LOCAL
Urge Columbia Bank to cut ties to anti-union Freedom Foundation
Take action on June 28 outside Columbia Bank’s Tacoma HQ
These billionaires are unaccountable to the public for their attacks on the freedom to join together in unions and negotiate fair returns for our work. But their foundations’ boards are often populated by corporate executives who prefer to keep their support for funding groups like the Freedom Foundation at arm’s length.
The Northwest Accountability Project is going to make sure Jeff Pinneo’s employers and colleagues know that the labor community and its supporters will hold Pacific Continental/Columbia Bank accountable for their board member’s role in funding anti-working family efforts. And you can help.
TAKE A STAND — Join advocates for unions, women’s rights and the LGBTQ community on Wednesday, June 28 at noon at Columbia Bank headquarters, 1301 A Street in Tacoma, to urge the banks’ leadership to distance themselves from the Murdock Trust. Also please use the Northwest Accountability Project’s tool to send a message directly to the inbox of Hadley Robbins, the interim CEO of Columbia Bank, urging him to distance the new Columbia Bank from Pinneo’s work with the Murdock Trust.
Source Watch reports that the billionaire-funded Freedom Foundation has close ties to ALEC. The Center for Media and Democracy also explains how funding for the FF and its fellow members of the State Policy Network can be traced back to the notorious billionaire Koch brothers. That money funds a continuous legal assault on labor unions, plus a campaign that includes canvassing, mailing, and phone banking union members to try to convince them to opt out of their unions. They even hired a Santa Claus to leaflet state workers as they walked in and out of their workplace, encouraging them to stop paying full union dues.
The Freedom Foundation, like its billionaire-foundation benefactors, is a tax-exempt organization that is not supposed to engage in partisan politics. However, the group has run afoul of state authorities for doing exactly that with its campaign to oppose Initiative 1, a ballot measure in Olympia that sought to adopt an income tax on high earners to fund college tuition for city residents.
But his tenure at the BIAW netted few victories and his abrasive rhetoric — BIAW once declared that former Gov. Chris Gregoire was a “heartless, power-hungry she-wolf who would eat her own young to get ahead” — alienated elected officials and some of BIAW’s own members. McCabe’s final straw at BIAW was his decision to spend more than $6 million in 2008 in a failed attempt to get Republican Dino Rossi elected as governor amid a housing crunch that was devastating most home builders. The internal BIAW acrimony that ensued led to McCabe’s ouster, but not before he negotiated a $1.25 million buyout and a year of health-care coverage as severance.