, I had been demonized for my second thoughts. . . Like Chambers, I had become the most hated ex-radical of my generation."

(break)

"HERE IS A NARCISSISM SO INFLATED THAT IT EXPLODES IN A BURST OF PURE ABSURDITY: Picture Chambers, defying the establishment, taking on a man like Hiss, and standing up to the power of the Soviet Empire. Now look at Horowitz: he swims with the tide, not against it, and breathlessly announces, at this late date, that socialism is evil and the Black Panthers were not Boy Scouts. As for comparing the resources and power of the Soviet Union to what is little more than a street gang, Newton was no Stalin, but an ordinary street thug. Horowitz is no Chambers, nor even a Gitlow or a Budenz, but an ordinary disillusioned liberal with nothing of interest to reveal but his own self-obsession.

While Chambers held his audience spellbound with tales of secret papers in the pumpkin patch, and Gitlow mapped the route by which Moscow's gold flowed into communist coffers, all Horowitz has to offer is a couple of friendly dinners with an unnamed Soviet official. These discussions were always held at the best restaurants, and on such occasions Horowitz claims to have argued against Soviet repression...."

(emphasis added)

David Horowitz’s former pro-communist life and current work as a key Hard Right ideologue  is illustrative of any number of Hard Left, former Communists who have found refuge and a paying occupation now in service of the Rad Right.

Their former diehard commitment to the Communist Party has become a strong point in the respect some radical “conservatives” hold for them.

The following excerpt is from "The Apparat: George W. Bush's back-door political machine: It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America" by Jerry M. Landay of Mediatransparency.org, March 18, 2004:

"Rob Stein, an independent Washington researcher, follows the money flow to the radical activist establishment. He estimates that since the early 1970s at least $2.5 to $3 billion in funding has been awarded to the 43 major activist organizations he tracks that constitute the core of the radical machine.

He terms the big 43 the "cohort" -- an "incubator of right-wing, ideological policies that constitute(d )  the (Bush) administration's agenda, and, to the extent that it has one, runs its policy machinery."

He calls the cohort "a potent, never-ending source of intellectual content, laying down the slogans, myths, and buzz words that have helped shift public opinion rightward." The movement's propulsive energies are largely generated within the cohort.

Stein describes it as movement conservatism's "intellectual infrastructure" -- multiple-issue, non-profit, tax-exempt, and supposedly non-partisan. The apparatus includes think tanks, policy institutes, media-harassment enterprises, as well as litigation firms that file lawsuits to impose their ideological templates on the law.

They mastermind the machinery of radical politics, policy, and regulations. They include campus-based centers of scholarship, student associations, and scores of publications. The shorthand of their faith is well known: less government, generous tax cuts for the privileged, privatization or elimination of Social Security and Medicare, rollbacks of environmental safeguards, major curbs on the public's right to go to court, and a laissez-faire free market system unfettered by regulations or public-interest accountability. Bush campaigns to advance the ideological agenda of the right, and the radical front in turn campaigns for Bush."

Where these folks find their "Roots":

"In the early 1970s, when the movement was spawned, most of the seed funding came from a relative handful of private foundations established by far-right industrialists and inherited wealth.

They included, most notably, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the John M. Olin Foundation of New York City, the quartet of foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, the Smith Richardson Foundation (Vicks), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors beer), and the Koch family foundations (energy).

Today, the right's funding base has hugely expanded. The NCRP now identifies a total of 79 private foundations that make grants to right-wing political action groups. The NCRP estimates that those foundations granted some $253 million to the 350 activist organizations between 1999 and 2001 alone.

Scores of for-profit corporations add millions more to the funding stream. These include Time-Warner, Altria (Philip Morris), AT&T, Microsoft, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and other members of the pharmaceutical industry, the two titans of the military-industrial complex Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as telecommunications, banking, real estate, and financial interests. Precise information on corporate contributions to tax exempt organizations is scarce since the IRS does not require their public disclosure.

