The Teachers Unions Faux Grassroots Organizing
The Hedge Clippers, a union run and organized group, laughably pretends to be grassroots.
The Hedge Clippers, born last year, is an anti-capitalist, left-wing, purportedly grassroots organization whose focus is on exposing “the mechanisms hedge funds and billionaires use to influence government and politics in order to expand their wealth, influence and power.” The group received a mention in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago in a piece that centered around American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who sicced them on a bunch of hedge fund managers that are involved with education and pension reform that the union finds objectionable. Perhaps #1 on the Hedge Clippers’ enemies list is Daniel Loeb, founder of the $16 billion Third Point fund. Loeb has the temerity of being a financial supporter of the wildly successful Harlem Success Academy charter school franchise, run by Weingarten’s avowed enemy, Eva Moskowitz. Weingarten has also accused Loeb of being involved with a group that is “leading the attack on defined benefit pension funds.”
The very same day the Journal piece appeared, the Los Angeles Times ran an “exposé” claiming that “activists reveal more dark-money donors to campaigns against unions and schools-funding tax.” The article centers around the Hedge Clippers outing donors who they claim made undisclosed contributions in 2012 as part of a “dark-money” scheme to defeat Prop 30, an initiative that raised income taxes on the richest Californians and sales tax on all Californians. The essential point of the article is that the Hedge Clippers have discovered that evil and greedy capitalists contributed money to an out-of-state organization, which circulated funds through a series of other groups and eventually back to California.
But just how does the Hedge Clippers enterprise do business? Is this really a “grassroots” entity, as billed? In “United Front: Teachers Unions Quietly Spend Millions on ‘Grassroots’ Groups” The 74’s David Cantor reveals that the “grassroots organization” has been created, funded, and directed by two of the nation’s largest political contributors – you guessed it – the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. The group is led by a union lobbyist who is based at New York City’s United Federation of Teachers headquarters. Moreover, Cantor points out that the Hedge Clippers’ “crusade against opaque financial dealings also seems at odds with the fact that in the last election only two organizations contributed more than the AFT to 527s – less-regulated groups that, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, can raise unlimited money for or against candidates….”
But wait, there’s more.
Teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci weighed in on the subject, pointing out that despite the contributions of those “opposing economic justice,” the Prop. 30 campaign was successful. Perhaps the fact that the alleged grassroots folks (mostly public employee unions) outspent the greedy and evil hedge-funders by almost $14 million had something to do with it.
To fully grasp the teachers unions’ “grassroots” activity, check out the following chart, plucked from the California Teachers Association website. (H/T Antonucci.)
As you can see, CTA’s (like most teachers unions’) political organizing is top-down, centrally planned, bureaucratic and frequently at odds with its own rank-and-file. The unions are many things, but grassroots? Hardly. They are run more like the Politburo.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.