Platitudes abounded: "Your share of the federal debt is about $52,000," said one. "We can't kick the can down the road," said another. It was all very earnest and the press clips were positive for what was, by all accounts, an exceedingly boring event.

But the most telling sentence of the meeting was one of the first. The student sponsors thanked Mark Graul and Stephanie Kundert of Arena Strategy (a local PR firm) for their help in setting up the event.

No one in the room appeared to catch the fact that they all were participating in an elaborate public relations ruse, set up by well-known Wisconsin spinmeister (Graul) whose claim to fame is a racist attack ad on a sitting judge, and orchestrated by a Wall Street billionaire whose name was never mentioned in the two-hour "teach-in."

Take a bow, Pete Peterson -- $500 million can buy you a lot of good feelings and positive press.

The media in advance touted the event without looking deeper. Clips the day after did the same. Nary a mention of Peterson or his vicious austerity agenda which will slash government spending, kill jobs, condemn students to higher rates of debt and make it much harder for graduates to succeed.

Peter G. Peterson is a former Nixon man turned Wall Street billionaire who has spent $500 million in five years to underwrite numerous organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, citing concerns over "unsustainable" federal budget deficits. In 2007, he made a fortune from the public offering of the private equity firm he co-founded, Blackstone Group, and pledged to spend $1 billion to "fix America's key fiscal-sustainability problems." He endowed the funds to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which he launched in 2008 to bankroll the endeavor.

The Madison event was shepherded by David Walker of the Come Back America Initiative (CAI). Who is Walker? Well, you can read all about him here, but the most important thing you need to know is that he has been on the Peterson dole for a very long time. He served as the head of the Peterson Foundation from 2008 to 2010. Then he spun off the more "grassrootsy" CAI to take the show on the road, funded by Peterson to the tune of $3 million. CAI is one of the many Peterson-funded "partner" organizations to Fix the Debt.

What is Fix the Debt? The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a $40 million "astroturf supergroup" that CMD exposed in a series of articles on the cover of the Nation magazine in February 2013. The effort involves over 120 CEOs all singing from the same "shared sacrifice" hymnal, but their association with the campaign has stirred outrage and protests because too many of the firms involved pay a negative tax rate or underfund their employee pension plans, yet their CEOs have the gall to call for cuts to vital "earned-benefit" programs lifting millions of seniors and kids out of abject poverty. Fix the Debt was launched on the Peter G. Peterson Foundation website, Peterson was at the National Press Club launch of Fix the Debt, and Peterson gave Fix the Debt's original parent organization some $5 million to get the project rolling.  

What is The Can Kicks Back? For many years, Peterson has tried to create the fantasy that students are more concerned about the nation's debt than their own. Thus, he has consistently tried to fund or create student groups to carry his message. The latest incarnation is The Can Kicks Back, a laughable effort to start student "chapters" at colleges and high schools in target Congressional districts. A key strategy? A foam can mascot and videos of Alan Simpson rocking out "Gangnam Style." This week those crazy kids at the Can Kicks Back bought themselves a flashmob. As the Huffington Post first reported, they paid  dozens of dance students $65 bucks to pretend that deficit reduction was a cause that had them dancing in the streets. The group says it is the "millennial arm" of Fix the Debt, but could be better labeled Peterson's pet propagandists.

What is the Concord Coalition? The deficit group was started many years ago, but kept alive in recent years by an infusion of Peterson money. It received some $6,036,060 (including $1,500,000 in matching funds) from the Peterson Foundation from 2009 to 2012. And its job is to take the Peterson message to the heartland with national deficit reduction tours and more "grassroots" confabs.

When we talked to the Bipartisan Issues Group, the local student group that hosted the event, they seemed entirely unaware of any of these connections and only vaguely aware of a fellow named Peterson. That is just the way Peterson and Fix the Debt like it. Fix the Debt PR firms in some 23 states, tap bipartisan community leaders (Scott Klug and Tony Earle here in WI) to announce that new chapter has spontaneously erupted, they set up "grassroots" events, and make sure serious interviews and op-eds are placed in mainstream media outlets. They tout their 350,000 petition signers, never mentioning they paid a petition site for most of the names and fell wildly short of their 10 million goal. 

While Fix the Debt owes a lot to the ghost in the machine, Peterson's name is rarely mentioned. Fix the Debt's spokesperson even told CMD that Peterson did not fund his organization two months after he told the Huffington Post the opposite, and the group is reincorporating and splitting from its fiscal sponsor perhaps in an effort to hide the Peterson start-up funds. (See my colleague Lisa Graves' very funny "Conversations with Fix the Debt.")