The NCRP report concludes that the right-wing domain these billions has built has "undoubtedly helped advance, market, and strengthen the conservative agenda in all policy realms," from international relations and so-called "preventive" war-making, to a raft of domestic issues."

(break)

"Political commentator David Gergen has noted that the integrated propaganda organs of the far right have created "a new politics in America," with its "ability to mobilize and interact with core constituencies on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to welfare reform."

The machine's efforts, which are misperceived by the populace as divorced from the GOP and the Bush White House, allow the President to appear above the fray at photo-ops and fund-raisers, while the unofficial machine augments his firepower and campaign bank accounts."

Note: In Michigan, the DeVos clan helped finance and establish the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which shares funders with the organizations and their associated foundations listed above.

Back to "The Apparat" analysis:

"During the Sixties and early Seventies “Domestic tranquility had been shattered by racial unrest, assassinations, and burning cities. "The glory hath departed," intoned the Rev. Jerry Falwell on CBS, as he organized his Moral Majority to "save" the nation. America, he preached, had lost its power, lost its values, lost its virtues. And he blamed the liberal movement for all the ills. With the Nixon landslide against McGovern in 1972, the right also sensed its moment. The Reagan victory in 1980 confirmed it.

The ultra-conservative William Simon, a financier, Treasury Secretary, and then president of the Olin Foundation, decided it was time to bring conservative wealth, manpower, and organizational ability to bear on the creation of a "counter intelligentsia" to roll back the "despotism" of the "Liberal Establishment."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce widely distributed an influential memo by a Richmond attorney named Lewis Powell (the Powell Memo), who would subsequently become a Supreme Court justice, calling for a conservative assault against what he viewed as the central echelons of liberal power -- the campus, the media, the courts, and politics.

Out of this tempest emerged what Sidney Blumenthal has called the "counter-establishment." A host of right wing intellectuals would staff "new institutes, writing policy papers and newspaper editorials ... serving as political advisers, lending the power of the word" to a movement to lead the counter-charge.

Many of these intellectuals were defectors from Communism, disillusioned by the excesses of the system, their personal quest for status and power unrequited. They were joined by disaffected liberals, ambitious operatives hungry for the power to make things happen. Both were familiar with the byzantine state machinery that ran the former Soviet Union."

(emphasis added)

And so it came to pass conservative tactics and goals become more and more like the tactics and goals of the former communists who sought to hold hegemony and control over everything public:  national, state, and local.

In the end,  personal liberty and true freedom falls victim to these left or right wing tyrants. Some writers have taken up the issue.  What’s the difference between the so-called conservatives / TeaPartisans and the former old style Communist ideology and practices?  Not much they say.

Let’s go ask Betsy about this issue, after all she chums around with a bunch of  former commies.

On the Reader:
Read about David Horowitz's latest escapades in "University of North Carolina students walk out on David Horowitz as he compares Muslims to Nazis" in the Daily Tar Heel and Islamophobia Today.

Related Slates:
“Queen” Elizabeth: Betsy DeVos, nouveau-riche, anti-social queen of mean - Betsy DeVos & The Amway Clan’s Abject Failure to Reach High Moral Ground via “Corporate Social Responsibility” -
Betsy DeVos’ Chum Bucket: Deep Inside - An Agenda & Dangerously Flawed Beliefs

Merged content from a multi-part Part 1 and Part 2 original.

Rick Snyder & the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Corporatist “Disaster Capitalism” on the Prowl in Michigan

Behold the Nerd Snyder's brass knuckled attacks on public education and local democracy; they are more brazen and destructive than former Gov. Engler's legendary ham-fisted assaults. Über-Ugly is on the rise, again.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is utilizing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) crib notes, a recall offense. The “Nerd” Governor can't make a move without employing ALEC models & policies and support from Michigan’s long history with ALEC and a long list of ALEC members.

Foremost in his attacks is his beefed up Emergency Manager Law and Emergency Managers in Michigan (EM) through Michigan Republican sponsored (led by the EM controlled Benton Harbor's own Phil Pavlov who championed the bill) EM dictatorial powers given Snyder appointed one-man rule set against the rights of local government under Michigan's long revered and respected "local control".

