Campaign News

Un reporte de las organizaciones Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, Enlace International y Strong Economy for All Coalition, reveló que las firmas JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo y BlackRock, ayudan a mantener y expandir un lucrativo negocio de $5,000 millones que criminaliza a las comunidades de color.

Lea el artículo completo aquí.

Late last month, thousands of Americans with HIV/AIDS -- many of them among the millions of Americans who rely on Medicaid or Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans for their health coverage -- saw the news and breathed yet one more major sigh of relief: GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell announced that, lacking the votes needed to win, the Senate would not go forward on its final effort this year to kill the ACA (aka Obamacare) and take a devastating bite out of Medicaid.

Read the full article here.

Arkansas Times - May 6, 2014, by Max Brantley - Don't look for Bill Moyers to be getting any grants from the Walton Family Foundation. His website reports on a new study about harm to taxpayers and school children from poor oversight of charter schools.

Charter school operators want to have it both ways. When they’re answering critics of school privatization, they say charter schools are public — they use public funds and provide students with a tuition-free education. But when it comes to transparency, they insist they have the same rights to privacy as any other private enterprise.

But a report released Monday by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy — two groups that oppose school privatization – presents evidence that inadequate oversight of the charter school industry hurts both kids and taxpayers.

Sabrina Joy Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education, told BillMoyers.com, “Our report shows that over $100 million has been lost to fraud and abuse in the charter industry, because there is virtually no proactive oversight system in place to thwart unscrupulous or incompetent charter operators before they cheat the public.” The actual amount of fraud and abuse the report uncovered totaled $136 million, and that was just in the 15 states they studied.

Here's the full report. Arkansas is not among the states studied. It had a cap on open enrollment charters for years, unlike some states where proliferation of the schools has led to shady operators, poor education and self-enrichment.

But a bit of the rubber meets the road this week in Arkansas. A Texas charter school operator,Responsive Education Solutions, is going to ask this week for permission to move its proposed Quest charter school into a building on Hardin Road in west Little Rock that neighbors says isn't suitable for the school because of traffic. Responsive Ed has a hand in seven charter schools in Arkansas. It has been faulted in a national study for quality of its work with poor kids and a Slate investigation pointed up shoddy curriculum in science (creationism) and history (fractured facts). In Little Rock, it has not been honest with regulators. It won approval for a school on Rahling Road in far western Little Rock while it was negotiating for a school site closer in, near existing Little Rock and charter schools. Then, it said it wouldn't complete the purchase on the alternative site  until it had approval from state and city officials. Records show the sale has closed, though neither the city nor state has formally approved use of the property for a school. How tough is Arkansas oversight? We shall see.

A measure of the looseness of regulation in Arkansas is the decision by top regulator Diane Zook,a member of the state Board of Education, to declare she has no conflict of interest in voting (FOR) on all Quest proposals even though her nephew, Gary Newton, is a lead organizer for the school and she has supported its establishment from early in the organizing process. Newton is financed in several pro-charter-school organizations by money from the Walton Family Foundation. I wonder if lawyer Chris Heller's aunt was on the state Board of Education if anyone would object to that Board member voting on a case, like Quest, where Heller was objecting to the charter on behalf of his employer, the Little Rock School District. I'd make a small wager that Gary Newton would.

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The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped considerably by his own timely loan of $100,000.

Bill Scheel is one of three founding partners of the public-relations and political-strategy firm Javelina, which Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families hired to run its campaign. The Phoenix-based firm got the job done in the form of Proposition 206, which will appear on the November 8 ballot.

Preliminary state campaign-finance records show that Bright Owl, a limited liability company of which Scheel is the sole member and manager, made a $100,000 contribution to the campaign on August 4.

Asked on Wednesday about the cash infusion, Scheel said the money is an interest-free loan, not a donation, and that it will be classified as such on the campaign's official pre-primary report, which is due to the state on Friday.

According to Scheel, the loan came in the nick of time to cover legal fees for an unexpected court challenge to the initiative, and was made possible by money he inherited after his parents died a few years ago.

"I couldn't think of a better way to honor their memory than to provide this loan, which has helped get our Healthy Working Families initiative on the ballot," he said.

If Arizona voters approve the measure, the state's minimum wage would go up to $10 an hour next year and rise to $12 in 2020.

But it almost didn't make the ballot. The Arizona Restaurant Association sued, claiming many of the petition gatherers hired by the campaign ineligible to collect signatures. The association wanted tens of thousands of signatures thrown out, potentially enough to knock the initiative off the ballot.

The campaign itself was in need of a raise.

Before Scheel's loan, the two largest payments to the campaign were a July 19 donation of $25,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers union Region 8 States Council, and a May 12 donation of $25,000 from the California-based Fairness Project. Prior to that, records show, from January 1 to May 31, the effort was funded with $384,642 donated by the nonprofit activist group Living United for Change in Arizona, (LUCHA), which reportedly received money for the effort from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy.

During that same period in the first half of 2016, the group spent $337,975.59 on signature gatherers, printing services, and other expenses, including $3,000 in consulting fees paid to Tomas Robles, the campaign's chairman and LUCHA's executive director.

Scheel says the campaign pays his company $10,000 a month for campaign management, plus another $5,000 a month for communications, all of which is split by several people at Javelina.

On top of all those expenses came the legal bills for the lawsuit by the restaurant association.

"We didn't have money set aside for legal expenses," Scheel explained, adding that his loan was a "huge help" to the campaign. It was also a risk to put his own money on the line, he admitted.

"If the court had ruled against us last Friday, my $100,000 would be gone," he said. "Legal fees is basically what [the money] was spent on."

Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance

Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families

The group's tenacity, along with Scheel's inheritance money, paid off in the courtroom. Last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit because the association filed the complaint seven days after the signatures were submitted to the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, exceeding the statutory limit of five days.

Now, the website for Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families lists Bright Owl as a major funding source, along with LUCHA, the UCFW, and the Fairness Project.

Scheel, who hasn't made any other contributions to the campaign, expects to be repaid out of donations that come in between now and November, he said.

"There will be future donations coming into the campaign from donors," he said. "About $1.5 million."

In response to questions from New Times, he said he hasn't made any deals with the unions and activist groups behind the campaign, nor does he expect anything in return other than repayment, if the group can manage it. His loan simply came at the right time and was a "huge help" to the legal effort that saved the initiative, he said.

"This really is a labor of love for me," Scheel said. "When I work on a campaign, I go all in. I want it to succeed."

By Ray Stern

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