Corporate Radio Picks On AFT Indiana

By Doug Martin

A few days ago, WIBC 93.1’s Ray Steele and Mike Wilson, hosts of The 10 @ 10 Show, found a tweet by AFT Indiana and went into corporate bully mode.

The AFT Indiana tweet read:

“To all the heroes of the education world headed back to the trenches: Good luck & Thank You!”

WIBC’s hosts were offended by the war metaphor, claiming that teachers do not do anything like engage in battle from the “trenches” and that it was “outlandish” for AFT Indiana to make such a statement.

WIBC is owned and operated by Emmis Communications. Emmis’ Executive Vice President is Scott Enright, a board member of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an Indianapolis-based national privatization propaganda mill started by economist Milton Friedman and Mitch Daniels. Emmis, as I note in my book Hoosier School Heist, was paid very well by the Friedman Foundation a few years back for ads to push school privatization.

With a board made up of Overstocked.com’s founder and many school privatization champions, the Friedman Foundation pays well, too. In 2013, CEO Robert Enlow raked in over $220,000 (see page 7). The Friedman Foundation has funded the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (page 39) and even the Indianapolis Urban League, the latter to the tune of $20,000 in 2013 (see page 40).

As I mention in my book, Milton Friedman knew quite a bit about war, literally war against the people. In the 1970s after the CIA helped overthrow the democratically-elected president in Chile, Friedman aided the new brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in beating into place a free-market scheme that still spurs protests in the streets. As Naomi Klein and others have detailed, thousands of people were killed and tortured who tried to fight off Pinochet and Friedman’s assaults against humanity. In fact, it is now believed that the great poet Pablo Neruda, a socialist, may have been killed by Pinochet.

Friedman and his trained economists, the Chicago Boys, heaped havoc on Chile, and the disaster capitalism to steal the public infrastructure you see going on in America and across the world today starts with Friedman.

Of course you won’t hear anything about this on WIBC or any other corporate media in Indiana or across these states. If WIBC’s hosts want to argue metaphor, maybe they should read some Neruda. If not, they should stick to discussing things they know something about, which is not education. And maybe they should read a bit of real history, too.