Also, TeaPublican Snyder continues to lead systemic Republican attacks on teachers and public schools (in all categories) and aggressively seeks to take down the very foundations of Michigan Public Education (rules, operations and imposition of privatization).

Lastly many, many areas of Michigan’s laws, rules and regulations are being “adjusted” at a furious pace to fit the whims of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (spin-off of the national arch-conservative Heritage Foundation), and Americans for Prosperity (AFP) - heavily backed by the Koch Bros. and mega-wealthy families like Michigan's own DeVos & Van Andel clans.

It’s a virtual, spiral corporate feeding frenzy!

Corporate Coups d'état: How ALEC is creating Corporatocracy
across the Nation state-by-state, bill-by-bill, Legislator-by-Legislator

Michigan has become an infamous "Mean TeaPublican" Battleground State

Scott Hagerstrom, the Director of the Koch-funded Michigan Americans for Prosperity (AFP) makes it clear, that it is the Kochs, working directly through ALEC, that have provided the AFP plans to the Michigan Tea Party, to eliminate all organized resistance from the political sphere, and as Scott says, they are aiming to "take the unions out at the knees." This belligerence started in Wisconsin and now it's spreading across the country.

Snyder and crew have sought to make their attacks “below the radar” using methods that accomplish virtually the same things Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker (attempting to raise money in Michigan to fight his recall) has attempted, but doing so in a backhanded way.  Walker’s M.O. has been replacement legislation, Snyder has used "substitution" and "amendments" to settled legislation to accomplish his “re-invention.”

Snyder's in a world of trouble. Snyder's causing the kids of this state, our kids, to go into panic. Their schools, bus transportation, art & music, sports programs, band and field trips, advanced placement classes and/or ability to take a class at a near by college or university (while still in high school) - all this and more, much more is on the cutting table.

The concepts that are the core of the Snyder program (to reinvent by destroying what we have, to rebuild in the mode Rick dictates) use the metrics and formulas of ALEC as found in its fabricated playbook of data and theories in “Rich States, Poor States”.

The American Legislative Executive Council is a heretofore unknown far right, Koch Bros. et. al. think tank - controlled and funded by major corporations which have found a way to force feed the various state legislative bodies with legislation and resolutions championing and directly benefiting their specific needs.

The following is a partial list of ALEC's other corporate backers, those we know of, from Wikipedia:

• Amway
• American Nuclear Energy Council
• American Petroleum Institute
• Coors Brewing Company
• Exxon Mobil
• The National Rifle Association
• Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America
• Philip Morris
• R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
• Texaco
• VISA
• and others.

Groups critical of ALEC claim that the organization is controlled by the entities that fund it’s operations and confabs, subsequently promote these donors' agendas and goals, along with making carefully crafted attempts to advance legislation which favor and advantage their interests.

The American Legislative Exchange Council is a political/ideological powerhouse, second to none. It calls corporate-serving shots nationwide. Most recently the power of ALEC has been laid bare in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, although ALEC subterfuge and "mainlining" of "just-fill-in-the-blanks" corporate written and approve legislation for states has been brought to the public's attention.

Little attention has been paid up until now as to the key early members were, those who set the tone and greased the skids for what has come to follow.

More than 30 years ago, a small group of state legislators and conservative policy advocates met in Chicago to implement a vision:

“A nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty. Their vision and initiative resulted in the creation of a voluntary membership association for people who believed that government closest to the people was fundamentally more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C.”

At that meeting, in September 1973, state legislators, including:

• then Illinois State Rep. Henry Hyde,
• conservative activist Paul Weyrich, leader of the New Traditionalist movement
• Lou Barnett, a veteran of then Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign

“(These men) together with a handful of others, launched the American Legislative Exchange Council.”

Among those who were involved with ALEC in its formative years were:

• Robert Kasten and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin
• John Engler of Michigan
• Terry Branstad of Iowa
• John Kasich of Ohio

“(A)ll of whom moved on to become governors or members of Congress.”