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the two co-founders of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, have been on the Peterson plan for a while now. They have their own $300,000 "Moment of Truth" project funded by Peterson, named after their big $4 trillion austerity package they cooked up in 2010 as chairmen of President Obama's national commission on debt. The economists at EPI estimated that steep cuts in the package would put some 4 million people out of work.  

A few weeks ago, the duo issued a new austerity plan that manages to screw the very students Peterson is hoping to attract. It would reduce the federal debt by some $55 billion by allowing interest on student loans to start accruing while student are still in school, not upon graduation. The plan makes other changes that hurt students and calls for increasing the student loan interest rate. On the flip side, it would increase the debt by creating a "territorial tax system" that would allow overseas earnings by U.S. firms to be exempt from taxation. No wonder Fix the Debt has so many CEOs flocking to its cause.

This plan has been lauded by the Campaign to Fix the Debt and by extension The Can Kicks Back, but do college students really think it's a good idea to increase the already $1 trillion in student loan debt in order to provide further corporate tax breaks?

They weren't allowed to weigh in on the issue because the issue was never presented at the UW "teach-in."

Also not discussed at the presentation, were recent developments that show that deficit scolds are loosing the debate. The empirical foundation for budget cuts, the Reinhart-Rogoff study on debt in 40 nations, was blown out of the water by a graduate student who found huge errors in their data. This week, private-sector and government economists have determined that unemployment would be a full point lower and U.S. growth would be two points higher had not Obama and the Republicans agreed to steep spending cuts in 2011. Austerity is exactly the wrong prescription during an economic downturn.

All in all, it was a masterful job by the Peterson puppets, another event that Fix the Debt will likely put on a list and send to Congress and the press as proof of a grassroots groundswell for a grand bargain on "entitlement reform," when all the polls show that the opposite is true. By huge margins Americans of both parties oppose pretty much everything Peterson and Fix the Debt stand for: 73 of American's believe protecting Medicare and Social Security from benefit cuts is more important than bringing down the deficit. Fully 84 percent opposed reducing Social Security benefits; 69 percent opposed reductions in Medicaid benefits.

And it is very hard to believe that with deficits in steep decline, America's college students are willing to embrace more student debt to help Pete Peterson and his puppet populists.

In February 2013, CMD and the Nation issued a special edition on Fix the Debt which you can read here. We also created a large wiki on all the Fix the Debt CEOs, board members, partner organizations, lobbyists and more at Petersonpyramid.org. CMD's Harriet Rowan contributed to this article.

In a victory for working families, New York is poised to become the largest U.S. city to require businesses offer paid days to workers. Community activists and labor leaders struck a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to allow a vote on a paid sick leave ordinance that would cover almost 1 million people. But workers in more than 700 other large American cities must choose between spreading their illness and getting paid.

Advocates have helped pass paid sick day laws in cities like San Francisco, Washington D.C., Seattle and Portland, but big business has been pushing back. Corporate-backed bills have passed at the state level in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Mississippi that would preempt (or as one GOP operative put it, "deliver the kill shot" to) local paid sick leave laws. Similar bills are on the legislative docket in Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Washington. This paid sick leave preemption effort can be traced back to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Workers who do not have access to paid sick days are one-and-a-half times more likely to go to work sick with a contagious illness, putting their co-workers and customers at risk, and costing an estimated $160 billion each year in lost productivity. Children are more likely to go to school sick when their parents can't get off work to care for them, causing illness to spread. Delaying treatment for illness can cause conditions to worsen, leading to more emergency room visits and increased costs for public health insurance programs.

An estimated 40 million workers, or 40 percent of the workforce, cannot take sick days without losing wages or possibly their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) only provides for unpaid leave, and only applies to employers with more than 50 employees. Approximately forty percent of workers do not qualify for the FMLA and those who do often don't take leave for financial reasons.

Seventy-nine percent of food industry workers -- who are especially likely to spread illness if they go to work sick -- don't get paid sick leave, according to a Food Chain Workers Alliance study. A recent Centers for Disease Control study found that more than half of all norovirus outbreaks can be traced back to sick food service workers.

In response to this public health and economic issue, cities and counties have proposed ordinances that require employers allow workers to call-in sick without losing their jobs or wages. And corporate interests are pushing back. In New York City, the business lobbyists managed to get City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn to block the legislation for three years, before a long-term campaign by worker's advocates put her in the hot seat and made it politically untenable to continue blocking the bill.

Big business has also lobbied the statehouses, in many cases successfully, to disregard "local control" and nullify and permanently preempt paid sick leave ordinances passed at the local level. And the legislation appears to have spread thanks to a bill promoted and passed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and shared at an ALEC meeting in 2011.

