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Daily News columnist praises StudentsFirst/Americans Elect chief
Astroturf campaign to privatize education, like the manufacture of a fake third-party grassroots electoral movement, is standard operating procedure for corporate America.
Daily News columnist praises StudentsFirst/Americans Elect chief
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
John Baer dedicated today's Daily News state politics column to praising Kahlil Byrd, the president of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst education reform group and past CEO of something you've never heard of called Americans Elect. (A copy editor apparently missed that "StudentsFirst" does not, contrary to English grammar norms, put a space between what appear to be two words)
As Baer notes, Byrd markets himself to Daily News readers as a master of "disruptive politics" — of an independent, nonpartisan variety. But, as I reported at Salon last year, the vast majority of candidates that the pro-charter and union-busting outfit supports are, surprise, Republicans. StudentsFirst's donors include Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge fund managers, and the Walton Family Foundation. In Pennsylvania, StudentsFirst hired Ashley DeMauro, former Department of Education government relations chief under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.
Byrd was a strong candidate to lead a corporate front group masquerading as a grassroots and nonpartisan movement: Americans Elect was one of the saddest jokes of the past decade in American politics, as Alex Pareene pointed out in frequent posts: "A lot of the more prominent AE supporters and many of the people involved in organizing the group are disillusioned Republicans — like former Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon and former Bush strategist Mark McKinnon — which helps explain why AE keeps going after people who only appeal to … disillusioned moderate Republicans."
Baer also credits Americans Elect for having "helped elect Maine independent Angus King to the U.S. Senate." King beat, nay destroyed, his nearest rival by 22 points. I'm not sure Americans Elect commercials (like StudentsFirst, funded by Bloomberg) were exactly the decisive factor.
Paul Krugman continues: "So why Americans Elect? Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on."
Next up for business-minded media credulity? Fix The Debt, another so-called nonpartisan centrist group that just happens to be funded by major corporate interests, "the latest addition to a group of deficit-scold shops supported by billionaire Peter Peterson ... Fix the Debt seems much more concerned with cutting Social Security and Medicare than with fighting deficits in general. ... [In] its list of “core principles,” it actually calls for lower tax rates — a very peculiar position for people supposedly horrified by the budget deficit."
But, like the privatization of education and the manufacture of a fake third-party grassroots electoral movement, this is standard operating procedure for corporate America.
Thanks, Dan, for exposing this. These pundits who write as if they have their finger on the pulse of politics seem to miss some pretty obvious issues.
And, even though I keep telling myself I must have dreamt this, Ed Rendell was (is?) a spokesperson for Fix the Debt. I guess he and David L. have always been of the same mind.— pachysandra
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