Congressional members who were active during this same period included:

• Senators John Buckley of New York,
• Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and
• Congressmen Phil Crane of Illinois
• Jack Kemp of New York.

Source: The American Legislative Exchange Council’s home site in “About ALEC”.

Anyone with a smidgen of knowledge about the power and thrust of the Far Right, or what Grand Rapids native former President Jerry Ford called the “Hard Right,” knows the power, impact and influence the above mentioned group of “reactionaries and revolutionaries” on the outer fringe of radical conservatism have had.  Observers also know the great and course-changing impact these men had, and continue to have, on today’s governance.

ALEC's activities are very widespread and endemic to the lawmaking processes of state legislatures across the country, and for that reason, their activities have been accepted through ignorance of the secret and underlying purposes and objectives they promote.  The public finds it hard to believe such a group exists. But they do. Consider: "ALEC has approximately 2,000 legislative members representing all 50 states, as well as more than 85 members of Congress and 14 sitting or former Governors who are considered 'ALEC alumni'" (Source: Wikipedia, CMD and VLTP who has reported on ALEC in most levels of US Courts as well).

The ALEC Koch Trade in Michigan
Thus, as Snyder attempts to roll out his jaundiced version of what's good for your child in Michigan's public schools it is only fair that we accelerate  the process of ferreting out who's underwriting these "re-inventive" concepts and in coughing up the statistics of the kind that Snyder uses to make his full-frontal, brutal raid on our neighborhood schools.

If you love outsiders dictating to Michigan (who, what, when and where about your child or grandchild's education) you will want to follow the revelations coming about Snyder's the sources behind Rick's snide attacks on schools and the teachers who teach.

As ALEC purposefully puts Michigan schools in the worst light possible, Snyder accepts that flawed data. His response, "It's a fact." No, governor, it's as filtered and reported by ALEC and staff doing the insidious work of the anti-public schools crowd.

The 2008 ALEC Education Report barked our Michigan public schools, placing them at the near bottom with the right-to-work paradises, the Gulf states, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. These are states with significant minority student populations. ALEC reports highlights states on the boarder with/or closer to Canada to the north: Minnesota, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Montana, where minority students are far less concentrated; these states are ranked highest. No genus is needed to find an important factor in those findings.

ALEC employed ideological bully William Bennett to head up its annual education report.  (He's the harsh critic of public education, whom Reagan put into the Carter established Department of Education to obfuscate and destroy as much as possible of this far right-hated federal cabinet post). Bennett also runs a for-profit business. K-12 Inc is Bennett's idea of what he would like to do to profit from public education, especially through the means of privatizing as much of its functions as possible. Bennett covets a major economic windfall from the potential passage of Snyder’s radical "Cyber Schools" legislation (through his stake in K-12 Inc.) being interjected into Michigan’s education system.

K-12 Inc. also has had among its shareholders those well-known parochiaid/voucher mavens, Dick & Betsy DeVos.

See also: “The Truth About Cyber Schools” on Blogging for Michigan January 23, 2012 and long history of ALEC and Right-Wing orgs like Heritage involvement in education - “School Choice”, Charter Schools and Public School Privatization.

Michigan Pieces in Place: Snyder as the Pawn of the Kingpin
Koch Bros, Scaife, Olin and DeVos Family ALEC  Corporatocracy

Snyder's vision, informed and directed by The American Legislative Exchange Council and the Wealthy Elite, is another brazened attempt at an radical right-wing coup in Michigan, the same one all Americans are facing across the Nation. 

It isn't the re-invention ideal as Snyder proclaims: it's retro-pursuit of the long-standing disenfranchising goals designed to destroy America's great institution, free public education. In this process the harsh critics have found a willing pawn in Snyder. Combine this too, with the creation Snyder's Jim Crow EM Plantations in multiple Michigan cities, the latest target being Detroit, and the destruction of basic principals of democracy, representation of elected officials, perhaps the pawn, is really "castling" all Michiganders, king to rook.

