Microsoft Deletes ALEC membership

Hooray for Microsoft.

They just resigned as a member of the wicked special interest juggernaut, ALEC, brought to us by the blackest of corporate "black hats"--the Koch Brothers, Exxon and others guiding the right wing tilt of national and state lawmaking.

The organization is responsible for thousands of bills introduced in Congress and at state legislatures—from school vouchers that drain public school budgets, to funding phony studies that undermine climate science, to enacting state and Federal laws aimed at allowing unlimited, secret political donations that conceal their own organizations anonymous influence.

Microsoft's recently announced resignation was not a quiet retreat.

The company used a megaphone to declare they are severing ties and repeated in their own announcement that Microsoft no longer funds or has any connection whatsoever with the group. A bunch of other major firms have also jumped ship since 2011.

Why would they do that?

They have figured out the road to perdition is paved with ALEC's political initiatives and the covert money that pays for them.

The American Legislative Exchange Council passes at least 200 of their bills into law each year. Special tax breaks and undercutting public health standards for dirty industries and Big Tobacco are a given.

But the "non-profit" has a special fervor for attacking public schools and the teachers who serve them.

ALEC and its allies demonize school teachers as the major cause of poor student performance while remaining silently complicit on the most serious causes—a lack of early childhood development, unsafe homes and high mobility in school districts due to poverty, drugs and alcohol. It is a perverse joke that ALEC has a long history of bitterly opposing initiatives that address these very social ills.

Their transparent goal is to bust the teachers unions, then abolish collective bargaining from the lexicons of labor and the statutes of law.

And they are gleefully aware that the "teacher question" is a political wedge that threatens to fracture the Democratic constituency along traditional and reform lines.

So do I.

No quarter should be exempted from scrutiny in the search for solutions to the problems that face our schools and the students who attend them. School readiness and high quality public schools are the pathway from poverty to self sufficiency.

But ALEC and by extension those who accept their money, takes aim at the easiest education target—teachers—to advance the broader right wing agenda of corporatizing public education while promoting the destruction of collective bargaining, a staple of the organizations political diet since it was formed in 1973.

Companies like Microsoft are right to publicly distance themselves from the tactics and positions of ALEC on a range of issues.