In May of 2011, Governor Walker pushed Senate Bill 23 to override a Milwaukee ordinance providing for paid sick leave. It appeared to be the first paid sick leave preemption bill passed in the country.

Milwaukee's ordinance specified that paid sick days could be used if a worker is ill or needs to care for a sick child, and passed via referendum with over 70 percent of the popular vote in 2008. The 2011 state law not only steamrolled local democratic will by overriding a law passed overwhelmingly in a popular vote, but also repealed the rights of working people to get medical treatment they need, care for their children, and help safeguard the health of their families, coworkers and customers.

A few months later, at ALEC's August 2011 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the bill was brought to the Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee of the ALEC Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force.

Meeting attendees were given complete copies of Wisconsin's 2011 Senate Bill 23 (now Wisconsin Act 16) as a model for state override. ALEC's Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee at the time was co-chaired by YUM! Brands, Inc., which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.

Legislators attending the Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee meeting were also handed a target list and map of state and local paid sick leave policies prepared by ALEC member the National Restaurant Association.

In Wisconsin, the state chapter of the National Restaurant Association lobbied for Senate Bill 23 to repeal Milwaukee's sick leave ordinance, as did the local branch of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an ALEC member.

And a similar pattern of opposition has emerged across the country: as cities like Seattle, Portland, and Philadelphia have taken up paid sick days, the state and local chapters of ALEC members the National Restaurant Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce have lined up against it. Other consistent paid sick leave opponents include the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), an ALEC member that presents itself as "the voice of small business" but lobbies primarily for big corporate interests, as the Center for Media and Democracy has described at NFIBexposed.org. Restaurant giant Darden (parent company of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Capital Grille and others) has also emerged as a major paid sick days foe. Darden is an ALEC member and has had a representative on ALEC's corporate board.

Paid sick leave opponents also regularly cite a "study" from a corporate front group called the Employment Policies Institute purporting to show that employers in Connecticut cut jobs and benefits after a paid sick day law took effect. The front group is one of many formed by super-lobbyist Rick Berman -- who has also formed groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom, a front for the fast food, alcohol and tobacco industries -- and has received $2.8 million between 2009 and 2011 from the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which is also a major ALEC funder.

These same big business interests have backed proposed state laws to thwart local sick leave ordinances that reflect the Milwaukee legislation. Sick leave preemption bills have spread across the country since the August 2011 ALEC meeting where Wisconsin's bill was shared. In 2012, a sick leave preemption bill was introduced in Tennessee and became law in Louisiana, and in 2013, similar bills have been introduced in Florida, Washington, Mississippi, Michigan, Arizona, Indiana, and Oklahoma.

The battle might be most heated in Florida.

Orange County is following in Milwaukee's footsteps, with advocates gathering more than 50,000 signatures last year to place a sick-time measure on the ballot. The referendum was kept off the November 2012 ballot because of a delaying campaign coordinated by Orange County commissioners working with big business, including ALEC member Darden Restaurants, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, Disney and others. In February, a court found the County had violated "the plain meaning of its charter" by refusing to put paid sick leave in front of voters.

Text messages released through open records requests indicate the delaying tactics were part of a strategy to kill the initiative entirely.

In early September, Orange County GOP Chair Lew Oliver texted Commissioner Ted Edwards saying he wants "at least one good faith straight face test reason to at least delay it long enough to keep it off the ballot in November. After that, the Legislature can deliver the kill shot."

The "kill shot" would come from Florida legislators duplicating the anti-democratic tactics of Wisconsin's governor.

House Majority Leader Steve Precourt (R), an ALEC member, recently introduced a sweeping paid sick days preemption bill that tracks Wisconsin's Senate Bill 23 and would thwart the Orange County effort. The bill would effectively keep Orange County residents from voting on the county's first citizen-led ballot initiative.

Precourt's proposal actually goes further than Wisconsin's bill by incorporating ALEC model legislation that would preempt local living wage requirements as well. (ALEC's slate of bills promoting a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions for America's workforce was recently detailed in a report by the National Employment Law Project.)

Precourt attended the 2011 ALEC meeting where legislators were handed complete copies of Wisconsin's 2011 Senate Bill 23. He reported receiving $487.38 from the corporate-funded "scholarship fund" to attend the 2011 ALEC meeting. According to documents released from the ALEC State Chair for Florida, Rep. Jimmy Patronis, Florida lawmakers' attendance at ALEC's 2011 annual conference in New Orleans was "one of the strongest delegations in years."

Also at that 2011 ALEC meeting, Precourt and sixteen other Florida legislators attended a "State Night" dinner at Antoine's Restaurant, where lawmakers sat down with corporate lobbyists for meals that averaged around $120. But Florida legislators were not asked to pay a dime for their expensive night out: their tab was picked up by the corporate-funded ALEC "scholarship fund."