ALEC's long march goes on, as the public will see
For the DeVos’ and in particular Betsy DeVos, the Koch Brothers (backers and funders of ALEC) and the mom & pop family-business-killers-the Waltons of Wal-Mart - public education is a target of great opportunity for quick profit and power lust.

The next major attack is already underway; again funded and cheered on by Betsy DeVos. It's her dismemberment and undermining of public universities and colleges.

Who would believe anyone, much less today’s radicalized Republicans, would literally stoop so low as to turn government and the taxpayers against our local schools so much a part of our state like in Ovid, White Pine, Monroe and Alpena, communities where and kids matter so much.  Republicans cannot hate teachers and professors and at the same time hold a dishonest honest claim to care about students.

The Michigan TeaPartisan's (Michigan Tea Party Republicans) radical and aggressive punishment attacks on educators are a clear indication of a very low-class mentality, festooned with haranguing diatribes, and the extremely rude conduct on the part of select TeaPartisans during education hearings in Michigan's legislature; all centered on crashing down on education and educators. Such is the sorriest of sights.

Snyder's ALEC centered education plan is a tragic loss - loss for Michigan's kids. And a tragic loss for taxpayers supporting neighborhood public schools. Killing local option and local government via the dictatorial EM regime is just plain evil and unacceptable.

Suppressing the right to vote and taking away the power of elected officials in units confiscated by Snyder can only be described as totalitarian in spirit.

The public must step up and fight back.  Not tomorrow, Today!

On the Reader:
Read a detailed SERIES on Betsy DeVos organizations attacking Public Education across the county by Rachel Tabachnick:
Part One: Voucher Advocate Betsy DeVos, Right-Wing Think Tanks Behind Koch-Style Attack on Public Schools 
Part Two: Pro-Voucher Astroturfing:  Campaigns Across Nation Coordinated by DeVos, Funded by a Few Mega-Donors 
Part Three: Betsy DeVos Announces PA Governor Tom Corbett Will Keynote Pro-Voucher National Policy Summit

Further reading on the American Legislative Exchange Council:
Investigate more about ALEC and read ALEC model legislation on the ALECexposed.org portal.
Read a Report on ALEC connections to Congress and the Federal Courts.
Read a early series of articles on ALEC in the Nation.
See how many ALEC bills and laws in US States identified so far.
Read a list of US and Multinational ALEC Corporate Members identified.
See what ALEC investigators and researchers have uncovered in State Reports on ALEC:
Arizona (Supplement) - Maine - Missouri - Michigan - New Hampshire - New Jersey - Ohio - Pennsylvania - Texas - Utah - Virginia - Wisconsin or find more information on your State.

Related Slates:
First piece focused on ALEC Disaster Capitalism on the Gazette:
Rick’s Re-Invention: A.L.E.C.’S Corporatist “Disaster Capitalism” on the Rise (April 2011)
Piece on Betsy Devos, ALEC and Education on the Gazette:
Betsy DeVos & The Amway Clan’s Abject Failure to Reach High Moral Ground via “Corporate Social Responsibility” (December 2011)

Best of ALEC posts on the American Legislative Exchange Council on the Gazette:
No Brainer Legislation & No Brain Legislators who slavishly deliver for the Corporatocracy (via ALEC) inside Michigan’s Legislature (July 2011)
Our Guides to the Bottomless Pit: Wolfram, Von Hayek, Lewis F. Powell, & A.L.E.C. (September 2011)
Smart A.L.E.C. in the Michigan: The secret is There is No Secret… But Oh Yes, There Is! (July 2011)
Who needs the Koch Brothers? We’ve Got Rick Snyder, ALEC and his “Buffo” Team of Privatizers! (July 2011)
Michigan ALEC State Chair Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker: A Cheery Face & A Fake Defense  promoting corporatist direct access to Michigan lawmaking (August 2011)

More on the American Legislative Exchange Council (tag) and the Emergency Management issue series in EM Plantation/Jim Crow on the Gazette.