Education - Corporate America's Biggest Victory

Ted Cruz is coming to town tomorrow.  He's going to be speaking at the 8th Annual Free Enterprise Foundation Dinner.  If that's not enough to get you to drop what you're doing and head out to the Citadel, Rick Santorum is also going to be there.  And Nikki Haley will be smiling her Miss Right-Wing South Carolina smile, soaking in the publicity.

To my astonishment, the Free Enterprise Foundation is tax-deductible.  As far as I can tell, they get away with this by pretending they are educational, as opposed to indoctrinational.  And I'm not just saying that based on the number of times they use the word "freedom."  Although if you click on the button called "Freedomville" on their website, it offers to take you to their "Financial Literacy Curriculum."

Except that when I tried to get to Freedomville I got an error message.

And more mysterious, there is no Free Enterprise Foundation listed on Wikipedia.

If not for the Washington Post article about tomorrow's big dinner, I would have no idea that they are brought to us by Americans for Prosperity and Citizens United.  Now, Americans for Prosperity calls itself an "organization of grassroots leaders," the leader of which is that old grassroots guy, David Koch, seen not too long ago on the board of Boston's PBS station, WGBH.  Apparently, if you can't kill public broadcasting, you just buy a position on the board.

This bizarre situation that finds David Koch running PBS, is I suppose the other reason these folks are allowed to be considered non-partisan, tax-exempt, and grassroots --  because they claim to be educational.  In fact, this Free Enterprise Foundation is not only based at The Citadel, but:

We have a close working relationship with faculty at the Citadel, the College of Charleston, and the Medical University of South Carolina.

Are we outraged yet?  Where are those liberal attorneys who can pore through reams of legal documents and confront these partisan corporate critters?  Are we so under the thumb of the Kochs and groups like this and the American Enterprise Institute that we will let them lay claim to Charleston's proud educational institutions?

Close working relationship with faculty???

Well, that does it.  You won't find me at the fundraiser tomorrow night.  I'll just be here at home crying into a beer and wondering how we in Charleston have so easily sold out our institutions of learning.