Under current Florida law those ALEC "scholarships" are banned. In 2006, Florida enacted some of the strictest ethics laws in the country, and legislators are now prohibited from accepting most gifts from lobbyists or their employers. But, legislators can still use ALEC "scholarship" funds collected prior to the law taking effect. "The organization has significant funds that were collected prior to the effective date of the law and which, when collected, even those from lobbyists and principals were entirely lawful," reads a House legal opinion sanctioning the use of already-raised scholarship funds. Despite these "scholarships" being grandfathered-in, the appearance of impropriety remains the same.

And ethical concerns about Precourt don't end there. In 2008, he formed a consulting firm whose founding documents indicate it intends to provide "engineering and lobbying services" -- with lobbying being a questionable activity for a sitting legislator. In 2011, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Rep. Precourt was gunning for an appointment to direct Central Florida's toll-road agency, despite a significant conflict of interest: his engineering firm, Dyer, Riddle Mills and Precourt (DRMP), had received $10.5 million in contracts in recent years and stood to make millions more from new contracts. Precourt had worked at the firm for twenty years, and though he said he resigned as a principal a few years after becoming an elected official, he retained a financial relationship with the company.

DRMP also has a financial relationship with some of the major opponents of Orange County's proposed Earned Sick Time ordinance. It has major contracts with Disney, for example, which lobbied against the sick leave initiative in Orange County.

Precourt's bill passed out of committee and is up for a final vote in the House on April 4.

Legislation has also been proposed on the federal and state levels to require paid sick days.

In Congress, the Healthy Families Act has been introduced several times since 2004, and would allow workers to earn up to seven days of paid sick leave (or one hour for every 30 hours worked) for use when an individual is ill or needs to care for a sick family member. States like Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington State are also considering bills to guarantee state-wide paid sick leave.

But the campaign against paid sick days is growing increasingly intense and coordinated, particularly as local governments take matters into their own hands. Keep an eye out for an ALEC legislator introducing a "kill shot" preemption bill in your state legislature.

While parent trigger was first promoted by a small charter school operator in California, it was taken up and launched into hyperdrive by two controversial right-wing organizations: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute.

Similarly, the Heartland Institute recently suffered an exodus of corporate sponsors after it launched a billboard comparing those who believe in the science behind global warming to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

As the movie's stars take to the airwaves this week to promote the film, it is unlikely they will discuss the agenda of the film's billionaire backers or the right-wing politicians and for-profit firms who are promoting the parent trigger idea, the purpose of which is to promote the transformation of the American public school system into a for-profit enterprise. We provide a primer below.

Hollywood Fiction vs. the Facts on Parent Trigger

What is a parent trigger law? The proposals have varied from state to state, but they generally allow parents at any failing school, defined by standardized testing, to sign a petition to radically transform the school using any of four "triggers." Parents can petition to: 1) fire the principal, 2) fire half of the teachers, 3) close the school and let parents find another option, or 4) convert the school into a charter school. While the details of how the school can be "restructured" varies from state to state, the charter school option is always present. Charter schools are privately managed, taxpayer-funded public schools which are granted greater autonomy from regulations applicable to other public schools, ostensibly in exchange for greater accountability for results, but they have been criticized for a very uneven track record.

The film, starring Oscar nominee Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, reportedly portrays the struggle of a teacher and a parent who work to transform a low-performing Pennsylvania school, despite resistance from the local union -- cast as the enemy of reform. Together, the African American teacher and the white, single mom unite to overcome hurdles and go door-to-door convincing parents to sign a petition to trigger a transformation.

While in reality most teachers do not sign the petitions and teachers are likely to get fired under parent trigger laws, Won't Back Down has teachers uniting with parents to sign the petition and transform the school. Eventually, 50 percent of teachers sign as well as parents and the intrepid duo finally turns the school into a charter school run by the Viola Davis character.

The film portrays parent trigger laws as a successful way of inspiring and uniting teachers and parents and the community. The real life history of parent trigger is quite different. Only two school districts, both in California, have used the petition mechanism: Compton Unified School District and Adelanto School District. In Compton, a new group called "Parent Revolution" founded by a charter school operator paid individuals to collect signatures to hand the school over to a charter school operator, but the courts threw out the petitions.

In Adelanto, parents first signed petitions, then had second thoughts. The school board rejected the petition after parents withdrew their support, resulting in a lawsuit. The courts ruled that parents could not rescind their signatures. The parents had advocated for a turning the school into a charter school, a plan which was rejected by the school board. Instead, an advisory panel was created and headed by the superintendent. The legal battles are continuing.

