You recall reports about military recruiters lying to new recruits, right?
My recruiter told me I would be able to drive everything from a jeep to a tank. He never told me that I'd have to jump out of an airplane to do it though.
By Lloyd Billingsley
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 2, 2005
To the casual web surfer, Leave My Child Alone appears to be a site for soccer moms, with friendly imagery and platitudes about child welfare. But slip below these surfaces and things changes. The name of the organization is an angry pun on the No Child Left Behind Act, which LMCA describes as "notorious." But the problem with the Act has nothing to do with education per se, but with a provision of the Act that allows recruiters from the United States military access to schools and to data about students. Leave My Child Alone, which began last April in San Francisco, doesn't like the military and wants recruiters to leave all students alone. It is a key part of an anti-military campaign that has targeted the nation’s schools as part of a long range strategy to undercut support for the war in Iraq and the War on Terror generally.
The group's prime mover is Megan Matson. She is now based in Bolinas but was formerly a former creative director at a New York advertising agency and a supporter of Howard Dean. Nine months before the 2004 election, Matson organized Mainstream Moms Oppose Bush (MMOB) and set out to mobilize single mothers with "Adopt-a-Swing-State" letter writing parties. MMOB also peddled "Dump Bush" bracelets parodying Lance Armstrong’s for $22. MMOB boasted 1,500 members in 45 states and got out 500,000 letters. It was not enough to carry the day 2004, but after the election the group decided to do camouflage and continue the fight by other means.
Matson changed the name to Mainstream Moms Operation Blue, allowing her to preserve the acronym and proudly wear the color of electoral defeat. She calls it an "education-in-action" project working to better the future for children. "Moms know Blue means progressive of every stripe and flavor, pure and simple," explains the organization’s ad copy, in which Matson also rails against "unauthorized recruitment."
MMOB is listed on the Leave My Child Alone website as a “partner.” In a style similar to the election campaign, LMCA operates "opt-out" parties, urging parents to remove their children from recruitment lists in a way that they might with unwanted telemarketers. These parties are pitched as a way to help people while having a good time.
Working Assets claims to have generated more than $47 million for "progressive" nonprofits such as Greenpeace, Oxfam America, Rainforest Action Network, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, and People for the American Way, among many other far-Left groups. In 2004 alone, the groups says, it generated more than four million letters and e-mails to Congress, the White House and corporate leaders on issues of critical public concern.
The "Creative Producer" of Working Assets is Becky Bond, formerly online editor of San Francisco Weekly, who has made public appearances with groups such as Together We Can Defeat Capitalism. Bond hosts the web radio program "Fast Forward" and is the force behind such Working Assets new-media properties as workingforchange.com, radioforchange.com, and actforchange.com. She uses streaming technologies, as she has explained, "to radicalize the hipoisie." Bond deals with the media for LMCA, as does Felicity Crush, a former Greenpeace activist from Stinson Beach.
Leave My Child Alone enjoys support from such "co-sponsors" as the Ella Baker Center, True Majority, Code Pink, MilitaryFreeZone.org, Peace Action, Student Peace Action, WAND: Women's Action for New Directions, WiLL: Women's Legislative Lobby, Sojourners, American Friends Service Committee, Coalition Against Militarism in our Schools, Latinos for America, and Veterans for Peace.