The Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran interviewed Sue Altman, state director of Working Families Alliance, who was famously removed from a state senate hearing on the corporate incentives program.
In the interview, Altman claims that Working Families receives about $75,000 from public sector unions. We are left to take her word for it because Working Families is a “dark money” group that does not fully disclose its donors.
Moran did not follow up with obvious questions:
- How does Altman explain the $795,000 that Working Families received from the NJEA from 2009-2016 (which is $99,375 per year from the NJEA alone)? Does the $75,000 from all public sector unions include the $50,000 the NJEA paid to Working Families for GOTV efforts in the 2019 elections? And given that the public unions funds 85% of New Direction’s budget, shouldn’t 85% of the $100,000 from New Directions be considered public union money? The numbers just don’t add up.
- Does Altman acknowledge that the NJEA wants to abolish the corporate incentive program that she is protesting against so that the money can be used for the NJEA’s priorities? Altman claims to speak for the interests of the people of Camden, but will she acknowledge that she also happens to be speaking for the NJEA, apparently her largest funder?
- When asked by Moran about New Jersey’s fiscal crisis and the need to trim public workers’ benefits, Altman talks only of raising taxes to pay for them. Does Altman acknowledge that this is also the NJEA’s position?
- Altman rails against the “politically connected” George Norcross, but does it concern her that she appears to speak for precisely the same kind of “politically connected” special interest (the NJEA) that she rails against?
Maybe someone else will ask Altman these questions.
Read the full Star-Ledger interview here.