The Freedom Foundation Pulls Back The Curtain & Reveals Their True Goal

Recently, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) wrote a fawning piece over the Freedom Foundation and bought Tom McCabe’s snake oil hook, line and sinker (to mix metaphors). While we’re not entirely surprised at the pro-billionaire stance of the Journal, we did find it interesting that McCabe unintentionally revealed the Freedom Foundation’s true motivations at the end of the piece:

“The bottom line is we are taking their [labor unions’] money.”

That’s a pretty clear statement that the Freedom Foundation’s main goal is to weaken the power of working families in Washington and Oregon by defunding unions.

We’ve seen McCabe and other Freedom Foundation staff say this before: on one occasion McCabe was recorded as saying that their goal is to “defund the left” so they can enact extreme right wing policies. On another occasion, their Oregon Coordinator, failed legislative candidate Anne Marie Gurney, yelled across an audience to an imaginary union member she thought was tracking her: “we’re here to defund you!”

Union members, however, are rejecting their advances across both states, and it makes sense because this isn’t the first time that McCabe has failed at realizing his far-right fever dream: In 2010, McCabe was ousted from the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) after the organization wasted $11 million on conservative candidates in Washington and paid almost $300,000 in fines and fees for skirting campaign finance laws. The BIAW took a left-turn after McCabe’s reign, even contributing to Democratic candidates, because the BIAW represents actual business people who employ workers and build things in Washington. The Freedom Foundation is just a schill organization, funded by out-of-state billionaires whose goal is to undermine working families. [The Olympian, 12/10/15; Seattle Times, 9/6/11]

McCabe’s Freedom Foundation and his billionaire friends loath the fact that working families can stand together to fight for better wages, better health care and paid time to spend with new or sick family members. And they despise the fact that they are losing. Both Washington and Oregon have recently passed some of the highest minimum wage policies and the best paid sick leave all while more and more working families are deciding to form unions. The power of working families does not look like it will be diminished any time soon.

Yep. Despite what you read in the Wall Street Journal, they’re losing.