In the recent “Fighting for our Futures: Youth Candidate Forum” one of the Bloomberg/GO endorsed candidates made some interesting comments which deserve sunshine. As our readers are aware by now, GO and aligned PACs have completely thwarted democracy by spending nearly two million dollars buying school board seats over the last 8 years. For a complete discussion of that, please read our earlier post entitled “Show me the Money.”
In the forum, the student leaders asked the question “What is your position on billionaires like Mike Bloomberg being invested in this election?” This was the GO endorsed candidate’s initial response:
“In terms of the billionaire money and Michael Bloomberg, when you look at what he’s done, and this is not to defend him, but this is to say there’s been an incidence where he helped with the soda tax, we’re looking at Florida right now and he’s helping us turn Florida around so that Trump doesn’t get elected…. So I think there is some, my assumption is that the money that is coming in, I like to believe that it is going for good.”
This is super problematic, and completely predictable because that is the same talking point pushed by supporters of the billionaire-funded Political Action Committees (PACs) supporting the GO candidates. Billionaires often use their money to buy goodwill – think the Sacklers who have made billions from pushing Oxycontin and are now required to pay $3 billion to the victims of their misleading and deadly actions. Museums that have benefitted from the “philanthropy” of the Sacklers are now rejecting their money in response to public outcry.
Former Mayor Bloomberg has his own shameful history, as brilliantly laid out by then Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren in a February debate. After comparing Bloomberg to Donald Trump for denigrating women with terms like “horse faced lesbian” and “fat broads” Senator Warren went on:
Warren went on to eviscerate his record on his less-than-transparent tax returns; on harassing women; on the racist legacies of his stop-and-frisk policing program in New York; and on redlining poor neighborhoods… Warren returned to the topic of Bloomberg having requested female employees to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) relating to sexual harassment and gender discrimination in his company’s workplace.
This GO-backed candidate attempted to excuse all that (while saying he was not defending him) by pointing to the Oakland Soda Tax which Bloomberg heavily supported as a “good thing” that might outweigh his racist and sexist policies and the undermining of New York City’s public schools. In reality, the soda tax deserves more of our scrutiny in that it doesn’t actually address systemic problems, as explained by an OUSD parent and Early Childhood Policy expert on facebook:
Privatization is part of the school to prison pipeline. Testing is part of the school to prison pipeline (created by eugenicists) Period. Political education, deep analysis and real praxis are critical because people will have you believing taxing soda is the answer instead of making healthy food and HEALTH CARE accessible universally. It will have you believing dismantling civil service unions, or any true political power communities leverage and letting the “market” decide who has education access means “quality schools”. It will have you de-crying homelessness and supporting candidates that criminalize poverty.
It is actually very simple.
After attempting to rehabilitate the Bloomberg money and pretend that doing some “good” can somehow excuse decades of harm caused to Black and Brown communities by Bloomberg’s racist policies, the GO-funded candidate went on to acknowledge that having billionaire money warping school board elections is probably not a good idea, and suggested that he was a victim of the system GO has created: “However, there is way too much money in this race on all sides, this is something that should be democratic, this should be something that everyone should have access to” (emphasis added).
This is not an “on all sides” problem: since the 2012 election when GO spent its first billionaire dollars to buy school board seats, GO and the aligned PACs have spent almost $2 million to date, more than 6 times more than OEA has spent in the same time frame. The teachers union, funded by hard-working educators, not billionaires, has been forced to increase their spending to even minimally offset the harm caused by GO.
If GO candidates are truly concerned about the impact of the massive, out-of-town Billionaire spending in Oakland’s school board races, they would have publicly denounced it long ago. In fact, they welcome it, as evidenced by this same candidate acknowledging back in August that he wanted and needed that money to win, when he said of GO: “I can’t run without [their] kind of money.” The failure of the billionaire-backed candidates to denounce this spending, to demand that GO and other Super PACs stop spending on their behalf, speaks volumes.
Vote for the candidates NOT endorsed by the GO PAC – parents, teachers and involved community members who are deeply invested in our public school system and in improving the education for the vulnerable students in Oakland.
Vote with Oakland Teachers Guide
Oakland Rising Action 2020 Voter Guide
Parents United for Public Schools 