Instead of prompting reform-minded unity, both petition drives have been criticized for creating "chaos and division" in the community. Charges of fraud and intimidation abound. "This is destroying friendships and all relationships," one Adelanto parent, Chrissy Guzman-Alvarado, told the New York Times. "With our school divided, parents are scared to speak out or sign anything, and our community is falling apart. All for what?" she asks.

ALEC Spreads Parent Trigger Nationwide

The first parent trigger law was enacted in 2010 in California and, with an assist from Heartland and ALEC, the idea is rapidly spreading.

The California law was based on a proposal from Ben Austin, a policy consultant for a small non-profit education organization called Green Dot Public Schools, which manages charter schools for the city of Los Angeles. Austin subsequently formed Parent Revolution, which promotes these laws across the country. But this is not your local PTA. Parent Revolution is backed by big money, including receiving funding from the conservative Walton Family Foundation (think Wal-Mart), which has spent over a billion to promote school privatization.

The rabid pro-privatization Heartland Institute quickly took up the parent trigger idea in 2010. The Heartland version of the bill (PDF) went a step further and gave parents the authority to trigger a school's restructuring regardless of whether it is "failing" or not. Heartland's version of the bill also calls for a "school voucher" option, which allows students to receive a monetary voucher to attend another private or public school. Voucher or "choice" schools have been criticized for diverting funds from public schools to unaccountable private schools, including for-profit religious and virtual schools.

When a new wave of school choice supporters were swept into power at the state level in November 2010, Heartland saw an opportunity to put the parent trigger idea on steroids by bringing it to ALEC, the controversial corporate "bill mill."

While ALEC has a governing board of state legislators it also has a governing board of corporations, packed with tobacco firms, giant pharmaceutical firms, and energy companies like Exxon Mobil. The ultra-conservative, billionaire Koch Brothers, have had a representative on the board for years and Koch-controlled money has funded ALEC to the tune of at least $1 million, according to estimates calculated by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

The ALEC Education Task Force voted to approve the "Parent Trigger Act" (PDF) at their critical December 2010 strategy meeting in Washington, D.C., and the idea quickly spread. According to CMD's analysis, ALEC members introduced or cosponsored various versions of the bill in 17 states.

At the time, ALEC's education task force was chaired by the for-profit education firm Connections Academy, which specializes in K-12 online education. Others on the task force include tech companies, testing companies and higher-education diploma mills like Bridgepoint Education and Corinthian Education, both of which are under investigation by state Attorneys General for aggressive recruiting policies that leave too many students in debt with no degree.

We have seen this pattern before. When the NRA finally succeeded in getting its first "Stand Your Ground" gun law passed into law in Florida, a law implicated in the tragic Trayvon Martin shooting, its next step was to bring the bill to ALEC which helped it spread to two dozen other states in short order.

Parent trigger and ALEC were a match made in heaven. ALEC's education bills encompass more than 30 years of effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school vouchers, an idea first advocated by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. ALEC bills also allow schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, exclude students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, eschew collective bargaining, and experiment with other pet causes like merit pay, single-sex education, school uniforms, and political and religious indoctrination of students. 

Parent Trigger "A Clever Way to Trick Parents"?

But does it work? The support for parent trigger, according to University of Illinois Professor Christopher Lubienski, is based more on ideology than empirical data. Lubienski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Organization.

"There is not good evidence that the options given [after the trigger is pulled] improve student achievement. The goal has more to do with changing school governance and giving opportunities for some of these organizations to get control of the public dollar," Lubienski said. "Policymakers need to look at the factors that actually influence student achievement.

"Unfortunately, that points to a lot more difficult issues than simply changing the structure of a school. It's relatively simple to fire the staff and bring in a charter operator. It's more important that kids are getting proper medical attention before they are born, that their mothers are getting the right nutrition at that time, that kids are read to at home, and that they are raised in an environment that values education. This is much more difficult to influence through policy."

The data shows that the conversion to charter schools, which Lubienski said is the constant theme running throughout the "parent trigger" legislation passed in states, has not shown to be effective in improving student outcomes. A study conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution presents evidence that students in only 17 percent of charter school show greater improvement in math and reading than students in similar traditional public schools, whereas 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than the student would have realized had they remained in public schools. However, the conversion to charter schools has proven profitable to many U.S. firms such as ALEC member National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter school management organization operating in eight states, and K-12, Inc., which promotes "virtual" charter schools as well as "virtual" voucher schools. K-12, Inc. is reportedly under investigation in Florida for improperly certifying teachers and asking them to cover it up.

