Cover Story: DC Voucher Passage is Huge Defeat

“It’s D.C. today. It’s Chicago tomorrow, St. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles next week, then it’s all of America. The message…goes far beyond Washington, DC,” warned Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) as the House passed a $10 million private schools voucher bill for the nation’s capital.

The Black Chicago Congressman’s rhetorical flourish was actually understated. The phony voucher “movement,” hatched only a few years ago by the same rich, racist, rightwing foundation that funded Charles Murray’s infamous book, “The Bell Curve,” has proven to be the perfect Trojan Horse. Hard Right money has successfully infested – poisoned – the national Black body politic, a penetration so deep and toxic, the victims of the “experiment” may never recover.

The lavishly funded conspiracy – an eminently proper use of the word – began in the Milwaukee boardrooms of the Bradley Foundation, which has invented and bankrolled ($400-plus million to date) virtually every anti-Black, anti-labor, anti-environment, and anti-women political offensive and front group of the past two decades. Bradley’s purpose was to create an alternative Black “leadership” that owes its very existence to the checkbooks of the rich, white, Hard Right. To this end, and with additional millions from the Olin, Scaife, Walton (Wal-Mart) foundations and other Republican moneybags, Bradley’s operatives created media impressions of a “movement” that had never before existed, based on a “demand” that Black people had never advanced: public funding of private schools. Through unlimited financing, Bradley & Co. grew its original, motley crew of Black education business hustlers into a national presence, now including the Mayor of Washington DC, Anthony Williams. The enemy has bought itself a place at the table of African American political discourse. It is a fatal conversation.

Congressman Davis is no Chicken Little. The sky really is falling – a deluge of greenbacks intended to undermine and then replace existing Black leadership. Vouchers are the Right’s wedge issue, carefully chosen to create divisions between the Democratic Party’s two strongest pillars: Blacks and public employees unions, most notably, teachers. Keenly aware of African American reverence for education, the very people who wage relentless war against the public schools wave vouchers under the noses of the poor, knowing full well that private schools cannot possibly meet the needs of the vast bulk of Black children. Private capital has no interest in taking on the responsibility of educating the masses of Black kids. Rather, their strategy is to sow dissension in Black and progressive ranks while setting up contra outposts in scattered, publicly funded private schools, places of employment and propagandizing for new waves of African American mercenaries. These hirelings will then form the core of “alternative,” “conservative” Black leadership in all those places Rep. Davis cited: ”… Chicago tomorrow, St. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles next week, then it’s all of America.”

The Black Commentator has documented the voucher offensive – a corporate conspiracy of the first order – since our first issue, April 5, 2002. As reported in our Cover Story, “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree,” the Bradley’s Foundation created the premier voucher front group, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), out of whole cloth in 2000. Various right-wingers funded a $3 million ad campaign as a coming out party. The voucher movement was born as the pure product of corporate dollars. Its luminaries, such as unsuccessful Newark, New Jersey mayoral candidate Cory Booker, were suckled on publicity generated by Right think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, itself funded by Bradley.

When George Bush came to power, the BAEO received $600,000 in federal funding to conduct more media campaigns (see “Bush Funds Black Voucher Front Group: Your tax dollars pay for propaganda blitz,” November 14). As we reported, then: