By Sean Cranley
Contributor
Greetings residents and friends of the Burlington Area School District, we have a frightful emergency.
Our public schools are under a coordinated attack from a Tea Party (TP) group in the form of WeVoteBurlington (WVB). The outcome of the first battle in this attack will be decided on Halloween at the School Board meeting to be held in the Burlington High School gym on Monday, Oct. 31, at 7:30 p.m. where they will try to brow beat the members of the board regarding adoption of the district’s tax levy.
I’d like to place this event in the broader context to better understand what’s happening and why. Mark Belling has promoted this attack and Charlie Sykes is threatening to bring in busloads of outside agitators, single-issue anti-tax zealots to flood the meeting.
People of goodwill in Burlington need to be present and ready to speak up to provide a counterbalance to this coordinated attack and to support our elected representatives on the board who have gone through the months-long process of developing a reasonable budget for our public schools, which are the central organizing, social institution of our community!
I know that “coordinated” sounds like conspiracy, that “attack” may seem like hyperbole and that representatives of WVB recently deflected questions about their TP status in the Standard Press. But I will demonstrate why all three are apt descriptions.
WVB held a legislative night on Oct. 8 at Burlington High School, which featured as one of the key guests Tim Dake of the Grandsons of Liberty, a bonafide TP group promoting the “Legislative Agenda for the Wisconsin Tea Party Movement – 2010/2012. To see the TP legislative agenda which mirrors that presented at the WVB event go here: http://www.wisconsingrandsonsofliberty.com.
Now to justify my use of the words “coordinated attack.” These TP groups are promoting this legislative agenda, but they didn’t draft the legislation. The bills were written by members of the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), where global corporations pay big bucks to sit down with Republican state legislators and draft laws in their interest to rule you from your State House.
The agenda of these special interests includes dismantling and privatizing our public school systems in America. Why? Power. Including the power to make profits for “educational entrepreneurs” and destroy unions. For more information on ALEC’s moves to starve public education see this article go here: http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed.
Are the WVB folks aware of the selfish and sinister agenda they’re helping to advance and who is behind it? Probably not. When it comes to public education, they’ve been conditioned to focus on only two things, taxes and thugs (their term for our teachers). But the TP movement has been co-opted and turned from grassroots to Astroturf by Americans For Prosperity (Plutocracy), the Club For Growth and other well-funded groups founded by 1 percent folks like the billionaire Koch Brothers, who also support ALEC.
The agendas of these groups are handed down from on high by corporate sponsored conservative think tanks founded by the Koch brothers and others like them, to serve their self-interest.
The WVB people have probably never even heard of ALEC. It’s supposed to be a secret. The likes of Belling and Sykes are certainly not going to expose ALEC and its goals. It was only revealed last spring that State Rep. Robin Vos is the ALEC state Co-chair, tasked with enacting the ALEC agenda in Wisconsin. You’d think he’d be proud of such a lofty distinction, but he doesn’t discuss it or campaign on its “merits.”
Vos even got an ALEC “scholarship” worth thousands of dollars for airfare and hotel, to be wined and dined in a sunnier clime by the ALEC corporate lobbyists who fund the organization. A “scholarship,” why that’s a major award to be illuminated and displayed prominently before your constituents! But modest Robin never mentions it.
News is what people want to keep hidden, everything else is publicity.
Recently, PR Watch discovered who Wisconsin’s secret ALEC Corporate Co-chairs are: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/09/11031/koch-lobbyist-alec-state-co-chair-wisconsin-scholarships-raise-ethics-concerns. One is a lobbyist for Koch Industries! Such a tangled web!
The citizens of Burlington have elected a local School Board to represent our interests in our community. It’s called local control, a principle the Republican Party once stood for.
We must not let a few vocal people, acting at the behest of squawk-radio propagandists, force on to us a hidden agenda that comes from selfish, narrow and far away special interests that have no stake in what becomes of our children or our community, other than how it advances their national political goals and their potential for future profits to be reaped at the expense of millions of students across the nation and right here at home. Scary!
You are the 99 percent! Please make yourselves heard at the board meeting on Oct. 31. Boo!
Sean Cranley lives in Spring Prairie. The opinions expressed here are his and not necessarily of this website or Southern Lakes Newspapers LLC.
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