In short, parent trigger laws are a "clever way to trick parents into seizing control of their schools and handing it over to private corporations," according to Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration.

Philip Anschutz, Right-Wing Billionaire, Owns Production Company

Won't Back Down, is a production of Walden Media, owned by billionaire investor and right-wing extremist Philip Anschutz. Anschutz participates in the Koch brothers' secretive political strategy summits and funds David Koch's Americans for Prosperity group, which backed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's union busting proposal and is working to defeat Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates across the country.

Anschutz bankrolls ALEC and ALEC member groups. In 2010, The Anschutz Foundation, gave ALEC $10,000 and his Union Pacific firm was an ALEC sponsor the following year. The Foundation funded three ALEC members who sat on the ALEC Education Task Force which approved the Parent Trigger Proposal: The Independence Institute, Center for Education Reform, and Pacific Research Institute. 

Anschutz has also supported the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which backs legislation designed to cripple unions; the Discovery Institute, which seeks to get creation "science" accepted in public schools; and the Mission America Foundation, whose president considers homosexuality to be a "deviance." He also owns the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard.

Walden Media was one of the producers of the pro-charter documentary film "Waiting for 'Superman'." This film was criticized by Diane Ravitch as propaganda and as "a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the 'free market' and privatization."

Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film

The film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox, owned by News Corp. and media mogul Rupert Murdock. News Corp. owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch formerly owned the British newspaper News of the World, which imploded once it was revealed that reporters hacked into the cell phones of the family of a murdered child, as well as the cell phones of the royal family, politicians and celebrities. The paper's top editors and reporters were arrested although Murdoch himself has not been charged.

As CMD previously reported, News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC "scholar" and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which he describes as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior vice president in charge of its education division is none other than former chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.

Lubienski, for one, is skeptical of "self-proclaimed experts on the topic of education" like Murdoch who "aren't accountable to the public" and who have a profit motive coupled with a political agenda of widespread privatization.

Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger

The film is being promoted by former Washington, D.C., public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee spoke at both the RNC and DNC screenings of Won't Back Down, and her involvement underscores what is often the bipartisan nature of the modern "school reform" movement.

Her tenure as the head of the D.C. school system was so controversial, she is widely credited with losing D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection campaign. She was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Today investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous. 

After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to start StudentsFirst, a 501(c)4 non-profit organization planning to engage in "direct and grassroots lobbying" on education issues including parent trigger. Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, spoke on "Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda" at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.

Rhee's group receives funding from Murdoch, who "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." New Corp's Joel Klein serves on her organization's board. Other supporters include New Jersey hedge funder manager David Tepper, and Alan Fournier (reportedly big backers of Romney).

Rhee was also featured in Anschutz's film Waiting for Superman.

Reform or Russian Roulette?

The movie ends when the hard work of turning around a struggling school begins. The Hoover Institution study discussed above shows that only 17 percent of charter schools do a better job educating students. 

With no data backing the benefits of the parent trigger proposal, many doubt that throwing a school system into chaos is the best way to improve troubled schools. Chaos does however give the privatizers and the profiteers starring roles in the ongoing debate over the future of the American educational system.

This article was authored by Mary Bottari and Sara Jerving. The Center for Media and Democracy is a non-profit investigative reporting group whose work aids public awareness about the people, companies, and groups attempting to shape the media and our democracy. CMD launched its award winning ALEC Exposed project in July 2011. Our websites are ALECExposed.org, PR Watch.org, SourceWatch.org, BanksterUSA.org, and FoodRightsNetwork.org.

Can Tobacco Cure Smoking?

As CMD has reported, in May of 2011 ALEC member Sen. Alberta Darling (R-WI) quietly inserted an amendment into the state budget that was virtually identical to the tobacco industry-supported ALEC model bill "Resolution on the Enhancement of Economic Neutrality, Commercial Efficiency, and Fairness in the Taxation of Moist Smokeless Tobacco (MST) Products." The provision would change the way tobacco is taxed from a per-unit basis or a percentage of cost to a weight-based tax, which would effectively lower the price of snus and smokeless tobacco products manufactured by the big tobacco companies. The provision successfully passed after ALEC sent a letter to Wisconsin legislators supporting the amendment, but it was too extreme even for Governor Scott Walker, who vetoed it.

Health Care Companies in Bed with Big Tobacco?

Other Workshops

• Timothy Russell (former deputy chief of staff to Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker) was charged with two felonies, and one misdemeanor related to embezzlement of donations intended for Wisconsin veterans in a special fund, which was created at Walker's direction. The money was used by Russell and his partner, Brian Pierick, to take a few vacations. Read the criminal complaint here.



