The Mackinac Center #Koch brothers & #Amway

  The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is crazy about privatization!

 The Mackinac Center’s is a fervent advocate of privatization—its scholars support outsourcing everything from public school districts to Amtrak to state prisons—and backs anti-union legislation for Michigan. In 2007, the center published "A Collective Bargaining Primer," advocating against mandatory unionization and automatic dues deductions for public school teachers and other public employees.

Collective bargaining for teachers, the Center claims, "has become a significant deterrent to educational quality." In other words, if you outsource as much as you can and kneecap the unions, the quality of education—and presumably city services—increases. That position is in line with the beliefs of its donors.

In 2009, #Amway and Wal-Mart were among the 3,100 businesses that signed a letter opposing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would've made it easier for employees to unionize; that same year, Wal-Mart spent $7.4 million on lobbying, much of it to defeat EFCA. (The law failed.)

The Koch brothers, meanwhile, fund an array of organizations opposed to unions, including the advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundation. With the Mackinaw Center, it seems, their investment is paying off.