How do you spell paranoia? N-E-A

By Bob Williams
President, Evergreen Freedom Foundation

You might expect an organization as large as the National Education Association to rank thorough research as a prerequisite before publishing a document with its name attached. Not so, when it has a political score to settle.

A recent report from the nation’s largest teachers union claims to show a "hidden link between anti-public education initiatives and the far right." It’s interesting reading. But it works better as fiction.

The report lists a number of people and groups the NEA claims have conspired to destroy public education. I’m named as one of the seven deadliest sinners. The organization I head, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, is fingered as a "co-conspirator" with powerful national influence. This amuses us greatly here at our little think tank tucked away in beautiful Washington state.

But, as the saying goes, when you throw a rock at a pack of wolves, the one that gets hit howls the loudest. The NEA is howling because it’s been wounded where it hurts most—in its reputation and pocketbook.

After waging one expensive campaign after another in its efforts to defeat various state measures to protect union workers from having their paychecks pilfered by union bosses, the NEA is feeling the financial pinch.

And after suffering humiliating exposure and costly penalties for illegally influencing elections in Washington state, the NEA has had to answer hard questions from its members.

That’s why our organization made the NEA’s enemies list. We looked into claims made by teachers who said their paychecks were being raided illegally to pay for politics. Our investigation revealed their suspicions were correct.

We found that the NEA had illegally laundered almost $500,000 into two Washington state elections. Along with underwriting campaigns, the NEA secretly sent high-priced political operatives to our state to organize and direct campaigns. Using our findings, Washington’s attorney general charged the NEA and its state affiliate, the Washington Education Association, with violating the state’s paycheck protection law, money laundering and failure to report campaign donations.

But union officials still refuse to stop raiding employees’ paychecks. So our Foundation and a group of teachers filed suit against the union. Its first response was to countersue. When those bullying tactics failed, NEA leaders resorted to tagging us as "ultraconservative, religious-right extremists."

To bolster its weak claims, the NEA paid for this report that it promised would expose a vast nationwide conspiracy against public education. The union even hired an experienced conspiracy maven, Bobby Watson, to assemble it.

Watson is a former Democratic Party operative who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in Virginia after he illegally recorded and disseminated a phone conversation of a political opponent in ’92. He paid a fine. NEA hired him soon after.

Watson’s report is exceedingly weak on facts. But he was paid to produce an accusatory political document, not a research report. He describes a "sophisticated web" of conspiracy that includes people who are dead, long gone or who never worked for the organizations Watson lists as anti-public education.

We read with great amusement the names of people and organizations who Watson claims fund us and give us our marching orders. Some we’ve never even heard of before.

What the NEA doesn’t want you to know is that the combined annual budgets last year of state-based think tanks—the very groups it claims are conspiring against public education—totaled just under $20 million nationwide. But the NEA and WEA took in more than $40 million in ’97 from their members in Washington state alone.

The NEA’s counterfeit report is aimed at keeping teachers and parents shackled by fear—fear that an extremist, well-funded boogeyman is out to harm children and their education. In fact, the boogeyman has been created by the NEA to divert attention away from its own failures and corruption.

Chills go up the spines of the NEA officials when teachers express the desire to protect their paychecks and their First Amendment rights to make independent political decisions. Union leaders know they need confiscated money to keep up the dishonest public relations campaign to appear indispensable to our children’s education.

But even dark clouds have silver linings. In its ill-fated attempt to weave dozens of independent organizations and philanthropists into a "sophisticated web" of conspiracy, the NEA has provided us with a list of new, potential donors. We’ll get on that right away.

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org