• Brian Pierick (partner of Timothy Russell): charged with two felonies involving child solicitation. It appears Russell's phone records led to Pierick and a nasty story about two men soliciting a 17-year-old minor for sex. Read the criminal complaint here.



• Kevin Kavanaugh (appointed by Walker as a county veterans' official): charged with five felonies related to embezzlement from the veterans fund. Kavanaugh appears to have been raiding the funds separately from Russell. Read the criminal complaint here.



• Kelly Rindfleisch (former deputy chief of staff to then-Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker): charged with four felonies relating to campaign fundraising while on the county payroll. Rindfleish's worked on a secret wifi system in her office just steps away from Walker's office. Rindfleisch continued to work for Walker's campaign until she was charged. Read the criminal complaint here.



• Darlene Wink (former aide to then-Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker): pled guilty to two unclassified misdemeanors as part of a deal that she made with the prosecutors relating to working on campaign fundraising while on the county payroll. Winks office was down a short hallway from Walker's. Read the complaint here.



• William Gardner (President and CEO of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad): Gardner pled guilty to felony violations of Wisconsin's election campaign laws in April of 2011. Gardner tried to convince prosecutors that his50,000 in illegal contributions to Walker, which he funneled through his employees and a girlfriend, was an innocent mistake, except he had done the same thing the previous year. Read the criminal complaint here.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Who Controls the Economy

Government isn't the problem -- it's the prize. But right now it rests in the hands of corporations and it sits a trophy case down on Wall Street. We can go to the government and ask elected officials to address these issues or we can ask who is really in charge here? We think the corporations are in charge, so we need to go to the people behind the curtain, the people pulling the strings and tell them 'if you want to run our economy, if you want to run our democracy, you will need to deal with us directly.'

Co-optation or Cross-Pollination?

People haven't done their homework. Our message is about how our democracy has been bought and sold, so I don't think the Democratic Party is going to pay for that one. In 26 years, RAN has never had any relationship with the Democratic Party. We are all about corporate campaigning.

"Another World is Possible"

ALEC's Race to the Bottom in Wages for American Workers

Crushing Unions

Secret Communication System Set Up by Russell

Stunning Email Revelations

Campaign Work Conducted 20 Feet Away from Walker

Further Charges Anticipated

Petitioners were only required to collect 540,000 by law. They far exceeded this number, making a successful legal challenge of the recall highly unlikely. Volunteers also gathered 845,000 signatures to recall Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and additional signatures to recall four of the state senators who voted for Walker's collective bargaining bill in March 2011, creating a mountain of paper estimated to weigh over one ton.

Wisconsin Recall Will Make History

The numbers coming out of Wisconsin are stunning. Of the 19 states that permit the recall of governors, Wisconsin has one of the highest thresholds. For governors (and legislators), recall organizers must gather signatures equaling 25 percent of the turnout in the previous election for the office. That means organizers faced the daunting task of collecting 540,000. To avoid losing the election through signature challenges, signature collectors wanted a "cushion" of additional signatures, so they set a goal of 720,000 signatures. They surpassed even that goal.

When California governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, residents collected 1.6 million signatures out of 21.1 million eligible voters or approximately 7.6 percent. In Wisconsin, 25,000 trained volunteers had 60 days to collect approximately 1 million signatures from 4.37 million eligible voters or approximately 23 percent. Plus, 1 million is almost half of the votes cast in the 2010 Wisconsin gubernatorial election. Wisconsin volunteers did it with less money, over the holiday season and in the depths of winter.



As a heavy snow fell on Wisconsin, volunteers explained that the 3,000 pounds of petitions would be delivered to the non-partisan elections board in trucks escorted by armed security guards. Volunteers from United Wisconsin, the grassroots organization that took charge of collecting the signatures, have designated two volunteers from each of Wisconsin's 72 counties to hand carry a box containing a portion of the petitions to highlight the fact that the work took place in every corner of the state.

Red State Blue State

In the months to come, the remarkable story of the recall organizers' massive, grassroots, signature-collecting drive is likely to be lost to the unprecedented sums of money the campaigns and the independent expenditure groups will raise and spend, and to the charges and counter-charges that will volley back and forth as they do in all elections, but today recall organizers celebrated.


Tina Nelson, a Dane County Coordinator for United Wisconsin, said she was "unbelievably excited," but also "wondering what to do with myself" now that she did not have thousands of emails to send and volunteers to organize. In Dane County, the liberal bastion surrounding Madison, volunteers collected an estimated 160,000 petitions.

But signatures came from red as well as blue areas of the state. In conservative Walworth County, represented by Rep. Paul Ryan in Congress, volunteers collected an estimated 10,000 signatures, 2,000 more than their goal. "I am feeling pumped, optimistic and gratified," said Ellen Holly, a United Wisconsin coordinator for the county.  "But deep down, I am also a little bit angry and sad. I have never lived somewhere where I had to recall my government before," she explained.

Volunteers in the small town of Burlington, which voted to support George W. Bush and John McCain and strongly backed Scott Walker in 2010, collected over 6,000 recall signatures from the area. Mary Ann Staupe, a retired school teacher, explained why people signed: "I asked every person who came into [the Burlington] office. Every person added another piece to the puzzle. Collective bargaining was just the tip of the iceberg. People were also concerned about neglected schools, neglected infrastructure, health care changes that hurt the poor and the disabled. Many people have friends and families in those situations. It was a huge tent."

In Delavan, Scott Walker's home town, volunteers set up shop in "Circus Park" in the town's tiny main square, where a towering statue of a giraffe watches cars roll by. On the first day that volunteers circulated petitions "we created a traffic jam. People were whipping up in their cars like NASCAR trying to be among the first to sign. Delavan was our 'hot spot' for a very long time," said Holly.

For Peggy Ellerkamp, a high school librarian, signature gathering felt more like a civic duty. "Walker has caused so much damage in less than one year," Ellerkamp said, referring to Walker's anti-union budget repair bill, $1.6 billion in public school aid cuts, Wisconsin's precipitous job losses, and the general climate of despair and anger in the state. "Just think what he can do if we don't get him out of there by end of his first term."

Making a List, Checking it Twice

The unofficial estimates coming in from around the state are impressive. Over 14,000 from Sheboygan County (6,000 above the goal) and 9,000 from Manitowoc County (2,800 more than the goal). Although Wisconsin Republicans have been raising the specters of "Mickey Mouse" signing petitions multiple times, the petitions were checked and rechecked.

Volunteers described a meticulous process by which signatures were reviewed first by the circulator, then by the local recall office, then in a regional recall office, then at the Madison headquarters. Volunteers were first looking to make sure the record was complete and correct. They also scanned for questionable names and other mischief. No one I spoke to reported any problems other than the occasional "WI" in the zip code spot. "We wanted to do it right, we knew that every signature had to count," said Staupe, who described the process as "arduous." In Madison, the recall office apparently entered all the records in the computer in an attempt to scan for duplicates.

Walker Team Petitions Court to Delay

The latest employment figures show Wisconsin lost 14,500 jobs in November. The  latest poll shows that support for the recall is around 58 percent, up from 47 percent in the spring. For Scott Walker's lawyers, delay appears to be their strategy. During that delay, Walker can continue to raise unlimited campaign funds and has already brought in close to $5 million, approximately half of which is from out of state.

In a normal recall, lawyers representing the candidate targeted for recall would review each signature and challenge any that seem inappropriate or unclear. Each challenge would be considered by the nonpartisan elections board. That is the way recalls have been handled in Wisconsin for decades, but even with 5,000 volunteers at the ready to review signatures, the Walker camp decided to bring a lawsuit to change standard procedure and lay the burden of the recall review on the small state elections board. On January 6, they succeeded in convincing a court to order the elections board to conduct a costly review. Kevin Kennedy, the head of the elections board, testified that entering signatures into a database and looking for duplicates could take eight extra weeks for his staff or might require the hiring of an outside computer firm.

Yesterday, Kennedy told the press, "we used to say that we could see an election as early as late May, but now we just don't know." An eight-week delay when the numbers are so overwhelmingly in favor of the petitioners is likely to spark a court challenge of its own. Some anticipate that the whole issue is likely to end up in the hands of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, no stranger to partisan bickering and controversy.

Putting off worries about the future and the massive amount of work ahead, thousands of recall volunteers prepared to party tonight at Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Terrace, the site of Scott Walker's 2010 inaugural.

The Most Dangerous Bank In America?

Obama Promised to End the Era of Big Bank Bailouts

Time for a Redo

Midnight Madness

The derivatives market is $600 trillion big and much of that market is controlled by just 4 Wall Street megabanks: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. Who is the watchdog for those derivatives? The CFTC has responsibility for most of them and it is getting a budget of only $205 million. They will not be able to hire the people or buy the technology that they need to keep up with Wall Street, never mind actually keep watch over them to try to prevent another financial catastrophe.

Five More Pro-Wall Street Measures Up Today

Suicidal Loyalty to Wall Street Barons

Confrontations and Arrests on the Rise

Protecting Free Speech Not "Marble"

Hot Heads and the Police State

Protesters Have Responsibilities as Well

No Banker Has Yet Done a Perp Walk