No ‘Choice’
Wal-Mart prepares to bury the left under a mountain of money
In These Times
Jim, John, Alice, Sam and Helen may carry the world’s most dangerous genetic markers. They are the Waltons, heirs to the global destructive force called Wal-Mart.
With more than $100 billion in personal assets among them, the five Waltons occupy positions six through 10 in the Forbes billionaires rankings, twice as rich as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the guy at the top. Collectively, they are antisocial malevolence with a last name. These spawn of Bentonville, Arkansas harbor an abiding hatred for the public sphere: business regulatory controls, nondiscrimination laws, wage and workplace safety standards, the social safety net—all of it—as expressed through the operations of their retail empire, which is both the largest employer in the United States and biggest importer of goods made in China. As the Democratic Socialists of America put it: “Wal-Mart is more than just a participant in the low-wage economy: It is the most important single beneficiary of that economy. It uses its economic and political power to extend the scope of the low-wage economy and threatens to extend its business model into other sectors of the economy, undermining the wages of still more workers.”
Such a vast project of political economy is far too complex for four middle-aged children of wealth and the 84-year-old matriarch, Helen. The family’s immediate personal ambitions are more modest: to destroy public education in the United States. To that end the Waltons, through their Walton Family Foundation and in close collaboration with Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation, literally invented the national school “choice” network and its wedge issue-weapon, vouchers.
It is the existence of the school vouchers “movement” that allows the Bush administration to savage and massively disrupt the nation’s public schools while positing “alternative” forms of education, both vouchers and charter schools that often operate very much like public-funded private schools. “Choice” has become national policy under Bush’s Department of Education, which has doled out more than $75 million to organizations birthed by the Waltons, Bradley and their allies. (See “Funding a Movement” by People for the American Way, www.pfaw.org.)
Public education’s defenders, already outgunned by the combined resources of the right-wing political funding network plus the full weight of the Republican executive branch, now await the deluge: an infusion of $20 billion into the Walton’s private philanthropy, most of it earmarked for education “reform”—the euphemism for school privatization. At the usual rate of foundation disbursement, this would translate as $1 billion a year—a tidal wave of money, enough to reinvent the voucher “movement” many times over.
The Money Storm
The Waltons’ planned transfer of $20 billion in Wal-Mart stock to the family foundation, most likely precipitated by tax exigencies, was heralded by the corporate media as a boon to prospects for education “reform.” Family voucher impresario John styles himself a savior of inner-city dropouts. “They’re choosing the streets over a school that apparently doesn’t work for them,” Walton told a receptive USA Today reporter. “If choice destroys the public system, then why are we so sanguine about the choices those kids make?”
This minority-aimed wedge has a sharp edge. The obscenely rich Waltons aren’t slumming, but rather are pursuing a super-cynical, fiendishly clever, grand strategy on the way to final victory: destruction of the public sphere. Although the Waltons and their friends would love to franchise (and, ultimately, monopolize) the education “market”—K-12 is worth $350 billion yearly to taxpayers—it is a mistake to view school privatization in vulgar market terms. That’s not how the denizens of right-funded think tanks think.
The public schools by far are the most pervasive public institutions, social spaces, in American society. Therefore, they must be made fully subservient to private capital. To the world-coveters of the Waltons’ class (all several hundred of them, plus their legions of hirelings), public education is more an obstacle than a potential convertible asset.
In the here and now, two forces stand in the way of total corporate hegemony over U.S. political life: Black American voters and organized labor, particularly the teachers unions, whose members are highly active and dependably progressive even in the more reactionary regions of the country. Blacks and labor are the two pillars of the national Democratic Party, without which not even a shell would remain.
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Jayson Funke
